Category: Photographers

I’m not sure when the ‘Turnhalle’ or ‘German Gymnasium’ at the back of Kings Cross lost its national epithet. The building itself has received a considerable makeover during the recent and continuing rebuilding of the area, looking as clean and shiny as it doubtless did in 1864-5 when it was built, and its fine brickwork and interior roof beams, although it has unfortunately lost its former entrance building. The German Gymnasium has hosted varied events over the years, from the first London Olympics in 1866 to more recent fetish events, but it is simply as the Gymnasium that it makes a fine venue for Brian Griffin’s latest show, ‘Teamphoto’, on a somewhat temporary looking first floor in this large hall.

Brian Griffin in an interesting jacket at the opening

Griffin was commissioned to produce a series of pictures to mark the building (at last) of a high speed rail line to link the Channel Tunnel with London, which unfortunately for those of us in the south and west, serves a rebuilt St Pancras station, and will significantly increase my journey times to Paris. Ah progress!

Working with art director Greg Horton, he concentrated on the team of people who worked on the line, described as Britain’s largest construction project (the Channel tunnel to which it links, was officially described as “many years of boring activity”.)

One of the more interesting aspects of the evening was that many of those portrayed in the images were present in person at the special preview, and I was intrigued both to eavesdrop on their comments – and in particular those of their friends – as well as to compare the person with the image that Griffin had created.

Two of the workers with portraits of them by Brian Griffin

The pictures fell into three major groups – workers, bosses and groups – with a few others. The images of the workers were mainly powerful black and white ‘studio’ portraits, heads taken against a plain background, sharp, detailed and contrasty, showing every pore and every blade of stubble with perfect clarity. They reminded me strongly of Helmar Lerski’s portraits of industrial workers and others published in his ‘Kopfe des Alltags’ (1930), glorifying the everyday faces in strong close-up, and of the images of workers as heroes in Soviet Socialist Realism, mythic stakhanovites.

If Griffin’s workers are heroes, the bosses and managers often seem lost, dejected, ill at ease or just downright shifty. The colour images often look like the odd random scenes from old films you might come across flipping through the channels on a hotel TV and quickly move on in hope – usually forlorn – of something better. I overheard one man ask a colleague if he had seen his portrait yet, and he continued that they had thought of sticking up a post-it on the frame with the caption “Someone’s stolen my fxxking car!”

I found many of these fascinating studies, generally more so than the black and white workers, powerful though some of these are. There were a few that were clearly following a storyboard (the post woman delivers a copy of the 1996 Act of Parliament for the line to a man in a suburban yard in America), others where I could identify a clear reference (one of my favourite images in the show is a Hopperesque tableau set in a hotel lobby, the subject at the counter, a head just visible on the other side and a third man in the open lift, all captured in a light that somehow curiously drains away much of the colour of the scene) but others that just left me guessing. Odd corners of sites, car parks, rather anonymous spaces that were perhaps convenient to where the person was working.

The groups are Frans Hals oils , perhaps the Cluveniers and I think a style that has often been used in advertising. Griffin’s examples are lively but to me have less interest than the other work in the show. Some of the images that don’t fit into the main three categories also intrigued me; a straight forward image of a driver and another man on a construction train, and my other favourite image in the show, a black and white of a man in an office viewed through a venetian blind, which reminded me of the best of Griffin’s portraiture for ‘Management Today’ that established his reputation.

Of course, openings are only partly about the pictures, and it was good to meet the photographers and others present, including in particular Paul Trevor, back from Spain on a visit connected with his forthcoming London Photo Month show, here talking to BJP editor Simon Bainbridge.

Teamphoto continues at the Gymnasium, St Pancras, NW1 until Nov 19, 2007.

Brian Griffin’s web site

It was impossible not to respond positively to the work of French photographer Gilles Perrin taken in Africa and elsewhere around the world, although I also found it hard to know what to say when he brought it to show me at Rhubarb Rhubarb in Birmingham. His images, taken carefully, reverentially of his subjects, using a 4×5 camera on a tripod and using long exposures (from perhaps 1/8 to a second) acknowledge and value the individuals who work with him, and the use of a Polaroid Neg/Pos film enables him to give them their image while he retains the negative for later printing.

Much though I admired his work, and the patient and sometimes dangerous travels which he made to find his subjects, I also found myself wondering how his practice could be supported, and whether it was in some respects a relic from a bygone age. Some of his subjects too, he told me, no longer appreciated the kind of humanistic exchange represented by the gift of an image, and demanded payment rather than a picture. He travelled among tribes where everyone had a gun, and it was necessary to pay the fee that they demanded.

Looking at his work, my mind went back to my childhood years, and the large pile of yellow-bordered magazines that had once belonged to a distant richer uncle, ‘National Geographic‘ magazines from the 1920s and 1930s. In their pages were images not dissimilar from many of those Gilles showed me (though seldom anything like as clear or assured) but that it seemed to me was the ideal client for his work – given a time machine. It was, incidentally, these magazines that I think first got me interested in photography, though not necessarily always for the right reasons.

Surprisingly, although all he showed was black and white, and many of the images would have been both more informative and possibly more startling in colour, it was not until near the end of his presentation that I really felt a strong need for colour, when a multiple image print including Tibetan prayer flags seemed somehow too drab. The images of people have a rapport, a connection with the subject that is strong enough to make thoughts of colour irrelevant (although it may weaken their interest as simple records of these rapidly disappearing cultures.)

I won’t put his work here – you can see so many sets on the web site, and read – almost entirely in French – his thoughts about the work. There are so many fine black and white portraits from Africa, Egypt, South America, Asia and of course France.

You can also see some colour urban landscapes from the Val de Marne and Bobigny (a suburb just to the north-east of Paris where I’ve sometimes changed buses to get to my brother-in-law’s place at Noisy-le-Grand.) The work from Val-de-Marne seems somehow more personal and more varied, and even includes one image actually shot as panoramic, rather than the triptychs and sets of four carefully aligned images Perrin more normally uses. Perhaps in the work from Bobigny the sheer technique needed to produce the work prevents the kind of spontaneity and interaction that I like.

Although I loved the work, admiring the images, I ended up wondering about whether it somehow was out of time. When others before done this kind of thing so well, is there still something new to say, or should photographers in the twenty-first century be finding new pastures? And perhaps importantly, is there a market for work of this type now? I’m not sure, but I hope so. Work of this quality and integrity deserves to be seen and to be rewarded.

Looking at Gilles’s work, I found it hard to know what to say, other than to admire it. But having seen the web site perhaps I can offer just a little advice. Firstly, to that he should get his own domain. Then to take a good look at the web design and in particular produce an index page that is more visual, and to cut down the overwhelming blackness that diminishes the images. And finally to provide the text in English (as well as French) on all pages; like it or not, English is the major language of the web.

I met Jaskirt Dhaliwal, one of the festival volunteers helping with the running of Rhubarb Rhubarb, on the coach trip on the coach trip to Walsall, and had enjoyed hearing about her project in Bearwood and her enthusiasm about it, Birmingham and photography, so I was intrigued to see what her pictures were like. So when I saw her sitting with a box of pictures at the book launch I went over and took a look.

I wasn’t disappointed. Her work has a freshness I find appealing, and the Bearwood series, which examines peoples ideas about community through a series of portraits of residents of this small town on the edge of Smethwick, just outside the centre of Birmingham. Each is shown in a location that has a particular resonance for them, and she has explored through them the question of why some people at least “continue to live in the same area for decades“, although, as she found, “a lot of other people photographed for this series believed the notion of community has disappeared.”

Unlike many groups of photographs which centre around a strong theme, the images here also show a sensitivity to the situation and the personalities involved. I benefited from hearing something about the people in these pictures as I was shown the images, and I think it would be useful to have some short texts with the images on the web site. Looking at the image of Mick, for example, it is not immediately obvious where he has chosen as the location for this image, nor his reasons. It is a portrait that echoes something of his personality, but for the project we need more.

Mick

Jaskirt graduated this year from Coventry University, where her degree was in Communication, Culture and Media. Her final project proposal, on Women Footballers, gained her the Photo Imaging Council Award 2007, and was exhibited earlier this year at Redditch United Football ground, at Focus on Imaging in the NEC at Birmingham, and, together with work from Bearwood, at Coventry Glasshouse gallery. You can also see work from Women Footballers on her Flickr site, as well as four images of British Asian Musicians.

Peter Marshall

I’ve just been looking at the latest issue of foto8, the so-called ‘Dirty’ issue, although there will be some very disappointed customers if they buy it on the basis of this title. Rather than being a ‘dirty magazine’ its an issue that concentrates on issues related to the environment – and a few other things.

You can see a preview including an index of the issue on the foto8 web site, although the thumbnail pages are considerably too small to give much idea of the features – I’d certainly suggest some re-design in this area, perhaps linking each to a page with a rather larger image, and, at least in the case of the longer features, some explanatory text. I can’t imagine many would feel impelled to buy from what is on show here.

If, like me, you have an interest in documentary photography and photojournalism, then I think it is ones of the best magazines around. I’m happy to be a subscriber, although I’ve yet to take advantage of their special offers on books.
It would be very difficult to guess from the thumb that Andrea Dapueto‘s ‘A Room of Their Own‘ is about the work areas of prostitutes in the bushes by the Italian roadside, and while the title ‘Cry for Me‘ might indicate that Alberto Giuliani’s images are from Argentina, there is almost nothing that can be inferred from the minute image about what is in some ways the most interesting portfolio in the issue.

Justin Jin‘s image in ‘Rags to Riches‘ is simply some blue blotches. It’s actually probably not a good editorial decision as the opening image for the story in any case, atypical and possibly the weakest image in the piece, which is an interesting look at the manufacture of fashionable jeans in China – with pictures showing the workers who at considerable risk to their health produce and distress these items for near slave rates.

I’ve written previously about Jacob Holdt‘s American Pictures. In 1969 Holdt ran from his native Denmark to avoid trial for political activities and spent around ten years hitching around America, staying with anyone who would put him up, as it says on his web site, “from the poorest migrant workers to America’s wealthiest families such as the Rockefellers. They not only gave him a hospitality and warmth, but their continuing friendship to this day.”

He gave blood twice a week to buy film to photograph mainly the 400 families he stayed with. You can see some of the work from this trip on his American Pictures site, and in particular in the presentation Roots of Oppression, which uses his pictures alongside historical images of the slave trade and of segregation in America.

Holdt in many respects isn’t much of a photographer, but in some ways the images gain from being mainly simple snapshots. I don’t think I’ve seen him mentioned in a print photo magazine before and although it is useful as a pointer to his work, viewing on-line has many advantages. The careful selection of his work for inclusion in the magazine perhaps makes it look rather different with its concentration on the dramatic. Incident rather than normality.

Perhaps the weakest aspect of foto8 is in the writing; the three ‘columns’, whose connection with photography is rather tenuous; the reviews too seem generally superfluous and sometimes ill-considered, and I’m sure the magazine would be stronger without them. Of course there are exceptions – such as the article on the documentary film ‘Black Gold’, and the end page item ‘On My Shelf’, where someone talks about the books that have influenced them is often interesting.

Its interesting to see comments from the other side of the table about Rhubarb Rhubarb, and one of the photographers who presented his work to me on Friday afternoon was Mathew Pokoik. So far on his blog you can read two comments on the event, Rhubarb Rhubarb – a dream – and Walker Evans and Italo Calvino, portfolio reviews, and Perseus.

I find myself in agreement with much of what he says, although I think it rather silly to worry about what he calls the ‘pay to play‘ aspect. You can’t really expect all the work and organisation that goes into such an event to happen for free. Someone does has to pay for it all.

As a reviewer, I didn’t have to pay, though it did in fact cost me not inconsiderably in several ways to be there in Birmingham for the four nights. I didn’t begrudge it, as Matt says, it is a great way to meet people.

The meeting between reviewer and photographer is perhaps the closest thing in photography to the confessional, and I certainly have no intention of revealing the secrets that passed between Matt and myself. I can however say that I invited him to send some of his work from his work in progress ‘the global city‘ for the urban landscape site that I run along with Mike Seaborne, who is curator of photographs at the Museum of London.

In one of his pieces Matt says “After presenting my work time after time today, honing my “spiel”, frankly I’m a bit tired of all this talk about myself!” I think most reviewers would actually prefer a more relaxed attitude, though probably not the “speak only in mythological images” approach he muses about. The mistake of some (fortunately few) of those I saw was to try and speak too much about their work rather than let the images speak for themselves. We don’t have much need for mythology when we have photographic images.

Matt also writes of having dreamed of a unknown young Walker Evans bringing the dummy for ‘American Photographs‘ into the portfolio review, and how he would have been treated. Had he come he might have met his ‘Lincoln Kirstein’, as two of today’s best book editors were certainly among the Rhubarb reviewers. ‘American Photographs‘ certainly owes a great deal to Kirstein who helped Evans greatly on the selection, sequencing, design and possibly, through donations to MoMA, the financing of the book.

Considering that the critics of the day mostly panned the book on publication (some of the worst comments came from other photographers), Pokoik gives the Rhubarb reviewers a pretty good batting average by suggesting that “that roughly a third of the reviewers would tell this young artist that the work was too broad“.

Actually I think not. Walker would have put the case for his work simply and straightforwardly and his pictures would have done the rest. There were several portfolios I saw over the 3 days that left me little to say, although I’m pretty well certain I saw no young Walker Evans.

Reviewers too have their different motivations for taking part in these exchanges (not least that we would all like to discover a young Evans), but most of them get to be reviewers by in some way demonstrating their competence. You can – if you wish – still read the several thousands of features, some trivial others less so, that I’ve written on the medium, or even look at the perhaps ten times as many images I’ve published, mainly indifferent, some bad and a few good. The thirty years of teaching is harder to inspect, though a few of my students haven’t done too badly.

Of course some of the photographers also have considerable experience, but the reviewer always has a considerable advantage, that of being able to view the work in a more detached manner. I wrote a little about the review process on the way home from Rhubarb Rhubarb in a piece called (after Minor White) ‘Three Canons’ and the second of these is I think a very valuable piece of advice:

• When making your pictures think for yourself; when preparing to present your work, think of your audience.

But putting yourself in the place of your audience isn’t easy, and its something many photographers find themselves unable to do. But reviewers are a part of your audience, and those at Rhubarb a particularly knowledgeable and articulate segment If you want to get your money’s worth from the event it makes sense to think very carefully about what they say, even if in the end you reject it. If as many as a third of them are giving a similar message, it is perhaps time to consider very strongly if they might have a point, even if it isn’t one you want to hear.

Equally important is not to read into advice things that are not there. I sincerely doubt anyone in Birmingham was advising any photographer to move down “a path of safety and mediocrity” so we have to think what might have really been said and whether it was justified. If as many as a third of reviewers actually said so there is a very good chance it was.

I’d suggest that people take a look at ‘the global city‘ on Matthew Pokoik’s web site. It’s perhaps interesting given the concern Matthew expresses about ‘”honing’ his spiel’ that on the web site he appears to present it without text.

I enjoyed talking with Louis Quail at Rhubarb Rhubarb, and looking at project he is developing on office work, ‘Desk Job’. Perhaps surprisingly the office is an area that has attracted some fine work from photographers in the past, and some of Louis’s work colour images reminded me of the black and white portraits taken by Brian Griffin for ‘Management Today’, as well as the colour documentary work by Anna Fox from the 1980s, published in 1988 by Camerawork as ‘Workstations‘.

I first saw her work when Anna came to a few meetings of ‘Framework‘, a small group of photographers who met in West London in the 1980s, and was immediately a fan (and it made me switch to printing on Fuji paper.) Unfortunately her work is hard to find now, although I was pleased (but certainly not surprised) to see it included in the Tate show “How We Are”. Presumably she is too busy running the photography programme at the Surrey Institute to think about a web site.

Another photographer I’ve met who has produced interesting work on the office is Lars Tunbjork, who I met in Poland in 2005. His show was one of the highlights of the festival there for me, but I’ve never published the piece I wrote about his work because the pictures it needs are not on the web. You can see a few images from his work at the Moscow House of Photography, and also in the ‘Booktease’ at photo-eye, but you really need to see either the finely printed book or his originals to fully appreciate the work.

I enjoyed seeing the work and thinking about it, and I hope the discussion was of some interest to Louis.  I look forward to seeing the finished project listed on his web site. He did also show me some of his pictures from a project on UK Swingers:

Image (C) Louis Quail: UK Swingers. First published Arena Magazine, Jan 2003.

and you can see more of this project on his web site, along with some other great features including a personal project on the world of Club 18-30 holidays.

Quail’s work has been published in a wide range of magazines including The Saturday Telegraph Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, Telegraph Newspaper, The Sunday Times Magazine, Observer Life, Marie Claire, Arena, Stern, Dagbladet, Nieuwe Revu, kronenzeitung, The Mirror Weekend Supplements and FHM, and he also does advertising work for some well-known clients.

When Giacomo Brunelli sat down in front of me and told me he liked going and photographing animals on the streets I did wonder what I was in for. But as soon as he opened his box of prints I knew that here was something rather special.

Giacomo meets Max Kandhola

They were small, intense black and white – mainly black – prints with black borders and rounded corners. It was an unusual presentation that entirely suited the work, with dogs with glowing eyes, snarling tiger-like cats; creatures, or parts of them emerging from darkness. His is a universe of menace and strangeness, finding rather more excitement in what is probably someone’s pet than in the pictures from exotic safaris. But while some of these animals may be pets, his images remind us they are not far from the wild, and they are often shown roaming the streets or countryside in a world their ‘owners’ have no knowledge of.

Untitled, 2006 (C) Giacomo Brunelli

Brunelli was born in Perugia (Italy) in 1977 and graduated in international communication in 2003. He was 24 when he first took an interest in photography, and the work on animals is a project he has been pursuing for two years. You can see his work on his web site at www.giacomobrunelli.com

Brunelli uses old Miranda 35mm SLR cameras made over 30 years ago and black and white film, and likes to work in the half-light to produce his powerful personal visions. Often the subject is picked out by a limited depth of field against a blurred and indistinct background, sometimes caught in a patch of light. Light, and lighting contrast, white against black, in some images is more important than sharpness. His printing is dark and sombre.

Brunelli is truly a hunter, catching the wild lives of these animals on the run, whether a dog prowling down an empty cobbled street or a cat in full flight.Some of the pictures show a more reflective mood, more the stalker. A peacock struts on a dusk (or dawn) street, its neck and head silhouetted against the glowing road, in the background the hint of a fence, a palm tree and the sinuous curve of a lamp post against the clouded sky. Another similar image (shown above) has a chicken stood across a mean street, the curve of its back rhyming with the out of focus trees against the stormy sky behind.

But more often he works by confronting, pushing his lens close, often to its closest point of focus, perhaps around half arm’s length, aggressive, almost touching his subject (and the pictures have a very tactile nature), forcing flight or fight from his subject, and photographing these reactions.

This project reveals a determination to express a personal view, to probe and explore a subject in his own way. Its an attitude that will I am sure make further projects by Brunelli equally worthy of attention.

Peter Gwyn Marshall