Category: Photographers

Daniele Tamagni at ArtEco

Wandsworth, like its neighbour Battersea, is not what it used to be, and many will say so much the better, though I have a certain regret for the passing of these older working class areas of inner London, their main streets now almost entirely submerged under whole blocks of estate agents. The Old York Road now has a by-pass and a rather different atmosphere, though a few traces of the old Wandsworth linger.


Kristin Hjellegjerde director/curator of ArtEco Gallery with Daniele Tamagni

I’d not before visited the ArtEco Gallery at No. 533 (despite the street numbers this is a very short road, these too being a reminder of the past, when it was just the west end of York Rd) but some Londoners perhaps need reassurance that it is very easy to get too – just a few yards to the right out of Wandsworth Town station, or for those masochists who insist on driving in inner London, almost next to the roundabout at the south end of Wandsworth Bridge (at the top of Trinity Road on the A217.) It’s only just south of the river and taxi drivers will have no problem in taking you there (run 128 starts just a short spit away.) But I took the 44 bus, one of several routes to stop nearby on Swandon Way.


Photographers James Barnor & Daniele Tamagni

And it is worth going there to see the current show ‘Global Style Battles‘ by Daniele Tamagni, who I mentioned in one of my earliest posts on this blog back in 2007, Peckham Rising, for a show at the Sassoon Gallery in a railway arch at Peckham, together with photographer Thabo Jaiyesimi and sound artist  Janine Lai. As you can read, I was impressed by the work Tamagni showed me there, a little of which was on the wall, including a couple of projects in the area.

I met him again at the opening of his ‘Gentlemen of Bacongo‘, north of the river at Michael Hoppen Contemporary in Chlesea in 2010, and wrote the post Sapology about the work, the opening and his fine book  Gentlemen of Bacongo, published by Trolley Books in 2009 and now out of print. There were still a few copies available at the ArtEco Gallery for £50, considerably less than its current price on the secondhand market.

Mention of Trolley Books reminds me of another bargain for those who act quickly on reading this – you have until 2pm EDT on 28 May to become a backer of the commemeorative publication of Trolleyology – The First Ten Year Of Trolley books on Kickstarter, where a pledge of £25 will get you a copy of the book and an invitation to the launch – at a considerable saving on the published price – and for £75 or more you will also get “a poster of the cover from our iconic book ‘Gentlemen of Bacongo’ by Daniele Tamagni. Plus you have the option of having your name printed in the Trolley supporters page at the back of the book.”

The work from ‘Gentlemen of Bacongo‘ is still the backbone of Tamagni’s show at Art Eco, which the gallery describes as ‘a mid-career retrospective … spanning works from 2007 to date.’ I would have liked to see more from his project ‘The Flying Cholitas‘, Bolivian women wrestlers, that won 2nd prize in the Arts and Entertainment section of World Press Photo in 2011, when they were a welcome relief from much of the other work in that show when I viewed it at the South Bank. The work from those two projects will certainly feature when the time comes for him to have a real retrospective show, while I felt a few of the other pictures on the gallery wall here will not last the distance, though they may be more saleable in the present.


James Barnor

I was very pleased to meet and have a long conversation at the opening with a photographer a little over twice as old as Tamagni (b. 1975),  James Barnor, born in Ghana in 1929. I’d seen some of his work before – at http://www.autograph-abp-shop.co.uk/authors/james-barnor Rivington Place, but hadn’t talked with him or remembered his name, though as we talked some things came back to me – and I remembered I had written about his ‘Forever Young‘ show in 2010.  Meeting the man it seemed an entirely appropriate title for him, and it made me feel young too.


The finger points at Charlie Phillips

Also present was another of London’s leading photographers I’ve known for some years, Charlie Phillips, born in Jamaica and perhaps best know for his book Notting Hill In the Sixties (Notting Hill In the Sixties  portfolio here), though his long career produced many other fine images. You can also see some of his work in the Museum of London collection. And there were many other people with whom I had interesting conversations about the work and the relationships between photographers and galleries and the world of art. Here are a few more pictures, taken with the 20 mm Nikon lens on the D800E using auto-ISO (so nice not to have to think, especially after a glass or two.)

It was a very pleasant opening, and I stayed for longer than I intended, not just to look at the pictures, but they are well worth the trip to see and I urge you to do so, and I look forward to being able to see more ‘a mid-career retrospectives’ from Tamagni in the many years I hope he has to come. Italian speakers may like to watch an interview with him on e-photoreview.

The show runs until June 22, open Tue-Sat 11am-6pm.

Continue reading Daniele Tamagni at ArtEco

Raw and Cooked

There is a link on the Lensculture blog  in a post Too much digital enhancement in news photographs? to an article on Speigel Online International, Enhanced Reality: Exploring the Boundaries of Photo Editing, a two part feature with an accompanying gallery of images that I think makes interesting reading. I don’t have anything to add to what I’ve already written on Paul Hansen‘s World Press Photo prize-winning image, which I think takes what was a great image and cheapens it by turning it into a film poster, but perhaps I might comment briefly on the picture by Yuri Kozyrev of Noor, taken in Tahrir Square in Cairo during the celebration of autocrat Hosni Mubarak’s resignation in 2011.

It’s easier to view the ‘before’ and ‘after’ versions on Lensculture, and the first thing I’d say is that I find this image treatment totally acceptable. To me, the final image looks very much a photograph, and probably a better representation of what the photographer saw when he made the exposure than the initial version.

I do have a problem with the caption ‘The raw image, before PhotoShop enhancement’ on several levels. First the pedant in me objects to PhotoShop – if Photoshop is good enough for Adobe it should be good enough for the rest of us, and I’m not a fan of capital letters in the middle of words (not a great fan of them anywhere come to that, though they sometimes serve a purpose.)

But more importantly, raw files (or RAW or Raw files if you prefer) are not images, and how they look depends on algorithms and settings in the software used to convert them to images. The upper image of the pair looks at least in part a consequence of using an inappropriate colour temperature in the conversion of the file to the image.

Of course the idea of colour temperature may not really be appropriate in any case, as often at night the lighting in public spaces is provided by very spectrally deficient sources. Possibly in this case the near-monochromatic orange of sodium vapour lighting.

For whatever reason, what appears clear to me is that the upper image, which they call the raw image, is quite simply the wrong colour. It does not represent how the human viewer would see the scene, which I think would be in a far more neutral rendering. I’d probably have made it slightly closer to neutral than the final version here.

As well as what I think is really correction, there is also a certain amount of interpretation in the lower image, with a touch of brightness and contrast being added to part of the face and the chest of the main figure. The kind of thing I might have done in the darkroom on a black and white print with dodging a little extra local development with the warmth of a fingertip or cotton bud of high contrast dev, or a little touch of ferri – or later on by some fiddling with coloured filters and dodging and burning on a Multigrade paper. Though both methods were tricky and a little imprecise, and Lightroom makes it a real doddle.

And just a little second thought, that looking through the images on Speigel there are some where I prefer the ‘unimproved’ version, and others where although the original needed correction, I think the improved version is in some respects lacking.

Finally, its also – as always – worth taking a look at Lensculture itself. On it at the moment among other things is a selection of 47 images from last month’s Paris Photo Los Angeles. In a way I was pleased to find I already knew all the best work in it, nice though something really fresh would have been. But it made me think I had been right not to contribute to global warming by travelling there.

Watching the Neighbours

Although I’m fairly clear about the right of photographers to photograph people in public, and to publish those pictures I do feel some unease about the work currently being shown by Arne Svenson in the Julie Saul gallery in New York, The Neighbours.

The neighbours in question don’t much like it too, and are threatening to take Svenson to court, and they may win. There was a similar controversy a few years ago, when an image in a UK portrait competition showed a person in a window of their house, taken by the photographer from the street outside. I don’t think that went to court, but probably a case against the photographer would have failed. And there has also been the work of Michelle Iverson, taken from her car deliberately parked outside likely homes; the comments on that page are generally extremely negative.

The key phrase is “a reasonable expectation of privacy“. If we are on the street or on a bus or a train or in a café window facing the street we clearly expect to be seen and have no expectation of privacy. If Svenson had restricted himself to photographing people looking out of their windows I would have no problem with his work.

But both by his choice of viewpoint – his own second floor flat in the building across the street – and the technical means used – a long telephoto lens (he refers to it as a ‘bird-watching’ lens) and carefully working “from the shadows of my home into theirs” he has penetrated into their homes in a way that would not be possible for the normal viewer on the street. Were I the judge he would lose the case.

The Photography is Not a Crime site linked above has an excellent summary of US and New York law relating to the case and concludes: “we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in our homes unless we are standing in front of a clear window where anybody walking or driving by can see us.”

It goes on to link the case with the use of surveillance by police and government, suggesting that they may not want to prosecute Svenson because they want to increasingly carry out their own surveillance using drones.

While Iverson’s black and white pictures do have an unsavoury air, Svenson’s are far more elegant, but there are a few among them that make me feel uneasy, a feeling of embarrassment at seeing something that I shouldn’t.  In real life I rather hope I would turn away rather than continue to stare, and though curiosity might get the better of me it would make me feel guilty.

Heiferman on Winogrand and Editing

I think probably there has been more nonsense written about Garry Winogrand than most well-known photographers, but the Lens blog Garry Winogrand – Nonstop and Unedited by Martin Heiferman posted last week is worth reading.

Editing is a problem we all have, and increasingly so in the digital age as Heiferman notes, although there are some ways in which digital makes editing easier. Certainly there is no longer the peering  though a magnifier we had to spend so long doing – either at negatives or contact sheets, though the 4x Ohnar loupe still at my right elbow. It still costs almost the same as I paid for mine many years ago – around £70, and if you work with 35mm film you should have one. Or you can pay several hundred for one that is about as good!

Although many (including myself) have commented on Winogrand’s gargantuan appetite for film, looking at it now it perhaps doesn’t seem so excessive. Looking behind me at the file upon file of my own negatives I didn’t quite equal his volume, but was beginning to get there – and when I look back on much of the work I am usually surprised to see how little I took – and the opportunities I missed. I haven’t checked the maths, but one of the comments equates his output to a couple of 36x cassettes a day – and I think surely it must have been more. And having spent over 10 years working with digital, I have a suspicion I may now have overtaken the master in sheer quantity! The last time I checked the number of images on My London Diary it was over 60,000, and typically I post less than 1 in 10 of the pictures I take there – that’s ‘3 per film’ in old money. Although I definitely take more pictures on digital than I ever did on film (probably around 4 times as many on a typical day) I think digital has enabled me to work more carefully rather than as usually suggested encouraging sloppy image-making.

Looking back at my old work on film – something I’ve only done systematically for my work up to 1985 at the moment is interesting, and I find that much of the work that interests me most now is the more straightforward images – some of which might be dismissed as ‘record’ images (and are by at least one of my photographer friends.)  But then I think one of my great photographic heroes – Walker Evans – was very much a maker of ‘record’ images.

Incidentally one of the comments includes a link that didn’t work for me (but was fairly easy to find here) in which Norman Bringsjord shares his memories of workshops with both Winogrand and Diane Arbus.

The Lens post also has a good selection of 20 images by Winogrand that I think includes some of his best images. Winogrand hasn’t I think always been well-served by leaving the editing to others, but at least here they have made a decent stab at it. I’m still trying to find the time and energy to lift, let alone read, the vast book on him that accompanies the SFMoMA show, which closes June 2.

In a Photographer’s Footsteps

Although the current series on BBC Radio 4 In a Prince’s Footsteps narrated by former hostage John McCarthy is interesting, its title and the description “John McCarthy revisits sites of the Prince of Wales’s photographic tour of 1862” rather annoy me. The important footsteps (and tripod holes) are not those of some royal prince (later better known as King Edward VII) but of photographer Francis Bedford (1816-94.)

I’m not sure how long the series of broadcasts and the image galleries that accompany them will remain on the BBC web site – and John McCarthy found some interesting people to talk with – but the Prince’s diary – which he wrote apparently in his own hand (perhaps unlike the current incumbent he actually put his own toothpaste on as well) is available in full at the Royal Collection, which also has a transcription of the pages – just as well as his handwriting would not get a gold star.

The Royal Collection entitles its exhibition more sensibly Cairo to Constantinople: Early Photographs of the Middle East, and the show continues at The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh until 21 July 2013, coming to the The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace at the end of October 2014. Birmingham Library and Archive Services bought a set of these pictures a couple of years ago, and used some large version on the hoardings around the Library which was being built in Centenary Square which opens in September, and he is likely to have a major show there later – doubtless cheaper to view than in the Queens Gallery. As well as the 172 pictures from this tour they have a very large collection of 2700 glass negatives and 2049 prints by him, mostly architectural and topographical views of Great Britain in the 1970s.

Francis Bedford was the first photographer to travel on a Royal tour, and afterwards the work he took was shown in what was then described “as ‘the most important photographic exhibition that has hitherto been placed before the public’.” It was certainly work that altered ideas about the Middle East and the Holy Land in particular, and led many to follow the photographer’s example and visit these lands.

Being a Royal photographer was clearly rather different in those days, and Bedford wasn’t a press photographer but a particularly fine photographer of landscape and architecture. On the tour he had to work under difficult conditions, with at times high temperatures making the wet plate process almost unbearable to perform. The photographs are well reproduced on the site, with links to his other works in the Royal collection and a handy ‘zoom’ function to see details.

Victoria and Albert had a great interest in photography, and built up a fine collection of Victorian images. I don’t think the tradition has really been carried forward, although the current monarch has a specially monogrammed Leica M6 and almost certainly used it at times. The Duke of Edinburgh used to take pictures of birds from the royal yacht with a Hassleblad and a 250mm f4 lens, as well as a using a Minox, and although I’ve never seen it’ his 1962 ‘Birds from Brittania’ (published in the US as ‘Seabirds from Southern Waters’ and still cheap secondhand) apparently shows that either he or his valet could use it! The Minox is presumably the gold-plated version the company presented him with in 1965.

You can read more about Francis Bedford – and see more pictures – in a lengthy article by William S. Johnson.

 

Fred Herzog

One of the shows I went to a while ago but never got around to reviewing was
Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour which was the inaugural show by the Positive View Foundation at Somerset House over the Christmas period. In part I didn’t review it because I wasn’t at all convinced by it as a show; it seemed a particularly sloppy piece of curating, a rag-bag of colour photography around a less than threadbare conceit. But among the work by 15 photographers on show, there was some of particular interest, particularly by Saul Leiter, Helen Levitt, Alex Webb and someone rather less well-known to me, Fred Herzog.

Herzog was born in 1930 in Germany, where he grew up and life was pretty tough during the war and afterwards. In 1952, having become a photographer, he emigrated to Canada, settling shortly afterwards in Toronto, where he worked as a medical photographer. In his spare time he walked the city taking pictures, using Kodachrome. Although his work was included in a few mainly group shows in Toronto over the years, it was only in 2008 following a show at the Equinox Gallery the previous year that it really began to reach a wider audience around the world.

Part of the reason it didn’t become known earlier was technical. It was difficult – and expensive – to make good prints from Kodachrome, so it was hard for him to show his work. Cibachrome was the first really practical direct printmaking process from slides, and it wasn’t ideal with its high contrast added to the already high contrast of Kodachrome favouring extreme impact at the expense of subtlety. Getting truly good prints needed expensive masking or laser scanning, and it was only with the advent of high quality inkjet printing from digital scans that making good and decently archival prints from Kodachrome became reasonably cheap. And it is these inkjet prints that have made Herzog’s work available to a wider audience.

Herzog’s work interests me both because of the subjects he took but also because it shows that – like I think ther work of many other photographers – there was interesting work in colour before colour was discovered by the art photography industry in the 1970s and 80s.  Photographers who were using colour not because it was saleable and could be shown in museums and galleries, but because of their interest in recording life in colour. We now know of Herzog, but I’m sure he is the iceberg tip.

There is also an individuality about his work. Unlike that of another recently discovered ‘unknown’ photographer I don’t look at his pictures and immediately think of the work that other photographers had made earlier and disseminated widely. Herzog was making his own history, not just repeating – however well – what he had appreciated in the work of others.

You can read more about him – and about the controversy that arouse over his views about the Nazi holocaust in a couple of features, Marsha Lederman’s The collision: Fred Herzog, the Holocaust and me  in the Vancouver Globe and Mail, and Timothy Tailor’s The Way Things Are: Fred Herzog’s Art of Observation in Canadian Art.

An Extra Ear

It’s often hard to know why I photograph a particular person, but this man at the protest by Ghurkas opposite the House of Lords had a face I could not pass by. He has a strength and dignity and an expression that to me expresses the disappointment of these people who served in the British Army but have been rather poorly treated by successive British governments. You can read more about their protest in Gurkhas Call for equal treatment. It’s a relic of our colonial past that still embodies the kind of attitudes that were thought acceptable – and indeed hardly questioned – 198 years ago when the army first recruited in Nepal.

One small thing that annoys me about this full-frame – that is uncropped – image is the extra ear at the extreme right. It would be simple to crop while retaining the aspect ratio by taking just a little away from the top and right of the image, and the kind of thing I often do when ‘developing’ my images in Lightroom. Using optical viewfinders – even on DSLRs has seldom if ever been precisely 100% accurate, even on cameras which have claimed this,  and the D700 only claims to show approximately 95% of the horizontal and vertical frame coverage – which means that around a tenth of the image area is invisible. Things like this extra ear can creep in and I feel entirely justified in cropping them out, despite my commitment to the uncropped image.

My commitment is not an absolute one and I’m certainly not a purist in this respect. I think trying to work in this way leads to better seeing, but when occasionally I get it entirely wrong I’ll crop if I have to. Very occasionally I’ll even realise I should have framed an image in portrait rather than landscape format and do so after the event. But mostly what I do isn’t really cropping, but a tiny bit of ‘trimming’.

Using the D800E as a DX camera, with the area around the image ‘greyed out’ (CS a6 set to ‘Off’) has several advantages, allowing you to frame in a similar way to using a rangefinder. But also, so far as I can tell, the framing seems 100% accurate. For most purposes the smaller image file at 16Mp is also a benefit, and – at least with FX lenses – you have the choice of switching to a larger 32Mb file for those few cases where it is an advantage. The disadvantage is of course the smaller image size in the viewfinder.

It has always amused me that the staunchest advocates of the uncropped image have been those who have used cameras with some of the least accurate viewfinders. I was a great fan of range-finder cameras, owning and using a number of them over the years – Leica, Konica, Minolta etc, and none of them were particularly precise – and with some lenses spectacularly wrong. And of course even that great photographer and advocate of the full frame – to the extent of producing images including the sprocket holes where he had loaded the film incorrectly – cropped what is perhaps his most famous image.

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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.

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ICP Infinity – David Guttenfelder

I’m not a great fan of awards ceremonies – and the nonsense over things like the Oscars, BAFTA and the rest really turns me off, but perhaps I’d make an exception for the ICP Infinity Awards, which don’t seem to suffer from the same kind of sycophancy, in-breeding and embarrassing acceptance speeches.

There are certainly a number of worthy winners each year (and sometimes one or two I find hard to understand) and this year is no exception. You can see a video presentation on each of the winners on Mediastorm, and I’d particularly recommend watching the video on David Guttenfelder  who won the Photojournalism Award – scroll down from that for the others. His isn’t a household name, even among photographers, but as a photographer for AP he has “spent the past 20 years of his life in some of the worst places in the world. He spent his 20s photographing bloodshed in Africa and his 30s reporting on the war in Afghanistan. Now the chief photographer for Asia, where he is primarily based in North Korea” and there are some fascinating images from there as well as a few which are perhaps more like we would expect from an AP correspondent covering official visits. As he says on the video, “the most mundane pictures sometimes are the ones that are the most powerful.”

I’ve not watched all of the other videos the whole way through, but I was also particularly impressed by Kitra Cahana, winner of the Young Photographer Award, and of course who could argue with the Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement Award going to David Goldblatt – I’m only surprised he hadn’t already won it. His classic ‘On The Mines‘ has been on my bookshelves since it was first published in 1973, and I was pleased to see a revised version published last year by Steidl as the first in series on his work they are bringing out.

These videos were shown to the audience at the awards ceremony on May 1, and if you were disappointed not to get an invitation to be there in New York, console yourself that it’s probably better be able to watch them in the comfort of your own home, without any of the razzmatazz.

And thanks to one of my favourite photographers, Ami Vitale, who shared the link on Facebook with the message “David Guttenfelder is amazing. Beautiful story.”

We Didn’t Evict a Millionaire


Going down the escalator at King’s Cross

Lord Freud’s house – in a pleasant a leafy estate in Highgate – was perhaps a little disappointing for a millionaire. It reminded me of the house in a rather less salubrious outer London suburb that my family had until my father retired to the south coast the 1970s. Though location is important and it would probably sell for around 5 times as much.  But property prices in parts at least of London are now so silly that almost anyone who owns a house there is a millionaire.

Lord Freud is, I suspect, very much richer than that. And the gap between those like him and the kind of people who will be hit harshly by his Bedroom Tax is now so immense that it is hardly surprising that he has no conception at all of what it is actually like to live on low pay or on benefits. Only a person with no idea of what it is like to be poor could have come up with an idea like this. Or some of the other attacks on the poor from the coalition.

I’m not rich, and there are many things I can’t afford, but fortunately seldom have to think much about money now. But I can remember when I had to count every penny. I remember my mother writing down every small amount she spent into a red covered notebook, adding up the bills every week, hoping that there might be a few pence to go into the Post Office towards the next pair of shoes I’d soon need when my feet outgrew the ones I was wearing. I remember too when my total wealth in the world amounted to £4-14s7d and a few pennies in my pocket, but I was lucky and was about to get a job -and in those days almost a fiver was worth a great deal more than it is today. I’ve always had enough to pay the rent and to eat and -apart from buying cameras – have never developed expensive tastes. So I completely lack the qualifications to be a member of the cabinet, even apart from not having been to Eton and Oxford.

And of course, Lord Freud was not in (I imagine he has several other homes to go to), and this house was surrounded by police, who despite all the ‘secrecy’ from UK Uncut had obviously put together ‘Bedroom Tax’ and ‘Millionaire’ and come up with the names of those whose homes you could reach easily from Kings Cross on a Travelcard. The only people who were in the dark were most of the protesters, and I suspect a few got lost on the way.


Platform at Kings Cross -A woman proudly wearing the t-shirt she still had from the Poll Tax protests

Photographically the most interesting part of the event was the tube journey, and fortunately the Nikons give great results in the relatively low light of tube stations. The escalator and platforms were fairly dim, but I was still able to work at 1/125 at f5.6 at ISO3200. Flash isn’t allowed in the underground, but I didn’t need it.

I’d been photographing the man with the ‘Tories Against the Tax’ placard on the platform, and when the train came in rather than follow him through the same door took a gamble and went through the next, hoping he would then turn and be facing me in the middle of the carriage. He did, and I got what I thought was my best picture (the five photographers visible behind him blended in well with the other passengers and don’t really spoil it) and was also in a good position for a further image when he got a seat.

Although the quantity of light was fine, the colour isn’t, with some bad fluorescent tubes. Flash might have given a better result but only if I could have used enough to completely light the scene with it. I didn’t think I could or I might have tried it at least inside the carriage. I think it still isn’t allowed, but I don’t think would present a safety hazard, which is the case on platforms, where it can temporarily blind the drivers.

There were a few other pictures, both at Kings Cross and at our destination that I was quite pleased with, and you can see in Who wants to evict a Millionaire?

I spent several hours covering the event and produced what I thought were some good pictures but I don’t think any of them have been used outside of Demotix and My London Diary (and now these on >Re:PHOTO.) It isn’t always the good pictures that make the news, and of course there were many other photographers at the UK Uncut protest, and mine were not available until perhaps four hours after the first images of it arrived. There were few if any arrests, no real ‘celebrities’ present and no violence – so nothing that would make it an important story for most of the mass media.

From the bus on my way home I saw a few people with placards just before it stopped at Kentish Town station, and decided to go and see who they were and what they were protesting about. I spent about ten minutes talking with the group, and wasn’t at all happy with the few pictures that I was able to make (the steadily falling rain didn’t help) but I thought there was enough interest in the story that despite the rather ordinary pictures it was worth putting on line – and you can see the longer version as Release Palestinian Prisoners. To my surprise one of the images was used by a national newspaper a few days later.
Continue reading We Didn’t Evict a Millionaire

Deutsche Börse Anti-Photography prize

I’ve more or less refrained from comment in public on this year’s prize competition at the London Photographers’ Gallery, and I ignored the invitation to spend yesterday evening at a considerably more interesting opening elsewhere. It has become very much a case of kicking a dead dog when it’s down.

The Guardian has I think got it about right, both in Sean O’Hagan’s initial comments when the shortlist was announced and in Wednesday’s piece on the show by Adrian Searle.  There are some salient points too in the comments.

Chris Killip is the only photographer with work of any real stature in the show, and as Searle concludes “He should win because his work is still valuable. Much of the other work here won’t be, in 30 years’ time.” Though probably he won’t.

Although I rather liked Cristina de Middel’s The Afronauts, a nicely done spoof space programme, it does seem to me rather familiar territory, a rather less complex version of Joan Fontcuberta’s 1997 Sputnik,  itself perhaps an unnecessary duplication in ideas of his earlier Fauna. Of course Killip’s early work in Isle of Man was also a reworking of Paul Strand, but the work for which he has been nominated shows more varied ideas. There is a nice presentation of his 2011 show 4 & 20 Photographs from the Howard Yezerski Gallery, which I think makes clear that Strand was not his only influence.  It’s perhaps interesting to read the comment by ‘answerback‘ (scroll down from here) which in part deals with this, but also makes some other adverse comments on his practice, though I wonder how much he really knows about Killip and his work. Perhaps he’ll read this and comment more!

Killip, so far as we know, has done little photography since the publication of ‘In Flagrante’ in 1988. There was a slightly botched commission photographing a Pirelli factory, and one longer term project on Irish pilgrimages, published as Here Comes Everybody. It is more than questionable whether his work “significantly contributed to photography in Europe between 1 October 2011 and 30 September 2012” in any way that would make him eligible for this award.

But at lease Killip and de Middel are actually photographers and the work for which they were shortlisted was photography. I think it most likely that, as last year, the prize will go to a non-photographer.