Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Sean Smith – Iraq

I’ve been privileged to hear Guardian photographer Sean Smith show and talk about his work in person, and you can do so on as a part of the French Cultural TV network Arte’s IRAK – 10 years, 100 viewpoints available on-line in French, German and English.

This is a incredibly impressive and wide-ranging web documentary project on the 10 years since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and I’ve only so far had time to look at a little of it. It aims to let the people of Iraq speak, and “The goal is to get the facts straight from the source and home in on an undeniably less “West-centred” perspective than usual.”

Smith’s contribution has some stunning images along with his own low-key dead-pan commentary, which puts the work into context, and avoids the kind of glamorisation of horror which I’ve sometimes felt – for example – in World Press Photo exhibitions. His is a view from the position of the ordinary people – both the people of Iraq and also of the US soldiers he got to know as he shared their experience, walking “a mile in their shoes” on patrol and in camp.

Also from the Guardian is cartoonist Steve Bell, and talking and showing how his work laid bare the lies told by Bush and Blair. His is powerful work, memorable and unfortunately only too true, but although I respond to it warmly, there is something about the ordinariness of photography that for me at least leaves a more lasting residue.

But there is so much more on the site to explore and appreciate (enjoy is perhaps not an appropriate word), and although I’ve peeked at a few other sections I haven’t yet had time to look properly. Feel free to comment about both the parts of the site I’ve mentioned and those I’ve so far missed. And thanks to David Hoffman for sharing Sean Smith’s “masterpiece of photography, courage and endurance” on Facebook.

Thurston Hopkins reaches Century

Few photographers in the UK get the attention they deserve, and it is only as Thurston Hopkins turns 100 that we get a little – but only a little – media interest in his work. He was one of the English photographers I included in my listing of notable photographers which I compiled on-line around the start of the century, and the subject of a fairly lengthy essay I published in 2005, when he was only 92!

I’d thought that essay had disappeared into the bit-bucket of history, though of course I have my own original copy (but not the rights to publish it) but was surprised to find it still came up in the top 10 on my Google search in a pirated version on a gallery site. Should I be flattered? Or sue?

Hopkin’s best known work was for Picture Post, and it is now the property of Getty Images where you can search the Hulton Archive and find around a thousand of his images on line – or only three if you specify ‘creative’ rather than ‘editorial’. Though I’d classify his editorial work – with a few exceptions – to be unusually creative.

Possibly his best work for PP remained unpublished. Here’s a paragraph of my piece:

The decline of Picture Post was clearly indicated by the fate of the story by Hopkins on Liverpool, arguably his finest work. Taken in 1956, it showed the people of the city living in slum properties with few possessions, through a series of powerful images.

A child peers from the corner of a broken window; a woman washes her face sitting crouched over a bowl of water on a newspaper covered kitchen table, her breakfast cup and plate still on it, an older woman stands among scattered sheets of newspaper in the desolate infinity of an alleyway between the walled yards of back to back streets, clutching a few packets to her breast., desolate and desperate. A child tries to sleep on a sparse bed below a dirty blanket. Covering this are sheets of newspaper, probably more to protect the blanket from falling plaster and drips of water than to keep her warm.

and I continued with the story of what became of it:

The city fathers protested to the proprietor, Edward Hulton about this indictment of conditions in their city. He put pressure on the editor (no longer Tom Hopkinson, who had left the magazine several years earlier following the dispute with Hulton over his printing of a report by Bert Hardy and journalist James Cameron on the mistreatment of prisoners in the war in Korea) and the story was dropped. Twenty years later, other photographers, including Paul Trevor, went back to Liverpool and found little had changed.

The Guardian published a nice blog about him by Observer Picture Editor Greg Whitmore entitled ‘Unsung hero of photography Thurston Hopkins turns 100‘ although as I’ve pointed out he was not entirely unsung – and my essay was probably read by millions around the world. On Friday they published a gallery of 17 of his finest images, almost half from the Liverpool piece, and you can see a more eclectic selection from the Photographers’ Gallery, largely illustrating a curious obsession with autombile fins. Getty’s gallery, which starts off with a curious travesty does improve if you scroll down, but one of the most interesting posts I’ve found on the web was written by the man himself.

Writing Through One’s Hat

I wasn’t quite sure why A D Coleman was writing about the as yet unpublished ‘How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read’, by Pierre Bayard in his Nearby Café Photocritic International post How to Talk Through Your Hat (1) and making the connection between the author’s name and one of the pioneers of photography, Hippolyte Bayard seemed rather a weak link – especially as Coleman says “I’ve yet to determine whether he’s related“. But of course I knew and trusted that he would at some point get to the point.

And of course he does, if only in his later post, How to Talk Through Your Hat (2), where he talks about the development of his own critical practice, where he increasingly realised the need to make “careful description and formal analysis” central to his reviews, although as he says, “it’s hard to make description and formal analysis interesting to read, more so certainly than interpretation and evaluation.”

It’s an approach that I’ve also very much tried to take in the best of my attempts at critical writing about photography – and forced students to take in their critical studies of photographers when I was teaching, giving them a formal structure which started with these aspects, even though it was anathema to academic practice at the time. As I wrote long ago, most writers on photography would rather do anything than actually look at the pictures.

And this, rather more elegantly, is what Bayard and Coleman are saying. Coleman of course has pointed it out long before, as he says:

As I pointed out back in 1997, you can peruse the entire English-language “discourse” around Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” without encountering any substantive engagement with the particulars of any one image of hers.

He goes on to say that most theoretical writing about images tends not to discus its actual content, but “the literal subject matter, and their personal response thereto ― equivalent to assessing a Cézanne still life according to your preferences in fruit.”

But you need to read his posts, rather than mine, and I gather from the bottom of the second post that we can expect a third on this series.

I read rather a clear example of writing about photographs without any real attempt to look at the actual content the other day in a review of the current Winogrand retrospective at SFMOMA. Caille Millner‘s review in the San Francisco Chronicle was drawn to my attention in a post by Joerg Colberg on The Ethics of Street Photography (his link to it may work if mine hits the paywall) and seems to me a near perfect example of someone writing about images without actually seeing the actual content, producing a diatribe based on her reaction to his literal subject – or one of them – women.

Millner seems to have little idea of who Winogrand was or what he was doing – or with how it changed what other photographers do, and to be completely unprepared to engage with them. She could have looked at a Picasso show and come out with the same response (probably with more justification) about his attitudes to women.

I think Winogrands attitudes and images were considerably more complex than she imagines, and although when I wrote a lengthy essay on him some years ago I wasn’t entirely uncritical of his approach to women, I didn’t mistake this as the point of his work. But unlike her I knew his work, and looked at the pictures, including those in my copy of his ‘Women Are Beautiful‘ (I got it reduced to £4.50 and it now sells at $450 upwards) and didn’t have the same axe to grind.

Kim on Koudelka

While I think that Eric Kim in his blog post 10 Lessons Josef Koudelka Has Taught Me About Street Photography considerably overstates the obvious, most of it is good advice, and what shines through is his enthusiasm about photography and Koudelka’s work.

Although I’m also a fan of Koudelka, and have several of his books, including Gypsies and Chaos which I think are perhaps his most important works, I think Kim goes rather over the top about him – as he also does in his features on Lee Friedlander and Daido Moriyama among others. But there are some nice links to a couple of videos and his Magnum page, as well as to his books.

Incidentally I paid £14.50 for my copy of his Gypsies, the 1975 UK edition which I find is now offered on-line at over £200. The more recent version had more images and is better printed and available second-hand for around $50. Photographic books can be a decent investment, though mine tend to become rather worn, which cuts their value. But many others I bought are probably worth less than I paid for them.

Although it’s nice to be able to hold a book and leaf through it, I think you can learn just as much from Koudelka’s work on line. There are photo books that really work well as books and are not just collections of images, where the sequence and the ability to look back and forward really matter, or where the print quality of the images is vital, but I don’t think this is so with Koudelka’s work. In general I think it works as well on screen – for example at Magnum – as it does in print or even in actual photographic prints, perhaps with the exception of his panoramic work, which really needs to be seen on a greater scale. Some in the Chaos book are reproduced as 22×9 inch double page spreads.

So you want to be a wedding photographer?

One of the great influences on photography in the last century was the art director of Harper’s Bazaar, Alexey Brodovitch, (1898-1971), who spent 24 years at the magazine from 1934-58. Brodovitch began his ‘Design Laboratory’ with courses for designers and photographers in 1933, with separate classes for designers and photographers, but it was perhaps after the war that they became more important.

Among the photographers who attended his courses were Diane Arbus, Eve Arnold, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Lisette Model, Garry Winogrand, Tony Ray Jones, Hiro and a personal friend of mine, John Benton-Harris.

In the American Institute of Graphic Arts biography of him, Andy Grundberg writes:

As a teacher, Brodovitch was inspiring, though sometimes harsh and unrelenting. A student’s worst offense was to present something Brodovitch found boring; at best, the hawk-faced Russian would pronounce a work “interesting.” Despite his unbending manner and lack of explicit critical standards—Brodovitch did not formulate a theory of design—many students under his tutelage discovered untapped creative reserves.

But perhaps his worst put-down when students brought work that did not meet his creative standards was “So you want to be a wedding photographer?”

It was a quotation that came to mind a couple of times today, first when I read an article For Photographers, Competition Gets Fierce in the New York Times, which talks about how many unemployed ‘digital debbies’ with little or no previous experience “are taking their fancy digital cameras and booking jobs shooting weddings”, seriously undercutting the pros at the game.

Back in the distant past, we had a professional photographer at my wedding, though I don’t really understand why. In those days photography was black and white, and he obviously had no idea how to use it, and the prints are flat and lifeless. At a glance they seem over-exposed, taken with no feeling for composition and printed on the wrong paper grade – there’s professionalism for you!

My own father’s wedding was I think recorded in only one photograph, a highly detailed view of a large group with my parents at the centre. It seemed perfectly adequate, although it might have been better if my father had not been holding a baby when it was made (it wasn’t actually his, and I only came along, the fourth child, some fifteen years later in case anyone was having doubts about my legitimacy.) I find it hard to understand why now people want large albums and even videos of the occasion.

Given that so many people attending weddings now take digital photographs, its hard to know why we also want professionals to take pictures, and harder still why they should employ those without some kind of track record at ‘under $1000’, when what they are getting is unlikely to be much if any better than friends could provide for free. Although weddings have provided a useful income for many professionals for many years, I’m not sure this is necessarily a good thing; wedding photographs don’t seem to me to be particularly worthwhile and few of those who get a living income from them have used the support to do anything more worthwhile.

But should you really want to be a wedding photographer there is some very good advice on some things to avoid in 32 Tips For Taking The Perfect Wedding Photo which is subtitled ‘Avoid disaster and embarrassment by following these simple rules.’ Thanks to EPUK News for directing me to this page, which I’m sure would have had me laughing all the way down the aisle even if had drunk a few less glasses of a good Bordeaux before reading it. My apologies for any errors of typing, sense or grammar.

Showing in London

Yesterday I had around three hours spare in London in the afternoon, and decided to visit some of the exhibitions that I’d been meaning to take a look at, including some photography shows.

As I was in Bloomsbury, I started with ‘Cartographies of Life and Death‘, a show marking the bicentenary of John Snow (1813–1858) whose careful research into cholera outbreaks in London in the 1850s showed that cholera was spread by polluted water. His work making use of careful mapping of the places where the deaths occured initiated a new science of epidemiology. It was an interesting show, with some well chosen documents both from the time of Snow’s ground-breaking study – particularly a and later disease mapping, but I found almost all of the contemporary artworks that had been specially commissioned for it disappointing in the extreme. It certainly was a show that would have been enlivened by some photography from the nineteenth century along with the rather dryer texts (though there was an amusing ballad pouring scorn on the cholera industry) and perhaps even a rather more appropraite contemporary photographic commission.

From there I walked to Soho, where the Photographers’ Gallery is just a little to the north of the site of the Broad Street pump which was the source of the outbreak. I’d decided against attending the opening of the current series of shows there on the grounds that it would only enrage me, but had decided to go in and check it – and they are on until April 7 2013. It’s best to take the lift up to the fifth floor and work your way down as there are far too many stairs in the building. By far the most interesting part of the exhibition on top floor, Perspectives on Collage, was the view out of the large window north across Oxford St into Great Titchfield St, and even that I couldn’t be bothered to photograph. There were a few mildly interesting collages both in C.K. Rajan’s Mild Terrors (1992-96) and the work of Roy Arden, and a little that was at least thought-provoking in the work of Jan Svoboda (there are at least two photographers of that name – this was the Czech artist ((1934–1990) who sought “who sought to redefine the language of photography in relation to painting and sculpture“. I remember seeing a show of his work many years ago – perhaps even at the Photographers’ Gallery – and taking a copy of a small book of his work being given out free at the gallery. There were large piles of them because almost everyone who picked up a copy took a quick look and put it back as not worth the price. Certainly most photographers who saw the show appeared to feel that Svoboda should have torn up his ‘The Table‘ but few if any would have suggested he should then have put the pieces on show. To be fair I thought them more interesting than most of the contemporary works. I don’t know how representative a show of collage this is, and it may reflect a dearth of work in this area.

On the floor below I found myself in a large empty space with around a dozen large empty still live images, Ill Form and Void Full, the work of Laura Letinsky. Mostly the large prints were empty of objects, with assemblages of objects in just a small area of the frame. The prints didn’t look particularly photographic, and when I put on my glasses they didn’t look particularly sharp, even from a fairly normal viewing distance, which I found annoying. I know I’m fussier than others in this respect, but if a large print looks unsharp I just feel it has been printed too large. Better to have made these perhaps A3. They are described as being taken with a ‘large format camera’ and frankly I’d expect more technically, although possibly the lack of absolute clarity is to enable the blending of real objects and photographs in the images.

I think her work looks better on my screen at home that it did on the wall, although perhaps rather despite myself there was an image of a simple white cup on a white table with a white wall (the image next to the text panel if you can brave the sea-sickness of the panoramic view of the exhibition, though you can’t see it well enough to appreciate it) which was a picture very much about light and illusion that intrigued me.

The lowest of the three exhibition floors was devoted to the work of Brazilian artist Geraldo de Barros (1923-1998) and despite some reservations it was perhaps the work on show that interested me most, though more for his early work in a modernist vogue than the collages of his final years when he returned to working with photographs, having abandoned any serious photography over 45 years before. You can read more about him, and some comments on the other shows in a Guardian piece by Sean O’Hagan.

By far the most worthwhile of the shows I saw was at the Courtauld Gallery, where Becoming Picasso has two rooms of his work from 1901, the first containing paintings made for his Paris debut exhibition and the second the start of his Blue period, perhaps inspired – as two of the works on show clearly are – by the death of a close friend. I don’t go much for large collected blockbuster shows, but this isn’t that but a closely focused exhibition that brings together work for a specific theme. You can’t really fully appreciate these paintings on line (or in reproduction) but really have to go and stand in front of them and look at them closely as well as from a distance. Most of these images have a three-dimensional aspect to their brushwork that is important. The show runs until 26 May 2013.

Going back to photography was perhaps bound to be something of an anti-climax, but also at Somerset House, in the East Wing Gallery, is Landmark: the Fields of Photography, a landscape show curated by William A. Ewing (until 28 April 2013.) It’s a vast show, full of huge images – along with some smaller ones – in a confusing rambling series of rooms, and you really need the map supplied to ensure you see it all.

The text says it contains ‘more than 130 original works of art’ and my guess would have been that there were around twice that number of photographs, but that’s perhaps just how it felt. Although there is much interesting work on show, I think a much smaller show would have been preferable. There was too much on the wall that made me feel I’d seen pictures like that so many times before or at times to ask, ‘but is is really landscape.’ It’s like one of those big thick bricks of books of photographs (and Ewing has of course produced some) and I felt the curator needed a strict curator to keep him in check. It seems driven by an unbridled enthusiasm, a child let loose in a sweetshop with an unlimited budget.

There are too many vacuous large works – some by well-known names. Too many pictures that seem nice pages for coffee table books or colour supplements. But still much work that I liked. If you have an interest in landscape there will probably be much that interests you – just be prepared to walk through a lot of long grass too find it.

Riverfront

As I’ve often noted, it is rare to find serious writing about photography that actually looks at photographs, so don’t miss Joerg Colberg’s Meditations on Photographs: Riverfront by Curran Hatleberg which does just that. And admirably.

Certainly there is more that could be said about this particular picture, and having started with this kind of largely formal analysis I would want to locate it in both a social and political context and in a photographic one. Colberg in his final three sentences instead goes off on in what is to my mind a tangent about staged versus street photography. It’s a subject about which I have my own views, but I don’t think one that particularly relates to this image, but most photography in any case exists somewhere between these two extremes, and in most of my own pictures although not staged there is some degree of interaction between observer and observed.

But don’t stop when you come to the end of Colberg’s post (though you could perhaps omit the last three paragraphs), follow the link in either his post or here to the work of Curran Hatleberg, new to me. There are two sets of pictures on his site, and ‘Riverfront‘ comes from ‘The Crowded Edge‘. Scroll through the images and after the / you came to the second series, ‘Dogwood‘.

Click on his name and you find the information “Curran Hatleberg was born in 1982 in Washington, D.C. and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. A graduate of the University of Colorado and the Yale School of Art, his work has been shown in galleries both nationally and internationally and is included in multiple collections. He currently teaches photography at the International Center of Photography and Norwalk Community College.” You can also find a set of his pictures on the Yale University School of Art site, some of which perhaps relates more directly to Riverfront.

Lensculture March 2013

I’m always pleased to get news from Jim Casper of a new edition of Lensculture, though I’ve not yet had time to look through all the material on it. Of what I’ve seen so far, the highlight is a set of work from Michell Sank, In My Skin, work from her project about “young people under 25 in the UK who are challenging their body image “, though I find it hard to understand why some of those she has photographed have any problems with what seem to me perfectly adequate forms. I’ve managed to live with all my own imperfections for a very long time without getting too worried.

I’ve also enjoyed looking at Gloriann Liu’s essay on Long Term Refugee Camps in Lebanon and several other pieces on the site, though as always Lens Culture covers a wide range of photographic practice, including a few things that do nothing for me. But there is plenty that does.

Winogrand

An interesting interview in Mother Jones Never Before Seen Photos From Legendary Street Photographer Garry Winogrand with Mark Murrmann talking to Ted Pushinsky, a San Francisco street photographer who got to know Winogrand in his later years and at times drove him around Los Angeles as he hung out of the car window taking pictures, as well as walking the streets with him.

And I think there are eight or nine of the “never before seen” photographs that I’ve never seen before, though they do include one or two I never want to see again and which I don’t think do anything to enhance Winogrand’s reputation. It’s good to hear of a new show, but I’m not sure it will add much to the 1988 MoMA show – and you can see some of his work in their collection. There is a good selection of links on American Suburb X, and pictures at various galleries including Kopeikin and Fraenkel.

More about the new retrospective show – the first for 25 years – which opens at SFMOMA today and continues until 02 June 2013 (press release here) and later travels to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (March 2 – June 8, 2014); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (June 27 – September 21, 2014); the Jeu de Paume, Paris (October 14, 2014 – January 25, 2015); and the Fundacion MAPFRE, Madrid (March 3 through May 10, 2015).

What a shame that London apparently has no gallery interested enough in photography (or considered important enough) to put it on here!

Bill Wood’s Fort Worth

Thanks to a Facebook link by Rina Sherman for reminding me of the work of Bill Wood Jr (1913-73), a commercial photographer in Fort Worth Texas from 1937 to 1970 when he retired because of ill health. Most of the pictures in the collection that was bought by actress Diane Keaton, who has a great passion for photography, date from the 1950s on, when Fort Worth was a rapidly expanding city, and Wood provided the images that represented the new citizens as they wanted to be seen.

I don’t know how representative the book and show at the ICP in 2008 was of his work as a whole; a search in the ICP collection on his name brings up 348 objects, most of which are photographs by Wood, and most of which have an image on line. Although not all have a great interest, they are almost all carefully composed, straightforward images, clearly made for a particular purpose by a skilled craftsman. He wasn’t a photographer who took a huge number of pictures, and only made photographs for his clients, usually taking only a single or small number of exposures. The 10,000 negatives in the collection that Keaton bought are mainly from the 1950s and 1960s, and represent only an average of 500 pictures for a year – less than many photographers now take in a day. Even in the days of film, when Winogrand went to make a very different view of Fort Worth, he probably took more pictures in a few weeks than Wood in a lifetime.

There are pictures here that could well be mistaken – seen out of context – for the work of one of the photographers of the ‘New Topographic’ school, many of whom worked in similar environments on the outskirts of other US cities. And sometimes reminders of images by other well-known post-war photographers who worked in America, though Wood’s viewpoint is a very different one from any of these photographers.

You can hear Keaton and fellow curator Marvin Heiferman talking about the work on a Studio 360 public radio broadcast from 2008, and there are a number of reviews of the show and book online, including one by Ken Johnson in the New York Times and Melanie McWhorter in Fraction Magazine. There is also an article in North Texas’s Art&Seek, which includes the Pontiac/Kleenex image mentioned in the radio discussion.