Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Larry Towell

Canadian photographer Aaron Vincent Elkaim interviews Larry Towell on Vice in a piece entitled You Will Change: Magnum Photographer Larry Towell Has Advice for Young Photojournalists. Its an interesting post about one of today’s more interesting Magnum photographers, though probably the advice, good though it is, is unlikely to improve the financial condition of those taking it.

Somewhere else on the web I took a quick look at a piece 19 Signs You Are Treating Your Photography as a Hobby and Not a Business by Bradford (Bradford Rowley), who describes himself as “one the most expensive portrait photographer in the world with an impressive list of prominent clientele. He operates studios in New York, California and on world famous Worth Avenue in Palm Beach. He has made over 20 million dollars from selling portraits. He has taught photographers from more than 70 countries.“

Its a rather different approach. Having met some of the best photographers in the world and read about rather more of them, I think most would count at hobbyists to Bradford. Few have been in it just as a business.

As Larry Towell says:

The main thing is to be on the right side, and if you’re not on the right side… then you’re probably going to make a lot of money.

PS. Don’t miss looking at the work by Aaron Vincent Elkaim either. The Vice article has links to Larry Towell’s work.

The Ovahimba Years – Rina Sherman

After Rina Sherman was exiled from her native South Africa in 1984 she settled in Paris, acting in independent theatre and working in television. She studied at the Sorbonne under the celebrated ethnographer and film-maker Jean Rouch, completing her doctorate with distinction in 1990.

Like Rouch she is a writer, filmmaker and ethnographer and in 1997 was awarded a Lavoisier Research Bursary by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs which enabled her to live for seven years with an Omuhimba community in Namibia and Angola, filming and photographing their every day and ritual lives.

In 2014 she donated her multimedia Ovahimba archive to the French National Library, where there will be an exhibition of the work from 29 Sept 2015 to 15 Nov 2015.

You can see some photographs and films from this project on her web site, where there is also a link to a crowd-funding project to publish a book of some of her photographs, The Ovahimba Years – Rina Sherman. As rewards for contributing you are offered your choice of archival inkjet prints from three galleries of work, in sizes from A5 to A2 depending on your contribution – the smallest print goes for a mere $25 plus shipping, with $1200 getting you three A2 prints, all unframed. If the project fails to reach the goal of $17,800 USD needed for a high quality photographic publication you will still receive the prints and the monies contributed will be used to cover some of the publication costs of a text only print-on-demand book and an eBook.

There are only 11 days left to contribute to what seems an interesting work and to get quality signed prints at a reasonable price.

Things Left Unsaid

I’ve never been a great fan of either Donovan Wylie or Paul Seawright, but the video of their conversation at the opening of Seawright’s show in Paris last November with the working title of ‘Making News’ but shown as ‘Things Left Unsaid‘ at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, held my attention, although I soon got rather fed up with looking at the two photographers and took to looking instead at the eight images and installation view which you can find on Paul Seawright’s web site.

On the web site it explains the project:

‘Exploring the theatre of war through the internal landscape of the US television news studio. Developing Virilio’s writing on electronic warfare and weapons of mass communication, Seawright focuses on the illusory nature of these spaces, where information is selectively transformed into news. Characteristically Seawright continues his exploration of contested spaces and illuminates an invisible aspect of contemporary conflict.’

(You can read an interview with Paul Virilio on Vice, and more on Wikipedia.)

The book contains – according to the talk – 26 images, and you can see a slide show of 7 images on APB where the 56 page book is on sale.

Seawright at one point says he doesn’t like taking photographs, the ‘moment’ for him is when he sees the exhibition for the first time on the gallery wall, and he comments that the book is secondary, lacking the drama of the exhibition.

WhileI feel with him and Wylie that the camera is a purely functional thing I find myself more in sympathy with Wylie’s comments about taking pictures and the experience of doing this. It may be and often is exhausting, but fore me it is also at times exhilarating. But perhaps it does account for an absence of feeling that I often feel in looking at Seawright’s pictures; something I don’t see even with the New Topographics who he relates his work to.

Near the end of the the discussion Seawright comments “We make work because we believe in the work and the idea behind the work” which seems very much, despite the differences in our ideas and approaches to photography, something with which I can wholeheartedly agree.

Looking at the various other projects on Seawright’s web site, there are others that I find rather more interesting that ‘Things Left Unsaid‘, a title which he suggests on the video could apply to all of his work. One of the more interesting is ‘Invisible Cities‘ and the site has links to two reviews, one of which is in Socialist Worker. Although not entirely complimentary, and commenting that it fails to show the African dynamism, implying that “the legacy of colonialism in Africa is too dominant and exhausting to ever be changed”, this concludes:

“Neverthless, Invisible Cities is a terrific selection of photographic art. It skillfully uses seemingly prosaic scenes of urban life to present an startlingly new image of Africa – one that is not dominated by violence and famine, but rather by human beings engaged in a day-to-day existence that is not a million miles away from our own.”

Donovan Wylie’s work can be seen on his Magnum page.

Thanks to Peggy Sue Amison, Artistic Direct for East Wing in Dubai for a Facebook post sharing the link to the video.

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.