Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

30 Under 30 Women

I almost gave up with Photo Boite‘s 30 Under 30 Women Photographers, as although the initial page loaded rapidly, when I clicked on the link for 2016 I got just a large blank white page with just the header menu, now showing a larger 2016 and, scrolling down several blank white pages, the page footer.

I waited and waited and after a minute or two, went to check my e-mail. But fortunately I’d left the page open in Firefox and five minutes later came back to find the site had loaded. I don’t know why the page should take so long to load, though around 3Mb of images doesn’t help, but I’m working on a connection where sites download at 35Mbps and pages with a similar amount of images download faster than I can scroll down them. Perhaps it loads all 30 pages at once, though the time seemed excessive even for that, or perhaps it was just very busy when I tried.

I tried the site in another browser, Internet Explorer, rather than the Firefox I normally use, and it did load rather faster, though still slow enough for many to have gone elsewhere. But don’t be put off; once the site has loaded it works well, and shows a good number of images by each of the 30 women.

As well as the pictures, there are also short biographies of the photographers, many of whom have already enjoyed considerable success, and rightly so from the quality of their work, though there are a few who I felt were perhaps a little over-exposed and where a tighter selection of images might have helped. Or perhaps their work appealed to me less.

Despite the press release which describes the work as:

“A more feminine vision: 30 UNDER 30 exhibits the work of women photographers from around the world offering their visions based on their experience, along with their tact and composure, innocence and sensuality, at times fierce and provocative.

A more innocent vision: Driven by expression, this new generation draws its inspiration
and conveys it through its works with purity, free of disillusionment, through portraiture, photojournalism, landscapes, art and architecture, fashion and even war photography in a milieu traditionally practiced by their counterparts.”

I can’t really see anything about the work that would make me think they were ‘women photographers’ rather than simply thinking of them as photographers; my experience has always been that many of the best photographers I’ve known have been women. When I taught photography, the great majority of my better students were women.

Of course women have been under-represented in the pantheon of photography, but the reasons for this are not photographic but wider social issues. When I put together a list of notable photographers for a photography web site, there were only 41 women among the roughly 200 photographers, but these did include some who made really significant contributions to the medium, including Julia Margaret Cameron, Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Mary Ellen Mark, Imogen Cunningham and more. Many women have over the years played an important role behind the camera as well as in front of it, something I feel the introduction to ‘30 under 30 Women‘ fails to acknowledge.

In Memoriam 2015

This year has seen the loss of a number of fine photographers, including figures who have really contributed to the development of our medium. Many of them are remembered in the Time Lightbox ‘In Memoriam‘ feature, including several who were particularly important to me. One was Charles Harbutt (1935-2015), whose 1974 book 974 book, Travelog made a great impression on me when I was starting in photography, and who I was later fortunate enough to meet and to attend one of his workshops. I’d already picked up much of the lessons that he taught by the time we met, but he really did change the lives of many, including one of my friends, the late Peter Goldfield; attending a Harbutt workshop in 1976 changed his life and he went on to set up his own photography workshop centre at Duckspool, where I met Harbutt in the 1990s. I wrote a longer post on him at the time of his death.

Another loss I felt personally was that of Lars Tunbjörk (1956-2015), a Swedish photograph inspired by the ‘New American Color’ of photographers including Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, who I think added a European irony and incisiveness to their work, and who I think is still comparatively unrecognised. After meeting him in Poland in 2005, I bought three of his books and continue to be amazed every time I take them from the shelves in my living room where I keep my favourite works.

Another photographer whose loss I felt greatly was an old friend of mine, Terry King (1938-2015), who I wrote about at some length in April. Although I’d only seen him infrequently in recent years, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s we often went together on photographic group trips and also worked together on what came to dominate his photography, alternative photographic processes, for which he became one of the leading evangelists and proponents, inspiring and teaching many others, as well as developing his own methods.

I had no personal connection with Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015) though I admired her work, as well as that of several others listed by Time. Hilla Becher (1931-2015) along with her partner Bernd were enormously influential teachers of photography, and while I admire the ‘typologies’ she and her husband produced I’m not always enamoured of the work of some of their students. Takuma Nakahira (1938-2015) too was a hugely influential figure as the founder and editor of ‘Provoke‘. If others on the ‘Time’ list are less well known to me, this partly reflects my lack of interest in certain areas of photography, though the list is also a reminder of the continuing dangers of photojournalism. The Committee to Protect Journalists lists 97 journalists and media workers killed in 2015, of whom roughly a third were photographers or videographers.

Yunghi Kim

I’m rather surprised – and slightly ashamed – to find that I’ve never mentioned Yunghi Kim in my posts on this site. I’ve been aware of her work as a photographer for a long time, with some powerful images from Rwanda and Kosovo and in particular her remarkable 1996 project on ‘Comfort Women‘, Korean women then grandmothers in their 70s who had been tricked by the Japanese Army and forced to become sex slaves serving Japanese soldiers. Perhaps my only excuse is that these stories – which you can see on her web site – were made before I began seriously writing about photography for a living, but not long enough before to have become a part of photographic history.

Of course Kim has continued to produce great photography, working through Contact Press Images, and winning various awards. Her pictures on her site as ‘Protest in America 2011 & 2012‘ include some of the strongest images of the Occupy movement, and in a very different mood is her highly original and inventive series ‘Coney Island Winter’, also in black and white. It’s great work to see her work and feel how exciting black and white can be, when with so many other photographers now black and white seems more simply just a fashionable ‘look’.

I’ve also come across Kim through being a member of the Facebook group she began and runs, The Photojournalist’s Cooperative, with its mission “to give freelance photographers a platform where they will exchange ideas and help each other maintain high standards as they navigate the dramatically changing business of photography in the areas of: image licensing, contracts and copyright protection.” She set up the group after realising the huge extent of unauthorised use of her images on the web, wanting to find out more about how to protect her work and to share what she found with other photographers. Last month she took that sharing to a further stage, giving $10,000 from the fees she has recovered from unauthorized usage to create ten $1,000 grants for members of her Facebook group, who have until next Tuesday (Dec 20, 2015) to make submissions.

Many photographers I know are also members of the group, and it was a post from one of them, Ami Vitale, on my newsfeed today which prompted this short note. It read simply: “Yunghi Kim is a huge inspiration!” and linked to a profile of her on AI-AP (American Illustration-American Photograph) which gives all the information about her that I’ve left out here. Ami, you are an inspiration too!

The Flaneur

Lensculture has a new set of images, The Flaneur, Hamburg Noir by Giacomo Brunelli, a photographer whose work on animals knocked me out when I first saw it some years ago across a table in 2007 in Birmingham. You can see that work, and other projects also on Lensculture.

I bought copies of both his books to date, The Animals (2008) and Eternal London (2014) and both are finely produced volumes. I usually like my photography clinical rather than emotional, but when it is done as powerfully as this I find it irresistible. His work has something of the graphic appeal of one of my favourite London-based photographers, Bill Brandt, but with a much smokier, more intimate quality. And like nicotine, it’s highly addictive.

I imagine there will before long be a book of his Hamburg pictures, and I’ll surely buy that. The Animals now sells second-hand for £300 upwards so it could also be a good investment. There may still be the odd copy of Eternal London ISBN-13: 9781907893520 available in bookshops or on-line for £25, and if you see a copy I’d advise you to snap it up now.

Derek Ridgers

It’s good to see one of my old friends – I first met Derek Ridgers almost 40 years ago – getting the exposure he deserves. I knew his work was good when I first saw it back then, and his work was included in a number of group shows we organised together – though none are listed in his Wikipedia entry.

Derek also designed posters for several of them, including a 1984 show at the Orleans House Gallery in 1984 by ‘Group Six‘, led by Terry King, which included the logo he designed for the group:

It was a rather better poster than those I cobbled together for some later of our group shows in which also took part,though the printer I took his artwork to complained bitterly about the large area of black which used too much ink.

Unfortunately we soon had to change the name after some fairly bitter moments that led to us leaving the photographic society we had been a rebellious part of and forming a totally separate group. Among our complaints was the society stealing an exhibition opportunity we had organised with a gallery on the basis of our group’s work to use for an exhibition by the whole society. Among theirs were the acerbic comments that Derek, myself and others made about club photography.

So we became Framework:

which wasn’t really a logo at all (and apologies for the poor reproduction in a scan from one of the posters which I printed on dot-matrix for a later exhibition – which also included Derek. Among the various shows was

city news urban blues…

in 1988 at the Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham, which you can read more about here in an unfinished web site I began to write about the group some years ago.

Derek’s contribution was:

THE BOX PEOPLE

Photographs of a few of the hundreds of people who are permanently living in cardboard bases now throughout London.

1987 was designated as the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless. All proceeds from the sales of these pictures are to be donated to Shelter.

The New York Times a few days ago published a gallery of 17 pictures from Derek Ridgers’s latest book ‘The Others‘ along with an article Getting Hot and Heavy in the 1980s. You can read an interview with David Owen of IDEA who published it, and a brief review here.

Another book by Ridgers, The Dark Carnival is also published this month and is described as “a darkly fascinating celebration stretching across five decades of London Nightlife’s exuberance and self-expression.”

DB Prize goes political

The shortlist for the 2016 Deutsche Börse photography prize is the subject of an article by Sean O’Hagan in The Guardian, Deutsche Börse photography prize shortlist: drones v the women of Tahrir, in which he writes it “is dominated by artists who engage with contemporary politics and social issues, from drone warfare to refugee activists in Africa.”

A small quibble in that, as he goes on to make clear in the next paragraph, Tobias Zielony actually “photographed the everyday life and struggles of African refugee activists in his native Germany for his exhibition The Citizen.” It’s work that seen on the web has only a limited appeal to me, but as well as the “Layout of 22 colour photographs, various sizes, on 11 large-scale pigmented inkjet prints, mounted on Aludibond, framed, 225 x 160 cm each” which you can view on screen the show also include an installation of newspapers, in 12 hanging displays, 130 x 205 cm each together with a 16 pages tabloid format which include the first-hand written accounts and interviews that O’Hagan mentioned. You get some idea of the look of these from the installation views of the show at the 2015 Venice Biennale also on the page.

Eric Kessels project ‘Unfinished Father‘ is more about an exhibition than about photography, and I’m not sure it will translate well to the Photographers’ Gallery. It certainly isn’t a book I would ever think of buying, and I think the photography in itself is of little interest, although the vintage images of the Fiats on the street towards the end of the short video have a certain charm, and incredibly empty streets.

Trevor Paglen‘s The Octopus is another installation which has little to offer me on the web, and from all I can see or read I doubt will engage me more in the gallery. But perhaps a closer investigation will bring out something of photographic interest.

I’ve mentioned Laura El-Tantawy‘s ‘In the Shadow of the Pyramids‘ several times on this blog, though unfortunately I missed the presentation she gave at one of our union meetings in London. But if you took my advice from In the Shadow of the Pyramids you will already have and have been impressed by her self-published book which is the subject of this short listing. And in response to a review of this work I added a little of my own thoughts in 1000 Words. The book as I predicted is sold out (and available on the web at around four times the original cost – but hang on and it will go up more), but the web site gives a great impression of the work and also includes page spreads and embeds a number of reviews.

I don’t much like these large competitions, which I think have a restrictive effect on photography, putting too much power over the future direction of the medium into the hands of a small and largely self-selected elite. It’s perhaps unhealthy too, that it’s banks which are behind a number of them – should we be relying so heavily on them for the future of the medium? And if these four photographers are all judged to be worthy of having their work exhibited at the Photographers’ Gallery I think there is something inherently unfair that just one of them should walk away with the £30,000 prize. Usually it’s the wrong one.

LIFE Force

I had forgotten about Life Force*, a ‘a free, monthly, on-line, photo-led magazine which celebrates the art-form of the photo-essay‘ which has been available since the January 2011. The back numbers are still available and over the years it has built up a interesting and varied collection of stories, though perhaps not all of them are truly ‘great photography and pushing the boundaries of the medium to explore conciousness and human perception, by harnessing the unique power that photography holds to capture a moment for analysis.‘ But there is plenty worth looking at, including work by a number of photographers I know as well as some I was surprised to find I didn’t.

The November 2015 issue has seventeen stories, some old, some recent. Rather than talk about them all, I’ll perhaps mention just three of more local interest.

Tonight several of my friends will be out photographing in Lewes where the Firework Societies will be celebrating, including burning a giant effigy of David Cameron with a pig on his lap and another of Seb Blatter. Patrick Ward‘s pictures of the Lewes Bonfire Societies which he was able to cover as an insider give a good impression of the activities, though perhaps they lack a little of the excitement I’ve seen in some other images from these events.

I was more than a little envious at seeing Unseen London by Peter Dazeley who has gained access to photograph the ‘hidden interiors of some of London’s most iconic buildings, from Tower Bridge to Battersea Power Station, Big Ben to the Old Bailey‘ and has done so with great care. Although I’ve actually been inside quite a few of the places in this set, either I’ve not had the opportunity to take pictures or have had to make do with hurried snaps, full of other visitors. The only man in Dazeley’s set is a founder at work in the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, an image which for various reasons I feel does not fit well with the rest of the set.

Finally you can see Brian Griffin‘s Black Kingdom, work I have written about before when I attended the opening of his show of in Paris. You can see more pictures from that opening on My London Diary. Good though the work by the others is, his is perhaps the only one of the three I’ve mentioned that I feel is any way ‘pushing the boundaries of the medium to explore conciousness and human perception‘, though there are other essays on the page that could also be considered to have done so.

*I’ve not added links to the individual issue or essays as these are not permalinks and will change presumably when the December 2015 issue is published. To find them after that date you will need to use the ‘Back Issues’ link at the top of the home page and then select the November 2015 issue.
Continue reading LIFE Force

Are photographs ever portraits?

John McDonnell MP, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer speaking at yesterday’s ‘Grants Not Debts’ protest

I take a lot of pictures of people, some of which I share here and rather more on My London Diary. I’ve also photographed many others, including members of my own family and friends I know well. Quite a few of those are framed and hanging on people’s walls, while those I’ve taken of public figures have featured in various magazines and newspapers. Some are better than others but most are pretty routine, like yesterday’s picture of Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, a man I know and have photographed on many occasions over the years. It’s not a great image, but you can find worse of him every day in the newspapers.

But I’ve never thought of myself as a portrait photographer. And always rather questioned the whole idea of a photographic portrait. I think there are valid examples – for instance Alfred Stieglitz‘s truly intimate work on Georgia O’Keefe springs to mind, but there I’m thinking not of a single image, but of a whole set of images,beautifully presented in the 1978 Metropolitan Museum of Art publication ‘Georgia O’Keefe – A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz’ which on the front dust-jacket flap states ‘His idea of a portrait was not just one photograph but a series of photographs that would be a portrait of the many aspects of a person.’ (The book is still available from book dealers at a ridiculously cheap price for such a well-produced and important work.)

There are many other pictures of people that I like, many of them good or even great photographs but few which really reach into the depths of a person in they way the best painted portraits do. Though its also very clear if you take a walk around inside – for example – the London National Portrait Gallery that there are many bad painted portraits as well as many poor photographic portraits both in the permanent collection and in their annual prize shows for photography and painting.

But even among photographers whose work I admire greatly, their ‘portraits’ are often the weakest work. Even with a master like Cartier-Bresson there are images which without the name of the famous sitter would probably never have been printed. (Some of his better portraits along with some images that certainly are not portraits and one or two that perhaps fail to display his master touch and were clichés even before he made them are linked in the Portraits selection on his Magnum page.) And newspapers and magazines are full of poor or indifferent if sometimes technically competent images of people.

What got me thinking about this was a video created by The Lab in conjunction with Canon Australia in which they set up six portrait photographers to photograph the same man, giving each a very different story about him. Looking at what you can see of their results on the video published in the story by Shutterbug, each produced a very proficient image based on the story they were given, particularly as they were given only ten minutes (though often photographers have to do with considerably less, while painters often have months rather than minutes.) But I don’t think any of them was really a portrait of the person, rather an illustration for the story they were told.

Continue reading Are photographs ever portraits?

Harrodsburg

A remarkable set of pictures by ‘Glasweegee’ Dougie Wallace of the wealthy on the streets around Harrods and other shops selling ridiculously priced bling have apparently caused quite a stir in Qatar (where many of those he photographed have their homes) according the the British Journal of Photography, in an article Qatar responds to Dougie Wallace’s photographs of Britain’s wealth tourism. The BJP also claim responsibility for having given him the idea, when they erroneously reported last December that he could be found working outside Harrods. It seemed to him to complement work he was doing in one of the poorest areas of Glasgow, close to where he grew up.

You can see more of his work from ‘Harrodsburg‘ at The Story Institute, which also has some text worth reading on his work and the motives behind it. The area in which he worked – not just around Harrods, but down to Sloane Square and around the Ritz, once the home of many over-wealthy British, is now largely in the hands of “the various tribes of the global super-rich buying up London homes like they are gold bars, as assets to appreciate rather than as homes in which to live.”

More interesting than the BJP story is the article it links to in The Doha News, published in August. It’s also worth reading the comments. (To save you worrying as I did, the hashtag #دوغي_والاس is simply #Doga_walas.)

Wallace’s images remind me of things that I’ve seen walking around some of those same streets, but have never photographed. Perhaps I should say, have never had the bottle to photograph. Though rather that I’ve never had a very good reason to want to photograph. They are streets too that I dislike, only going through them when I have to, usually on my way to some embassy or other to photograph a protest. But his work is impressive – even if it doesn’t go down too well in Qatar. At the moment we can photograph freely on the street – a liberty I value that we may well lose unless we defend it.

Ooredoo (formerly Qtel Group) which provides most of the internet in Qatar (and probably other internet providers there) was quickly forced by the authorities to block the web site with the images, probably because as well as causing the ultra-rich embarrassment they also show their hypocrisy, particularly in wealthy visitors to London abandoning the strict rules of dress they forcibly impose on others in Qatar.
Pictures from ‘Harrodsburg‘ have been on show in London at the Printspace on Kingsland Rd, but the show, part of the East London Photomonth, was due to close today – or tomorrow or Wednesday – all three dates are in the links.

You can also visit Dougie Wallace’s web site, and buy his books Shoreditch Wildlife and Stags, Hens & Bunnies. The Shoreditch book is I think much better than the presentation on the web, and I hope that Harrodsburg will become available in print before too long.

The Palaces of Memory

If you’ve not yet got a copy of Stuart Freedman‘s The Palaces of Memory, pictures from the Indian Coffee Houses, I suggest you do now. It’s one of the most charming publications I’ve seen for a while, and I was pleased I decided to support the Kickstarter campaign – one of the 157 backers who together pledged the £10,496 that made it possible.

You can see 44 images from the Indian Coffee House project at Panos Pictures, and there are also pictures on the BBC web site and elsewhere. I was fortunate to see the photographer talking about and showing this work around six months ago to a crowded meeting of Photo-forum in London, and it was also featured on Lensculture.

Google will now find you a long list of reviews, articles and interviews about the work, but I’ll pick out just a few: Roads and Kingdoms has a nice interview with Freedman talking to their Director of Photography Pauline Eiferman; Slate’s Photo Blog Behold has a well-illustrated feature, and of course Freedman has his own web site including a blog, Umbra sumus – ‘we are but shadows’…, where his occasional posts are always worth reading.

But perhaps the nicest article I’ve so far found is on The Delhi Walla; City Moment – People of the Book, Indian Coffee House by Mayank Austen Soofi who took Freedman’s book to the Indian Coffee House in Connaught Place to the obvious delight of the workers whose pictures and those of their customers appear in it.