Category: Photographers

I’ve often linked here to posts by Jeremy Nicholl on his The Russian Photos blog, for example his excellent coverage of the Morel vs AFP/Getty saga (the agencies have lost twice but are still fighting – perhaps just to benefit the lawyers) and it was interesting to read an interview with him today on the ‘SellNews Blog‘.

The heading to the post there also made me smile a  little.  “A comfortable pair of shoes is one of the most important pieces of photo equipment” is a quotation from Nicholls, but was also almost word for word my reply some years ago when I was being interviewed for some amateur photographic magazine.  There it was the kind of interview that went through a stock series of questions, and one at the end was “What is your most useful photographic accessory?” and my answer “A comfortable pair of shoes” was not really what the interviewer wanted.

A few years later in another similar interview, about my urban landscape work, my answer had changed, and had become my Brompton, a superb British-made folding bicycle that had made my later work in the Thames Gateway possible. The distances there were too much for convenient walking, and the bike took me to places that a car would not have reached (and in any case I’ve given up driving) and let me stop almost anywhere on the roads to photograph. No nonsense about finding somewhere to park and walking miles back to find the light had changes or that what looked interesting at 5o mph didn’t quite look so good when you got back to it. The Brompton has the big advantage that once folded it could also always be taken on trains and the underground across London (and on buses, but usually it’s quicker to ride.)

More recently it’s back to shoes again for me, with much more of my work in central London, and often at events where a bike might be damaged or be very likely to be stolen if locked out of the way.  So it’s back to buses and walking – and sometimes the tube or Overground. My taste in shoes has changed – then I went for lightweight hand-sewn leather, while now I prefer rather heavier, warmer and more expensive and waterproof  models that provide more support.

But Nicholl’s interview isn’t just about shoes and the Morel case, and there is a nice section where he gives his view that photographers have to be not neutral but honest, as well as his views on social media, his problems photographing in Russia, his equipment and his clear advice to those amateur photographers who wish to become professional: “marry into money.” Though he does go on to say more. The whole piece is worth reading.

The newly opened show at the ICP in New York is not one I’ll bother to go to. Having looked at their web page about it with a slide show of 15 images, I’d probably not bother with it even if I could hop on a bus outside my front door direct to the show.

According to ICP Curator Carol Squiers, What Is a Photograph? “will explore the intense creative experimentation in photography that has occurred since the 1970s“, but I’m afraid it leaves me distinctly unimpressed. A few of the captions seem more interesting than the images, always a bad sign and to me in their attempts to probe photography itself, “the role of light, color, composition, to materiality and the subject” rather than reinventing photography they appear to have deserted it.

Which perhaps would not be important in itself if these works could stand on their own in the world of art, rather than occupying some of the very limited cultural space allowed to photography, but I doubt most can, even if most are selling well in the current art marketplace.

It is in part perhaps a matter of selection – there are many both past and present whose creative experimentation has been of rather more interest, from the earliest days of photography with Talbot and Hippolyte Bayard through people such as Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy and on to guys like Henry Holmes Smith and Ralph Eugene Meatyard and others to the present day.

The issues which this show claims as the prerogative of these conceptual artists are those that every worthwhile photographer addresses each time they make an image, but the question that obsesses them is not ‘What is a photograph?’ but ‘What makes (or how do I make) a worthwhile photograph?’. To me it seems a distinctly more crucial issue.

Two stories in the news today relate to photographic ethics. The first seems clear-cut. AP have issued a statement AP severs ties with photographer who altered work about their decision to break all ties with freelance photographer Narciso Contreras who apparently owned up to them that he had removed the video camera of another photographer he was working with from the corner of a dramatic picture of a Syrian fighter he had sent them last September.

Mexican freelance Contreras “was one of five AP journalists who shared in the Pulitzer awarded last April for breaking news photography, cited by judges for “producing memorable images under extreme hazard” and saluted by AP’s VP and Director of Photography Santiago Lyon for their bravery and skill. AP say they have examined all the 494 pictures by him that they have handled and this is the only one that has been altered, but they are still removing all of his work from their publicly available archive.

In their release, they quote Contreras as stating: “I took the wrong decision when I removed the camera … I feel ashamed about that” and he goes on to say that he was working under extreme pressure, and that this was the only time he had done such a thing.

Although one can sympathise with Contreras, I’ve often given my opinion that integrity is paramount in photojournalism and news reporting. Without it our work has no credibility.  It is harsh treatment for what appears to be a single slip, but inevitable for AP to take such decisive action. Though I do feel that people who say that the AP should hand back that Pulitzer are just being silly.

Other cameras getting in the way and messing up our best pictures is an everyday hazard for those of us who photograph news and events. Sometimes we can crop them out, other times burn down to make them less obtrusive, both acceptable, but cloning them out clearly breaks the link between reality and image. The particular camera here seems to have been simply lying on the ground, but often it is the cameras of other photographers using them who get in our way – and our cameras may well be in their pictures too. But still photographers usually try to cooperate with others in taking photographs to avoid such clashes as far as possible. (Videographers are often more of a problem because of their different requirements – which I realise, but some working for particular major media outlets do appear to feel they have a divine right to get in everyone’s way and have sometimes to be politely reminded this is not the case !)

Politica y Sociedad in The First Photo Won a Prize; The Second Made a Controversy Explode look at a pair of photographs taken at the same time of a 14 year old Haitian girl killed by the police for looting a store of two plastic chairs and a framed picture. One, a superbly composed but highly worked on image by photographer Paul Hansen won the Swedish Picture of the Year Award 2011.

The other is far more prosaic, taken from one side gives a much clearer view of the location, and shows the dead girl with a group of photographers in a line taking her picture. It isn’t a great picture and unlikely to win awards, but one that provokes thought.

Hansen’s is almost an abstraction from the event, perhaps more like Andrew Wyeth might have painted the scene than a photograph. The second photograph is by Nathan Weber, and on his web site you can watch his video about the death of Fabienne, which includes several striking and rather more realistic images of the dead girl, as well as putting the images into their context.

Politica y Sociedad comment: “The debate that is arising in Sweden revolves around the question, “Would Sweden have donated less for disaster relief if that photo had not been published?” Or “Would fewer resources and professionals have been sent?”

But I think there should also be a debate about the aestheticisation of reality in the post-production of images like Hansen’s. To me it loses authenticity by the excessive and over-dramatic interpretation, something which as has been pointed out, seems to make everything like a film poster. Let’s see things as life.

I’ve written previously about the blog by an old friend of mine – though our paths seem seldom to cross these days – Derek Ridgers, whose Ponytail Pontifications are always of interest. His latest post about meeting and photographing Alexei Sayle, and his invention of the Sayle Twins is a good example.

Back in the 1980s, Derek and I used to meet up regularly with some other photographers to criticise each other’s work, and Derek pulled no punches, as I mentioned in a post Photo Reviews. As I commented there, these critical gatherings “were about developing ourselves as photographers, photo reviews are all about developing your careers” and I know that they were important for me, and I like to think that some of my comments (though rather more polite and less controversial than his) may have at least encouraged him, and occasionally  I think we both gained from a little mutual advice.

Derek has worked for over 35 years for UK magazines and Newspapers like NME, The Face, The Independent, The Sunday Telegraph, Time Out and Loaded, and has a remarkable archive of work, including much on his web site.  Sabotage Times last month published an interview with him about a book of his pictures from the London Tattoo Convention with a gallery of 13  pictures.

Derek has a new book, Derek Ridgers: 78-87 London Youth, due to be published on March 31, 2014, and you can see and hear him talking about his photography in a promo video. His pictures are on show at Ketchum Pleon at 35-41 Folgate Street in Spitalfields, London E1 6BX in February 2014.

Over the years I’ve seen a number of photographs making use of scanners and photo-finish cameras and various multiple exposure techniques and never found them more than amusing novelties. But there is something rather more compelling about Adam Magyar’s stainless (video).  Perhaps because video is essentially a transient experience, while in still images I want something deeper, that says more than ‘how clever’ or even ‘I wonder how he did it?’

You can see more of his other work – and it is impressive if largely not to my taste on his web site linked above, and learn much about Magyar’s ingenuity and perseverance in a feature  ‘Einstein’s Camera’, which also includes the video along with other work.

I’m rather sceptical about any link with Einstein – and most other such claims made by artists – but that doesn’t detract from the work. Wikipedia has this quote from Arthur Eddington

Let us draw an arrow arbitrarily. If as we follow the arrow we find more and more of the random element in the state of the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future; if the random element decreases the arrow points towards the past. That is the only distinction known to physics. This follows at once if our fundamental contention is admitted that the introduction of randomness is the only thing which cannot be undone. I shall use the phrase ‘time’s arrow’ to express this one-way property of time which has no analogue in space.

which might be more appropriate, but ‘Eddington’s Camera’ wouldn’t have the same attraction.

The ‘Medium‘ site on which this piece appears has some other articles that may be of interest, though on a quick look through I found no other significant photography. One of the site’s features is to tell you how long each will take to read. For ‘Einstein’s Camera’ it tells you ’22 minutes’.

Thanks to Peggy Sue Amison of the Sirius Arts Centre in Cork, Ireland for bringing this work to my attention by a post on Facebook. Magyar is bow based in Berlin where she is a consultant and curator at Picture Berlin. The video was also shot in Berlin, and reminded me of my visit there a couple of years ago, when I also took the U-Bahn from Rosa Luxemburg Platz to Alexanderplatz, both close to where I stayed, though I took few pictures.