Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Should We Ask?

The NPR ‘the picture show’ has an interesting story What It Feels Like To Be Photographed In A Moment Of Grief about a photograph of a woman praying in front of a candle and statue of the Virgin Mary outside the St. Rose of Lima church in Newtown, Conn., on the day of the school shootings there, taken by AFP photographer Emmanuel Dunand.

The woman contacted NPR after they ran the picture, identified herself and wrote that although it was a beautiful image and she wasn’t asking for it to be taken down, she “would like to make a point about responsible journalism, it would have been nice if someone could have asked my permission.”

The photographer’s response was that he thought that in the situation, leaving her alone was the most respectful thing to do. I’m fairly convinced that in the circumstances I would have come to the same decision.

There are I think several things that are not really brought out in the short feature or really in the 140 comments people had made on it by the time I read it, and also it connects with something I was thinking about writing about a small incident when I was taking pictures last Saturday.

There is a sense that the picture in question is not really a picture of a particular woman, who is hardly recognisable in the image, her face largely covered by hair and her hands far more important in the image. This is a picture which gains from being generic, from expressing the feelings of many rather than being an image of a particular person.

The NPR talked to Kenny Irby of The Poynter Institute, who gave what I think was a very confusing answer about the two benefits of photographers introducing themselves and interacting with their subjects. It showed a complete failure to understand the difference between news and features, perhaps surprising coming from a leading journalism school. It isn’t as Kenny Irby says ‘unfortunate‘ that the AFP does not have a policy requiring photographers to ask for subject’s names when they are photographed in public places, it is very much at the foundation of news photography.

The woman in the picture is quoted as saying “all of a sudden I hear ‘clickclickclickclickclick’ all over the place. And there are people in the bushes, all around me, and they are photographing me, and now I’m pissed. I felt like a zoo animal.” I don’t know how accurate a description that was, but it shows that there were many other photographers as well as Dunand involved, and it obviously can be very disturbing and intimidating to be surrounded in this way. But this was a very public event, in a place ‘packed with local residents and the media’ and the attention she got was inevitable. Hers was a private grief but she was expressing it in a very public place and in a way that was certain to attract attention.

Her final sentence in the quote was perhaps unfortunate. Zoo animals often come to welcome visitors and generally don’t have strong feelings against being photographed, often playing up for the camera. It’s one reason why I don’t much like zoos and have seldom photographed in them. And though I don’t mean to suggest that she was acting for the camera, many people – even in distressing situations – do so. As of course many people including Susan Sontag have pointed out.

News photography is sometimes tough. I’ve at times photographed through tears and I think all good photographers ever who photograph difficult events will have too. But like Dunand who commented “all you want to do is put down flowers, you don’t want to take photos” we have a job to do. He is also reported as saying that ‘if he sensed that someone was bothered by the camera, he simply put it down’ and I think most professionals would do the same. But of course it may well not have been the click of his camera that disturbed.

There are many times when I start taking a picture on my own and find myself surrounded by a crowd. I don’t like working with a pack of other journalists, and when I feel the shoulders pressing against mine I always know I’m in the wrong place – and after I’ve taken my picture try to move away. Many events now we have far too many people with cameras trying to photograph, and those who generally behave the worst towards both the subjects and other photographers are generally not the professional photographers present.

But there are times when I think it is right to ask and I do. One happened last Saturday, when I was photographing the start of the large march to save the hospital in Lewisham, one of the most successful, well-run and needed in the country, threatened simply because other hospitals have huge debts arising from the policy of a former government – the private finance initiative. Closing Lewisham wouldn’t even do much – if anything – to solve the financial problem and it is more of a human sacrifice demanded by the current government -both metaphorically and literally, as its closure would lead to excess deaths among the sick and injured in the area.

I was photographing one of the local MPs and some of the senior hospital staff at the front of the march when one of the march stewards asked me if I had seen a family taking part with a young child in a pram who was on a drip. It would he said, make a good picture. The family were on the pavement only a couple of yards from the head of the protest in a very public place, and it would have been possible to photograph them without asking, but I felt that it would be unduly intrusive to do so – I needed to get very close. I went up to them and asked. They said no. I didn’t take the picture, though I think it might have been an image that would have dramatised the protest and perhaps made some front pages.

Of course I did take many other pictures. There were only two others where I felt I needed to ask permission, both involving people not actually taking part in the protest. One had no problems, and in the other one of the two people ran away while the other was happy to be photographed. Of course I did talk to many other people while I was taking their pictures – particularly to the parents of the children I photographed, but it wasn’t a matter of asking permission – this was a situation where permission could be assumed and almost everyone was pleased to be photographed (and some demanded it!)

More of my pictures and story at Save Lewisham Hospital.

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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

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Tony Ray-Jones – Pepys

Until I read a three part article on the Pepys Estate at Deptford published in ‘The London Column‘ I wasn’t aware that the work which Tony Ray-Jones took for the Architectural review was now in the RIBA photographic library.

The first of three posts on the Pepys Estate, Deptford links to BBC archive footage of a remarkable programme first broadcast in 1969, Bird’s Eye View – The Englishman’s Home – shot mainly from a helicopter with commentary by John Betjeman who refused to fly, but worked with the footage as it was edited. Rather slow-moving by modern standards, though Betjeman is always a pleasure to listen to, unless you have a strong stomach for the sentimental and picturesque you might like to skip the first thirty-something minutes where inevitably it lingers far too long over many stately homes, and omits the true history of misery, repression and exploitation behind their architectural splendour. Ground-breaking it claims to be for its aerial perspective, but the approach is comfortable and conservative in its politics.

After a brief trip to fairy-tale Wales at around 30 minutes the programme shifts first to Chiswick House in Betjemans beloved Middlesex, before moving to truly urban housing in Bath “in the crater of an extinct volcano” and then Clifton in Bristol, built when it was the second city of England (built on the unmentioned slave trade) then on to Brighton, our best-looking seaside town. The helicopter (and commentary) concentrate on the Georgian terraces of the 1830s before zooming down to the Pavillion.

Next come a couple of ‘model’ villages built on some of the huge estates – including the single house left in the old village at Chatsworth that had spoiled his Lordships view and Edensor built up the hill for his tenants: “I can’t see why this sort of thing is any more inhuman than what a council does today“. I can.

Then its comfortable North Oxford and swimming pool suburbs, “the sort of house that everybody wants, an acre and a garden and no cow“. Finally at 39 minutes we get to Port Sunlight “a protest against northern back to backs” (which don’t get shown), and on to Peacehaven. Betjeman comments on the snootiness about this cliff-top development, but his defence of it seems to be based more on a wish to stand out from the architectural crowd than any real knowledge of the place – to which two of my aunts moved to die around the time the programme was made.

At 42 minutes comes Harlow New Town (“do you think this is the way we ought to live and do as we are told)” and on to a new Lyons estate at New Ash Green in greenfield Kent, then at 44 minutes, Docklands and high rise, with brief glimpses of the Royal Docks and Roehampton. The programme ends with the Pepys estate: “But where can be the heart that sends a family to the 20th floor of such a slab as this … .caged halfway up the sky… what is housing if it’s not a home” and the wide cleared site for Thamesmead with a its early blocks under contsctuction – “how human will it be?” asks Betjeman.

The image by Tony Ray-Jones, ‘Pepys Estate, Deptford, 1970‘ brings us back very much into the real world of a group of young kids playing on the estate, as does the text by Owen Hatherley and the further picture by Ray-Jones on part two of the series. In part three. Robert Elwall writes about the work commissioned by Hubert de Cronin Hastings, owner of the Architectural Press and editor of its leading journal, the Architectural Review from Ray-Jones and some other leading photographers in a series entitled ‘Manplan‘ which ran 8 themed monthly issues from September 1969 to September 1970 and its place in the history of architectural photography. Ray-Jones’ contribution was in the last of these, ‘Manplan 8: Housing‘ and perhaps the final straw; it was an experiment too much for many of the magazine’s subscribers and had to be abandoned.

Searching in the RIBA Photo Library using the term ‘Ray-Jones’ returns 167 images by him (rather more than the 138 mentioned on The London Column), from the Pepys Estate, from Lillington Gardens in Pimlico, from Haringey, Thamesmead, the Old Kent Rd, Blackheath, Battersea, Southwark, Crawley and New Ash Green and elsewhere and includes architect designed small houses as well as council estates.

The most interesting pictures to me are those of children playing around the estates at Thamesmead and Hammersmith and particularly in the Pepys Estate at Deptford, which appears to have occupied him more than the other sites. Some of the work seems straightforward architectural work – and at times similar to images I and many others have taken of similar subjects (and frankly there are a few that are a little boring), but the work comes alive once he found people to include in the picture – and there are a few where there is no visible architecture.

But his purely architectural work – like much of that genre – often leaves me cold. Too often the pictures are of idealised structures, everything clean and tidy, with the emphasis on new buildings, pristine and unlived in. I suspect like me, Ray-Jones was truly more interested in the lived in, buildings that have developed a character through use – and abuse. Too often architectural photographs look like pictures of models rather than the real world, and although I’ve spent a lot of time photographing buildings, I’ve never called myself an architectural photographer.

I’ve written here before on some of the issues over housing, and in particular the privatisation of estates such as the Pepys Estate, and it was good to read Owen Hatherly’s piece. You can read some of my own thoughts in Views of Deptford and on posts about the Carpenters Estate (Around the Olympics) in Stratford and the Heygate Estate (Southwark’s Shame) at the Elephant.

The three pictures illustrating this piece are from my own archive, and include some which will appear in the books I’m currently working on from my pictures of London in 1970-85.

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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

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London Day and Night

I’ve been putting in a lot of time over recent months sorting out my own work from the 1970s and early 80s, and have just decided that Lightroom can help me organise this stuff in a similar way to my current digital work. I’ve set up a new catalogue ‘London1’ and have imported several hundreds of scanned images – 16 bit tiff files – into it.

The raw scans need quite a lot of work doing on them – and some things are much quicker in Lightroom, for example rotating and cropping – and it is also probably an advantage that the edits leave the original file untouched. There are some things – like retouching – where at least most of the work needs to be done in Photoshop, and it is easy to use Ctrl+E and open and edit the original and then save it to return to Lightroom. But with so many pictures to work with, I’ve decided only to retouch the scans when I actually need to make a print. Too much of a job to retouch everything.

In Lightroom it’s easy to tag, keyword, select and sort files into collections, and then to output an individual image or a whole set with a preset for a particular purpose – for web, or book pages etc. And at least one of my next set of books will be from my early pictures of London.

Or at least it’s fairly easy to keyword and caption pictures – it sometimes would have helped if I had bothered to make notes, which I wasn’t too good at back in the 1970s. It should still be easy when, as in the case of ‘Carrington Mews Dwellings’ the pictures come with their own label, along with another, too small to read on the web but easily legible on the original that tells you they were ‘Erected A.D. 1877 by the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes’. There is a Carrington St in Mayfair – but Streetview shows it has nothing to match and Google can’t help for Carrington Mews either – and it isn’t listed in Wikipedia among the existing buildings erected by the MAIDIC. Pevsner of course wouldn’t have thought it worth mentioning, nor does it appear in the Survey of London. It is – or rather was, the bottom windows are boarded in my picture – somewhere close to Carrington St, as the adjoining image on the contact sheet is Whitbread’s ‘The Grapes’, still in Shepherd Market although now with décor rather less to my taste a free house ‘Ye Grapes.’

Of course they are not very early pictures of London, and people were photographing the city from the 1840s, when certainly a Mr Talbot made a calotype negative of Nelson’s Column under construction in April 1844.

One site that regularly published old pictures of London is Spitalfields Life, and a couple of days ago it had a feature The Forgotten Corners of Old London with images from the extensive collection of the Bishopsgate Institute – which is the source for many of its features on old London. This particular set of pictures appealed to me as in some ways being like much of my own work, often recording things that seem peripheral or inconsequential but which have a certain resonance.

Another recent feature which particularly appeals to me is Dark City: London in the 30s on the ‘Library Time Machine‘ of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, which republishes well 15 of the evocative night photographs from from London Night John Morrison and Harold Burdekin published in 1934. The book has a total of 50 photogravures in dark blue by Burdekin with assistance from Morrison who also wrote an introduction. I could reproduce some of these pictures here, but its better if you go and look at them all on the Time Machine site (if you haven’t got a copy of the book.) I added it to my collection ten years or so ago when I was researching a piece on the photographers of London. It came from an era when night photography was becoming much easier, and was perhaps prompted by Brassai’s night images of Paris. Today night photography is easier still, but it remains a good idea to take a companion in many places, even in parts of London. Burdekin made a deliberate decision not to include people in his pictures and the streets are eerily empty of traffic, but London then mainly went to bed well before midnight and it would probably have been hard to have found any to include in many of the places he photographed. London is much more of a 24 hour city now and you might find yourself waiting for a long time for some streets to be empty. Then you took your friends and relatives along if you wanted people in your pictures.

Ones to Watch?

The British Journal of Photography (BJP) has published its list of Ones to Watch in 2013, a selection they have made of 20 photographers from a list of over 200 suggested by an impressive list of “photographers, publishers, curators, picture editors and critics” as ” the photographers they believe will make their mark on the wider international photographic community in 2013.” It was perhaps a shame that having gathered this wide range of eminent consultants to put forward their suggestions that the final short list was picked by the magazine’s staff.

PDN has long carried out a similar exercise to select annually 30 photographers to watch, and you can see last March’s PDN 30 for 2012 on line. I’ve written about their selections at times in the past, and while most of the photographers selected for such lists are very worthy, if you look back at one of the lists from ten years or so ago, there will probably be relatively few names you recognise, even if, like me, you spend far too much of your life looking at photography on-ine and in galleries etc. In a way these lists are more about current fashions than about particular photographers. As always there are a few whose work I find exciting, rather more I think don’t really stand out from so many other good photographers whose work I see and one or two that really bore me.

Comparing the two presentations, PDN immediately gains points from me by its better understanding of alphabetical order, but although I don’t much like its web presentation with a drop-down list, there were many more photographers where I looked at the initial page and could summon the energy to click to see more work. And for those photographers whose work I was already familiar with, I felt the BJP had not selected a good image to represent them.

Probably the best known of those on the BJP list is Magnum nominee Jérôme Sessini. Take a look at his page on the BJP and then go to look at his work on the Magnum site, and I think you will understand what I mean.

Anyway, here is the BJP’s list in full – you’ll find links to them on the BJP page:

Adrian Fussell, Cyrille Weiner, Gert Jochems, Giorgio Di Noto, Hanna Putz, Jake Stangel, Jerome Sessini, Jim Mortram, Jiri Makovec, Jose Diniz, Jun Ahn, Kyoko Hamada, Lamia Maria Abillama, Lauren Marsolier, Max Pinckers, Namsa Leuba, Pari Dukovic, Paulina Otylie Surys, Ruth Van Beek, Samuel James

and this is PDN’s:

Mustafah Abdulaziz, Jenn Ackerman, Kyle Alexander, Meiko Takechi Arquillos, Michele Borzoni, Dominic Bracco II, Peter DiCampo, Eliot Dudik, Sarah Elliott, Mark Fisher, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Misha Friedman, Andrea Gjestvang, Mark Hartman, Lauren Hermele, Ingalls Photography, JUCO, Sam Kaplan, Peter Ash Lee, Sebastián Liste, Mark Mahaney, Chloe Dewe Mathews, Ilvy Njiokiktjien, Ryan Pfluger, Markel Redondo, AnaStasia Rudenko, Daniel Shea, Jake Stangel, Christopher Testani, Yasu+Junko

There is a useful set of links to these photographers web sites on the Photo Editor blog.

Jake Stangel is the only photographer who has the honour of appearing on both lists. I took a look at his work on a familiar subject, London & Amsterdam. Maybe like the rest of us he has his off days.

Nowhere People

With inequality yawning wider by the hour in the UK, and being given yet another step up in Parliament with attacks on benefits today, it’s salutary to look at the fine set of images by David Hoffman, Nowhere People.

He comments under the pictures:

“Homeless people in London. Young and old alike forced from the margin of survival out into the streets by the inequality of our financial system. Shot over more than 30 years it’s depressing to see how similar the most recent ones are to the oldest. Yet in that same time the income of those at the top has increased tenfold.”

But although the circumstances are depressing, these are pictures that are full of humanity and which show an understanding and respect for the people in them, a dignity we all deserve, whatever our circumstances.

If anything I think David’s comment is too optimistic; there has been the occasional improvement but things really – particularly in recent years – have got worse. The Labour government at least tried, but generally were incompetent and failed to address the issues, while the coalition just fails to understand the problems faced by the poor and out of work. When you are earning thousands a week it’s hard to understand what life is like on £71 (£56.25 if you are under 25.)

If we really were “all in this together” the present Government would be pressing for a more equal income distribution, perhaps by making a limited ratio of salaries of those working for an organisation a condition of tendering for all government contracts – and by getting rid of outsourcing as a way to pay poverty wages and impose primitive employment conditions. They’d also be clamping down on the tax avoiders and bankers, working for fixed actual wage increases rather than percentages, and raising the minimum wage to a living wage. And supporting a real ‘big society’ that helps provide support and services for others rather than one that makes huge profits for a few often corrupt companies while putting many charities out of business.

Jonas Bendiksen – Extinction Tourism?

Another interesting post by Pete Brook on Raw File, Extinction Tourism: Work at a Newspaper While You Still Can looks at the decision by Magnum Photographer Jonas Bendiksen to take a job at a small town newspaper in a remote area in the north of Norway, the Bladet Vesterålen, with a circulation of only 8000.

I’m not sure how the paper survives on such a low figure, and I doubt if it pays the kind of rates Magnum photographers usually expect, but apparently working for a newspaper was something he wanted to be sure to have done before he and newspapers die, and a challenge to work “where nothing too obvious or dramatic was going on“. There are a dozen of his pictures in the post and links to a couple of stories on the paper – the one on moose hunting despite the subject showing the quality of his work.

He splits his life between weeks in Oslo and weeks at the newspaper, and the job has turned out to be more of a going back to his roots than he expected. Having chosen to stay in the small village of Myre when working on the paper he found out that this was the place where his great-grandfather was born.

Bendikson (b1977) first came to Magnum as an intern in their London office when he was 19, before going to Russia to work for several years as a photojournalist. He joined Magnum in 2004 and was made a full member in 2008. His best-known work The Places We Live, made in 2005-7, looked at life in the slums of Mumbai, Nairobi, Caracas and Jakarta, and was published as a book by Aperture in 2008.

I’m not sure what future there is for printed newspapers, but from the look of its web site, the Bladet Vesterålen seems to be doing a very good job and deserves to survive. This lunchtime I was reading my own local paper – we still buy one – and thinking how hopeless it was, and that a half-decent blog based in the area could provide a much better service. It is part of a large group that has many titles, and I think few of the reporters or editors know our actual area well, though there are still one or two struggling journalists who do a good job. But half the time it publishes news not related to our particular area and misses what is happening here – and seldom sends reporters or photographers. And of course won’t pay to use pictures. Frankly much of our local press has lost its way and would hardly be a loss.

Shades of Grey

Although I’m a regular user of Surrey Libraries, I’ve yet to contribute to the statistics just announced that show Surrey borrowers to be the most avid readers of EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey series – which apparently accounts for one in 5 loans – as a libray spokesman commented “they just can’t get enough.” Certainly I’ve noticed over recent months the ‘New Issues’ and ‘Quick choices’ troughs clustered around the front of the library are engorged, full to bursting with these titles and the many, many rip-offs, ‘Seventeen Shades of Purple‘ and the rest. It’s perhaps surprising that ’50 Shades’ was also reported to be the country’s least wanted Christmas present, so there are presumably many virgin copies lying around in homes through the country.

Although I’ve yet to open the covers of any of these titles which seem to be multiplying like rabbits – after all I’m not in any way the target audience – Shades of Grey has been on my own bookshelves – and regularly consulted – for over 20 years. And if anyone got that volume, long out of print, for Christmas they will have been entranced by Oscar Marzaroli‘s picture of Glasgow from 1956-87, published shortly before his death in 1988 (and reprinted twice the following year.) There is a very wide selection of his work on the Marzaroli Collection web site, but unfortunately the images are rather small and seem contrasty and over-sharpened (rather like some pictures I put on the web in the early days of the mid-1990s) and don’t show his work to advantage. The site does seem overdue for a re-vamp.

The book Shades of Grey, second-hand copies of which now seem to sell for £50 or more, wasn’t particularly well printed – bog-standard offset of the period, with poor separation of the darker tones and perhaps in homage to the title lacking a true black – but it does a much better job than the web site, and is a wonderful portrait of a city and its people, complemented by a fine piece of writing ‘Where Greta Garbo Wouldn’t Have Been Alone‘ by William McIlvanney. I’d take issue with the flyleaf description which states that this, “with its subjective impressions perfectly complements the objective images from Marzaroli’s camera” only because his pictures are fortunately an equally subjective view of the city.

Free James Foley

When US journalist James Foley was kidnapped by unidentified gunmen in Northwest Syria, on November 22, 2012, his family wanted it to be kept out of the news, hoping for his safe return. Four other journalists, including Richard Engel, chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News were kidnapped in the same region and were freed after a battle between their captors and one of the two main Syrian rebel groups. It isn’t known if there is any connection between the kidnappings, or who has held Foley or why.

His family has now decided to go public and has set up a web site and a Facebook group to appeal for his release. Please sign the appeal on the web site and if you are on Facebook, you can ‘Like’ the group too.

You can read more about this on GlobalPost, for whom Foley had filed many reports over several years. In April 2011 on assignment for them in Libya, he was captured by Gadaffi’s forces and held in prison for 44 days before being released – and later he returned to Libya to photograph the events around the fall of Gadaffi. AFP to whom he had sent around 30 videos since March 2012 have issued a statement of solidarity with his family.

You can also see more of Foley’s work on his ‘A World of Troubles‘ web site. On its front page, as well as the appeal from the family for his release is a video he made in Aleppo a week before his capture showing home-made weapons being used by the rebels.

His Family say:

Jim is the oldest of five children. He has reported independently and objectively from the Middle East for the past five years. Prior to his work as a journalist, Jim helped empower disadvantaged individuals as a teacher and mentor assisting them in improving their lives.

The family appeals for the release of Jim unharmed.

I too hope and pray for his safe release. They feel publicity can help and we can all add our names to their petition.
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Just before Christmas, the Committee to Protect Journalists published a special report on journalists killed in 2012 which states:

Syria was by far the deadliest country in 2012, with 28 journalists killed in combat or targeted for murder by government or opposition forces. In addition, a journalist covering the Syrian conflict was killed just over the border in Lebanon. The number of fatalities related to the Syrian conflict approached the worst annual toll recorded during the war in Iraq, where 32 journalists were killed in both 2006 and 2007.

Those killed in Syria included four international journalists, Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times, French freelance photographer Rémi Ochlik, France 2 reporter Gilles Jacquier and Mika Yamamoto, a journalist for Japan Press. At least 13 of those killed were ‘citizen journalists’ and others included local professionals Abdel Karim al-Oqda of Shaam News Network, Mosaab al-Obdaallah of Tishreen and Ali Abbas of SANA. Two others, Bashar Fahmi working for Al-Hurra and Mohamed al-Saeed of Syrian State TV are missing, with unconfirmed reports that al-Saeed was beheaded. US Journalist Austin Tice has also been missing since August.

Harlem Views

Roy DeCarava has long been one of my favourite photographers, and his ‘The Sound I Saw‘, pictures of his from the 1960s was one of the more interesting publications of the early years of this century, and one that I often reach down from the shelf in my living room to leaf through. It helps of course that in the 60s, before became a photographer I was a great jazz fan (and the world’s worst tenor sax.)

The book is about jazz and Harlem, and is a kind of improvisation around his pictures and poetry of jazzmen and Harlem, something I can’t pick up and leaf through without the sound of Ellington’s ‘Harlem Airshaft‘ and other compositions including ‘Drop Me Off At Harlem’ springing into my head. I think too of Ben Webster (pictured here with Coltrane) who I once spent an afternoon with, trying to keep him sober for the evening’s concert with spectacular lack of success but who despite that reduced me to tears with a few breathy notes and continued to play a set that left me emotionally exhausted.

I was pleased a day or two ago to come across John Edwin Mason‘s blog and an article Roy DeCarava’s Harlem in which he rightly calls DeCarava “the greatest of all photographers of Harlem” and which includes video about him and links to a fine essay by A D Coleman. Elsewhere there is a nice review of the (re-issued) 1955 book The Sweet Flypaper of Life he produced with poet Langston Hughes by Alan Thomas and there is a fine set of pictures on the 2009 obituary programme on NPR. There is a DeCarava archive site, but authorisation is needed to access the images. There is another obit at BlackandWhiteCities, which links to the NYT Lens feature, as well as the JazzWax tribute with the Webster/Coltrane image and more – and you can read a long scholarly article by Rebecca Cobby, ‘Visions, dreams and a few nightmares’: Roy DeCarava’s Representations of African American Workers in Harlem‘ in the BAAS journal.

Mason’s post compares DeCarava’s view as an artist and an insider to that of photojournalist Gordon Parks, and the triumph and tragedy of his fine photo essay ‘A Harlem Family‘ which appeared on pages 48-62 of the edition of Life Magazine for March 8, 1968, the first of five features in a special section ‘The Cycle of Despair: The Negro and the City. As Mason points out in a second post ‘Gordon Parks: “A Harlem Family,” Life Magazine, 1968‘,this was published after “the end of the long hot summer of 1967, a summer of urban uprisings in black America.”

The feature is worth reading and thinking about, with some interesting reflections on the essay and the publication, and I think too on the role of photography and photojournalism which remain pertinent. Mason ends with an account of the tragedy which followed – although unconnected – for the family Parks had photographed and Park’s own thoughts, as well as linking to an exhibition of the work marking the centenary last November of Park’s birth at the Studio Museum in Harlem, continuing until March 10, 2013, with an exhibition catalogue to accompany the five volume publication of Park’s work by Steidl.

Although a fine publication for libraries, at £148 it seems a little excessive both in terms of cost and shelf space for impoverished photographers, particularly those like me whose walls are already full of books. Perhaps a single print volume with an accompanying DVD with a larger selection of images would be more attractive to a wider audience.

Gideon Mendel on Instagram

If you’ve been online at all in the last few days you will be aware of the controversy that new terms and conditions announced by Instagram have caused, with photographers leaving the site.

Instagram have reacted and issued a statement on their blog, which in part reads:

Our intention in updating the terms was to communicate that wed like to experiment with innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram. Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear.

which is perhaps itself clear but confusing as there seemed to be little other way to take their original statement. Those who use Instagram will doubtless be waiting to see the ‘updated language’, and I think we may have a new term to add to our language. When next you realise you really made a mistake and have to change your intended actions you will no longer be making a U turn or changing your mind, it will just be ‘updating your language.’

But I’ve not messed with Instagram myself as it seems to require a smart phone, and my phone now past its tenth birthday is decidedly stupid. All it does is make and receive phone calls and it doesn’t even include a camera. Perhaps one day I’ll feel it necessary to join the modern world, but not yet. And certainly the Instagram images that appear on my Facebook feed – some of them from very good photographers – don’t I think do them any favours.

But Pete Brook on Wired’s Raw File blog has a set of fine images from Instagram of the Nigerian floods by Gideon Mendel which prompted me to write this. There is an interesting discussion about how this work – which has reached a wide audience – relates to his more conventional work on the subject, and also about its marketing as art. What makes his work stand out from much of Instagram is of course his photographic eye, and his use of “either #nofilter or with the lo-fi filter just to tweak the contrast.” #nofilter seems to be something few Instagram users have discovered and it really makes a difference!