Category: Photographers

More Raw Files

Pete Brook writing his Raw File blog for Wired magazine often comes up with some interesting work that’s new to me, and a couple of recent posts are worth a look.

I like the long exposure night images of Alnis Stakle in Ghostly Photos Reveal Subzero Shortcuts Through Post-Soviet Cities (that’s almost an essay rather than a title), made with exposures of several minutes on film in a Hassleblad. The lengthy exposures lose much of the feeling of night but produce some strange effects (with the peculiarities of Fuji Reala 100 and Kodak Ektar 100 doubtless adding their contribution.)

It’s also worth looking at Stakle’s own web site and the other projects there, a reminder of the great interest and depth of photography in central and eastern Europe, perhaps rather more vital now than the west.  I was reminded at times of the book ‘Lab East’ whose launch I photographed at Paris Photo in 2010.

Another recent post I enjoyed on Raw File was by German photographer Gesche Würfel, a set of images of the basements of apartment buildings in New York made while hunting for a flat there with her husband with another typically long title, Photographer Finds Cockatiels, Jesus in NYC Basements.  Among the other projects on her web site is a set of pictures by Würfel taken around the London Olympic site, Go for Gold!, covering areas I’ve myself documented over 35 years, some work from which is on my River Lea/Lea Valley site and in my book Before the Olympics.


One of my pictures from Before the Olympics – on Waterden Rd, Hackney Wick in 2005

The Power of Photography – Marcus Bleasdale

Watch National Geographic Live!‘s short film of Marcus Bleasdale talking about the D R Congo and how he hopes his pictures will improve things in The Power of Photography to Witness. As it says on the page:

Photojournalist Marcus Bleasdale wants to make people angry; as angry as he is about Africa’s first world war and the surprising way in which we are funding this violence.

On his own web site you can hear him talking at more length about one of these images at the start of another short film, Avoiding Photographic Dangers.

His work in the Congo is in ‘The Rape of a Nation‘, which is one of a number of stories on his VII page.

I’ve written a number of stories on the war in the Congo, seen from the considerably safer viewpoint of London’s streets and the protests by Congolese on them to try to focus public attention on the conflicts there, and the links between this and our mobile phones, computers and other electronic devices. But Bleasdale’s images bring home powerfully what happens there and its effect on the people.

You can find out more about what is happening on the Raise Hope for Congo website. Many organisations are working in the Congo, and in 2008 the BBC Radio 4 Today programme published a list of charities who work in Congo and deal with survivors of sexual violence, including Merlin, part of Save the Children. Others include War Child and Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

 

Lauren Henkin

David Vestal whose passing I mentioned yesterday, was a man whose work very much reflected the interaction between craft and vision that is at the heart of photography, and the same is certainly true of the landscape photography of Lauren Henkin, as you can see from the interview with her published recently on Petapixel.

This starts by looking at what made her become a photographer, and she picks as a key moment a visit with her parents to a Harry Callahan retrospective at the US National Gallery of Art in 1996, when she was in her early twenties, around the end of her BA in Architecture, where she says “Callahan’s prints (in particular the photographs of Cape Cod), I had a visceral reaction to them.”

She goes on to describe taking a master printing workshop with George Tice, certainly one of the finest printers around both in platinum and silver  I think I probably first registered his name when he was one of the photographers featured in the ground-breaking volume ‘Darkroom‘, published by Lustrum Press in 1977 – on the verso of the title page under the usual details of the colophon the statement ‘PHYSICAL FACT/PSYCHIC EFFECT‘. A series of prints Tice had made from the same negative “opened up the path for me to develop a vocabulary for my prints.”

Henkin goes on to mention two other even more familiar names to me, Tyler Boley and Jon Cone, pioneers in fine art digital printing, whose helpful comments on-line in groups such as Digital Black and White the Print and Piezography 3000 have been a part of my daily life for a dozen or more years. You can read an intersting article written in 2012 by Cone, The State of the State of the Arts in Black & White, which is illustrated by the work of Henkin and Boley among others.

It was Jon Cone who, following on from his experience with Iris printers pioneered high quality black and white printing on Epson desktop inkjet printers.  I started printing with his PiezographyBW Quad ink system in 2000, producing black and white images on matte papers that startled me by their quality, matching or surpassing those I’d made some years earlier with platinum, platinum/palladium and kallitype (albeit with less control over image colour.) I went on to be a beta tester for the next generation of PiezoTone inks.

Cone’s work led printer manufacturers to up their game, and although I’m convinced that Piezography’s latest generation is still the ultimate in black and white printing quality (now on both glossy and matte papers – and yes, capable of more than silver) I no longer use them. Most of my printing is now in colour and I don’t print enough for it to seem worth changing to the cheaper ConeColor system that gives results identical to the Epson inks. If I ever get around to printing serious black and white portfolios I’ll start by investing in a new printer and the latest Cone inks.

But back to Lauren Henkin, who goes on to talk about her inspirations, mentioning photographer Robert Adams as well as painters, sculptors, architects and poets and then moving on to discuss her latest project. The Park, taken in that highly photographed space, Central Park in New York over three years, and her earlier work. Visually, even on screen, it is delightful and her website has an admirable and classical simplicity that complements the fine imagery.

I’ve yet to have the opportunity to see her actual prints as her work hasn’t been exhibited in the UK (she has been in group shows in Arles and Paris, along with a long list since 2007 in the US and Canada.) But its perhaps a reflection on the kind of photography that is promoted by the relatively few spaces that show contemporary work here that London (or some of our other major cities) is not yet on that list.

Henkin is also co-editor of Tilted Arc, a web site with the strap-line ‘Art and argument, fact and fiction. And verse.’ which has recently began a series ‘Women in the Landscape, a new ongoing feature,”conversations between women photographers whose work focuses on the land”. The first conversation is between Henkin and Canadian photographer Jessica Auer, whose work is well worth exploring.

David Vestal (1924 – December 5, 2013

When I first became seriously interested in photography and was taking pictures, back in the early 1970s (before then I’d been interested but to skint to actually buy film for the the camera I’d owned for around ten years) there was really only one magazine in the UK worth reading, Creative Camera, though that didn’t stop me buying some of the rest, mainly to drool over the equipment I still couldn’t afford.

There were also articles on technique, though mainly about taking photographs, recycling stuff about depth of field, exposure, panning and the rest, and occasionally about printing tricks, but little or nothing about making expressive images or about great photography. Photographing landscape would be illustrated by a few camera club images by the deservedly unknown author rather than the work of Ansel Adams or Edward Weston, let alone anything more modern.

For magazines with a wider interest in photography you had to go the the larger branches of Smiths which stocked the US magazines; Popular Photography, Modern Photography, Camera 35. In these magazines I learnt more about photographers and photography, though they also had technical reviews that went into far more depth than the UK mags – and made me buy the Minolta 28mm rather than the Leica to fit my Leica camera (and also to save up for the Leica 90mm f2.8 which I still occasionally use with an adaptor when I need a long lens on the Fuji-X cameras, while the Minolta, though once a fine performer has succumbed to fungus inside the lens.)

There were several regular columnists in these magazines who stood out, and foremost among them was David Vestal.  No mean photographer himself, as you can see from the set of pictures at the Robert Mann gallery, Vestal had learnt photography from one of the legendary teachers of photography, Sid Grossman of the Photo League in New York in the late 1940s, an himself became a legend.

I learnt much from his regular columns, not just about the how of photography, but also about the why and he was a man who inspired many. I don’t think there will be a better obituary for him than that by Jim Hughes in The Online Photographer; Hughes knew him well and in March 1972  began to serialise his “David Vestal’s Book of Craft—An Advanced Course in B&W Photography for Beginners and Others” in Camera 35  – and I became a regular reader. In 1978 it was published in book form as “The Craft of Photography”, and was one of the finest introductions to advanced photography ever to appear. Even if like me you never now go into a darkroom with intent it remains a book worth reading.

 

 

 

L’Oeil de la Photographie

I was very pleased when L’Oeil de la Photographie was announced in October, produced by the former editors of Le Journal de la Photographie, a daily blog of short articles on photographers and photography which was closed by its proprietor a month before, presumably because this free resource wasn’t making enough money.  You can view the site in English or French as you prefer.

I’d looked forward to having a quick look through their free mailing every day, even though there were often days when nothing really caught my interest, and two months ago these postings resumed.

Yesterday’s was one I particularly enjoyed and spent some time looking at the splendid collection of pictures by Anders Petersen, along with some perhaps too brief comments on each of the sections of work, put together for L’Oeil  by Anne Biroleau, the curator of the show of his work at the Site Richelieu of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in the rue Vivienne in Paris,  Anders Petersen [photographies], which continues until February 2nd 2014.

Other commitments meant I was unable to get to Paris Photo this year, and in the past there has always been less happening in the ‘odd’ years, but for 2013 there does seem to have been rather more than before, and I’m sorry to have missed it.

Also currently on show in Paris at Galerie Vu until January 11 2014 is a more recent project by Petersen, To Belong, made at a village near Modena in Italy called Finale Emilia, in the aftermath of the earthquakes in the region in 2012.

I can’t at the moment find a way to subscribe to the daily e-mails from ‘The Eye of Photography‘, nor can my RSS reader find a feed on the site.

 

 

 

 

 

The Cost of Coal

More fine work by Ami Vitale in slide shows for the Sierra Club multimedia web site ‘The Cost of Coal‘, with sections on West Virginia, Michigan and Nevada.

Its a presentation that brings home the real cost of coal in terms of the health of the people who live in these areas. Sierra‘s executive editor Steve Hawk and photographer Ami Vitale

“spent about a month on the road, talking to people on porches in West Virginia, at playgrounds near Detroit, and in darkened single-wides in the Nevada desert. Our concept was to show how coal damages lives in all three phases of its energy-generating cycle: when it’s extracted, when it’s burned, and when the leftover waste is discarded. DIG, BURN, DUMP. That was the title we’d envisioned.

But we kept hearing a different phrase, from all quarters. First, from defiant Donna Branham in Appalachia, whose once tight-knit family atomized after a mountaintop-removal mine shuttered her hometown: “They always talk about the cost of coal. I can tell you the true cost of that lump of coal. It cost my family.”

Coal as the web site says is truly “a dirty industry” and one that is supported in the US by massive lobbying. Companies like those owned by the Koch brothers put massive amounts into lobbying (though they make more from oil, another polluting fossil fuel)  They are reported as putting “more than $20 million on lobbying in 2008 and $12.3 million in 2009” and were named as the US’s “most prominent funders of efforts to prevent curbs on fossil-fuel burning” by Los Angeles Times reporter Margot Roosevelt.

Fracking and oil from tar sands are other examples of fossil fuel extraction that is causing massive environmental damage, and of course while the extraction has terrible local effects, the use of these fuels which generate large amounts of carbon dioxide is a global disaster. The results seem increasingly likely to be catastrophic, perhaps terminally so for our civilisation.

The Beyond Coal campaign by the Sierra Club states clearly:

Coal is an outdated, backward, and dirty 19th-century technology.

Not only is coal burning responsible for one third of US carbon emissions—the main contributor to climate disruption—but it is also making us sick, leading to as many as 13,000 premature deaths every year and more than $100 billion in annual health costs.

The Beyond Coal campaign’s main objective is to replace dirty coal with clean energy by mobilizing grassroots activists in local communities to advocate for the retirement of old and outdated coal plants and to prevent new coal plants from being built.

It aims to close a third of the US’s 500 coal fired power stations by 2020, replacing them “by clean energy solutions such as wind, solar, and geothermal” and wants to keep  “coal in the ground in places like Appalachia and Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.” It’s literally vital that we cut carbon emissions drastically.

I’ve not photographed the environmental destruction caused by opencast mining in the UK at sites such as Ffos-y-Fran in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, though long ago I did photograph some of the disused deep mines there, closed not because of the pollution but because we could get cheaper coal from overseas. And more recently I’ve photographed a number of protests in London related to dirty coal, and mining and power generation using coal.

This was a protest on April 1 2008, dubbed ‘Fossil Fools Day’ against the company that owns the open cast mine at Merthyr.

And in 2011 there was a protest against the activities of the Koch Brothers outside their London offices, though it was too windy that day to put up the giant banner – which was used a couple of months later at the US embassy.

and it was used again for another protest outside their offices the following year:

when the Koch brothers were also with the protesters for a very cold open-top bus tour across the city to the US embassy.

Continue reading The Cost of Coal

Koudelka Cop-out?

Can you photograph something as contentious as the Israeli “separation wall” in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and refuse to discuss the politics?  It’s a question that has aroused debate following the publication of a two-part interview with Josef Koudelka on the New York Times Lens blog on the publication of his new book “Wall: Israeli and Palestinian Landscapes“, images made in 2008-2012.

There is a fine introduction to the controversy by Henry Norr on Mondoweiss, which also looks at the slowness of the NY Times to correct an error of fact about the wall which Norr pointed out on pubication, but took much prodding and nine days for the paper to admit and correct. Norr asks why it should take so long and require a  “great deal of consultation” to correct a simple fact. If the NY Times can’t get facts right, who can? And what business does it have publishing a newspaper?

Norr gives the links to the Lens posts, but it is worth reading his piece before you go to them, so I won’t post them here. But the problems in the interview – at least as printed by the NY Times – are discussed in some detail in another post he refers to, The Moral And Intellectual Cowardice Of Josef Koudelka, written by photographer Asim Rafiqui (you can see his Idea of India online.)  He also links to a post by a Nazareth based prize-winning journalist, Jonathan Cook, A photographer who obscures the victims, who takes up Rafiqui’s complaint.

Cook makes the point :

By all accounts the photographs are an unequivocal indictment of Israel’s imprisonment of the Palestinians. If only the same could be said of his interview.

and Norr too makes the point that much of the details of the situation are given in the book (if in very small print) along with the photographs (though he doubts if many will read them.)

Like Rafiqui I’m an admirer of Koudelka’s work (his Magnum portfolio has a good selection up to 2004) and I also find the evasive NY Times interview rather shocking.

Addition:

I wrote this yesterday, here is another post on the issue I’ve just seen:
http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/koudelka-interview-follow-up-2.html

It seems fairly clear to me that the interview reflects a lack of integrity at the New York Times rather than the “cowardice of Josef Koudelka”.  As Jim Johnson writes:

‘Although I would need to inquire further, the problems seem to lie primarily with editorial decisions at The Times rather than with Koudelka.’

Film Night

I’ve not watched all the 16 films that are listed in 16 Photography Documentaries every Street Photographer should watch on the Street View Photography site, though there are some that I have seen. Most of the 16 can be found on YouTube, although a few are only available on DVD.

Perhaps I’ll find myself some spare time over Christmas to watch some of the others, although I usually keep pretty busy, and I find it hard to just sit and watch, especially for the longer films.  Daido Moriyama: Near Equal is 1hr 24 minutes, and  so far I’ve just dipped into it at a few points, so I can’t tell you if it is worth watching as a whole. Picking up his ‘Shinjuku 19XX-20-XX‘ from my bookshelves and looking through a few pages is rather more satisfying if I only have a few minutes to spare. But if you don’t have the book (or others with his work – and there are some available more cheaply), YouTube is considerably cheaper.

And while film is seldom a good medium for looking at photography, it can be good at talking about it, and the film features the photographer and  a number of other people (fortunately with subtitles for people like me whose Japanese is non-existent.)

I’ve never considered myself a ‘street photographer’, a term which always seems to me to lack any real meaning, though usually I work on the streets, and certainly see my own work as being a part of that great body of photography that was celebrated in ‘Bystander: A History of Street Photography‘, a book that annexed at least half the history of photography to its presumed genre (as you can appreciate from this speed-reading video.)  I don’t think any of those included in the original publication in 1994 – Atget, Stieglitz, Strand, Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Kertesz, Lartigue, Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and more –  called themselves street photographers either.

I don’t have the Eggleston DVD mentioned in this feature. but I did put another one on my Christmas list a couple of years ago, William Eggleston Photographer, a Reiner Holzemer film (extended trailer here) made in cooperation with the William Eggleston Trust, and I might watch that again.  And since people never know what to get me for Christmas, I might just search for a few more films I could add to put on a list for this year.

 

Saul Leiter (1923 – 2013)

Saul Leiter who died yesterday was a photographer who became better known in his eighties than he had been earlier in his life, as it was only in his seventies that he took many of his old 35mm Kodachromes taken on the streets out of their boxes and made the prints which showed his colour work from the 1950s and 60s, an age before colour photography became respectable to the art world.

Of course he wasn’t completely unknown before. He’d exhibited paintings on walls along with some very well-known artists, worked as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, and even had his black and white photographs exhibited in MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) when Edward Steichen was at the helm.

Back in 2006, his show ‘Saul Leiter: Early Colour’ attracted a great deal of favourable critical comment, and at the time I noted:

Currently on show until 21 Jan 2006 at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York is Saul Leiter: Early Color. For a real photographic treat go to the gallery web site and look through the 42 superb images dating from 1948-60, mainly taken in New York, but also from Rome, Venice and Paris. Despite the title of the show, the site includes 12 fine black and white pictures.

Leiter, born 1923, the son of a distinguished Talmudic scholar, began to study at Cleveland Theological College before leaving for New York to work as a painter. There he met Abstract Expressionist painter, Richard Pousette-Dart, who was also working with photography, and he also began taking pictures, working with 35mm colour on the streets of New York in the late 1940s.

Colour was alive and well in photography long before its discovery by the art world as ‘new color’ in the 1970s with the work of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and others.

(Links updated – the Howard Greenberg gallery link is to his artist page there rather than the 2006 show and is not the identical selection and there are now only 39 works.)

One of the nicest current pieces I’ve seen about him is on Faded and Blurred, but you can also see selections of his work on Retronaut, Time Lightbox, Jackson Fine Art, Gallery 51, InPublic and of course Lens Culture, as well as watch the trailer for the film about him, ‘In No Great Hurry.’

As he says in the opening moments of the trailer, “There have always been people who liked color, its not as if I was the only person“, but although there certainly were others – such as Helen Levitt and possibly others currently unknown whose work may yet come to light – his work is permeated by a remarkable lyricism which apparently continued unabated even after he switched to digital in recent years.

Morel Wins Hands Down

“I feel good. I hope that never happens again to any of us. This is a victory for all artists, for all copyright holders”

Daniel Morel’s verdict, (as reported in the Times of India) after hearing the jury had returned a unanimous verdict that AFP and Getty had willfully violated the Copyright Act expresses what many of us feel, though he has the added bonus of having been awarded $1.2 million – the maximum statutory penalty available – along with an extra $20,000 for their violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Reading the day by day account of the trial on Editorial Photographers UK makes it pretty clear why AFP and Getty lost the case, and reinforces what I and many others wrote earlier about the madness of AFP and Getty in fighting it rather than admit their mistake and come to an early settlement as the other offenders did.

It seems to have been a case of the agencies thinking they were so big they could do what they liked, and get away with it despite the law. The attempt by AFP to blame the photographer could hardly have made a positive impression on any sentient jury member, and I suspect that had the jury been able to make a higher award they would have done so.

I’m not generally in favour of the scale of damages that US Law allows, which often seems unreasonably high (while the UK approach lets off deliberate offenders too lightly.)  But this case seems to be  good example of why such high damages should be available.

For more on the background of the case see Jeremy Nicholl’s excellent feature on his Russian Photos blog. I’m sure he and EPUK will have something to say about the verdict.