Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Richard Benson

A Facebook post by Dayanita Singh who I mentioned in the previous post and which was reposted to me by curator Peggy Sue Amison reminded me of a fine site by Richard Benson, The Printed Picture, which I’d not looked at for some years. Indeed there is much on the site I’ve never looked at all as the entire talk by him on it takes 8 hours, but is fortunately split into short digestible sections such as ‘Black and White Inkjet Printing‘. Text and some examples accompany each of these short videos. It isn’t a ‘how-to guide’ and some of the technical details are rather vague, but it is a grand overview of everything to do with printing images from marks on cave walls to modern times. Be warned it is an addictive site and you may find – like me – you spend more time on it than you really have.

The text on the site comes from the book, The Printed Picture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008 and still apparently available from the MoMA store – though cheaper elsewhere) and an exhibition of the same name at The Museum of Modern Art in 2008-9, so is not completely up to date with the latest developments in ink-jet printing.

Richard Benson started as a printer which led him to take an interest in photography, and as his biography at the Pace/MacGill Gallery (where you can also see his photographs) states “has been instrumental in revolutionizing the technologies and standards for photographic reproduction in ink“. Among many fine works that have benefited from his expertise are over a dozen Lee Friedlander monographs and the monumental ‘The Work of Atget‘, 4 superbly produced volumes published by MoMA in 1981-5. But almost every finely reproduced photographic book in the last 40 or more years owes something either first or second-hand to his work. You can read an interview with him by John Paul Caponigro, first published in 1997 in View Camera magazine on Caponigro’s site.

Indian summer & Lala Deen Dayal

I read the article India’s 10 best contemporary photographers you should know on World Photography Day and it set me thinking about Indian photography, and also about lists such as this. World Photography Day may have passed you by – it almost did me – but it is a project started by a young Australian photographer in 2009, “with the dream to unite local and global communities in a worldwide celebration of photography.” The day chosen was August 19th, the anniversary of Daguerre’s patent being purchased by the French government and announced as a gift “Free to the World” in 1839. Except for Britain, where Daguerre had separately acquired a patent for it 5 days earlier. So it isn’t perhaps a very suitable date for those of us in the UK to celebrate.

But there were a number of events to mark World Photography Day, although I could only find five – and those rather obscure – marked on the world map on the web site. One not listed was at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts in Mumbai, where Drawn From Light, an exhibition of the early photographic history of India opened, with one of the ten from the list, Dayanita Singh, as guest of honour. There was also a display of 40 vintage cameras, including a daguerreotype camera, part of Dilish Parekh’s collection of 4,425 cameras. And I sometimes think I have far too many.

The exhibition is from the Alkazi Collection of Photography, which is extensive, and has formed the basis of a number of publications, but has relatively little material online.

Some years ago I wrote a series of articles on early photography in India, mainly covering the work of British photographers who worked there in the nineteenth century. Before working on that I had hardly been aware of the splendid work of Lala Deen Dayal. A few years later on this site I wrote a little about him again, including this paragraph:

Lala Deen Dayal (1844-1905) is one of relatively few photographers to have been honoured by a postage stamp issue, and I was very pleased to receive a commemorative album from his great granddaughter who runs the web site about his work containing examples of the 500 Rupee stamp issued in November 2006. Few photographers can claim an edition of 0.4 million!

There are still a number of links on the web to the pieces I wrote about him and several other photographers working in India, even though these have been unavailable for seven or eight years, for example at Harappa.com, which does still contain much interesting material about India and Indian photography. So I thought I might revisit the article about Lala Deen Dayal, and try and bring it a little up to date. Mostly it is as I wrote it in 2003. Unfortunately I’ve been unable to find some of the actual photographs I wrote about that were available on the web back then – please post links in the comments if you can do so.

Lala Deen Dayal

Part 1: Key Facts

Chronology

1844 Lala Deen Dayal was born to a Jain family, following one of the ancient religions of India (dating back almost 3000 years) in 1844 in Sardana, near Meerut, a small town in north India.
1857-8 Meerut was the scene of the first serious rioting in the 1857-8 uprising (the ‘Indian Mutiny’) and the events will doubtless have made a strong impression on the 13-year old Deen Dayal.
ca 1861 Dayal studied enginering at the Thomason Civil Engineering College in Roorkee (now the University of Roorkee), the first engineering college in the British Empire (and only the third in the world) set up in 1847 by to train Indians to provide the roads, railways and other infrastructure needed for the exploitation of the country’s resources.
Dayal was apparently a brilliant student, covering the five-year course in only three years, emerging with a first class degree and an almost perfect mark. It was while here in 1863 at the age of 19 that he first learnt photography.
1866 After graduating, he started working for the Indian Civil Service at the Department of Works Secretariat in Indore, as a draftsman and estimator. He continued to photograph and was encouraged by some of the British civil servants, in particular Sir Henry Daly, the Agent to the Governor General for Central India.
1875 Daly commissions Dayal to photograph the royal visit by the Prince of Wales. Later he takes him with him to photograph on a trip to Bundelkhand.
1882/3 Dayal returns to Bundelkhand with the new Agent, Sir Lepel Griffin.
1885 Dayal photographs the Viceroy of India, Lord Dufferin, and his wife, Lady Dufferin. They are so impressed by the quality of his work that they appoint him as official photographer. Dayal resigns his civil service job to become a full time photographer. He moves to Hyderabad where he becomes court photographer to the Mir Mahbub Ali Pasha, the sixth Nizam and opens a photo studio at the nearby military station of Secunderabad, the largest in India, where there was a great demand for portraits. The Nizam awards Dayal with a knighthood for his photographs of him, giving him the title of Raja Musavir Jung (‘Bold photographic warrior’), although Dayal only uses the first name, becoming Raja Deen Dayal.
1886 Eighty-nine of Dayal’s pictures are printed by the carbon process to illustrate Griffin’s book ‘Famous Monuments of Central India’ (London, 1886)
late 1880s Opens studios in Bombay and Indore. His two sons, Lala Gyan Chand and Raja Dharam Chand both work for the business, Raja Deen Dayal & Sons, as photographers.
1892 Opens Zenana (women only) studio in Hyderabad, supervised by the wife of the Times Correspondent, Mrs Kenny Livick.
1893 his display of views of India received a special award at the World Colombian Exposition in Chicago.
1897 Queen Victoria granted the firm a Royal Warrant.
1902 Dayal photographs the visit of Lord and Lady Curzon to the Nizam. Lord Curzon was the Viceroy (governor) of India, and his wife was an American heiress, daughter of Levi Leiter, the founder of Marshall Field’s. Some of Dayals best-known images show their tiger shoot.
1904 His son, Raja Dharam Chand dies.
1905 Dayal dies. The business is continued by his surviving son, Lala Gyan Chand, and later his grandsons, including Shri Ami Chand (Amichand Deen Dayal.)
1912 Nizam Mahbub Ali Khan dies.
1919 Lala Gyan Chand dies. For the next 15-20 years the business declines until Ami Chand is old enough to turn its fortunes around. His work includes an extensive record of the era of Nizam VII Mir Osman Ali Khan.
1987-92 Amichand’s daughter Hemlata Jain organises exhibitions of the work by Dayal using prints her father had preserved, in Bombay, London and Pune.
1984 Amichand dies. His sons continue to run the photographic studio in Hyderbad.
2002 The Deen Dayal web site, is put on line by his great grand daughter Hemlata Jain. Much of the information in this feature comes from this site.

Part 2: A Deserved Renown

His reputation

Although Lala Deen Dayal had an immense reputation in India as well as being recognised abroad during his lifetime, there are relatively few mentions his work in the main histories of photography. Only since the exhibitions around 1990 and in recent years with major shows on Indian photography in general has his work begun to get some of the recognition it deserves.

Part of the reason for this may lie in his identification as a photographer of the colonial era. Following the successful completion of the struggle for independence in 1947 there was perhaps a desire to forget the excesses of the past, some of which are evident in his work.

Foundations of success

Dayal’s success was founded on technical excellence and hard work. He was apparently a deeply devout and hard-working man, often putting in an eighteen hour day to ensure the success of his business. The evidence of the pictures very much shows him to have been a perfectionist, striving for every detail to be perfect.

Groups

The meticulous attention to detail is very much evident in the group photographs that he made. One of the more fascinating was taken on May 22, 1892, which shows Nawab Ghalib Jung and friends, including several European (or, most likely, American) women in white dresses with white hats, in a group of around twenty people gathering around and apparently listening with delight to that new-fangled state of the art American treadle phonograph, complete with long tubes to carry the sounds to the more privileged of their ears. It is a carefully posed group with a lively sense of animation.

The Nizam’s Palace

Dayal’s India was very much an India of colonial occupation. Many of his portraits were of the soldiers, civil servants and their wives who were in charge of the country. They were the ones who could afford his services. As court photographer to the Nizam, he was working for a man supported by the colonial administration, with a lifestyle that was very much modelled on the English upper classes. His palace (photographed by Dayal) was very much in a European style, both in architecture and in its furnishings.

His view of the interior of the Nizam’s palace shows a galleried sitting room with grand curtains and heavily ornate chandeliers, in the most extravagant of nineteenth century European taste. The decorated ceilings and walls, and ornate padded furniture all show the Nizam’s immense wealth. Dayal’s careful choice of camera position and the fine natural lighting, doubtless with some help in the darkroom as well as possibly the use of mirrors to direct more light towards the ceiling make this an impressive and very clear picture.

Of course there are Indian aspects in the photographs of the Nizam and his court, with some of the visitors in Indian dress, but at times it seems a parody of the excesses of a European aristocracy rather than an authentic nationalism. Dayal himself of course was simply the photographer, engaged to record the events, and whether the occasion was a soiree or a tiger shoot he did so with great care and precision.

Part 3: Indian Views

Street View of Ulwar (This image is no longer on line so far as I can see.)

Dayal’s ‘Street View of Ulwar’ is taken from a high viewpoint looking along a main street of the town the capital of Ulwar state (now known as Almar.) On the left side of the image is the shaded side of the street; Dayal is roughly at the level of the tops of the roof of the nearby building, perhaps a temple. On the right of the picture, the deep street is fringed by shops with taller light stone buildings behind them.

The sunlit street is busy with people, in its centre what looks like an early car, although the date of 1882-6 makes this impossible – perhaps it is a rear view of a horse-drawn vehicle. The shops have awnings to shade them from the sun and the street is busy with people. In the distance we see a fort, possibly the photographer and his camera are standing on top of a similar one. Further on, we see the mountains towering above the town, and, above them a dramatic cloudscape.

Chichai Waterfall near Rewalala, 1882 (see p140 Zahid R Chaudhary’s Afterimage of Empire- AE- which can be viewed on line)

Dayal choose a dramatic viewpoint for his picture of the ‘Chichai waterfall’ in 1882, making the most of a drop front on his camera to put the horizon very high in the view.

His viewpoint is actually from a slightly higher point than the top of the falls, giving a view back along the top of the plain along which the river runs until reaching this apparently enormous drop. The slow shutter speed used – probably something between 5 and 20 seconds – gives the water a blurred, almost ethereal quality that increases as it falls and perhaps spreads out giving more spray.

River at Indore (a similar image at p128 in AE)

In contrast, the river at ‘Indore’ is smooth and glassy as it flows through a grove of palm trees, languorously curving out over the placid stream (again an effect increased by the long exposure used.) The diffuse light emphasizes the near-silhouettes of the trunks and fronds against the plain sky.

Daulatabad Fort (This paticular image not on line, others of the fort here.)

The east scarp of ‘Daulatabad Fort’ rises steep and unassailable ninety metres from the stream below, and the photographer has chosen a viewpoint where he appears to be hovering in mid-air to view the scene. In the foreground, filling most of the right of the picture, it towers above the more distant plain in the left half of the picture, starting far below the camera and stretching into the distance.

The scene is a thrilling combination of horizontal and vertical, with an aerial perspective that enhances its effect, and creates a hovering bulk of distant mountain on the horizon below a radiant sky. The fort, built by Hindus in the 12th century in this imposing position, was one of the many properties belonging to Dayal’s employer, the Nizam of Hyderabad.

Part 4: Elephants & Tigers

Elephant Battery in Action at Fort Jhansi (No longer on line.)

Some of the more engaging of Dayal’s pictures – at least to a western eye – are those of elephants in action. The broad sweep of landscape below the fort in his ‘Elephant Battery in Action’ at Fort Jhansi, with clouds of smoke, groups of men, elephants, bullocks and cannon create the effect of some the filming of some battle epic.

Shikar – the Tiger Shoots

Dayal also recorded a number of the Nizam’s tiger shoots. These included one arranged for Lord and Lady Curzon in 1902, which shows the ‘shooting party’ of nine men and two ladies arranged across the base of a tree in front of the dead body of a tiger. Apparently Lady Curzon had minutes previously witnessed the death of the Nizam’s head tiger hunter, who had unwisely dismounted from his elephant and been leapt upon by a tiger. (Two different images from the shoot on the British Library site.)

Among the other pictures of this subject on the Deen Layal site is a picture of the Nizam himself under a wall covered with the skins and some heads of the tigers he had shot, probably around fifteen or twenty, standing proud with his gun under his arm.

Also on the Deen Dayal site are a number of fine portraits by Dayal, and in the ‘Heritage’ section, images of ancient monuments from various towns and cities in India. Fairly large numbers of some of Dayal’s pictures were probably produced, especially for those that he made for the Nizam, who apparently often presented his visitors with albums of them. He also sent an album to Queen Victoria, who was delighted to receive these images of a vital part of her empire she never visited. The largest existing collection of Raja Deen Dayal photographs is apparently housed at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in Mumbai, having been bought by the Indian Government.

Dayal’s career as a photographer was long and distinguished, fully meriting the Urdu verse written about him by the Nizam, which – according to the Deen Dayal web site can be translated as:

“In the art of picture making, Skill surpassing all, A master of masters is Lala Deen Dayal.”

Exit re-enters stage left

Exit was the most significant single documentary project in UK photography in the 1970s (if not in the whole century), and although it gained some publicity – and a showing at the Side Gallery in Newcastle (home to most of the rest of significance in the genre in this country) in 1982, as well as publication by the Open University of ‘Survival Programmes in Britain’s Inner Cities‘ (ISBN-10: 0335101119) in the same year, it soon disappeared in the morass of theory than engulfed British photography in the lost final decades of the twentieth century.

Documentary was old hat. Seen as outdated, lacking in discursive mumbo-jumbo the project failed to be recognised and legitimised by academic flummery. And although the OU got some funding from the Arts Council, the two testimonials on its rear cover come from Peter Townsend, Professor of Social Policy at the University of Bristol, the leading sociologist of the era and Chris Hamnett, Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the OU. The academic photography establishment preferred to hold its nose and look the other way, largely towards its own navels.

This was work in a tradition that many – largely those who were ignorant of it and had failed to understand it had rejected. But it was also fresh, compelling and highly political. And it was probably most importantly the political nature – telling the truth about our inner cites – that made it too hot to handle for the major galleries that should have shown it.

There were notable images in the book, taken between 1974 and 1979, by all three photographers, Nicholas Battye, Chris Steele-Perkins and Paul Trevor, though for me it was particularly the work of Trevor in Liverpool that stood out. Steele-Perkins writes informatively about the group in Photoworks (via David Hofmann who I thank for posting the link on Facebook) and includes this about how they divided up the country:

We all did some work in London as we all lived there, and we all did some work in Glasgow, but most of Paul’s time was spent in Liverpool, Nick’s in Birmingham and mine in Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Belfast.

His article also gives a good idea of the shoe-string nature of the project, and how the photographers worked, and of the importance of the interviews along with the photographs. The first image on his Magnum portfolio is from Belfast in 1979.

I first met Paul Trevor in the’80s and went to several events where he showed and talked about his work, in Survival Programmes as well as in East London and in India, and I was highly impressed. But it was only in 1997 when I reviewed a book giving a very one-sided view of the magazine ‘Camerawork*‘ (not to be confused with Camera Work!) which Trevor had been one of the nucleus from its first issue in 1976 that I got to know him personally. I sent him my draft review for comments, and as well as correcting some of my misconception he also contributed his own review to the small magazine, LIPService, I was then editing for London Independent Photography. You can read the text of my review for ‘Visual Anthropology Review‘ on-line and the final article with illustration here if you have a Wiley Online Library account. Though why they should charge for accessing my work without giving me a share is something of a mystery.

The following year ‘Visual Anthropology Review‘ published a feature with 20 of my pictures from the Notting Hill Carnival with text by George Mentore (my name does not appear in the abstract – and again you pay but I get nothing) and also an article by Dale Newberry, ‘Photography and the visualization of working class lives in Britain‘ (same terms) in which Trevor’s work was featured, and I was rather surprised to find how little known his work was at that time in the USA. I got the front cover of the magazine, with a rather better image by Trevor on the back.

More recently, I wrote about his work in Liverpool and the book and show there in 2011, Like you’ve never been away. It’s a nice book, with much better photographic printing than Survival Programmes, though with its portrait format some of the images disappear rather disastrously down the gutter.

Grain, the new Photography Hub and Network for the West Midlands at the also new The Library of Birmingham, has recently acquired a collection of over 250 vintage prints from Exit Photography Group as a gift from the the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation who funded the original project, although I think there are only 3 pictures – one from each photographer currently on line. There is a large collection – 125 pictures – of Paul Trevor’s work from Liverpool – reproduced from his contact sheets in a rather strange sepia – on Flickr.

* Camerawork is now apparently rare. I just found a bookseller offering a copy of a single issue for £32.95 (+ postage). I have an almost complete set and gave away some spare copies… You will be lucky to find a copy of Survival Programmes for less than £100 too.

Safeguarding Truth

An excellent article published yesterday in Ochre, Safeguarding Truth in Photojournalism: Ami Vitale’s Survival Guide which looks at how the way in which some of Vitale’s images were appropriated and misused on the web, and how this hit the photographer:

“It literally stopped me in my tracks,” she said in an interview with Ochre. “There was a week I thought this was enough: I’m quitting. And then I realized that this was actually just a call to action to try to educate people, protect yourself and the people you photograph as best you can.”

The article goes on to explain the steps that she took, along with others who helped her to do this, and has a great deal of good advice and links to resources. (Ami Vitale is one of the photographers mentioned in the previous post, Inge Morath & Danube Revisited.)

I posted about the misuse of her images and her response here in May, in Image Abuse, and much of the advice in her survival guide has also been covered here in previous posts, though it is good to have it all put together in the Ochre article.

She says “I hated watermarks before. I thought they were so tacky.” I thought the same, and came very reluctantly to my decision to use a relatively discreet visible copyright message in 2010 after some very much more minor problems with the unauthorised usage of my own work, though I’d advocated their use in a post here a year earlier. Virtually every image I’ve posted on the web since then has carried this visible watermark, though sometimes its been midway through the year when I’ve got around to changing the date.

Much earlier I made sure that every image carried my contact details in the metadata, though that too often gets stripped out. With my watermark along the bottom of the image that too is easily removed, but for anyone to do so would be clear evidence of guilt, and my experience is that most people who use images without consent don’t remove it. Most unauthorised use of images on the internet is by people who just aren’t aware of copyright or think it doesn’t apply to their use.

There are a few aspects of the Ochre article that relate to the USA and its peculiar copyright system, which makes the enforcing of copyright financially non-viable in the US unless photographers register their images with the US Copyright office, while permitting punitive damages for registered images. Its a system that non-US photographers can use as well, but the surprising fact quoted in the article is that “less than 3% of professional photographers surveyed by the American Society of Media Photographers in 2010 registered their work.”

There is also some information about the PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System) Registry which I mentioned back in 2008, and again three years ago in PLUS Makes Progress , and it is apparently still making progress – if it does seem rather slow. You can register for free – as I did in 2011 – and this enables you to be found in the registry from your name or some other information. But to get real benefit from it you will need to become a supporting member – and for individual photographers -“small businesses with one employee, the contribution of $125 per year (reduced to $75 per year for members of participating trade associations)” may not seem worthwhile.

I was also very pleased to hear of yesterday’s US court judgement which affirmed the damages of $1.2m awarded to photographer Daniel Morel after AFP and Getty stole his images of the Haiti earthquake. The court did make one minor adjustment, ruling that there was insufficient evidence that Getty was guilty of half of the DCMA violations, which will same them just a few pennies. I can’t pretend to understand all of the court ruling, but – as in the earlier trial – it is certainly damning. I’ve never understood why AFP and Getty felt the case was worth fighting and didn’t come to a settlement with the photographer as soon as they discovered what had happened. Presumably they just thought they were big enough to bully their way through, though perhaps the award and presumably the costs they will have to pay might make them think differently.

I have posted before about the Morel case, but there is more information on Jeremy Nicholl’s The Russian Photos blog, and though as I write he has yet to respond to the latest news, doubtless he soon will. His last post in January about the AFP/Getty appeal estimated that the case will cost AFP and Getty to well over $10m, most of which will go to the lawyers – including those who presumably told them the case was worth pursuing. For the lawyers it certainly was!

Inge Morath & Danube Revisited

I have to admit to something of a blind spot so far as Inge Morath is concerned. I knew the name of course, and that she was one of the first women to join Magnum, a little after Eve Arnold, in 1953 (becoming a full member in 1955.) She had earlier met Capa when she went to Paris as a writer working with Ernst Haas in 1949 and had then worked for Magnum as an editor and researcher before coming to London.

She started taking her own pictures in 1951 and she worked for Simon Guttman at Report, first as a secretary and then as a photographer before returning to Paris and Magnum. Russell Miller in Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History says she did the little jobs that the men didn’t want and that her first, of judges in rose contests, paid only $100. That would be worth over $900 allowing for inflation, not a bad little job – how times have changed for photographers.

Looking at her work on Magnum, there are certainly pictures that I remember having seen and admire, but none that I would have looked at and recognised as her work; I might well have thought they were probably by a Magnum photographer but I don’t see any particular strong personal style. Perhaps it might be more apparent if I’d ever owned one of the various books she produced.

After her death in 2002, Magnum established the Inge Morath Award, made annually to one or more exceptional young women photographers, and her family set up the Inge Morath Foundation the following year to preserve and share her legacy.

I’ve for some time been following the progress of Danube Revisited, the Inge Morath Truck Project, a photographic road trip taking a travelling exhibition of Morath’s work from the Danube area along by the river in a converted 7.5T truck, together with nine of the winners of the Inge Morath Award who have worked as a collective taking pictures and promoting “the power and potential of photography through night projections, artist talks, photo forums and engaging in cultural exchange with institutions and organizations along the route.”

The nine are Olivia Arthur, Emily Schiffer, Lurdes R Basolí, Claire Martin, Claudia Guadarrama, Ami Vitale, Jessica Dimmock, Mimi Chakarova and Kathryn Cook, and they hope ” to discover for themselves the region that meant so much to Inge Morath throughout her life” and see “the River itself becoming a metaphor for the kind of long-term, sustained international projects to which they have devoted their careers. ” Kickstarter was used to fund the project, with an appeal for $50,000 raising $59, 563 from 323 backers.

On the Danube Revisited site you can see a great portfolio of pictures by Morath, from the region where she began work in 1958, visiting again over the years but only finally being able to complete her project after the fall of the Soviet Union gave freer access in the 1990s – and her book ‘Danube’ was published in 1995.

The links at the left of the Danube Revisited pages currently show portfolios of earlier work by the participating photographers, but you can see 60 pictures from Danube Revisited in a New Yorker portfolio, and you can also see pictures and many links on Tumblr.

Vanessa -no longer invisible

New York Times Lens blog has a nice piece by Rena Silverman, No Longer an Invisible Photographer about Vanessa Winship and her current show at Madrid’s Fundación Mapfre; even if you can’t get to Madrid you can take a ‘virtual tour‘ on their web site from outside the gallery and go in and see the work on the walls. The audio is in Spanish, but the rest of the site is available in English, and there are excellent images of around 25 of her pictures on-line.

I’ve mentioned her work on this blog several times in the past, most recently in Singing about Vanessa and it really deserves the attention it is now eventually beginning to get even in the UK. She was the first woman to receive the Henri Cartier-Bresson award in 2011, and quite possibly the only photographer ever to make a project about Barton-on-Humber, the place she grew up in.

Of course you can also see her work on her own web site, and in the book she dances on Jackson, made with the funding from the Cartier-Bresson award. This was a book I recommended when it came out (actually I think before it came out in the UK) at the time I ordered my copy. I note on Amazon it now says:

Hardcover

2 Used from £670.03 8 New from £130.00

although you can get it for less on Abebooks. Her ‘Sweet Nothings’ is still available at reasonable prices but the exhibition catalogue, as well as looking like a fine book may also be a good investment. You may need to order it from Spain.

About Minor and Ray

I’m not sure when I first got to know the work of Minor White. Like many my first introduction to the wide spectrum of photographic history and contemporary practice came through Helmut & Alison Gernsheim‘s ‘A Concise History of Photography‘ from which he is remarkably entirely absent, not fitting the ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ vision that both focused and constricted their view of the medium.

Probably I had already seen some of White’s work when I got to know Raymond Moore (who got two pictures and an appreciative mention in the Gernsheim’s opus) through a series of workshops with him and Paul Hill at Paul’s Photographers Place in Derbyshire in the late 70s, but it was Ray’s appreciation and understanding of his work that really got me interested. Ten years ago I wrote:

In 1970, Ray read a feature in an American magazine about Minor White. He was already aware of White’s photographs, but the description there of White’s ideas, especially his interest in Zen, excited him as they seemed so similar to his own views. On a sabbatical from Watford, he decided to go to America to visit White, and photographers Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, whose work he knew from in books. Ray stayed with White in America and they got on well; Ray saying “It came as something of a relief to find that people felt the same way as I did. I had been interested in Zen for a long time, even while I was a painter, and it was very exciting to see how this had been developed in photography.”

Ray’s work went down very well in America, and he was given solo shows at both the Art Institute of Chicago and George Eastman House in 1970, with a further show at a in Boston gallery in 1971. (Carl Siembab Gallery)

(You can read more of my thoughts and some comments on Ray and the workshops at Remember Ray Moore, posted here in 2010.)

It was perhaps an indication of how little White’s work was known in the UK at the time that I found it very difficult to get hold of a copy of his then out of print major work, Mirrors Messages Manifestations (1969), the only copy that could be located for loan to British Libraries was at the British Library in Boston Spa, which I was required to sign for in blood to be allowed to live with for a month. It certainly changed my photographic thinking at the time.

It was a Facebook post by film-maker and photographer Rina Sherman with a link to Minor Words: Photography and Writing by Michelle Dunn Marsh that sparked off my thoughts about Minor White and led to this post. Marsh’s article, mainly about his sequencing, includes a short sequence of his prints and was written as the first major retrospective of his work since 1987 is on show at the J Paul Getty Museum until October 19, 2014.

I had been thinking of writing more about White, but a little Googling found to my surprise something I had made earlier, one of my own articles on White, first published in two parts on another web site in 2001, as Minor White – Spiritual Journey and Minor White – Equivalents which save me the bother and may still be of some interest. But don’t expect any of the links to work after 13 years – and I gave up maintaining them in 2007.

It is slightly easier to find examples of White’s work on-line than it was when I wrote that piece, but there are still relatively few examples given his importance in photography.

There are some pictures on Luminous Lint, a usefully encyclopaedic site on photography, and also at major museums such as SFMoMA (only 10 of the 26 images in their collection have images on-line) and MoMA, but I was able to find very little at the Princeton University Art Museum which houses the Minor White Archive and has loaned 30 pictures to the retrospective. The largest collection on line is at the Art Institute of Chicago which has around 50 images on line, but on a disappointingly small scale.

There is of course an article about him on Wikipedia, and also some images on the Masters of Photography site as well as scattered images elsewhere across the web. You can also read John Szarkowski’s comments on White from ‘Looking at Photographs‘ where White’s Capital Reef, Utah, 1962 was reproduced, along with some other of his pictures at Atget Photography.

Work by Raymond Moore is harder still to find. His archive, prepared at considerable expense after his death by his young widow, Mary Moore Cooper, failed to find a buyer (another reflection of the lack of interest in the UK cultural establishment in photography) and his negatives, contact sheets made from them, drawings, correspondence, publications and between 700-1000 prints – estimated according to a Guardian article in 1990 to be valued at £440,000 – still so far as I know languishes in store at Sothebys.

Shocking Gaza – Romenzi

The news from Gaza has certainly been shocking, with now well over a thousand Palestinians, mostly innocent civilians, including many children now known to be killed. Of course we should grieve too for the Israelis who have died – mainly soldiers – but the figures point to the disproportionality – this is not a war but an entirely out of proportion one-sided punishment of the population of Gaza. The consequences of the attacks on heavily populated city areas with the weapons being used – even if every one was accurately targeted – are inevitably large numbers of civilian deaths. If you’ve not seen it, watch Jon Snow‘s report which makes this crystal clear – though it does contain some disturbing images. I was pleased I wasn’t watching in HD.

Although I don’t find it easy to look at the pictures and videos which are coming out from Gaza, I think it is important that brave journalists are going there and sending them out. Today I read that another journalist I admire, Paul Mason, is now in Gaza and reporting for Channel 4.

One of the sets of photographs which brings home what is happening there to me appeared a few days ago in Time Lightbox, Innocents in the Crossfire: Alessio Romenzi’s Shocking Photographs From Gaza, work by a 40 year old Italian photographer who has spent the last five years in Israel and Palestine. There isn’t a great deal of gore in the images, though an enormous amount of destruction in the background, but for me they bring me very close to the people who are suffering in Gaza.

I’ve just spent two days photographing protests in London about what is happening in Gaza, and the realities of the situation seem now to be getting through – even through the media smokescreen that seems to prevent the BBC from hearing what its own reporters are telling it about the situation. One thing that impressed me about yesterdays protest – by around 50,000 people – was the strength of the feeling among many Jews in the protest that Israel – as one speaker put it – “is not behaving as a Jewish state should.” Over 600,000 people have read Naomi Wolf’s statement on Facebook about why she is “mourning genocide in Gaza.”

As I write this, the latest figures for the Palestinian deaths are 1032, with the BBC reporting the total number of Israeli deaths as 40 soldiers and two civilians. A Facebook post today pointed up the reason for these very different figures:

Israeli Tanks – 3930 – Palestinian Tanks – 0
Israeli F-16 Fighter Jets – Palestinian F-16 Fighter Jets – 0

By the time you read this, the figures for deaths will doubtless be higher. Surely it must be time for peace.

You can see more of Romenzi’s work from Gaza and elsewhere on his Photoshelter site.

Skinningrove

Although I’ve written a few times over the years about the work of Chris Killip, the problem that I’ve always faced is that so little of his work is visible on the web. Most of his books too are out of print*, though I have several on my shelves. Although in the last few years he has become a little more visible (and his show at the Photographers’s Gallery in 2013 was one of their lamentably few highlights in recent years) he remains rather obscure compared to many other photographers. (And no, he didn’t win the prize, which went to a pair of people who had made a book using other people’s images – which wasn’t without interest, but this is supposed to be a photography prize.)

Killip, a professor of visual and environmental studies at Harvard where he has worked since 1991, has deliberately chosen to keep his photographs so far as possible away from the web – as his own web site clearly shows. I’m sure too that he could have done far more to make his work available in print. You can see an illustrated review of his Seacoal (apparently still available) on The Photobook, a three pictures from our ridiculously small Arts Council Collection in the UK National Archives, and rather more in various exhibition listings and reviews. You could also try a search using his name on Google Images, though as always not all the pictures this returns are by him.

Thanks to PetaPixel, and the short post Chris Killip, (mainly as it makes clear an excerpt from an Aperture interview with him) linking to a note in the NYRB, I’ve just been watching a short film, Skinningrove, with Killip speaking about and showing his work from this small North Yorkshire, fishing village. It’s well worth watching.

One of the pictures shows a secondary teacher with boys sketching on the beach, and Killip says that he is actually a photographer, who has to teach for a living, and names him as Ian Macdonald. You can see some of his work on Amber Online.

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*The paperback edition of ‘Isle of Man’ is likely to cost you £250 or more, with the hardback being rather more. I think ‘In Flagrante’ may cost around the same. There is also a study of ‘In Flagrante’ available from Errata Books rather more cheaply.

Arles Disaster?

You are almost sure to be aware that there is a photo festival every year at Arles. I’ve never been to it, though I’ve occasionally commented on what happened there, and have written about why I’ve not gone on several occasions. But rather than do so this year, I just want to refer you to a post on l’Oeil de la photographie Arles 2014: An Off Year? Worse—A Disaster!.

I should have gone to Arles perhaps 20 or more years ago, but then I was always busy with my students’ photography examinations at the time it took place, early in July. Since then the nature of this festival – and many others – have changed, as the article puts it “it’s becoming a buyer’s festival, that galleries and collectors and agents are crowding in, that deals are being made, that guys and girls from all over are bringing an astounding creativity to the “off” and “off-off” sections of the festival.”

That this is happening to the fringe is good in some ways – and particularly good for those photographers taking part. If you look at my reports on the several Paris Mois de la Photo I’ve attended I’ve written for this site you will have hear my thoughts that the activities on the fringe are generally much more interesting than the relatively few shows of the actual Mois, and certainly from the delear’s festival few days at Paris Photo.

In his editorial, Jean-Jacques Naudet writes:

“we’ve had enough of these veterans: enough Martin Parr, enough Raymond Depardon, enough Christian Lacroix, enough Erik Kessels. They’re all great, but their ubiquity has become unbearable. At this rate, if Hébel and the festival weren’t parting ways, then next year’s edition would have featured Martin Parr’s cookbook, Raymond Depardon’s garden gnomes and Christian Lacroix’s children’s toys.“

and he talks about the wild passions and outsized egos of recent years.

I’m not sure I agree when he says that one day we will want to revisit these – perhaps we will want only to revisit some aspects of some of them, and there are other parts we will want to bury our memories of. Well there are some of Depardon’s images I’ll be glad to see again, the garden gnomes are perhaps not among them, and although I admire some of Parr’s work, too often he appears to be trading on his reputation rather than than producing anything of great import. I’ve yet to see anything by Lacroix I’d want to revisit, but hopefully he will in time prove me wrong.

But somehow I hope that festivals like Arles which have such an important place in photography would become in some way more democratic and more varied – perhaps with the official festival becoming more like the fringe.

As well as the editorial there are of course other reports on Arles, both on the l’Oeil de la photographie and elsewhere, so you can read these and make up your own mind. The Guardian has a video review which seems to me to underline the vacuity of the event, and a set of the ‘finest shots on display in Provence’ which suggest that the best work was from the 1950s in Chile or perhaps a little later in with John Davies’s Elf Services, Autoroute A26, Nord-Pas-de-Calais (1988). It’s hard to believe there has been so little of worth produced in black and white (the theme of this year) since then. Actually we know this isn’t true.

Though perhaps it is worth asking why anyone should work in black and white now, when so many of the reasons we chose to do so in the past have gone. It’s perhaps relevant in this to point out that Peter Hugo’s slightly odd heads and shoulders images were actually taken in colour, then converted to bring out the melanin to black and white in Photoshop. And most of today’s black and white images were actually taken in colour, their conversion to monochrome more a stylistic fad than anything else.

I spent over 30 years working in black and white, thinking in black and white, as my primary medium. I worked in colour too, often only doing so for images where colour seemed particularly significant or indeed the subject of the image – I was certainly a colourist at heart in my colour work. Few if any photographers now seem to think in black and white. My own approach to colour has changed too, and I’m not sure I could satisfy myself with monochrome except for the very occasional image.