Seven Elements That Have Changed the World
Page 15
In October 1833, William Henry Fox Talbot, another Englishman, was on honeymoon on the shores of Lake Como. He was trying to sketch the landscape using a camera lucida, another draughtsman’s aid which uses a prism to superimpose the image of the landscape over the paper. He was having little luck. When he removed his eye from the prism, he ‘found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold’.31 Fox Talbot wanted to find a better technique and so on his return home, apparently unaware of Wedgwood’s experiments, he began creating silhouettes of leaves, lace and other flat objects using paper coated with silver nitrate. But just as Wedgwood had found, he could not stop the images from fading. One day he noticed that the edges of the paper, which had been treated with only a small amount of salt solution (used as a base for the silver nitrate coating) were often much more light sensitive. By using a strong salt solution he saw that he could make the paper much less light sensitive. And so he realised that if he soaked the exposed paper in a strong salt solution, his images would be fixed in place. But that was only half the battle. The images from a camera obscura were too faint to make an impression. He set about experimenting to improve the light sensitivity of the paper and, by using lenses, which focused the light on to a smaller area, was able to create images the size of postage stamps. The images ‘might be supposed to be the work of some Lilliputian artist’, wrote Fox Talbot.32 He had got further than Schulze and Wedgwood, but like them failed to comprehend the significance of his discovery; he put it to one side to pursue other interests.
Meanwhile, across the English Channel, a French theatre designer was experimenting with silver’s light-sensitive properties, using silver-coated copper plates and iodine. In spring 1835, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre put an exposed but unsuccessful plate away in a cupboard to re-polish and use again. Returning a few days later he saw that an image had miraculously appeared. It turned out that mercury vapours from a bottle in the cupboard had developed the ‘latent’ image. When the plate had initially been exposed, silver atoms had created a hidden image, but the number of atoms was too small to make it visible. The mercury vapour amalgamated with the silver atoms in the latent image, making it visible. Using this process, Daguerre was able to reduce the exposure time to only twenty minutes, short enough to capture sharp images of unmoving objects. On 19 August 1839 the Académie des Sciences in Paris announced the invention of the daguerreotype.33 When the competitive Fox Talbot heard of this, he quickly created his own method of latent-image production using a new type of paper with an exposure time of around a minute.34 He called the new process the calotype.35
Almost forty years had passed since Thomas Wedgwood’s first attempt to capture images using the light-sensitive properties of silver. There were now two successful and competing commercial products; Fox Talbot and Daguerre were each soon battling to convince the public of the advantages of their particular photographic method. Fox Talbot had some initial difficulty in persuading the public of the advantages of his process.36 It did not produce as detailed an image as the daguerreotype but it could produce multiple images from the same negative whereas the daguerreotype could not, limiting it to expensive one-off projects such as portraiture for the wealthy. Fox Talbot’s invention won out and it laid the foundations of photography, built on silver, for the next two centuries.
The proliferation of images
I took my first photographs in Singapore when I was four years old. It was the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and Singapore, once a Crown colony of the British Empire, was heaving with what we now call street parties. With my Kodak Brownie, I took photographs of my family, my friends and everything I could see for as long as I had unexposed film. My Brownie camera was eventually replaced by a better version and then a whole series of cameras up to today when a set of great Leica cameras are my tools. These machines continue to help me record instants of action and momentary scenes, with occasional success. Kodak released the first Brownie camera, named after a set of popular cartoon characters, in 1900. The simple cardboard box with a roll film was portable and easy to use. It was an instant success and especially popular with children. Costing five shillings (around a quarter of an average week’s wages), it was affordable to almost anyone. Its creation was made possible by the development of gelatin silver bromide-coated plates. These plates could be exposed, stored and, critically, only developed later in a laboratory. They were thus called ‘dry’ plates. ‘Wet’ collodion plates had to be coated, exposed and developed in a short space of time, requiring photographers to carry a heavy and cumbersome portable laboratory everywhere with them.
George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, took his first lessons in the wet-plate process in 1877 and soon discovered its impracticalities.37 ‘My layout, which included only the essentials, had in it a camera about the size of a soap box, a tripod, which was strong and heavy enough to support a bungalow, a big plate holder, a dark-tent, a nitrate bath, and a container for water.’38 He had read about new developments in dry plates and decided to experiment himself. By 1879 he had created his own plates, which could be stored for much longer before developing than other products on the market. Eastman was still not satisfied: his glass plates were heavy, fragile and expensive. As Henry Ford would later do with the Model T automobile, he sought to put photography in the hands of the wider public. He wanted ‘to make the camera as convenient as the pencil’, but to do this he needed to invent a cheaper and simpler photographic process.39 He developed ‘Eastman Negative Paper’, which used rolls of paper, rather than glass, to capture the image. A roll of Eastman film could fit into a small black box, around which he designed a camera reduced to its essential components: the lens was fixed and the shutter was released by pulling a string.40
The Kodak camera first went on sale in 1888, costing $25 ($600 today). Its popularity enabled Eastman to produce cameras on a mass scale and so also reduce the price of each unit. In 1896, the 100,000th Kodak camera was produced; by then each one cost only $5 ($120 today). Kodak cameras appealed to a huge market because of their simplicity and affordability. Eastman had done what great inventors of consumer appliances have always done. He allowed the user (photographer) to focus on his purpose (taking photographs) while making the technical functions (developing and printing) unseen.41 Eastman’s cameras were sold ready loaded with a one-hundred-exposure film that was returned to the factory when finished. A few days later the processed negatives would be delivered as mounted prints. As Kodak’s slogan went: ‘You press the button, we do the rest.’42 By the end of the following year, his factory was processing about seven hundred films a day. Now anyone could be a photographer. Kodak cameras enabled individuals to keep a record of their personal history and to fix memories of their most treasured moments. Photographs were now seen everywhere. They became not only common and disposable items, but also documents which recorded world-changing events, producing images that have shaped generations.
The decisive moment
Some images define cruelty, brutality and intolerance. The image of a Vietcong prisoner with a gun held to his temple, in the moment before execution, is, for me, synonymous with the Vietnam War. The photograph of crowds of civilians waiting for food in a sprawling Rwandan refugee camp will for ever remind me of the genocide which took place there. And the image of emaciated inmates pressed against the barbed-wire fence of the Auschwitz concentration camp describes the fate of so many members of my family in the Holocaust. Other images show much happier times, however. The photographs that I have taken from my windows overlooking the Grand Canal try to capture the moods of Venice as the seasons change. The photograph I made and which sits opposite my desk is of fascinated people in Santa Maria Novella, Florence. They are looking at the fresco, which demonstrates perspective, painted by Masaccio. The poetic images of the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II, with painted backdrops of Westminster Abbey, by Cecil Beaton were designed to give joy to a Great Britain recovering from the Second World War. We learn of and r
emember momentous world events through photographs. Iconic images create shared experiences; they define generations.43
By the outbreak of the Second World War, more portable cameras with film that was more sensitive to light enabled the photographer to follow soldiers into battle, in contrast to earlier war photographers such as Mathew Brady and Roger Fenton, whose nineteenth-century equipment required their subjects to remain still. War photographer Robert Capa was with the second wave of troops in the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. Waist-deep in the English Channel, machine-gun bullets tearing up the water around him, Capa took some of the defining images of the D-Day landing. If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough,’ Capa would say.44 Photographs were able to capture fleeting images of the world that, without silver, would exist only as a faded memory. ‘There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture,’ explained Henri Cartier-Bresson, the prolific and masterful photographer, in 1957. ‘Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.’45
Making that click at the right moment created images that revealed how civilians had become tangled up in the Vietnam War. No longer was the enemy a faceless monster, but a suffering human being to whom viewers could relate. By revealing the common humanity on the other side of the world, photography awoke the global social conscience. Eddie Adams’ 1968 photograph ‘Saigon Execution’, alluded to above, provoked protests against what appeared to be the unthinking murder of an innocent Vietnamese citizen. His photograph also demonstrates the power that photography has to distort actual events. Adams explained: ‘The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths … What the photograph didn’t say was, “What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?”’46
While photography comes close to a true representation of reality, it is by no means a wholly reliable source. Images can be and are deceptive. Joseph Stalin famously had photographs altered as part of his purge of Party enemies; commissars vanished from photographs as they were selectively purged. The Chinese Communist Party, too, has made ample use of distortion created in the darkroom.
From trusted sources, however, come gripping images of reality. In 1994 photojournalist Sebastião Salgado spent three days at the Kibeho refugee camp in south-west Rwanda. Hundreds of refugees arrived each day, fleeing rape and murder at the hands of militias. Salgado was shocked by what he saw: ‘The scale of the horror seemed to numb people to the very idea of death. I saw one man walking with a bundle in his arms, chatting to another man. When he arrived at the mass grave, he tossed the inert body of his baby on to the pile and walked away, still chatting.’47 As an economist, Salgado wanted to use images to show the reality behind the statistics describing the world’s poor. Showing is more powerful than telling: vivid images of human suffering move beyond simple political messages and invoke wounding, personally touching detail. In doing so, photographs compel the viewer to act.
For me, silver has other ways to store precious memories beyond photography. On the coffee table in my study sit three Persian silver boxes, given to my parents as parting gifts when they left Iran in the 1960s. Their elaborate designs were fashioned by repoussage, the technique of hammering a metal from the back to create a pattern in low relief. They bring back vivid memories of my time in Iran: the roar of gas flares, the night-time glow from the oil fields, and, of course, our visits to the silversmith, who would sit cross-legged in a hut to ply his trade. In ornaments, decoration and jewellery, silver has always preserved memories. But it also continues to store value. During the 1970s, when silver photography was thriving, two brothers seeking a safe haven for their extraordinary wealth caused the price of silver to rise to a height never seen before or since.
Silver’s last gasp
Bunker Hunt was first and foremost an oil man. He had inherited his interest in oil from his father, H. L. Hunt, the richest oil producer in Texas. H. L.’s first fortune was made playing poker in the aptly named oil town of El Dorado (and where, in 1926, Bunker was born). With his winnings he invested in a small oil lease and was lucky enough to strike oil with his first well. Though the well soon ran dry, he invested in several more successful wells, moving out into Florida and then back to Texas. Here he was the largest independent operator in the vast East Texas oilfield. By the time Bunker Hunt began to follow in his father’s footsteps, there were few opportunities for oil exploration in the US and so he looked abroad to Libya. The Libyan government was at the time (during the reign of King Idris) selling concessions to foreigners to drill for oil. The race was on to buy up the most prospective areas. Hunt, an independent up against the well-equipped and well-financed international oil companies, won a concession in the eastern province of Cyrenaica, close to Libya’s border with Egypt. Another concession, a T-shaped plot (‘T for Texas’ Bunker would say) called Block 65, much further inland in the Sahara Desert, seemed less promising, but Hunt was able to buy it on the cheap.48
He had little initial luck and was fast running out of money when, in 1960, he struck a last-ditch deal with BP. He agreed that BP could drill in Block 65 for a 50:50 split of any oil found. The gamble paid off; in November 1961, BP struck the huge Sarir oilfield, estimated to hold between eight and ten billion barrels, at least half of which was thought to be recoverable.49 Even with the low oil prices of the 1960s, Hunt’s half-share would be worth an impressive $4 billion which, along with the fortune inherited from his father, made him the richest man in the world. But the fortunes of both BP and Bunker Hunt were soon to change when, in 1969, a coup brought Colonel Muammar Qaddafi to power. British troops had taken a role as a guardian in the Persian Gulf since 1835 but in December 1971 they were about to withdraw. The day before their departure, Iran inserted itself in the power vacuum by taking control of three small strategic islands. The British did not resist the occupation, provoking a backlash from the rest of the Arab world. BP was at the time majority owned by the British government. So, as an act of retribution against Britain, Qaddafi nationalised BP’s Libyan oil operations.50 Hunt was still able to produce his share of the Sarir oilfield, some 200,000 barrels a day, but the next year Qaddafi ordered all the oil companies to give Libya a 51 per cent share. Unlike many other companies, Hunt refused. In April 1973, his Libyan operations were nationalised to give, as Qaddafi expressed it, ‘a slap on America’s cool, arrogant face.’51 Bunker Hunt had become the richest man in the world and then gambled and lost almost everything. It would take a daring business mind to gamble again, but Hunt did just that. Oil no longer seemed a safe investment and so he invested in real estate and horses, which were his hobby.52 He also turned his attention to silver.
In the 1970s, silver seemed an increasingly safe store of value. High inflation was eroding the value of money and precious metals looked like a good investment. Silver, which was selling at a low of $1.50 an ounce, seemed more of a bargain than gold. Hunt’s view was that ‘just about anything you buy, rather than paper, is better. You’re bound to come ahead in the long pull. If you don’t like gold, use silver, or diamonds, or copper, but something. Any damn fool can run a printing press.’53 Bunker Hunt’s brother, William Herbert Hunt, was also interested in investing in silver.54 He had swallowed the assertions in Silver Profits in the Seventies by Jerome Smith which declared that ‘within our lifetime, and perhaps within the decade, silver could become more valuable than gold’.55 Herbert Hunt explained his logic for investing: ‘My analysis of the recent economic history of the United States has led me to believe that the wisest investment is one which is protected from inflation. In my opinion natural resources meet this criterion, and, to that end, I have invested in oil, gas, coal, and precious
metals, including silver.’56 In the early 1970s, the ratio of the value of gold to silver was around 20:1. Bunker believed that this ratio would eventually return to its historical level of around 10:1, which, according to his logic, meant that, even if gold remained at its then prevailing price, silver would have to double in value.
The Hunts began buying millions and millions of ounces of silver. By early 1974 they had contracts totalling 55 million ounces, around 8 per cent of the world’s supply. Unusually, they were taking physical delivery of their contracts. They were looking for more than short-term profits from speculation; they wanted to create a permanent and literal store of value. But by taking ownership of silver, they began to reduce its physical supply and drive its price higher and higher. Worried about the US government interfering, as they had done with gold in the 1930s, the Hunts decided to move a good portion of their silver to vaults in Europe.57 At a 2,500-acre ranch to the east of Dallas they recruited a dozen cowboys by holding a shooting match to find out who were the best marksmen. The winners got to ride with guns on three unmarked 707s, protecting the Hunts’ silver hoard on a flight to Europe. Arriving at New York and Chicago in the middle of the night, they loaded 40 million ounces of silver from armoured trucks on to the aeroplanes. The cowboys climbed aboard and then flew to Zurich, where the bullion was delivered to six secret storage locations.