ack London died young, at the age of forty, yet in some ways it is amazing that he lived as long as he did. To anyone who happened to see the thirty-one-year-old London and five other inexperienced sailors cruising through San Francisco’s Golden Gate on April 23, 1907, his survival would have seemed nothing short of miraculous. His boat the Snark–leaky and unable to heave to, its blown engine lashed to a rotting casing and its hold full of spoiling food–had been designed by London himself, his first and only attempt at naval architecture. The anchor wouldn’t winch, the lifeboat was unsafe, the head didn’t work, and the hull had to be hoisted out of the mud because the stern had sunk at the pier. The plan was to get as far as Honolulu and put in for repairs. Jack blamed deceitful contractors, unions, and bankers for overruns that drove the costs from the $7,000 he had budgeted to $30,000. Undaunted, he pressed ahead anyway, making landfall in Hawaii twenty-four hundred miles and nearly one month later, where the necessary improvements were made. The drama of the departure behind him, London could finally concentrate on the things that made the journey worthwhile–experiencing foreign lands and writing short stories, articles, and an account of his journey, all the while taking photographs of the people and places he encountered. In the run-up to the voyage London had been contributing short texts to magazines and newspapers to raise cash. But the key to making the enterprise work financially lay in monetizing the trip itself. Published in 1911, the Cruise of the Snark would ultimately prove a bestseller and remains one of London’s more popular works. London viewed photography in part as a way to maximize his profits. Writing to his editor at Macmillan, Harold S. Latham, in 1911, he claimed to be “a professional photographer of fifteen years’ experience.”1 This was an exaggeration on both counts, since the photographs he included in People of the Abyss, his account of the poor living in the East End of the city of London, were the first significant pictures he published, and did not appear until 1903. Nor was London a “professional” photographer in the conventional sense, although he did sell photographs on occasion, primarily (if not exclusively) to illustrate his own writings.
Despite an association with famed German émigré photographer Arnold Genthe (1869-1942), London was, and remained, principally an author. He was said to have learned the basics of photography from a former classmate at Oakland High School Fred Jacobs and from his first wife, Bessie May Maddern, an amateur photographer who maintained her own darkroom.2 By the time of the Snark voyage, London boasted a small arsenal of equipment: Kodak Model 3A and 4A roll film cameras, a view camera, and cameras for panoramas (see Fig. 2) and stereo views.
London developed a distinctive photographic style in keeping with his egalitarian leanings. He favored a relatively long lens, enabling him to photograph a subject engagingly even some distance away. He was also able to control depth of field, so that the subjects themselves are often shown in sharp focus while the background is allowed to blur. This has the effect of providing context for the sitter, while at the same time suppressing details a viewer might find distracting. Shooting from slightly below his sitters, he afforded them an air of dignity, sometimes exaggerating the angle of view to create novel effects (see Fig. 4). Natural in style and free of conscious affectation, they are the visual embodiment of socialist political philosophy as he understood it, emphasizing humanity in the face of poverty and sympathy to the plight of exploited peoples. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â pls mark branliest i beg
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