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John G Morris

I’ve not always been the greatest fan of photography’s oldest magazine, the British Journal of Photography, though I was a subscriber for over 20 years, but there are often things it does very well. One of them is a feature by Dimitri Beck, editor in chief of Polka magazine, (whose Paris gallery and offices I visited last November for a show by Daido Moryami), an interview with deservedly the best-known photographic editor of the last century, John G Morris.

Now 96, Morris is still working with photographers, but the occasion for the article is the showing for the first time of the photographs he made himself in Normandy in 1944, a month after the Normandy landings, when, keen to see things for himself, rather than staying at the Life Magazine London offices, he invented the job of ‘pool editor for Western Front’ and went out daily with the Life photographers for 4 weeks, taking his Rolleiflex with him and shooting a dozen rolls of film.

The pictures, being shown until Sept 15 at Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan, certainly evoke the era and place from the few examples I’ve seen and show he was proficient as a photographer, but rather pale beside the iconic images from others that he edited.

If you are not familiar with the story of Morris, the film Eleven Frames, directed by Douglas Sloan gives some idea of his work and has Morris himself telling the story of Capa’s D-Day pictures. You can also see a video interview made earlier this year with him by Alessia Glaviano on Vogue Italy.

Morris’s autobiography, Get the Picture: a Personal History of Photojournalism was first published in 1998, came out as a paperback in 2002 and has since appeared in various languages and is still available.

Dave Wyatt

A Facebook post from Photo-Democracy attracted my interest to work by Bristol-born photographer Dave Wyatt, and their web site has four of his works for sale. You can see a much wider range of his photograph in the seven projects on his own web site. Perhaps to me the most interesting series photographically are the two dozen black and white images in Olive harvest: Palestine, which seem to have a spontaneity absent in his colour work. But while the deliberately formal images of Thames Town: China’s new Suburbia have a weird fascination in the subject matter which is amplified by the absolutely correct vertical treatment within the square format, there are times in some of the other series where I feel that format becomes something of a straight-jacket. Porto Romano: Living on Toxic Land departs from that and shows a much more visually lively approach that appeals to me greatly.

Photo-Democracy, a sister company of Chris Beetles Fine Photographs in London is an interesting business, though I think with a misleading name. It sets out to market decent photography at affordable prices – from £40 for an 8×10″ signed print in a ‘limited edition’ of 500, up to £1000 for a 30×40″ version of the same image in an edition of 10. It’s rather a pity that these are digital C-types rather than high quality inkjet prints – but this reflects a prejudice that still exists in some fine-art circles and which this site unfortunately presents as a selling point. Personally I’ve only bought C-types in the last ten years when the extra cost of a good inkjet was an issue, and the more archival quality of good inkjet prints was of no importance.

Although it isn’t a way I would chose to market my own work, the scheme seems well thought out – and the site FAQ makes interesting reading about how it works for buyers, and I hope it succeeds in getting a decent return for the photographers concerned. And if it does widen the audience for buyers of photographic originals, perhaps some of them will begin to look outside of ‘Photo-Democracy’ for other photographers – including myself – who sell their work on the web as signed prints at reasonable prices. You can buy any of my pictures from My London Diary or my other web sites at similar prices to those of Photo-Democracy although only in sizes up to A3. And all my prints are high quality pigment ink jet prints.

Google Glass – Future of Street Photography?

We’ve all heard of Google Glass, and probably seen features which comment on these devices, but on Time Lightbox, Richard Koci Hernandez talks about his experience of actually using this wearable camera.

He says: “It is jaw-dropping as a photographer to walk out with a wearable camera that’s almost physically and literally attached to your eye. Believe it or not, it’s just like wearing a pair of sunglasses, and it’s a lot less intimidating for subjects. Nobody has objected. Every now and then I’ll hear somebody whisper, ‘Oh, he’s got Google Glass.’ But nobody has stopped me or said ‘don’t do that.’”

Of course there are other glasses with cameras, though the image size and quality is generally low and a quick search on eBay or elsewhere will soon find slightly less obvious ‘spy camera glasses‘ than Google Glass for a relatively modest price, giving – according to the ads – high quality 1280 x 720 pixels video or 5Mp images. Of course you can’t talk to them and have to kind of scratch your ear to take a picture.

Google Glass is more than a camera as a TechRadar feature makes clear. But as a camera system its specifications are modest, 5Mp and 720p – just like the cheaper ‘spy’ glasses. So if you want to try this kind of thing out, you can probably do so now on the cheap.

Capa and Leica

Thanks to dvaphoto for pointing out the great advert for the launch of the Leica Monochrom-M at the at the Sao Paulo Leica store, which is based on vignettes of the life of Robert Capa and some of his best-known images.

If you are not familiar with his work, it might be worth looking at a set of his pictures on Magnum before you view the video, and reading the profile on that page.

Capa really isn’t a great advert for Leica, although it’s true that his career started with a Leica II put in his hands by Simon Guttman who sent him to photograph Trotsky speaking in Denmark in 1932. But Capa fairly soon abandoned Leica for Contax (and sometimes Rolleiflex.) I don’t think he used a Leica after he came back from Spain. All of his well-known World War II pictures were taken on a Contax II. When he died in Indochina he was using a Contax IIa and a Nikon S rangefinder.

Who knows what he would have thought of the M Monochrom, though it’s certainly a camera capable of fine black and white results. But were he still alive and working today – at the age of 100 – I rather doubt if he would be using Leica!

Dancing In Mourning Across America

I’ve been slow to mention Vanessa Winship‘s ‘She Dances on Jackson‘, which was on show in Paris at the Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson from May 15-July 28 this year. I’d half-hoped I would find time for a weekend in Paris, and would certainly have gone to see the show if I’d been there, but unfortunately it never happened.

As well as the show in Paris, there is of course a book of the work published by Mack, though it isn’t the same as the show. And so much has been written about the book that my thoughts are probably redundant now – though perhaps I’ll try to write something when I’ve more time – and perhaps we may some time see a show of this work in London. But for the moment I’ll suggest if you don’t already know all there is to know about it that you start by reading Liz Jobey in FT Magazine, which will tell you about the background to the project and explains a lot about why and when Winship visited many of the places in the book. Then you may like to read Christer Ek’s blog post which expresses his slight disappointment with the organisation of the show, and the lack in the book of the personal material which was in the exhibition, and in particular:

“what appears to be Vanessa’s diary. It is a large A3 size book that has been made with emails that she exchanged with her sister and some hand written notes. The book is enriched by all the prints that are hanged on the wall in a very small format (around 8 x 10 cm). The small prints are some kind of reading prints on a beautiful warm tone argentic paper.“

Christer feels that once you have seen this:

“you can only consider that this is the real entire work and you start to imagine what could have been a book including all those pieces.“

I haven’t seen it, and so can hardly comment, but looking through the book and the pictures on line it seems to me that it is a fine body of work, and it is what the photographer has presented to us, and what we have to deal with. But it can’t be divorced from the personal life of the photographer, and the cruel blow of fate that as she was about to leave for America, having been awarded the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation prize of €30,000 to enable her to make it, she learnt that her father had been diagnosed with a terminal cancer from which he died three months later.

Finally, in the on-line gallery ‘The Great Leap Sideways‘ you can see 20 of the images from the book, as well as read an interesting essay: The Democracy of Universal Vulnerability: Vanessa Winship’s “she dances on Jackson”, though I’m not quite sure I follow all it has to say. There is at times a certain vagueness about it, where I would like the writer to get more involved with the specifics of the images. Also on the page is a video ‘leaf-through’ of the book which enables you to glimpse all the images in sequence.

ASX Eikoh Hosoe

A video on ASX of Eikoh Hosoe, a leading figure in Japanese photography talking about his work and inspirations at the launch of the exhibition ‘Eikoh Hosoe: theatre of memory’ at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2011 brought back some fond memories from meeting him in 2005.

We both had shows as a part of the first FotoArtFestival in Bielsko-Biala in Poland, which brought together work by 25 photographers from 25 countries around the world along with a group show of Polish photoreportage of the 1970s and 80s. It was I think a deliberately eclectic selection, including different types of photography and photographers of all ages, including a few no longer living – Inge Morath, Russian war photographer Robert Diament and Mario Giacomelli, and a mixture of well-known names and relatively unknown photographers including me.

Many of those still living had come in person to the festival to talk about their own work, and in addition I’d offered to give a couple of lectures – one on the work two rather different British photographers who had influenced me, Tony Ray Jones and Raymond Moore, both of whom were more or less unknown in Poland at the time (and Moore still is, largely because his work is still inaccessible, but Ray Jones was featured in a festival at nearby Krakow a couple of years later), and the other on the work of some of my photographer friends in London. It was something of a disappointment that neither Boris Mikhajlov and Malick Sidibe were able to attend, but great to meet the others – including Eikoh Hosoe, certainly the best known of those present.

Here’s what ASX says about him:

“Eikoh Hosoe was born in Yonezawa, Yamagata in 1933 and graduated from Tokyo College of Photography in 1951. He exhibited in his first solo show in 1956 and has since established himself as an internationally acclaimed photographer. Hosoe’s figures have a Surrealist quality that is startlingly intimate, yet also render the flesh abstract and strange.”

I don’t think he was present for the initial press conference, an interesting event for me when I found myself under attack for Britain’s colonial past by one of the other photographers who had been liberally enjoying the local hospitality – I’d decided myself that the only way to survive was never to drink vodka, a resolution I think I almost managed to keep. In an exchange (which I don’t think was entirely followed by the local press) I told him that those very same people who had screwed his ancestors had liberally screwed mine too, and after a little argument we became good friends – and afterwards I helped him down the street to another bar along with some of the other photographers.

Eikoh Hosoe, Jutka Kovacs and Stefan Bremer at the reception in the castle

It was later after a grand opening ceremony with projections of the our images to a fantastic live piano accompaniment by Janusz Kohut that I first met Eikoh as we both made our way out into the foyer on the way to a party at the castle. I went up to him and told him how much I liked his work and that I’d been an admirer of his work and had written about it – it must have been a rather embarrassing moment but he remained charming and extremely courteous.

Eikoh Hosoe, Ami Vitale and me at the meeting: photo by Jutka Kovacs

Being 72 at the time (born in 1933) he didn’t join the group of photographers who went to a local bar when the wine ran out (there was still vodka, but I expect he needed some rest.) But probably his head was rather clearer than most of us the following morning for the start of the ‘author sessions’ where the photographers talked about their work, and clearly took a great interest.

The next day the sessions all overran, and everyone decided a break was needed before my rather long performance, talking about my own work as well as the two short lectures, though I’d rather have got on with it. A group of the photographers went together for a pizza, and took him along with us. A beer or two helped to steady my nerves too, and we all indulged in taking silly pictures of each other as we waited for the food to come.

The pink phone was the only camera Eikoh Hosoe had with him, and I think it was a new toy, Fortunately someone was able to show him how to see the pictures he had been taking (which he hadn’t found how to do) and above you can see his reaction.

Later, after my talk, and another by Stefan Bremer, it was his turn to present work as the finale of the event. The light in the large hall came from the computer projector, and Hosoe moved into it on various occasions to talk about the work. I tried hard to catch him at just the right moment, and I think the image below was my best attempt before the battery on the small compact Canon Ixus ran out.

Eikoe Hosoe makes a point about one of his pictures

You can see a good selection of Hosoe’s work at the Howard Greenberg Gallery site. There are some more pictures with him in – as well as many others – in the FotoArtFestival Diary I wrote when I was in Poland, and I’m pleased to see that at least some of the links to the Wayback Machine with the posts I wrote at the time for About.com are now working again.

Continue reading ASX Eikoh Hosoe

Frederick Sommer

I meant to write earlier about a show that closes today, though since it was showing at the US National Gallery of Art, Washington, probably few of us would have gone to see it had I posted in time. Though of course I’m sure all of my readers within easy distance of the NGA will already have seen it.

The NGA has a long history of fine big shows of photography (and another on Charles Marville coming up at the end of September 2013, followed in March 2014 by the Winogrand show from San Francisco) but A World of Bonds: Frederick Sommer’s Photography and Friendships was one of its smaller offerings, a mere “twenty-seven photographs, prints, collages, and drawings” in one room and

Frederick Sommer (1905-1999) had some interesting friends, including Edward Weston, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Charles Sheeler and Aaron Siskind and had a philosophy that very much valued the sharing of ideas, and you can see something of the influences of his friends in some of his work, and of his ideas in theirs, in particular in some works by Weston and Siskind.

The Art Blart review perhaps best gives a flavour of the show, with some comments by a photographer who visited Sommer as well as the author’s own comments, as well as some fine reproductions of images courtesy of the NGA. For something of a different opinion you can read a review of the show in the Washington City Paper. You can also see thumbnails of 59 of his works on the NGA site, though clicking to see a larger version of any seems to return an ‘image not available’ page. To see more of his work on the web the Frederick & Frances Sommer Foundation is the obvious place to go, and although the Catalogue Raisonne is still under construction it has many of his photographs already in place.

Many years ago, it was one of Sommer’s 1943 Arizona landscapes that came as a revelation to me (was it perhaps in the 1975 show at the Victoria and Albert Museum curated by Bill Brandt with Mark Haworth-Booth, ‘The Land’ – if not it surely should have been, though it was much later that Sommer gave them some images for their collection.) It made me aware of new possibilities in the photographic print and in creating a powerful image from seemingly highly detailed nothing much spread from corner to corner across the picture. It seemed to me a work that transcended conventional ideas about subject, foreground, background in favour of the whole field of view. I didn’t rush out and buy an 8×10 (or make much if any more use of the two 4×5 cameras I owned) but I think it did change the way I felt both about composition and about printing.

Later I read in Darkroom 2 (published by Lustrum Press in 1978) about Sommer’s printing method using a ‘contour printing pack‘ , with a fine example by Emmet Gowin, Siena, Italy, 1975 Dedicated to Frederick Sommer: The Hint That is a Garden.’ Fortunately it was a book that sold fairly well at the time and is still available (along with the first volume Darkroom) second-hand at a sensible price for anyone who wants to know more about what is now largely a historic practice.

Sommer’s other work perhaps interests me less, though when I see so much of the more recent constructed art photography in galleries and publications I do so often think Sommer did it so much better years ago.

Dead End Bum Wiping

Two articles among many that relate to the future of photojournalism and documentary photography that I’ve come across in the past couple of weeks are David Hoffman‘s Dead End Streets: Photography, Protest and Social Control and a series of questions by Charlie Campbell to the legendary Vietnam photographer Tim Page for Time World.

Tim Page’s Wikipedia entry makes interesting reading, and most of the legends about him appear to be true. His own web site contains some interesting work and together with Horst Faas he edited REQUIEM, a book and exhibition which is a memorial to the photographers who died covering conflict in Vietnam and Indochina.

Page, born in Tunbridge Wells in 1944, left England at the age of 18 to drive overland through Europe the Middle East and Asia, running out of money in Laos. He got a job with USAID and taught himself photography, becoming a stringer for UPI and AFP. In the Time feature, Campbell says to him

“I’ve heard you comparing a degree in photography with a degree in “bum wiping.” Any advice for budding snappers out there?

Page’s answer is typically to the point:

Don’t. Being a photojournalist now is the most fraught way of making a living. I’m no longer involved in the news, but I do other type of work. To make a living as a photographer these days is impossible. I was there the other day, and there were 100 people with cameras, video cameras and iPhones. And where are you going to sell the pictures?

Hoffman‘s essay is closely thought out and more difficult to read, looking at how the changes in media have both reduced the impact of still photographs and the ability of photographers to make a living from photographing social issues. As he says

When I began working as a photographer a single publication fee would keep me for a week. Now it keeps me for perhaps three hours.

Photographers now have to make several saleable images a day to make a living (I think the number is rather higher than he suggests) and no longer have time to study issues seriously and work in depth. What perhaps he doesn’t stress enough is the influence on the nature of images that ‘saleable’ implies.

He looks briefly at the promise of democratic access of Indymedia and Demotix, two very different organisations which enable at least a limited publication of work but he says fail to allow “contributors a role in shaping the audience and the context in which the work is presented.” While agreeing with much of his criticisms, they are surely even more true of the traditional media, with both Indymedia and Demotix allowing contributors considerably more creative freedom – the only reason I still contribute through Demotix. And, as he says “open access agencies such as these that are providing the last remaining life support for independent street photographers.” Though it’s not much of a support.

Demotix is part of Corbis, which gives some of the pictures from it a wider circulation, but in general he is correct that “neither has much of an audience.” Work posted to my own web site or on this blog generally gets seen by perhaps five or ten times as many people as on Demotix. Some pictures from Demotix get published around the world in traditional media, and I think it has had a rather more important role for many photographers around the world who don’t have even the rather slim opportunities that remain here.

The final section of the essay is about “the forces of the state subverting and hijacking the reportage photographer with a variety of tools and techniques” and is his usual penetrating analysis of the situation, particularly as regards the police. He also talks about the mistrust of photographers by protesters, including examples from both Climate Camp and the 2010 student protests, though surprising omitting mention of the right-wing ‘fatwas’ and violence directed at us (and I’ve been attacked at protests by people who thought I was David Hoffman, as well as others who know who I am, and been with David when we have both been subjected to threats and abuse.) But I imagine he takes that for read. It isn’t a new phenomenon for someone who was a photographer for Searchlight.

His is a piece that ends with a gloomy conclusion, and one it is difficult not to share. He writes:

Whether or not the kind of documentary photography in which I have been involved will still exist in the future is not clear… The ecosystem that once maintained those creating socially relevant work is all but gone and it’s far from clear what, if any, new support mechanisms might take its place.

Photojournalists are an endangered species, their numbers shrinking, and once extinct they cannot be replaced.

It’s hard in a fairly short post to give a fair summary of a long and detailed presentation such as this, and I hope not to have greatly misrepresented his opinions. It is a piece worth reading and thinking about, illustrated with some of his fine images. You can see more on his web site.

More on Traveller Children

It seems a very long time ago that I wrote about the book launch of Colin O’Brien’s Traveller Children, and I’m rather surprised to find it was only 3 weeks ago. I’d just got a new lens for my Fuji X cameras, and had taken taken out the Fuji XE-1 with the Samyang 8mm f2.8 (along with the Fuji 18-55mm) to try out the Samyang.

The people close to the image edge are noticeably less distorted than with the Nikon 10.5mm

Like the 10.5mm Nikon I’ve loved to use, the Samyang is a DX format lens that gives a ‘diagonal fisheye’ view, producing an image that fills the frame with a 180 degree view across the diagonal of the image. Of course I can use the Nikon lens on the Fuji X cameras with a suitable adapter, but the Samyang is smaller, lighter and altogether more convenient to use. It also has a different – though similar – perspective, its ‘stereographic’ projection giving less distortion of objects at the edges of the image. Like the Nikon, it also suffers from a fairly distinct degree of chromatic aberration, which can be largely corrected in Lightroom or other software, but otherwise is optically pretty impressive.

It also, like the Nikon, has a bulbous front element which precludes the normal use of front of the lens filters, but with a lens that cost me around £230 I’m rather less worried than with more expensive glass It fits nicely on the Fuji XE1, and is also available for Sony E and Samsung NX mounts. It comes in both black and silver finish, so of course I choose the black.

The first – and so far only – minor disappointment is that at the back of the black finish lens barrel is a half an inch of shiny silver lens, cosmetically something of a disaster. Apart from this the build quality seems impressive for the price (actually better than many expensive lenses.) This is a manual lens, but this isn’t really a problem. You seldom need to focus an 8mm lens, and with the shutter speed on Auto, the digital viewfinder automatically adjusts (if sometimes just a little slowly) to give a properly adjusted viewfinder image.

With the different projection, software such as my favourite Fisheye-Hemi dpn’t quite work properly, and need a little tweaking in Lightroom to get things more or less right – as in the example above. I was pretty pleased with this lens and look forward to using it more. Some of my favourite images on the Fuji-X cameras to date have been taken with the Nikon 10.5mm, and this looks to be a more convenient replacement. You don’t get any information on aperture or distance setting in the Exif data, but the scales on the lens are very clear and seem accurate.

What I didn’t say in the previous piece was that all of the images at the book launch, including the exterior images such as these were taken at ISO 6400, a full stop faster than I usually like to work, even with the Nikon D800E. I’d set the camera at this speed inside the gallery space, where the light was rather dim, and simply forgot to alter it when I came outside.

I can’t pretend the quality is the same as it would have been at say ISO 400, but it is surprisingly good and usable for many purposes. Of course it isn’t just the camera, but also the noise reduction from Lightroom. Here’s a 1:1 crop from a part of the image without any noise reduction:

and here is the more or less the same area of the image, again 1:1, after some fairly aggressive noise reduction and a little sharpening:

I probably haven’t got the settings at the optimum, but the difference is clear, with virtually all the colour noise (and some colour) removed, along with much of the luminance noice. Very little actual detail seems to have been lost, and although at full size it seems a little low in contrast and lacking in colour, it works pretty well at web scale, and also for reasonable size prints. And the contrast and saturation could easily be increased if necessary.

The result of the high levels of noise removal can be seen in the upper images, in particular the second image down, where the foreground figures somehow seem too smooth and lacking in detail. But digital is certainly producing results that would have been impossible with film.
Continue reading More on Traveller Children

Fireworks

Years ago when I wrote for a US-based web site as a part of my living I had to remember that for some reason Americans – or at least those who live in the US – used to let off fireworks for some occasion in July. Rather than our own good British anti-catholic bonfires and celebrations in November, though over the years we’ve mainly forgotten their origins and use the occasion to regret the fact that poor old Guy Fawkes, “the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions” failed in his plot.

But back in the US, I wasn’t surprised to find Pete Brook in Wired’s Raw File blog a few days back with a post on fireworks, Complete Idiocy Makes for Pretty Amazing Fireworks Photos, despite its unpatriotic assertion “we’re sorry to tell you that Mexico does explosions better than the United States.”

Back then I had to write ‘how to do it’ stuff as well as hunting for good examples of firework pictures on the web (they were fairly few and far between) and looking at these, I think one piece of advice purely on grounds of health and safety would be to stay away from the National Pyrotechnic Festival in Tultepec, appropiately held as Brook points out “in honor of Saint John of God, the patron saint of hospitals, the sick, nurses, firefighters and alcoholics.”

Fortunately you don’t need to put your life at risk, but can just look at Thomas Prior‘s pictures on Raw File.

Of course Lewes in Sussex, England does rather a good job of celebrating our Bonfire Night, though I’ve failed to find a really stunning set of images from there, though there a quite a few of some interest around on Flickr (along with far too many others) and elsewhere. There is a decent set on The Week, but although they give a reasonable impression of the event, I don’t feel they capture the atmosphere in the same way as Prior’s work.