Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

You want to be a war photographer?

Read the article Woman’s work: The twisted reality of an Italian freelancer in Syria by Francesca Borri in Columbia Journalism Review for a view of what it is really is working in Syria.*

Making a living as a freelance is pretty tough anywhere, but in Syria people like Francesca Borri are risking their lives and getting virtually no support from the people who use their pictures, and the same kind of inadequate payments for pictures that photographers get working on our safe streets here.

As she says

But the dirty secret is that instead of being united, we are our own worst enemies; and the reason for the $70 per piece isn’t that there isn’t any money, because there is always money for a piece on Berlusconi’s girlfriends. The true reason is that you ask for $100 and somebody else is ready to do it for $70.

In February the Press Gazette reported that The Sunday Times refused to accept work made by British freelance Rick Findler, telling him that although “it looks like you have done some exceptional work” they “have a policy of not taking copy from Syria as we believe the dangers of operating there are too great“. And it soon became clear that other leading UK papers, including The Times, Guardian, Observer and Independent had similar policies.

Canadian broadcaster CBC’s ‘the Current’ set up a radio discussion on the subject with an interview with Findler and a panel discussion with freelance photographer Bruno Stevens, academic Romayne Smith Fullerton & former head of Al Jazeera English and CBC News Tony Burman, which has some interesting points. My own feeling is that papers should cover dangerous situations so far as possible by giving proper support and commissioning work, and in areas such as Syria should make greater use of local photographers, who will often be facing similar risks even if not taking pictures.

The paragraph from Borri I quoted above continues as follows:

It’s the fiercest competition. Like Beatriz, who today pointed me in the wrong direction so she would be the only one to cover the demonstration, and I found myself amid the snipers as a result of her deception. Just to cover a demonstration, like hundreds of others.

Even in safe London, those of us working on the streets often need to know they can rely on the help of others, and there is a great deal of support when covering some events, along with sharing of information. For example on Tuesday I met a photographer I’d bumped into a few times before covering an event, and told him that I was leaving in a few minutes to go to another demonstration – and he shared with me news of a meeting later in the day. We walked together the short distance to the second event. Later another photographer I knew came along – and I told him about the first event. Except for information we’ve been given in confidence, I think most of us share what we know at least most of the time.

A week or so earlier, I was standing with a photographer watching a protest when a third photographer arrived, and the guy I was standing with said to me “We’ve got competition.” At first I didn’t understand him, I don’t really think of other photographers as competition. I’ve thought of them as colleagues. If my work is any good it’s because I’ve managed to express my own personal view which will be different to that of other photographers, so it doesn’t matter if they are there or not. So long as they don’t keep getting in my way.

* you can also read another article (no pictures) Borri wrote about Allepo.

Photo Reviews

Ignacio Evangelista is a Spanish photographer with a degree in Psychology whose work you can see on the Turn On Art web site in his 2013 project After Schengen which shows some of the border crossings in the EU that were abandoned in 1995 when the Schengen treaty brough free movement of people and goods across much of the EU. It’s a nice idea, which got him the 2013 Project Development Grant from CENTER in New Mexico, though I can’t get very excited about the large format images as they are presented on screen – perhaps they look rather better for real.

But what brought me to Turn on Art was not his photography, but a feature written by Evangelista, Are photo reviews a good investment? in which he writes about the growing number of portfolio review events for photographers and proposes “to edit a guide based on Portfolio Reviewers, such as hotels or restaurants guides, with scores marked by coloured stars and users’ comments.” (Thanks to Alan Griffiths of Luminous Lint for bringing it to my attention on Facebook.)

The feature gives a good description of what these reviews are and of the costs and possible benefits they bring to photographers. I’ve never attended one as a photographer, but back in the days when I wrote for a slightly more popular and influential web site than >Re:PHOTO (it had perhaps six times the readership here, though of course what matters is really quality!) I was invited to attend just one as a reviewer. You can read a whole series of posts about the event and some of the better photographers that brought there work to show me, starting with Rhubarb Rhubarb: Three Canons.

We reviewers certainly had a great time, and for a few of the photographers it was an important stepping-stone in their careers, with several exhibitions and at least a couple of books coming out of the event. But I was left wondering whether I would go to such an event – and from what I’ve heard this was one of the best – as a photographer.

Back in olden times, when I was beginning my active fascination with the medium there were no such things, but I did find it very helpful to show my work to other photographers and to talk with them about it. I went to a number of photographic workshops run by photographers who I admired, quite a few just days or afternoons, but some over a long weekend, where there would be sometimes very lengthy group crits, as well as often the opportunity to talk more over meals and at the pub. Most of them were relatively cheap events compared the the costs of attending a photo review, and in those days it was normal to just come along with a set of prints in an old Ilford box (and one of the most interesting of photographers who came to see me in Birmingham brought his 10×8 prints in an old Kodak box.)

There were also more informal events where photographers got together, and for some years I met monthly with a group of friends where we would bring our latest work, hot from the darkroom, to discuss, sometimes with a bluntness that you are unlikely to find at photo reviews. Among those who used to meet was Derek Ridgers, whose blog ‘The Ponytail Pontifications‘ gives a good idea of his style, though I think he has mellowed rather over the years (or perhaps fears legal action if he put some of his views in writing.) It wasn’t always an easy ride when you brought work, fools were sometimes not suffered gladly and some people never came a second time. Occasionally other better-known photographers would be invited along to show their work and to comment on ours, and we also organised a few shows, particularly under the title of ‘Framework’.

Groups a little like this still exist, including a number that I helped to start when I was on the committee of London Independent Photography, and I still occasionally attend one, although somehow it isn’t quite like the old days, when I think we were rather more inclined to call spades spades.

What both workshops and groups had in common where that the people who took part in them were all photographers. Sometimes well-known – I learnt a lot from meeting and showing my work to people like Raymond Moore, Paul Hill, John Blakemore, Lewis Baltz, Charles Harbutt, Fay Godwin, Ralph Gibson, Leonard Freed, Martin Parr and the others over the years, and from many who never became well-known.

Photo reviews are very different. Mostly those who review are not photographers (or at least not there as photographers) but those who have become the gatekeepers of our medium, running galleries, museum departments, photography festivals and photo reviews, publishing photo books and magazines and so on. I had been invited because I was then writing a photography blog and web site which was gaining a reputation around the world – and around a million visits a month, mainly to read the fairly long weekly articles that I wrote about photographers or aspects of photography.

Some of those people are definitely very well informed on photography (though others are better informed on book-keeping), but I think that it is the opinions of photographers which should drive the medium. Sometimes the relationship between artists and curators etc can be symbiotic, but all too often it seems merely parasitic.

After getting the invitation and about 2 months before going to Rhubarb-Rhubarb, my long-running dispute with bosses over my determination to continue to write seriously about photography had come to a head, with the termination of my contract. (I wrote just a little about the problems at the time, for example here.) So to some extent I was there as a reviewer under false pretences, although I think I worked hard and gave good value, if not necessarily always pleasing the reviewees. And although my current sites don’t have quite the same visibility (or the backing of the New York Times), they – mainly >Re:PHOTO and My London Diary – are currently getting around 400,000 hits a month, almost now up to half the level the commercial site enjoyed. One big difference is that you had to struggle through the ads to see my stuff before, and of course little of what I put on line then was my own photography. And of course those annoying ads then did more or less provide me with a living.

But back to photo reviews. Whereas the things we used to do were about developing ourselves as photographers, photo reviews are all about developing your careers.

Of course most of those attending – certainly in my experience – are not going to have much of a career in photography. In most cases because there work lacks interest or novelty (more important these days.) Just because a photographer is fascinated by staring at his/her navel does not mean the world will have any great interest in him/her. Some work is probably best kept to yourself, and I wish photographic education would give students a more realistic appraisal of their work, rather than rushing to sign up bodies to fill their courses. We are simply turning out far too many people with at least a certain technical facility (not that you need a great deal these days) but with little vision.

I saw some great photography at the review. It was easy to look at, to explore and to discuss with the photographers, who were keen to listen to what people thought. Others came along with work it was hard to find anything positive in, but were full of their own importance. There were some that I hardly had time to get a word in during our session together, they were so busy telling me how good their work was. Of course I tried to give them some guidance, but it wasn’t welcome. I imagine I got some fairly negative reviews from some of my reviewees, while some of the other reviewers who had suffered the same people told me they just sat there and nodded.

I’m sure photo reviews can be good at the right time for photographers. The right time is when you have good work too show and are prepared to listen to advice. You are then likely to get your money’s worth – and you just might be offered opportunities that would otherwise not come your way. Perhaps if such things had been around when Vivian Maier was taking pictures and she had been able to afford to take her work there she might have got the odd publication or show, though I think we would have rather less hype about her work now!

Anyway, here is a little piece of advice I published on this site immediately after my experience as a reviewer to those who intend to take their work to such things. The third is a reference to the then current refuge of the apparently untalented and perhaps may by now have been replaced by something else that would get up my critical nose:

Three Canons for Reviewees

Be still, let your work speak and your reviewer think. Say only what is necessary.
When making your pictures think for yourself; when preparing to present your work, think of your audience.
Erase the word memory from your memory, your statements, your discourse. Let your work be memory, if so, then no one will need to be reminded.

Colin O’Brien: Traveller Children

Colin O’Brien at the wall where he took the pictures in 1987

Yesterday I went to the launch party for Colin O’Brien‘s book, ‘Travellers’ Children in London Fields‘, the result of a chance encounter in 1987, when he was photographing a deserted warehouse on the edge of London Fields in Hackney.

A group of largely Irish travellers had parked their caravans here on the derelict streets. Back in those days kids would often come up to photographers on the streets and say ‘Take me picture Mister‘ whenever you photographed in areas like this, and in those days the main concern was the cost of the film. O’Brien realised the opportunity, got to know the families involved and gained their confidence, in part by giving them Polaroids of their kids, and over a period of around 3 weeks he went back and took more portraits, building up a great series of images of the children, largely posed images against a particular short stretch of the wall of a building. Then one day he went back and the caravans and children were gone and his project was at an end.

You can see some of these pictures on O’Brien’s web site – or at the Independent – along with much of his other work, but the book ‘Travellers’ Children in London Fields‘ ISBN 978-0-9576569-0-1 presents a good collection of them (you can get a signed copy from Spitalfields Life), where you can also see some fine images that there wasn’t space for in the book, as well as several other posts about this and other work by O’Brien, from his first pictures taken as a young boy outside his Clerkenwell home in 1948 with a box camera to recent work, a remarkable 65 years of photography.

The book is a fine start to Spitalfields Life Books as a publisher, and look forward to seeing further volumes from them. It’s a nicely designed small book edited by ‘The Gentle Author‘ of Spitalfields Life and printed locally at The Aldgate Press, and at the reasonable price of only £10.

The book launch was at the E5 Bakehouse in the arches underneath London Fields Station, only 50 yards from where the pictures were taken, and there were a number of the travellers who were photographed 26 years ago along with others from the family at the event. After we had finished the barrel of another local product, Trumans Beer (from the new Truman’s brewery in Hackney Wick), and Colin had made his speech, he led us the short walk to the wall where he had made these images.

I hadn’t gone to the event with the intention of taking photographs, but I seldom go further than the local shops without a camera, and I’d taken a few pictures on my way to the event. I wasn’t entirely happy with the performance of the Fuji X-E1, which didn’t always want to take pictures when I wanted it too, and despite some published reviews and tests, the image quality in relatively low light does not seem in the same league as the Nikons.

I’ll put some more images from the event into my photographic diary, My London Diary, in due course.

Continue reading Colin O’Brien: Traveller Children

Photography, I’m a believer

Having spent a little time reading Charlotte Cotton‘s Nine Years, A Million Conceptual Miles written for Aperture and published on page 34 of the Spring 2013 issue #210* (if your copy isn’t to hand you can read it on line here) I decided that she and I have such different perceptions of the medium that there is probably no way we could engage. But I think that the paragraph in which she writes:

“… the very mechanisms of the medium’s dissemination—publishing houses, museums, commercial galleries, and art schools—that could be seen as having won the good fight to legitimize photography as a contemporary art form with its own medium-specific history are becoming part of the problem. These structures, with their gamut of agendas, unwittingly risk placing a stranglehold upon the evolution of the medium.”

is truly a key one. The things that she names are truly “placing a stranglehold upon the evolution of the medium“, and that stranglehold is exactly what she goes on to describe as “something magical beginning to happen“. To me the work that she describes lacks real photographic interest, although sometimes it may be mildly amusing. And it is cluttering up galleries that could be exploring the great and still developing wealth of photography.

For me that “medium-specific history” – what I prefer to call a tradition (history relegates it to the past) – is still a thriving and growing one, and growing to some extent through some of the mechanisms she goes on to describes, including the ease with which any photographer can now self-publish. Blurb (and others) has perhaps done more for photography over the last decade than a MoMA which lost any direction after Szarkowski (and almost any direction is better than none for an institution.)

But “the very mechanisms of the medium’s dissemination” have been even more radically changed by the growth of the web. It’s something I deliberately set out to play with in my own primitive way in 2002 when I began ‘My London Diary’ though I make no great claims for the result. Like Cotton I think we have a “beautifully complex medium …” which “has been since its conception, a fabulously broad church” but unlike her I don’t feel its story has already been told.

Photography, I’m a believer.

* You might also like to read photographer Thomas Ruff’s Photograms for the New Age in the current Summer 2013 issue.

Continue reading Photography, I’m a believer

Security Guards

Photographers and security guards don’t always mix well, and I’ve had many run-ins with security in the past. In part the problems have often simply been that the guards have not been properly trained and in particular that they neither know nor understand the laws relating to photography. I spent quite a lot of time in the 1980s in particular educating those guarding sites in London’s Docklands, then an ‘Enterprise Zone’ with huge handouts to the developer friends of the party then in power to build in the area.

Although I didn’t always avoid a little trespass – though I never made my own holes in fences, many sites were rather derelict and boundaries rather vague – almost all of the confrontations I had were on the public highway, where I was very sure of my rights. Now its perhaps a little more difficult to always be sure, with large tracts of London now privately owned even when open to the public and looking like public space.

I tried always to be reasonable and polite but to insist on my rights. Having told them my rights I usually suggested they either contact their boss or call the police or both. On one or two occasions the police did arrive, and confirmed that I had the right to take photographs, but usually I’d already finished what I wanted to do and moved on before they came. I’d learnt in any case to work fast, and most times by the time the security guard came to tell me I couldn’t take pictures they were already in my camera.

More recently there have been many well-publicised examples of photographers getting harassed by security, and I’ve supported the protests of I’m a photographer not a terrorist and am pleased at the work done by members of my union, the NUJ, to educate the police and security guards about the situation. After the incidents shown in the video Stand your Ground made in 2011, some photographers have become involved in the training sessions run by the police for security personnel.

With this background, I wasn’t too sure that I wanted to go and photograph a protest on behalf of the security guards employed at the University of London, but soon overcame my prejudices. These guys are low paid workers, doing long shifts and getting badly treated, working at the University but being employed by a contractor on considerably poorer conditions than staff who are employed directly by the University at the same sites, just like the cleaners. And theirs is, at least in part, a very useful and necessary job.

‘3 Cosas’ – sick pay, holiday pay, pensions

It’s time to get rid of these abuses of low paid workers, with contracting companies being used so that apparently reputable organisations can wash their hands and evade their responsibilities. And as we’ve seen clearly in many areas, contracting out leads to the work being done less well as well as those doing it getting worse conditions and treatment. So the IWGB (The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain), a grass roots worker-run union gets my support in its fight for proper sick pay, pensions and holidays for the security guards along with the cleaners and other low-paid workers.

Security Guards on duty watched the protest for their rights and conditions
The protest got off to a late start (as one of the organisers said, “perhaps we should have said 1.30pm not 1.” Always a bit frustrating, as photographers can’t afford to be late for events, but fortunately I wasn’t in a hurry to go elsewhere. More of a problem was that visually it was very similar to other protests by the IWGB that I’ve photographed before – including one in the same location. And that yet again I’d forgotten my earplugs!

A placard specially for the Polish security guard on duty watching the protest.

More pictures at London University Security Guards.

Continue reading Security Guards

Home on the Range

A nice little piece in the New Yorker, Montana Ranch, with photographs by one of my favourite photographers, Ami Vitale.

It seems a very long time since we met in a castle in Poland.

For the New Yorker, she told Elissa Curtis “I wanted to do a story about my home, about the deep connection people have to the land here, and the importance they place in stewardship, and the vanishing way of life in the American West.”

Grazing animals have become the subject of lively popular debate since Allan Savory’s TED talk: How to green the world’s deserts and reverse climate change in March. But Savory’s ideas of “holistic management and planned grazing” are widely challenged, as a Slate article by James McWilliams, All Sizzle and No Steak, makes clear, with his final conclusion “the evidence continues to suggest what we have long known: There’s no such thing as a beef-eating environmentalist.”

Personally I still sit a little on the fence, and just very occasionally allow myself to have a little prime Scotch beef as a special treat, for example at Christmas – rather than a turkey. I think it is still grass fed like those on the ranches in the pictures.

Ami Vitale also makes films, as you can see from her ‘Mamtaz’ Story: The Fight for Climate Justice In the Bay of Bengal‘ on Culture Unplugged, where she is asking for support for her work, which includes a new feature film on the mass migration of people due to climate change called Bangladesh: A Climate Trap.

Westminster Afternoon 2

[continued from Westminster Afternoon 1]

Bianca Jagger was probably the best known of the many speakers at the protest to Save Legal Aid & British Justice, most of whom were lawyers or people from groups supporting those who relied on legal aid, with a few MPs thrown in, including David Lammy, Andy Slaughter and Jeremy Corbyn. It was serious speaker overload so far as I was concerned, not helped by the lack of a written list of them being available. After the first half dozen or so I gave up on trying to write down the names – heard over poor amplification it becomes almost impossible to know what they are or how they might be spelt.

I decided I wanted to try something different for Jagger, and thought that she would still be recognisable from behind – as I think she is, thanks to her black and white clothing and hair. I don’t think it is a great picture, but it does give an idea of the crowd, though less than half are actually in the picture.

Often advice to photographers on covering events tells them they should start with an ‘overall view.’ It’s something that is seldom really possible, or at least almost never possible to make an interesting image – and there isn’t usually a great deal of point in taking pictures that are so boring they will never be used. But it’s often a good idea to at least try something that gives an impression of the scale of the event. Often this is very difficult from the ground level, and many photographers end up holding the camera as high as they can reach above their heads and pressing the shutter with a hope and a prayer – sometimes called a ‘Hail Mary’ shot.

Some use monopods and a remote release (or the self-timer) to gain more height, and I’ve often considered this option, but not yet found one that fits into my bag or I can be bothered to carry. Back in the old days of static press shots, guys carried step ladders, and you still occasionally see these in use, though mainly in places like Downing St pens, rather than on the hoof.

There is a place for ‘overall’ images, and if you’ve not seen Lewis Whyld‘s remarkable 360 degree photojournalistic images it’s certainly worth taking a look at these, but for most of us most of the time they are a waste of time – unless we can find a suitable viewpoint. Sometimes a drone with camera attached would be handy!

But here I was standing on the wide concrete wall of the same flower bed that was being used as a platform for the speakers (probably built solidly enough to stop tanks attacking the Justice Ministry, and certainly more attractive than the fortifications around Parliament.) Solid and wide enough for my increasing lack of balance and terror of even very low heights that stops me climbing on most street furniture these days not to be a problem.

Shortly before taking this image I’d seen Bianca Jagger slip and fall slightly as she was helped up onto the wall. Of course I’d been photographing her at the time, and of course I wouldn’t use those pictures, and I deleted them. But I think she was still looking a little unsettled from her fall when I photographed her speaking a few minutes later.

I was also having camera problems, with the D800E taking a few frames and then freezing up with the error message that appeared to read ‘CD.’ In fact it should and probably did say ‘CArd’ but I broke the flimsy covering over the control panel months ago and repaired it temporarily with heavy duty sellotape – still in place but now not very clear and it isn’t easy to read. (I took the camera in for repair shortly after it broke, but my usual repairers told me they hadn’t yet been trained to work on the camera then and it would have to go to Nikon, and somehow I’ve not got around to it since.) The error message seems obvious now, but in the heat of the moment I couldn’t work out that this meant there was a problem with the memory card!

Usually I have a 16Gb SDHC card in the camera, format it before starting work and very seldom fill it, but I’d come out in a rush and left that card at home in my card reader. The D800E has I second CF slot, and I’d filled the smaller card I keep there, and had replaced it with another old card from the depths of my bag proved to be incompatible with the camera – though probably it had worked OK with the D200 I’d bought it to use with. But there busy working I didn’t understand what the problem was, but found if I turned the camera off and back on I could take a few more frames, sometimes half a dozen before it locked again, and I kept working like that.

There were more speakers after Jagger, but I’d taken enough pictures and heard enough speeches, and decided to walk back to Old Palace Yard to see how the rival protesters for and against gay marriage were getting on. Numbers were fairly even, but the supporters were clearly making rather more noise.

A few from the anti-gay protest stood out, including a posed couple dressed as bride and groom on a ‘wedding cake’, but I found it harder to photograph them those against the bill, not least because of the music. ‘Amazing Grace’ certainly has an amazing history behind it, and is estimated to be performed around 10 million times annually, and it can still be moving, but here I didn’t feel it suited the occasion and the performance grated.

As well as these supporters of ‘Christian Concern’ (who certainly don’t speak for all Christians, some of whom welcome the idea of gay couples being able to make the same kind of commitment as heterosexual couples) there were also some more straight-forward old-fashioned fundamentalist bible-bashers wandering around Westminster, preaching to the traffic and carrying a careful selection of poster-print bible quotations. You can see more from these protests For and against Gay Marriage on My London Diary.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

Abigail Heyman (1942-2013)

“Some photographers feel the camera separates them from their own feelings about people and events. To the contrary, the camera makes me closer” wrote Abigail Heyman in her 1987 Aperture book ‘Dreams & Schemes: Love and Marriage in Modern Times‘, certainly the only book of wedding photographs I own, and in which I think her pictures demonstrate the truth of her statement.

You can read her obituary, published yesterday in The New York Times, which also has a small gallery of images, beginning with a portrait of her by Bill Jay, taken in her New York home in 1980.

When I wrote about her ten or so years ago for my ‘Directory of Notable Photographers’ (a listing no longer on line) I searched the web with little success to find anything by or about her, recording my conclusion: ‘No useful material available on the web’, and I don’t think things have changed much, with just a few isolated images on various blogs. Information about her is also still rather sparse , and a little of what I did find and used was perhaps not absolutely accurate. It’s a shame that her work isn’t more readily available.

Her first book, ‘Growing up female; A personal photojournal’ was published in 1974 and sold many copies, becoming something of a feminist icon. Although there were a number of images I admired, I didn’t buy a copy and still consider it a less interesting work than ‘Dreams & Schemes‘. Her third book, ‘Butcher, baker, cabinetmaker : photographs of women at work‘ picturing them in occupations at least then normally thought of as male preserves seems considerably less personal than the first two. All three are available very cheaply second-hand (or, as usual if you prefer, very expensively, one of her works being offered in apparently similar condition by different sellers at around a fiver or over £99.)

The NYT obit states “She was one of the first women admitted to the prestigious photographer’s cooperative Magnum“, but she was only nine when Eve Arnold was accepted as a member and there were a number of others before Heyman become linked to them in some way. Although various sources describe her as a former member of Magnum Photos I’m not sure what her exact relationship was to the organisation as her name does not appear in the index of Russell Miller‘s Magnum book, and she is not included in the list of present and past members on Wikipedia. Perhaps one of my readers can clarify?

She was one of the founding members of Archive Pictures, along with Mark Godfrey, Mary Ellen Mark and Charles Harbutt, who all left Magnum in 1981 as well as Joan Liftin who had been the director and editor of the Magnum Photos Library. In the mid-80s Heyman ran the Documentary and Photojournalism Department at the International Center of Photography in New York – a position later held by Liftin.

Heyman also founded Picture Project, a photography publisher which seems to have brought out two books, ‘Flesh & Blood‘, a collection of family pictures by various well-known photographers, and a second edition of her own ‘Dreams & Schemes‘, and to have been associated with the University of New Mexico Press in publishing ‘My Fellow Americans’ by Jeff Jacobsen.

Art Shay

Thinking about D-Day for the previous post led me to the work of one of America’s most prolific photojournalists, Art Shay, who at the time was the navigator on a B-24 bomber named ‘Sweet Sue’ and whose “Whitmanesque poem to my beautiful new bride” about his experiences got published in the Sunday Washington Post.

Shay, born in 1922 and still active at 91, has been described as “Chicago’s premier photojournalist” and his record of around 1,100 magazine covers is certainly impressive (and it’s around 1,099 more than me.) His work is deeply embedded in aspects of American culture, particularly of the 1950s, and there are some aspects of it that rather pass me by in the short video about him on PetaPixel, though anyone who gets the testimonial there from Studs Terkel certainly deserves and gets my respect.

Shay’s work appears on the Chicagoist blog in a regular ‘From The Vault Of Art Shay‘ feature each Wednesday, and there is also a blog devoted to him and his work, as well as an artist’s page at the Stephen Daiter Gallery. You can also read about him in Wikipedia.

England, Normandy & the Liberation of Paris

It’s hard to resist the lure of looking at old photographs, and I’ve just spent half an hour I didn’t really have looking at some rather different pictures about the 1944 Allied advance across the Channel and on to the liberation of Paris, taken by Life photographer Frank J. Scherschel (1907-81) who life sent with his Speed Graphic (or something rather similar he is holding in his Life portrait) to record the advances in colour.

It’s hard to know exactly why Life sent him, since apparently they used few if any of his images, which seldom show anything of the actual action, but certainly record its aftermath, with one whole series of images devoted to The Ruins of Normandy, and others in the series Before and After D-Day also showing more devastation.

But the pictures say more about the time, with a wonderfully evocative image, A small town in England in the spring of 1944, shortly before D-Day, with the village trough framed between two trees, and the lane beyond leading towards tree-covered hills, a small row of cottages to the right, the odd house on the left. Unusually – particularly for colour at the time – the view is taken towards the sun (what used to be labelled contre-jour, the French term expressing some of the transgressive nature of the act, disregarding the standard advice to photographers of the time) and the colour suits the subject in a way that perhaps isn’t always the case in this series of pictures.

No details are given about the film used – my guess would be 4×5 Kodachrome – and the colour that is now produced from other images taken on this film at around the same time seems to me to be considerably better than that in contemporary publications. Scanning and digital correct can produce superior results, and also compensate for some of the ageing of the originals. There is a nice set of pictures on 4×5 Kodachromes taken by several photographers for the Office of War Information in the 1940s selected by Pavel Kosenko for his blog from the many available on the Shorpy site, which show the excellent quality that could be obtained, though some are better than others.

The ‘small town’ image was clearly taken with the camera on a tripod, and demonstrates the lack of lens coverage with the rising front, but the vignetting perhaps improves the image. A few of the other pictures are less technically precise, and the colour at times rather odd, perhaps because less effort has been put into correcting it and some may have been made on smaller film formats.

I’m not sure what some of those who took part in the Normandy landings would have made of Scherschel’s comment “We thought it was going to be murder but it wasn’t. To show you how easy it was, I ate my bar of chocolate. In every other operational trip, I sweated so much the chocolate they gave us melted in my breast pocket.” He made it about his photography of the invasion from the air (which isn’t in the set of images) and not about his experiences once he had joined the forces on the ground, as in the picture it is below, GIs search ruined homes in western France after D-Day, the closest we get in these pictures to seeing actual action.

Perhaps devastation wasn’t the image that Life wanted to show, but it is the strongest theme that runs through his images. Looking at – for example – his pictures from Paris, I’m reminded of the many more powerful images in black and white taken at the time. Some of the fascination of a few of Scherschel’s images for me is that they are in a way so ordinary, pictures taken slightly randomly by a bystander rather than an active mind interpreting the situation – and of course that they are in colour.