Author: Peter Marshall

Photographer, Writer, etc.

Captioning Dreams

One of the consequences of age (along with diabetes, exacerbated by too many mugs of coffee staring at the computer screen) is that most nights I wake up around 4.30 am (yes, Alex*, AM does mean in the morning.) Fortunately after a short visit to the bathroom I normally fall quickly back to sleep. But this morning, I had a little shock as I woke, struggling as often out of a dream. I realised that my dream had been a kind of dream about a dream, in which I had been captioning each of its images for my pages at Alamy.

As contributors to Alamy will already know, each image submitted needs extensive key-wording, caption and description information, and it is a time-consuming process to add these, made more tedious as the system doesn’t match up well with the more standard IPTC meta-data. Yesterday I spent around 6 hours working on a batch of images submitted last month, so it’s hardly surprising that it was still at the top of my sleeping mind.

I’m not sure that my images will in any case sell from Alamy, as probably they are the wrong kind of subject matter for its customers, and those wanting my work are more likely to look elsewhere – perhaps in specialist libraries such as Photofusion, where I also have work. Or better still; come directly to me having found what they want in the 25,000 or so images on My London Diary. I do get plenty of requests to use images from there, but too few from anyone who can afford to pay.

The simplest approach to keywording would be to make use of a controlled vocabulary, and there are hierarchical lists available for import into applications such as Adobe Lightroom, for example, the Controlled Vocabulary Keyword Catalog or CVKC. I’m not sure that their listing would be particularly appropriate to my rather limited field of work, and until the libraries I work with adopt it, I don’t think it makes much sense for me to pay the modest dollar cost but much more significant time input to make use of it. However the site does have one of the best pages of advice on captioning images I’ve come across, of course starting from the basic “Who, What, Where, When, Why and How?” but with some other very useful tips.

But, as my dream showed, things can take over our lives. I’ve met many people who have said to me that they never take photographs, as they feel it makes them into observers and they would rather take a full part in what they are doing. It’s a view I have some sympathy with, but then there are plenty of events I’d rather observe than take part in.

But there are other occasions where photography is an important part of how I take part in things. It’s also important to me in preserving my own memory and sense of what happened. In the 1960s I threw myself into various things, and was too busy to take photographs. Now I find that it’s true that if you remember what happened you weren’t really there – largely because these were exciting times and too much was happening rather than substance abuse. All I have are occasional glimpses – being in a dressing room with the great master of the tenor sax, Ben Webster, came back to me a few weeks back (my job was to get him on stage able to stand, largely accomplished by drinking my share of the whisky he would otherwise have got through on his own. If he could stand he could play. And did, beautifully. I’ve never really liked whisky since.)

It wasn’t that I didn’t have an interest in photography. But in those years you either had to be extremely rich or devote hours of your time to the darkroom to be a photographer. I was penniless and already trying to fit more than 24 hours into every day. It didn’t help that my camera was still suffering from a rusty shutter after being dropped in the lake at Versailles, making speeds above an eighth of a second problematic and those below default to B. All in all I have little photographic record of those times to jog memory, one of my great regrets.

*Alex ten Napel, a fine Dutch photographer I met in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, left checking his travel arrangements home rather late. In the car when we were going to dinner to celebrate the end of the event, late on the night before we all left, he asked me “does AM mean morning?” And found he was booked to leave in a few hours on the 4.30am train. His portraits of swimmers, taken standing with them in the pool, were one of several highlights for me of the Foto Art Festival there.

Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is of course a much more serious day, the start of Lent, and a time for sack-cloth and ashes, which I did get to photograph, although my photographic day started with a couple of hundred people opposite Downing Street as a reception committee for ‘war criminal’ Condoleezza Rice. Unfortunately she came in to visit Gordon Brown by the back door and so missed our welcome – and a much-needed Geography lesson from the Friends of Lebanon:

The Middle East

I felt sorry for the guys inside the stockade opposite the famous door, cooped up for hours with nothing to photograph, perhaps because it was too noisy for Condi to emerge in case her delicate ears might hear the shouted advice from the road opposite. It really was much more fun outside, and the picture opportunities were also much better. I’m sure this would have made a better picture for the paper than another boring shot of a politician:

By 3pm we had all had enough and went away – but they were still waiting and hoping. I hope they did finally get to take something, although a quick look through the papers the next day certainly failed to find anything of interest.
More pictures.

Meanwhile the Ministry of Defence was getting more and more barriers and a policeman every few metres around its periphery, as if a huge and violent demonstration was imminent. Others were gathering across the road.

I walked past them and into Embankment Gardens, where a small circle of around 50 people was holding an Ash Wednesday service. This was the combined forces of Pax Christi, along with Catholic Peace Action and Christian CND. One man held a simple wooden cross on which were small photographs, I think of modern Christian martyrs, another a megaphone. The only other weapons – and ones that had seemingly struck fear into the hearts of the Metropolitan Police were ash and charcoal (and later I was also to see a hammer, some nails and sack-cloth.)

This was a Lenten Witness for Peace, an Ash Wednesday Liturgy of Repentence and Resistance to Nuclear War. The vast police presence was because a small number of those taking part were prepared for an act of civil disobedience, writing on the walls of buildings using charcoal. In fact all of those taking part were almost certainly in breach of the SOCPA legislation as the organisers “have never sought permission from the police to engage in the act of prayer and resistance which has taken place here every year since 1982.”

The ashes and charcoal were blessed with holy water and then those present took part in an act of penitence, symbolised by the marking of each of them with a cross of ashes on the forehead. After some further prayers there was a procession to ‘Station 1′, the pavement outside the Old War Office, where the service continued.

This was fittingly a situation begging for a ‘Hail Mary‘ shot, holding my camera above my head at the fullest height I could get, cursing Nikon for their cheapskate omission of a viewfinder curtain from the D200 (actually they give you a small rectangle of black plastic which you lose in ten seconds and isn’t exactly convenient) which means you have to hold one thumb over the viewfinder to get correct exposure while doing so. They did build one into the D2X, but over a thousand pounds and a large weight penalty is a lot to pay for this fairly essential but cheap for Nikon to implement feature. My first attempt (above) was possibly the best.

As this section of the event ended, one of those taking part pulled me to one side to tell me to watch out for people trying to write on the building, and so distracted me from actually taking a photograph of it happening (and I’d already changed lenses and added the flash for that very eventuality.) Of course he meant well, and I was able to photograph the police holding the guy and the unfinished message. Later I saw a woman writing on another wall, and ran, but was too far away to get to her before a policeman had stopped her and was telling her off.


A fisheye used in ‘Hail Mary’ mode to give an overall view. More curses on Nikon.

Outside the Ministry of Defence itself, a large sheet of sackcloth was used to cover the pavement and the cross laid on it. A set of theses for the modern church was read and each of them nailed to the cross while the congregation continuously repeated their chant of a short ‘Litany of the Martyrs.’

Unfortunately I think my curses must have upset Nikon, because halfway through the event my D200 stopped working. I think it had crashed, always a possibility with computers (and modern cameras are computers.) I tried the standard treatment of removing the battery for a few second, and it came back to life, though just to make sure I also changed the battery as it was below 30% left.

Somehow in doing all this, the camera went from the RAW setting I always used and on to basic quality JPEG, and I didn’t notice until I got home, and got rather a nasty surprise on viewing my work. Using my normal LightRoom import settings on jpegs always gives very contrasty poor quality images (they work best using the Linear . Once I had realised the problem I was able to get surprisingly decent results, but the lighting had been extremely tricky and I really missed the flexibility of RAW.

More pictures on My London Diary.

Shrove Tuesday: Three Races

I don’t think I’ve previously photographed four baronesses in the same picture, but the problem with the Pancake Race at the Houses of Parliament was that visually it wasn’t very exciting. So though a caption like “Lord Morris of Manchester, Lord and Lady Dholakia, Baroness Northover, Anne Begg MP, Baroness Garden of Frognal, Baroness Walnesley, Lord Addington” may be great for name-dropping (and would have presented a horrible problem if they hadn’t all been wearing numbers), I can assure you the caption is better than the picture. Despite all these high-powered contestants, I’m pleased to report that it was the media team that won the day.

Over from Westminster to the City of London, and visually things were getting better:

Although I couldn’t quite get this how I wanted it, there is certainly a touch of the surreal, and the Lord Mayor, Chief Commoner and various guilds were having a bit of fairly quiet fun, though the miniature cannon used to start the races was surprisingly loud. This historic event is now in its fifth year and is the Poulters’ Company Shrove Tuesday Pancake Race; they supply the eggs, while the Fruiterers bring lemons, the clockmakers time things, and the glovers supply gloves, though I don’t think anyone wore them. The gun was of course from the Gunmakers, and my only disappointment was that the forks provided by the Cutlers to eat the pancakes were only plastic. In the City I expect silver.


Tossing is easier when you can simply make the pancake levitate with your superpower

I was also worried about where or who the flour and milk for the pancakes might have come from. But further down the road and the social scale in Spitalfields things were clearer, with one of the 15 or so teams of four competing for the prize in the ‘Great Spitalfields Pancake Race’ consisting of four young women clearly labelled flour, milk, egg and lemon. This event is organised by Alternative Arts and the teams taking part seem to be students and young professionals from the many small businesses in the area. Despite one team boasting superpowers in the persons of Superwoman and Batwoman, it was a team from one of these with the sinister name of Execution that won the day.

All this and more of course on My London Diary.

Candid on Candids?

Bus, Peckham 1991 (C) Peter Marshall
Bus in Peckham, 1991 (C) Peter Marshall

A day or two ago someone asked on an on-line photography forum if anyone knew of a book on the subject of candid photography they could recommend, mentioning one publication they had already been given as a present. (I haven’t read it, but what looks to me a rather posed portrait on the cover didn’t inspire confidence.

My immediate response was to wonder what there was to write a book about, which perhaps wasn’t the most helpful of comments, although perhaps appropriate. On further thought what I would recommend is Ralph Hattersley’s ‘Beginner’s Guide to Photographing People‘, published in 1975, though it came out in the UK, published by Robert Hale Ltd, in 1979. (ISBN 0709174039)

It’s a work that I admire for starting with a discussion of the ethical basis of portraiture, and with a listing of some of the wrong and the right reasons for taking pictures of people, in a chapter on taking candid portraits. Later in the book there are chapters on how to make staged candid pictures and how to photograph strangers in the street – and that also starts with an examination of your motives.

Hattersley also does a pretty thorough job of the technical stuff, including lighting. Of course its a book written for photographers using film, but really digital hasn’t changed things that much, although some cameras at least provide new opportunities for shooting with the camera away from your eye.

The very term ‘candid photography’ has a dated feel to it. I immediately think of the 1930s ‘Mass Observation’ project and the splendid images of Humphrey Spender on the streets and in the pubs of ‘Worktown.’ If you have any doubts about the validity of working in this way, take a look at the way the Bolton Museums now give the work a proud place on their web site. As they write, “He used what was at the time cutting-edge technology in the form of an unobtrusive 35mm Leica camera.” In some respects the early screw Leica that he used was a better instrument than the later M cameras for this kind of work – where you don’t change lenses. It was smaller and less obtrusive, and I think the shutter was perhaps even quieter. Certainly much quieter than that on the latest digital Leica M8, and even the promised (and expensive) replacement will still be rather more noticeable.

Bolton’s weather also helped Spender, since he spent most of his time there wearing a mackintosh, keeping the camera hidden under this except when he was actually taking a picture. As they note, “He recalled that the occasional Boltonian would react angrily if they discovered him taking a photograph.” There was a feeling of being spied on – rather more rational then than under the Panopticon of security cameras that now track us through much of our lives. Spender himself they suggest “disliked the intrusiveness of his work” and the stress of documentary was one reason why he turned away from photography to painting and stage design.

I think photographers always have a responsibility to their subject, and especially so when you photograph people without their permission. I often take pictures I would not use, perhaps because I’ve caught a moment when they look distinctly peculiar (something some other photographers sometimes seem to strive for.) Or when photographing a flamenco dancer recently, the picture that caught the fleeting fraction of a second where her rapidly swirling skirt revealed rather more than intended. I perhaps see it as my job to try and see the picture as the people in in might see it years later in a book or museum rather than an immediate reaction.

One of the great projects of candid photography was made by Walker Evans, travelling on the New York City subway trains, often accompanied by his assistant Helen Levitt. Starting in 1938 he photographed using a Leica hidden under his coat, its lens poking out, making around 600 photographs. He had conceived the project with the help of his collaborator, writer James Agee – they were working together on the even more famous ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men‘, published in 1941 – and Agee in 1940 wrote a preface to the subway work. Although the pictures were finished in 1941, it was not until twenty-five years later in 1966 that ‘Many Are Called’ was published to accompany a show of the images from it at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

While at the time the pictures might have been seen as an intrusion into privacy, the passing of time gives us – and any of the subjects – a different perspective. The work was published again in 2004 by the Yale University Press and the Metropolitan Museum of Art mark the 100th anniversary of the subway system, with new texts and also greatly improved reproduction of the images, thanks to new digital scans.

I was reminded only briefly of this work on Saturday, as I crammed into an underground carriage full of Kiwis out with a few thousand others for their Waitangi Day Circle Line Pub Crawl. This image, taken with a 12mm lens on a Nikon D200 may in some respects qualify as candid, but was certainly not made without the knowledge and willing consent of those shown.

New Zealanders celebrate Waitangi Day on the Circle Line Pub Crawl
(C) Peter Marshall, 2008

More pictures as usual on My London Diary. More about candid photography in other posts shortly – including Stream of Consciousness.

What makes a good portrait?

I often find Jörg Colberg‘s Conscientious blog (see sidebar) annoying, too often clogged up with short and undiscriminating links to photographers, but among these are some interesting pieces that make me continue to check it out.

One of these is What makes a great portrait, where he and Miguel Garcia-Guzman of Exposure Compensation, another blog I’d add to my Sage feed if I could work out how, wrote to zillions of photographers, fine art and commercial, bloggers, curators, editors, and gallerists and asked them the question “What makes a good portrait?”, asking them to provide an example and their comments.

They both print the 20 or so replies that they got – which do include a few great portraits, notably by Ingres and Sander, along with a few others that are frankly dross and some between those extremes. One of the pictures is that beautiful image of a young woman, Edouard Boubat’s muse Lella, taken in Brittany in 1947. This can be seen with some of his other images of her on the Sexuality in the Arts blog. It is certainly the best image of the set, but I’m not sure it is the best portrait of her.

Tim Hetherington wins World Press Photo Prize

Congratulations to UK photographer Tim Hetherington, whose colour image of an American soldier resting in a bunker in Afghanistan has won the 2007 World Press Photo Prize. It is a picture that captures, as jury chair Gary Knight of VII notes “”the exhaustion of a man – and the exhaustion of a nation.”

On his web site, he says “I’m currently in New York recuperating after an accident in Afghanistan.” He was in the country on assignment for ‘Vanity Fair‘, where there is also a slide show of 15 of his portraits of soldiers and another of 15 images from the Korengal Valley – the winning image is the final picture of this. There is also a video discussion between Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, the writer of the feature.

You can also see it and all the other winners on the World Press Photo 2008 pages, which will be occupying me for some time.

PGDB Shortlist: John Davies

John Davies is a photographer who I’ve long admired and the only one of the four I know personally. I’ve written and talked about his work (I’d also written about the work of Holdt before the nomination for the prize) including an extended review of the superb large-format book of the show ‘The British Landscape‘ (2006) which was nominated for the prize.

John is included in the Urban Landscape web site which I run with Mike Seaborne, but you can see more of his work on his own site.

His work is the best presented of the four short-listed photographers, filling the gallery at No 5 (with the coffee bar) with large, well printed black and white silver gelatin prints.

John’s landscapes are panoramic not in format, but in the sense that he likes to work from a high viewpoint with a relatively wide angle of view. Simply in terms of technique, his work stands out compared to the competition, but of course that isn’t it’s main strength. What strikes me on viewing these prints is their sheer lucidity both physically and conceptually.

The prints on show are a cross-section of his black and white work from 25 years in the book – and in the larger show. The book was my choice for the photo book of the year when it came out and the even larger prints here are just slightly more impressive. I do just wonder if they are a little too large on the wall, with the grain beginning to become intrusive in some areas. But they are certainly very well printed.

I’ve long considered John to be the leading contemporary exponent of urban landscape photography (though I also love the work of others including Gabriele Basilico.) On show here are some of his classic images, although I think I am currently even more interested in his colour work, and would feel that that is now making a greater “contribution to photography” than his older black and white work. Perhaps the weakest element of John’s work are his captions which sometimes seem to me to be too prosaic and concerned with the place rather than the precise location of the picture or its content.

One curious aspect of his work in the catalogue is the warm tone of the illustrations, brown rather than the much more neutral tone of his images. I don’t think this – or the small scale does them justice.

PGDB Shortlist: Jacob Holdt

Jacob Holdt‘s work is a slide-show of images he took while hitch-hiking across America as a penniless and trusting Dane from 1970-75. On his odyssey he met and befriended many, mainly from the poorer American underclass, both black and white (though mainly black), living with them. As he has often said, he was a wanderer, a vagabond (occasionally an image made me think of Gaylord Oscar Herron, a photographer of the same era with very different work – and like Larry Clark, from Tulsa) I though and not a photographer and took his pictures largely as a record of his travels with a cheap Canon Dial half-frame camera sent him by his family so he could show them what he was up to. Back in Denmark, he made a slide show, which became in great demand, and before long he was showing it to mainly student audiences across America and elsewhere, a career that has kept up for over 30 years.

This work has been available on the web for years, and I wrote about it and linked to it a few years ago in those days when I had an audience of millions. Last year his work was picked up by Steidl and published in a book, leading to this nomination.

Holdt obviously has a great deal of interest and empathy for the subject that he took on – the American underclass and its treatment by rich America. He has a great ability to get to know people and gain their confidence (and apparently still keeps in touch with many of those he photographed.) But much as I liked his work on the web I found the slide show at the Photographers Gallery hard to watch. It’s perhaps some measure that, having come in part way through the showing I found it very hard to be sure when I had got to the same pictures again, and I think watched another 10 or 15 of the 81 slides before I was sure I had seen one before.

Much of the problem for me is quite simply his photographic incompetence. Almost every picture I found myself thinking “if only…” There was this guy in a fantastic situation and if only he had taken a slightly different viewpoint or moment, or got the exposure closer to correct or had better lighting… Add to that some decidedly odd colour processing and rather small negatives, along with what appears to have been a deliberate immersion in dust and hairs. In a way it’s like citizen journalism, those fuzzy cameraphone images whose very lack of quality sometimes adds to their impact, the feeling that comes from them being records from someone who was really caught on the spot when the bomb went off. Powerful as they may be, I wouldn’t be happy if one of these scooped the World Press Photo Prize.

There is a programme at the gallery with his captions in running order, but it isn’t really good enough (and impossible for me to read in the dark.) What the slide show needs is his commentary, as well as more thought about the timing for different images.

For the book the images were made much more respectable, cleaned up, and some corrections made to the exposure, though some images are still clearly beyond the limits of the film. Together with the much smaller scale of the printed images, these changes make the work look much better in the book than in the slide show. The book is also I think better edited, although most of the pictures in the slide show are also in the book.

Several of the images shown included TV sets, but in one the screen appeared on the initial view to have a huge crack across it, sending my mind flying in a particular direction until I realised that it was only either a hair (or the image of a hair) on the slide. The interiors did make me recall the very different work of Chauncey Hare, truly one of photography’s forgotten figures, and his book ‘Interior America‘ whose work showed a deep spiritual despair at the centre of the nation. Unlike Holdt, Hare was a photographer, although after making the work in this book and ‘This Was Corporate America‘ (1985) he moved out of photography into taking more direct action as a co-director and therapist involved in a not-for-profit community-based business supporting those who have been abused at work.

Holdt tells a powerful story, and the pictures provide some good illustrations for it. On the web presentation he also makes use of pictures from other sources, including historical documents about slavery. He writes about his own pictures “I have never been interested in photography as art so very few of my pictures can stand alone“, and I think he is right. And whatever you think about photography and his work I think it would be beyond human ingenuity (even of such ingenious people as those on the jury) to justify his work as making any significant “contribution to photography over the previous year.” So perhaps he should be my hot tip!

PGDB Shortlist: Esko Mannikko

It was seeing the work of Elina Brotherus which won her the 2000 Finnish Photography Prize that first prompted me to take a deeper look at Finnish photography, and to write a feature about it at the start of 2001. Before then I think most of us had thought of Arno Rafael Minkkinen as the only Finnish photographer. Esko Männikkö was not among the almost 30 photographers I mentioned in my feature, nor did I feel it necessary to add him when I revised it a few years later.

This isn’t an opinion that the work on show at the Photographers’ Gallery would cause me to revise. There is something deeply wrong when the most interesting thing I could think of to write about is the frames (and these are not very interesting) and the fact they are hung without space between them, apparently his ‘trademark.’ Though not it seems in Berlin.

But I have actually changed my mind rather about him as a photographer, not because of the pictures on show, but for the book ‘Mexas‘ (1999) included in the corridor display at No. 5. This must qualify for some kind of award for the worst colour repro in recent years, looking like a comic book version of poor inkjet printing. More like the kind of thing we got in the 1950s than modern publishing. For $75 I expect more, although Photo-Eye, where you can see a few pages from it, thinks differently, writing “The printing, done in Finland, is lush.” But despite this I found the work impressive.

At least one of the pictures from this book is in the show, ‘Simon, Batesville’ and on the wall – like the other works – is impeccably printed there. In fact the most positive thoughts I had about his work on the wall was about the quality of the printing, particularly in the still life works.

Batesville, Texas, near the border with Mexico is the location for many of the pictures in ‘Mexas’ and in particular some very impressive panoramas (as Gary Michael Dault remarks in one of the two introductory essays, “The panoramic works are the key“.) My advice is not to waste too much time looking at his stuff on the wall, but to take a good slow meander through the pictures in this book.

PGDB Shortlist: Fazal Sheikh

Fazal Sheikh’s work is far better for me in the book (and on the web) than on the gallery wall. On his web site he describes himself as “an artist-activist who uses photography to create a sustained portrait of different communities around the world, addressing their beliefs and traditions, as well as their political and economic problems. By establishing a context of respect and understanding, his photographs demand we learn more about the people in them and about the circumstances in which they live.”

Reading the exhibition labels, and even more so the book, I found the texts considerably more interesting than the photographs. You can read the complete book, Ladli – ‘Beloved Daughter’ in either English or French on his web site (or of course you can buy it in print.) The text on the web (actually present as images) is just a little small for my comfort on the web, but the images are well reproduced.

Part of the problem on the gallery wall is the scale of the images. In his work, Sheikh makes use of a narrow plane of focus, usually rendering the eyes and face sharp, while the side of the head and ears are out of focus. It’s a technique that for me only really works at a particular size of print, as the print size alters the apparent degree of ‘fuzziness’, giving a different effect at different scales. The web images, at around 13.5 cms high are a little too small, and just look slightly annoyingly unsharp, for example the ears in the portrait of Kajal. It looks more like a slight mistake than deliberate decision, while in the large gallery prints they seemed too fuzzy. There is an uneasy line between when a ‘signature’ becomes merely a ‘formula’ and seeing all these works gathered together on the gallery wall rather than embedded in the lengthy text of the book did start to make me find the approach relentless.

Sheik’s prints are inkjet prints, and according to the catalogue are maked on “handmade Photo Rag paper.” They are actually pretty good prints, but the paper looked to me rather like a machine made Hahnemuhle paper that many of us use for our exhibition prints. But perhaps this is just another manifestation of the extreme problem that galleries have in spitting out (or gicleeing) the “i” word.

I think his are fine books, and that they deal with important issues. However I think that other photographers have produced essays around these topics that are more powerful photographically, less mannered and more direct.