Ken Burns shows America’s history through photographers’ lenses

Photographs make miracles.

They make time stand still. They bring the dead back to brief life. Ken Burns, who has spent a career turning old pictures into moving documentaries, remembers the first time he was in a darkroom, watching his father, an amateur photographer, develop a print.

“An image began to slowly emerge from a blank piece of photographic paper immersed in a tray of strange-smelling chemicals… my father’s right hand agitating the newborn print with metal tongs,” Burns writes. “To a three-year-old, it seemed like magic.”

Burns’ new book “Our America: A Photographic History” is his way of recapturing that magic and preserving our nation’s memories.

The coffee table book collects nearly 250 photographs spanning more than 180 years of the art’s history and America’s. A simple caption underneath each photo lists the location and the date. Readers who want more can turn to the back of the book for additional details.

But first, Burns wants you to think of nothing but the image itself. And to really see it.

The pictures come in chronological order from a variety of photographers, some now famous, some still unknown. Still, a few common themes emerge. There are pictures of war and economic hardship. Of personal triumphs and struggles. Of creative geniuses and political martyrs.

“Here is our beauty, fragility, grandeur and cool,” Burns writes in his introduction. “Here is reflection and perseverance, industry and nature. Our harmony and our dissonance. Our forgetfulness and our memory.”

The oldest photograph is from 1839 and may be the world’s oldest selfie, too. Using a homemade camera, Robert Cornelius took a picture of himself, looking a little suspicious. He was perhaps right to be wary. Although he soon embarked on a new career, quickly opening two photography studios in Philadelphia, neither made much money.

He returned to running the family’s lamp and chandelier business.

But new technology would soon make photography more popular, just in time to document the most brutal time in American history.

There is an 1845 portrait of Isaac Jefferson, born into slavery on Thomas Jefferson’s plantation in 1775. He gained his freedom four years after Jefferson’s death. There is also a horrifying one of the man known only as Gordon, who escaped bondage but whose back would always bear the scars of brutal whippings.

And there are pictures of the people who fought for emancipation.

The abolitionist Captain Jonathan Walker helped seven enslaved people escape to the Bahamas. Arrested in 1845, he was put on trial in Florida and had his right hand branded S.S. – for “slave stealer.” And the fierce John Brown tried to lead a slave revolt. He was caught, convicted, and hanged on Dec. 2, 1859, and was the first person in the United States executed for treason.

As a documentarian, Burns made a mini-series about the Civil War, so it’s not surprising that the era is well represented here. One 1861 picture shows the beginnings of the conflict, with the inauguration of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. One 1865 picture shows its end, with the ruins of the Confederacy’s capital, Richmond, Va.

And in between are signs of the fallen. Like the cemetery at the Andersonville P.O.W. camp, where nearly 13,000 Union soldiers died of typhus and other diseases. Or, even grimmer, a morning-after shot of the battlefield at Gettysburg, where more than 50,000 perished, and acres of bodies lay rotting in the sun, awaiting hasty graves.

“It was indeed a harvest of death,” photojournalist Alexander Gardner observed a year later, defending the gruesome photo. “Here are the dreadful details! Let them aid in preventing such another calamity falling upon the nation.”

But there are prettier pictures here, too. Shots of natural beauties, like a frozen Niagara Falls in 1881 or the mysterious Devil’s Tower rock formation in 1887. The geyser Old Faithful was caught mid-eruption in 1884; it was already a must-see on any tour of Yellowstone, our first National Park, created by President Ulysses S. Grant as a public “pleasuring ground.”

Man-made wonders are memorialized as well. A present from the people of France, the Statue of Liberty arrived in New York in 1885 like a bookcase from Ikea; some assembly required. An anonymous photographer was at the scene of the unpacking and captured a shot of her bodiless, impassive face.

And there’s a picture of Manhattan’s City Hall subway station in 1904, just before it opened to straphangers. Boasting brass chandeliers and cut-glass skylights, it was hailed as “the most beautiful subway station in the world,” but the honeymoon didn’t last. As soon as service began, newspapers complained that trains were “crowded uncomfortably, and many passengers stood in every car.”

Occasionally, celebrities make their appearance here, too.

Sitting for a portrait in his Camden, N.J. home in 1891, a year before his death, the poet Walt Whitman has the grave dignity of an ancient prophet. Impishly grinning into the camera in 1916, a 27-year-old Charlie Chaplin shows the delicate beauty he usually hid behind the mustache and ragged costume of “the Little Tramp.”

There are also shots of a young Joan Baez at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival and Bob Dylan at a voter registration rally in 1965 Mississippi. And of Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, who was born in a New Orleans slum so dangerous it was nicknamed “the Battlefield.” He went on to a storied career, and in 1947, one photographer captured him in concert at Carnegie Hall.

“What he does is real, and true, and honest and simple, and even noble,” said fan Leonard Bernstein. “Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul.”

The book, though, is called “Our America,” and famous people are but a small part in it. It also features photographs like a 1905 portrait of a Jewish immigrant, newly arrived in New York – one of the nearly 10 million dreamers who arrived on Ellis Island between 1905 and 1914. There are pictures of struggling farmers and child laborers, too.

“Has been working in the Crescent Hosiery Mill for some months,” photojournalist Lewis Hine writes of Nannie Coleson, an 11-year-old girl he met on assignment in 1913. “Makes about $3 a week… Told investigator, ‘There are other little girls in the mill, too. One of them says she’s 13, but she doesn’t look any older than me.’”

It’s a grim story. To its credit, “Our America” doesn’t let it end there. It notes that Nannie grew up to be a mother and a grandmother, and that she enjoyed watching Ed Sullivan and Julia Child on TV. “Favorite fragrance: Yardley,” it adds. “Loved music and could play the piano by ear. Expert seamstress.”

Small details, sure, but Nannie didn’t quit; those featured here never did.

Sometimes they are famous people – like Jackie Kennedy, pictured here at her husband’s burial at Arlington, her widow’s veil not quite hiding her weary eyes. Sometimes their details are lost to us — like Gordon, the escaped slave who later joined and fought with the Union Army before disappearing into history.

They all struggled. But they all persisted. They were all Americans. And this book gives them their moment, remembering them forever.