Photography: Words ramify. Anonymous is as often as not meant to mean, as Chambers Dictionary has it, not only the lack of a name but "lacking distinctive features or individuality".
That sense of the word in no way applies to the photographs in this wonderful book. We may not know the identity of the photographers, but the photographs are as individual and distinctive of feature as anything done by the great masters. Look at the snapshot in sepia tones (right) of a group of toffs scampering across a rainy road on their way to the races - UK, c. 1925 - an image, as William Boyd notes in his perceptive introduction to the book, that Jacques-Henri Lartigue would have been proud of, or consider the study of a top-hatted cabman at twilight awaiting a fare - New York City. USA, c.1900 - which would not seem out of place in one of Atget's portfolios of Parisian cityscapes. And while the three buxom belles - USA, c. 1940 - who appear on the left-hand page fully dressed and on the right-hand page in the nude may not be built on the lines of super-models, the double photograph, impish, witty and moving, is pure Helmut Newton avant l'image.
Robert Flynn Johnson, who bears the rather grand title of Curator in Charge of the Aschenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco - no anonym he - remarks the striking way in which many of the pictures he has assembled "recall and fit within the aesthetic of an established photographer's oeuvre". He goes on to admit, however, that he has "visually, intellectually and emotionally used up many of the great photographic images of the past", and if he never again sees for example Karsh's celebrated portrait of Winston Churchill or Ansel Adams's Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, "it will be too soon". All this despite his earlier, approving quote of Diane Arbus on the enduring quality of photographs: "You can turn away, but when you come back they'll still be there looking at you".
Anonymous photographs, Johnson claims, cannot become stale since "every photograph is virtually unique". However, it seems that here he is confusing the words "anonymous" and "unknown". A Cartier-Bresson photograph is no less "virtually unique" than a snapshot by an anonymous photographer, and indeed it is an irony that a large handful of the pictures Johnson has gathered in this book are so good that they may well in time become as familiar as the French master's iconic images of Kashmiri women at prayer or picknickers on the banks of the Marne.
What does endure more strongly in the anonymous picture is the quality of the enigmatic that it conjures, usually inadvertently - Johnson's introduction is entitled "Accidental Art". We know the intent behind a Cartier-Bresson photograph, or think we do, since we know it was taken by Cartier-Bresson; what is mysterious about an anonymous photograph is not so much its subject or the occasion of its making as the fact that we do not know who was behind the camera. The enigma, then, rests less in the anonymity of the photograph than in the anonymity of the photographer.
There is something uncanny in the thought of them, these stealthy snappers, hunched over their daguerreotype machines or their Box Brownies, holding their breath as they prepared to press the button and stop time in its tracks. It is no accident that we speak of taking photographs, of making exposures. The primitive peoples were right: a part of the soul is imprinted on the photographic plate. How defenceless the subjects of these pictures seem, even when the subject is a landscape or a motor car, how unalterably caught. Poring over the book, one cannot help but feel oneself to be part voyeur; as Johnson says, "like slowing down to see a car wreck, there is a feeling that one should not be looking".
Johnson has cast his net wide in his search for striking pictures; in the acknowledgments at the back of the book he lists scores of "passionate and knowledgeable dealers" whom he thanks for their help and guidance. Who would have thought there would be so many? He describes the millions of anonymous photographs that have piled up over the past century and a half - he cites the observation by John Szarkowski, former curator of photography at MOMA in New York, that there must be more photographs in the world than there are bricks - as a "parallel universe" through which he has been wandering in happy wonderment for the past decade. He also speaks of the last resting place of these pictures as a "purgatory of apathy" and wonders what act of "death, estrangement or miscommunication" led to their being dumped there, waiting for a collector to come along and haul them back into the light.
This is a marvellous volume. The photographs are by turns beautiful, mysterious, moving, amusing, horrifying. They remind us, yet again, how powerful an instrument the camera is, and how enduring is the instant art that it makes.
Anonymous: Enigmatic Images from Unknown Photographers, By Robert Flynn Johnson, Thames & Hudson, 207pp. £19.95
John Banville's most recent book, Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City, is published by Bloomsbury