Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Are You an Artist?

“You may be a photographer, but are you an artist?” is the question posed by Roger Ballen in a short video in which he gives seven thoughts about this.

They are of interest, even if you are not really concerned about being an artist, certainly thinking about some of them should make you a better photographer. They may also help you understand Ballen’s work better.

I’ve admired his work since I first saw it, but it has never been something that I wanted to emulate. And I think that those photographers who I’ve really admired most and who have inspired me in my own work are generally people who were more interested in what it meant to be a photographer rather than in being an artist.

Thanks to Peggy Sue Amison for sharing a link to this video on Facebook.

Depardon’s Glasgow

Despite suffering from a terrible amount of that horrible creeping zoom that really does mess up looking at still photographs – which get much of their power from the fact they are still, fixing a moment in a way that video or film doesn’t, Zisis Kardinos‘s Glasgow by Raymond Depardon is worth watching. The powerful atmosphere of his images still comes across, and the musical accompaniment generally goes well with the pictures, apart from one rather embarrassing moment with a “1.2.3” where it persuaded the editor into a very silly visual trick.

If nothing else, it got me looking for the pictures themselves, and you can see 82 of them on the Magnum site, starting here – then click on the first image, then ‘show image only‘. It’s just slightly disappointing that clicking on the ‘View information’ link below the pictures adds nothing, and makes the image smaller again, but good to be able to see them.

I’ve not seen the book, simply titled Glasgow, but you can read about it in ‘The Scotsman‘, and a more perceptive and personal view from someone who was a 13-year-old growing up in Glasgow when Depardon made his two visits to photograph the city.

It might have been a little less dangerous than his work the same year covering the civil war in Beirut, but in the ‘Dailyrecord‘ you can read some of the photographer’s own thoughts – and how despite being “shocked by the destitution” he loved every minute of his time there.

It says a great deal about about the political direction of the British press that the Sunday Times which had commissioned the prize-winning photographer to give his personal view of the city decided when they saw it not to publish it. It wasn’t, as most writing about it now seem to believe that it was shocking, but that it was an unpalatable truth. Then as now there are many stories that don’t get published, stories that the papers and particularly the BBC, never mention or quickly buries to keep on the right side of proprietors and their political allies. Depardon’s work showed the Thatcher era only too clearly.

The bi-lingual book Glasgow (ISBN-10: 202130362) came out at the end of February from Editions du Seuil and has text by William Boyd, who studied in Glasgow in the 1970s. Some of the pictures were shown at the Grand Palais in Paris from Nov 2013 until February 2014 and are perhaps the best reason to go and see Strange and Familiar which is at the Barbican in London until 19 June 2016.

Strand at the V&A

In the Guardian you can read I posed for Paul Strand, in which 73 year old Angela Secchi recalls the day when she was 9 and the photographer came into her native town of Luzzara in Italy.

Her portrait was one of many that he made there for his book with writer Cesare Zavattini, Un Paese: Portrait of an Italian Village. It was Zavattini’s home town, but the two worked separately, and Strand’s guide to the town was one of the eight sons of one of the most famous family in photography, The Lusetti Family, Luzzara, taken in 1953.

It has long been one of my favourite photographs, and Strand certainly one of my favourite photographers, though that doesn’t stop me being criticising some of his pictures. I’m not too enamoured of the portrait of Secchi, which, like quite a few of his others seems a little too contrived, wearing the oversize hat of her farmer father, put on her head by the photographer.

Of course Strand was a very fine portraitist, and doubtless there will be many of his better examples in the show, Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century which is at the V&A in London from 19 March to 3 July.

This is a rare example of a great photographic touring show – organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE and made possible by the Terra Foundation for American Art – coming to the UK, and is apparently the first major retrospective of his work in the UK since his death in 1976. I do remember the previous retrospective – and unlike the current V&A show – I was invited to the opening in Carlton House Terrace shortly before he died.

Strand was of course a communist, and worked with a number of others who shared his views; as Fraser MacDonald writes in his detailed essay Paul Strand and the Atlanticist Cold War on Strand’s fine book on the Hebrides, Tir a’Mhurain (1962). You can also read my own far less scholarly account of the New York Photo League originally published in 2001.

WPP 2016

You can read about the winners of the 2016 World Press Photo Contest on the Lens Blog at the New York Times – and doubtless elsewhere by the time I finish writing this. I don’ like the title of their article by James Estrin, The World’s Best News Photos, as good though these images may be, they are only one panel’s selection from the 82,951 submitted of the many millions taken in 2015. The NYT did do rather well in the awards – perhaps because there are now rather fewer newspapers with a “serious commitment to quality photojournalism.”

The winning entry, a picture taken by moonlight (24mm, 1/5s, f1.4 ISO 6400) of a baby being passed under the barbed wire border fence as Syrian refugees cross from Serbia into Hungary taken on 28 August 2015 by Australian freelance Warren Richardson certainly catches something of the reality of the refugee crisis, but it also epitomises the problems facing photographers today.

The picture was previously unpublished. Richardson spent several months working and living with the refugees without any paid assignments, enduring himself something of the hardships they faced – including being beaten by police. But although this picture – certainly one of the’ World’s Best News Photos’ was submitted to two agencies, no newspaper or magazine around the world thought it worth publishing until now. If he hadn’t sent it to WPP we would probably never have seen it.

You can read his story Refugee Crisis Hungary on his web site, and see around 40 pictures from it,though the winning WPP entry is not included.

I’ve only had time for a quick glance through the other WPP winners so far – and will certainly go back to look at greater length. It’s good to see the WPP run under stricter rules and I hope there will be none of the controversies we have seen in recent years.

FullBleed

Thanks to L’Oeil de la Photographie for a story FullBleed, the channel exploring photographic stories which is a new YouTube channel showcasing films about photographers and their projects.

The one of the four short films featured in the story that caught my attention was of Glaswegian photographer Dougie Wallace photographed at work on his ‘Harrodsburg’ project (which I wrote about last October) and talking about it. It’s better not to rely on the subtitles which I think had a little problem with his accent on things like ‘grey imports’, ‘bit of flash’ and ‘go to import it’. Photographers just don’t ‘teleport’ even from outside Harrods.

Also on the page are videos of Paddy Summerfield and his project ‘Mother & Father‘ on dementia and Bob Mazzer talking about the pictures he would take into a bunker at the end of the world, the latest of a series called ‘Apocalypse Pictures‘ which earlier featured the choices of Summerfield and James Fry, as well as the first in a series ‘The Show’ which reports on a variety of photographic exhibitions.

The full set of FullBleed videos is on their You Tube channel, and they also have a Facebook page, the top item of which today is about the forthcoming Photo London but which also has some interesting links to items of photographic interest. Photo London for me is on the wrong side of a line about making money from photography rather than making money for photographers.

My own union branch began a series of videos, ‘Working Lives‘ a couple of years ago with an interview with Anne-Marie Sanderson, chief photographer at North London and Herts News, followed up last year with one on Freelance photographer John Sturrock who worked on social and political issues for the renowned Report agency in the mid-1970s and now photographs major regeneration and construction projects. I was filmed for the series last year, but it seems unlikely for various reasons that this video will ever be completed.

Mario Cravo Neto

One of the minor disadvantages of living just outside London is the time and expense of getting to events taking place there. I have to make an effort to go to events such as tonight’s opening at Autograph of photographs by the late Brazilian photographer Mario Cravo Neto (1947-2009), and I just don’t have the time – and unless I’m up in London for other reasons its often hard to persuade myself to do so for openings. But I will certainly find time when I’m in London before the show ends on 2nd April 2016 to pay a visit to Rivington Place in Shoreditch, London.

One of the things I most enjoyed doing and which I thought was most important when I was employed to write about photography on the web was a series of articles of photography in various countries around the world, in part to get away from what appeared to be the assumption of many that the only important things happening in photography – at least since the start of the 20th century – were made in the USA. (Not that I neglected the USA, and I also wrote extensively about American photographers, particularly those involved in the New York Photo League, some of whom I felt were being forgotten.)

And although I wrote about photography in various countries around the world, in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia, the backbone of my series was the countries of Central and Southern America, which I tackled in alphabetical order. Brazil thus came fairly early in the series, which followed a fairly standard pattern, beginning with and introduction to the country and what I could glean about the early history of photography there (French-born inventor Hercules Florence living in the Sao Paulo region was apparently using a camera before that Mr Talbot at Lacock) and continuing on into the 20th century and ending with a short text about post-war and contemporary photographers. I wrote about around a dozen from Brazil, including this paragraph:

Mário Cravo Neto comes from Bahia, and his work incorporates references to the voodoo religion of that region, using indigenous people as actors holding objects often of ritual significance. He trained a sculptor like his father before turning to photography and his work shows a strong, tactile appreciation of texture.

It’s rather brief but to the point, though I might also have commented on the richness of both his black and white and colour work, but I did also make links to any web sites where his work could be seen, though in 2000 these were few. Things are rather easier now. There is a set on Lensculture for the Autograph show, and an extensive web site on the Project ‘Black Gods in Exile’ with work by him and Pierre Verger, another photographer who featured in my article.

Vivian Maier – Digging Deeper

I was about to post this as a comment to my post last week, Vivian Maier Still in Hiding, but then I thought people often miss the comments, so instead this short post.

On yesterday’s Lens Blog I read a summary the first part of Digging Deeper Into Vivian Maier’s Past with the second instalment promised for today and probably there by now. Its a summary of a longer feature on the Vivian Maier Developed blog, where you can also read Part 2 – A Life in Pictures.

The researcher, Ann Marks “who has no background in photography and started researching Maier only after seeing a documentary about her life — has learned a great deal about Maier’s family history“, some of which had also been uncovered by the sources in my previous piece.

It amplifies what was already known about her background, and the confirms the speculations about the closeness of her link with a photographer: “From early childhood, Maier spent a significant amount of time with a woman named Jeanne Bertrand, who worked as a professional photographer, as well as other positive female role models” and throws a great deal of light on what was a rather disturbed life. And I await today’s second part with interest.

What it won’t do is tell us any more about her as a photographer, and for that we will have to await detailed studies of the whole of her work – which appears to have been kept together by her tenaciously while she was able to do so – rather than the selected examples that we have so far seen. The second part does give some insight into how her photography developed, although unfortunately at least some of the illustrations there appear to be reproduced at the incorrect aspect ratio.

So far I remain unconvinced that she was anything more than a very capable and talented photographer able to imitate the styles of others. My question if there was a real photographic ‘Vivian Maier’ who had something distinctive to say remains unanswered.

Mendelsohn’s Balsall Heath

An article in The Guardian brought to my attention the work of American photographer Janet Mendelsohn, a Harvard graduate who in 1967 came to study with Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart at the ground-breaking Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Forgotten for years, her work which she made use of photography as “a tool for cultural analysis” in a multi-racial area undergoing a radical transformation through immigration and dire poverty, was rediscovered when Kieran Connell, who was curating a show for the 50th anniversary of the centre, became obsessed by a photograph of hers on the cover of its 1969 annual report.

It took considerable detective work by Connell to find out more about the photographer, but when he finally managed to contact her sent back the request “Please take these photographs off my hands” and sent him a large box with several hundred prints and 3,000 negatives.

Some of these were from a project in the red-light area of Varna Road in Balsall Heath, and it is this series which is the basis of the newspaper article, as well as a forthcoming show at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham (PDF press release here) and a free symposium at the end of January at Birmingham University with speakers including Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas, artist Mishka Henner, UCL History Professor Catherine Hall and curator and photographic historian Pete James.

One classmate of Mendelsohn’s at Harvard was film-maker Dick Rogers, (1944-2002) who also went to study in Birmingham with Hall and Hoggart for two years, after which he returned to Harvard to study on a Visual Education programme where he met his future wife Susan Meiselas.

Mendelsohn worked with Rogers on his first film, Quarry (1970). His best-known work, Pictures from a Revolution (1991) retraces Meiselas’s work on her photo essay ‘Nicaragua: June 1978-July 1979‘. In an earlier film, 226-1690 (1994) he used recordings left on his phone answering machine from her when there including one with a gunshot in the background.

Some of Mendelsohn’s work was shown last July in ‘The Ghost Streets of Balsall Heath‘ at The Old Print Works, Moseley Road, Balsall Heath as a part of the Flat Pack Festival.

As Drik as Possible

I’ve written on a number of occasions here and elsewhere about Shaidul Alam and Drik, most recently on the agency’s 25th anniversary. The idea of people in the majority world telling their own stories is one which has always seemed important to me, and I have a healthy distrust of some of the efforts of celebrity western journalists and photographers who sometimes work with little real idea of the society and background to the events they are covering. It’s great to read a truly inspirational success story about Bangladesh, and how they have overcome so many problems. Optimism, a strong belief in what they are doing, the willingness to take serious risks and continuing hard work have been rewarded.

It goes a little deeper than that. Even when I look at how life in my own country and city gets represented though the media I’m often aware of a concentration on the froth and the failure to really understand or show the realities of life for the majority of our citizens. Of course there are some notable exceptions, but we really need a grass-roots photography movement too, as well as publishing on-line and in print that supports it.

The story of Drik, told in Alam’s blog post As Drik as Possible, is an introduction to the 2016 Drik Calendar, and tells a little of the storyand there is a little more about it on Flickr. You can also see a larger album of over 600 of Alam’s pictures of Bangladesh.

Vivian Maier still in hiding?

I’m not a true believer when it comes to Vivian Maier. Not that she was a bad photographer, far from it, but I’ve failed to share the kind of fawning hype that seems to have affected so many. Though I can enjoy looking at her work, to me its rather like the ‘Easy Listening’ section that they used to have in record stores. Obviously she had a great interest in photography and a good eye, and a great appreciation of the tradition, but to say, as curator Anne Morin does in her Lensculture interview with Jim Casper “She has a key place in the history of the medium—right next to Robert Frank and all the other great practitioners” seems just ridiculous nonsense.

As Morin makes clear, Maier was very aware of the history of the medium, and looking through the selection of 120 images on Lensculture it’s impossible not to realise some of the sources that inform her work. As you look at the images, its obvious that this one would not have been made had she not been aware of the work of Lisette Model, others completely predicated on her knowledge of Lee Friedlander or Robert Frank … though perhaps she never quite came to terms with Diane Arbus.

Maier didn’t make history, she depended on it, at least in the images we have seen, and Morin is misguided to think that her exhibition “helps place her work in the history of the field.” Perhaps the main point it and her story makes is that she was outside that history making, a mere – if sometimes enjoyable – footnote.

The fascination is very much in the back story, and it is one that has been carefully cultivated in article and film, with more yet to come to light. Morin mentions the link with the young French woman photographer Jeanne Bertrand with whom Vivian’s mother and the young Vivian were lodging in the Bronx at the 1930 census. Though Vivian was then only four, it seems likely that Bertrand was a friend of the family and they may have kept in touch in later years.

Claus Cyrny in his Artificial blog links to writer Jim Leonhirth who has posted the information he has gathered together about Maier’s family from various sources which often contradicts earlier statements and includes the information above about Bertrand, as well as reproducing a page from the Boston Globe in 1902 with a long article about her becoming well known as a photographer in the region at the age of 21.

Bertrand came from the same commune in rural France as Vivian Maier’s mother, where Vivian and her mother went to live from 1935-8 before returning to the USA, where the 1940 census shows them both living with Vivian’s brother and father (both called Charles) in 1940. Other family members, including an aunt and great-uncle also lived in New York, and it is thought that Vivian’s mother had reverted to her maiden name and died in New York in 1975.

Morin says that so far “somewhere between 120,000-150,000” Maier negatives have been found, including “6,000 rolls of film that Maier didn’t even develop” as well as voice recordings on cassette of her thoughts and ideas. She was only able to make her selection for her exhibition from a selection already made by John Maloof. Perhaps in the larger body of work we have yet to see there will somewhere be the real Vivian Maier?