Category: Photographers

Max Pinckers

Thanks to a Facebook post by photographer George Georgiou for a link to Colin Pantall’s blog post Liverpool Look/15: Don’t Take Boring Pictures, a look at the current Liverpool at Look/15 Festival continuing until Sun 31 May 2015.

Were I in Liverpool I would certainly go and take a look, although the big show, Martin Parr and Tony Ray Jones in Only in England at the Walker Art Gallery is one already seen in London, and which I reviewed here last year as well as posting a link to a review by John Benton-Harris, who knew TRJ well.

While I had huge reservations about the ideas behind the show and some aspects of its presentation and John made very clear his thoughts on the misrepresentation of his friend’s work, I still concluded “It really is one of the most significant shows of photography here in the UK for some years“. In part that is a reflection on the fact that most of the more significant photography shows fail to get a showing in this country. But it is an opportunity to see around 50 vintage images taken by TRJ (if rather fewer of them actually made by him than claimed) but also as a reminder of what a good black and white photographer Martin Parr could be back in the 1970s.

But this is also a show which contains Parr’s selection of work the TRJ rejected, printed in a way he would have felt totally unsuited to his work, contradicting the clear directions he gave to people – like Benton-Harris – he got to make prints for him. It was a travesty that Benton-Harris clearly felt strongly about and makes his feelings abundantly clear in his review, and I think represents a failure to respect the work of Ray Jones by the organisation entrusted with his legacy.

What prompted me to write this post today was however the final section of Pantall’s post, about the apparently rather hard to find show of work by Belgian photographer Max Pinckers, Will They Sing Like Raindrops Or Leave Me Thirsty, a project on “the price of love in India and the stories encountered daily by the Love Commandos, a volunteer group working to prevent honour killings by providing assistance to those who have found love outside their prescribed destiny” which you can explore in greater depth on Pinckers’ own web site.

The work is the fourth self-published book by Pinckers (as well as a self-published book dummy – I’m unclear about the distinction) and copies of it are expensive, with a ‘special edition’ including a signed print still available for 320 Euros and shipping. There is an interesting interview with the photographer about his earlier highly praised book ‘The Fourth Wall’ by Taco Hidde Bakker, though this was a work that failed to arouse much of my interest.

Looking on-line at a selection of pages from the latest book and images on the web site, I find the work far more suited to the web presentation, which animates the series of images of images which on the page – which despite Pantall’s assertion – do sometimes become rather boring.

Andrzej Baturo – 50 Years

It seems a very long time ago that I first met Andrzej and Inez Baturo in Bielska-Bialo, and it’s something of a surprise when I realise it was only 10 years ago.

You can read more about my first visit to Poland and the first FotoArtFestival held in Bielsko-Biala, Poland in June-July 2005, organised by the Foundation Centre of Photography there, with Andzej, the centre’s president as Art Director and Inez, the vice president as Programme Director in my Polish diary.

It was a fine festival, with an international cast of photographers, one from each of around 25 countries, with some well-known names including Eikoh Hosoe from Japan, Boris Mikhalov from Ukraine, and Ami Vitale from the USA, as well as work by the late Inge Morath (Austria) and Mario Giacomelli (Italy) and others. There was also a strong Polish representation, with soft-focus pictoriasm by Tadeusz Wanski from the middle of the twentieth century, and the much gritter group show ‘”Unoffical Image” – Polish photoreportage of the 1970s/80s‘ which included work by Andrzej Baturo.

Last year Galeria Bielska showed ‘Andrzej Baturo – 50 Years Of Photography‘ with around 200 images over the years since he began taking pictures in 1962. You can read an English version of the page about it, which quotes Andrzej as saying:

The photograph was first invented simply to record social realities, but with time, social documentary photography and reportage photography have both been raised to the status of art, much in the same way as the journalism of Hanna Krall or Ryszard Kapuściński are now considered great literature. I feel a close affinity with both these areas, and I’ve never been sure whether I’m more of a journalist than an artist, or the other way round.

The Polish version is here. Also in Polish, but worth watching for the images even if you understand little or nothing that is being said, is the video, Andrzej Baturo – 50 lat z fotografią. There is also a page about the show with some comments on his work on the Polish site Art Imperium, which I viewed through Google Translate.

There is now a crowd funding appeal for the publication of a book Andrzej Baturo – 50 years of photography. I’m not sure how well a link to the page through Google Translate will work, and if you understand Polish or have a browser that will automatically translate, you may find the Polish original works better. And even if like me you don’t speak Polish, the pictures speak in any language.

The various rewards available for supporting the publication are of course priced in Polish Zloty (PLN) and where items are to be posted, international postage would presumably need to be added. But 150 zł (about £27) for the 240 page hard-cover book with around 200 photographs seems very reasonably priced. But registering and using the Polish crowd-funding site might need the help of a Polish speaker and charges for converting currency may add to the cost.

Fox Talbot goes on-line

WHF Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, died some 115 years too early to set up his own web site (though I think there is little doubt that had he still been around he would have been at the forefront of that scientific advance too.)

But now the Bodleian Library is about to repair that omission, with “an ambitious project to create a new web-based research tool that will allow scholars and members of the public to view and search the complete photographic works of British photographic pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot.”

There is already some material on-line at the project site, including a blog “to provide updates on the development of the William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné” and the project is a large and lengthy one, due to be completed by 2018. It is hoped that the publication of the work in this way will lead to new information and insights into the work of WHF Talbot – and perhaps even the discovery of new images that were made by Talbot and his circle of photographic colleagues.

My only slight quibble over what appears to be a magnificent development is over the statement: “Catalogues raisonnés are common in the world of art, serving as a detailed academic inventory of an artist’s work. However, nothing of this scale has been attempted for photography.”

While the scale of this particular project may be unique, there have been a number of publications which are essentially catalogues raisonnés for the work of the photographers concerned, though bearing in mind the different natures of photography and painting or sculpture. While it may be relatively simple to cover every painting by an artist, every print and every reproduction of a photograph by even a not very prolific photographer is an virtually impossible challenge. Ours is a prolific if not profligate medium.

You can read more about some of these photographic equivalents – including the magnificent two volume edition of Alfred Stieglitz, The Key Set and the 4 volumes of ‘The Work of Atget‘ in a post Photography Catalogues Raisonné by Loring Knoblauch on Collector Daily in 2009 – and the suggestions in the comments on that piece, which include references to a number of other photographic catalogues raisonnés.

2015 PDN Photo Annual

There is plenty of good photography in the winning work in the 2015 PDN Photo Annual, though there are some of the various categories that interest me less than others. They include quite a few that have me thinking ‘how slick’ rather than really appreciating, and rather too much ‘so-whattery’, but it’s easy to skip on to the more worthwhile.

As well as the well-known names, there are also quite a few new to me. If you are short of time, I’d recommend going to the Student section first. Much of the other good work you may already have seen, and this also seems to me the most consistently interesting group of work. And perhaps surprisingly given my lack of interest in most sports photography, the Sports section here (which I almost didn’t bother with) is one of the more interesting.

I think the PDN Gallery might be more useful if it featured rather fewer photographers – if you worked your way through all the work here and went on to follow the links to the websites you could spend a few weeks on this site. It perhaps isn’t as obvious as it might be that the ‘Next’ button at bottom right of the screen is a very good way to go through all the photographers in order, showing you the first of their images – and you can then either view more or quickly jump to the next person.

Time to Act

Or rather well past time for some real action on Climate Change was the message of a large and largely unreported protest in London at the start of March. In my account at Time to Act on Climate Change I began “Over 20,000 protesters marched through London” and while it is hard to be definite about the exact figures at such events it was certainly a large protest.


Time to #AxeDrax

Over forty-five years ago, when I first began to think about environmental issues (and even to speak in public on them), climate change was something that would happen in the future, the stuff of post-apocalyptic fiction such as J G Ballard’s ‘The Drowned World‘, first published in 1962 (though I only read it much later.) Now it is very much with us, and among the pile of discarded papers I moved to find my keyboard this morning I came across an article about wine producers buying up estates in Kent and Sussex as the Champagne region is becoming too warm.


Champagne is perhaps the least of worries for most of this, though perhaps not for those in the 1% whose opinions driven by wealth really matter. But unlike many of those associated with global warming, one that is easily overcome by a simple shift of location. Less easy to solve the problems of countries such as the Marshall Islands or Bangladesh already suffering from rising sea levels and global climate instability.

Last September, ahead of the New York Climate summit we had another large march in London, the Peoples Climate March, about which I commented that it seemed to have been “taken over by various slick and rather corporate organisations rather than being a ‘people’s march’ and seemed to lack any real focus.”  Although some of those same organisations were backing this march, they were far less visible, and it was far more a march dominated by climate activists and grass roots organisations.

The important arguments are no longer I think about environmental or scientific details (though of course the detailed matters of ecology remain vital) but of politics – how we get the change we know is vital to save life on this planet, if indeed that is possible.  How are that small and wealthy elite – the 1% or perhaps rather fewer – to be persuaded to abandon their own increasingly insulated lifestyle of extravagance based on planetary exploitation for the sake of a future for the rest of us. Can it be achieved within the institutions – including governments – which they dominate or will it only happen through catastrophe or revolution?

Protests such as those I spend much of my time photographing often don’t acheive their aims, often indeed are asking the impossible, often are doomed to failure, but that doesn’t mean they are unimportant. There are sometimes small victories, but even more vitally they serve to bring issues into the open, to manage to break through the dictatorship of the elite over the public agenda, to slightly rock the government boat. They are the way that many things start to happen. And even in my gloom, especially in it, there is hope that something may happen over climate change. And much of that hope comes from the people that appear in my pictures and what they are doing.

The event began in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the largest public square in London, including the surrounding roads around 250 yards by 180 yards, enough to make a large crowd look fairly sparse. As the front of the march was leaving from the south-west corner, people were still flooding in to the square from Holborn station and High Holborn. It took around 35 minutes before the last of the march – which at the start was fairly tightly packed – to leave the square.  The “Over 20,000” was the organiser’s estimate, and my own guess would have been a little lower. But where most of the media talk about hundreds when thousands are on the streets a little overestimate helps to balance things.

I stayed taking photographs in Lincoln’s Inn Fields until the end of the march had got fairly close to the start point, and then rushed off to catch up with its front. I had the advantage of being able to take a short cut where the marchers went around the one-way system at Aldwych, and they had been walking rather slowly with frequent stops, and I caught up halfway down the Strand.


‘Renewables – I’m a Big Fan’. Fossil Free Pompey at McDonald’s

Ahead of us were several places where I thought some of the marchers might decide to make some kind of protest, and I kept close to a group who I thought might be involved in this. And as we approached McDonald’s I was not surprised when things livened up. But the police had also for once anticipated the action too, and McDonald’s had extra security staff on the door. Instead of trying to enter, people sat down in the road, and hundreds of other marchers followed their example, blocking the street and stopping the march.


Tina-Louise Rothery and friends on the Strand

The low winter sunlight made photography difficult, with areas of deep shade and bright sun. Working with an extreme wide-angle as I mainly was, using fill-flash was impracticable, and although I tried hard to avoid blown highlights I wasn’t always successful. After  making some pictures close to McDonalds I stepped over protesters who were sitting or lounging on the road to get across to a group of anti-fracking protesters towards the far side of the road and joined them to take pictures.  Among them were several, including Tina-Louise Rothery and some of the other ‘Nanas’ who I’d met at previous protests, who it was good to meet again. It does make working with the 16mm fisheye easier when the people you are photographing know you and are happy to be photographed at close quarters.


Time to Act on Climate Change

After a few minutes the protesters got up and the march moved on, though the corner of Trafalgar Square and turning down Whitehall.  Here the black bloc came to the front of the march, and I expected some lively scenes at Downing St.  There was a little shouting and they were joined by a small group of polar bears, but soon they were on their way again. On reaching King Charles St  they rushed off down it, followed by a small group of marchers. I ran down with them for a short distance, and then had to decide whether to stay with them or the main march.

Their protest might well have provided some images of clashes with police and of minor damage to property that would be likely to be used by the mass media. Thinking purely in terms of likely use of images and possible sales, I should have stuck with the black bloc. And I think like most photographers I welcome the adrenaline of confrontations. But I’m not happy with the way that such images are used by a press and broadcasting establishment dominated by the 1%, which picks on such things to obscure or denigrate the main issues. I vacillated, then turned around and ran back to photograph the main march as it came into Parliament Square.


‘Frack With Us Cameron and the Oven Gloves are Off’

I was anxious too not to miss the rally on College Green and the opportunity to photograph the speakers and the crowd there. Though there was relatively little press interest as the only major celebrity input came from a video link with Vivienne Westwood speaking from Paris. But there were some interesting speeches and speakers, including John McDonnell and Caroline Lucas, Matt Wrack and others, with Tina-Louise Rothery bringing Frack Free Lancashire activists with her and John Stewart coming on with some of the polar bears who had protested earlier in the day at Heathrow.


Almost corrected image of the Viking Longship and oil slicks against BP sponsorship of Art by ‘Art Not Oil’

At the end of the rally I had another choice to make. I could either go back north to Parliament Square and Westminster Bridge with activists likely to face confrontation with the police, or go south with Art Not Oil‘s Viking ship to protest on the steps of Tate Britain. Either would have taken me towards a station from which I could catch a train home, something my body was telling me it was time to do. Although Parliament Square would have been more exciting it was also more open-ended with perhaps hours of police kettles and confrontation, I went with the ship simply as a quick and easy option.  I’d done enough and needed a rest and dinner.

More at:
Time to Act on Climate Change
Climate Change Rally
Viking longship invades Tate steps
Continue reading Time to Act

Inside in France

Like me you probably missed the show Prisons: 2011 – 2014 by Grégoire Korganow which was at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) from Feb 4th-May 4th, 2015. I’ve been just too busy to go over to Paris for a while, much though I would like to.

In 2010, Korganow was working in French prisons on the making of a doucmentary film about the man in charge of them, Jean Marie Delarue, The Comptroller General of Places of Deprivation of Liberty (CGPL). At the end of the filming, Delarue asked him if he would photograph the French prison system, and Korganaw had the unique opportunity to work in twenty prisons, spending 5-10 days in each of them over the next three years.

Korganow was made an ‘inspector of prisons‘ and he writes on his web site “I’m able to photograph everything; the inside of the cells, the exercise yard, the visiting rooms, showers, the ‘cooler’ (solitary confinement unit)… Day and night. I have access to all areas.”

As Pete Brook writes: “Korganow has made the most of his phenomenal access producing an unrivaled and varied of body of work about the French prisons.” It really does seem to be a remarkable study. As well as the exhibition, there is also a book, Prisons-67065 (the number is the total of prisoners in French prisons on Jan 1st, 2014), with 432 pages (ISBN-13 979-10-92388-05-3) which I’ve not seen. It seems to be a relatively small format but rather fat book from the dimensions on the publishers page of 17 x 22.5 x 5.2 cm and its weight of three and a quarter pounds. I can’t see anywhere the number of photographs it contains.

I read about the show on Pete Brook’s Prison Photography site, and the same feature, with larger illustrations is also on Vantage, which seems a site well worth looking at.  On its ‘About’ page it reveals simply “We are fans of photography” but then goes on to list an impressive list of editors and writers including of course Pete Brook, but also a number of other names I recognise.

Vantage is a part of Medium, which is a kind of publishing network and looks very interesting – you can find out more about it in Ten reasons why I love writing on Medium. If I didn’t already have too many other things to do I might be thinking about using it.

 

Stanley Greene in Brixton

Stanley Greene is one of the best photojournalists around (see his work on Noor if you have any doubts), and someone I’ve written about before, particularly over his coverage of Chechnya. You can – though I don’t now for how long – see his coverage of the UK elections on Catch Up on Channel 4 News.  Asking him to cover the it was certainly a great idea,  and you can see the results in a video which combines  video footage with his black and white images at From Beirut to Brixton: war photographer on election trail. And there is an article about it.


One of my pictures from earlier in the day in Brixton

I was in Brixton earlier in the day at the event which he covered, but didn’t see him there.  Much of his coverage from Brixton (it starts at 7m30s) is of people that I know and that I also photographed, and its great to see how a real master does it (though I did get a few decent pictures too.)


One of my photographs of Lisa McKenzie in Brixton

The piece does a fine job of combining video clips with the still images and also is nicely edited, combining well-selected opinions from people on the street – including Class War’s election candidate standing in Chingford against Iain Duncan Smith, Lisa McKenzie – with Greene’s own intelligent and somewhat laconic insights.  As he concludes, there is plenty of politics happening on the streets, “but it seems to me, its the politicians who aren’t taking part.”

Camera buffs will no doubt find the equipment hung around Greene’s neck of interest. In Brixton at least there were two cameras, one of which has the word ‘Nikon’ on it, but I don’t recognise it. Certainly it isn’t a D3s which he mentions in a 2012 interview on ClueCult :

I’ve got it all figured it out. I’m shooting Leica for black and white, Nikon D3s for big jobs where you pull out the camera to say “I am the photographer”. I’m shooting the Leica M-9 when it’s a digital work with an artistic flavor and I can match it up. I’m using the Olympus to do daily life, it is my diary.

Embedded in that interview is a short video trailer for his book Black Passport, which is better viewed at higher resolution on Viewtube. There is also a video interview with him by the French magazine Polka which is also worth watching.

Often I find photographs produced now in black and white an annoying affectation, with photographers sometimes thinking that working that way makes their images more ‘documentary‘. But there is a big difference between a photographer who thinks in black and white – as Greene clearly does here, and those who work in colour and simply convert the images to monochrome.  In the Channel 4 video, choosing to work with black and white photographs clearly also has the function of separating them from the video clips.
Continue reading Stanley Greene in Brixton

The New York Photo League

Like many of my articles, the piece on the Photo League I published in 2001 was based on work I had done earlier, either for teaching or for articles in a small magazine that I edited for some years, later reworking and adding material to them for publication.

And rather than relying on the images in books and magazines, and on slides I made from these as well as commercial film-strips and a few videos mainly recorded from TV, I had to find images and articles I could link to on the web.

Many of those links no longer work, but there is now far more material on the web and it is much easier to find than in the days before Google. So I’ve removed any links from this piece, and leave it to the reader to research those aspects that they find of interest. Anyway, here’s the piece from 2001 without those links:

The New York Photo League

Origins

The Photo League was one of the most important movements in twentieth century photography, its influence spreading wide from New York. Yet it remains one of the least well known areas of photography, with many half truths and some downright fiction in the history books and on web sites. In this feature I hope to state some of the main points about it, and also to state why I believe it to be so important. Along the way I hope to blow away some of the myths.

Of course, there are long scholarly and no doubt more accurate accounts than this, although some historians perhaps lose sight of the wood as they concentrate on the leaves. This is an outline only. In future features I’ll look in more depth at some of the photographers who were members or otherwise associated with the organisation.

Anne W Tucker, Clare Cass & Stephen Daiter’s book ‘This Was The photo League: Compassion and the Camera from the Depression to the Cold War’, published by the Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago in 2001 is probably a good – if expensive – reference for those who want more detail. Anne Tucker also contributed a chapter, ‘Strand as Mentor’, to the book ‘Paul Strand: Essays on his life and Work’ edited by Maren Strange, Aperture, 1990. Some information in this feature was taken from her and other essays in this book, including one by Walter Rosenblum.

The ‘Film and Photo League’ was founded in 1930, but its origins lay in the earlier Workers’ Camera Club of New York which had been active for some years. As the name suggests, this was a communist inspired organisation. Workers’ International Relief , which was the American chapter of the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe, part of the Communist International, sponsored the merger of the Workers’ Camera Club with an organisation of similar nature, the Labor Defender Photo Group, into the New York Film and Photo League.(FPL)

The object of the League was to make film and photographs that supported workers in their struggles against the bosses, that stood for the rights of the working people and fought for a better life for them. These movements drew their inspiration from the German worker-photographer movement organised by Will Munzenberg. They aimed to awaken the working class and train them in the use of film and photography in the production of politically committed pictures.

Film occupied an important place in Russian culture of the era, and the FPL also aimed to project a positive picture of Soviet cultural achievements in this area as well as producing it s on films. Although still photography was seen as important and the majority of members were still photographers, the movement in the early years was dominated by the film-makers, some, including Paul Strand were also well known as still photographers.

The late 1920s and 1930s were a period when intellectual life in the Western world was dominantly left wing. Capitalism was seen as having led to the carnage of the First World War and later the failures of the Depression. Following the Russian Revolution in 1919, a new society was being created in the Soviet Union that would lead to a freer and more equal society. Of course it didn’t quite work out like that in practice. At the time however, many if not most photographers in the USA shared the at least broadly socialist or left wing sympathies and hopes of their generation.

In 1935, various arguments within the FPL led to a three-way split; the film-makers who stuck more closely to party lines keeping in the FPL (it faded away a couple of years later) while those who wanted to make more ambitious documentary films formed a production company, Frontier Films. The still photographers, who largely took the side of Frontier Films, formed a new organisation, the Photo League. Frontier Films was closely allied to the Photo League throughout its existence. Paul Strand, the President of Frontier, was a member of the Advisory Board of the Photo League and played an important role in its activities until he left for France in 1949.

Activities

Although the split from the Film and Photo League marked a certain degree of distancing from the Communist Party, there is no doubt that a number of its leading members – almost certainly including Strand – were also party members. However many others were simply people who shared the general left wing views of the times.

After the split, the League had no support from outside bodies and was entirely dependent on membership fees and the charges for courses and lectures. It was open to all photographers, and had a bold belief in the true purpose of photography. In the document ‘For A League Of American Photographers‘, its executive board stated:

Photography has tremendous social value. Upon the photographer rests the responsibility and duty of recording a true image of the world as it is today. Moreover, he must not only show us how we live, but indicate the logical development of our lives.

The major figure in keeping the activities running over the years was Sid Grossman, described as an organisational genius as well as a fine photographer, but many others, including Walter Rosenblum (president for many years), Dan Weiner and Sol Libsohn played vital roles. Paul Strand was always on hand for advice and also taught and lectured (Rosenblum describes a class by him in his essay mentioned earlier). Aaron Siskind led the Harlem project for four years, and there were many others. All those involved in the League’s programs gave their time without charge.

Most of those who belonged to the Photo League, at least before the late 1940s, were working class New Yorkers, from the lower east side, from Brooklyn and from the Bronx. Most were in their teens and twenties when they joined; many were the sons and daughters of first generation immigrants living in these working class areas, and they were predominantly of Jewish origin. Few were professional photographers, most were working in low paid jobs

The League set up in a second floor loft – the former FPL premises in East Twenty-first Street. This small base became exhibition hall, meeting room, darkroom and school for the members.

They were attracted in particular by the low cost (the teaching staff were not paid) and high standard of the photographic tuition on offer. The League school, directed by Sid Grossman, offered courses in the techniques, history, aesthetics and practice of photography. As well as Grossman, a gifted teacher, and Libsohn who together ran the documentary class, there were also courses and guest appearances by many well-known photographers. Teaching in the photography classes was very much based on practice, with the students being sent out to record life in the various communities of Manhattan, taking photographs that were then criticised – at times extremely forcefully – and discussed in class.

The Photo League School was, at the time as Hal Greenwood noted in 1947, the ‘only non-commercial photo school in America‘, and in the years it was open, trained over 1500 photographers. It used a ‘progressive educational method: the student learns by doing’ which was unusual for its time and aimed ‘to help the student ‘discover the world; to develop a personal, philosophic, and visual perception which would load to an individual direction in photography’. Its success can be seen in the work of those who passed through it, and also by the later adoption of similar methods by many courses in photography in our schools of art. Unfortunately few of them did it anything like as well.

Hine and recent scandal

As well as Strand, other notable photographers, including Berenice Abbot and Margaret Bourke-White – sat on the advisory board and persuaded other well known figures to come and talk and also to exhibit their work, including Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Lewis Hine. Weegee had his first exhibition at the Photo League and became an enthusiastic member.

Hine, occupied a special place in the pantheon of the League. His campaigning around the turn of the century, fighting for better protection for children in the workplace (and the enforcement of existing laws designed to protect them) was the epitome of the type of photography they existed to promote, although their interests did range much wider to cover the whole range of what might be called expressive photography, and included almost anything but outright commercialism and the pictorialism of the amateur club movement. Their list of heroes very much derived from Strand’s views on straight photography, expressed forcefully in the 1920s in opposition to pictorialism. A typical list would include Stieglitz, Strand, Hine, Jacob Riis (the first photographer to record the conditions of the poor in New York), the FSA photographers, Atget, and Edward Weston, all photographers who used the camera without manipulation.

When Hine died in 1940, his collection of pictures and negatives was presented to the League; when the League was wound up, this collection ended up with the former president, Walter Rosenblum, eventually becoming a part of the George Eastman House collection. The provenance of some prints apparently signed by Hine but made on paper which was not produced until the 1950s has been a recent cause célèbre among gallerists and collectors, involving an out of court settlement and possible continuing legal action.

(‘Vintage prints’, generally accepted as those made by the photographer within a couple of years of the date of the negative, sell for a considerable premium over those made at a later date by other hands. Although later prints are often both better printed and in better condition, they never have the same rarity as vintage prints.)

Photo Notes

One of the other vital activities of the League was the publication of a monthly bulletin, ‘Photo Notes‘. By today’s standards this was very crudely reproduced, poor quality type from a stencil duplicator. Despite the lack of photographs, it became the most important photographic magazine of its times. Edited for four years by Rosalie Gwathmey, (other editors included Lou Stoumen) it gave details of the League’s events, published reviews of current photographic shows, and published both new writing on photography and also reprints of some of the classic articles.* Among those who wrote for it was perhaps the best-known critic of documentary photography, Elizabeth McCausland. Photo Notes was distributed free to museums and galleries and reached a large audience, attracting them to League events. Although the league’s actual membership was never high, many other photographers participated in its activities

The War

The USA entered the war in 1941, and most of the men in the League were of fighting age. For many of them the war provided an opportunity for photography. Among League members who served in the military were Walter Rosenblum (he was among those to land first on D-Day), Morris Engel, Sid Grossman, Morris Huberland, Theodore Gumbs, Sam Solomon, Bess Maslow (with the Red Cross), Louis Clyde-Stoumen, Maz Zobel, Sam Dinin, Kenneth Miller, Albert Fenn, George Gelberg, J P Connolly and Dan Weiner.

Those left at home photographed in various ways to support the war effort; a Photo Notes editorial urged members ‘to make photographs for the defense project which the League is working on. To make photographs of the people of America as they organize themselves to defeat fascism’ and to help the League ‘to utilize all the resources of the League, our exhibitions, our project, our school, our relationship with other organizations; with the aim of doing the most that we can towards the successful prosecution of this war.’

Subversive Activities

Editorial!

In the immediate post-war period the future looked bright for the League. Many old members had returned and there was an influx in new members, so much so that the League had got together the money for a move into new, larger premises, when a bombshell fell. The first the League knew about it was when they received a phone call from a newspaper, asking if they would like to comment on their listing by the Attorney General as an organisation subversive to the United States.

The group called an emergency meeting, at which Strand spoke eloquently about the need to defend democracy and our rights. You can read his speech in the ‘Special Number’ of Photo Notes, together with contributions by Walter Rosenblum, Ansel Adams, Barbara Morgan and others. Strand and Nancy Newhall drafted a protest telegram that was sent by the meeting to the Attorney General, congressmen and the papers, while Gene Smith was working on the draft of a more detailed letter. A petition was started. Following a suggestion by Barbara Morgan, Beaumont Newhall was appointed to produce a historical article to submit to magazines showing the League in the context of documentary photography, and work began on an exhibition, ‘This is the Photo League’ which included work by both Richard Avedon and Ansel Adams.

Special Number

The immediate result of the blacklisting was an increase in membership, with many noted photographers from across the USA joining in support of the organisation, seeing it as being a fight for photography and against political interference. However, as the years went on the cold war hysteria intensified. In 1949 there were further allegations made against the League and Sid Grossman was named in a trial by a former League member who claimed to have been recruited by him into the Communist party. Grossman was blacklisted and had to resign from his position in the League and abandon his teaching career.

Although the accusations against the League were clearly unfounded, in that its activities were photographic rather than political, in the paranoia of the McCarthy era, any well-founded suspicion that some of its prominent members were Communists was enough to prove guilt by association.

Paul Strand left to live in France as things started to become difficult for him, others found difficulties in getting work or passports because of their League membership, and so left. The school had to close; newspapers would no longer mention League events and so audiences for events dropped dramatically. Finally in 1951 it could no longer pay the rent and had to close.

For 15 years the League had provided a vital support mechanism for photographers in New York. It had educated them, given them encouragement and new ideas. It was a place to go to meet and talk with other photographers It had made an important contribution to the growth of photography and public awareness of photography in New York at a time when that city was becoming the world centre for photography. It was a movement in which others – notably pioneers such as Steiglitz, Steichen and others at the Museum of Modern Art – played a part, but it was the Photo League that brought photography to the heart of the city.

How the League would have developed, and the consequences for photography if it were not for the accusation is a matter of pure conjecture. In some ways it was very much a product of the 1930s and the spirit of brotherhood and selfless generosity and idealism of the times. Those involved still- in the main – look back in their eighties and nineties with justified pride at what they achieved, and their work is a legacy we can still enjoy.

Peter Marshall, 2001.

* Photo Notes was something I had in mind when I was editor of the magazine of London Independent Photography, LipService, in the 1990a. It did include images, but only as rather diagrammatic photocopies of photographic prints.

More Liebling

Exactly a year ago I wrote a post Liebling Revisited, prompted by an article that had appeared in the New York Times Lens blog.  And today I find myself writing again, urging you not to miss another feature, this time in Slate, How One Photographer Captured a Changing New York City Over 50 Years in connection with a show at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York until June 6, 2015 and which includes some previously unseen work.

I wrote a whole series of articles about the New York Photo League and a number of the individual photographers who were a part of it at a time when it was little talked about either here on in the US.

At more or less the same time Anne W Tucker, Clare Cass, & Stephen Daiter’s book ‘This Was The photo League: Compassion and the Camera from the Depression to the Cold War, was published by the Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago in 2001, I wrote five page introduction to the Photo League, with a long list of web links to the few articles then on the web about it and a rather longer list to individual photographers who had been associated with it, some better known than others: Morris Engel, Sid Grossman, Arthur Leipzig, Rebecca Lepkoff, Sol Libsohn, Jerome Liebling, Marion Palfi, Rae Russel, Larry Silver, Erika Stone and Dan Weiner. I had by that time already written about some others including Paul Strand, Lewis Hine, Walter Rosenblum, Gene Smith, Berenice Abbott and Aaron Siskind, and promised to write more about some of the others in later posts.

And for some of them I did, though I think I never got around to writing about Jerome Liebling at any length. I’m not sure why, for ‘The People, Yes‘ was certainly a fine book and one I got when it came out in the 1990’s  and it is still available secondhand at a reasonable price. You can find out more about him on the Jerome Liebling web site.

Terry King (1938-2015)

I was shocked last night to hear that an old friend of mine, well known to many photographers in the UK and around the world with an interest in alternative processes, had died yesterday afternoon of a heart attack.


Terry King reads one of his poems at his 70th birthday party

I wrote a post here in August 2008, Terry King at 70, which went into some of my personal involvement with him, and I won’t repeat those stories here. Terry was one of the first in the UK to kick-start interest in the potential of many historic processes with his lectures and workshops, and founded the international APIS (Alternative Processes International Symposium) meetings as well as paying an important role in keeping the Historical Group of the RPS going over the years when closure seemed inevitable.

When I first met him, I found his work using colour transparency film beautifully romantic, and a number of these images were later transformed into the fine gum bichromate images which gained his FRPS. His work and his approach were quite different to my more classical approach, but we shared many views about photography, not least about the dead end of academic theory that was beginning to blight photography – and particularly photographic education – at the time.

Terry’s was always a no-nonsense approach, seeking to cut through mystification. He read the historical accounts as well as the more recent publications, revelling in such details as the ‘raspberry syrup process’ and names like Mungo Ponton, with his magnificent beard,  the Scottish grandfather of the gum bichromate. And his sometimes chemically illiterate hands-on investigations of alternative methods led him to develop new and interesting variants on old processes such as the chrysotype rex and cyanotype rex. The latter provided a way of relieving what we both considered the great weakness of they cyanotype process, that the prints were always blue.

Terry’s company was always stimulating, and his Hands On Pictures web site is an good reflection of his character if a rather messy piece of web design.  One of the links on it is to his 2009 Blurb book, Beware of the Oxymoron, which the preview allows you to view in full with fine images matched by his sonnets and other poems.

My own photographic interests diverged fairly completely from Terry’s in the 1990s, and I saw him relatively infrequently after that time, but it was always a pleasure to meet him – as I last did in September last year, when he had a fine show of his work at the new studios he had just moved to in Kingston. And I have many happy memories of our outings together, sometimes with an 8×10″ camera lent to Terry by a photographer who lived down the road from me. It had it’s first outing with us at the bottom of my garden, photographing (badly) Sweeps Ditch with a lens that didn’t quite cover the format. Later I took pictures with it in Richmond, and helped Terry make some good exposures of the stones at Avebury. At the time I wrote one or two articles for Amateur Photographer about some of our outings along with other photographers to places like Bedlams Bottom. Perhaps one day I’ll dust off those memories and republish them.


Terry King with red umbrella at Pewsey, 1980
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