Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Web views

I’m never entirely sure what web statistics mean, but the web host that I use provides them, so here are some of my figures for 2014.

>Re:PHOTO

The total visits to this blog in 2014: 1,603,778

Total page impressions in 2014: 3,418,124

Of course some of these were visits by robots rather than people, and some may have taken a look at the site and immediately gone away (the average time spent here per visit was almost exactly one minute) but I’m still a little surprised by the figure, which works out at almost 4,400 per day, while the number of page impressions is over 9000 a day. Well, thanks guys.

My London Diary etc

From My London Diary, Nov 2014

It’s hard to give an exact figure for My London Diary, as it can be accessed using several different domain addresses, including mylondondiary.co.uk and mylondondiary.com along with others, some of which are shared with other of my content. My web space also contains some other web sites with my work, as well as a couple of sites hosted for other groups with very low usage – perhaps hundreds or at most a few thousand visits per year. The only significant site which is not entirely my own pictures is the Urban Landscapes site, listed below.

Using the overall figures for the web space less those for >Re:PHOTO and Urban Landscapes gives the following traffic for my own web sites

Total visits in 2014: 1,208,489

Total page impressions in 2014: 2,365,442

Which works out to around 3,300 visitors a day and around 6,480 pages viewed per day. Again figures I find surprising.

Urban Landscapes

A site with work by around a dozen photographers which I curate together with Mike Seaborne.

Dagenham #1, 2004 Peter Marshall
Tanya Ahmed John Davies Philip A Dente Lorena Endara Pablo Fernando Bee Flowers Nicola Hulett Peter Marshall
Paul Anthony Melhado Neal Oshima Paul Raphaelson Rabi Rashmi Roy Herman Schartman Mike Seaborne Luca Tommasi

2014 : 71,310 visits
116,564 page impressions

Which works out at around 195 visits a day with 319 page views, a respectable but not high figure.

My favourite image of Brian Haw, with Babs Tucker at his right. From Taken in London

It’s the figures for some of the less popular sites that I host that make these figures believable. Taken in London is a small site I set up for an exhibition with Paul Baldesare in 2009, and which I’ve left on line with no further publicity since then. I would not expect it to get a great deal of web traffic, and the figures of 10624 visits and 18898 page impressions for the year (29 and 52 per day) are around what I would expect.

Paul Baldesare Laughing women Oxford St

Taken in London was a nice show with some fine street photography by Paul Baldesare, and some of my protest pictures that still don’t look bad, and the web site is well worth a look. Perhaps this mention will boost its figures for 2015!
Continue reading Web views

Phantom

I’ll freely admit to never having heard before of Peter Lik, whose photograph “Phantom” has just sold for a world record $6.5 million. And when I went to his web site to (as it says) ‘DISCOVER THE BEAUTY OF “PHANTOM” FOR YOURSELF‘, I have to say I was not overly impressed.

In the press release about the sale it states:

“Phantom” sold to a private collector for an unprecedented $6.5 million. The purchase also included Lik’s masterworks “Illusion” for $2.4 million and “Eternal Moods” for $1.1 million.

“Phantom” and “Eternal Moods” are black and white representations of Lik’s iconic images “Ghost” and “Eternal Beauty.” Lik is known for his artistic approach to landscape photography and capturing Mother Nature’s vibrant colors. His use of black and white imagery is a rare and compelling departure from his normal style.

Looking at his site I was very much reminded of those many on-line shops I’ve browsed, perhaps in search of a new jacket or t-shirt, though there are t-shirt companies like Philosophy Football that I find rather more artistically interesting.

Of course Lik is a more than competent photographer (and has the certificates on-line to prove it), but frankly I think that anyone who pays more than two figures for one of his prints is lacking in judgement, and it is hard to disagree with anything that Jonathan Jones says in his Guardian article “The $6.5m canyon: it’s the most expensive photograph ever – but it’s like a hackneyed poster in a posh hotel“. Where the frames are worth more than the image.

It’s interesting that Lik’s on-line biography (which fails to mention a single other photographer whose work might have inspired or influenced him) includes the following:

Peter’s images can be viewed in luxurious hotels, prominent estates, leading corporate offices and in all of his galleries around the United States.

So perhaps those ‘hackneyed posters’ were really clichéd Lik originals. And if you can read that ‘biography’ without reaching for a sick bag you have a stronger stomach than me.

In black and white, “Phantom” is perhaps slightly less tacky than “Ghost” which is the colour version, but Jones is spot on the ball when he comments ‘Today, this deliberate use of an outmoded style can only be nostalgic and affected, an “arty” special effect. We’ve all got that option in our photography software.’ Though I suspect Lik’s conversion to black and white, presumably with ‘PhaseOne‘ was a little more sophisticated than Instagram, it does I think emphasize a failure in his vision.

As Jones says “Someone has been very foolish with their money, mistaking the picturesque for high art“. It harks back an argument that was current in photography around a hundred years ago, and for most of us looking back was fairly convincingly brought to an end by the final editions of Camera Work, begun at devoted to the work of Paul Strand. Edward Weston struggled with the issues in his own work in the 1920s, (and wrote about them) as did others in that period, but the debate was essentially over. And of course since then we have had further movements away from the pictorial and “arty”, for example in the later work of Strand, as well as with Walker Evans, Robert Frank and more. We’ve moved too from Ansel Adams (who perhaps seldom entirely escaped the picturesque ) to Robert.

Where Jones misses the point is to condemn ‘fine art photography’ because of the foolishness of some US billionaire and the avarice of the art market. Of course this is not ‘the most valuable “fine art photograph” in history’, and an idiot or a business paying huge money for it or other pictures (whether painted or photographed) doesn’t make it anything more than the most expensive.

In a house spat, yesterday The Guardian published a riposte by Sean O’Hagan ‘Photography is art and always will be’, which also says many things it is hard to disagree with, despite the silliness of its title. Most photography plainly isn’t art and never will be. And while not quite all the names given by O’Hagan to support his argument have a high rating in my personal Pantheon and we disagree about the dividing line between artists and photographers, he is clearly right about the irrelevance of the debate which Jones brings up and right too in his agreement over the worth of that Lik image: “It’s global capitalism – obscenely rich people with more money than sense.”

What matters in the end is not whether anything is art or photography – or in the end whether people chose to work within the photographic tradition or a wider artistic one, but vision and the ability to communicate that vision. As O’Hagan says, work that “makes you look at the world differently“.

Capa Myth Rumbles On

This morning A D Coleman published Episode 18 of his series Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day, a series that with the help of others, particularly J. Ross Baughman, has explored what really happened to Robert Capa and the pictures that he took on Omaha Beach during the first day of the D-Day landings in 1944.

There is now no room for doubt that Capa only made 11 exposures on Omaha Beach on June 6 and the question has now moved on to who fabricated the myth of the darkroom accident and why, and the continuing defence of untenable positions by various of those involved – even now they grudgingly admit there were – or at least may have been – only 11 images.

Of course nothing in this whole saga diminishes Capa as a photographer, and we have always known that he was a great storyteller, and while photographs remain fixed, stories surrounding them always have a habit of growing with the telling, and the legend always affects and can sometimes come to overshadow the actual image.

What distinguishes this story is the speed at which it was elaborated (if inconsistently as Coleman demonstrates) and the mythic status it has gained in the history of photography. And those of us who have taught and written about the history of photography feel a certain betrayal at having been duped and a little shame at having passed it on to our students and readers. (Though in mitigation I think I usually put down the actual appearance of the ‘surviving’ images to factors other than darkroom damage while repeating what was the accepted lie of the loss of other pictures from the beach.)

As a journalist and a photographer, I have a strong conviction that truth matters, although of course recognising the subjectivity of my own viewpoint. What has emerged in Coleman’s investigations seems clear evidence of a deliberate construction of falsehood, of lies that don’t affect the actual photographs but have contributed to their status as icons. And lies that materially affected the careers of some of those involved, probably getting Capa the offer of a permanent job with LIFE, and, as Coleman also pointed out in Episode 17:

Were it not for the myth of the melted emulsions (and its potency as a visual image), Morris would be even more obscure as a relevant cultural reference point today than his boss at LIFE, Wilson Hicks, then the chief picture editor at that magazine, or Tom Hopkinson, editor of the British magazine Picture Post — names you rarely hear today outside of courses in the history of photojournalism. As it stands (or has stood until now), the dramatic emulsion-melt fable functions as the key moment in Morris’s professional life.

There are lies that matter – and lies that don’t. All of us regularly tell plenty of the second type, and most of Capa’s ornamentations in his writing are harmless and amusing – as they were meant to be. This was something different, something deliberately intended to mislead and which succeeded in doing so with such a powerful effect on our perceptions of the history of photography. Even though we now know as a lie, there is no way we can cancel the distortion it has caused.

Days of Night – Nights of Day

Verve Photo, a web site created by photographer and photo editor Geoffrey Hiller “to feature photographs and interviews by the finest contemporary image makers today” – what he calls “The New Breed of Documentary Photographers” often features photographers of interest, though I can’t always see anything very new about some of them. Though that isn’t necessarily to the bad, although in artier circles it’s been fashionable to talk about the death of traditional documentary for at least thirty years, many of those of us actually at the coalface feel there is plenty of life in the old dog yet.

The latest photographer to appear on Verve as I write is Elena Chernyshova, born in the USSR in 1981 and a self-taught photographer who in 2011 received a grant from the Lagardère Foundation (best known for its Hachette Livre the foundation awards grants to young professionals in various media) that enabled her to work in the Siberian city of Norilsk, 400 kilometres north of the Arctic circle, “the 7th most polluted city in the world. The average temperature is -10C, reaching lows of -55C in winter, when for two months the city is plunged into polar night.” It’s hard to understand why people would want to live there, but in Soviet times they had no choice, being sent there as “prisoners of the Gulag.” You can see more of the resulting images in ‘Days of Night – Nights of Day’ on her web site.

It’s a series of beautiful photographs of what seems an impossible life, and for me that opposition is an interesting, sometimes exciting one, though the images left me wanting to know more about the stories behind them.

For just a slightly less inhospitable environment, you might want to look at her series ‘In the Land of Scotts‘ (there are a few places on the site where this talented photographer’s English (or Scots) spelling perhaps needs a little help), though though seriously all of her work in the Documentary, Assignments and Series sections of her site os worth exploring. Clicking on ‘Corporate‘ returns the message ‘Not Found – Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here‘ which amused me too, though perhaps not by intention.

Ultrawide or Panoramic?

Yesterday I met up with an old friend – both of us are getting quite old, though Mike Seaborne is rather younger than me – and we had a drink before going on a short gallery crawl. But in the pub we talked a little about our current work, and I took along a copy of my last book, Rotherhithe & Surrey Docks, which he had not yet seen.

Both Mike and I take panoramic photographs – and you can see quite a few of his on his web site. Although I like Mike’s work, and admire his panoramas, we have some basic differences in how we work although often we photograph the same subject matter. So one set of pictures on his site is from Swanscombe, which I photographed back in the 1980s, and then in the 1990s and early 2000s returned and made panoramic images. Both of us have photographed extensively elsewhere around the Thames Estuary too, although the work on his web site is not panoramic, although it was made by stitching together a pair of images.

There are I think two things that qualify a photograph as panoramic. One is the format, which has to be significantly more elongated than the standard 1.5:1 of the 35mm frame. Many cameras now also allow you to take 16:9 images (1.78:1) which to me doesn’t quite cut it as panoramic – just ‘widescreen’. As a working definition I’ve arbitrarily decided that panoramic format starts at around 2:1, and currently I mainly actually work at 1.9:1.

The swing lens cameras that I worked with on film generally had an aspect ratio of around 2.4:1 and I chose these when I first bought a specialised camera largely because I thought that this was the optimum format for panoramic images. Mike thinks differently and likes to work with images around 3:1, though has produced at least one 360 degree panoramic which was (from memory) around 9:1, about 18 feet long and 2 foot tall.

Of course there are panoramic images that don’t really have an aspect ratio, particularly 360 degree spherical images, which you can only see through an on-screen viewing window. Useful for house agents, but not – so far as I’m concerned – for any serious photography.

But a large aspect ratio doesn’t make a photograph a panorama – it makes it panoramic format.For me the other necessary element of a panorama is a wide angle of view. It has to be a very wide angle, and although I liked using my Hasselblad X-Pan with its normal 45 mm lens, I never felt it was producing panoramas. It was only when I added the 30mm lens that I felt the images were truly panoramic. The 30mm gives a horizontal angle of view of around 94 degrees, which is at about the useful working limit of rectilinear perspective – at greater angles the distortion usually becomes unacceptable. A horizontal angle of view of greater than 90 degrees is often taken as the minimum for a true panorama. Swing lens cameras -such as the Widelux and Horizon models I used, generally gave an angle of view of around 120-130 degrees.

The images I’m making now usually have a horizontal angle of view a little greater than this, at around 146 degrees, but they also have a larger vertical angle of view than those from swing lens cameras, and if uncropped have an aspect ration similar to that of a normal 35mm frame rather than anything more panoramic. The vertical angle of view of a swing lens camera is limited, because a wider vertical view would lead to distortion and unsharpness due to the different film to lens distances away from the middle of the image. The cameras use a curved film (I almost wrote a curved film plane – but of course the film forms a part of a cylinder, with the lens at the centre of the cylinder. Along the centre line of the image there is a constant film to lens centre distance, but as you go up or down from the centre that distance increases, giving greater magnification and also becoming out of focus.

You can avoid these effects by using a fisheye lens – but of course that produces a ‘fisheye’ image. In the pre-digital age there was little you could do but learn to love them, but I seldom did. But thanks to the work of Prof Dr Helmut Dersch and his ‘Panorama Tools‘ and the many free or commercial products that developed from his mathematical insights we can now do almost what we like with them.

In By the Royal London you can see a number of images, some stitched and others converted from a single fisheye original. I’d gone to Whitechapel to photograph an event, but had time before it got going to take a short walk and to retake an image I’d made as a multi-image panorama around 18 months ago. of the new hospital building. One of several attempts is the top image above, shown in its ‘full-frame’ version.

And this is my ‘panoramic crop’ version of that same image. In taking the picture I had to carefully set the left and right boundaries of the frame, and ensure that the camera was level. In the viewfinder I could see the top and bottom centre of the top image, but not precisely where the four corners would be – and there are different ways of processing the image that would give different results, although I’ve generally standardise on the particular method used here. And as you can see, when cropping to the 1.9:1 format I had considerable choice of where to place the frame – the equivalent when taking an image in the old days on a view camera with a rising/falling front. I think the crop improves the image, but in this case I rather like the uncropped image too – and I think despite that ration is still is panoramic, though less contentiously I’d simply call it ultrawide. But really the name doesn’t matter.

For this picture I possibly wanted more of the top of the building and the roof, and tried to get this by stitching a series of images taken in vertical format with a 16mm lens. I hadn’t however taken my tripod with me to lean on and stitching the images proved a little tricky. You can see one attempt on My London Diary, along with around 15 other pictures I took in the area, all shown converted to give straight verticals, but otherwise uncropped. Most aren’t among my best pictures, but most would be improved by a crop to 1.9:1 format. But if I wanted to use the 3:1 ratio that Mike prefers I would have to work differently.
Continue reading Ultrawide or Panoramic?

Dora Maar (1909-1997)

Dora Maar certainly merited a page in the book by Rosalind Krauss, Jane Livingston and Dawn Ades published for the Corcoran Gallery’s 1985 show, L’amour Fou: Photography & Surrealism, a thoroughgoing examination of the role of photography in the Surrealist movement, which I saw the following year in London’s Hayward Gallery.

But the page – a brief biography, ends with the statement “(Dora Maar has declined permission to reproduce her photographs in this book.)” Maar was then 76, and the reasons for her refusal are not known, though she had given up photography over 40 years earlier and turned to painting. She does appear in the book’s pictures, but only as the subject for a well-known solarised portrait by Man Ray.

Should one want to speculate on Maar’s reasons, the biography by Mary Ann Caws, Dora Maar With And Without Picasso: A Biography, published in 2000, three years after Maar’s death aged 89 might offer clues. I’ve not read it, but there is an interesting edited extract online from The Guardian.

Maar’s work undoubtedly would have been a valuable addition to that book and show, certainly rather more central to it than some that was included. You can judge for yourself on the web in Venice : Dora Maar Despite Picasso, and Dora Maar – Photographer and Muse. There is also a page from Wikipedia worth reading (and states she returned to photography in the 1980s) which has some further links, including to A World History of Art.

The video from the Cleveland Museum of Art, Artist Spotlight: Dora Maar || Forbidden Games: Surrealist and Modernist Photography which prompted this post is in some respects curious and perhaps unfortunately shows rather little of her work and rather too much of “art collector and filmmaker David Raymond, whose once-beloved photograph are now owned and on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art as part of the exhibition, Forbidden Games: Surrealist and Modernist Photography, “, on view there until 11 Jan 2015, entry free.

My thanks to Peggy Sue Amison for posting a link to this video on Facebook.

Lewis Baltz 1945-2014

I met Lewis Baltz when I went to a workshop led by him at Paul Hill’s Photographers’ Place in Derbyshire around 1979, having been greatly impressed by his work in ‘The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California‘ which I had seen in books and magazines from the US. Along with Robert Adams and Stephen Shore his work has had a great influence on my photographic practice.

He brought the page proofs of ‘Park City’ with him to the workshop and we were able to compare them with his original prints, and I rather put my foot it in when I told him I felt that some of the book versions were an improvement on his original prints. He had only just received these and I think would probably have rather spent the time looking through them on his own than with us. I got even more into his bad books when I commented on the tonal problems of using the ultra-slow b/w films he was working with that were not designed for pictorial photography. They were problems that I experienced too. Then he had been using some ultra-slow Kodak recording film, but later he moved to Technical Pan, and that was a beast I spent some years trying to tame to my satisfaction. When it was good it was very, very good, but…

I don’t think he looked at the work of any of us taking part in the workshop – rather unusually, but it was a short workshop, certainly if he did I remember nothing he said about the work I had taken from my Hull project, but he was very generous in showing and talking about the work of the other ‘New Topographics‘, including some who were hardly known in the UK. I think it was him who got me excited about the work of Robert Adams, as well as that of Anthony Hernandez and also Chauncey Hare, with whom I later had a brief correspondence. I’ve not met Baltz to talk with since that workshop, but his death still came as something of a shock; someone I’d once spent a few fairly intensive days with and a man a few months younger than me.

I well remember standing in a London bookshop a few months later with Park City in my hand, looking though the images and trying to steel myself to buy it. But here in the UK it was I think £50, roughly a week’s pay for me, and I reluctantly put it back on the shelf. Perhaps I would have gone without food for a few days, but it would be hard to explain to my wife and two sons. Of course it would have been a good investment.

I still have the signed copy of ‘Nevada’ he sold at the workshop, and I did buy Chauncey Hare‘s Interior America, which was going cheap in a sale at the Photographers’ Gallery shortly afterwards, perhaps I was almost the only photographer here who appreciated his work. I wrote about him and the book perhaps 10 years ago on About Photography, and was pleased when a new and larger book of his work was published in 2009.

Baltz remained very much in the eye of the photographic public and I followed his work in the pages of some of the more expensive photographic magazines and at exhibitions such as Paris Photo, but there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of his later work on line. George Eastman House has a largish collection of his very early work and there is more information on American Suburb X. There is an interesting related note at SFMoMA, who also have the best on line collection of his work up until 1979 I’ve found, although only around a quarter of the 81 works listed have images available.

You can also find some quotations from him on the web, including this:

I believed it was necessary to investigate photography, dismantle it, jettison all the non-essential components, and begin again with a stripped down but more powerful idea of what is, or could be “photographic”.

and

I’ve thought that when people appear in a picture, they automatically are perceived as the subject, irrespective of how they are represented. I wanted the only person in the picture to be the viewer.

Perhaps once you have stripped it down it isn’t too easy to know which way to go. The second quotation was a point of view in my own mind for years, though perhaps I have got over it now, and was perhaps behind my thinking for the photographic show I curated back in 2001, Cities of Walls, Cities of People.

WPP and WPO

The 2014 World Press Photo exhibition is currently showing at the Royal Festival Hall in London until Wednesday 26 November 2014, open every day from 10.00 to 23.00 and free. Perhaps surprisingly it doesn’t get a mention on the front page of their web site, but it isn’t too hard to discover on an inside page. Of course you can also see the entire collection of winning images online at World Press Photo, along with the previous versions.

It’s easy to knock WPP and other similar contests, but in various ways I think this is probably the best of the bunch, and there are some surprising images in the 143 on show, as well as a few others that made me think “oh no, not again.”

Another ‘World’ organisation in a similar area is the WPO, or World Photography Organisation which appears to be largely a Sony marketing exercise, though it does have something to offer to non-Sony users too. I’ve not thought too highly of their

They have videos on YouTube, some of which are more than disappointing. I watched one, and then saw the second comment on it, “There’s 18 sec of my life I’ll never get back” and could only agree. Except I think it was 21 seconds as there was an advert you had to watch for 3 seconds before you could click to close.

But I did find one that I thought was worth watching (and there may be others), IMPACT: Photographers share the most impactful moments of their photographic careers, though I shudder at the word impactful (see Common Errors in English Usage.) You can find the video here, and it isn’t surprising it is worth watching as the 8 photographers who talk and show pictures are from Panos Pictures, a “photo agency specialising in global social issues, driven by the vision and commitment of its photographers and staff. Panos is known internationally for its fresh and intelligent approach and respected for its integrity and willingness to pursue stories beyond the contemporary media agenda. ”

It’s all true too, except it should perhaps that second sentence should start “Panos is nothing like as well known internationally as it should be” and that it does a considerably finer job than some of the better-known names in photography. I’m not entirely convinced either that it is a good thing for them to be “proudly partnered with Sony through their new Global Imaging Ambassadors programme” though their participation will undoubtedly raise Sony’s game. It is actually a very interesting venture and the web site is worth exploring.

Prize Portraits

The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the London National Portrait Gallery has often proved controversial, and this year is no exception. The show opens today, Thursday 13 November 2014 and is at the gallery until 22 February 2015, and entry is free. I’ve not seen the actual images, and don’t feel a great compulsion to rush to the gallery, but doubtless I’ll find myself with a free half hour in the Trafalgar Square area in the next couple of months and will pop in to have a look.

From some reproductions on-line, the winning entry, by David Tatlow, described as an “intimate portrait of his baby son being introduced to a dog” is certainly rather disappointing, the kind of picture that if I’d taken it I would have kicked myself for not having done it rather better. As the photographer comments “Everyone was a bit hazy from the previous day’s excess’ after a midsummer party”, and on-line at Taylor Wessing it does seem to me to be more a portrait of a photographer’s hangover than of his baby son. Reactions I’ve heard from other photographers have been largely unprintable. But then the reproduction of it on the Taylor Wessing page is a shocking travesty – and I hope they will quickly replace it. Seen in the Evening Standard – as I did last night reading it on the top deck of a bus in a London gridlock – it is actually a far better picture!

The contest this year attracted 4,193 pictures from 1,793 photographers. At £26 per picture, that brings in a considerable sum of money, my calculator makes it £109,018. The prizes add up to £19,000, and either my maths is wrong or this seems a pretty poor bet to me. Far better take your £26 to a roulette wheel.

You can see more of the 60 selected images on-line at the NPG, along with some technical details, and also, thanks to Portrait Salon, a slightly larger selection from the 4,133 rejected images made by Christiane Monarchi (Photomonitor), Martin Usbourne (Hoxton Mini Press) and Emma Taylor (Creative Advice Network). Overall their choices seem a little more interesting from what I’s so far been able to see. And I am sure that there would be work from many of the other over 1,600 photographers who entered that was at least as worthy of showing as that in either of the shows. It really is a lottery.

Portrait Salon was at Four Corners Galley in Bethnal Green from 6th-11th Nov and has future showings at Fuse in Bradford (Dec 4-27), Oriel in Colwyn Bay (Jan 9 – Feb 9), Napier University Edinburgh (19Feb – 16 Apr) and Parkside Gallery Birmingham (6-31 July) and also in Bristol.

It’s a competition I’ve never thought seriously of entering, in part because although I take very many pictures of people I’ve never considered myself a portrait photographer. More importantly I’ve never been a great believer in photographic competitions, and after a few in my early years (some of which I even won) have generally avoided them. I reject the idea of treating photographs like the Eurovision Song Contest or Miss World or prize pigs. Though of course there are some bad photographs, some incompetent photographs and a great many more that have little or no interest for me.

And it’s that last phrase that is important. Judging such competitions will always be a very personal matter and any different group of judges would have picked a different set of images. It’s a shame that two of the five judges for the Taylor Wessing prize were ‘in-house’ from the NPG and a third came from the sponsoring law firm; the prize would certainly have greater credibility from a more independent panel.

In some past years, the NPG prize has been criticised as a competition for who can produce the best Rineke Dijkstra rip-off. Some years so much so that it rather seemed misleading if not even fraudulent not to have added this as one of the contest rules. At least this year’s winner, whatever one thinks of it, has broken that mould.

It’s certainly always been a contest dictated by whatever was the current fashion, and run in an organisation that really seems to have little understanding of photography. They do have some great photographs in their collection, but every time I visit I find myself appalled by some of the other work I see on the walls, tired, vapid and often highly fashionable.

But I also feel the whole idea of the photographic portrait questionable, though I can think of some great examples – such as Stieglitz’s portrait of Georgia O’Keefe, though of course here I’m not referring to a single image. But relatively few photographic portraits seem to me to have much more significance that the small rectangles we have on our passports or ID cards, and it is only when they are subsumed into some greater project – such as August Sander‘s – that they gain depth and greater meaning.

New York Chinatown

If you’ve not already seen them, do take a look at Bud Glick‘s pictures of New York City’s Chinatown in the 1980s which were featured in an article byDL Cade on Petapixel yesterday. There is a generous selection with the feature but more on the photographer’s own site.

Like many of us, Glick is finding that scanning his old negatives gives them a new life, enabling him to print those that were previously unprintable and finding others than at the time were neglected. Things that may have seen rather ordinary or insignificant at the time can gain a new perspective thirty years on when so much of what was photographed has disappeared or drastically changed.

As Cade writes “Images he overlooked in the past now jump out at him as culturally significant, and Photoshop allows him to salvage some he would otherwise not be able to use.” The feature also has some comments by Glick, but having read it it is worth going to his web site to see more pictures.

The other work on Glick’s web site is more recent, and I particularly enjoyed seeing his set of images of Paris, a city I’ve often visited at this time of year for the tremendous amount of photography that is shown there in the Mois de la Photo and Mois de la Photo – Off every other year, and of course what is probably the world’s most important fair for photography dealers, Paris Photo. There are links to the shows I’ll be missing on LensCulture, although of course its meeting the photographers and so many others with with an consuming interest in our medium – like Jim Casper at LensCulture – that really make Paris in November so rewarding. You can read a series of articles starting at these links about some of my earlier visits in 2012 and 2010, and on The Eye of Photography (L’Oeil de la Photographie) can read the list of openings you are missing tonight – and there will be further similar posts.

This year, for the first time for quite a while, I didn’t feel up to it, not least because I’ve been so busy with events in London. Perhaps – if things quieten down here, which seems unlikely at the moment – I’ll pay a visit to Paris just to enjoy the city in the spring instead.

Paris 2006 Peter Marshall (taken in November on my way to Paris Photo)

Like Glick, I’ve also found that scanning my old negatives gives them a new life, and I’ve put many of them on the web, as well as into collections self-published on Blurb. As well as the books on the Lea Valley, Hull and London, the series on London’s Docklands now has four volumes and I’m working on the fifth. And there are already a couple on Paris, one in black and white and another in colour, from the 1980s. All the books are still available from Blurb (and most more cheaply to UK customers direct from me) and although none is likely to become a best-seller, I continue to get occasional sales. Much of the work in the books can also be seen on the web.
Continue reading New York Chinatown