Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

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.

Bethnal Green Blues

We had a fine day for our book-related walk around Bethnal Green and a good audience. Our meeting point was, for various reasons, the Museum of Childhood, which features in two of my pictures in Cathy’s book (The Romance of Bethnal Green (ISBN 9781901992748), Cathy Ross, 2007). One shows the sculpture which was in the space at the front of the museum for many years, and I was surprised to find it now inside, at the rear of the cafe area, and given a white coating (perhaps so the ice-cream won’t show), and the other features some of the panels on the outside of the building about agriculture.

Bethnal Green, (C) Peter Marshall, 1986

So I chose to talk here instead about perhaps one of the most significant changes to the geography of London in the past 50 years, the small card rectangle of the Travelcard. My father lived in the London area for the first 70 or so years of his life, but probably never visited Bethnal Green, and the convoluted journey I’d made that morning on the way to the Museum would, before its introduction have involved me queuing to buy two train tickets and paying separate fares to 4 bus conductors. The Travelcard (and slightly later the Capitalcard), introduced by the Greater London Council led by Ken Livingstone in 1981, was a revolution in travelling across London.

It made a significant change in my photography. Previously I’d photographed Hull, a much more compact city, walking almost everywhere with just the occasional bus journey back to base from the city centre (a fairly massive project from which a gross of pictures were shown as ‘Still Occupied, A View of Hull‘ at the Ferens Art Gallery in 1983.)

Before the Travelcard, my work in London – with a few exceptions – had been limited to very specific areas, largely within walking distance of Waterloo or London Bridge, as well as pictures taken on visits to tourist attractions and other specific trips. The Travelcard opened up the whole of London in a new way – and among the areas I visited in a fairly systematic coverage of the capital was Bethnal Green.

Bethnal Green (C) Peter Marshall, 1993

Arnold Circus, Bethnal Green (C) Peter Marshall, 1986

Arnold Circus, shown above, was one of the places our walk took us, though it has come up in the world considerably since 1986. The first major slum clearance scheme from the London County Council, it was built due to the urging of the local vicar, Rev Osborne Jay, in 1890. Charles Booth’s great survey had marked ‘Friar’s Mount’, better known as the ‘Old Nichol’, as London’s worst slum. Jay also brought the writer Arthur Morrison to the area, and his ‘A Child of the Jago‘, published as the demolitions were taking place gives a horrifyingly real picture of the old area, and its people. Those who lived in the Old Nichol of course got no benefit from its clearance, simply being evicted and having to fend for themselves, decanted into the slums of surrounding areas, the new flats being let by the council to the ‘industrious poor.’

Around the corner at the new Rich Mix Cultural Centre lay the great disappointment of my day. Earlier, standing opposite the former site of ‘Camerawork’ I’d talked about the great days of the ‘Half Moon Photography Workshop’ based in Aldgate, and the magazine, ‘Camerawork’, the early issues of which – before it sank into theory-laden senescence – helped vitalise British photography, and of two very different important photographers associated with it I had known, Jo Spence and Paul Trevor. And I’d promised that people would be able to see why I think of Paul as one of the most important British photographers of the 1970s when we arrived at Rich Mix, although I had yet to visit the show myself.

Unfortunately we couldn’t. This is what we found:

Installation view: Paul Trevor’s work on display at Rich Mix (see note)

Images projected at a slight angle onto a wall mostly in fairly bright light from the large window area at the front of the building, pale and washed out. Of course they would look better at night, although the air vent will still hide the upper left part of the image . But more , but even then they all suffered from a curious squashing effect, presumably due to some digital reprocessing to make the images fit the format of the projector, but resulting in figures that looked like caricatures.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone could do something this badly. This is a show that has been well advertised and is in many respects the major event of the East London Photomonth. But it seemed to have been presented with less care than most people would take over showing their holiday snaps. (See note below)
Peter Marshall

What we saw at Rich Mix was not the real show, which we should have seen when we went and sat down on the sofa downstairs. We sat down and had a little rest there (it had been a long walk) but there was nothing to see. I’d actually walked down the stairs expecting to see more, and was surprised to find nothing there. It just hadn’t occurred to me that a gallery would switch an exhibition off during opening hours.

Urban Mutations

Listening to Sam Appleby talking about his series of night images of Crawley, one of the post-war war new towns, brought many resonances.

The presentation was the initial meeting of ‘Urban Mutations‘, a group initiated by Appleby and 3 others who have just completed an urban studies course. It took place in the Angel pub in Rotherhithe, a stone’s throw from the genesis of another gang of four (in Limehouse), but perhaps significantly south of the river. The first floor room, close to Cherry Gardens pier, looks out over the Thames, with views of Tower Bridge, the City and, in the other direction, the towers of Canary Wharf.

One image I couldn’t resist on my way to the Angel (its roof is visible at centre right.) Cherry Gardens pier, Rotherhithe and Canary Wharf; the figure caught in the centre appears caged in the centre of the gate.

My urban studies were of a more guerilla nature, starting on the streets of Manchester, walking through the cramped Victorian terraces of Hulme, learning to drive around their flattened acres of rubble, interviewing in the instant system-built slums (now in turn demolished.) Neighbourhood politics in Moss Side, including what I think was the first real exercise in public participation in the UK, “planning for real” with people modelling their own future (years later when the council knocked down what they went ahead with at the time, the next generation replacement bore an uncanny resemblance.)

From their I went to Leicester, sitting at the feet (literally, as there were usually more students than chairs) of Jim Halloran, one of the pioneers of Media Studies, as well as learning photography, and filming and editing hour after hour of live closed circuit TV.

My first job after Leicester was in a new town, Bracknell. The Development Corporation provided a large new flat at a decent rent – including enough space to set up my first darkroom, as well as an empty shop in the local shopping centre a few yards away dedicated to community purposes, where a few of us met regularly as a community photography group. I started to take photographs for the theatre group based in the local arts centre, and help in the hire darkrooms there, as well as setting up a photography course in the local comprehensive where I was teaching.

In many ways, Bracknell wasn’t a bad place to live, and much of the criticism of new towns in general is unfair and ill-informed – and is usually made from the perspective of Hampstead rather than Dagenham or the St Helier Estate or North Peckham.

Although Bracknell seldom inspired me, since then I’ve taken many urban landscape images, with shows on Hull, London and Paris. Some of these – together with work by a number of other photographers – appear on the urban landscape web site I run with Mike Seaborne.

Appleby’s view of Crawley was shown in print form at the Photographers’ Gallery in 1990 (it had started life as a tape-slide presentation.) At the time I found it an interesting set of pictures accompanied by the kind of theoretical baggage that fortunately seemed to bear little relation to what the photographer was actually doing.

It came at a time when theory had become all in many photographic courses, and it was de rigeur for gallery respectability to have a jargon-infested statement and presentation. As many shows were almost entirely composed of this, often with minimal, tedious, bland or even incomptent photographic content, Appleby’s work stood out.

There is a long history of night photography, stemming from the early days of the dry plate, with photographers such as Paul Martin in London and Jessie Tarbox Beals and Alfred Stieglitz in America, and continuing – for example in London in the 1930s – with books such as John Morrison & Howard Burdekin’s ‘London Night‘ (1934) and Francis Sandwith’s ‘London By Night‘ (ca 1935). One of the more influential books of the 1980s was ‘Summer Nights‘ by Robert Adams (1985) – this year at Rhubarb Rhubarb in Birmingham at least 3 of the roughly 30 portfolios I reviewed were clearly influenced by it.

Of course these photographers had worked in black and white, but in the 1970s we had started to see colour becoming respectable – even trendy – in fine art photography. Guys like Shore, Eggleston, Meyerowitz and the rest were shooting day and night and (among other concerns) exploring the peculiar colour response of films under different lighting conditions. Often the kind of peculiar effects of mixed lighting, of neon, tungsten and dusk skyglow.

Appleby’s images from Crawley very much explore the kind of alienating effect of typcial colour-deficient street lighting, notably the almost monochromatic sodium yellow (shifted more towards red in some images, either by dye characteristics or differential reciprocity of particular emulsions) and also the ghastly green peak of mercury vapour.

The images broke the photographic taboos of the amateur hobby press in this respect, as well as in their deliberate use of the tilted frame, a sometimes over-mannered bow in the direction of Rodchenko’s soviet modernism. Winogrand was of course at the time upsetting some by his tilted viewpoint, but in his images the framing follows a certain compositional logic based on the subject. In Appleby’s pictures it sometimes works in a similar way, but in others seems a deliberately upsetting device which didn’t always seem to suceed.

I was sorry to have to leave in the middle of the evening, and miss the further discussion by the group about urban issues. I look forward to further events.

Alexandra Boulat dies

Today I heard the sad news that Alexandra Boulat has died, aged 45. I wrote about her here in June after her hospitalization following a ruptured brain aneurysm while she was working in Israel. Doctors induced a coma to give her the best chance of recovery, but unfortunately she failed to recover, dying peacefully in Paris on October 5, as reported on the VII site.

You can see her portfolio and read a brief biography on the VII site, and there is also a tribute on ABC News.

Hers was a striking talent, and her death is a sad loss for photography as well as a great loss for all her friends and family. As it says on VII, “Her friendship, courage, spirit and creativity touched all of our lives and will remain dear memories always.”

Here is the main part of what I wrote about her earlier:

Alex was born in 1962 in Paris, and her parents were both connected to photography. Pierre Boulat (1924-98) was a Life staff photographer in the 1950s and 60s and Annie Boulat founded and still owns the Paris-based Cosmos agency (its photographers include Bruno Stevens.)

Pierre began working for Samedi Soir in Paris in 1945, and photographed both in Paris and overseas for the magazine. His pictures appeared in Life from 1953 to 1976, and he photographed many leading celebrities, including Aristotle Onassis, Federico Fellini and Duke Ellington. From 1973 on he became a freelance again.

Not suprisingly Alex started taking pictures when she was 12 and became a photographer in 1989 after training in graphic art and art history. She became well-known for her work covering the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and in particular for her fine work on Kosovo, which showed the efect of the violence on the every-day lives of the people there, and gained her the Golden Visa Award at the Perpignan Visa pour l’image, in 1998, and both an ICP Infinity Award and an Alfred Eisenstadt Award from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1999. Other awards came from the NPPA, World Press Photo, Overseas Press Club etc.

Alex worked for the SIPA agency founded by Göksin Sipahioglu in Paris for 10 years until 2000. In September 2001, together with Ron Haviv, Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, Christopher Morris, James Nachtwey and John Stanmeyer she founded Agence VII. Her work appeared in leading magazines around the world, particularly in the National Geographic Magazine, Time and Paris Match.

You can see her photography on the VII site, and also at War Photo Ltd and the Hasted Hunt Gallery.

Unfortunately my two articles linked to in my previous piece on Bruno Stevens and Göksin Sipahioglu are currently not available on line – even on the Wayback Machine, although you can find many of my older features there.

City People

If you are at a loose end in London tomorrow night (Thursday October 4) why not come along to The Juggler in Hoxton Market, where the London Arts Cafe show ‘City People‘ has its opening (it continues until October 26.) Curating a show is one way to make sure you get your pictures included, and four of mine are on the wall.

I decided to show four pictures taken in the same place, Parliament Square. In 2005, our New Labour government decided that Brian Haw’s ongoing demonstration looked rather untidy and embarassing in Parliament Square, it was a continual and unwelcome reminder of the great blunders they had made over the Iraq invasion. So they decided to add a bit to the ‘Serious Organised Crime and Police‘ bill that was going through at the time. But rather than a clause that directly said “Sod off, Brian” they brought in a blanket need for demonstrations in a wide area around Parliament needed to give 7 days notice and get permission from the police.

Unfortunately, the 2005 SOCPA act ended up causing rather more trouble than it was worth. It didn’t shift Brian, at first because careless drafting meant it didn’t apply to him, and then, even when a judge was found to say it did (because they had meant it to), the police found that his protest was still allowed, as the law made an exception for individual demonstrators (although the police could impose some conditions to restrict them.) Then comedian Mark Thomas came up with the brilliant idea of mass lone demonstrations (and one day there were over 2000 such events in the area.) Perhaps his best one was a demonstration against the wasting of police time.

So Parliament Square has ended up being a much more important focus of dissent, including at times – usually in the middle of the night – some rather nasty attacks by police (and off-duty police in plain clothes) on Brian Haw and others. Unfortunately I’ve not been around to record these, but I have photographed many other events there in recent years, including these 4 in the show:

The Space Hijackers challenge MPs to a cricket match (May 1. 2005)

Police v Anarchists, Sack Parliament, Oct 10, 2006

Brian Haw: “Find Your Courage; Share Your Vision; Change Your World” (Dan Wilkins)

No Trident Replacement. March 14, 2007

There is one other photographer in the show, Paul Baldesare, along with various paintings and drawings, providing an interesting mixture of methods and viewpoints.

Borough Market, Paul Baldsare.

My pictures have ended up being rather more topical than I expected. Tony Benn, President of ‘Stop the War’ wrote to the Home Secretary on Monday following the announcement of a ban on the proposed march from a rally in Trafalgar Square to the Houses of Parliament on Monday October 8 under the 1839 Sessional Orders legislation. Benn states that he and others intend to defy the order by marching along Whitehall to lobby members of Parliament and call for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. I hope to be there again taking pictures.

Peter Marshall

Hereford Photofestival

Well, living in London, its as easy and fast for me to get to Paris as Hereford. Of course some people will live nearer. So I need to have a really good reason to go to Hereford, and this year’s festival probably doesn’t provide it.

Unlike Photomonth, I did get a mailing about Hereford. But not to me either for >Re:PHOTO or even for About Photography (where I had one of the largest worldwide audiences for any photography web site) but for a long defunct photographic group I helped to run in the 1980s.

Photography has a lot of catching up to do. Too many people still sticking their heads in the sand about the web! The information on the 2007 Hereford festival site is a one page PDF and if you happen to have an A2 printer handy you can print out the 23.62 x 16.54 inch document and read it.

I don’t, and fortunately I don’t have to, since on a screen it is tricky to read and navigate, and I soon gave up. But, as I said earlier, my 1985 persona got a mailing through the letterbox, which turns out to be exactly this document, but folded to make it considerably more legible. It’s hard to do this with a screen, and perhaps someone should point this out to the designer concerned.

Presenting the whole thing as a single A2 page has to get some kind of medal for the least web friendly way to present information. Even as two A3 pages – as printed – would be better. Another few minutes work could have turned it into something far more useful – although even a multi-page PDF is still nothing like as good as a decently designed web site.

The print version has also to deserve come kind of award for making South African photography seem so boring (Paul Wombell, the festival director, previously managed to more or less kill off the Photographers’ Gallery so far as I was concerned, so perhaps that isn’t surprising.) The front of the leaflet has one of the least inspiring pictures of a dog you can imagine – but this may be thanks to the design, which may cover or crop significant elements. It’s hard to imagine any photographer actually producing an image like this.

Despite this, I’m sure the work of photographers like David Lurie, Andrew Tshabangu (and 12×12), Rene-Paul Savignan and Peter Hugo is worth going to see. And for May 2008 we are promised David Goldblatt and Guy Tillim.

And guess what. Like every festival these days (including the East London Photomonth) it has one of these get-a-snap things where your picture becomes a part of the show. Just say no!

East London Photography Festival: Photomonth

I’ve often written about the lack of photographic festivals in England, and so it is hardly surprising to find that now two come along together.

Photomonth, the East London Photography Festival is now I think in its fourth year, but this year it does seem to have taken off into something rather more significant. I’m not sure how many of the events I’ll get too, but one certainly not to mix is the show at Rich Mix on the Bethnal Green Road, where ‘East End Street‘ includes the work of Paul Trevor.

I first got to know Paul’s work through the magazine ‘Camerawork‘ produced by the ‘Half Moon Photography Workshop‘ set up by Wendy Ewald and based around the Half Moon Theatre in Alie St, just off Aldgate. (Later it morphed into Camerawork.) Indeed it was an exhibition in the theatre foyer there that first really took me into London, and started me photographing there. So you can really blame ‘My London Diary‘ on him!

Paul’s project with the ‘Exit Photography Group‘, ‘Down Wapping’ prompted me to visit Wapping and the group’s ‘Survival Programmes‘, looking at Britain’s inner cities in the late 1970s, is surely the most significant documentary project of the era in any country. Although all three photographers made significant contributions, it is pictures by Paul – such as the opening image of Mozart Street in Liverpool – that provide most of the real excitement in this great body of work.

This is the first show for which Paul has opened up his ‘Eastender Archive‘ although some images are already familiar. I’ve long regarded him as one of the best and most influential photographers in Britain at the time, and one whose work has never really received the attention it deserves from the public, although well-known by other photographers. Unlike some others of the time he hasn’t chosen to seek publicity and ride with the various trends to become the darling of the galleries and curators. But it does look as if, at long last, his work is beginning to get the attention it deserves.

Showing along with Paul is work by Stephen McLaren, who was one of the curators of the rather disappointing show of Contemporary British Street Photography at Photofusion last Summer (his own work was some of the more interesting in the show.) I was one of several photographers who told him that Britain had a great (and continuing) tradition in street photography – including the work of people such as Paul Trevor, of which he seemed at the time (and in the exhibition text) to be blissfully unaware. And when I’d told him, John Benton-Harris, who I think has personally contributed much to the street tradition here since he arrived from the South Bronx, took over and told him too!

London 1975, (C) Paul Trevor, from ‘Cities of Walls, Cities of People’

I showed a half a dozen pictures by Paul some years ago in Clerkenwell in the London Arts Cafe show Cities of Walls, Cities of People, which also included street photography by two old friends, Jim Barron (who sadly died not long after) and Paul Baldesare, although for that show I included some of my own urban landscape rather than street work.

Another familiar name to me is Anna Fox, who is giving the Photomonth lecture, talking on 8 November about her new publication, Anna Fox Photographs 19832006 (Photoworks/Impressions
Gallery), coming out in late 2007.

Altogether there are around 50 venues taking part in Photomonth, including Magnum, Host and others around Shoreditch as well as some further east. I have to say much of what is on offer doesn’t particularly excite me, but at least it does seem to be a proper festival in London, even if much of what is in it simply reflects the recent upsurge in photographic spaces in the area covered.

I hope to cover a few of the events in Photomonth over the next few weeks (some don’t start until November), though despite asking to be put on the press list and being promised information, somehow nothing has arrived.

One day, the photography establishment will realise that the web exists and is worth using. Just not yet. Even when I wrote for a site with hits per month in 7 figures it was often hard to get treated seriously as press.

Hereford? Another, rather shorter feature to follow in a few minutes.

Peter Marshall

Autumn is official

The Druid Order seem a very nice, friendly bunch of people who welcome photographers taking pictures at their events. The leaflet they gave me gives the “three fundamental principles of wisdom:
Obedience to the Laws of nature
Effort for the welfare of mankind
And heroically enduring the unavoidable ills of life.”
A little more learning from nature would certainly have helped us avoid the sad state we’ve got the planet into at the moment, and heroic endurance is likely to be in great demand in the future.

There are various Druid groups around, but the Druid Order seems to be the largest and more publicly orientated in England, with regular public meetings in Covent Garden and public ceremonies for the Spring Equinox on Tower Hill
the Summer Solstice at Stonehenge (outside the area I normally cover for ‘My London Diary’) and the Autumn Equinox on Primrose Hill, where I was with them again on Sunday.

Primrose Hill has a fine panoramic view over London, although the air is seldom really clear enough to enjoy it fully. It is really quite a noticeable hill, and most photographers will also recognise it as the location for one of Bill Brandt’s finest portraits, of painter Francis Bacon, made there in the early evening in 1963. This is an image I’ve written about before, in part as a good example of Brandt being very clear in his mind exactly how he wanted his images to look, making an appointment with Bacon to meet him at that exact place at the right time for the kind of light he needed. Bacon squeezed a little awkwardly at the edge of the frame, looking out of it stony-faced in his black leather coat (doubtless garment and expression also at Brandt’s order), the leaning lamp post with its light against the gloom of the burnt-in sky, the triangle of path leading to the scraggy trees at the brow of the hill and the darkened grass creating a surreal background, and a little light (available or added?) from the left bringing out the face of the subject and some detail in his coat.

Fenton, who I’ve also written about before at some length, had a rather nice house on the edge of the park with a view across it. A blue plaque marks the house, one of rather few in London related to photography.

This Sunday it was bright and fairly clear as I walked up the hill. People were running up it, jogging around the park, and admiring the view from the top. I watched a small group of the druids, still in ordinary clothes, practice a little of their ritual and read a chapter or two enjoying sitting in the sun while waiting for things to happen.

On My London Diary you can see my pictures from the hill and of the druids, both as they prepare for the ceremony – putting on their robes and lining up, and during it.

Unfortunately I had to leave before the end of the ceremony to get to St Paul’s Cathedral where I was meeting some friends for a walk – so perhaps I’ll need to go back another year to photograph the end of the event.

Incidentally I intend to rewrite some of my old features from another place (most needed revising in any case) and post the new features here or elsewhere. But 8 years of writing is a lot to tackle.