Category: Photographers

As I sit at home writing this post, people are going to the poll or not in the Crimea, voting on whether to go for greater autonomy inside Ukraine or to return to Russia, which they were part of before Kruschev gave them away in 1954. Or not, because some people are said to be boycotting the vote as neither of the two alternatives represents their wish to remain in the present arrangement.

There seem to me to be only very limited situations where boycotting a vote can be an effective tactic, though I wouldn’t presume to give the guys in the Crimea any specific advice. Here in the UK, most people don’t bother to vote in most elections, though its rather apathy than boycott that gets the greatest support in almost every poll. But I do think this would be at least a slightly healthier democracy if on every voting paper there was the option ‘none of the above.’

I’ve been glad these last few weeks that I’m not one of those photojournalists who flies out to trouble spots to report on them, though I have been impressed by the work of those who do.  Paris-based photojournalist, Alfred Yaghobzadeh, was on the ground in Kiev documenting the events from the day after things kicked off, and on LensCulture you can see an in-depth showing of his work, with 87 colour images and 105 black and white pictures.

It’s interesting to see the work like this, and there are some fine images. Kiev seems to have brought out a huge number of memorable and spectacular images from a great many photographers, but looking at the work of just one person is in some ways more revealing and gives a greater insight into what things were really like. The same is also true for videos such as Vice New’s Ukraine Burning with camera work mainly by Phil Caller (along with three others who from their names are probably Ukrainian.) Once you have got over the rather annoying interviewer (Vice Magazine seems to revel in the annoying, perhaps it worries it might have to change its name otherwise) it’s an interesting film – and again makes me feel glad not to have been there.

Caller is someone I used to find myself often covering events in London with a few years ago, when he was still working mainly with still images, but starting also to take video. Had I then been at a similar stage in my career to him it is a decision I would quite likely have felt I had to make also, if only to earn a living. Keeping on taking only still pictures – and keeping on putting my stories on Demotix are luxuries I’m in a position to afford after over 40 years of work.

There are things the still image does better, preserving a moment and bringing it to our attention in a way that doesn’t happen in a movie – unless perhaps you introduce a still frame. But that becomes an ‘effect’ in the way that a still image isn’t, and one that alters the nature of a film.

Looking at Yaghobzadeh’s work I found myself wondering why he had chosen to take some of the images as black and white. The square format is great for most of the portraits, but in some of the other images I found myself thinking that they would almost certainly have been better in colour. There are some exceptions, mainly those images with a strong element of design.

Of course many photographers now who present their work as black and white have actually taken these as colour, but I think that Yaghobzadeh was working with film, and from the format of the images, with medium format.  One of the things that attracts me, at least in principle, to working with cameras with an electronic viewfinder – such as the Fuji x-E1 – is that you can work with an monochrome image in the finder, while still if you are saving images in AW, have all the colour information still present should you later decide you would prefer to have a colour picture. But I say in principle, because although I’ve taken a few thousands of images on the camera I’ve yet  to take a single one as monochrome. I’ve still too got a cupboard with a shelf full of black and white film (now all rather outdated) but somehow I feel that photography and I have moved on.

At a quick count I appear to have ten books by Robert Adams already on my shelves, though I’d be surprised if there were not another one or two lurking somewhere. A few of the ten were review copies, but most I paid good money for; I expect I thought both Denver and The New West were rather expensive when I bought them; the cover price for each was $15, though in a London bookshop at the time they probably cost £15. And of course there are portfolios  by him in various magazines on my shelves too.

Which kind of suggests that I am something of a fan of this work – and I have been since I first saw it in the 1970s. It also reminds me that he has published quite a few books, because there are certainly some that I know I don’t own. At a little over £100, his The Place We Live seems almost certain to fall into that latter category, though as a three volume set with a total of 640 pages it could well represent good value for money.

The Place We Live is a show as well as a book, and is currently at the Jeu de Paume in Paris until May 18, 2014. Although the show was originally scheduled to have a showing in London at the Media Space, this seems now to be the closest it will get to us. But you can view the show on-line at the Yale University Art Gallery. I’m wondering whether to take a trip on Eurostar, but that would cost me about as much as the book, and given the choice I’d probably go for the book.

Forty or so years ago when I first started in photography, it was important to see original prints, partly because there were relatively few books, but mainly because the quality of the reproduction in almost all of them was, by today’s standards, abysmal.  Now it possible to get fairly decent quality in even cheap publications – and even from print on demand companies like Blurb, while some of the best (and most expensively) printed photographic books are superb.  I remember back around 1980 rather insensitively telling a well-known photographer when we compared his print with the page proof from his latest book that the printed page actually reproduced the highlights rather better than his darkroom print. True, but it upset him to be told so. A few years later and this would be almost commonplace, and we began to see duo-tones and tri-tones that did things that were impossible in the darkroom.

Now it is also possible to view images on large high quality displays, and certainly looking at my own images, I often find I can see them better in any print. Images on the web are generally a poor substitute, but the high quality pdfs I’ve made of my books are often better than any print I can make. Of course there are some ways in which a real object is preferable to a digital image (and I have many real prints framed on my walls, along with a few less real), but perhaps the days when you had to see the ‘real thing’ are largely gone. Except for print fetishists.

There is also an article about the show by Aaron Gertler in OUT OF ORDER Magazine and Alexander Strecker blogs about it at Lensculture.

It knew it was heresy. So I kept it to myself. Drank the white wine and kept quiet.

I was there in the temple of silver, the Print Room of London’s Photographers’ Gallery, in the rather subdued if not hushed darkness of the opening of ‘Eternal London‘, worshipping with others both Giacomo Brunelli‘s undoubted talent (as I said in my initial post –Giacomo’s London – this is a show to see and, perhaps more importantly, a book to buy.)  And I found myself thinking the unthinkable.

There is a particular mystique about Giacomo’s work, which goes with it’s mysterious quality. He uses the old Miranda SLR and lens given him by his father for all his pictures. It has a removable pentaprism, enabling you to hold the camera close to the ground and see them image on a ground glass screen on the top of the camera body. I thought to myself, just like you can with the tilt-able screens on many digital cameras, or even with a little less elegance using Live View on the back of digital cameras without this feature.

The wall text also had a reference to the printing, comparing it to the wet plate images of the Victorian era in its qualities. I found myself thinking of those fine large, highly detailed prints by Samuel Bourne and others from what is arguably the greatest era of photographic printmaking and finding no similarities. Perhaps there were a few empty skies that were reminiscent of images made when photographic materials were only sensitive to blue light and the ultraviolet, but the wet plate process enabled incredibly detailed images, limited only by the lens as the light-sensitive material was not an emulsion.

Looking at the images on display, I think what they resemble more are prints made from paper negatives, such as those produced in the even earlier calotype process – and also those that I used years ago to make prints by alternative processes, enlarging my images onto resin-coated photographic paper and then contact printing onto another sheet of the same material to give a negative – which was then again contact printed, in my case onto hand coated and sensitised ‘salted paper’ or albumen. Exposures through the paper were much longer than when using sheet film – I put the printing frame in the garden when I went to work and take it in when I came home – and the prints had something of a similar quality to those made by Brunelli in a more conventional manner, though it was more the highlights than the shadows that seemed to diffuse.

And I thought again about what had caused me to lose much of my interest in those alternative processes. In a word, Piezography. Jon Cone‘s four shade black inks and software that I bought into when it first came out, enabling me to make prints on matt papers that had a richness that I’d never managed in the silver darkroom (though it was to be another ten years or so before this became possible on glossy surfaces.)  Now, things are even better with seven shades of grey, though I now make do with Epson’s rather inferior ABW offering (3 greys and the odd spot of colour) as I no longer print enough black and white to keep a dedicated printer running. But even with the Epson inks I can produce prints that are in almost all respects a match for silver.

Soon after I started using the Cone inks (BJP published a review, which half paid for my first set), I had someone visit me who wanted some enlarged negatives using these inks. He’d photographed on 4×5 and printed from this as a platinum print, but wanted to make a larger print – and so needed a larger negative. I scanned his 4×5″ negative, and printed it out as an 8×10″ negative, and before he left I printed out the scanned file as a positive print on a Hahnemühle paper. He looked carefully at it and went rather quiet. It was clearly (at least to me) a rather better print than the platinum, but I made no comment.

Brunelli gets a particular look about his prints that comes from his exposure and work in the darkroom, but it is one that could also be readily applied to a digital file, either by some clever footwork in Photoshop or perhaps even by applying a suitable filter in that or some other software.

Of course it doesn’t really matter whether we work on film or digital or print using silver or carbon pigment inks. I probably wouldn’t have bothered to think about it or to write about it if there didn’t appear, at least from the gallery, some odd kind of mystification over the process. What matters is the end product, the pictures.

And of course these have been printed digitally, and very well indeed, not for the show, but for the book, ‘Eternal London‘ printed by Editoriale Bortolazzi Stei (EBS) in Verona.

Somewhere hidden at the back of the rack of shelves behind me are a pile of issues of a very special magazine that was published in Lucerne, Switzerland, Camera. I only subscribed to it shortly before it ceased publication in 1981, but bought a number of the back issues that were still available when I signed up. We called it ‘Swiss Camera’ because there were also US magazines that shared the name.

The reputation of this magazine, at least for photographers here, was made only in its last 16 years, when Allan Porter was editor-in-chief from 1965 to 1981.  A new Camera magazine was launched last year in a bilingual English/French version, published in Paris and aiming to take over the mantle of the former publication, and in issue 5, out this week it looks at the work of Allan Porter.

There are a series of articles in L’Oeil de la Photographie related to Allan Porter and the magazine, starting with Camera #5: In search of a mythical magazine, and continuing with Allan Porter: Editor of Camera, Allan Porter: His personal Pictures, Allan Porter: His Photographer Portraits, Allan Porter: His Favorite Covers, perhaps the least interesting for me as his choice of the best 12 from the 162 covers is rather different to mine, and finally, Allan Porter
“I was a go-between” with a short audio-visual in which he talks about his work and the photographic context of the era, and welcomes the new publication.

At the end of the first article it states: ‘Vintage issues of the magazine are collector’s items today.’ But many can still be picked up cheaply – I found quite a few on offer on the web for $5 an issue, less than half the cost of the new magazine. I haven’t yet looked at the new ‘Camera’ in print, though it is available at half a dozen outlets in London including the Photographers’ Gallery and selected newsagents – details can be found on the website.

 

Readers who have kept wide-awake though my many posts cannot have failed to register a certain coolness towards the London Photographers’ Gallery, though this hasn’t prevented me from being a member since almost its earliest days (though I think my membership has lapsed a couple of times over the years thanks to their administrative incompetence.) The gallery may not be much, but it is more or less all we have, and I live in hope, though not much, that one day it will start caring about photography rather than seeing its role to try to ingratiate itself to an art establishment that really doesn’t want to know.

But that isn’t really what I sat down to write about today. You can read my other posts, for example Paris and London: MEP & PG and Zombies in Ramillies Street to get some idea of my thinking about the Photographers’ Gallery.

Often on my visits to the gallery, the most interesting work is to be found in the bookshop and the print room, and rather than pay your £4 to confirm your feeling that their might be a very good reason why William Burroughs’ photographic work is so little known, that David Lynch is a considerably better “film director, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor” (thanks to Google) than a photographer, and that Andy Warhol was better at almost everything else than taking photographs, I’d suggest you go downstairs to the book shop and print room. Because there you will find some interesting photography, Giacomo Brunelli’s Eternal London, a show which continues until 27 April 2014.

Giacomo Brunelli (left) at the book launch

There are around 30 pictures from the series on Brunelli’s web site, along with his other series, The Animals and Animals II, and Self Portraits.  I wrote about his ‘Animals‘ in 2007, and mentioned them again enthusiastically when they were on show at Photofusion in 2011. I still find them exciting. Self Portraits is a series prompted by Lee Friedlander’s famed 1966 image of the photographer’s shadow on the back of a person on a New York street (you can see more of Friedlanders work on ASX here) but Brunelli works through a whole series of changes, some quite amazing in their effect.

Eternal London certainly has its moments, and comes from two years of early morning walks around central London with the old Miranda camera given him by his father with its 50 mm lens, on a commission from the Photographers Gallery. Perhaps there were just a few I felt were too mannered, but overall I think it’s a fine set of work. My favourite image is a woman walking in the rain holding up her umbrella as she approaches Lambeth bridge. As the gallery text says, the mood is very ‘noir’, stills from some mysterious film of suspense.

I was reminded of possibly Bill Brandt’s most curious picture story, ‘The Day That Never Broke‘ published by Picture Post in 1947, (also called ‘The Man Who Found Himself Alone in London’) (1947), a surrealist fable in which a man wakes up to find himself totally alone in a London enmeshed in fog; he gets on his bicycle and cycles to the river to throw himself in an end it all.  (Incidentally while looking for a link to this image I found a pirated copy on the web of most of my 1999 essay on Brandt in which I mentioned this story.)

Hats are important in Eternal London – in half a dozen of the 31 images

That I also thought of Robert Frank’s pictures from London in 1952-3 has more to do with hats than anything else. By the time I first saw those images around 20 years later thanks to Creative Camera, the hat had largely disappeared from the streets of London. The presence of them in a large proportion of Brunelli’s images is part of what gives his images a period feel, harking back to the black and white films of a previous era.

Frank of course found fog as well, that kind of London peculiar that could be cut with a knife, or rather as the term pea-souper implied, scooped up with a spoon. The near-sihouetted man in a bowler with his umbrella and newspaper behind his back (the third image down on Chasing Light) and shining black shoes seen in rear-view on a mildy foggy street with a Routemaster in the distance is perhaps an archetype of Brunelli’s Eternal London. Though perhaps hard to imagine how the photographer managed to track down so many in streets where the only headgear on normal view apart from policemen’s helmets (perhaps strangely absent) are close-fitting woolly hats.

The book Eternal London, Giacomo Brunelli, published by Dewi Lewis to accompany the show (ISBN 978-1-907893-52-0) is a fine volume, and I think the printing suits the images even better than the handprinted silver gelatin prints available in the Print Room. The images on show (and for sale) are editioned in two sizes, 9.5×12″ and 20×24″ and I think work better on the smaller size. Though around half of the images in the book are printed with a plain verso and would be eminently suitable for framing!

The title ‘Eternal London‘ comes from the Irish poet, author, singer, songwriter, and entertainer Thomas Moore (1779 – 1852) who wrote among many other works the words for the Minstrel Boy, The Last Rose of Summer, The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls, Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms, The Meeting of the Waters and many more. Byron on his deathbed made him his literary executor, trusting him with his memoirs – which he burnt at Byron’s family’s pleading. He published a ridiculous number of works, and though born in Ireland and writing and performing many Irish songs spent much of his life in London where he had come to study law at the age of 20.

This is a small extract from his ‘Rhymes on the Road‘ published in a book dedicated to Byron in 1823, and written after Moore had had to leave England and travel on the continent to get away from the country until he could pay back a debt of £6000 following the loss of a court case (the money had been embezzled by one of his servants.)  It’s not as often seems to be assumed a statement of some nostalgic longing to be back there, but actually a curse, a complaint about how, wherever you went to get away from it, even climbing up mountains in foreign lands, you heard people talking about what was happening in the City!

Fancying we leave this world behind,
Such pleasant sounds salute one’s ear
As — ” Baddish news from ‘Change, my dear — ”
The Funds — (phew, curse this ugly hill) — ”
Are lowering fast — (what, higher still ?) — ”
And — (zooks, we ‘re mounting up to heaven !) — ”
Will soon be down to sixty-seven.”

Go where we may — rest where we will,
Eternal London haunts us still.
The trash of Almack’s or Fleet Ditch —
And scarce a pin’s head difference which —
Mixes, though ev’n to Greece we run,
With every rill from Helicon !

Even before everyone was connected to the Internet and carrying a smartphone you couldn’t get away from it!

As I started saying in my previous post, I’m not in favour of contests and awards. I very rarely enter my photographs in for any competitions, though I have occasionally submitted portfolios for some festivals etc in recent years. But essentially I don’t feel most awards are appropriate for a medium like ours.  There is a post I rather like by Paul Melcher on his Thoughts of a Bohemian blog, Photojournalism is not a competition that I think expresses why not rather well:

“It is not a function of photography to be better than another. Photojournalists do not go covering events thinking ” I have to beat that image Nachtwey took last week”. Photography, and photojournalism, is not a competition. So why would the resulting images be ?”

and of course the whole post is worth reading, though I don’t think his conclusion about judging is entirely sensible.

Of course some contests are largely money-making enterprises, hoping to attract large numbers of submissions, each with an entry fee. They lucky winner may get something worthwhile as a prize, but the real aim of the competition is simply to enrich the gallery or organisation running it. So one of my rules is never to enter anything that asks for what seems a nominal entry fee clearly designed to do nothing more than cover the actual costs of handling an entry. Where submission is digital, these should be very low indeed.

Other competitions are simply a cheap way of getting to use images, with companies making excessive rights grabs as a condition of entry. Always read the small print carefully!

But most of the well-known competitions in photography are genuine and well-run, or at least so I though until I read the post World Press Photo: great pics and the usual incest by duckrabbit (a blog that often has something of interest.)

This years WPP Picture of the year (you can see the results for 2014 contest announced a few days ago here) was an image by John Stanmeyer,  a founder and shareholder of the limited company VII photo. It’s actually rather an interesting picture in several ways (though perhaps it would not have been my choice as overall winner), but what raises some doubts is that the chair of the jury that chose it, Gary Knight, is a fellow founder and shareholder of the limited company VII photo.

It’s worth reading what duckrabbit has to say about the obvious conflict of interest and the apparent lack of any process at WPP for dealing with such conflicts, but it is perhaps even more interesting to read the comments on the article, one of which gives another example of such conflict which is perhaps more open to challenge.

There is also a link to an interesting piece of research, which can be downloaded in full from Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Awards, Archives, and Affects: Tropes in the World Press Photo Contest 2009 – 2011, by Zarzycka, M. (Marta) and Kleppe, M. (Martijn)