One of the genuine giants in the crusade for the assertion of photography as high – dizzily high –  art has been aptly commemorated by the splendid book Charles A. Herbert, A Photographic Tribute, 1905 – 1991, by Mary Attard.

Herbert, of mixed Anglo-Maltese parentage, born in Cospicua just after the turn of the Victorian era, was still waiting to be immortalised. Of the visual arts, photography tends to be among the more ephemeral. In a fruitful collaboration with Kevin Casha and Lionel Cassola, his devoted pupil and torchbearer, Attard has gifted this maestro with a persuasive monument destined never to fade.

Herbert excelled in both creativity and technique. He knew what he wanted his pictures to say and, equally eloquently, he knew how to make them say it. He had mastered all the secrets that make the photographic narrative loud and unmistakably clear. Those were the times before digital photography, before electronic doctoring, before Photoshop.

Every image was conceived in the mind, born in the hands and caressed by nature. He was not the first to do it in Malta but he was among the most prolific, gifted and forward-looking.

Netting

Other notable photographers, Maltese and foreign, had shared Harbert’s voracious appetite to express, improve, break through glass ceilings, from Leandro Preziosi to Felice Beato, from Geo Furst to Salvatore Lorenzo Cassar, from Horatio Agius to the Watsons, from the Grand Studio artists to Gerald Formosa, from Armstrong Jones to Daria Troitskaia, a crescendo of camera virtuosi. In my view, Herbert was the Stradivarius among them.

Though he proved instrumental in acquiring premises for the Malta Photographic Society, 10 doors up the street where I was brought up and lived, I confess I never met him. Herbert craved to share his unmanageable knowledge, his enthusiasm for the young art with anyone who cared to listen and learn. He persuaded Marquis de Piro to lease a couple of rooms in Old Bakery Street, Valletta to the society, where the members could meet, discuss organise courses and lectures. Time showed Herbert’s initiative to have been invaluable. Their headquarters remain to this day the ones negotiated by Herbert.

Morning Calm

All the full-page compositions reproduced in this book seem to reveal the Herbert aesthetic fingerprints. Though landscape, indecisively hovering between the dramatic and the lyrical, is anything but neglected, he seems more confident in keeping shorter distances from his subjects.

Among his masterly achievements is the marriage which he celebrates between the sinuous human figure, almost Art Nouveau, with bold man-made monochrome geometrical repetitive patterns, in a way that the plays of curves against the angles, instead of clashing, fortify each other.

The book shows several stunning examples of this. And those backgrounds, we are told, were laboriously constructed by hand, not through the easy magic of photoshop. Even with pre-existing backgrounds, the preference is for showing off the roundness of the human body against stiff and linear geometric architecture.

Stilt Fisherman

Herbert seems to have been the Maltese pioneer of nude photography, a variant practised, openly or clandestinely, since the invention of the revolutionary graphic art in 1839. Though French salon naughty nudes (marketed as painters’ models) circulated in Malta since the earlier days, I am not aware of photographers on the island producing any known original nude work before Herbert. He slammed this door wide open with some admirable images in black and white and in colour. But would it be the female figure he is glorifying? Or is it his own personal aesthetic interpretation of it?

He knew what he wanted his pictures to say

He never lets a suspicion of eroticism creep in his published works. His naked women could almost be angels that tumbled still half asleep from heavenly beds. A chastity which remains essentially a remote pretence for self-restraint, not pandering to the mating imperative imprinted by nature. Of the five double-page spreads, two glorify the essential female figure. It is a pity that the 112 photos reproduced in this book show no date. That would have made it easier to place these creations in their right temporal sequence.

Although black and white remains Herbert’s forte, he also counts among the early pioneers of colour imagery. There is a general misconception that colour photography is only an inter-war development. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Coiffure Exotique

Chemists and photographers were already experimenting very successfully with colour photography mid-way through the Victorian era and with spectacular results. Only, the processes were difficult to master, the results sometimes unpredictable and the costs excessive.

Spoilt as we are by the results of the click of a mobile phone in the most untutored of hands, we cannot even start conceiving how complex, slow and contrary the progress of colour photography had been. Herbert latched on to the new trends early on, grasping, even improving, the colour techniques with some enthusiasm and this book is testament to his inquisitive spirit. I pay homage to Herbert the colour pioneer but I believe his truly great achievement is suggesting colour through the absence of colour.

Modern Juliette

An unsurpassable master of adventurous academia, Herbert reveals an almost slavish complicity with the classical rules of good photography. He took these rules to their extremes but showed little taste for crossing the boundaries, for violating the four untouchable taboos taught to every well-trained photographer:  balanced composition, critical focus, correct exposure, no camera shake.

Personally, nobody more than me embraces a different aesthetics, that of deconstructed quasi-abstraction, by which every image has to break at least one, but possibly more, of those basic rules. I believe Herbert would have produced some masterpieces, different from those that came naturally to him, had he occasionally got lost in the chaos of the selva oscura instead of in the order of the camera obscure.

Don José

Very obviously, Herbert loved portraits and made no effort to hide it. His best work, however, does not reproduce the physical features but the spirit, the life force, the psychology of being. He was after the personality, not the person, of the sitters. A portraiture that penetrates the superficial skin to force to the surface the human condition, the achievements and the defaults, the strengths and the surrenders, an X-rays of mindsets, rather than a record of facial features.

Not happy with so much already going for it, the book adds other bonuses, notes by the author, Attard, a perceptive introduction by the affirmed historian (and, we learn, the one-time photographer) Joseph M. Pirotta and also memoirs by Casha and Cassola. They all contribute to fix the image indelibly, if I may be allowed to abuse a photographer’s metaphor.