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Lunatic photographers

It’s almost a week since I last wrote a post here, and I’m rather scratching my head to say why. I have perhaps been a little busier than usual, starting with the funeral of the father of one of my friends, where I was appointed official photographer. This isn’t something I’ve done before, and although I did a decent job at the wake, I didn’t feel I really did a job of the actual funeral, too many inhibitions showing themselves. It would have been easier had it been a burial rather than a cremation, and I found myself very much a mourner rather than a photographer. The pictures I did take I’ve given to the family, and have decided not to share in public.

Since then I’ve photographed several protests, one very large and some quite small, but all taking time, both to attend and to edit and file work, and I’ve made a resolution to try and keep My London Diary up-to-date – so you can already see the pictures I took yesterday there. Today I’m having some time off because of a minor health problem, though tooth-ache never feels minor. I had to rush to my dentist for an emergency patch-up yesterday, though it will require rather more painful work at a later date, and have time to write now because I’ve had to cancel a couple of things in my diary. Though being still tanked up on pain-killers and feeling a little unsteady probably isn’t the best state to be in charge of a keyboard, it does take my mind off my symptoms, and I started my day looking back at some of the things online I’ve missed over the past few days.

Judging from the pictures I’ve seen on Facebook and elsewhere, one of the biggest photographic events I’ve missed in the past few days was the “super blue blood moon” of January 31st, described by the Telegraph newspaper as a “a once-in-a-lifetime event“. Except it wasn’t. I saw the moon rising through my window and there was really nothing special about it, and I didn’t bother to pick up my camera. It was the same old moon, a little brighter than sometimes, thanks largely to a clearer than usual atmosphere here, and exactly the same colour as usual.

Of course, London wasn’t the right place to photograph it, as the eclipse which did give it that blood-red colour was over well before the moonrise here. Which didn’t stop a number of photographers from producing (and the papers and web publishing) nice orange or red sunrise pictures, which of course owed more to our atmospheric pollution and perhaps a little Photoshop than the moon.

You can read a long account and watch a video on Peta Pixel of how Michael Tomas took a series of these pictures showing a moon rising through the skyline of central London 10 miles away from a hill in Richmond Park with a 1000 mm lens, though I have to tell him he didn’t shoot a super blue blood moon, as he was several thousand miles away from a blood moon, with the total eclipse starting at 12.52 and ending at 14.08 and moonrise in London being at 16.55, almost three hours later, and three quarters of an hour after the end of even the penumbral eclipse (which is almost impossible to see.) It’s still an interesting image and got a remarkable amount of exposure. Though I feel rather sorry for him for thinking this makes it the best photo of his life.

It wasn’t even a true ‘blue moon’, as Diamond Geezer points out in his daily blog for 31st January, the blue moon a name given to the third moon in a single season which had four moons rather than the normal three. On this definition there are no blue moons in 2018, but we do get one on May 18th 2009. But a journalist in 1946 got it wrong, and journalists have been getting it wrong ever since, calling the second moon in any month a blue moon. We get our next one by this definition on March 31st this year.

And it was hardly a ‘supermoon’ either, though it was a little larger than usual (5.9% according to the Hermit Eclipse web site). The actual perigree (closest approach) was a day earlier. Visually these differences are hardly visible.

Lunar eclipses happen quite frequently – there is a good one due on 20th July 2018, where the total eclipse should be visible at moonrise in London at around 9pm.

But it is instructive to compare Tomas’s real image with the many Photoshopped ones that appear, notably that by Peter Lik, which has been the subject of much discussion, including on FStoppers, but also posted on Peta Pixel. Clearly this is a composite image and the fact that an identical image of the moon appears in another of his pictures makes this beyond doubt. Perhaps the most mystifying aspect is that only 75% of those who voted in the accompanying poll were sure it was made in Photoshop, though I suspect the other 25% hadn’t watched the video or read the article in any detail.

Lik’s work is obviously very commercially successful, though few believe that his claim to have sold a single copy of a print for $6.5 million in 2014 to be anything more than a publicity stunt, he certainly makes a small fortune providing expensive decor, enough to employ a small team of people working on his images in Photoshop; two of those taking part in the FStoppers discussion revealed that a former employee had hold them he had spent an entire seven days working on one particular image. People could paint these things from scratch in less time than that.

But in the end I don’t have much interests in how Lik’s images are produced; they are simply not worth bothering with. I fail to see anything of interest in them, bad paintings produced with a little aid from a camera and rather more from software, clichés that lack any sense of reality and any meaning.

American History of American Photography

Only Part 1 of Marc Falzon‘s short survey of the history of American photography is currently available (and featured in PDN Pulse), but it’s 8 minutes offers an interesting introduction to the subject, dealing with it through 3 key curatorial figures, Alfred Stieglitz, Minor White and John Szarkowski (part one only deals with Stieglitz) and a few key photographers.

Among those photographers, so far only Timothy O’Sullivan and Walker Evans have been the only to have been looked at in any depth, with a passing mention of a few others.

It’s an introduction that tries to demonstrate what is peculiarly American about American photography and makes some interesting points, while of course minimising or neglecting much European work of the era.

Where it descends to the ridiculous is in suggesting that photographers such as Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson were somehow the product of American advances in the medium and the influence of Stieglitz. What influence there was clearly flowed the other way.

It wasn’t the school around Stieglitz that motivated Walker Evans – except in a reaction which dismissed it as well as the newer modernism of photographers such as Paul Strand, but the vernacular photography of the many unknown American photographers – and the work of Atget which was brought to New York by Berenice Abbott and Julien Levy.

What I find most annoying about this video is however the way that the photographs are shown, generally starting zoomed into a detail and wandering around the image, with only at best a fleeting glimpse of the image as a whole. Framing is so intrinsic to our medium and we need to see and study pictures in their entirety – perhaps occasionally zooming in to view significant details.

Daniele Tamagni (1975-2017)

It came as a real shock as I caught up with my reading online today to learn of the death of Daniel Tamagni, someone I still thought of as a young photographer, born in Milan in 1975 and only 42 when he died last month, and who I first heard of and met in 2007 , the year when he won the Canon Young Photographer Award for his series on ‘The Gentlemen of Bacongo‘, African dandies or ‘Sapeurs‘

I met him first at around that time at a show he had with two others in Peckham, writing about it for this web site, Peckham Rising, where he showed me a newspaper article on his work on Black Churches in the area, one image from which was in the show, and I was sorry to have missed the earlier show he had of that work.

I wrote about him again when his work on the ‘Sapeurs’ was on show at the Michael Hoppen Gallery and my piece Sapology included the picture of him with Araminta De Clermont, whose pictures were also showing in the gallery. The work had by then gained him the 2010 ICP award for Applied Fashion photography, and had been published by Trolley Books (Gentlemen of Bacongo, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-904563-83-9.) As well as writing a little about the Sapeurs and Tamagni’s pictures of them I was also pleased to be able to photograph one of them in person at the event.

I used that picture again when I wrote another piece, Encore Sapeurs, following on from a post by Joerg Colberg on his on Conscientious blog which linked to some of Tamagni’s work.

My last meeting with Daniele was at the opening of ‘Global Style Battles‘ at the ArtEco Gallery in Wandsworth (now the Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery), an enjoyable occasion graced by the presence of a number of leading photographers who live in London, including James Barnor (with him above) born in Ghana and Charlie Phillips, born in Jamaica (below).

It was a memorable night and you can read about it and see a few more pictures at Daniele Tamagni at ArtEco.

You can read a brief obituary of him, as I did, on PDN Pulse, and, in Italian, in Corriere della Sera.

The Conversation

I’m often critical of the BBC, and they way they promote an establishment view in many of their news programmes, often failing to report or minimising stories which would embarrass the government and, as academic studies have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, being extremely biased in their treatment of trade unions, Jeremy Corbyn and class issues generally.

It is a very middle-class institution, and employs too many people as commentators who come from highly privileged backgrounds (with private education and Oxbridge), but does produce some excellent programmes. And one whole area that particularly stands out is the BBC World Service – which also covers the news more neutrally than the internal services, which often follow the lead of the UK newspapers which are owned by a small handful of billionaires including of course Rupert Murdoch and reflect their perspective on matters.

On Monday morning this week the BBC World Service broadcast in their series ‘The Conversation’, which looks at the experiences of women across the world on “image, work, relationships, equality, migration and working lives” had presenter Kim Chakanetsa talking with two women, Mexican photographer Cristina Goettsch Mittermeier and Ami Vitale from the USA.

It was a lesson in sensitive presentation, with Chakanetsa encouraging the two women to talk with pertinent questions (unlike some BBC programmes which end up being more about the interviewer than the guests), and in the roughly half-hour programme there were some interesting reflections on photography, on women photographers generally, on news, on ways of working and more, much of which as they state applies to photographers whatever their ethnicity or gender. You can listen to the programme online (along with 169 other episodes of the series) or download it from the page.

Both women are photographers for National Geographic, and Mittermeier’s recent video of a polar bear starving without the ice it needs to hunt has attracted global attention to the problems of climate change. She is also the founder and President of SeaLegacy, a non profit organization working to protect the oceans. Ami Vitale’s ‘Pandas Gone Wild‘ won her second prize for Nature Stories in the 2017 World Press Photo – to add to her many earlier awards.

I first wrote about Ami Vitale many years ago as one of the more interesting photojournalists around, and it was a great delight to meet her in Poland in 2005.

Ami Vitale (in red) at Alcatraz, Bielsko-Biala, Poland

You can read more about that event, the first FotoArtFestival on My London Diary, which links to my own diary of the Festival.

Like you’ve never been away

I got quite excited this morning when a parcel arrived and I unwrapped it to find a signed copy of the new edition of Paul Trevor‘s amazing pictures of children in Liverpool in the mid-70s, ‘like you’ve never been away‘. The first edition, which sold out pretty quickly, was published as an exhibition catalogue in 2011, and was a rather unsatisfactory portrait format, with pictures split across the gutter, and the new edition’s landscape format is a great improvement.

I’ve always regarded Paul Trevor as the most interesting of the whole batch of British photographers who became known in the mid 1970s at exactly the time I was myself coming to photography, and there were some other impressive talents, some of whom are very much better known. Some were rather better at self-publicity.

I wrote a little about the first edition when it came out, and still have it on my shelves, but I was pleased to be one of the 193 supporters of the Kickstarter campaign which closed on 28th October andt enabled this re-publication (though I didn’t pay the extra to have my name included or get the very reasonably priced prints on offer.)

The new edition is of a thousand copies, of which half are hardback and the rest softcover. It isn’t yet listed for sale at the publisher, Bluecoat Press, and the link at Amazon is still to the unavailable First Edition, copies of which secondhand now cost roughly twice as much as as the new and far preferable hardcover edition.

I’m sure it will soon appear on sale, though perhaps not for long as quite a few copies will have been sent out to those supporters. The hardback is ISBN 9781908457387 and the cover price £25 it might make a good Christmas present for someone with an interest in photography. I’ll try and comment or update on this later.

Brooklyn’s Sweet Ruin

Sixteen years ago, with Mike Seaborne, who was then both a photographer and Senior Curator of Photographs at the Museum of London, I agreed to set up a web site dealing with one of our great shared interests, photography of the urban landscape. I had some web space for it, wrote the site registered the domain urbanlandscape.org.uk in December 2001 and the site was online for the start of 2002, with pictures by Mike and myself.

It was never our intention that the site should be limited to just our own work, and from the start there was an invitation to submit work, both photographic essays and theory, that fitted our ideas of urban landscape photography, and I tried hard to include some definition of what we were looking for.

As well as the ‘contribute’ page which was a part of the original site, which began with the message:

We welcome critical essays on urban landscape and small bodies of urban landscape work by photographers, although we are unable to offer any payment.

and continued to give some details, at the start of the following year I added another page, which attempted to explain my definition of urban landscape, with some example images. We had added a few of the many submissions Mike and I had received, but far too many were just from people who made pretty pictures in the urban environment without any real intention to say anything about the city.

But there have been other submissions over the years which have have given us a great thrill to receive and one of earliest of these was by Paul Raphaelson, whose work ‘Wilderness‘ we added to the site in 2005.

So I was delighted to get an e-mail from Paul a day or two ago announcing his new book, Brooklyn’s Sweet ruin.

Books

You can see some of the pictures from this project on Paul Raphaelson’s web site, along with more of his work, and they appeal to me greatly. I’ve long had an attraction to decaying former industrial sites – which you can see in some of my own work both on Hull and in London’s docklands and estuary – and Paul’s images have a clarity and elegance that I admire, along with some fine colour. I’ve not seen the actual printed book, but it appears to be a fine publication, available from Amazon through various UK suppliers.

Both Mike Seaborne and I have moved on considerably since we set up the site, and although it is still on line and still open to new contributions, we haven’t really been keeping it up to date. As readers of this blog will know photographing protests around political issues have been engaging much of my time, and this year I’ve been putting another image from my work in Hull in the 1970s and 80s on line every day as a contribution to Hull’s year as UK City of Culture both on the Hull web site and on Facebook. Next year as well as adding some more images on the Hull site I also hope to put a new site about my work on London Buildings from 1986-2000 on-line, most of which has not previously been published.

f8 and Be There, plus …

‘f8 and Be There‘ is a famous quote attributed to ‘Weegee‘, the New York press photographer Arthur Fellig whose brutal flash-lit exposures documented the seedier side of the city’s life and crime in the middle years of the last century, and is often quoted as the maxim for photojournalists and street photographers.

Weegee got to many crime scenes before the police, not because he used a Ouija board as the nickname implied, but at first because he hung around in the Manhattan Police Headquarters and watched the teletype, rushing out to take photographs when a crime report came in. He started without any police permit, but from 1938 because he was the first journalist to get permission to have a police-band short-wave radio, which he kept in the boot of his car along with portable darkroom facilities. He would get to the location, rush in with his 4×5″ Speed Graphic camera and bulb flash, take a picture, develop and print the sheet film, stamp the back with ‘Credit Photo by the Famous Weegee’ and have it at the newspaper or agency hours before other photographers.

Despite the quote, Weegee seldom if ever worked at f8. You needed greater depth of field for his work, and he would generally have his camera set at f16, with the focus at 10 ft and the shutter speed of 1/200th, probably the fastest speed to synch the flash bulbs with the lens he used. It worked, and he didn’t have to think about technique, just get in the right place and press the button.

Of course not everything needed to be done at such a rush, and despite the impression of naked emergency given by the flash and the often slightly dynamic framing, as with other newspaper photographers many of his pictures were posed. He was a photographer who knew what he wanted and made sure he got it.

‘Photojournalist‘ is an overused term in photography, as too is ‘street photography‘and I don’t think Weegee was either, but essentially a news photographer. His work was certainly effective and his simplified technique worked well.

Much of the time many professional photographers now use the ‘P’ setting on cameras, often derided as for amateurs and newbies (including by me in years long past.) It generally works well and enables you to concentrate on framing and content and let the camera get the exposure more or less right. And should you need a faster shutter speed or greater depth of field a control dial is there under your finger or thumb to give it – and automatically adjust the other exposure parameters (these days we can use shutter, aperture and ISO) to retain correct exposure in P* mode. Though should you be using flash (other than for fill), S seems to be a better choice, at least with Nikons.

‘f8’ simply means the technical side of making an image, not the literal aperture, though I often do work at f8, though in winter more often at f4, or whatever the maximum aperture of my lens is, stopping down one or two stops if light allows – or for greater depth.

‘Be There’ is of course a sine qua non, but it isn’t sufficient. To make good pictures you have to be in the right position – sometimes with almost millimetric precision, with the right lens and the right framing. Often there will be dozens of photographers at an event, but only one will get a great image. Even good photographers take plenty of pictures that are marketable without being of any great merit, and many feel that if they get paid that’s all that matters. It’s one area where I find myself in agreement with Ofstead; when taking pictures, ‘satisfactory‘ isn’t good enough.

But ‘f8 and Be There’ still isn’t enough, though it may make for the financially successful newspaper photographer – so long as they can also get the pictures in before the next photographer. Perhaps the word I’d choose to add is ‘attitude‘. It’s what you need to have to know which is the right place, the right framing and the right moment, even if you may not always be able to catch it (for that you usually need a little luck as well.) Unless you have a point of view how can you know how to express it through your pictures?

Though it may well not help you financially. When Kertesz went to the USA in 1936 attracted by an offer from the Keystone agency, the editors complained his images “speak too much” and they soon parted company. In his pictures Kertesz said he interpreted “what I feel in a given moment, not what I see, but what I feel.”

You can see some of the best of last year’s press photography in London now at the Royal Festival Hall, where the 2017 World Press Photo Exhibition is on show – free to view – until 20th November 2017.

An Exodus of Pain

I’ve written many times about seeing things from different viewpoints, and in particular about getting away from seeing things in the often blinkered viewpoint imposed on much of our mass media by the small group – a handful – of billionaires who own and control our media.

Even if we pride ourselves on the independence of the BBC, its news agenda is largely driven by the major newspapers and its close relationship with the British establishment often determines the line it takes on issues.

I first reported on the Rohingya and their mis-treatment by Myanmar over 5 years ago, but the story then was hardly taken up by the UK press. I didn’t go there, but was alerted to what was happening largely by overseas media and in particular by a group many in Britain say should be banned, Hizb ut-Tahrir, who protested outside the Bangladesh High Commission. Bangladesh was then blocking of aid to Rohingya refugees by NGOs and sending them back to be oppressed in Myanmar (Burma.)

It wasn’t a great protest to photograph, and Hizb ut-Tahrir were often rather suspicious (with some justification) of the media, but I wrote a fairly lengthy piece about the situation on My London Diary.

Of course things have changed since then and the situation has deteriorated greatly for the Rohingya, and the story has been taken up again world-wide. A few days ago I wrote a post about some of the photographic coverage in The Salgado Effect, and it’s good now to see a view from Bangladesh itself, photographed by Shahidul Alam of Drik/Majority World with text by Lyndall Stein, An Exodus of Pain half a million people driven from their homes.

Continue reading An Exodus of Pain

The Salgado Effect

Like me you have probably seen the set of pictures by Kevin Frayer published by The Guardian Documenting the Rohingya refugee crisis – in pictures.

They are a powerful set of pictures and I have a great deal of admiration for the photographer having gone to document the situation and managing to photograph scenes such as this. But I also found myself feeling a little uneasy at certain aspects.

I think I remember years ago Don McCullin discussing the dangers of aestheticising scenes of violence and death, I think in relation to working in Biafra. Obviously we need to produce powerful images using the tools at our command, but there comes a point where making pictures out of scenes conflicts with showing the brutal realities.

I’m also a little disturbed by the use of black and white rather than colour in these and many other sets of images, the huge majority of which are actually made in colour. Perhaps Frayer worked in black and white either on film or on that Leica M Monochrom but the images have a look that owes much to software. With many photographers conversion to black and white is simply an affectation that makes them think their work is more documentary, or perhaps reflect their admiration for the work of photographers such as Salgado (whose work sprang to my mind looking at some of these pictures), Frayer (or his post-production team) certainly take full advantage of its possibilities, much too full for my taste.

Photographers have long taken advantage of the possibilities offered in the production of their images, whether in darkroom or with Silver Efex. Where would Gene Smith’s Spanish Wake be without the hours (and the ferricyanide and whisky) in the darkroom? But as Horacio Fernández comments on this image, the selection of pictures for Time’s 1951 Spanish Village essay (one of the landmarks of photojournalism) were made “paying more attention to beauty and emotional meanings than to information and political commentary.”

Of course, as Smith said, “The honesty lies in my—the photographer’s—ability to understand…I will retouch.” And we all do to some extent. Some of my pictures have a little help from Lightroom’s ‘Clarity‘ brushed delicately on faces or elsewhere (though mainly I work rather less aggressively with a little added exposure and contrast – it’s something that has enabled me to largely move away from using fill-flash.) But in these images it has been applied with a shovel not to enhance what was there but to create a deliberate and to my eyes un-photographic effect. Some of these images are well onto the way to becoming film posters for the crisis rather than exposing it to the world.

In How not to photograph the Rohingya genocide in the making… Suchitra Vijayan examines these pictures and also features a lengthy YouTube video of a talk with writer Maaza Mengiste, Unheard of things – the vocabularies of violence. I’ve not listened to all 88 minutes, but it is worth starting as I did at 38:10.

And here’s another set of photographs – also in black and white – of the crisis. Less dramatic, less aestheticized, less post-produced but I think that Greg Constantine work is somehow more real and tells the story better. And there are other pictures both black and white and colour that do so too.

MOMA Clearout

If you have rather more than £50 to spare and feel like indulging yourself, then the news (from PetaPixel) that MOMA is having a clear-out sale of prints it no longer needs may come as good news.

Over 400 prints are up for sale, mainly on-line through Christies – and you can browse the lots on-line, though the news has come a little late as by the time you read this the auctions for the October sales will probably be over. The site lists the schedule for the sales:

October 2017
MoMA: Pictorialism into Modernism
MoMA: Henri Cartier-Bresson

December 2017
MoMA: Women in Photography

January 2018
MoMA: Garry Winogrand
MoMA: Bill Brandt

April 2018
MoMA: Walker Evans
MoMA: Tracing Photography’s History

The 400 pictures includes some of the better-known images by many of the photographers included, and the prices are likely to be high. But its a good opportunity to view a great set of images on-line.

And if, like me, you can’t afford to bid for ‘HENRI CARTIER–BRESSON (1908–2004) Behind the Gare St. Lazare, Paris, 1932’ for which, as I write the current bid is USD 35,000 (£27,741) then you can console yourself with the thought that its actually much better to own a whole book of his pictures, such as ‘The Decisive Moment‘, republished in 2014/5, which you can still buy on the web for a little over £100 including postage. Or if that is beyond your budget, you can buy the perfectly adequate though not quite as desirable Photo Poche or Aperture volumes of his work secondhand for little more than a fiver.