Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Island History

On Tuesday evening I went to the opening of Isle Of Dogs Then & Now: Photographs By Mike Seaborne, which is showing at George Green’s School Café Vert, a venue for various community and youth organisations, open to the public at times. But it is rather easier for most to see Mike’s work elsewhere, particularly in the ‘Then and Now‘ section of Mike’s 80sIslandPhotos web site.

Mike Seaborne talks about his work on the Isle of Dogs in the 1980s at Café Vert

In 1983-6 Mike undertook an extensive photographic project on the Isle of Dogs in East London to document the area prior to its redevelopment, in conjunction with the Island History Trust. In 2013, a Heritage Lottery Fund grant enabled him put approximately 1500 of his black and white photographs into Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives where the albums can be viewed by the public. But you can also see them on his 80sIslandPhotos web site, where they are covered by a Creative Commons license that allows them to be copied and used for non-commercial purposes provided they are correctly credited (Copyright © Mike Seaborne) and are not altered or cropped. So here is one of the pairs of images in the show at Café Vert,

In the show his black and white images from 1983-6 were paired with colour images taken from the same place over the past year or so. For some it was easy to know exactly where he had taken the earlier photograph – the belfry was still there, and the chimney of the former colour works has been retained, although it is the only thing in the recent photograph that remains – even the river walls have been rebuilt since then. The power station across the river on Deptford Creek is long gone – and you can see the chimney in mid-air as it was dynamited in one of Mike’s pictures.

Mike’s photographs of the area form an important record, not just because of the quality of the work but also because of the information that is attached to them, both by him and also by others, and part of the reason for making them available on-line is to enable others to come forward with more information about the people and places in them.

You can also see more of Mike’s work from this and other places on his main web site, and also on the Urban Landscapes website that we set up around 12 years ago and co-curate.

Although I took quite a few pictures on the Isle of Dogs around the same time as Mike in the 1980s – some of which are in my book City to Blackwall 1977-84 (preview here) – my work there just a small part of a much larger project on post-industrial London and not dedicated to a particular area. His is a much more in-depth study than mine and one that involved considerable interaction with the local community. It was only a few years later that I got to know him, when I joined a group of photographers he set up, London Documentary Photographers, to document the changing city, though by then I had seen some of his work – both of us had four pictures in the 1988 BJP Annual, two of his from the Isle of Dogs.

At the opening I talked briefly with Mike about the problems of re-photographic projects such as his, particularly in areas like the Isle of Dogs which have undergone almost complete redevelopment. I’d had a few hours spare and had walked through the Island on my way to the show, taking a few panoramas. Much of the way I was walking along streets and paths I’d walked on back in the 1980s, and little remained. I think I would find it tricky to exactly pinpoint the locations of many of the pictures I made back then, or the exact direction in which my camera was pointing.

Later I began to take more careful notes about locations, and as well as street names the contact sheets from much of my later work also contain grid references, although these only locate to a 100 meter square. Life would be much easier now with GPS and the ability to automatically record the image location into metadata.

Capa Under Fire

I’ve never believed the story about Robert Capa‘s D-Day films being ruined by a darkroom technician, but though I’ve certainly expressed my doubts in discussions I can’t find anywhere where I’ve published them clearly in print or on the web.

I don’t believe it because I’ve tried hard to melt film, and it isn’t easy, and when you do so the results don’t look anything like those familiar D-Day images. Back when I was teaching art students, some of them worked hard to distress films in various ways, and found modern emulsions surprisingly resilient. They couldn’t get results like Capa’s using a film dryer or a hair dryer on full heat and ended up using more extreme means – ovens, matches and gas burners – and the results were rather different.

I didn’t believe it also because of the conflicting stories that have come out, but I kept quiet about it. I hadn’t done the research that would be necessary to write what I felt in my bones, though I tried to express a certain degree of scepticism when I wrote about it back in 1999 (and rather more in my lectures on which this was based:)

Both Capa and Rodger covered the D-Day landing in Normandy. Rodger strode ashore at Arromanche and found little happening, while Capa hit Omaha Beach where all hell was breaking loose. He shot three rolls of film on his two Contaxes, during the approach and wading ashore from the landing craft and then while lying flat on the wet sand while bullets raced over his head. Capa’s most quoted remark about photography is ‘If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough’, but here he was closer than he intended. He realised his duty as a photographer was to get the pictures back and rushed himself and his film back on to a landing craft and from there to England.

Only 8 of the 106 frames were fit for use. Apparently the Life darkroom technician was so excited by what he saw that he allowed the film to overheat while drying it, ruining most of the film. Life at first put out a story that the pictures had been ruined by sea water, then, after telling Capa what had really happened, ran the pictures with a caption that enraged Capa, saying he had not focused properly in the heat of the action. Of course this and a certain amount of camera shake would have been pretty excusable in the circumstances. The faults that are present in the existing pictures give them a graphic quality which would have been lacking in properly processed work.

What I was implying in the section emphasized above, though being careful not to be explicit, was that to me these pictures looked just as if they were out of focus and suffering from camera shake and that we needed no other explanation for what we can see.

But while I only implied and failed to research in any detail, J Ross Baughman recently made his views quite clear in two guest posts on Photocritic International, Robert Capa’s Troubles on Omaha Beach (1) and (2).

A D Coleman himself has followed this up with his usual dogged forensic attention to detail with a series of posts Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day, currently up to part 7, in which he comes to the conclusion about the ruin in drying “I no longer believe a word of it. I’m embarrassed that I did for so long, and amazed that it’s gone unchallenged for seven decades.”

But he also concludes “But it no longer matters, because whatever caused the complete loss of three of Capa’s rolls of 36-exposure 35mm film and 2/3 of the fourth roll, none of that film — according to the photographer’s own caption notes and the data encoded in the remaining negatives themselves — contained any further images of the landing at Omaha Beach.”

It seems pretty clear that Capa only made 11 exposures on Omaha beach (not the 8 which were said to have survived when I wrote) although the best of those negatives has since gone missing. Another was apparently too poor technically to print. Coleman suggests pretty convincingly that the other exposures on the film were made by Capa before the landing craft reached the beach and were drastically overexposed (as shown on the stills from a recent video.)

Coleman’s account is not quite as clear as it might be in part 4, as his mind has been changed by an exchange with photographer Mike Doukas. The frames shown on the contact sheet appear to be the final ten from a commercially loaded 36 exposure cassette, ending as usual at frame 38 (with 37 the missing negative.) They start with 5 exposures made from the landing craft as troops wade ashore and end with the final picture Capa took on the beach.

The other films lost or ruined appear not to have been taken on Omaha beach but – according to Capa’s own notes, to have been taken earlier during boarding and the journey across the channel.

It is hard to know what to make of Capa’s claims – discussed by Coleman in part 5 – to have taken more films (or indeed about anything else in his life – Capa was nothing if not a great story teller, and good stories are always at least a little more than the truth), but Coleman’s dismissal of this seems convincing. But he is surely too harsh on Capa in the conclusion that by only taking 11 pictures and then running to get away from the beach that “On this crucial occasion, the opportunity of a lifetime, he failed himself, his picture editor, his publisher, his public, and history itself.” It is perhaps a conclusion that reflects Coleman’s own anger at having been taken in for so long by the improbable story.

It was arguably a surprising failure not to have reloaded the camera immediately before the craft hit the beach so as to have a full 36 exposures at his disposal, but perhaps there was not enough warning that it was about to happen. But flat on the beach under withering fire he would have known that he only had a few frames left, and probably felt that loading another film would have been too much of a risk to his life. To get a couple of good images, pictures that became icons for whatever reason – and to keep alive to take them back to England seems to me a success.

You need to read the whole story, starting with Robert Capa on D-Day which Coleman published on June 10th.

One mystery I think remains. The young lad in the darkroom was long thought to have been the 18 year old Larry Burrows, but later LIFE‘s London picture editor John Morris who was in charge later made clear that he had not been involved, laying blame on the youngest of the darkroom staff, 15-year-old lab assistant Dennis Banks (although according to Capa biographer Richard Whelan, his name was Dennis Sanders.) 15 in 1944, if still alive he would be 85 now, and in any case there must still be many people alive who would have known him, and doubtless he would have told some his story. If he – or anyone who knew him – is reading this we would all like to hear from you, so please get in touch. Or was he simply a fictional character?

Rochester Views

I’ve finally worked out how to get TIME Lightbox to almost work on my computer, running the latest Firefox. It has always been a frustrating experience before and the only way I’d found to see all the pictures was to manually alter the address line in the browser. But now I’ve realised you can actually go on to the next image by simply waiting for the black rectangle to appear along with the ‘timer thingy’ and then pressing the ‘F5’ key to reload.

It still isn’t perfect in that to see the pictures in the full window (they call it full screen) you have to do it individually for each image, as the reload reverts to normal view. Or perhaps that is how it’s supposed to work?

I suspect my problems come from my computer refusing to accept some advertising or tracking stuff TIME want to load on me. I do have a few things set up like ‘DoNOTTrackMe‘ which blocks four trackers on the page. Although I post a lot of material on the web I value my privacy and can’t really understand people who use Facebook but don’t look at their privacy settings. And I use and would recommend FB Purity and the advice in How to stop Facebook snooping on your web browsing activity and other similar articles.

Actually it is best to look at the work on the photographers’ own site, where there is also some text about the project. The pictures were made in 2012-3.

Back to Rochester, long the home of the yellow box which fed so many cameras, and as well as Kodak, also Bausch and Lomb and Xerox. Kodak no longer make film, and some of the pictures by Alex Webb here were shot on the last few rolls of the Kodachrome that was so symbiotic to his photographic style. But now the film can only be processed – with slightly unusual ‘distressed’ results as black and white. There are also some typically bold colour images by Alex (which I presume were made on digital), to my taste rather stronger than the more poetic pictures by his wife, Rebecca Norris Webb, still working with (no longer Kodak) film.

The book is published by Radius Books who advise “As both previous RADIUS books with these artists have sold out quickly – this is sure to be a collector’s item.” I could ask why if they think this to be the case they did not produce a larger print run. But then perhaps they did!

Although the US release date is give as June 30, it appears to be available in the UK now. ISBN-10: 1934435767 ISBN-13: 978-1934435762 and

As well as the standard edition, signed copies are available for an extra $5, as well as a limited edition with a couple of signed digital C-types thrown in for an extra $1440. I’m not greatly attracted by signed books – though I do have a few, mainly from having attended book launches or having bought directly from the photographer. But though I’d never pay a great deal more for a signed copy, I think the idea of marketing them at a small premium – so long as most or all of it goes to the photographers – is a good one. Although given the deliberately small print runs of many new photographic books, there really is little reason why every copy should not be a signed copy.

Rochester of course still has a special place in photography, George Eastman House, the world’s oldest museum dedicated to photography which opened in 1949. It was also one of the first institutions to put a large collection of its photographic works on-line in 1998, and although the original site was decommissioned in 2006 it remains available for ‘historic and research purposes’. The replacement site is perhaps easier to search, and quite a lot of the older work is on Flickr.

Singing about Vanessa

Great to see a fine article by Sean O’Hagan, Vanessa Winship: the great, unsung chronicler of the world’s outsiders in The Guardian. I’ve been telling people for quite a while about her photography – back in 2008 I wrote in a piece about not going to Arles that – judging from the previews,

the outstanding pictures were by Vanessa Winship, whose work has deservedly done well in several competitions in recent years (and her ‘Albanian Landscapes‘ was screened at Arles in 2003)

and not long after, looking at a photo diary about the festival I also noted that so far “only Vanessa Winship’s exhibition seems worth more than a cursory glance.”

There are quite a few more mentions of her over the years on this site, particularly Sweet Nothings – Vanessa Winship (2009) and Dancing In Mourning Across America (2013) which are perhaps still worth reading. This piece seems to be the 14th time I’ve written about her here and I think I had mentioned her when I wrote elsewhere. Also worth reading is Michael Grieve’s review of ‘she dances on Jackson’ in 1000 Words, which I also linked to in an earlier post.

So I can only echo the sentiment under the headline of O’Hagan’s Guardian blog:

“From Mississippi to the Black Sea, Winship’s poetic, masterful photographs show how hard it is for people to belong … so why don’t British galleries acknowledge her as this large Madrid retrospective does? She deserves it”

Though I’m afraid the explanation is unfortunately rather simple. She is a real photographer, and there is no major British gallery with a real interest in photography.

Glenna Gordon & #bringbackourgirls

The New York Times Lens blog has a follow-up to its story about the abuse of images by Ami Vitale which were used to publicise the kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram which I wrote about earlier (Image Abuse.)

In Bringing the Nigerian Schoolgirls Into View, James Estrin writes about the work by Glenna Gordon who having photographed the demonstrations over the kidnapping in Nigeria decided she needed to do something more personal about the missing girls, and made the difficult journey to meet with some of their relatives and friends. In the Lens blog, and on her own web site you can see pictures of some of the clothing, notebooks and other items that belonged to them, along with some short descriptions of them and their hopes in life and some pictures that their families allowed her to share with the world.

It is also worth looking at the other work on Gordon’s web site, which as well as the 16 pictures on the Lens feature includes a longer series, ‘the hunters who want to #bringbackourgirls’, vigilantes keen to take on Boko Haram, said to be better armed than the Nigerian Army, with bow and arrows and hunting rifles.

There is of course much more to look at on her web site, including a lovely series on Nigerian weddings, as well as a powerful set taken in King George Home for the Elderly in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Barts Tries Censorship

I never take kindly to being told I can’t take photographs anywhere. I was at the protest outside the Royal Whitechapel Hospital in Whitechapel in a crowd of around a hundred people, probably at least half of whom were using their phones or compact cameras when a security man came up to me and asked “Excuse me, Sir, are you from the press?”

It’s a question that always makes me remember a film showing one of the greatest pioneers of photojournalism, ‘Eisie’, Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898-1995) working on the streets of New York, photographing kids at play, who when asked whether he was a professional replied that no, he was just an amateur*. And of course he was a great amateur in the original sense of the word, a lover of photography. And so too am I. And given the current level of fees the press are willing to pay we are all getting to be amateurs in every sense now.

So it’s always something of a judgement call what to reply to such questions. And there are a few events where I wear my press card visibly, around my neck, but rather more where I keep it in my pocket. Everyone has a right to photograph and I don’t usually want to claim any special privileges.

But it was a polite question, and he showed me his ID card, and when I told him I was a freelance journalist he told me I could not photograph as this was land owned by the Barts Hospital NHS Trust.

I had several problems with that. Firstly it was clear that he was not attempting to stop others around me from taking pictures, so this seemed clearly to be an attack on the freedom of the press to report events, and an attempt at censorship. Secondly, the NHS trust is a public body, paid for out of my taxes as a member of the public and I feel that gives me some rights. But overriding everything was the legitimate public interest in what was happening.

So I made it clear that I intended to continue taking pictures and did so, and the security didn’t bother me any more. It seemed a particularly inept attempt to control media coverage of the event, and one that was aimed at me alone. Among the others recording the event were a couple of professional videographers who were not approached. Or perhaps they just gave up after they found I told them they had to be joking.

Local GP Dr Anna Livingstone,

It wasn’t a hugely photogenic event as you can see at Barts cuts Health Advocacy & Interpreting but over an issue which is of great importance to the local community as well as arising out of wider issues over the future of the NHS across the country. It wasn’t the first time I’d photographed in the grounds of the hospital either, and there had been some rather strange responses from security last October at the protest Scrap Royal London NHS PFI Debt
when police had to persuade them to let the protest happen in the roadway leading to the hospital after it was clear the numbers were creating a severe problem on the Whitechapel Road.

Mark Cubbon, Executive Director of Delivery came to receive the petition

You can see more of the hugely expensive new building, both on the outside and some views from the staff canteen area in Whitechapel – Hospital Views.

* I don’t think the film I used to play to classes about ‘Eisie’ is available on-line, and although some of his best work is on the LIFE site, this seems to be a site which really fails to celebrate the photographers and it is difficult to look at more than odd pieces of work by him. But on YouTube you can watch in four parts a BBC programme Alfred Eisenstaedt Master Photographer from 1983 where he says the same thing at the end of part 3.

Continue reading Barts Tries Censorship

Purple Pictures

I’ve deliberately refrained from any comment in public (or at least I think so) on this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2014 at the London Photographers’ Gallery. Let’s just say I found none of the short-listed photographers of great interest.

But if you don’t know who won, and want to, this page will tell you. In case you were wondering, “At the project’s heart are the points of failure of documentary photography” though I still see plenty of good documentary photography that excites and informs me considerably more than this work; (one example that comes immediately to mind is Robin Hammond’s ‘Your Wounds Will Be Named Silence’ shown at Arles in 2013 but there are many, many more.)

But had I been one of the judges faced with the four short-listed bodies of work, I think I would been hard put to make an award. But I doubt if “none of the above” was one of the options available to them.

But good luck to the fortunate winner – who is at least this year a photographer, unlike some previous recipients. Perhaps the fame and money will give him the time and space to produce something of more interest. And to buy some new film.

Image Abuse

Probably most of us have seen pictures tweeted around the world with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls but I imagine few have asked ourselves about the source of the three commonly used pictures.

James Estrin did so, and on May 8 Lens published his The Real Story About the Wrong Photos in #BringBackOurGirls in which he interviewed the photographer who took the pictures, some time ago and in a different country more than a thousand miles from where Islamic militant group Boko Haram carried out the kidnapping that has shocked the world.

The first photographer Ami Vitale knew about it was when she was told by someone from the Alexia Foundation that the work was being used in this way, and she was enraged. She had made the pictures in a long-term project showing the “dignity and resilience” of African people whose lives were improving, and had promised the families she had lived and worked with that she would take responsibility for the images and use them to tell their stories.

As she makes clear, it isn’t that the images have been used without her permission that upsets her, and she supports “the campaign completely and I would do anything to bring attention to the situation” but the misrepresentation and the use of these images without the consent of those in them for a very different purpose to that for which they are made.

If you don’t feel it is important, think for a moment if a picture of you, or your daughter or some other family member had appeared across the world illustrating a similar story. If you had the resources and could identify who had carried out the abuse you might well sue and receive hefty damages.

And as Vitale put it: “I can’t help but wonder that they thought this was O.K. just because my friends are from Africa. If it were white people from another country in the photos, this wouldn’t be considered acceptable.”

The article and a comment there on one of Vitale’s images prompted John Macpherson to make an image search, and revealed a huge level of unauthorised use across the web of this particular image, as he shows in his Tears for fears on the duckrabbit blog on May 11th, Mother’s Day in the US.

The first comment on this piece came from Ami Vitale herself, expressing her surprise at the many ways her picture was being used “for almost every stereotype one can imagine” and going on to say how it was “particularly poignant and disturbing to read this on Mother’s Day. How would any of these people feel if they saw their own child’s image used in the same way? ”

I’d loved Ami Vitale’s work from Guinea-Bissau from when I first saw it, particularly for its warmth and intimacy and its life-affirming nature, presenting a very different view from the stereotypes we see of Africa. And when I was fortunate enough to meet Ami in Poland it was clear how her work embodied her ideas and personality.

I’m not sure what can be done to prevent the irresponsible use of our images, though I do know those who have made large amounts of money in the courts from people who have misappropriated their work.

But we really need to somehow change attitudes. Using images in this way is simply dishonest, but people who wouldn’t dream lying publicly seem quite happy to do so through images. I don’t know if it is going to be possible to change attitudes, when it does seem to be going against the whole stream at the moment. My images on blogs and my own web sites carry a simple copyright watermark, but it isn’t possible to insist on this on most usages, and perhaps that doesn’t in any case go far enough. Perhaps it might begin to get our message across if we also included a simple message ‘May not be used in any way without permission’ as well.

Street Photography

Here’s a nice article on the aPhotoEditor blog about a photographer who took his pictures onto the street – and sold them: New Ideas In Photography – Rob Hann.

I’ve seen a few photographers doing this in London, where I think you do have to get a licence and pay for a pitch, so the economics may be somewhat different. Most of those I’ve seen in London are very much aimed at tourists who want something a little different from the standard tourist stuff, but I’ve seen some nice photography at times.

I suspect that it’s rather quirky work that sells best, and over-dramatised landscape of well-known places. It isn’t something I’ve ever felt tempted to do and I doubt if my work would sell well.

But it would probably pay better than working through agencies for the press. People are always surprised when I tell them how little I get for my pictures – a few months ago I worked out that the average repro fee (or at least my 50% or less of it) that I’m now getting was around £16. Partly that’s because so much is now just online, partly because I think I’m doing very badly out of having some of my pictures used on a subscription basis.

I do occasionally sell prints, but not from a barrow. Anyone can buy decent quality prints of any of the pictures I post on the web – details are here. And I occasionally sell the odd one or two when I exhibit work, at gallery prices which are around 3 times those web prices. I suspect on a street stall I’d have to sell considerably more cheaply than on the web.

Italian Photography

The New York Times Lens blog (again) has a nice piece on Italian photography after the Second World War, Italy’s Independence in Postwar Photography, written by Rena Silverman. This is based on and features a set of photographs from ‘Mid-Century Postwar Italian Photography‘ showing at the gallery web site, but not, so far as I could see any text about the show, so Silverman’s article is very welcome.

The photography is very much the equivalent of something far better known abroad at the time – and still now – the ‘Neorealism’ of Visconti, Zavattini, Rossellini, De Sica and others, but I have to admit that very few of the photographers in the show are familiar to me, though some of the images I’ve seen before.

Perhaps the best-known of the photographers is Gianni Berengo Gardin, who received the Lucie Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008, and an exhibition of his work is currently on show in London, at Prahad Bubbar until May 23, 2014. The Daily Telegraph has a feature The Sense of a Moment: Gianni Berengo Gardin with a gallery of 10 photographs, Gianni Berengo Gardin: Italy’s greatest photographer. Perhaps not, and there are certainly others who could lay claim to that accolade, but certainly some work of interest. Although Wikipedia is hardly a definitive source, Gardin doesn’t event make it to their list of Italian photographers, though there are quite a few names familiar to me there, including that of Gina Lollobrigida!