<p>Photo: A History From Behind the Lens is a 12-part, six-hour television series produced for French television, which aims to discuss some of the hidden technical and aesthetic aspects of what is arguably the defining art form of the past hundred years. In terms of sheer access, photography is something that many, many people have participated in, whether as a producer of images, a subject of them, or a consumer or in many cases, all three. Especially in the industrialized west, one would be hard-pressed to find anyone who has no or even very little experience with all these aspects of the form.</p><p>It's reasonable to expect, then, that an in-depth look at the history and development of photography would hold great interest for many viewers. Alas, although this is the case, this series fails to deliver on much of its promise. There is a good deal of information here, to be sure, but the series suffers from a scattershot approach that undermines a more measured approach, one that perhaps seeks to avoid staleness and predictability but swaps that for an unpleasant randomness. Moreover, in a world in which the static image has lost some of its glamour, the producers spend much time with annoying, Terry Gilliam-style animations of the photos themselves, which more often than not are annoyingly distracting.</p><p>The first of the criticisms is the more significant. For a series that proposes to illuminate the history of photography, it's bewildering that the first episode should focus on the Surrealist movement of the '20s and '30s. Surrealism, after all, was an art movement that sought to undermine the outward appearance of things, which is what photography excelled at capturing; much of their output was a reaction against what had come before. Given that this is the first episode in the series, nothing has come before, from the viewer's point of view, making it a disorienting starting point.</p><p>Not until episode two does the viewer journey to the starting point, with "The Primitives of Photography, 1850-1860". One of the best installments in the series, this provides an illuminating and interesting look at the very earliest images ever recorded. It also reveals, surprisingly enough, that "trick" photography and the overt manipulation of the image had its roots in the very earliest days of the art form. Photographers would often take multiple exposures of a scene in order to cobble together the various bits into a single, acceptable image. What we think of as Photoshopping existed many decades before Photoshop.</p><p><a href="http://www.popmatters.com/review/177062-photo-a-history-from-behind-the-lens/">Keep reading...</a></p>