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Postcards from the Past

I’ve just been reading John Szarkowski‘s “Evening Lecture at Wellesley College” which he gave in 1977 and is reproduced along with pertinent illustrations on American Suburb X (ASX) a site so stuffed with interest that I hardly dare visit it for fear of spending far too long there.

As always, Szarkowski is a delight to read, even if I sometimes feel his felicity with words can sometimes run away with him. His starting point is the assertion that “the function of the photographer is to decide what his subject is. I mean that this is his only function.”

What follows is an examination of this through the work of some fairly disparate photographers – Frith, Lange, Winogrand, some largely anonymous newspaper photography and on of course to Atget, who he starts by calling “perhaps simply the best of all photographers” and then reminding us that although widely regarded as a ‘primitive’, the pictures suggest he was “a man who understood that photography could be a precise, critical tool, a system with which an artist could define exactly what he thought to be true.”

Finally he goes on to consider the work of Bill Dane, then “a young California painter” who a few years earlier had begun to send unsolicited postcards of images taken on his travels to a group of around a hundred influential critics etc in photography. This was long before the era of the world wide web when everyone has a blog (even if most have few readers) or puts image after image on Flikr. Having to pay for the postcard printing paper (then you could buy special postcard size heavyweight photographic paper with backs already printed for the purpose),to go into the darkroom and expose and process his cards one by one and then to pay postage created a natural limitation on his output – often I wish for for a similar throttle on photo-sharing sites.

Szarkowski suggests that most of the recipients were more taken by the novelty of the project (some things never change) and that he was unusual in taking an interest in the images – leading to Unfamiliar Places: A Message from Bill Dane being shown at MoMA in 1973-4 (you can view the press release.) Bill Dane, on his web site, dedicates his ‘Volume 1‘ to Szarkowski. You can also see many of his later images in volumes 2-14, although I enjoyed the early work most. His biography on the site sums up his work well: ‘If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.’

Bill Dane is also on Flikr, and has a blog and he makes a great offer of his work which I think is very much in the spirit of our medium:

Everything is for sale.

$99.

Choose any picture from my Website or Flickr.
Decide the exact size of your picture.
Pay for the production costs.

No more limited editions – just reasonably priced archival pigment inkjet prints more or less any size you want.

This Year Not Going to Arles Turned Out Well

I’ve always made excuses about not going to Arles, not least that I can’t really afford it. Probably the time I would have found it most worthwhile I was still teaching in FE, and my term always seemed to end just after the week of Arles. But really I think I’ve been scared to go. Events like this are great if you know a lot of people and go with a group of friends, but I think could be difficult if you don’t know that many people who attend. Several years I’ve tried to persuade some of my photographic friends to go with me, but somehow it has never happened, and this year for once I’m glad I didn’t make the effort.

Back when I wrote about photography for About.com, Arles was something I felt I had to cover, and I did, but writing from London and using the festival web site and the various reports in blogs and elsewhere, as well as what I knew about the photographers concerned etc. I don’t think I ever pretended to be at Arles, but there were times when I didn’t mention I wasn’t actually there.

I have been to Arles, but just not when it was full of photographers. I spent a day there as a tourist, very much on a Van Gogh trail, though back in the early 1970s it was rather less commercialised than I imagine it will be now. Earlier in that same week I’d visited Cezanne’s house and some of the places he painted, and climbed most of the way up Mte Ste Victoire before falling ill.

This year, according to Jean-Jacques Naudet writing in Le Journal de la Photographie, Arles with its major theme ‘a French school’ based on the “talents of the photographers, historians, and curators trained at the École Nationale Supérieure de Photographie (ENSP)” was a failure. Perhaps some would hardly be surprised that it would be “boring to death.”

It’s worth reading what he says about it, and that the only redeeming features were the “mad creativity of Dorothée Smith” and the ” magic that could only be provided … by those two legendary old men: Joseph Koudelka and Elliot Erwitt.” Both of course Magnum members – and on the new Magnum web site.

Sean O’Hagan’s review in ‘The Observer’ finds some more positive aspects (and some links, though I can’t share his enthusiasms), but again he concludes that it was a “festival that momentarily, at least, seems to have lost its way and its spirit of adventure.“

Insider, Outsider?

Should you be in London before July 22 this first show of work in the UK from the ‘Majority World Photo Agency‘ featuring “17 emerging photographers from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East” at the Guardian Gallery is worth a visit, although I can’t see any mention of it on their web site. You can read more about it on Shahidul Alam’s blog, and on Friday I went to King’s Place to see it.

The gallery is the space on the ground floor of the Guardian’s offices there, and the first time I went to see a show I walked in and went straight up the escalator and missed it; some of the displays there have seemed rather minimal! This occupies most of the two walls that aren’t glass, with a little on the space under the stairway.

I met one of the photographers, Shadi Ghadirian, back in 2005 when we were both showing work at the festival in Bielsko-Biala so I’m not too convinced that she is still an “emerging photographer” but perhaps that is a meaningless category in any case. You can see more of her work on her web site. I have only a vague feeling of seeing the names of someof the other photographers involved before although several like her have an impressive record of publications and exhibitions, and some have won various awards, so I have probably seen more of their work – here’s the full list:

A M Ahad, Bangladesh, Aaron Sosa, Panama/Venezuela, Adolphus Opara, Nigeria, Andrés Lofiego, Argentina, Andrew Esiebo, Nigeria, Daniel Patiño Flor, Ecuador, Dominic Sansoni, Sri Lanka, Fabrice Monteiro, Benin, Farzana Hossen, Bangladesh, Kishor Sharma, Nepal, Màrio Macilau, Mozambique, M Anisul Hoque, Bangladesh, Neo Ntsoma, South Africa, Samar Hazboun, Palestine, Shadi Ghadirian, Iran, Shankar Sarkar, India, Tammy David, Philippines.

In the gallery you can pick up another free newsprint publication with an introduction by Alam, who is the Chairman, Co-founder and majority shareholder of Majority World, as well as his rather better-known enterprises based in Bangladesh. Some of the images, particularly one by Lofiego, don’t reproduce too well in newsprint, and look rather better on the web. The publication, which includes a few pictures by other photographers including Alam himself, only gives the address of the Majority World website, which doesn’t as yet appear to have completed the page about its photographers.

Ghadirian’s work is the only staged image in the show, with almost all of the rest falling at least broadly within the photojournalistic. Most photographers are represented by only one or two images, although the accompanying texts do help to put these into some kind of perspective I would have liked to have seen more pictures, perhaps even as a series of small images actually on the wall. There was a display screen in the centre of the show, but unfortunately all it was displaying was error messages that someone had removed the disk it needed.

The only photographer to be shown in any depth was Kishor Sharma, with a set of black and white images, ‘Living in the Mist – The Last Nomads of Nepal‘. You can find work by most of the other photographers without much difficulty on the web, for example Adolphus Opara and Andrew Esiebo, both from Nigeria.

Fractured Serbia

One of the blogs I regularly follow is Pete Brook’s Raw File (as well as his Prison Photography), and another is DVA Photo, on which “Matt Lutton and M. Scott Brauer share their work and others’“so it’s nice to be able to post something that involves both of these, with Raw File showing Luttons portfolio Only Unity , a long-term documentary project about Serbia and the Serbs “in the aftermath of Yugoslavia.”

This is a superb project, full of intense and thoughtful images, and a worthy winner of the Burn Magazine Emerging Photography Fund for 2012. At $10,000 it isn’t the biggest prize in photography, but work like Lutton’s certainly makes it one of the most important in photography. Brook interviews Lutton on the blog and that too is worth reading.

Also in the text are some links to some fine work by others, and at the bottom links to the work of the runners up and other finalists. All are worth a look, though my favourite among them is a photographer I’ve written about before, Anastasia Taylor-Lind.

Nikon’s Disgrace Continues

Nikon, forced by the Tokyo District Court to honour its agreement with photographer Ahn Sehong to show his exhibition of ‘Comfort Women‘ after it had bowed to right wing pressure to cancel it (see my post Nikon Bows To Extreme Right), have further antagonised opinion around the world by their actions at the gallery.

On the Nikon Salon web site today the only mention of the show is still the statement:

“Tue., Jun 26 – Mon., Jul 9
Ahn Sehong’s photo exhibition has been cancelled based on a number of reasons. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused concerned parties.”

and a visitor to the show on Sehong’s Facebook page, quoted in a detailed report in English on Global Voices, Japan: Korean Comfort Women’ Photo Exhibit Sabotaged says there was no mention of the show at the gallery.

Visitors to the show had to undergo searches by Nikon hired security staff, including the use of metal detectors, and Nikon tried to prevent any media coverage and attempted to prohibit photography inside the show, although such bans are now virtually impossible to enforce. Their actions have been both misguided and counter-productive.

Right-wing extremists who deny the Japanese atrocities of the Second World War including the abduction and abuse of the ‘Comfort Women’ have protested outside the gallery, and some heightened security at the gallery is necessary to prevent any attacks by these groups on the show. But the Nikon gallery are clearly trying still to censor the show and public debate about it, as well as making it difficult and unpleasant for visitors to attend. Fortunately this does not appear to have had the intended effect, and Global Voices report Sehong as saying that many people came to the show on the first day and “many Japanese people showed condolences to these old ladies.”

Photographers from around the world have also showed their support for Sehong and their anger towards Nikon, with some calling for a boycott of Nikon products. The I Am Censored web site mentioned in my post Letter to Nikon is still calling for signatures – please sign if you have not already done so.

Calls to boycott Nikon are hardly practicable for those of us who are Nikon users, and have no meaning for the other half or more of professional photographers who use Canon. But I think we all have an interest in opposing this threat to free speech and photographic integrity, and need to find effective ways of making our views known to Nikon – wherever, whenever and however we can.

Afghan Photographers

Last week I read an interesting Aljazeera feature Afghan photographers shoot to glory, which as well as starting me on a search to see more of the work of the Afghan photographers featured, also sent me looking at the work of Reza who toegether with his brother Manoocher Deghati founded the Aina (mirror in Farsi) media and photography school, where most of these photographers studied, in Kabul in 2001.

Reza is well known for his work around the world for the National Geographic Magazine, which is perhaps why I’ve not really looked much at his work before. There is something about the whole NatGeo look and approach – at least in modern times – that I often find too slick and glossy – and I rather like photographs that are a rather more down and dirty – perhaps rather more like the world itself. NatGeo tends to be a little too American and too coffee-table for my taste, though of course that is being unfair on photographers such as Reza, born in Iran and, like his brother, an Iranian-French photojournalist. He’s won major awards in photography for his work and been honoured by France and UNICEF, and looking at his work you can see why.

After studying film-making in Rome, Manoocher returned to Iran to photograph the revolution and worked for around ten years for the agency SIPA, founded by the legendary Turkish photojournalist Göksin Sipahioglu (one day I must find and resurrect the article I wrote about him) in 1973 in Iran and later in the USA, then mainly for AFP before going to Kabul to found Aina, and is now Middle East Regional Photo Editor for the Associated Press (AP), based in Cairo.

There are some pictures in the Aljazeera feature, but you can find more of their work on the web. The is a portfolio on AFP for Massoud Hossaini as well as his work at World Press Photo. Farzana Wahidy who is his wife and another fine photographer also appears in a feature
Shooting Stars: Reza presents Farzana Wahidy, where his introduction ends with the words “Farzana is telling the story of Afghanistan from the inside.” This is something that is important and true about all these photographers. Fardin Waezi, has his own blog which makes the same point in its title, Though Afghan Eyes. He learnt his photography starting at the age of 7 in his father’s photography studio in Kabul.

Barat Ali Batoor grew up as an Afghan refugee in Pakistan and going to his country for the first time in 2001, he taught himself photography in 2002 to “draw the world’s attention to the plight of the Afghan people the problems facing the country.” You can see his remarkable and controversal images of dancing boy entertainers on his site.

Time Travel…

Thanks to PetaPixel for republishing Time Travel and Ethical Photojournalism by Utah-based photojournalist and chief photographer of the Salt Lake Tribune Trent Nelson, a piece that originally appeared on Nelson’s own web site Trenthead.com on June 15th.

This is a discussion which applies a great deal of common sense to the discussions of the ethics of post-processing of photographs, although I think it says little if anything that I and many others haven’t said before, it does so very clearly.

His final sentence: “Remember, reality is the goal.” is perhaps a good summation of both what is and what is not acceptable in terms of image processing (though perhaps I might sometimes put in a word for clarity too.) Certainly we should not be bound by the limits of what was possible in the not so good old days, and be ready to take advantage of the powerful corrective tools that are now available in software such as Lightroom 4.

It’s worth taking a look at the rest of Nelson’s Trenthead.com web site too. How many photographer’s web sites have a section on Polygamy? And as it says there are some Amazing Links.

Monet at Giverny

Bernard Plossu is a photographer who perhaps has not been given the appreciation he deserves in the English dominated photographic world (by English I refer of course to the language they speak in America.) There has always been a philosophical background to his work as with many things French, and doubtless his own minimal almost non-existent website in some way reflects that, though you can see more of his work at Galerie Camera Obscura.

The text on the English version of La Lettre de la Photographie in the feature Monet at Giverny by Bernard Plossu is not too easy to follow (presumably a machine translation), and if you can read a little French the original makes more sense.

Plossu likes small prints – the colour images are 18x24cm or less and the black and white only 11.4×7.6cm, around 4.5×3 inches, around the size of most people’s family pictures when I was small, representing only roughly a 3x linear enlargement from his 35mm negatives. There can be a certain exquisite quality to small black and white prints like this but looking at the images in the slide show on screen, I’m not sure that these prints possess it (and looking at the images full-screen I see them rather too large for his aesthetic.) But these are prints by Guillaume Geneste, of La Chambre Noire, one of the best printers in Paris, and not far from my favourite area of the city.

The colour images, printed by the Fresson process I think I like less. It’s a pigment process which uses four exposures with colour separated negatives onto a rather granular pigmented gelatine made light sensitive with a dichromate, with the unhardened material being washed or even abraded off the paper with a sawdust slurry, although the details are a trade secret.

The earliest monochrome prints made in this way used finely divided carbon particles as the pigment, often ‘lamp black’ made by cooling smoke on a cold surface, and were called carbon prints, and the image hardens from the top surface which was exposed to sunlight (or other UV source) down. Because of this the process became known as carbon printing. In traditional carbon printing the exposed layer is covered by a sticker gelatine coated paper and adhered to this before being washed to remove the original porous paper backing and unhardened gelatin that was left below the hardened image.

The Fresson process was one method that eliminated the need for transfer, enabling the print to be produced directly on the coated material – a direct carbon process. Probably the secret relied on thinner coatings with paper with a good ‘tooth’ and perhaps a certain ‘graininess’ in the coating producing a kind of crude half-tone.

They call the process for colour printing ‘quadrichromie’ and it was developed from the original single colour process first exhibited in 1899 by Théodore-Henri Fresson (which took his name) and marketed by the family. A two year research project by his son and grandson resulted in the first charcoal colour print in 1952, and the process provided by their family firm became popular with advertising and fine art photographers in the 1960s and 70s.

The effect is similar to a tri-colour gum bichromate print, and gives a very painterly effect with the texture of the paper and a usually subdued rather pastel colour. Although some Fresson prints I’ve seen have been very nice as objects, the process with its characteristic palette often seems to overwhelm the subject matter, and I think it may do so here, though it’s obviously unfair to judge from the web images.

Somehow too the Fresson doesn’t quite for me sing the right tune for Monet, and I think it lacks the kind of clarity I see in his works. Though I’ve never been to Giverny I have spent some considerable time with his works in our splendid National Gallery. Often when photographing protests in Whitehall or Trafalgar Square I’ve had a few minutes to spare and have slipped into it to stand in front of works such as his The Waterlily Pond painted in 1899 at Giverny.

I wonder if Plossu might have been better to make use of modern technology to achieve similar but purer effects, processing with Photoshop (I’m not entirely convinced by this example) and printing with pigment inks on suitably textured watercolour paper. It’s a thought that will be heresy to many.

There are a small number of Plossu’s earlier Fresson images on the Camera Obscura site, some of which I think are more suited to the process, but it is his black and white work that interests me more.

The show is at the Musée des impressionnismes Giverny across the summer, until 31 October and perhaps this will be the year when I finally get to Giverny. It would certainly be more pleasant than watching the Olympics.

Deadly Coal & Filthy Lies

Last week was apparently “End Mountaintop Removal Week Washington DC,” a piece of news that probably wouldn’t have made our media even in a week without the wall-to-wall royal sycophancy, and to be honest something that I would not normally have been aware of. Although strip mining in the UK is something I’ve written briefly about and photographed protests against in London, the environmental problems it causes in Appalachia are not a major issue here.

What brought them to my attention was a Facebook post from the The Shpilman Institute for Photography referring me to an LPV Digest post about the misuse by ‘Big Coal’ of child pornography allegations to prevent Maria Gunnoe, described by Rolling Stone in their feature about the incident as “one of the most effective and celebrated mountaintop removal activists in Appalachia” to prevent her using a picture by photographer Katie Falkenberg showing a young girl in a bath full of what Aaron Brady in The New Inquiry describes as “brown, poisonous water” caused by the mining. The photographer’s caption which he quotes states that the water has a high level of arsenic which the family say is a result of the blasting used in mining which has disrupted the water table and cracked the casing of the well which is their only normal source of water. Although the mining company haven’t admitted they caused the problem, the caption stated “they do supply the family with bottled water for drinking and cooking.”

Mother Jones gives more details of how Gunnoe, who had gone to Washington to testify to a committee of Congress, was told before she did so that she must remove the picture from her presentation and that after she had given her presentation was questioned for almost an hour by police over allegations that the image was child pornography.

The image had been taken and used with the permission of the child’s parents and Gunnoe also had their permission to use it, but since the police investigations started it and the caption have been removed from Falkenberg’s web site, replaced by the statement: “The family has declined media request to use this photo; it has therefore been removed from the photo essay to honor their wishes.”

Although some other web sites and blogs have removed the picture at the photographer’s request, it remains fairly widely available on the web. You can find more about the U.S. Representative who appears to have been responsible for the removal of the picture and the porn allegations in the Schmuck of the Week feature Doug Lamborn should be thrown out with the bathwater on Denver Westword, and Gunnoe’s testimony (without the disputed image) is also available online.

The publicity surrounding the case has almost certainly caused problems for the family concerned, and they may well have come under considerable pressure to revoke their permission for the picture to be used. It would be hard to criticise them, and given their request the photographer, for the decision to withdraw the image, but it really it is hardly possible to remove images from the web once they have been released, and it took less than 10 seconds to find a copy.

This perhaps isn’t always a good thing, but when we are talking about censorship by powerful vested interests who are more than prepared to play dirty I think it must be.

Letter To Nikon

I’m now back on an internet link and busy catching up with things – as well as covering four demonstrations yesterday which got me event further behind. I’ve run out of time writing what was intended to be my next post, but have just come across something I’d like to pass on to you before I next fall asleep on the keyboard, something I’ve already managed several times this evening.

In the last sentence of Nikon Bows To Extreme Right about Nikon cancelling the show of work by South Korean photographer Ahn Sehong I wrote:

Nikon should certainly be ashamed of their part in this affair, and I hope the photography community worldwide will make its views clear to them.

I’m very pleased that UK photographer Si Barber has put on line the site ‘I Am Censored‘ with information about the case and an open letter to Mr. Yojiro Yamaguchi, Managing Director of Nikon UK, Nikon Japan and the national and international press, urging Nikon to re-instate Sehong’s funding “and most importantly show his work.”

Photographers of all persuasions, pro or amateur are invited to add their signatures to the document which already has the support of at least one Magnum member and “a number of well known veteran photographers.” I’ve just added my own name to the list and urge you to read the letter and do the same.

________________________________________________________

Si Barber was previously so incensed by PM David Cameron’s vapid twittering about ‘The Big Society’ that he published his own book ‘The Big Society – Snapshots of 21st Century Britain‘ as a “visual riposte to Cameron’s imagined nation and a critique of the voodoo economics which took Britain to the edge of moral and financial calamity.” Still available for £12 and you can order on-line using Paypal.