Category: Photographers

Sutton Show

I don’t much relish hangings, even though fortunately those which I’ve experienced have been of an artistic nature. Today’s at Sutton Library in south London (or for those who still believe the Post Office, Surrey) was a rather lengthy slog, and the show with the hardly inspiring title ‘Eight Photographers‘ remains on show only until Nov 15th, and on the 16th gets taken down to make way for a barn dance.

So those of you inclined to venture south of the river (or who even live there) will need to get your skates on if you wish to see it (and don’t go on Monday as the library is closed.) My contribution is eight images from ‘My London Diary‘ chosen a little at random from the 24 that appeared earlier this year in ‘Another London‘ at Kingston Museum (or rather the 20 that were still in their frames, unsold.)


‘Kiss-It’ protest against violence in Mental Health treatment, London Feb 2005.

Among the other seven egos laid bare on the white walls are a number of photographers I’ve known for a long time, including Sam Tanner, whose images of his own mother’s last years are a sensitive, loving, poignant and very human document. David Malarkey has caught and enlarged the diffraction of light in a way that can be very striking, especially when glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, although they also have an unusual quality seen close to. Carol Hudson‘s four panoramic images come from her local street, and one which includes a startling pink pedestrian blur along with a static figure, other people and a bus particularly caught my attention. Tony Mayne was the only among us to have worked to give the show some particular local interest, his three blocks of nine images each showing people on the high street a few yards away. Also exhibiting are Nick Hale, Darren McCloy and Len Salem.

Sutton Library looks a superb library, in a new civic centre for the London Borough of Sutton, just off the High Street, a short walk from Sutton Station (it felt further when I was carrying 8 framed pictures.) It has a nice exhibition space, although unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a coherent arts programme there (and I certainly can’t find any details of this show on the London Borough of Sutton web site), and it is also used for other types of event – such as the barn dance. Ask Sutton not me if you want details of that.

Climate Camp

I regret not going to the Camp for Climate Action at Sipson, near Heathrow in August. Partly because I was busy with other things – no real excuse when its our only planet at risk, but also because I found the anti-photographer rhetoric put out by some of the organisers upsetting. (And of course I was there in 2003.)

Fortunately others did go and make a fine record of what went on, which was on show at The Foundry in Shoreditch last week and closes today (Sunday Nov 3.).

You can see the exhibition online and as well as the pictures, there is also some thought-provoking text about the camp, and the police reaction to it. It is important to understand that those taking part were doing nothing illegal in holding a camp and enjoyed a great deal of support from local residents.

Almost all of the disruption in the area over the week was caused by the police activities, which seriously disrupted life for those living in the area as well as the campers, as well as resulting in some delays for those flying from Heathrow. The whole policing operation – and I wrote a little about my experience of it in August – was totally out of proportion to any likely threat from those at the camp.

The decision to go ahead and build a third runway at Heathrow will almost certainly be viewed by history as the most criminally irresponsible act of the Brown government. The industry is already taking it for granted that it will go ahead. I think it is also likely to lead to the largest direct action campaign ever seen in this country – and it may even end up being Brown’s ‘poll tax’. The police were perhaps just getting in a bit of doubtfully legal advance practice.

My congratulations go to Mike Russell, Kristian Buss, Gary Austin, Jerome Dutton, Adrian Arbib, Amy Scaife and Mike Langridge for their pictures, Jody Boehnert for the exhibition design and Mike Russell for the web site.

Still on show at the Foundry (Great Eastern St, London EC2A 3JL) until Sun Nov 11 are images from the G8 events in Rostock by Paul Mattsson and Guy Smallman.

Still Life: Killing Time – Ed Clark

Last night to the Photographers’ Gallery, not for an opening but a book launch. I was greatly impressed by Edmund Clark‘s still life images from E Wing at Kingston Prison in Portsmouth when I saw them at Rhubarb Rhubarb in Birmingham this Summer, and pleased to learn from him then that they were to be published by Dewi Lewis (who was at the time reviewing portfolios at the table in front of mine.)

Some of my favourite photographs come in the opening section of ‘Let Us Know Praise Famous Men‘; a bed, its worn sheets starkly illuminated by Walker’s flash, a small bowl on a shelf, and through the doorway an oil-cloth covered table with an oil lamp in a sparsely furnished room, a pair of boots on bare-dust earth, a family’s stock of cutlery ledged behind a strip of wood. In Evans’s case there are of course also portraits, unrelenting gazes into his lenses, direct, honest (while his and James Agee’s motives were perhaps less so.) But for me it has always been the images without people that told me far more about the particular exigences of these people living on the edge of America.

Ed Clark is not Walker Evans, but these images seem to me to be in the same tradition, precisely seen and organised, recorded in detail on a large format camera (in colour rather than black and white.) And of course it is the details that matter, that grab the photographer’s and our thoughts and feelings. Among the more powerful of them are the various lists that mark out time – newspaper rotas, the day’s activities (or rather lack of), a prisoner’s handwritten lists of his lunch for the next 3 weeks, even the series of steps required to use the toilet printed in large for a senile inmate. But there are also many strong visual clues to the nature of life for those in this particular dead end (and the final image in the book shows a coffin in the crematorium chapel.)

Wisely, Ed Clark decided not to include images of the elderly “murderers, rapists, paedophiles and other violent criminals” whose time was being killed in E Wing in his project, although some were happy to be photographed. Most of them are inside for acts that we find reprehensible, although occasionally we may glimpse our own darker sides and shiver “there but for fortune...”, but despite the disgust we feel for what they have done, it is hard to look at these images and not to feel a considerable disquiet at the way that we – and our agents, the prison service – treat these elderly, sometimes senile, men.


Side of Inmate’s Cupboard (C) Edmund Clark.
We changed to decimal coinage on February 15th 1971, roughly 35 years before this picture was taken. A life sentence, ordered like the chart in neat rows.

Government and opposition eagerly scramble over each other to prove who is toughest on crime, inventing new offences, making sentences longer and longer and sending more and more to jail. We have more and more elderly prisoners, many of whom no longer present little if any real threat to the community at large, and for whom prison is an inappropriate place. As the images suggest, you don’t need 20 foot razor wire fences of its initial image for people who need a stair lift or walking frame.

E Wing was of course a small if inadequate step to care for these people within a prison system where the weak and elderly – as Erwin James points out in his afterword – are easy prey in the struggle all prisoners have to survive. And housing only 25 men it was for its 8 years of existence the only unit catering for a prison population of over 2000 over-60s.

This is a powerful book, and a disturbing one, and it deserves a wide audience, not just among those of us with an interest in photography but with all who care about the kind of society in which we live. It should be published in magazines and newspapers and other media. It’s work that thoughtfully and graphically raises important questions – but importantly without preaching or suggesting solutions. Every politician should have a copy, and think carefully about where their competition for the red-top vote is taking us.

Peter Marshall

STILL LIFE: KILLING TIME
Edmund CLARK
Dewi Lewis Publishing
Hardback, 72 pages. £16.99
43 photos, 310 x 247mm
ISBN: 9781904587538

Two exhibitions of this work have so far been confirmed:

Light House, The Chubb Buildings, Wolverhampton: 18 Jan – 12 Mar, 2008
Aspex, The Vulcan Building, Portsmouth: 1 Feb – 20 Mar, 2008

Bielsko-Biala Diary

Photo festivals tend to keep you pretty busy, with meeting and talking to other photographers, but I like to find time to take a few pictures too. While I was in Bielsko-Biala last a just over a week ago for the 2007 FotoArtFestival , I kept a diary, and took some pictures both of the place and of the festival to illustrate it.

I’ve had to censor the diary a little for publication, and get rid of the libellous remarks and wilder thoughts, but I hope there are still a few controversial passages. You can read what I really thought about some of the shows, and see a little of what photographers get up to at such events.


On my way to the theatre in Bielsko-Biala


Friday lunchtime – I was sitting next to Joan Fontcuberta and Sarah Moon


Early on Saturday morning in a smoky Gallery Wzgorge

I’ve not finished the diary – still some material from the final day of the ‘Maraton’, the final party and a couple of pieces on some of the shows to add. Then there is my own presentation, the final session in the Maraton, and I also intend to put the text and some of the pictures of it on line as well (copyright issues mean I cannot use them all – but wherever possible I’ll link to the same or similar images.)

All the pictures I made in Poland were using a Fuji Finepix F31fd. Would I buy one again? Probably not, but some of them aren’t bad. But not having a viewfinder is still a pain.
You can also read the diary – and some of my presentation – from the 2005 FotoArtFestival on line.

ROOF UNIT at [ space ]

First I’d better declare an interest. Actually I’m not sure I need to. This is – I hope – a very personal blog, one that reflects my own personal involvement in the medium of photography, and my conviction that if it isn’t personal, it isn’t worth saying (or photographing.)

But I was at [ space ] in Hackney on Friday night partly because my own work was appearing in the ‘Roof Unit Foundations’ show there, though I would have gone in any case to see the Brian Griffin show also opening there (see separate article.) My pictures in it are ones I now feel a certain distance from, as I took them in 1983.

Roof Unit is a group of photographers based in a former soap factory in the East End. I met one of them, Toby Smith, at an ‘Olympic Symposium’ held at [ space ], an arts complex in Hackney, in June, (where I also saw what will almost certainly be the best film to come out of the London 2012 Olympics.)

Toby talked at the symposium about his bid for a photographic contract for the games, made together with Photofusion, based in Brixton. I contribute work to the Photofusion library and I’ve been connected with it – if fairly peripherally – since its earlier incarnation in Webbs Road when I joined a ‘Men’s Group’ run by Crispin Hughes.

I met Toby again at a Photofusion opening on the day before the contract was announced (it didn’t go to Photofusion, although their bid was credible enough to get to the final stages) and naturally talked to him about my work in the Olympic area and the Lower Lea generally since the early 1980s. He was interested and later took a look at my River Lea site, and I was delighted to be invited to take part in the Roof Unit show in Hackney with a group of 4 colour pictures from those I had made around 1983.

This is a picture from the edge of the main Olympic site, and a scene that when I saw it made me exclaim ‘Man Ray’, although I have really no reason to think the wrapped object is a sewing machine. I’ll put the other 3 of my images at the bottom of this piece :


Bromley by Bow, 1982.
Lightjet print on dibond, 30x20cm. Peter Marshall

Back in April this year, after I’d photographed the Manor Gardens Allotments – now sadly lost to the Olympic juggernaut – I wrote: “part of the charm of the allotments at the moment is that they are a little run-down and the plot-holders huts have a very personal and rather heath-robinson quality. a still life photographer could spend their life here and never exhaust the subject matter.” The three images by Gesche Wurfel provide a powerful illustration of the fact, working precisely and in square-format colour. I particularly liked Shed 2, with its perfect balance between inside and outside lighting connecting the interior with the allotments and its use of colour, particularly the glowing orange plastic spade, the reds of the window frame and the yellow hedge outside.

Rita Soromenho‘s bunch of dandelion heads collected on a walk by the Lea were also glorious for their colour and richness, transmuting these wild and so-common plants into an image of sumptuous beauty. The fine detail and glow against the black background produced in this image made on a scanner gives an amazing realism.

Jason Larkin adds a touch of human interest in his two pictures taken in one of the many small factory units on the site. Heads peer out between stacked white boxes of scotch salmon, and a crudely tattooed hand cuts through a slice of rich orange fish. Of course all of the work on show implies human presence, whether in the eerie night-time pylons of Anthony Marsland (one suspects putting the cables underground was a decision made largely on doubtful aesthetic grounds) or the goal-posts of East Marsh by Mark King, seen in dramatic light and one of a number of sporting facilities to be lost during the Olympic development, in this case I think for a coach park.

Chris Littlewood’s three Ebb and Flow images show the patterns left by the rise and fall of water and waste, soon to be a thing of the past above in the site area with the building of a lock on the Prescott Channel, which may enable the use of barges to carry away spoil from the building sites, but perhaps more importantly will protect the delicate noses of the athletes and corporate guests for whom the Olympics is staged from the sewage sometimes carried upstream on the tide.

Reinaldo Loureiro‘s untitled C-type print reminded me of the travellers caravans I was invited into for tea many years ago when helping to protect them from police harassment in Manchester. The same mixture of kitsch religious images, plastic flowers and everyday life – in this case a plate of biscuits and a beer can. Toby Smith‘s Silo 7 is very much the kind of view of derelict industry that has excited some of my own work over the years, and I would have welcomed seeing more of his work, even if that meant smaller prints. Jon Wyatt‘s panoramic image of the ‘Greenway’, the path on the Northern Sewage Outfall, shows it in dramatic light with a fine mass of grey clouds. I wasn’t sure whether it might have been improved by rather less of the brown of the path in the foreground, but perhaps this was a deliberate reference to what lay under the photographers feet on its route to Beckton.

Outside in the corridor are two large light boxes with Duratran lambda prints by Allesandra Chila. These ‘Olympian Visions’ were (I think) of a group of volunteers tidying up one of the filter beds of a former water works and a view over the rooftops of Hackney Wick. I’m not sure exactly from where this was taken, but many of us will have spent considerable time waiting for Silverlink and contemplating a rather similar view. Although I found these prints impressive, I also felt a little disappointment when I moved in for a closer view, which gave me grain or texture rather than the greater detail for which I had hoped.

Also in the show were Peter Ainsworth, with an image of fridges piled up behind a wall and a white van parked in front, Sophie Gerrard with a picture of a lock-keepers house on the Bow Back Rivers (an interesting lock, recently restored,) and Wendy Pye, whose Ipod slideshow gave us some fleeting glimpses around Marshgate Lane and the Old River Lea; too fleeting for me – I would have liked to see more images and a slightly slower presentation rate.

It’s an interesting show, combining a variety of approaches to the area, much of which will disappear and whose whole character will be changed over the next few years, a change which I can only view with considerable regret.


The Lea Navigation carried timber to many timber yards. Upper Edmonton, 1983.
Lightjet print on dibond, 20x30cm. Peter Marshall


Ponders End, 1983.
Lightjet print on dibond, 20x30cm. Peter Marshall


Hackney Wick, 1983.
Lightjet print on dibond, 20x30cm. Peter Marshall

Brian Griffin: The Water People

One of the things that I admire about Brian Griffin’s work is that he takes what could be dull, commercial projects and turns them into something personal and exciting. In his early years it was his portraits of businessmen.

If you have the misfortune to read any of the business press or by mistake open the business section of your newspaper rather than send it directly to recycling, you can unfortunately find too many tedious suits, often supplied by company PR who generally have as much imagination as the typical woodlouse.That you will also sometimes come across some more interesting photography probably owes a great deal to the example of his work, inspiring other photographers.

A commission by Reykjavik Energy in Iceland could have been boring. Brian has turned it into a mythical narrative, based very loosely on Jules Verne’s ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth‘, in which he undertakes a dangerous journey to discover the city of the water people, who he then photographs. Two of the more interesting images in the show for me are of structures which I assume belong to Reykjavik Energy which suggest a different science fiction, clearly the alien landing craft.

The portraits of the water people are I think taken through sheets of glass with water or other more viscous clear liquid on them to give distortion effects. Years ago I had a box of sheets of various patterned glass samples some of which could also produce similar – but generally more regular – effects when used close to the lens.

It was a nice opening at [ space ], where it is on show together with water medallions by Brynja and in the next-door gallery Roof Unit Foundations, all running until 15 December 2007. I’m pleased to report that the opening was liberally supplied not with water but with Pilsner Urquell, one of the great bottled beers. Such a change from the brew at London’s best known photography space.

Brian also has another show in London at the moment – Teamphoto, which I’ve written about previously – at the (German) Gymnasium at St Pancras until Novermber 19, celebrating the great achievement of adding 20 minutes to my travel time to Paris. I’ll try out the new service in a few weeks on my way home from Paris Photo.

Water Portraits

Last week I spent some time with another photographer of ‘water people’, Alex ten Napel, whose work I’ll write about shortly. His approach to water portraits is more direct, getting his subjects (or helping them) to duck under water just before he photographs them, standing in the swimming pool.

Paul Trevor at Rich Mix

Last week I got e-mail from Paul Trevor and realised I’d not actually been able to see his work when I called in at Rich Mix Cultural Foundation on the Bethnal Green Road at the top of Brick Lane – and I’ve since met several people who had the same experience as me.

Paul contacted the gallery after hearing from me, and whether as a result or otherwise, when I called in there on Friday, things were very different. I went down the stairs again and sat on the old sofa, and enjoyed around 300 of Paul’s pictures on the large display screen, projected at roughly six second intervals in a show lasting roughly 30 minutes.

As I sat down, one of his pictures from the ‘Battle of Lewisham‘ was on screen, and what followed was a kaleidoscope of life from London’s East End in all its rich diversity. Of course many of the pictures were familiar to me – including some of the half dozen or so I’d featured in the London Arts Cafe show a few years ago, as well as those I’d seen in various shows and publications over the years, but there was also a great deal of work new to me.

The images in the display were a selection from the 5000 scanned from Paul’s contact sheets by the London Metropolitan University as the initial step in a project to produce 500 high quality scans for his Eastender Archive. Paul obviously took rather more care over his contact than some photographers (me for example!) but there were still some that were a little too light or dark, as well as those for which a straight unmanipulated print cannot do justice. The scans were of surprisingly high quality – considerably better than those I made of my own contacts for my very first CD project, ‘London Pictures 1992’, made in 1993 when I found that none of the clients I gave the CD to had the equipment to play it. Technology has moved on considerably since then! Contacts from 35mm are 1.5×1″, and a scan at 1200 dpi gives a 1800×1200 pixel image, sufficient for most display devices.

The sofa and screen are in a hole down a set of stairs from the main floor level. There are now two large projected images on the walls above this, one at the side and one on the back wall. Although the quality of these large projections is still rather washed out – even in the dull light of approaching dusk that I was there, at least the projectors are now set up correctly without the distortion of aspect ratio and keystoning apparent in my previous vision, and the images are shown on a blank wall avoiding the ventilation duct that formed a part of every image previously,

Its a shame that my write-up here – and in my previous piece has had to concentrate so much on the practicalities rather than the images. But this is only an initial stage in the project. Paul Trevor’s work in the East End of London is certainly one of the most significant bodies of documentary work produced in the UK in the era and deserves considerably more care and respect than was shown by the gallery – and a much fuller treatment by critics – including myself – at a later date when the project is in a more complete form.

There were a few pictures in those I watched that I would be surprised to find in the final cut, knowing something of the strength and depth of Paul’s work. A few perhaps where his feeling for the people or the place or the occasion is stronger than the photographic representation, as well as a little duplication, but the overall impression is hardly diminished.

There were many places and situations that I recognised, and some – in particular the anti-racist demonstrations – where I was scanning the image to see if I was visible, at the time more as a participant than a photographer. I didn’t find myself, but Paul’s work forms a very recognisable and very intimate view of an East End that I’ve only really glimpsed over the years as an outsider.

So, get along to Rich Mix and see the show – its on until 30 Nov, and Paul’s work is by far the most interesting show in London at the moment.

Bielsko-Biala

You have just missed one of the world’s best photo festivals (although the exhibitions remain open until Sunday.) I’m not actually sure I should tell you about it, because it was already standing room only for at least one session, and part of what makes it so great is it’s manageable size. If you all come for the next one it may not be the same!

I first heard of Bielsko-Biala when I was invited to show work at the first FotoArtFestival there in 2005. I hate to travel. I’ve even refused jobs on the grounds that I couldn’t get there on a Zone 1-6 London Travelcard. Before then I hadn’t been on an airliner since I was about 15 – and then only on a tour of the workshops at London Heathrow where my eldest brother then worked (and I suspect it was a DC-3.) I started taking my ‘carbon footprint’ (not that we called it that then) and energy use seriously in the late 1960’s, when I was “a friend of the earth before the earth had friends” or at least before the organisation was set up here in the UK.

Two names made me decide to bend my principles sufficiently to make the trip to Poland as well as sending work there. I wanted to meet Eikoh Hosoe and Ami Vitale.


Gunars Binde, Eikoh Hosoe, Ami Vitale and Peter Marshall. Photo by Jutka Kovacs

I also wrote about many of the other fine photographers I met there, including Stefan Bremer Gunars Binde, Sarah Saudek, Pilar Alabajar, Shadi Ghadirian, Lars Tunbjork, Bevis Fusha, Ali Borovali, Obie Oberholzer and Vasil Stanko for ‘About Photography‘, and although those features are no longer on line there, you can find them on the ‘Wayback Machine‘ along with those about photographers unable to come to Bielsko, such as Joachim Ladefoged and Boris Mikhailov, and Mario Giacomelli, who of course died in 2000. One curious feature of many of the pages on the Wayback machine is that my photograph is replaced by that of the current guide.

This year’s FotoArtFestival also brought a range of stars to Bielsko-Biala, including Sarah Moon, Misha Gordin and the author of one of the best-known histories of photography, Naomi Rosenblum. The outstanding show for me was Walter Rosenblum‘s ‘Message from the Heart‘ and I had the privilege of visiting it together with Naomi and his daughter, the film-maker Nina Rosenblum. A screening of her film about her father was another highlight, despite some technical problems. I was there to give a presentation, which included some of my own work as well as images by John Benton-Harris and others who have photographed on the streets of England.
At the moment I’m still exhausted from my trip there and the journey home, and still writing up my memories and processing the images I took there on my highly pocketable Fuji Finepix F31fd. Even though these are only jpegs, it is still worthwhile importing them into Lightroom and adjusting as if they were raw files. The difference can be astonishing, and it somehow seems to result in less degradation than similar processing in Photoshop or other image-processing software.

The F31fd may not be as good as the Nikon D200, but it is considerably easier to carry! And if a pink phone was good enough for Eikoh, then I think I can manage with it for things like this.


Eikoh Hosoe photographing in Alcatraz, Bielsko, Poland

Much more later!

Peter Marshall

Helen Levitt – Street Colour

Jim Casper‘s Lens Culture has long been one of my favourite sites, and each new issue brings much of interest. One of the highlights among the latest on-line issue is a set of 24 images, some in colour, by that doyenne of street photography, Helen Levitt, now in her 90s. Work by her from seven decades, starting in 1938, is on show at the Fondation Cartier-Bresson in Paris until 23 December 2007 (if you read French it is worth downloading the press PDF from the site.)

Levitt was a pioneer in the use of colour, with Guggenheim fellowships in 1959 and 1960 to explore its use in her work. Unfortunately most of these early transparencies were stolen by a curiously selective burglar (who apparently took little else) in 1970, and have not been seen since. But in 1974 she had the first showing of colour photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, ‘Slide Show‘, organised by John Szarkowski, some two years before William Eggleston‘s work was shown there.

Levitt is noted for not talking much about her work, but there are several interesting interviews on-line, including (as Lens Culture also mentions) a NPR feature with some clips of her talking.

More About Helen Levitt

You can see images by Helen Levitt on Lens Culture and at the links above. There are some further links to sources and images at the end of this feature.

Helen Levitt was born in 1913 in Brooklyn (many sources give the date incorrectly as 1918); in 1931 she quit school and started working for a portrait photographer in the Bronx, where she received a good technical grounding.

In 1935 she met and saw the work of Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson; Evans she thought was “brilliant” but Cartier-Bresson was a “genius”. It was their impact that decided her to become a photographer, and in 1936 she bought her first Leica. She went with Cartier-Bresson on at least one occasion as he photographed in New York. From him she saw that photography could be art, and determined that she would be an artist with a camera. This led her to spend time studying paintings in New York’s museums, learning from them lessons about composition, and the use of light which have a powerful influence on her work.

In New York, the prevailing tradition of photography was that of the New York Photo League, documenting the people of the poorer working class areas. Levitt also learnt from this and her subject matter was also the people of the working class areas of New York, particularly Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side. Here in the late 1930s she found life still being lived in a vivid way on the streets, especially on hot summer days when it was too hot for anyone to stay inside. This was an era before air-conditioning and television, and she found the streets crowded with children playing who became her main subject and she photographed them with warmth and humour.

As well as the children themselves, Levitt also saw and photographed their drawings. In an age before the spray can, the streets and walls were filled with chalk drawings, often – as with modern graffiti – of striking energy and originality.

In 1938-9 she became assistant to Walker Evans, and also met the writer James Agee, who would later work with her on her first book, ‘A Way of Seeing’, not published until 1965. Unlike Cartier-Bresson, Evans believed strongly in the need to crop images to make stronger compositions, and Levitt learnt from his practice.
She went with Walker Evans when he was taking his series of subway portraits using a camera hidden under his coat, sitting with him so that he was less obvious. These pictures were only published as a book many years later, ‘Many Are Called‘ (1966.) In some of her own Levitt also took pictures of people who were unaware of being photographed, at times using a mirror device photograph at right angles to the direction in which she was apparently shooting. This was particularly important in some of her pictures of children playing, enabling her to capture images without distraction.

Levitt’s one major body of work away from New York was made when she went to Mexico in 1941. While there she worked as a film editor with Luis Buñuel. Cartier-Bresson had worked for a year in Mexico in 1933, and his pictures from there were shown in Mexico in 1935, and he had brought them to New York.

In 1943 she had her first one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (M0MA), curated by Edward Steichen. Although she returned to street photography around 1950, her next solo showing at MoMA was not until over 30 years later, although her work was included in major group exhibits, including Steichen’s ‘The Family of Man‘.

In the years immediately after the war the Levitt and Agee worked together with painter Janice Loeb on the film, ‘In the Street‘, a documentary about everyday life made using a hidden camera on the streets of New York’s East Harlem. All three worked with film-maker Sidney Meyers on the Oscar-nominated documentary about a young African-American boy, ‘The Quiet One‘ (1948).

Two Guggenheim Grants, in 1959 and 1960, enabled her to investigate the use of colour transparency film in her work on the streets. Tragically the great majority of this work was stolen in a puzzling burglary in 1970, where apparently little else was stolen. But Levitt made new colour images to replace the stolen work, leading to a ‘Slide Show’, curated by John Szarkowski at MoMA in 1974, and published as a book in 2005.

In 1991, Levitt’s work was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and she received a Master of Photography award from the ICP in New York. Other retrospectives came at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and elsewhere, although it was the use of her pictures in the opening sequences of the 2001 Ken Burns PBS documentary ‘New York‘ that brought her work as “one of the great living poets of urban life” and of the people of New York to a wider audience.

Other Web References

Laurence Miller Gallery
The gallery have represented Levitt for many years.
Stephen Daiter Gallery

Slide Show: Powerhouse Books

Helen Levitt: 10 Photographs,
A lengthy and interesting essay by Thomas Dikant on her career through a detailed study of 10 pictures.

Review of ‘Here and There’ by Sarah Boxer – New York Times
May require registration.

The Deutsche Börse Shortlist

I’ve previously written at some length about two of the four photographers shortlisted for the 2008 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, John Davies and Jacob Holdt. Fazal Sheikh I think I also mentioned when his work was included in the ‘Heroes of Photography‘ feature on ‘PopPhoto‘, which is an excellent introduction to the work of this ‘artist-activist’. I looked at the work of Esko Männikkö when I was revising a piece I wrote on Finnish photography, but in the end decided not to include him.

Esko Männikkö (b1959, Finland) has an impressive record of exhibitions, his Artfacts page starting with a show at White Cube, London in 1998. You can see some installation views of his 2002 “Flora & Fauna” show in Berlin at the Nordenhake archive (Nordenhake is an important art gallery in both Stockholm and Berlin.) There is a good selection of his work on the Galerie Rodolphe Janssen (Brussels) site, along with a chronology and some information (in French.)
One of the things that puts me off his work, is, that as the Photographers’ Gallery states, his work is “shown in assorted wooden frames, found and weathered by time” which they feel give his images “a timeless, almost painterly quality.” Actually they – or at least some of them – are good enough not to need that kind of crap.

Jacob Holdt (b1947, Denmark) has told his own story (and this page avoids the terrible music) at great length. He arrived in the USA from Canada in 1970 with only $40, intending to hitch to Mexico, but instead spent much of the next five years hitching around the USA, staying with anyone who would put him up, mainly the poorest people in the country, and in particular those suffering from racial prejudice.

At some point his family sent him a camera, and though he wasn’t a photographer (and the pictures sometimes gain from his lack of expertise, but at other times I can’t help wish that he had become a better photographer) he began taking pictures of the oppressed people who put him up. Eventually in 1977 he published a book using his and other pictures that exposed the depth of racism and poverty, hoping to use the profits from it to build a hospital in Angola.

When he realised how the KGB intended to use his book as propaganda he withdrew it from sale, and it was only republished after the fall of communism. He also made films using his work, and presented slide-shows at hundreds of campuses across America. His nomination comes with the publication in 2007 of ‘Jacob Holdt, United States 1970-1975‘ by Steidl in Germany.

Fazal Shiekh was born in New York in 1965 and educated at Princetown. His awards over the years include a Fulbright Fellowship, a US National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Photography (1994) and in 1995 a Leica Medal of Excellence, an Infinity Award from ICP, a Mother Jones International Documentary Award and two awards from the ‘Friends of Photography’. In 2003 he won ‘Le Prix Dialogue de l’Humanité‘ at Arles and in 2005 the ‘Henri Cartier-Bresson International Grand Prize‘ and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Sheikh is certainly one of the finest documentary photographers around and you can see a great deal of evidence on his web site. The nomination is for ‘Ladli‘, also published by Stiedl in 2007, which took up from his earlier book ‘Moksha‘, which investigated the mistreatment of widows in India. In Ladli he looks in particular at the problems experience by mothers and daughters in a society where a girl child is a burden, with many being aborted or killed at birth. His site contains a fine on-line version of Ladli.

John Davies (b1949, UK) is a particular favourite of mine, and one of the photographers featured on the Urban Landscape web site I run with Mike Seaborne. You can see a great deal of his work on his http://www.johndavies.uk.com/ web site, but I’d recommend buying his superb book which I reviewed at some length, The British Landscape, 2006 (Chris Boot, London ISBN 095468947X) It would be hard to think of any recent photographer of the urban landscape whose work has been more influential than him.

The jury for the prize is Els Barents, Director of Huis Marseille Foundation for Photography in Amsterdam, photographer Jem Southam, Thomas Weski, Chief Curator of Haus der Kunst in Munich along with Anne-Marie Beckmann, the curator of the Deutsche Börse Art Collection and Brett Rogers of the Photographers Gallery in the Chair. It is good to see a fine photographer, Jem Southam on the panel, and Weski was of course a photographer of some note before becoming a curator.

I’ve not had a great success in picking winners of these (or the previous Citibank) awards. But I’d be particularly happy to see either John Davies or Fazal Shiekh win, because their work is much more central to my idea of photography than that of the other two on the shortlist.