Category: Photographers

Danny Lyon – Burn Zone

I was annoyed to realise yesterday that I’d forgotten to go and see the Danny Lyon show which closed a few days ago in London. I’d had it marked down in my list of things to do, but there were just so many other things. Not that I would have seen anything new to me in the show –  the pictures in the  BJP feature are all familiar. But it’s always good to see real prints on a wall, even though I think much photography works better in books.

Lyon in yesterday’s The Guardian article Danny Lyon on why he’s naming and shaming ‘climate criminals’ by Alex Rayner mentions the London show, and the comment by Lyon, ‘”There is a show now of my work in a London gallery,” he says. “I have nothing to do with it and no interest in publicizing it“‘, and the article also has a link to a gallery of his pictures from his major retrospective when launched at the Whitney Museum.

But the article is about Lyon’s latest book, Burn Zone, and you can download a PDF of this free from his Bleak Beauty blog. You can also order and pay for a print version.

The book, Lyon’s newest published work, is described as “a Cri de Coeur directed at the artist community and our youth asking them to join the fight to save planet Earth” and as well as a text about Lyon’s return to New Mexico after 30 years illustrated by his black and white photos, it also includes a state-by-state list of 50 leading US climate criminals prepared by climate activist Josephine Ferorelli at Lyon’s request for “a list of the worst of the worst, a climate j’accuse” with descriptions of their role and contact details, all from publicly available sources.

In the book Ferorelli says:

The people who profit from the sale of fossil fuels have played a really cunning game, and we have lost more than 20 years of possibility as a result. As we approach dangerous environmental tipping points, a phrase my friend Eiren Caffall wrote in a song comes to mind: “the wickedness of wasted time.”
The alliance of corporate executives, their legal teams and the politicians they finance has pushed the line so far back from progress that liberals now congratulate themselves simply for
acknowledging the existence of this threat to our lives.

Some of those named in the list are well-known, at least to climate activists here, such as the Koch Brothers about which Ferorelli comments “Almost mythic in their climate obstructionism, the Kochs are involved in just about every aspect of every fossil fuel, as well as beef, fertilizer, lumber, disposable dishes, and other environmental-nightmare products, through their many-faceted multinational corporation.”

The book ends with an article by Lyon on “Kill the Koch Brothers” a Thanksgiving play by Ava Lyon, his 10-year-old granddaughter, which ends with a a Google search that reveals that the “the Koch brothers had successfully killed a documentary film that had been
made about them before it could be broadcast on PBS. It said, “Koch Brothers Kill Film.”

The PDF comes free and with this comment:

“Bleak Beauty offers the entire contents of Burn Zone free to anyone who wishes to read it, download it, or print it. We want to have the widest possible distribution of this work, and hope you will put it out there, to every person and every website and organization possible.”

So I’ve shared the link here and hope you enjoy and make use of the book and share the work. Perhaps we should have a UK supplement naming and shaming our own climate criminals.

You can see a post on this blog with more about the Koch Brothers,  The Cost of Coal.

British Bikers

I’ve seen some rather scary video of UK Bikers and the police harassment of their events which take place on rather out of the way ‘strips’ on the south and eastern edges of London, and although I’ve thought they would make an interesting subject, it’s never been one that I have seriously considered pursuing. And although some of the videos have been interesting, those I’ve watched have been rather amateur, and I’ve seen relatively few good still images. And most of those are by Dan Giannopoulos.

Giannopoulos came across some of them when cycling to work on his mountain bike and went over to talk to them, and Lens (again!) has just published a feature on the eigtheen months of work that followed, illustrated by 17 of his black and white photographs.

I’m not generally a fan of those photographers who work in black and white simply because they feel it gives their work a more documentary look, but Giannopoulos isn’t one of these, and his use of black and white really suits the subject, though there are just one or two pictures among the 17 where I felt colour might have been better. You can see a few more pictures from this project on his own web site, along with a number of other projects both in b/w and colour.

Among the work is another black and white series form 2009-2010 on the UK’s Far Right, which includes some striking images from some events I also photographed. His series was highly commended in the 2015 British Life photo awards, and he was Documentary Series Winner with a series of four images from his project Living with Dementia.

The BLPA isn’t a competition I know anything about, and having taken a brief look at its web site I don’t think I’m a great deal wiser. The entry fees seem relatively reasonable as such things go, but the site currently says:

“We are currently in discussion with a major new sponsor regarding opening times and terms and conditions. We hope this will be an exciting new development taking the awards to a new level of awareness and prestige. Please bear with us whilst the negotiations are in progress.”

Jack London Photographer

As often happens, it was a feature on the New York Times Lens blog that set me thinking this morning , this time by Jonathan Blaustei, the ‘The Rarely Seen Photos by Jack London‘. It wasn’t the first time I had seen photographs by London, with a number of earlier article such as Spitalfields Life’s Jack London, Photographer, published a couple of years ago at the time that Tangerine Press and L-13 Light Industrial Workshop republished his classic study of London’s East End, The People of the Abyss including all all 80 original black & white ‘illustrations from photographs‘ of the first 1903 US publication.

Interesting though these are, the poor quality of the original reproduction (which I assume is faithfully reproduced in the republished version) perhaps makes it had to appreciate London’s qualities as a documentary photographer.

Those unfamiliar with London’s life and other works such as ‘The Call of The Wild’ (which I was intrdouced to at school many years ago) will find a good short biography in the Smithsonian Magazine marking the 100th anniversary of his death a few days ago. The feature does mention his photography but almost in passing, a surprising lacuna given the 2010 book Jack London, Photographer by Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Sara S. Hodson and Philip Adam, which used original negatvies from the California State Parks collection (and there is a Jack London State Historic Park) and the albums of original photographs in the Huntington Library Jack London collection (this has 200 images on-line but these don’t really represent his documentary work.)

The book includes images from the East End, where he dressed as a working man and lived with those he photographed and wrote about (an approach which later inspired George Orwell‘s 1933 ‘Down and Out in London and Paris‘ – though Orwell worked only in prose), his work as a war correspondent on the Russo-Japanese war for the Hearst press, the 1906 San Franciso Earthquake, sailing trips to the Hawaiian Islands, the Marquesas, Solomon Islands, and Bora Bora where he documented cultures he saw fated to disappear, and his final photographs of the 1914 Mexican Revolution two years before his death. You can read a review of the book by blogger Ron Slate.

This April The Daily Telegraph published a feature accompanying the release of a new book, ‘The Paths Men Take‘ by Contrasto Books which has 70 photographs from his four major photographic coverages, and more recently The Guardian got in on the act.

Unlike some other famous figures whose snapshots have been published in later years, London was clearly a serious photographer, taking over 12,000 photographs in his relatively brief career. He saw himself as a professional photographer and was taking his pictures to sell alongside his writing. He called his pictures ‘human documents‘ and while they lack the revolutionary and controversial power of his writing they bring to life the people and events that he photographed.  He died on his ranch, aged only 40, having suffered from many serious illnesses on his travels, including scurvy in the Klondike and various tropical infections on his voyages, as well as life-long alcohol addiction on 22nd November 2016.

Black Panthers

On Lensculture you can see a set of 31 images and a short text by Stephen Shames, The Black Panthers — 50 Year Anniversary. The pictures are a selection from the 200 black and white images by him in the recently published Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers by Bobby Seale with photographs by Shames.

Shames met and photographed Seale at an anti–Vietnam War rally in April 1967 and Seale became a mentor to the University of California student  who became the most trusted photographer to the party, remaining by Seale’s side through his campaign for mayor of Oakland in 1973.

The story of the Black Panthers is a remarkable one, not least for showing the illegal lengths that a white political establishment was prepared to go to maintain its racist supremacy, with military-style police attacks and a huge campaign of intimidation and assassination by the FBI.

Shames has produced many other fine projects and it’s worth spending time on his web site. In particular there are many pictures about child poverty and low income families and his work has been compared with that by Lewis Hine a hundred years earlier. As well as working with organisations involved in social issues he has also “started an NGO which locates forgotten children (AIDS orphans, former child soldiers, and children living in refugee camps) with innate talents and molds them into leaders by sending them to the best schools and colleges.”

Although most of his work has been concerned with the USA – which is perhaps why he is not well known in the UK, his essay Street Kids includes images from Brazil, Bangladesh, India, Romania and Honduras.

Dannin on Magnum

I’m not sure that ‘“The Dannin Papers,” a series of Guest Posts by Robert Dannin, who served as Editorial Director of Magnum Photos from 1985-90′ actually tell us a great deal about photography, revealing as they are about some photographers, but at least for me the first piece, now on part 4 of 6 about his years with Magnum, based around an interview he gave to Russell Miller in 1995 is a highly entertaining series about the inner workings of the world’s best-known photo agency.

It is more than just gossip. More seriously it also shows up Miller’s book as a highly sanitised version of the truth, and I can find little in it that reflects the inside information that Dannin gave him when he was producing his ‘MAGNUM: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History’, as well as giving some insight into the inner workings of what would appear also to have been one of the world’s most dysfunctional organisations. Dannin gets 5 lines in the book, with a note of his resignation and a very pithy quotation of his reasons; Haiti, the first of three disasters which Dannin recounted to Miller in the current post, does not even feature in the book’s index.

Perhaps things have changed a little since then, and though there are still some fine photographers in Magnum, it no longer really deserves or enjoys the reputation it had back in the last century, with other agencies now encouraging much of the best photojournalism and Magnum sometimes appearing a little past its best-before date. When I started in photography it was every young photographer’s dream to become a Magnum member, but I think few harbour that aspiration now.

A big Send-Offf…

Those of you who missed Thursday evening’ celebration of the life of Colin O’Brien can get some idea of the event from a short film made at the event by Sebastian Sharples and featured on the Spitalfields Life site.

Colin was a good photographer with an exceptionally long career who began taking photographs about the time most of us learn to read, and a acquired a Leica which an uncle found in the back of his taxi as a teenager. His early pictures are an intimate record of working class life in London in the immediate postwar period, for me a reminder of growing up in a similar age in a rather less interesting area of outer London.

I think most if not all who met him remember him as an extremely generous man, and the event reflected this. It was interesting to listen to two of his boyhood friends talk about him and their lifelong friendship, and to see some of his better images projected both on a small screen in the church and a larger area of wall in the crypt afterwards, where we ate excellent pork pies and eccles cakes with some rather fine cheese and oranges and toasted his memory with wine, beer or blackcurrant cordial.

The blackcurrants had come from his last assignment with Spitalfields Life, when together with ‘The Gentle Author’ and a coachful of EastEnders they went to glean in the previously machine-harvested blackcurrant fields of Tudeley, and the cordial was served in bottles decorated with some of the images he took. We got the story of this told during the celebration, and how a rather unsatisfying trip to the pub by the two of them had resulted in them being diverted by the church and finding its unique windows by Marc Chagall.

I was a little surprised when I first read this to find the windows came as a surprise and wondered if this was merely a little fictional embellishment. I’d heard about them but never visited, though my wife had seen them when she was taken to hear a concert in the church. But putting ‘Tudely’ into Google (surely the kind of research everyone now does before visiting a new place?) immediately brings them up.

It wasn’t one of Colin’s best assignments – and he was a man whose best photography came from his own wanderings rather than on assignment, though there are some good pictures of people in the many time he photographed for Spitalfields Life. We were reminded of this in a film shown in the ceremony and in what seemed a very fitting and generous gesture as we left the church, where everyone was handed a paper bag containing a couple of envelopes of pictures of his work and the fine book which resulted from wandering around London Fields where he came across a group of traveller children, returning on several occasions to photograph them. It’s a book I already have a signed copy of, but one of my friends who was unable to attend will benefit from.

Be Creative

As I’ve found in the past, its hard to write about creativity. All to easy to mouth platitudes and end up sounding rather soppy. And at times in his ‘The Creative Manifesto‘ Ben Sasso on PetaPixel strays a little into that territory. For me at least the pictures accompanying the piece don’t help in that respect (too sentimental for my taste, though many will react postively), and neither does the fact that he’s American. But the ideas are certainly good advice, and mostly things that I’ve urged on students and those who bother to read my advice over the years.

It’s best you go and read his article. But in precis (and a little of my own spin) his 10 points are:

1. Emotion beats aesthetics
2. Go the other way to the crowd
3. Use you own emotions
4. Be yourself in your work
5. Experiment, try new ideas
6. Don’t get hung up on technical perfection
7. Take time to think when you need to
8. Photograph what you enjoy
9. Know your craft and study your medium
10. Get weird!

I don’t think there is anything new in any of these, and I’ve heard or read them all from many great photographers over the years, from Cartier-Bresson on. But there is also plenty of bad advice out there, confusing means with ends and more. And being a more creative photographer isn’t necessarily going to make you more commercially succesful – which is often rather more about business and people skills than your photography.

Although I came across it through PetaPixel, it’s better to read this on Sasso’s own site, as I couldn’t get some of the links to work from PP, and that ‘weird’ gif is worth seeing.

You can also read the comments, which though I don’t think they add anything in terms of content do show how this piece has been enthusiastically received by other photographers. Most of us at times feel we are in a rut.

There’s also another article on the same subject published on the same day on PP, ‘On Creativity: Seek Failure‘ by UK photographer Jacob James. Again  you can also read it on his own web site.

Irwin Klein published

Six years ago I wrote a short note on this site, The Color Photographs of Irwin Klein, about the work of a photographer whose life ended tragically in March 1974. You can now read the story I didn’t know then of his death on a web site Irwin Klein: Photographer (1933-1974) created by his nephew Nikolai Klein in 2012.

Rather more of his photographs appear to have survived, and there is a quite extensive archive on the web site, including the colour images of Brooklyn. There are over 300 of his Brooklyn slides on the site, although quite a few scenes are represented by two or more very similar views.

I was emailed about this site by Nikolai’s brother Ben Klein, who also commented on my 2010 post and has compiled and edited a book on the photographer’s major project, The Settlers. ‘ He tells me that the slides were discovered in Klein’s widow’s house less than ten years ago.

Irwin Klein and the New Settlers, Photographs of Counterculture in New Mexico, ISBN 978-0-8032-8510-1 is edited by Benjamin Klein with essays by David Farber, Tom Fels, Tim Hodgdon, Benjamin Klein, and Lois Rudnick, a foreword by Daniel Kosharek and an introduction by Michael William Doyle is published by the University of Nebraska Press.

You can download a PDF from the university site which includes the contents pages, preface, introduction and opening essay From Innocence to Experience: Irwin B. Klein and the New Settlers of Northern New Mexico, by Benjamin Klein and Tim Hodgdon.

There is also a Facebook Page and a number of article on the web about Irwin Klein, including one in the Santa Fe New Mexican. He is represented by the D Gallery, where you can see his most famous image, Minnesota Fire, 1962 and other pictures from the 2009 show Last Look: The Photographs of Irwin Klein (1933 -1974).

I think most photographers will recognise that striking ‘Minnesota Fire‘ image though they may well – like me – have forgotten who took it.

Killed by Roses


Eikoh Hosoe and one of his pictures from Ordeal by Roses

Today’s L’Œil de la Photographie with its article Eikoh Hosoe, Barakei A portrait of Yukio Mishima brought back memories to be of a few days spent in company with him and other photographers back in 2005 in Bielsko-Biala, at their first FotoArtFestival.


Eikoh Hosoe in Bielsko-Biala

It was a great privilege for me to be invited to show some of my urban landscape work from London’s Industrial Heritage along with such distinguished company as Eikoh Hosoe, Ami Vitale, Boris Mikhajlov and Malick Sidibe, as well as many rising stars and a few of those no longer with us, Mario Giacomelli, Inge Morath and Robert Diament, as one of 25 photographers representing 25 countries around the world.


Eikoe Hosoe uses his pink phone camera

I’d travelled light to Poland, and had only taken a small digital pocket camera, a Canon Ixus. It was an excellent camera for the time, but in some of the dimly lit interiors I did find myself wishing I had brought a Nikon. But it was a small and pocketable camera, and I think did remarkably well all things considered. You can see more pictures I took with it on the trip in my FotoArtFestival Diary, along with some of one of my three talks there. As well as presenting my own work, I also gave presentations on the work of two great British photographers, Tony Ray Jones and Raymond Moore, and on the work of some of my London Friends, Paul Baldesare, Jim Barron, Derek Ridgers, Mike Seaborne and Dave Trainer.


Eikoh Hosoe photographs me photographing him

What was remarkable apart from the photography was the atmosphere and camaraderie among the group of photographers there, some of the exhibitors and a few of their friends. Any ice between us had been broken at the press conference, which was enlivened by vitriolic attack on me as a British colonialist by one vodka-fuelled photographer as I got up to speak, enabling me to reply with a robust statement of some of my own political views and working class background, a family history of being screwed by that very same ‘elite’, ending up with us embracing each other – and going to a bar with most of the other photographers. Though I stuck firmly to my own resolve not to drink vodka, the beer was good.


Eikoh Hosoe

Hosoe was certainly the most distinguished of the photographers present, and probably too the oldest, and had a typically Japanese quiet reserve which was rather at odds with his photographic work. Though as some of these pictures show, by the end of the event he was very much one of us.


Eikoh Hosoe shows a picture on his pink phone

The ‘Eye of Photography’ feature accompanies a show of the work Bara-kei, (1961–1962) more often known in English as ‘Ordeal by Roses’, homoerotic images of melodramatic poses by the writer Yukio Mishima, one of Japan’s leading postwar writers, also a poet, playwright and actor as well as a nationalist who founded his own small right-wing student militia, the Tatenokai, taken in Mishima’s own house in TOkoyo. His work set out to break taboos and upset cultural traditions, with an emphasis on sexuality, death and political change, a delusion that led in 1970 to him with just four of his militia to perform a coup attempt to restore the power and divinity of the emperor, thought to have been a dramatic staging for his own ritual suicide with which it ended.


Eikoh Hosoe talks about one of his pictures

The Show ‘Barakei – Killed by Roses’ is at the Galerie Eric Mouchet in the Rue Jacob in Paris from today until December 23, 2016.


and another

You can see and hear him talking about some of his work in a video made for the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

There is a good selection of his work on Artsy – or you can search on Google Images. Although his work is on many gallery sites he does not seem to have his own web site. He has been the director of the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts since its foundation i 1995. There is a nice piece on him, Eikoh Hosoe – Kamaitachi – From Memory to Dream by Rob Cook in The Gallery of Photographic History

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