Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Weegee the Unknown

Arthur Fellig, the self-styled ‘Weegee the Famous‘ is certainly one of the oddest figures in the history of photography and his best images of his New York have a remarkable raw power. I’ve tried to write about his on various occasions with varying success, and one of the great problems has always been to separate the facts from his inventions.

Writing a biography of the man would seem to be a rather Herculean task, and one not attempted before but it looks as if Christopher Bonanos’s ‘Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous‘ is a remarkable effort. I’ve not read the book, but there is an excellent long article about it in the New Yorker which I’ve just enjoyed by Thomas Mallon, Weegee the Famous, the Voyeur and Exhibitionist. As Mallon says, all we have had before is “a host of fragmentary recollections and the loudmouthed, unreliable memoir, ‘Weegee by Weegee’, published in 1961.” And of course the pictures, available in various books of which Weegee’s own ‘Naked City’, published 73 years ago is still possibly the best. But to go with Bonanos’s book you need a rather wider collection of his work since he refers to too many of this pictures to be included in the biography.

As well as various more recent publications, some listed in The New Yorker, there is also the web, and the ICP has quite an extensive archive of his work on-line. For a better short introduction I would recommend the 42 images at Amber, which also has a short version of his life. A Google Images search also throws up an interesting collection of pictures, though not all by Weegee. It also led me to the graphic novel, Weegee: Serial Photographer, by Belgian cartoonists Max de Radiguès and Wauter Mannaert, now translated into English and published last month, and the hour long “documentary” from 1993, The Real Weegee, not in great quality, but the few scenes I’ve dipped into have been, as one comment says, “Terribly produced and horribly executed.” As well as using his photographs it is based around footage of Weegee himself acting out an extremely silly script of a fake story of his life.

I’m never quite sure how much knowing more about a photographer’s life helps us to understand his work, though certainly in Weegee’s case it does answer some of the questions that have long bothered me about some of the pictures. There are also some photographers whose work would never have emerged into the art world had it not been for their biography. But sometimes I find myself thinking that I wish Minor White or Edward Weston had written less and had less written about them, and perhaps rather more about their actual pictures.

David Douglas Duncan (1916-2018)

Vietnam was the perhaps the greatest war for photojournalists, the last war where photographers were allowed the freedom to work and report what they saw with relatively few restrictions. The coverage in magazines and particularly on TV in America had a powerful effect on public opinion, stimulating the anti-Vietnam War movement there and across the world.

While the iconic images by Nick Ut and Eddie Adams are seared into our minds, there were many, many others and so many fine photographers, many of whom made their names there. And too many who died there, as had Robert Capa years earlier in 1954 when we knew it as Indo-China and it was the French colonial power who were fighting and losing.

There were far too many photographers of note in Vietnam to mention them all, but two stand out for the body of work that they produced and also for the books they published. One was the greatest Welsh photographer of the century, Philip Jones Griffiths, with his ‘Vietnam Inc‘, published in 1971 and the second, a man twenty years older than Griffiths, was David Douglas Duncan, who died on Thursday. His ‘I Protest!‘ (1968) was also a denunciation of US policy in Vietnam.

Duncan had made his name as a photographer in an earlier war, in Korea, and his book ‘This Is War!’ is a classic of photojournalism which Edward Steichen called “the greatest book of war photographs ever published.” It was a view very much from the position of the fighting man, reflecting his own past in the Marines, aiming to see war through their eyes. He went on to photograph many other things, and to produce a remarkable document of the life of Picasso as a friend and resident photographer.

You can read more about this remarkable photographer and his life in the TIME Lightbox celebration of his 100th birthday in 2016 and in the New York Times obituary.

The Corners

I first got to know Chris Dorley-Brown when I was curating a photography show for a now defunct organisation, London Arts Café in 2000. Cities of Walls, Cities of People included work by eight photographers, some of whom I had known for some time and worked with before and two I found when planning the show, including Chris. He was suggested to me by Mike Seaborne, also in the show and at the time Curator of the Historic Photographs Collection at the Museum of London. Dorley-Brown’s work in the show was a number of paired images of council estate tower blocks from a group of images ‘Revisits 1987-2001’ showing how these blocks had altered in that time period. The web page for the show has one of these pairs and my brief text on him and the work.

I was pleased to read a post on BJP Online by Diane Smyth, Chris Dorley-Brown’s singular vision of East End London, which looks at some of his more recent work which is being published by Hoxton Mini Press as The Corners.

As it says on the web site:

These hyperreal photographs of East London street corners are a unique documentation of an ever-changing landscape. Using multiple exposures, Chris Dorley-Brown plays out different narratives simultaneously, creating dream-like scenes that lie somewhere between fiction and reality.

Although I’m impressed by these images – and there are many more on the web (this link goes direct to his galleries rather than the front page of his site which my browser seems to have a problem with) not just from the East End but elsewhere, I find them rather disturbing. Firstly there is something about the tonality that makes them seem to me more like paintings than photographs – truly as the blurb says they are hyperreal.

But it is the figures caught on the multiple exposures that worry me most, and the whole idea behind these pictures. As he says in the BJP, “I don’t have a journalistic bone in my body” and it seems to me that this way of working subverts the whole idea of photographic truth which lies behind the realism that has always been central to my own work. Of course photography can be used in many different ways, and such methods are unquestionable in, for example advertising photography, but in the BJP article it states that his work is filed under ‘documentary’ which I find worrying.

Brixton Portraits and GDPR

Rather fewer photographers now have shops with windows to display examples of their work, and of course it was only those who made a living from social photography – weddings, portraits etc – who sold their services to the general public for whom it made sense. Now, most people take their own portraits, apart from those usually hideous examples produced by school photographers which parents are blackmailed into accepting so that schools can have a photographic record of their pupils (or rather ‘students’ now that you graduate even from nursery schools.)

Of course there are parents who like them, but when I was a teacher I was opposed to them on principle; not just because they generally had the same degree of originality as a photobooth, but because I knew that they put parents on low incomes into the position of having to either pay for them and go without necessary food or clothing or disappoint their child and force them to take the pictures back to hand in at school.

But good social portraiture is a rare skill, and during the late 1980s and early 1980s I carried out a project that involved photographing in and through many shop windows across London, and this included many photographer’s windows. I photographed a detail on one in Landor Rd in 1989 which I think must have been Harry Jacobs studio window; the caption states 4/6/89 Landor Rd 305758, where the 6 figure number is a Grid reference, though these were not always correct to the last figure. The image is a scan from a commercial enprint, which I could locate quickly as these are filed by the 1km grid square in which they were taken.

I’m sorry that I don’t appear to have taken a wider view of the shop front, but this picture is unusual for me and I think means that I realised the value of his work. As with many of the pictures in this series it was taken on a Sunday morning, when most shops were closed as this usually enabled me to work undisturbed. I do remember thinking that it would be worth going back and finding out more about what appeared to be a remarkable social record, but I never got around to doing so. And perhaps a little over ten years later I noticed the shop no was no longer there.

Soemone from the Photographers’ Gallery had clearly also noticed the work, and three years after Jacobs retired in 1999, with an archive of almost 60,000 photographs they put on a show based around his work in 2002, discussed in The Guardian. His son wrote a short piece, My Father the photographer which was published in The Evening Standard.

The Photographers’ Gallery apparently decided at the time that for photographs taken before the 1988 Copyright Act they had to get permission from the subjects to exhibit them. I’m not sure that was true, but although we have had no such problems from then until now, it is possible that things may be different again under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). But you can rest assured that the GDPR allows processing for the purposes of journalism, and I think for art. The problem with the work by Jacobs was that it had been taken as a commercial agreement between the sitter and photographer and the sitter’s permission was probably required for it to be shown as art or documentary. My photograph above is clearly a work of art!

The Freelance Branch of the NUJ (a union to which all journalists in the UK should belong) has published an excellent guide to the GDPR for Freelances, which is generally reassuring, though it does point out we should all have registered as data controllers under the Data Protection Act 1998 and should continue to pay the £40 per year this involves.

You are also required to take proper steps to protect your data, which would include using strong passwords or physical locks on devices including computers, backup disks and memory sticks etc. The article makes clear that as journalists you can use the exemptions for free expression to avoid giving any information in response to ‘subject access requests‘ and that journalism is explicitly exempted from the ‘right to be forgotten‘. Something which may upset some is that the advice suggests that there may be problems under GDPR in using cloud storage.

Back to Harry Jacobs. My reason for mentioning him is that Lambeth Council are for once doing something I approve of, with a show of his work in the Town Hall. A Snapshot of Brixton: Harry Jacobs and the Empire Windrush opened on Friday 25th May and runs until Friday 6th July. Open M – F, 09.00 – 20.00

Framework History

One of the many things I talked about with the late Terry King the last time I met him, not long before his untimely death, was the possibility of an exhibition to celebrate the activities of Framework, a West London based photographers group which existed from 1986-92.

I was reminded of this recently by a mention of Framework in the London Independent Photographers magazine by Peter Jennings (not currently on line.) Peter, who took part in a couple of Framework shows, gets most of the details wrong. The group wasn’t run by me, and the only meetings at my house were specifically to plan exhibitions and not the main meetings, which were in the first years at community associations in East Twickenham and Kew, but latterly at the Watermans Arts Centre in Brentford.

Apart from the special meetings to plan particular shows, sometimes in my house, sometimes at Terry King’s in St Margarets, Framework held regular monthly meetings at which the photographers were expected to arrive with their most recent work for criticism – and to take part in criticising work by the others. These were small meetings, usually around half a dozen of us, and with no holds barred, Quite a few people came once but couldn’t stand the criticism, but the central core of those who attended grew from it. Of course not all the criticism made sense, but it was what people thought, and sometimes things did get pretty heated.

The LIP satellite groups were my attempt later to get something similar going inside LIP, though I don’t think any have quite lived up to their predecessor. For a while the Twickenham group which met at Jim Barron’s home came close – and most of those taking part were former Framework members.

Not that Framework had a membership or a constitution. You just came along and did it. We collected a sub from those taking part in exhibitions when we needed money (and it was the cause of some bitterness when one member refused to come up with the cash, leaving me out of pocket, but otherwise worked well.) Terry King did most of the organising of the meetings, inviting a number of photographers to come along and talk to us at various times as well as to take part in our critiques.

The group had its origins in the Richmond &Twickenham Photographic Society, where I met Terry and others including Randall Webb. The RTPS had regular large meetings with speakers, club competitions and the like, but had also spawned a number of small groups which members could attend. When someone decided to form a group which took a wider view of photography than the club world, I suspect for political reasons they didn’t want to give it a name which reflected this, and as there were at the time already five groups, they gave it the name ‘Group Six‘.

When I first went along, perhaps around 1975, Group Six was run by Vincent Oliver, who was I think the first person to get a photograph accepted in the Royal Academy Summer Show and much later ran the Photo-i web site, but it was soon taken over by Terry King. As well as meeting for a monthly discussion, often with guests (one such was Martin Parr) who would critique our work, we also organised monthly outings to take photographs. These took me to some remote rural creeks in Kent which Terry favoured, and also to Avebury and Southwark and a couple of longer visits to Portland and the Welsh Valleys. I got hauled before the RTPS committee, who had no sense of humour, for articles I wrote about some of these for Amateur Photographer.

We decided to hold shows of work by Group Six members, the first of which was in 1982 at the Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham. We went on to produce further shows at the Quay Arts Centre in Newport on the Isle of Wight and a second show at the Orleans Gallery. We were preparing for a further show at the Orleans Gallery, when the RTPS committee put their foot down and decided that they would take this over for a general RTPS show.

We set up separately from the RTPS as Group Six Photographers, organising our own large show at the Hexagon in Reading – by six photographer; later in 1985 we had another show at the Poole Arts Centre, and at both I showed work from my ‘Homage to Atget‘ (now on-line as part of Paris Revisited and in the Blurb book In Search of Atget.)

Although I had more or less left the RTPS, others in the group, including Terry King were still active members, and were getting hassled by the committee over our continuing use of the name ‘Group Six’. Although I thought we had earned the right to continue to call ourselves by that name, having established a reputation for it quite separate from the RTPS, I came up with the name ‘Framework‘.

Framework organised quite a few shows in the next six years, though I’m not sure I can remember them all. The first was at Parkshot in Richmond (where the RTPS had also moved to hold their meetings) and was followed by another at the Hexagon, where I showed 28 prints from my ‘German Indications‘, along with the half dozen or so texts which accompany them (now online mainly in black and white and also rather better as a Blurb book.) Next was another at the Orleans House Gallery, there were one or two small shows at the college where I was working and then a series of at least five shows at the Watermans Arts Centre.

One of the advantages of leaving the RTPS is that we were able to invite other photographers to join Framework, and those who came and attended the meetings and showed work included Carol Hudson, Peter Jennings, Jim Barron, Townly Cooke, Tony Mayne, Virginia Khuri, Yoke Matze, Robert Claxton, David Malarkey and others whose names will be familiar to at least some LIP members. We also had guests who showed work with us, including several of those who Terry persuaded to come and talk to us, such as Jo Spence. Unfortunately I don’t think a full record of the shows and certainly not of the meetings exists, and though I started to put together a web site with the information I had to hand in 1997, I never completed it – though the unfinished work is still on-line.

Framework basically worked by having a whip-round when we needed money – and I think we had a notional fee for coming to the meetings, though were seldom good at collecting it. But one thing we did buy was a large and expensive portfolio case to take work to galleries. And it was this portfolio, with work from Framework people, that was taken to the Mermaid Theatre to get the venue for LIP’s first exhibition.

LIP never quite replaced Framework, which closed down a few years after LIP was formed. LIP was a larger group but lacked the independence that had been an essential part of Framework – which for example never used external selectors for its shows, but battled it out amongst ourselves. And though LIP enabled the Photographers’ Gallery to stop running its ‘Young Photographers’ group, which I wasn’t the oldest still taking an active part in, which had become something of a trial for its education officer who frankly wasn’t up to the job, LIP never really received the support from the gallery that it had apparently been promised.

But I think also, the key people in Framework had moved on the time we decided to quit. Terry was increasingly involved internationally in the alternative processes world, and into the RPS Historical Group which he ran for some years, Derek Ridgers was enjoying great success working for the NME and other publications who flew him across the world to photograph music icons, and I was involved in London Documentary Photographers and their shows, though I still took part in LIP events and shows for more than 10 years – including around five years as editor of the LIP magazine, then called LIPService, until pressure of work writing about photography and taking pictures made it impossible. Others remained more firmly in LIP, some until the present day.

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Loss, Lauds, Leaps & Lazarus

Of Loss, Lauds, Leaps, and Lazarus is the title of a yet another interesting post by Professor Larry J Schaaf, the Project Director of the Talbot Catalogue Raisonné at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. I’ve mentioned the catalogue before and it is truly a magnificent project on one of the founders of our medium, one which I very much wish had been available when I had to write a few articles on W H F Talbot and the Calotype process.

Among the items covered in the latest weekly post is one on a process that Talbot experimented with prior to 1839 that I’d never heard of before, the lo-type, which has now been recreated by Grant Romer, involving the printing-out of images by extended exposure on iodised surfaces of copper or silver on glass, not dissimilar to the work of Daguerre in France.

Unlike Daguerre he did not break his thermometer and thus discover the use of mercury to ‘develop’ these images, instead using greatly extended exposures that produced both a positive metallic silver image and also some fairly strong colours from interference patterns. The colours are unrelated to the colour of the subjects, most of which were leaves and similar specimens in contact with the copper or silver surface.

Another topic mentioned in his note is the 209th anniversary of the birth of Anna Atkins on March 16th 1799, though it is actually the 219th anniversary if my maths is correct. She was the only daughter of a well known scientist of the time, John George Children and very close to him as her mother died when she was only a few months old. He brought her up and encouraged her as a scientist and she continued her scientific work after marrying a railway promoter in 1825. She of course is deservedly famous for producing the first photographically illustrated book, Photographs of British Algæ: Cyanotype Impressions, its blue images produced exposing the specimens in contact with sheets of paper senswitized using the cyanotype process which had recently been developed by the man who proposed the term ‘photography’, her friend Sir John Herschel and who had sent the details of his work to her father. Schaaf has some interesting news about new publications and exhibitions of her work later in the year.

More sadly, there is also an obituary for Peter James (1958-2018), “Head of Photography at the Library of Birmingham for more than 25 years until his job was criminally swept away in 2015.” As well as his own thoughts, Schaaf also has those of a number of well-known people in photography who knew him. I only met him on a few occasions, and we had once briefly discussed the possibility of working on a project together. I was impressed as others were by his knowledge, appreciation and enthusiasm for photography and his early death is a great loss for phtoography in the UK.

A Russian Vivian Maier?

I think it does little service to “Leningrad’s lost photographer” Masha Ivashintsova (1942-2000) to call her a ‘Russian Vivian Maier‘ as the headline in Peta Pixel about her work does. The images in ‘Russian Vivian Maier’ Discovered After 30,000 Photos Found in Attic‘ bear no similarity to the work of Maier, nor do the circumstances of her life or the ‘discovery’ of her archive. And fortunately, since they have been put on-line and into the ‘Masha Galleries‘ by her only daughter Asya Ivashintsova-Melkumyan there are very unlikely to be any of the legal shenanigans that have plagued the exploitation of the work of Maier by various parties.

Masha ‘s husband and daughter had moved to Moscow away from her when the marriage broke up around 1976, and the pictures (including some of the daughter) were found in 2017 by her daughter and her husband in the attic of the family home in house in Pushkin, Saint Petersburg where her mother had stored them.

Looking through the images both in the article and on the Masha Ivashintsova website and Instagram it is apparent that she was a very proficient photographer and the pictures also appear to be an interesting document of “the Leningrad poetic and photography underground movement of the 1960−80s”. There is too a stylistic consistency absent from the work of Maier.

Of course we have so far seen only a very small fraction of her output, though perhaps more will emerge with an exhibition being planned this Summer in Vienna. It isn’t of course something that is going to change the history of photography, but I think it might well make a very interesting book or two – and possibly a rather interesting film.

I’ve long been of the opinion that their are many interesting collections of photographs in attics and often consigned to skips around the world, and its good to see one of them preserved and presented to the public.

Nine Photos

Nine photojournalists talk us through the story behind their favourite photos in a feature published by XCity+, a site I’d not heard of before which is produced by alumni of London’s City University, which recently had a rather confusing name change to City, University of London. Formerly the Northampton Institute, it has its base in Northampton Square, Clerkenwell, and was one of the CATs which given university status (part of Harold Wilsons “white heat of technology“) in 1966 as The City University, changing its name after becoming a part of the wider University of London (which boasts 18 constituent colleges and nine research institutes) in 2016.

It had always had a close connection with the City of London and the trades of that city, and it is perhaps surprising that it only formed its journalism department in 1976 offering a diploma in Newspaper Journalism, when it is less than a mile for any crow flying from Fleet St.

One of the photographers included is David Hoffman, and his picture from the 1983 Stop the City protest against globalisation, big business and the banks is a stunning image. But it is a little disappointing that the text that accompanies this – and the others is so short. The feature promises us more:

“we rarely have the full story. How were these photos taken, and why?

As the photographers talk us through their most powerful images, we are given a rare opportunity to see these pictures through their eyes.”

Fortunately in David’s case it gives a link to a much more detailed story about the image , both about the situation in which it was taken and how it was the vital evidence in a court case. Its also well worth going to his web site and seeing more of his work.

There are also links in the XCITY+ article to the web sites of the other 8 photographers.

Sex, Lies and Lemmings

Sex, Lies, and Lemmings: Hossein Fatemi and the Toxification of Photojournalism is the provocative title of a detailed article by on PetaPixel by Benjamin Chesterton, known to many of us through his Duckrabbit blog, where this and many other thoughtful and incisive articles first appeared.

In it, Chesterton looks in some detail at the abysmal failure of World Press Photo‘s ‘investigation’ and the equally guilty collaborations by Fatemi’s agency, the generally well-respected Panos, Time, the New York Times and others in dismissing the evidence from fellow Iranian photographers and two Iranian women who worked with him in the making of the pictures (though not in their subsequent misuse), one of whom was falsely labelled in the caption as being a prostitute working to support two young children, a complete fabrication, which could result in severe penalties for the woman in the picture.

Rather than make investigations and take appropriate action, WPP and others appear to have decided on a campaign to discredit fellow Iranian photographer Ramin Talaie who first raised the issues about Fatemi’s work, which has now been shown by WPP around the world. The evidence against Fatemi, as related by Chesterton, much of which comes from investigations by Talaie as neither the WPP, Panos, Time or others has bothered to contact the people in the pictures, seems completely damning.

One of the strengths of Chesterton’s article is that he doesn’t stop there, but goes on to suggest how the matter should have been dealt with – an approach which he says he suspects would have made Fatemi withdraw his work before the issues became public, rather than lead to “the charade on show.” It seems good sense, and an approach that were it taken would lead photographers to think much more carefully about photojournalistic standards rather than, as in the current case, to put forward theatrically staged images with false captions. They may be powerful pictures and I have nothing against the creation of fictional narratives using photography, but it needs to be clearly identified as such and has no place in photojournalism.

You should read Chesterton’s article, and I’ve deliberately not given much of its content here to encourage you to do so. The real scandal is not the photographs themselves, although Fatemi appears to have used them and his subjects irresponsibly, but “the incomprehensible decisions that led to Fatemi’s work being given such a massive platform to deceive.” And as he says in his conclusion:

“World Press Photo set a new standard for photojournalism: NO standard. Basically, you can get away with pretty much anything. Just as long as there are no pixels out of place and you stick to your story, any s**t goes.

You can be certain: lemmings in search of awards will follow.”

The price we pay for devaluing photography

The full title of photographer Kenneth Jarecke‘s piece on ‘Medium‘ is ‘How Newsrooms Abandoned Photojournalism – And the price we pay for devaluing photography‘, and I think it’s an interesting view.

Jarecke, born in Nebraska, USA in 1963, has worked with Contact Press Images since he was 20, going around the world as a photojournalist, and has also worked for TIME. He is probably best known for an iconic and controversial picture from the Gulf War, first published in American Photo in 1991. You can see more of his work on his own web site.

His is obviously an American view, but I think in some ways the situation in the UK is worse, with few news outlets having any real interest in much beyond celebrities and the latest scandal. America still has many local papers which still employ a number of photographers and probably many more who actually pay for photographs rather than begging them from members of the public. His article was written in response to These tools will help you find the right images for your stories published by Poynter, where you can also find some responses they asked for others to make on that story.

Here in the UK, my union, the NUJ, are having a month long campaign, #Useitpayforit, which you can also read about in Amateur photographers should charge for published work, says new NUJ campaign and Major publisher’s pictures budget is less than your daily cup of coffee a week, which I understand the company concerned has said is inaccurate, though they haven’t yet given a figure to correct it. But I did a search and failed to find any mention of the campaign on the Amateur Photographer web site.

I think most photographers like me will be used to getting e-mails and phone calls from local papers asking if they can use my work, “of course we’ll give you a credit“. My response is simply to tell them that of course they can use my work so long as they buy a licence from the appropriate agency it is with. I don’t think any of them ever has gone on to use an image, even though the prices are usually ridiculously low.