Camera Man's Journey: Julian Dimock's South. Photographs by Julian Dimock. Edited and with essays by Thomas L. Johnson and Nina J. Root. Foreword by Dori Sanders. Preface by Cleveland L. Sellers Jr. Afterword by Leon F. Litwack. 191 pages, 155 photographs. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. $39.95.

At the heart of Camera Man’s Journey are 155 photographs made in South Carolina nearly a century ago. The man who made them, Julian Dimock, was an early photojournalist who worked in collaboration with his father, a successful financier who spent most of his time indulging a love of travel and adventure and writing magazine articles about his experiences. As a team, the two of them traveled throughout North America, producing articles for periodicals such as Outing and Country Life. Their published work included pieces on the Everglades, the desert Southwest, and various hunting and fishing spots in Canada and New England.

In 1904 and 1905, the Dimocks traveled to South Carolina, where Julian made more than 600 photographs, about a quarter of which appear in Camera Man’s Journey. Almost all of the images in the book were made in early 1904 and depict African American residents of Columbia, Beaufort, and Hilton Head. For the most part, Dimock portrayed his subjects as proud, hard-working, and self-reliant, a point the authors of the book’s several essays make repeatedly. These same essays also tell us that the subjects of Dimock’s photographs lived desperate lives of crushing poverty—quite likely true but rarely apparent in the pictures.

Technically, the images in Camera Man’s Journey are remarkably competent for photographs made in uncontrolled field conditions almost a hundred years ago. They are well-exposed, in sharp focus, and make good use of late-winter light and shadow. In terms of content, though, they lack both variety and depth. Most of the images fall within three general categories: waist-up portraits, often made from a low angle; domestic scenes of women and/or children working or playing outside their homes; and pictures of men doing agricultural work. The most engaging of the photographs are several of the portraits—those that go beyond mere details of costume and deal with their subjects as individuals. The children in Dimock’s pictures, however, are almost always too cute, and the women, usually shown taking care of children or performing other domestic tasks, too safely picturesque. The agricultural scenes are nearly all too distant. In short, a modern-day photo-editor would not be happy with Dimock’s South Carolina “shoot.” He or she would demand a greater variety of images and insist that the photographer get closer to his subject matter next time.

In some ways, of course, these are unfair criticisms. Working in 1904, Dimock had neither the sophisticated equipment available to present-day photographers nor the intervening century’s worth of photographic tradition and practice to draw on. Even when we make such allowances, however, his pictures seem lacking. While they no doubt possess historical value as records of how people dressed, what the exteriors of their homes looked like, and prevailing agricultural practices, Dimock’s photographs do not get to the heart of their subjects’ lives. The only exceptions, perhaps, are the few images, all portraits, from which the subjects glare angrily at the photographer, seemingly unable, as African Americans in South Carolina of 1904, to tell the white man behind the camera that they’d rather not have their picture made. In short, Dimock’s distanced, formulaic approach points most glaringly to what’s not in his photographs—the cruel facts of being black in the Jim Crow South of the early 20th century. (In similar fashion, most of the essays in Camera Man’s Journey merely allude to the harsh social realities of the time and place, but it’s not until the book’s very end—in Leon Litwack’s afterword—that those conditions are directly acknowledged and identified.)

Shortly after his father’s death in 1917, Julian Dimock quit making pictures for good. A year later, in an article for Country Life, he confessed a strong dislike of being behind the camera, calling photography “a waste of a man’s time” that made him “feel like a useless spectator, a hanger on, a dead weight in the universe.” He may well have been feeling this way for some time, because the photographs in Camera Man’s Journey are indeed those of a spectator: distant, detached, lacking in emotional weight. And this has led to another book of pictures that encourages people to think that it’s all right to substitute what the photographic medium does easily and well—make records of what things look like—for what its serious practitioners constantly have to struggle to achieve—reach beyond mere appearances and get to some of the reasons why things look the way they do.

David Wharton