Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Centr Cam

I’m more than mildly tempted by the CENTR camera, a Kickstarter project I read about on PetaPixel that gives you a tiny doughnut of a camera you can handhold (with your thumb up the hole in the middle, and a ring of LEDs on the bottom so you can keep it level if you want. Using 4 cameras and stitching their images results in a 360 degree video with a circumference of 6900 pixels and a height of 1080 pixels, which you can also view (and print) as a long thin image. Each of the identical f2.0 lenses produces a horizontal view of 110 degrees and a vertical 75 degrees. More details

It looks an incredible piece of gear, and should be shipping in Feb 2015 to Kickstarters who pledge $299 or more (+ $55 for shipping outside the US) which makes it around £210 in the UK. It is expected to go on the market – if it reaches the Kickstarter target – for $399.

A few things only make me reluctant to put my money up. Remarkable though it is, it is still quite a lot of money for something which I see essentially as a toy. Though the sample video is impressive, the still image quality is rather less so. There is a link on the page to some “high resolution still images“, which are around 5000 x 720 pixels (the camera works in either 720 or 1080 pixel high modes.) On screen, some of these are quite impressive at 33% size, though with a lot of blue fringing, which could probably be greatly reduced with suitable software. But at full size – as with viewing the movies full screen – they are noticeably soft and lacking in detail. I’ve not tried printing any of these (and you can see some prints in the Kickstarter video) but I don’t think I would be very happy with anything larger than a long strip about two and a half inches high.

Last week I saw a 360 degree panorama by a friend of mine, Mike Seaborne, taken on the Swanscombe peninsula (where I’ll soon be getting on my 1985 walks in North Kent I’m occasionally posting here), taken with a Nikon D800E, part of a show ‘The Swanscombe Project’ by 16 photographers at Goldsmiths, University of London which ends on 4 May. I can remember quite how long it was, but very long, printed on canvas that Mike says was too long to completely unroll inside his living room. Perhaps around 12 feet, and you could walk along beside it, looking as close as you like and seeing detail. A completely different experience. The pictures from the show aren’t on his web site but you can see some of his other pictures of the area on the page linked above.

But that’s not to knock the Centr, just to point out the kind of thing it isn’t suitable for. I think 360 panoramas are actually best suited for viewing interactively on screen and although I’ve made some in the past I’ve never printed them as such. The added experience of the movie is I think great for them, though I find the interface a little uncontrollable. Probably the only thing that makes me hesitate about supporting the Kickstarter project is that you need to have a smartphone to work with the camera, and my current mobile is anything but smart, a museum piece of technology that has enabled me to make and receive calls since around 2001, and I now see described on e-Bay as “Vintage Retro Collectible“. It’s probably time I got a new phone, but the ancient Sony works and costs me very little to run on pay as you go.

ICP 40

The International Center of Photography (ICP) is shortly celebrating 40 years of its existence, when Cornell Capa with the aid of Micha Bar-Am opened its doors on New York’s Fifth Avenue. It has grown over the years, and moved – and as an interview in the Lens Blog with executive director Mark Lubell, the former director of Magnum Photos, tells us, is moving again, though to an as yet undisclosed location. The opening of the ICP was actually on November 15, 1974 and you can see some pictures from the Founders Scrapbook.

Its history really begins earlier, when Cornell Capa set up the ‘International Fund for Concerned Photography‘ in 1966, and set up the exhibition and 1968 book, ‘The Concerned Photographer‘, featuring the work of six photographers, first shown at the Riverside Museum in New York. Four had had their brilliant careers cut short by early deaths while working, Werner Bischof in a car crash in Peru in 1964, Cornell’s brother Robert Capa killed nine days later by a land mine in Indo-China, ‘Chim‘ (David Seymour) in Suez in 1956 and Dan Weiner in a plane crash in 1959. Cornell in his introduction stated that ‘as brother, friend and colleague’ of these four men he had ‘become deeply involved in the fate of the work that a photographer leaves behind.’ Also included in the book was the work of two then still living photographers, André Kertész and Leonard Freed.

It was a book that had a great influence on photographers when it was published, and is still worth reading and studying today, a fine tribute to those included. The book sold well, at least in the USA, and is still available second-hand at a sensible price, though postage from the USA sometimes costs several times as much as the book. The printing, harsh by today’s standards and with strong blacks, suits most of the work well. A second volume The Concerned Photographer 2, published in 1972, featured the photographs of Marc Riboud, Roman Vishniac, Bruce Davidson, Gordon Parks, Ernst Haas, Hiroshi Hamaya, Donald McCullin and W. Eugene Smith.

The Eye of Photography (L’Oeil de la Photographie) devotes it’s issue today to the 40th anniversary of ICP, ”A mythical institution.’

Man Up?

Blogger Duckrabbit‘s latest post Man up for the World Press Photo Awards has certainly stirred up a great deal of controversy, and deservedly so. In it he starts with a reminder of the previous complaints by him and others about conflicts of interest in the judging of the WPP awards, and the “credibility problem when the chair of judges is required to chair over and vote on the work of a business partner“, something which WPP don’t apparently see as a problem.

To his credit that chair , Gary Knight, offered to stand down, but was told by the WPP that this was not necessary (and I understand that it was not possible for him to do so.) I think he should have insisted on doing so, but that is of course something easier to say both in hindsight and from my position well outside the situation.

But Duckrabbit goes on to raise rather more fundamental problems in his typically robust fashion:

The biggest issue is that they appear to be unaware that the human race has two sexes and that black people don’t exist just to be photographed dying of starvation.

The WPP have just been having a two day awards event with 21 speakers, and Duckrabbit lists them, adding the comment:

Out of the 21 there is just a single woman. As far as I am aware not a single person on this list is black.

Fifteen years ago, when I started writing seriously (and for money) about photography, one of the major issues I tried to tackle was the chauvinistic nature of most of our thinking about photography. Post-war the centre of gravity for many areas of photography other than photojournalism had shifted from Europe to North America, but anything that came from outside the major centres in those regions was off the photographic map.

Of course there were exceptions, and plenty of pioneers working away and bringing photography from places outside that narrow view. And the North American audience in particular was generally remarkably unaware of anything that had happened in Europe after the foundation of Magnum. There were too parts of their own tradition – such as the Photo League – that they also tended to have forgotten. Photography in the USA had perhaps become rather tied up in a cold war attitude.

Things have move on a little both politically and in photography, but perhaps the WPP has failed to register this. Many of the more interesting photojournalists at the present time come from the majority world, and one of, if not the, leading centres for teaching photojournalism is the South Asian Institute Media Institute Pathshala, set up in 1998 by Shahidul Alam in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

WPP of course know this – and I single out Pathshala as its students and former students have won a number of WPP awards, but there are other things happening in other countries too. But somehow the WPP seem to have failed to respond to the changes.

I don’t know what proportion of entries to the WPP come from the majority world, but Duckrabbit points out that only 14% of entrants last year were women. I’m not sure what proportion of photojournalists are women, but it is surely rather higher than 1 in 7, and certainly many of the best photographers whose work I’m aware of are women (and some have had work in the WPP shows.)

One of them is Abbie Trayler-Smith, who has just been at WPP in Amsterdam talking about her work (her presentation followed that of Edward Burtynsky.) There is a picture of her giving it in Bas de Meijer’s post about the WPP Awards Days, The real value of the World Press Photo.

But Duckrabbit’s post is not about the award winners, but about invited speakers at the event. And it would be hard not to agree with his conclusions.

Liebling Revisited

Some posts just get away, falling into the cracks in my computer system and my failing memory. Often I’ll see something and make a quick note, perhaps save a link as a draft post in WordPress, or in the text editor I usually write with – a kind of beefed up Notepad, which allows me to work on several documents but doesn’t add the kind of formatting that word processors do, making it easier to paste text into various applications. I’ll save the draft or the text file, intending to come back to it later. But later is usually after I’ve been out taking pictures, and by the time I’ve finished dealing with these and writing the captions and text I’ll have forgotten all about the draft I wrote before I went out.

So I saved a draft a couple of weeks ago, and then came across it today, about an article on the New York Times Lens Blog, Look Again, With Love and Liebling, by James Estrin.

Well for me it was looking again, as I think all the pictures (certainly almost all) are in Jerome Liebling’s 1995 Aperture book The People, Yes which I have on a shelf downstairs. Its title comes from that of Carl Sandburg’s epic 300 page poem, published in 1936, inspired by the the language and lives of ‘ordinary people’ in the economic and social upheavals of the 1930s, and Liebling’s work reflects a similar social and political outlook, reflecting his photographic studies with Walter Rosenblum and membership of the New York Photo League. I’ve written about Liebling in the past, but there was a good obituary with some details by Sean O’Hagan in The Guardian in 2011.

The Lens blog was published shortly before the end of a show of Liebling’s work at the Steven Kasher gallery in New York, which you can read more about on the Jerome Liebling web site. On the videos page there you can listen to him talking about his work and the people in his photographs:

“There are no superiors, I think we’re all about the same, but there certainly are advantages in life, and money and who writes the history .. so I suppose I’m saying these are valuable people…”

He goes on to talk about his work as showing “the politics of everyday life” and the idea that going to look at the work should get people to challenge their ideas.

You can also read an interesting piece by Randy Kennedy in the New York Times in 2006, The Still-Life Mentor to a Filmmaking Generation which looks at Liebling’s influence on documentary film through his teaching in which “he tried mostly to impart a deep suspicion of dogma, of piousness and of the compromises that can lie just beneath the surface of American culture.”

New York Portfolio Review

I’ve always believed in the value of showing your photography to other people, particularly other photographers, but have had some doubts about ‘portfolio reviews’.

Most of these doubts are about how these events aid in the institutionalisation of photography and how they serve to legitimize and cement the control of the medium by a relatively small group of curators, editors and other controllers of taste who are the reviewers at such events. I’ve always been an outsider, and indeed have relished being an outsider, and a believer in photographers as being the most important people in our medium, and those most qualified to comment on photography and to shape its future direction. Of course curators and editors and critics have their place, but to me they are the tail and shouldn’t be wagging the dog.

I’ve never felt a need to take my own work to one of these events as a photographer, though I don’t doubt that I might get some useful advice – as I have done in the past when I’ve shown my work to other photographers – and on one or two occasions to curators. I’ve taken part in (and helped organise) events where photographers show their work to other photographers on a fairly large scale, and found them of some interest, but it has been the largely less formal and more long-term associations with a few other photographers that have for me been more productive.

The only review I’ve taken part in as a reviewer was an interesting and enjoyable experience – and also a great way of getting to know a large number of people in the wider photographic world, perhaps more about networking than about photography. I think at least some of those who showed me work will have gained a little insight from my views (and some still greet me in a friendly manner!) But reviewing the work of living photographers whether in print/web or in person is often somewhat fraught.

Of course the two things are rather different, and in person as well as trying to understand and appreciate the work perhaps my main preoccupation was in exploring the differences in how the photographer and I as a viewer see the work and in suggesting possibilities for further development and exploitation. In writing reviews there is a greater need for evaluation and communication with the readers rather than the photographer. Usually photographers have appreciated what I’ve written but I’ve had just a few angry emails and phone calls over the years. It’s safer reviewing the dead!

The New York Times Portfolio Review stands out from the others for several reasons. As Jonathan Blaustein writes in APhotoEditor,

“it is free, which is rare. It’s announced via a Lens blog post, and then the photographers are selected from applicants all over the world. Even the application process is free, so you might consider applying next year.”

In this, the first of two posts about the review he shows the work of half of those he saw over the two days of the event, of whom he states “all of them had a voice, and showed me at least one picture I found worth publishing here.”

I can’t say I react positively to every picture that he has selected, but there is plenty to look at here and on the web sites of the photographers he features – worth following most of all of his links in the piece. I look forward to seeing the second part of this post and the work in it.

The fact that this review is free is I’m sure important, and the reason for the overall high quality of the work. It’s perhaps more a matter of attitude than actuality, for many of the photographers will have travelled long distances and have high hotel and other bills to bring their work to New York for the event. But it does mean that the work will already have been carefully selected for the review, while some other such events are open to anyone who signs up and pays while places are still available.

Climate Revolution

I have a problem with celebrities. Partly it’s that there are many of them I don’t find interesting. But it’s more the idea I have a problem with, and they way that they are treated by the media as a whole. Often it seems to be the only thing they have an interest in. Last November 5th, several thousand people were protesting in London, but the only interest in the press was that Russell Brand turned up. To me that wasn’t of any great interest.

Other photographers often ask me if I’m going to events and tell me that various well-known names will be there. I go if it’s an event that interests me, and when I’m there I’ll photograph the ‘names’ along with the less well-known people who are taking part, although often I won’t recognise them except by the crowd of photographers poking lenses at the.

I don’t watch much TV. Virtually none, outside short clips that people post to Facebook, mainly of news (I don’t bother to watch the ‘cute’ cats.) We don’t have a TV in the house, I’ve not lived permanently anywhere that had one since I got married in 1968. We just didn’t seem to need one then, and haven’t since. We get news from the internet and radio, and every time I see news from the TV it convinces me radio does most things better. But you don’t often recognise people from the radio!

But even I have heard of Dame Vivienne Westwood, and have photographed her before. Even for someone whose last interest in fashion was well over 40 years ago, she had a certain impact, part of the punk revolution that shook up our over-stuffy Englishness. And someone who has over the years supported many of the causes I’ve also been involved with, including nuclear disarmament, civil rights and most recently against climate change, setting up her own ‘Climate Revolution’ campaign.

She also has an interesting face, with plenty of expression, that I enjoyed photographing. At first, near the start of the march at Battersea Bridge, there were relatively few photographers around, just a handful or two of us, but on the Kings Road we were joined by quite a crowd, including those from the main agencies and newspapers. I don’t much like working with a pack, but it does bring out a certain competitive streak in me!

In Climate Revolution March to Fracked Future Carnival you can see I took rather a lot of pictures of her (I’ve included 6 taken in a short sequence) and later in the day while she was taking part in the main carnival events I took more. One of my pictures of her made at least one newspaper. You can read her own diary on the event on the Climate Revolution web site. (I appear briefly in the video in the p0st, squinting into my camera a the right of a group of photographers, though not looking my best!)

I don’t always agree with everything that Vivienne Westwood says, but her message that “We need to talk about fracking” seems to be beyond argument (and there is a petition with that name) and that we need to cut energy use and move away from all fossil fuels is one that makes good sense – as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have also concluded.

Continue reading Climate Revolution

Bert Hardy

Dewi Lewis, one of the leading photographic publishers with many fine books both from his early years in Cornerhouse and as a leading independent publisher, begins his recent post The Picture Post Photographers on the Photoworks web site with the statement:

Last October was the 75th anniversary of the launch of Picture Post yet you would be forgiven for not having noticed.

A book of Bert Hardy’s work was published (Bert Hardy’s Britain, The Bluecoat Press) and we also published the first ever monograph of John Chillingworth. But where were the exhibitions, where was the TV and magazine coverage?

I can only agree with him that the event failed to receive the attention it deserved (what a shame we don’t have a national gallery really dedicated to photography), and have previously in 2009 suggested that we should have a proper exhibition on Picture Post and its photographers in The Unseen Bert Hardy , and elsewhere. But 2013 was also the 100th anniversary of Bert Hardy’s birth as well the 75th anniversary of Picture Post and neither went entirely unnoticed.

As well as the book that Lewis mentions, the Photographer’s Gallery Print Room staged a Bert Hardy Centenary Exhibition from 4 Apr – 26 May 2013. Getty Images, which now owns the pictures taken by Picture Post employees including Bert Hardy celebrated “the double anniversary of the photographer Bert Hardy and Picture Post, the magazine with which he is inextricably linked” with a show ‘Bert Hardy – Picture Post Legend‘ from 14 August to 5 October at their Eastcastle St gallery in London (and you can buy prints from them of his work at reasonable prices, though I think it is best seen in books.).

The Guardian ran a feature at the time of the Photographers’ Gallery show, and this was also mentioned in the Daily Mail and there was a slide show on the the BBC web site, and other mentions elsewhere in blogs and the press. So if you failed to notice you were not really paying attention.

Although I’ve never written an extended feature on Hardy, I did write and publish one about his fellow Picture Post photographer, Thurston Hopkins, whose 100th birthday also in 2013 was marked by a feature in The Guardian by Observer picture editor Greg Whitmore, whose own paper were not interested in publishing his Unsung hero of photography Thurston Hopkins turns 100. I blogged on this anniversary in Thurston Hopkins reaches Century, in which I also mentioned that my article on him was also in the ‘top ten’ on Google, though not attributed to me. It’s now up to number 4 on a search for ‘Thurston Hopkins’. So I’ve done my bit of singing.

Here too are a few short things about Hardy from several different things I’ve published over the years.

Bert Hardy was a working class Londoner who went to work in a photo printing plant. Soon he was taking photos of his other love, cycle racing. He got a Leica and became a photographer.

Hardy’s great asset for Picture Post was his ability to go anywhere and get on with the people he had to photography, whatever their social background. He really was interested in people and his photographs show this.

During the Second World War he photographed London in the Blitz, and was the first photographer to be credited by name in Picture Post. He was called up and sent as a photographer to cover the armies advancing across Europe after the invasion, photographing the Rhine crossing and many other events. He was among the first allied soldiers to enter the concentration camps and photograph there.

After leaving Picture Post he did some advertising work and set up a printing business.

In the UK, one of the first photographers to use a Leica was Bert Hardy (though this picture was made with a Box brownie.) Working for a film processing company he had two interests that filled much of his spare hours, photography and bicycling, and had combined the two by photographing various cycle races.

A story he would always tell when asked how he became a photographer was that some friends of his decided as a joke to tell him that one of the large Picture Agencies in London was looking for ‘miniature’ photographers. Hardy went along with a pile of his cycling prints to see the manager and said that he was taking pictures with a Leica. ‘That’s not real photography’ he was told, ‘take a look at these’, and he was shown a set of technically fine, but static and dull prints. After a while, the manager said that he might as well have a look at Bert’s work since he had brought it. As he leafed through the pile of prints, his expression changed, and although he didn’t take any of the work that the photographer had brought in, he sent him on his first photographic job, to take a portrait of a visiting Hungarian musician.

Hardy went to the hotel with his Leica and an single light and took a series of pictures that presented his subject naturally as a personality rather than the kind of posed formal portraits that were more normal at the time.

This was the start of a career that was later to make Bert Hardy famous as one of the leading photographers for the UK picture magazine, Picture Post, for which he took most of his best known pictures. His coverage of the Blitz in the early years of the war epitomised the conditions of the time and the spirit of the British people. ‘Picture Post’ even published the photographer’s name with the work – previously features had been credited only to the magazine.

Later he was called up into the army and worked as a photographer in the British Army PR department; after the invasion he too followed the path of liberation, recording the entry into Paris the crossing of the Rhine and the concentration camps before the war ended and he was able to go back to a job with ‘Picture Post’, again capturing the mood of post-war Britain.

Blackpool Railings
This carefully staged ‘spontaneous’ picture of two girls sitting on the promenade rail on the seafront was taken as a challenge using a Box Brownie after Hardy had said in an article of advice for amateur photographers that you did not need to own an expensive camera to take good pictures.
Gorbals Boys
These cheeky street lads were from another Picure Post assignment, where Hardy was sent to replace Bill Brandt who had filed empty streets dominated by apparently unending blocks of flats.

Bert Hardy was among the many who went to Korea. One of many stories he used to tell was that of the Inchon landing, which started as light was failing in the evening. On the approach to the landing he was shooting at around 1/25 at f2 on fast black and white film. When they reached the beach there was a concrete wall in their way, with hostile fire coming over the top of it, and none of the assault party was keen to go over it. Eventually Hardy climbed over the wall and led the assault because he realised the light was going fast and he couldn’t afford to wait! When they saw he was still alive the others followed.

He kept shooting with his Leica loaded with fast black and white film until the light was down to 1/8 at f4, then made it back to the landing craft, only to be told they had actually landed on the wrong beach and were coming under fire from their own side. Hardy was however the only photographer to get pictures of the initial landing as the American press photographers present were all using Speed Graphics with f4.5 lenses and had to wait for the light to come up the next day to take pictures.

While in Korea, Hardy photographed a group of political prisoners being mistreated. They were crouching, chained together part naked. Hardy and the journalist he was with, James Cameron, decided that they were going to be executed by our Korean allies without trial and tried to get both the United Nations and the Red Cross to intervene without success.

This is a story that made history by not being published. The editor of ‘Picture Post’, Tom Hopkinson, decided to publish it (in a toned down form) despite a warning from the owner of the magazine, who then actually stopped the presses and removed the article. When Hopkinson put it in again next week, again the presses were stopped and he was sacked. After this loss, ‘Picture Post’ never regained direction, slowly going downhill and eventually closing as it failed to meet the competition of the new medium of television.

You can see and hear Bert Hardy on a film trailer on You Tube, which shows some of the people he photographed in 1950 in Cardiff dockland’s Tiger Bay looking at his pictures 35 years later, as well as the photographer talking about his visit there. Another YouTube video, “Life in the Elephant” Bert Hardy, shows pictures he took around the Elephant and Castle area of south London, with a not particularly appropriate musical background (which you can turn down or mute) and labels some of the images with their locations.

30 And 30

There is a lot to look at in both this year’s PDN 30 and Photo Boite’s ‘30 Under 30′ Women Photographers, and most of it is of interest. And if you’ve not done so previously you can also look at the four previous years selections.

I’m not sure what it means that there are relatively few photographers from this or previous years whose names are familiar. Perhaps it means there are just so many interesting young women photographers, but looking back at similar lists such as the ‘PDN’s 30: New and Emerging Photographers to Watch’ from previous years – such as 2010 – there are rather more names I now recognise – and even more women.

Of course the PDN feature has been running for 15 years while ’30 Under 30′ is relatively new, only in its fifth year. And the two operate in different ways, PDN relying on nominations by photo editors, art directors, curators, educators and fellow photographers around the world, with some invited to submit based on work seen in promotions, portfolio reviews or photo contests.

Twelve out of the 31 photographers featured in PDN’s list (it includes a husband a wife team) are women, so perhaps the introduction to 30 Under 30, with its emphasis on the traditional gender role of women in photography is outdated or at least overstated:

“Photography, whether we like to admit it or not, is by and large a male-dominated arena, where the ‘looking’ is a masculine act, and the subject is feminine, playing the role of ‘looked-at’ and admired mainly for their outward appearance. Photography, then, has been a mirror for conventional gender roles in western society.”

It seems to me to be more a commentary on the persistent gender stereotypes in advertisements rather than an accurate reflection of the state of photography. In my years as a teacher of photography, in a school and a college I almost always had more female than male students in my classes, and most of my better students were female. And although there are more men than women among the photographers I know and meet while working, many of the best and most successful are women.

But I welcome anything which gives us a chance to look at some fine photography – whether by women or men, and I’ll come back to both these rather different sets of work and enjoy them – and wish all those concerned a successful future in photography.

Come to the Party

31 Contemporary Photographers

I’ve often mentioned LensCulture here; it now styles itself as a ‘Global photography network and online magazine celebrating current trends of contemporary photography in art, media, politics, commerce and popular cultures worldwide’ though I still think of it mainly as one of the best on-line photography magazines. But its Editor & Publisher Jim Casper clearly thinks in a larger context, and it has organised portfolio reviews and and has a very wide range of photographer’s portfolios on the site – including a few of my May Queen pictures.

And rather to my surprise I find that the new Lensculture exhibition which is coming to London is the 5th annual LensCulture Exposure Awards show. You can see work by the Award winners and finalists in 31 Contemporary Photographers at the London College of Communication, Elephant & Castle, London SE1 6SB from April 1 – April 5, 2014, 10 am – 5 pm.

The work on show was from thousands of submissions by photographers from 62 countries and was selected by a nine-person international jury. Between them the six winners and 25 finalists represent 20 countries. Photography is indeed an international medium.

Jim also asks me to share the invitation to the Opening Party for the show on Thursday 3 April, 2014 from 6 pm – 9 pm with all of you. I hope to see some of you there.

Gang of Two – Only In England

Around 45 years ago, two young men, both with a mission about photography bumped into each other in the offices of the British Journal of Photography and got talking. Despite their very different backgrounds they recognised each other as kindred spirits and became good friends.

One was the son of a respected English artist, who died only months after his birth, leaving his mother to bring up a family on a very restricted income; aided by support from various bodies including the Artists Orphans Fund she was able to send him to one of England’s oddest and most antiquated minor public schools, from where he went on to study to be a graphic designer. The other came from a large Irish Catholic family in the Bronx, where public schools were something rather different.

But both had studied at separate times with the same man, Alexey Brodovitch, a legendary graphic designer and art director, and had experienced the vibrant photographic culture in New York in the early 1960s where they found both had many common friends. Both too had very little regard for the small clique that made up the British photographic establishment of those times, and then and later both made themselves unpopular by saying what they thought about them and their limited perspective on the medium. There is a considerable contrast between what some well-known names now say about Tony Ray-Jones and their relationship with him compared with their views expressed at least in private while he was still alive. John Benton-Harris continues to challenge with his widely-informed and forthright opinions on the medium.

The two men photographed together very occasionally, with most of Ray-Jones’s pictures being made outside London and most of Benton-Harris’s in and around the capital – John says they agreed to split the photographic country between them along these lines. But they worked together in other ways, educating the editors of Creative Camera and introducing them to many of the American photographers whose work they published, and John printed much of Tony’s work, both before and after his death. The show did contain at least 5 prints he had previously owned for many years, and probably other prints in the first section were among those he had printed for Tony Ray-Jones; certainly the majority were from negatives from which he has printed.

So I was very interested to hear John’s opinion on the show ‘Only in England‘ which featured both work that was printed by (or probably mainly for) Ray-Jones during his lifetime and also new prints made from work that the photographer had rejected as not being good enough. After its showing at the new Media Space in London’s Science Museum, this opens today (March 28) at the National Media Museum in Bradford and continues until 29 June 2014.

After I’d written my own review of the show (and earlier I’d posted a short note based on the promotional video), I had some lengthy conversations with John, and was pleased to hear that he was busy writing his own review. Since then I’ve asked him quite a few times how he was getting on with it and finally yesterday he was satisfied that it was complete and ready to be seen.

Finally, with a little computer assistance from me, the review is now up on John’s blog with a couple of pictures, at last completed to his satisfaction. It is a long piece with the title ‘Only Baloney‘, a title which relates to one of Ray-Jones’s favourite phrases (I think borrowed from Brodovitch), as John mentions in his piece:

‘Instead we were given a lot of phoney baloney (Tony’s polite way of saying bullshit) about how a friendship that never was, and a methodology that has nothing to do with Tony’s way of approaching and commentating on existence by a photographer who claims so much respect and appreciation for Tony and his seeing, yet deliberately ignores the information and other evidence he left us and that is also clearly present in Tony’s prints.’

The review reads very much in John’s own voice and expresses his views about both the show and some of the aspects of the rewriting of photographic history it represents. John did give me permission to put the whole of his review on this site, and I may do so later, but for the moment you can read it on his The Photo Pundit blog.

I was pleased to find that his view is largely similar to what I had previously written about the show, though his close knowledge of both the man and his work gives his view a much greater weight. There is quite simply no one who can speak about Tony Ray-Jones and his photography with greater personal knowledge and authority, although many still seem to want to ignore his views.

And, also on John’s blog there is a great bonus. On March 7, artist Edward Mackenzie, another English former Brodovitch student (he recently moved back to this country and set up his studio in Stoke-on-Trent) gave a talk at the Media Space, about Tony Ray-Jones who he met in New York in 1966 him along with Tony’s brother, Philip Ray-Jones. You can see the two of them in a photograph at the top of another post I helped John put on-line yesterday which is the text of Mackenzie’s talk. It’s an interesting and slightly different perspective of both the man and his work.