Category: Photographers

Frank & Stones

Thanks once again to Peggy Sue Amison of Picture Berlin for reposting a link to a short film edited from Robert Frank‘s Super 8 footage shot of the Rolling Stones in Los Angeles and New York, set to the soundtrack of their ‘Rock Off‘ from ‘Exile on Main St‘, a track many believe to mark the zenith of their output, a short time when they were clearly ‘The greatest rock & roll band in the world?’

Frank was hired by the Stones to make a documentary film about their 1972 American Tour and did so in cinéma vérité mode, with those taking part in the backstage antics being invited to pick up cameras and add to the record. They did so too well, providing a revealing view that led to the Stones getting a court order to prevent the release of the film; although in recognition of the rights of Frank as an artist it can be publicly shown if Frank himself if present.

You can usually find several parts – and occasionally the full film until it gets taken down fairly rapidly – on YouTube, though some of the links will be to the Stones track of the same name, their final single for Decca Records, deliberately made to be rejected (though Decca issued it by mistake in Germany in 1983, quickly withdrawing it after they realised what they had done.)

I can’t sign up to Charlie Finch’s opinion in Sockcumber Blues on Artnet when he says that rather than ‘The Americans’, “Frank’s true masterpiece is his still unreleased chronicle of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 American tour”, but it is a film that should be seen.  And ‘The Americans‘ is certainly a book every photographer should own and study, still ‘The Book That Changed Photography‘. But I’m sure I’m preaching to the converted.

While trying to find out more about the ‘Rocks Off’ video I came across a fascinating article by Bob Egan on Pop Spots NYC researching the location of photographs of Bob Dylan taken by New York musician/photographer John Cohen, who was a neighbour of Robert Frank who lived at 34 Third Avenue – and around three quarters of the way down the very long post he includes a photo of the relevant page of the NY reverse street directory showing both of them. There are also links to ‘Rocks Off’ and also mentions another of Frank’s films, Pull My Daisy, as well as more that may be of interest to fans (like me) of Jack Kerouac, who of course wrote the fine introduction to the US publication of ‘The Americans‘.

Elsewhere in various forums on the web you can glean more information about the film locations in ‘Rock Off’ video. The guy dancing on the street as he dodges traffic to wipe car windows is apparently at the corner of Houston and Bowery in New York, and the rest of the New York street scenes are in that area (including Lafayette), while Mick Jagger is shown outside the Galway Theatre at 514 South Main Street in  Los Angeles, an ‘adult’ theatre that has apparently appeared in a number of films.

Maggie Steber

In another interesting interview on Vantage, Why We Make Photographs, originally published on the blog of Blink, Kyla Woods talks to photographer and picture editor Maggie Steber about her own work, what she looks for in the photography of others and about styles and changes in documentary photography.

It’s an interesting and at times thought-provoking article (though if I stop much to write about it I will miss my train), illustrated by images of Steber’s work, many of which are also in the “greatest hits” section of her web site.

I think it is rather more satisfying to look at her images in the the other sections of the site, particularly Portraits, Haiti, Madje Has Dementia, Native Americans and Dark Side, where many of these images are shown in their contexts. It perhaps reflects a difference in our attitudes, but I rather dislike the idea of “greatest hits”.

Its also interesting to read about the film she made, Rite of Passage, about the final years of life of her mother Madje Steber. Maggie, born in Electra,Texas in 1949 was an only child, bought up by her mother living as a single parent, having divorced when Maggie was only six months old.  In her teenage years, there relationship was often strained and Maggie left home “to seek her fortune” in New York at the age of 21. But the two were the only family each had, and in the Time Lightbox article she says “She would never let me photograph her before. When her defenses were down—and I’m sure some people will say that’s not right—I started photographing her.”  Originally begun as a purely personal project, the photographs have become a moving record of their relationship and the human condition.

To Ask or Not to Ask…

That was the question posed to 18 photographers by Feature Shoot, a web site I don’t remember coming across before that was started in 2008 by Brooklyn-based picture editor and curator Alison Zavos and aims to showcase “the work of international emerging and established photographers who are transforming the medium through compelling, cutting-edge projects.”

The actual question was “Do You Always Get Permission From People That You Photograph?” and you can read the responses from all 18, together with links to their work on the web so you can see the kind of work they produce.  As several of them make clear this is of course a vital context for the question.

Do I ask? Sometimes. Mostly I don’t because there is no need to, as there is an implied permission in the situation. People in general take part in protests to gain publicity for a cause and are pleased that you take an interest and want to photograph them. Or they are at other events where being photographed is a part of taking part.

Of course there are exceptions. Occasionally people at protests will tell me they don’t want to be photographed or will hide behind a placard when I raise a camera in their direction. If they do so, usually I simply don’t take a picture, as most often their face would have been a vital part of the image.  Though in most cases they will actually appear in other photographs I’ve taken of the event.  If anyone actually objects to my photographing them, I have to take their objection seriously, though it won’t necessarily stop me taking a picture or deleting an image I have already taken. I ask myself a question – is there a genuine public interest in taking this photograph? And try to answer it as honestly as I can.

With protests, people who don’t want their faces shown have a simple option – to wear a mask of some sort. Police may occasionally instruct people to remove masks (although they now appear to have conceded that people may do so – and the police are also often masked) but photographers never do. Masks add a certain mystery and that’s always a good thing in a photograph.

Even at protests I’ll often ask if I can photograph someone, often just by gesture, but only when I want to make something that is more a portrait of them rather than an image showing the action. Its more a matter of getting their attention rather than their permission, and is usually the most I do to direct the people I’m photographing,though just occasionally I will ask someone to look at the camera – particularly these days when so many spend almost all their time looking at their phones.

Outside of those events and occasions where there is at least some implied consent, I think my approach is simply pragmatic, and again based on some questions:

  • Do the people I am photographing have a reasonable expectation of privacy – or would my picture be an unreasonable intrusion?
  • Would my taking a picture without asking upset or disturb them?
  • Is there a good artistic reason for taking an image without consent? Or for asking if I may take a photograph?

But if you are not sure, take the picture. As one one my friends commented on line when Tony Olmos posted a link to the Feature Shoot article this morning on Facebook, “I’d always rather give an apology than lose a picture.” Spot on David Hoffman.

It also depends on usage –  whether the photograph is for commercial, editorial or artistic purpose. When some Magnum street photographers photographed for commercial use I understand they were accompanied by a team of supporters with pads of model release forms, while for editorial or artistic work these are seldom if ever needed.  I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of model releases I have bothered to obtain over the years. Two hands at most.

One of the most difficult places from this aspect that I’ve worked in was Climate Camp. I’d more or less avoided it in earlier years simply because of their ‘Photography Policy‘ (and in 2007 had been prevented by police from getting there), but in 2009 was persuaded by the late Mike Russell,  perhaps better known as ‘Mini Mouse’, who organised the media coverage of Climate Camp, to go and photograph officially – and I was issued with a sash denoting me as an official photographer. Despite this there were still people who objected to being photographed through some misguided idea about their human rights. It was an attitude that had a negative influence on my own work over many years from the late 70s on.

Get over it, if you are in public, you are in public.
Continue reading To Ask or Not to Ask…

Disorder Prize

I’m not sure what I think about the various prize competitions we now have in photography. Often they seem to be rather unfair, and I was certainly heartened to hear the winner of one literary prize being interviewed on Radio 4 recently who had decided to share the large cash award equally with the other short-listed writers, whose work he said was equally deserving.

I find I often don’t agree with the judges in photographic competitions, and things are seldom so clear that I don’t feel a different and equally qualified panel would have come to a different verdict.

One of the biggest prizes – at least financially is the Prix Pictet, and on PDN you can read Shortlist for $105K Prix Pictet Announced, and the 12 photographers on the list for the 6th series of the prize on the subject of ‘Disorder‘ include some very well known names as well as a couple I’ve not come across before:

Ilit Azoulay (Israel); Valérie Belin (France); Matthew Brandt (USA); Maxim Dondyuk (Ukraine); Alixandra Fazzina (UK); Ori Gersht (Israel); John Gossage (USA); Pieter Hugo (South Africa); Gideon Mendel (South Africa); Sophie Ristelhueber (France); Brent Stirton (South Africa); Yang Yongliang (China).

It’s perhaps a surprising that the photographers come form only seven countries, with three South Africans and two each from France, Israel and the USA.

In the PDN article there is an image by each of them and in all but one case a link to their work on the web. The Prix Pictet link currently only has a couple of pictures by each of them on its ‘Portfolios’ page.

The series ‘Eleven Blowups’, images of bomb craters by Sophie Ristelhueber was a part of the work that won her the 2010 Deutsche Borse Photography prize at the London Photographers’ Gallery. As the article from the Daily Telegraph explains, these were not pictures of real craters, but computer simulations of bomb craters based on images by other photographers, and using “details of her own pictures of rocks and stones that she had shot in Syria, Turkmenistan, Palestine and the West Bank.” Not my kind of photography.

There are others whose work I don’t have a great deal of sympathy with as well, but also some truly moving and impressive work. I was fortunate to see Gideon Mendel talking and showing work at a meeting in London a few months ago from his ‘Drowning World‘ which includes a series of portraits of flood victims, including one taken around a mile from where I live as well as others around the world.

I’ll leave you to discover the other great work for yourselves from the links in the PDN article. There are four or five among the dozen who I think deserve the first prize!

As well as the monetary prize, there is also a commission awarded “in which a nominated photographer is invited to undertake a field trip to a region where Pictet is supporting a sustainability project.”  The short-listed work will be shown in Paris at the Musée d’Art Moderne da la Ville de Paris and the winners announced in  November 2015.

August Sander (1876-1964)

I find it hard to believe that I have never published at any length about August Sander, but all I can find are  few brief notes such as one that was a part of the ‘Directory of Notable Photographers’ I was once responsible for, and a number of brief references to him in articles about other photographers.

I know that I have written in greater detail about his life and his work in general, as well as in more detail on a few of his images, and he was certainly one of the photographers whose pictures I talked about when I was teaching. If I do find what I’ve written on him, I’ll publish it in a later post.

I started hunting for my own piece after reading Rena Silverman‘s
Finding the Right Types in August Sander’s Germany in today’s Lens Blog, an article prompted by the recent acquisition by the New York Museum of Modern Art of 619 prints from his project People of the Twentieth Century which he started around 1909 and had to abandon with the rise of the Nazi party, who confiscated and burnt his preliminary publication with 60 images, Antlitz der Zeit, in 1929. A few copies survived and are now fairly expensive.

In looting that followed the end the war, some of his work was destroyed in a fire, but Sander himself survived until 1964. He didn’t entirely give up photographing people in the 1930s, but certainly concentrated more on landscape. I haven’t looked through all of the huge Sander collection at the Getty Museum – apparently 1186 images, and almost all viewable on line – but there are some fine portraits from the 1930s, including some that the Nazis would not have approved of. But most seem to be studio portraits rather than the images of people he travelled his region around Cologne to locate for his typology.

A large volume of Sander’s Menschen des 20. Jahr hunderts was published in Germany in 1980, and I have a copy of the French version published the following year, with 431 portraits from 1892-1952. In the USA it was called ‘Citizens of the 20th Century‘. It’s a very heavy book, really too heavy for its binding, and a larger publication with over 600 plates in 2002 split the work into 7 volumes.

In the article Bodo von Dewitz is quoted as saying “He was the first who worked with what we now call ‘concept’ in photography,” and I think I have several problems with that. Firstly because many earlier photographers from Fox Talbot on could be argued to have worked with ‘concept’, but mainly because what distinguishes Sander’s work is not the concept or even the scale of his work (perhaps rather small compared to say Atget) but its quality.

Although conceived as a part of a great scheme, it is the very individual quality of Sander’s response to his subjects that still holds us, whereas with most contemporary ‘concept’ works the concept overwhelms the motif, producing sets of images of stunning mediocrity. It’s largely their predictability and recognisability that makes them, along with their normal impressive scale into such ideal commercial fine art for the corporate atrium.

There are smaller and more readily appreciated sets of work by Sander elsewhere on the web, including a small and varied set at MoMA, a rather better selection of 32 from ‘People of the Twentieth Century’ at Amber Online, and 24 images at the Edwynn Houk Gallery. There are various other sites devoted to Sander, including some I found it hard to see more than one or two images on.

Charles Harbutt (1935-2015)

Charles Harbutt (who I always thought of as Charlie), died on June 29th 2015, aged 79. Although he was twice president of Magnum (leaving it in 1981 to form Archive Pictures along with others including Abigail Heyman, Mary Ellen Mark and Joan Liftin), he is perhaps not that well known as a photographer, but will be remembered warmly by all those of us who attended one of his many workshops.

It was one of his workshops back in 1976 at Paul Hill‘s Photographers’ Place in Bradbourne, Derbyshire that led a few years later in 1985 to a friend of mine, Peter Goldfield,  leaving his business as a pharmacist and purveyor of high quality photographic products – particularly fibre-based Agfa papers – under the name of Goldfinger in Muswell Hill to set up his own photographic workshop at Duckspool in Somerset, and it was there in 1996 that I spent some days at a workshop with Harbutt. (Goldfinger of course morphed into Silverprint under the guidance of Peter’s partner in crime, Martin Reed.)

I’d perhaps been around too long in photography for the workshop to totally change my life as it did Goldfield’s, but it was certainly a very enjoyable and stimulating experience, and Harbutt was one of two outstanding photographic teachers I’ve had the privilege of working with.

I’d first met Harbutt around 20 years earlier, not in person but through the pages of his 1973 book ‘Travelog‘, one of the first real photography books that I bought, though the Creative Camera bookshop in Doughty St. It was a book that pushed documentary beyond its traditional limits (Harbutt had studied at college with both Roy Stryker and Russell Lee as visiting lecturers) with images that were very personal and often left far more questions than answers.

I’ve written a little about him in a few posts here, on the occasions of his work being featured on-line in Visura magazine and in L’Oeil de la Photographie.  He also merits a mention in my post written on the death of Peter Goldfield in 2009.

Travelog I think remains his most important work, a book that is one of the classics of photography, and compared to it his two later volumes are perhaps a little disappointing, with the best work in the 2012 ‘Departures and Arrivals‘ being mainly from the earlier volumes. Travelog is unfortunately now a rather expensive second-hand purchase.

There are obituaries of Harbutt in The New York Times (which includes material from the afterword of Travelog), in Photo District News, some details in Mike Pasini’s Photo Corners article and more elsewhere. As well as the pictures on his own web site you can also see a few at the Peter Fetterman gallery and in the Visura feature mentioned above. An older web site of his web site is on the Internet Archive WaybackMachine.

Under Surveillance

I’m not sure what I think about Simon Høgsberg’s ‘The Grocery Store’ project,which I read about in a post on DVAPhoto. It’s certainly remarkable, made from around “97,000 photos of people outside a grocery store in Copenhagen” which were then analysed by the  facial recognition algorithms in Picasa  – freely downloadable photo software  – to identify people who appeared in multiple images.

It’s worth reading the interview with Høgsberg by DVA’s M Scott Brauer which explores the how and why of the project and some of the issues, particularly around privacy involved, though I feel this could have been investigated more.

The images were made by Høgsberg “returning to the bike rail outside the supermarket with my camera” and zoom lens on 159 afternoons and “Freezing face after face with a click.” They certainly seem often to be very carefully chosen moments – as you can see from exploring some of the 2067 images that make up the web project – which is a very impressive one, with the images laid out on a single zoomable page as a grid “of sequences of images crossing each other in horizontal and vertical lines. Each sequence shows the same person caught on different days” and ” are arranged in chronological order.” It’s easier to look at than explain.

On Høgsberg’s web site there is more about how the project was carried out and his discovery of the face recognition in Google’s Picasa, software which enables you to “Organise, edit and share your photos” and share them with your friends on Google+L

Picasa uses facial recognition technology to find and group similar faces together across your entire collection of photos. By adding name tags to these groups of faces, new people albums are created.

The link tells you how it is done.  Picasa is software I found rather annoying when I played briefly with it (here is a set of images of Paris I shared in 2006, complete with a multiple spelling mistake), but it seems perfect for this project.

Høgsberg gave some people in his images tags, starting with A1, A2, A3… and Picasa then sifted through the images to find the same people in other pictures. One man, E46, turned up in 276 of them. These sets were used to construct the project image.

There seems to me to be some theoretical problems here. Lets consider three people, who we could call A, B and C, and assume that there is a picture including A and B, another including B and C and a third including A and C. If the set of pictures of A is laid out horizontally  then the set of pictures including B could be laid out vertically, with the picture including both at the crossing point. But  if you then want to add the series including C, it can either be set to include the image together with A as a vertical, or that together with B as a horizontal series, but not both. And if A and B appear together at several different times, what then? Don’t even think about A, B and C all turning up at once…

Perhaps these kind of problems are why only around 2% of the images taken appear in the final presentation, though I imagine the interest and quality of the images was also a consideration.

But these are technical matters, and it is perhaps the privacy implications that concern me more. I wonder what ‘E46’, ‘R51’ and the others make of this project and their inclusion in it.

Its also a project that makes me think about the millions of images gathered every day by security cameras in various public places, and the kind of analysis and use to which they might be put – with the aid of far more powerful software tools than that included in Picasa.

 

Deutsche Börse Prize 2015

For once I have to say I was pleased to hear the result of the Deutsche Börse Prize. Although I wasn’t entirely enchanted with the work of Mikhael Subotzky (b.1981, South Africa) and Patrick Waterhouse (b.1981, UK),  Ponte City was an impressive publication which includes some truly excellent photography, and I felt it stood head and shoulders above the other three short-listed works. Perhaps for once the gap between the winner’s £30,000 and the £3,000 to the runners up which I’ve always thought fundamentally unfair could be justified.

The DBP isn’t of course just about photography, its also a prize on several levels about politics which has often resulted in work which I think has little place in a photography gallery being short-listed and sometimes even winning. Unlike this year, politics has meant it often hasn’t been the best photography that has been successful.

Ponte City is a work that uses photography, but certainly isn’t just photography, but unlike many concepts it has photography at its heart and uses it well. There are some superb images here, and some of the other things – like the series of pamphlets published as a part of the book – are fascinating if not for their photography.

There is still time to see this and the other three sets of work that were short listed as the show continues at the Photographers Gallery until 7 June. I think it says something about the gallery’s fundamental contempt for photography that on the web page about the prize, the images from the four projects are shown as a narrow strip cropped from an image, 720x260pixels, an aspect ratio of 2.76:1,though of course you can see the full picture on the artist’s individual pages.

That for Subotzky and Waterhouse shows 7 full images along with one detail view of a multiple image and a gallery view, as well as a postage stamp sized video, which in my browser refuses to go full screen or link to Vimeo except by some tricky right clicking, though perhaps that may have been because of a current heavy demand on the site. You can however watch it on Vimeo, where  the page also has links to the videos of the other three artists. I’d suggest changing the video to HD and making it full screen unless you are viewing it on some miniature device.

The other work I found of some photographic interest were the portraits by Nikolai Bakharev  made on Russian public beaches, mainly in the 1980s, when there were various restrictions on photography and the taking and circulation of photographs containing nudity was strictly forbidden.

While some of these excited me, there were too many that seemed to have little to offer. I had rather similar doubts about the portraits of black gay women by Zanele Muholi, where though the project may have been commendable and worthy, it needed some stronger images. And although I know people who enthuse over the work of Viviane Sassen, it did nothing for me.

Gardeners Delight?

‘The Gardener’ Jan Brykczyński (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2015)

I have to confess to being a colourist. Someone who seems more affected than the general population and by the art photographic establishment in particular by colour. I had to quickly leave one room in Photo London when confronted by wall-sized images with a particularly nasty thin yellow cast.

My first real job was as a colour chemist, in the research lab of a company making dyestuffs, where small differences in shade were vital. For various reasons I didn’t stay in it long but perhaps something of it stayed with me. When I began as a photographer in the early ’70s, carrying two cameras, one for black and white and another for colour, I was seldom if ever in doubt about what was a colour and what and black and white image and my work in the two was quite different. I was, as a then eminent photographer commented on my work, a colourist.


Jan Brykczyński talks to Diane Smyth at Photo London detail- apologies for poor quality

Few photographers now actually work in black and white, and most of those who do seem to think – if they think at all – in colour. Others certainly do think in colour, and Jan Brykczyński is certainly one of them, but his colour is rather different to mine – around R+3 B+7 different from both me and Photoshop, as I find if I put one of his images into that programme and examine the colour of a neutral shade.

It may not seem a great deal, but R+3 B+7 is enough to make me feel a certain nausea when I turn the pages of this book, and it gets in the way of my appreciating his imagery. I have a slightly smaller problem with the rather muted colours and contrast. Brykczyński uses a large camera (4″x5″?) and film, and likes to shoot on dull days, staying in and researching when the sun comes out, to lessen the technical problems of light and shade. Colour film has always been balanced for summer sun (or tungsten); back in the bad old days of transparencies you had to use CC filters when the sun went in to get the colour right, though with the switch to negative we got lazy and made the corrections on the enlarger and it almost worked. But breathed a huge scream of relief when digital gave us more accurate colour with far less hassle. Film has become relegated to a ‘look’, something one can apply to digital with what a less polite than me photographer referred to as ‘f**king up filters’.

I’m not criticising Brykczyński for having chosen a particular aesthetic with its desaturated and slightly unreal colour, just relating my own difficulties in approaching his work though a barrier which for me is hardly mountable but others may take in their stride; from his comments in the presentation at Photo London, the approach may in part derive from having to blend together images taken at different times in four very different areas. But personally I would have liked to have seen a book that represented differences in the conditions under which the images were made rather than attempt to minimise them for the sake of a perhaps spurious unity.


A very different garden image from ‘Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood’ by Peter Marshall’

As a photographer who has also produced a very different book on gardens I appreciate the problem of dealing with all that green. And back to that room I had to leave, some can live with (or at least work with) and pay very silly money for giant images I find nauseating.


Jan Brykczyński talks to Diane Smyth

So I struggled to appreciate this book, although the images there are at least clear. I felt for the photographer at the presentation, where his images on screen behind him and Diane Smyth of the BJP asking him questions were projected at a standard that would have disgraced an amateur gardening club in a run down church hall. It seemed a disgraceful contempt to the photographer and his work and the seriousness of his approach as well as to a paying audience. Some images from the position I was sitting, a few rows back from the front, were almost completely burnt out with the screen a glaring white.


I took pictures only when a few images were better projected

The project looks at urban gardeners in 4 cities in very different states of development and with very different histories, Nairobi, New York, Warsaw, and Yerevan in Armenia, and seems to attempt to suggest à la ‘Family of Man‘ that whatever our social arrangements and historical development, at base people around the world are much the same. It’s a thesis undoubtedly close to the heart of a multi-national Swiss-based giant like Syngenta, and behind the singular title ‘The Gardener‘ that the photographs, mixed together as they are in the book, rather triumphantly overcome.

Perhaps behind the book there is a rather more subversive mind than the company hoped for. Perhaps I should make myself a pair of colour-correcting spectacles to enable me to get to grips with it more adequately. But you may well not share my personal problem.

Boiko, Brykczyński’s series on  rural life among the Rusyn people (a small group of farming people who apparently consider the name Boyko derogatory) in the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains which became his first self-published book is a fascinating series (and  I have no problems with their colour), as too is the group of photographs of the sheep farmers of Árnes in Iceland that won him the Syngenta Award, with a grant to pursue the project and, later, to publish the book ‘The Gardener’.

Born in Poland in 1979, much of Brykczyński’s work has been on rural areas. He is a founding partner of Sputnik Photos, an international collective of photographers that focuses on transformation in Eastern Europe and post-Soviet states.

Continue reading Gardeners Delight?

Photo London

I wasn’t going to bother with Photo London. I’m rather busy and thought there were better things I could do with my time, so hadn’t bothered with accreditation. But a day or two ago I decided I could fit in a few hours there on my way to something else, and took up an invitation to a book launch (more of which in a later post) which included a complimentary day ticket.  If you have to pay, a day ticket costs £20 (concessions £17) and the show continues until Sunday 24 May.

There certainly are things worth seeing, particularly the first UK showing of a remarkable project by the late Iranian documentary photographer Kaveh Golestan in the in the Citadel of Shahr e No (New Town), Tehran’s red light district, a walled ghetto where 1,500 women lived and worked, between 1975–77. With the Iranian revolution the whole area was destroyed, together with many of the women in it.

Beneath the Surface, 200 rarely-shown photographic works from the Victoria & Albert Museum Photographs Collection, features a fine collection of work by William Strudwick (1834-190), an employee of the V&A. The museum purchased around 50 of his cityscapes, ‘Old London: Views by W Strudwick‘ in 1869, and then proceeded to disperse them around their collection, only re3cenly reuniting them for this show. There are some other interesting prints from a century ago or more, but the choice from the last hundred years was rather less interesting, with a number of good but well-known works, and some more contemporary work about which the museum may well feel rather embarrassed in another hundred years.

I was disappointed by the show of Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis series as large-format platinum prints. Frankly many of these images were more convincing on the magazine page. Making platinum prints doesn’t necessarily mean better prints as this exhibit proves. Elsewhere on some of the gallery stands there were rather better prints of his work and I think it is more suited to silver or inkjet.

The backbone of Photo London is of course the commercial gallery shows, and in the main I found these a little disappointing. There was an awful lot of large and rather empty images and a dearth of interesting photography, and the range of work didn’t seem to match that which I’ve seen at every Paris Photo I’ve attended. There were things that were good to see, but most of them I’d seen before, and very little that was new.

One of the more interesting was the series series Liverpool 1968, by Candida Höfer, black and white images made during a trip there when she was twenty-four years old. If anyone doubts the dire effect of the Dusseldorf school on photography they should go and study these images made long before she studied with the Bechers, whose work I admire but who seem as teachers to have inspired a huge pyramid of boredom, with just the occasional photographer and work of interest. They were I think at Galerie Zander.

Another set of pictures that I really admired was by Anthony Hernandez, Landscape for the Homeless showing at the Galerie Polaris stand. A book of these was published by the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany,in 1996 and there is an article in Unhoused. The book was a relatively small print run and is fairly rare and a little expensive.

Somerset House is a fantastic building, but a rather confusing layout which wasn’t quite clear to me from the exhibitor map, and I had to ask my way a couple of times but eventually I think I managed to find everything in the show, including the LensCulture area which is all on its own with a separate entrance, and where work by all 31 award-winning photographers of the LensCulture Exposure Awards 2014 was on show.


Raina Stinson, with her winning image ‘Alluring‘ at top left, holds the Lensculture Awards Catalogue

Also on the LensCulture web site you can see their view of Photo London – rather different to mine, but recommended.
Continue reading Photo London