Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

London Festival Opens

Unfortunately I don’t have time to write fully about each of the five shows I attended on the tour before the opening party of this years London Photography Festival which was held in the Dog Eared Gallery where the major show ‘The Great British Public’ is taking place, particularly as I have a rush job to complete before I flee and lie low for a few days as the country suffocates under a sea of red, white and blue. But certainly this years festival is a quantum leap up from last years somewhat tame London Street Photography Festival, and perhaps if this progress continues London will soon have the kind of photography festival it needs, rather than two events – this and the East London Photomonth – that while interesting don’t really create the kind of buzz that London deserves.

One show not to miss is at the Guardian Gallery at King’s Place in York Way from 1-28 June 2012 open 10-6, 7 days a week. I suspect I have seen most or all of the pictures in Steve Bloom’s ‘Beneath the Surface’ before, because when Bloom left his native South Africa in 1977 he took the “small pile of silver-gelatin black and white prints” to the offices of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in London, and they sent him on to the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa who published and exhibited them, but that now seems an age ago, distant in terms both of time and sensitivity. It is hard now to believe the everyday nature of apartheid that emerges through his pictures perhaps even more than the more dramatic scenes. Accompanying the show is a free limited edition 24 page newsprint publication produced by the LFP together with the Observer, so go soon to get your copy before all 1000 disappear.

Its a short walk from Kings Place in York Road to the Minnie Weisz Studio in Pancras Rd, where her Camera Obscura is showing (Tue-Sun, 10am – 6pm until 29 June 2012), though you may want to allow yourself an hour or two to explore the redevelopment at last taking place to the north of Kings Cross and across the canal in the former goods yard site. It was in 1987 – 25 years ago – that I became involved for a couple of years with the Kings Cross Railway Lands Group after the first rumours of the comprehensive redevelopment emerged.

Minnie Weisz’s work is particularly concerned about “buildings on the brink of change” and this area has thus provided plenty of scope for her photographs of room interiors. In some she turns the room into a camera obscura so that an upside down image of the outside world is projected on its surfaces, which she then photographs with a normal camera, sometimes choosing to display the room upside down so that the projected image appears the right way up. It was work that reminded me of Abelardo Morell, though the images in Weisz’ show that most appealed to me were her simple straightforward atmospheric images of deserted rooms with peeling paint.

A couple of doors down is the Hardy Tree Gallery, (named for the well-known feature of Old St Pancras Churchyard) showing the results from “a four year research project by London-based, Saudi photographer Wasma Mansour (1-30 June 2012, 10am-6pm, 7 days a week.) I don’t feel competent to evaluate the assumptions behind her work on the generalisations about Saudi women living alone and the effect these have on their “efforts to reconcile with their identities and asserting their sense of individualism” but for me her exploration with “a multidirectional photographic approach” did not seem to have reached the kind of final resolution that I found satisfying. The set of work I found most interesting did not feature the women but showed what I assume were areas of their living accommodation as still life. But perhaps this is a show that needs to be examined in greater depth than I was able to give it in my brief visit.

Next came the two mainline stations, and first was St Pancras, a building whose rebuilt interior I still find depressing at ground level, even more so when entered from the north-west end. The new concourse at Kings Cross is however more impressive – I just hope they will soon sort out the Euston Road frontage.

The display at St Pancras is a small collection of work from the group show ‘The Great British Public‘ at the Dog Eared Gallery printed large on free-standing panels (until 1 July 2012, 24/7.) Handy if you are in a rush for a train or can’t afford the £6.50 for the gallery, and of course will be seen by many thousands more than the show, and acts as good advertising for the festival, but essentially adds nothing to the show (see below.)

At Kings Cross there is a large display of panels of Contemporary London Street Photography, which although it will certainly attract much public attention I found disappointing (as too did the group of photographers I met there looking at it.) Although there were a number of good pictures (including several by personal friends), the whole long wall gave me a powerful feeling of deja-vu. Of course some of the pictures I had seen before (and I’m sure there were one or two that were in last year’s festival) but it was more that these were pictures very like pictures I had seen before and largely the kind of image that very soon exhaust themselves, pictures better suited to a digital world where the next image is a mouse click away or quickly changes to the next image in a slide show, sometimes only visible for a fraction of a second. It’s perhaps unfair on at least some of the photographers, but overall this was my feeling. There was something very dated about much of this work, and an over-reliance on graphic effect, a confusion of means as ends. For me photography is essentially about content and too often here it was lacking.

The Great British Public group show at the Dog Eared Gallery in Field St, a short walk away down the Kings Cross Road (1-24 June 2012, 10am-6pm, 7 days, £6.50) is a ragbag, but at times an engaging one. Oustanding are set of http://chrissteeleperkins.com/personal.php portraits of centenarians, looking extremely young and healthy, and head and shoulders above the rest of the work in the room not least for the sheer professionalism, but also for the sensitivity of the photographer, Chris Steele-Perkins. Another very fine piece of work is Liz Hingley’s Under Gods, pictures from the urban multi-faith communities of Birmingham’s Soho Road, undoubtedly one of the finest recent British documentary projects, although I would have liked to see the prints a little larger (and better lit than some were for the opening.) Martin Parr’s few pictures from his Black Country project that he can still take good pictures when he puts his mind to it, even if sometimes in other work he seems to be coasting on his reputation, and there were a number of other pictures around the room that appealed to me even if I felt rather disappointed at the quality of some of the work on show.

There are of course other shows in the LFP, as well as talks and workshops, and you can find about about everything on the LFP web site.

Nikon Bows To Extreme Right

In January this year the Shinjuku Nikon Salon in Tokyo agreed to show the project Layer by Layer of South Korean photographer Ahn Sehong, with the show due to open on June 26 and to run until July 29, 2012. The pictures were also to be displayed at the Nikon Salon in Osaka for a week in September. As a part of the pre-show publicity, Sehong gave a lecture in Nagoya, Japan on 19 May, and the lecture and show were covered in a long article in the local edition of the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun.

When the Japanese Imperial Army occupied China in the 1930s and 1940s, a number of women, mainly from Korea, were abducted by the military, taken there and forced to provide sexual services. At the end of the war these so-called ‘comfort women’ were abandoned in China.

On his web site in the project Layer by layer Sehong writes:

When the survived Korean Comfort Women were forced to stay in China in 2001, the contact with them made me understand much better their situations. I saw the individual women selling things on the bus, or on the train, or on the ship for living. Such a miserable way of living seemed to mirror their past lives as the displaced. This harsh reality made me visit to China five times to find out them.

It’s worth reading his text there in full, and also looking at the fine set of black and white images. The women were all in their 80s and 90s when he met and photographed them, and his images reflect their stories with a great sense of intimacy and compassion. He began photographing ‘comfort women’ in 1991, ten years earlier, but although his pictures have been published in Japanese magazines, the Nikon show would have been their first exhibition in Japan.

The Ashahi Shimbun reports that from May 21, two days after his lecture, their were frequent postings condemning the exhibition on the Internet, with one describing it “as propaganda by a foreign nation, while another said it was an act of betrayal that would only serve to falsify history” and calls for people to protest about the show to Nikon.

The following day, an official from Nikon phoned Sehong and told him the show could not go ahead. Nikon have refused to give him or anyone else a reason. A Nikon official told The Asahi Shimbun “While it is a fact that we received several phone calls protesting the holding of the photo exhibition, the cancellation was decided on after comprehensively considering various circumstances.”

On the Nikon Salon site it says “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.”

The English Edition of Hankyoreh comments on the increasing activity of the Japanese extreme right in recent months since last December when the South Korean urged that the issue of the ‘comfort women’ be resolved. They deny that there was any abduction and continue to hold frequent protests outside the Korean embassy in Tokyo.

The Japan Daily Press links the cancellation to a refusal by the residents of Palisades Park, New Jersey which has many Korean living in the area to take down a memorial to the ‘comfort women’.

“Japanese government officials requested that the monument be taken down, as it was reflective of behavior from a long time ago, and no longer represents the Japan of today. As expected, the town declined and its residents were furious with the request. As result, there was a small amount of protesting in Japan about Ahns planned photo exhibit. “

You can read more about the Japanese reactions to the cancellations in The Japan Times, which reports that the Japan Visual Journalist Association is preparing a statement (and someone from it comments “This is basically Nikon’s self-censorship. Is it all right for a large corporation like Nikon to permit such a wimpy reaction?” ) They also report the statement of the campaigning group ‘Military Sexual Slavery by Japan During the Second World War’:

“Ahn Sehong does not accept the cancellation of the photo exhibition, which (Nikon) cannot explain the reasons for. The world-renowned Nikon’s reaction damages one photographer’s honor and will be known by the global media.”

As reported there and elsewhere, there is to be a showing of Sehong’s work in Japan on the afternoon of June 10 in a community hall in Yokkaichi. But it deserves a much wider showing both in Japan and elsewhere. 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.

A Different Suitcase

Another photographer whose work deserves to be better known is the Catalan photographer Agustí Centelles (1909-85), one of the earliest to use a Leica, and whose work on the Spanish Civil War has perhaps unfortunately been eclipsed by the fairly small body of work – and one image in particular – by Robert Capa.

Capa’s negatives from that era, lost for decades after he left them in Paris in 1939, were discovered some years ago in Mexico City, and the three cardboard boxes containing his work along with that of Gerda Taro and Chim (David Seymour) and a couple of rolls by Fred Stein, together known as ‘The Mexican Suitcase‘, were finally handed over to the ICP archive in 2007. Many of the more interesting images from them were already known through their reproduction in magazines of the time, but having the negatives obviously allows these to be seen in their context.

Centelles began an apprenticeship to a photographer in Barcelona where he grew up in 1924 and ten years later became a freelance photojournalist. In 1936 he photographed events in Barcelona after the July military upraising and was then sent to the Aragon front as an official photographer. In 1939 he fled to France as Barcelona fell to the Nationalists, taking with his cameras and his 4000 most important negatives in a suitcase. The rest of his work was seized by Franco’s troops along with other Catalan government material and stored in what became the Spanish Civil War Archive in Salamanca.

In various internment camps in France he managed to continue with his photography, managing to get a French press card and later a job in a photography studio, and was soon taking pictures for forged ID cards for the French Resistance. In 1944 several members of his group were arrested and he left his negatives behind in Carcassonne, fearing that if he took them back to Spain they would compromise many of the , fleeing back to Spain where he spent two years in hiding before giving himself up to the Spanish authrorities in Barcelona. After his trial he was released on parole and became a successful advertising and industrial photographer.

It was only in 1976 following the death of Franco when his press card was restored that he felt able to go back to collect his negatives from France and he spent the rest of his life restoring and cataloguing these images. In 1984, the year before he died, Centelles was awarded the Premio Nacional de Fotografía from the Spanish Ministry of Culture for his work. Since his death his work has been promoted by his sons, who were determined to keep his archive together, and it was acquired by the Spanish Ministry of Culture in 2009 for 700,000 Euros to be held in the Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica de Salamanca.

Looking through his images there were a few that were familiar to me, though I had not remembered the name of the photographer. In 2001, Magali Jauffret reviewing a show of Spanish Civil War photographs for the French newspaper l’Humanité, recognised the immense value of his work in her piece published under the headline ‘Agusti Centelles aussi grand que Capa‘. As a record of the Spanish Civil War his pictures are I think rather more valuable, although Capa certainly took the best-known image from the conflict and of course went on to do much else.

An exhibition with forty of the Spanish Civil War Photographs of Agustí Centelles (The French Suitcase) was shown at New York University in Oct-Dec last year, and you can watch a video with some of his pictures from that show, Centelles in_edit_oh!

There are a couple of other YouTube video’s I’ve also found worth watching (though depending on your musical tastes as often with such things you may like to be ready to mute the sound on either or both of them), Agustí Centelles – Spanish Civil War and Agustí Centelles, fotógrafo de la historia.

A feature on the Times Quotidian, Three Suitcases: Walter Benjamin; Agusti Centelles; and the Hypothetical Suitcase of Baltasar Garzon Part One by Janet Sternburg, adds some interesting detail about Centelles, and suggests that his work only became internationally known to the photography world after the first French showing of his work at the Jeu de Paume in 2009. A comment on the article points out that “the first exhibition of Centelles work in France was in 2004, in Carcassone” and that it was shown in New York in 1986. The Paris show mentioned above in which at least for one reviewer he was a star was at the Hôtel de Sully in June-Sept 2001. But I make no claims about it being the first.

Maier in France

There is an interesting post on the NYT Lens Blog from a few weeks ago, Touring the Nanny-Photographer’s Past by Richard Cahan in which he writes about a visit he made to Saint-Bonnet-en-Champsaur in the Hautes-Alpes near Gap, France, a village which now has a population of around 2,000, but was perhaps rather smaller when Vivian Maier, born in the Bronx, lived there with her mother who had been born near there in the 1930s. Maier was then between 6 and 12 and they returned to live in the USA around the time of the start of the war, but she came back in 1949 and 1959 to take photographs.

Cahan is writing a book together with Michael Williams, Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows, which will present her photographs in the context of her life, making use of the 18,000 Maier negatives owned by Jeffrey Goldstein who accompanied him to France.

On their trip they found very few people who actually remembered Maier, but more who recognised themselves and others in her images. For them in particular these photographs have great value, but so more generally do these, and many other collections from the past for all of us.

The NYT is a subscription site, but allows a limited number of free visits per month, and it’s worth using one of them to read this article and view the 20 or so pictures that illustrate it. And of course the web site of her work from the negatives owned by Goldstein (linked above) is worth a look.

Although I’m still not impressed by the super-hype about Maier as a great street photographer and she was definitely not a great innovator, she was an excellent photographer and her work certainly has interest and value. I’m not sure I would ever particularly want to own the book (shelf space here is limited and the $85 pre-order price could be put to better use) but I welcome it becoming available, and I’m sure it will be interesting to read. Though at that kind of price it perhaps is not likely to make my local library. But the future for most photographic publishing is perhaps the e-book (after a further generation or two of development of better reading hardware.)

Signs & London Festival

Let This Be A Sign

I was pleased to arrive at Swiss Cottage Library last night for the opening of what I think is the first show of the London Festival of Photography, “taking place throughout June with a focus in King’s Cross, Bloomsbury, Euston & Fitzrovia. ” A little outside this both physically and temporally, ‘Let This Be A Sign‘ by Simon Roberts opened last night.

My journey had not been a good one, thanks to a broken-down train at Acton Wells that shut down the Overground service from Richmond, followed by lengthy delays on the longer alternative route via Clapham Junction with trains too packed for everyone to board and I almost gave up and went home. It was perhaps an appropriate introduction to a show that deals with the political and social effects of our continuing recession here in the UK, with nothing in our lives and economy quite working as it should.

This is an interesting show and it continues until 1 July, open with the library 7 days a week, combining 4×5 images printed large with collages of small digital images of protest placards and closed down shop fronts, text, graphs, and a collection of actual posters and placards on the floor below (and I’m sure I’ve missed something.) Although I’ve nothing against such a multifaceted approach, I felt it worked rather better in the free newsprint publication ‘This Is A Sign‘ by Roberts, available free at the library which I read at some length on my rather smoother journey home, than in the showcases and on the gallery wall.

We’ve seen several such newsprint publications in the past couple of years, and this, designed by FUEL and printed in an edition of only 2000 is like some others probably destined to become a collectors’ item, so go there soon and grab your copy. It’s always difficult to know the constraints in mounting a show such as this, but I didn’t quite feel it gelled, and in particular the separation of the posters and placards, possibly dictated by security considerations, was unfortunate. Perhaps too this collection lacked the strength and diversity that those of use who regularly visited Occupy London or go to protests are accustomed to.

Roberts has taken on a large and important topic, and certainly one which is difficult to do justice to. It is also one which politically presents some problems for the council owned venue, and Camden is one of the Labour councils that last year saw angry protests blocking streets outside the council offices and an occupation of the council chamber as well as a high-profile campaign against cuts in its Library service.

Possibly fortuitously, his pictures of protest were made elsewhere, including a couple in the neighbouring borough of Islington, from Occupy Finsbury Square, where Islington Council, who had for many months supported the Occupy movement’s right to peaceful protest announced earlier this week that they would take legal action to regain possession of the site after many living there had ignored a legal notice ordering them to leave by last Friday.

But what I missed most in the show were people as people. Protesters were largely shown as crowds, and other images had people mainly as co-incidental inclusions, standing for example on a street corner looking – as was the photographer – at the after-effects of the riots. In the newsprint a page digital collage of images ‘Brokers with hands on their faces’ stands out from the rest of the work – not because the photography is better (it isn’t) but because it concentrates on people. Later I read the small print at the back of the publication and found that these pictures were not by Roberts but from the Brokers With Hands On Their Faces blog, images from Wall Street rather than the UK. Perhaps for me the strongest image in this publication/show was the one exception, placed deliberately after the brokers, it showed people queuing outside a Sheffield Credit Union.

Perhaps too the strengths of large format are not best suited to covering protest, and the images on display to some extent reflected its lack of flexibility. There are times when the extra resolution of 4×5 film adds a great deal, but I seldom felt it in these images, and in some the printing didn’t help to make the case. Seeing the work in newsprint works better because we have no expectations of higher quality, but also it helps to unify the various aspects of the show.

But this is a show worth seeing – and go soon and get your copy of ‘This Is A Sign’, complete with a blank placard on the cover for you to supply your own slogan.

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Memories of Swiss Cottage & the Death of Large Format

Of course like most openings it was perhaps more interesting for the people that I met and talked to, and few of those present seemed to be paying a great deal of attention to the pictures – though perhaps they had done so more before I arrived. Among those there was an old friend, Mike Seaborne with whom I organised a show in the central space of this same library in 1993 of work by members of London Documentary Photographers, which included couple of dozen of my own pictures of shop-fronts and interiors, some of which are in the web project ‘Café Ideal, Cool Blondes, and Paradise‘, including this example.

Soon after I also helped to organise and took part in two shows in the same venue for London Independent Photography. Apparently it was not possible to put anything from this current show into this larger central space, a shame as this is considerably more visible to the many users of the library who pass by on their way to take out and return books. At least they may see the placards on the ground floor entrance, although I managed to walk past without noticing them on my way in.

Mike and my conversation turned to new cameras, and in particular the Nikon D800E, which we agreed looked likely to make 4×5 totally redundant, so long as it is teamed with the high quality prime lenses which Nikon is now bringing out. Frankly I seldom feel the need for that kind of quality, and have always preferred to work with smaller formats – and if necessary with smaller prints. Curators and photographers I showed the ‘Café Ideal...’ project to in the 80s and 90s often said to me “If only you worked with medium (or large) format …” to which my response was always that for several reasons the work would simply not exist if I had done so, and that the prints were of more than adequate quality for what I needed, particularly as I’ve never been a great fan of large prints – for me part of the essential power of photography has always been that it is an intimate medium, producing objects that one can hold in your hands.

I’m still thinking of getting an 800E, but if I do so I would expect to be using it as a DX rather than an FX format camera for perhaps 99% of my work, and to continue working with my current Nikon zooms. I’ve found the 16-35mm f4 and the DX 28-105mm pretty amazing, at least with a little help from Lightroom’s automatic corrections, and you just don’t need huge files most of the time, though it’s great to be able to make them when you do.

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Frederick Wilfred

More about the LFP at a later date. Glancing through the festival guide perhaps the most intriguing show is of work from 1956-62 by Frederick Wilfred (1925-2010), who I’d not heard of before despite the fact that we were both at times active members of the same photographic club (though perhaps at different times, and I saw the error of my ways in the early 1980s) which doesn’t open at the Museum of London until 16 June (it runs until 8 July) although you already can see a fine set of his work on line. Probably when I was around he was busy with his commercial work and portraiture.

One thing the two LFP shows have in common is that both include an element of audience participation. In the case of Wilfred, one thing I found annoyingly lacking on his web site were captions, and the museum which has recently acquired 124 of his pictures is appealing to anyone who recognises the locations (some are of course obvious) or the people in the pictures are being asked to let the museum know.

But it is also a good reminder for us as photographers to make sure that our prints have captions on the back and our digital files include appropriate metadata.

The Right To Photograph

Don’t let them stop you taking photographs on the Glasgow subway is the headline on a fine piece by John Perivolaris in today’s Guardian ‘Comment is Free’ section, provoked by the news published in the Amateur Photographer that ” the Strathclyde Partnership for Transport announces plans to ban all photography on the Glasgow subway except that for which written permission has been obtained.”

The AP quotes the authority as stating that all photography is banned unless

“a passenger has the written permission of SPT in relation to the activity.

The passenger must be carrying the permission, show it to an officer on request, and comply with any conditions of that permission.“

Of course such a bye-law is impossible to enforce now that almost everyone has a camera phone, but that isn’t really the point. Perivolaris writes about some of the classics of photography such as Walker Evans’s pictures on the New York subway with a hidden camera later published as ‘Many Are Called’.

I’ve taken the occasional image on the London Underground over the years, working discretely to avoid disturbing the people I was photographing. I hope I do so with a proper respect for the people I am photographing, but if we hope to record something meaningful about the human condition most of the time we need to work without permission.

But the only permission that we ever may need is not that of the company the runs the subway – essentially an extension of the street – but of the individuals we are photographing. There are times when I ask permission and when I feel it would be impolite not to do so (and I think many photographers, including some very well known photographers in works that have made their reputations have been inexcusable impolite.) I feel I need to ask not when I am taking someone’s picture, but when to do so I need to intrude on their personal space, whether or not they would notice it.

I don’t often travel on the Glasgow subway, but when I do so I’ll feel honour bound to break their bye law and take pictures. I hope all other photographers – and indeed anyone who has a camera on their phone or otherwise – will join me.

Back in the 1990s my friend Paul Baldesare carried out a couple of project on the tube you can see online. In Zone 1 he worked in colour, and previously in Down The Tube he used black and white. Both projects are also available as Blurb books.

I saw Paul’s work and decided he had done such a good job I wouldn’t try to emulate him, but he did inspire me to photograph on buses for a transport project which included both our work, along with several other photographers, shown at the Museum of London.

Some of the people I photographed did notice they were being photographed, although most remained unaware, even when I was making no attempt to hide what I was doing. I didn’t use a hidden camera or anything special, although sometimes, as obviously in the lower image I worked with the camera – a small and quiet model – held on my lap.

As I’ve written before, only one person I photographed on the buses complained. He was sitting opposite me wearing sandals, shorts and a very large snake, and was on his way to Covent Garden where he expected tourists to pay him to take photographs of their partners with his snake. His objection was I think because he was off-duty and I wasn’t paying. When he objected I didn’t really get a chance to argue with him, as two elderly ladies butted in and told him in no uncertain terms that if he got on buses dressed like that he should expect to have his picture taken!

Lensculture May Issue

I’ve just been looking at the latest issue of Lensculture, “an online magazine celebrating international contemporary photography, art, media, and world cultures“, and as usual it is worth a look, including some fine photography. (If you read this post some time in the future you will find this issue in the Lensculture archives as No 33)

There are quite a few things I’ve seen before, but even some of those have been revitalised – for example the pictures from a new and expanded edition of Christer Strömholms great Les Amies de Place Blanche, first published in 1983, and an expanded version of Robert Adams‘s Prairie from 1978 (which I thought I had bought then but can’t at the moment find.) Other favourite projects covered in the issue include Chongqing: City of Ambition by Ferit Kuyas (surely one of the best if not the best of the many essays on the new China) and there are other familiar works such as Jocelyn Bain Hoggs remarkable book, The Family and Simon Norfolk‘s Burke and Norfolk.

But there is other work new to me, some of which I found interesting and just the odd thing that failed to touch me. But overall this is a great read.

Two To Tango

One of the things that I find relatively few photographers really seem to appreciate is that much of photography is really a collaborative art. It’s perhaps obvious in some branches of photography – where would Bailey have been without Shrimpton? But most of the collaborations I’ve been involved with have been considerably less intimate, often a matter of a few fractions of a second, and are often unwitting at least in detail on the part of my photographic co-respondents.

I’ve never been a great fan of David Bailey (or of fashion as a genre, though it has provided a living for some fine photographers), but when I was invited to apply for a post writing about photography for an Internet site back in 1999 by sending a trial article, I chose to make him the subject. He had made his name by going to New York with the Shrimp in 1962, and it amused me to make my own debut as a Londoner for a New York based company with a piece about another Londoner. Looking back, it isn’t a piece I’m particularly proud of (perhaps one of the few of the hundreds I wrote that I’m pleased is no longer on line), but it had a certain edge and humour and it got me the job.

I didn’t see BBC4’s We’ll Take Manhattan which was screened in January, though I suspect I would have been unable to watch it in its entirety, but the video about its making is almost certainly a more interesting piece, and considerably shorter. It’s also worth noting, as ‘Daks’ comments on the The Arts Desk piece that as usual film-makers rewrite history to suit their purposes – as well as presenting a highly censored version of Bailey-speak.

It should also be noted that the shoot was January 1962, and Diana Vreeland did not join Vogue until April 1962; in January she was still editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar. Bailey also claimed to have met Shrimpton at VOGUE studios where she was being photographed for a Kelloggs advert by Brian Duffy, who was one of the ‘terrible three’ (Bailey, Duffy, Donovan), so the BBC production was also not accurate with how they met. (Fashion Theory, Lustrum Press 1978)

Daks also goes on to point out that the BBC also showed ” a great documentary on Bailey – Four beats to the bar and no cheating“. You can watch it as four clips from a broadcast on Swedish TV starting here on YouTube. I’ve only watched a little of it so far. Or you could just watch Blow Up again.

I’ve always thought of My London Diary as being at least in part for the people who collaborate with me in the making of the pictures, some more actively than others. It’s one reason why I put so many pictures of most events on it – so that the people I’ve photographed can see the pictures I took of them. Often people will ask me where they can see the them – or if I can send them a copy – and it’s easier to give them my card and tell them they will be on the site in a few days, and that they can e-mail me.

One group I like photographing is Climate Rush, and I was with them a couple of times towards the end of April. Here’s Tamsin Omond cleaning up the London Air:

and I think this is the best – though you can see some others too in Climate Rush Spring Clean London’s Air on My London Diary. Earlier I’d grabbed a picture of her with the duster between her teeth that I quite liked too.

But of course Climate Rush, whose tagline is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s “Well behaved women seldom make history” and have adopted the suffragette slogan ‘Deeds Not Words‘ isn’t just Tamsin. She was at the solidarity protest for the Russian anonymous women’s punk band Pussy Riot the following Monday, but the best pictures I took in Protest Supports ‘Pussy Riot’ were not of her.

It wasn’t easy to make a picture that included the flag of the Russian embassy (not that anyone recognises the Russian flag now) visible at the top right, and the placard – from Pussy Riot in Moscow – is perhaps a little less clear than in some of the more obvious images I took, but I felt this was an image that reflected Pussy Riot more than the others which you can see on My London Diary.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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Encore Sapeurs

I was interested (as I often am) by a post on Conscientious, Joerg Colberg‘s blog on Congolese photographer Baudouin Mouanda, who had a show I missed at Gasworks in Vauxhall last summer following a residency there. I quite probably walked past it, as it’s a stone’s throw from London’s best repair shop, Fixation, and in an area I know well, from long before it had galleries, where friends of mine I visited regularly lived in a council flat close to the Oval cricket ground. The page at Gasworks has some information and a few pictures as well as installation views from three of his projects: La Sapologie, (2008), Délestage, (2010) and Sur la Trottoir du Savoir, (2011).

Colberg’s post links to a set of pictures Hip Hop & société / Libreville on Afrique in Visu, and to the web site of the Brazzaville Generation Elili collective where there is some French text about Mouanda, and I also found some pictures of young women working as car mechanics in Brazzaville I felt were of rather less interest than the other projects, along with a rather more promising set on the elections in Congo.

But in some respects the most interesting work – and the image chosen by Colberg for his post came from this – was the project featured on the Leica Camera site that he links to, La Sapologie. As well as the pictures there is also an interview with the photographer about the work.

Readers of this blog with a long memory may remember that I wrote a post on Sapology around two years ago, following the opening in London of photographer Daniele Tamagnis ‘Gentlemen of Bacongo‘ and the publication of his book of the same title. A portfolio of work from this project had earlier won him the portfolio prize in the Young Photographers Canon Award 2007.

It was a memorable opening in particular for the presence of one of the’ People of Elegance‘, who I photographed for the blog. Mouanda’s (and Tamagni’s) pictures of the sapeurs are of course very much better than my quick snaps on that occasion.

Limited Editions?

I’ve never been in favour of ‘limited editions’ of photographs. It has always seemed to me to be a repudiation of one of the intrinsic properties of our medium, its reproducibility.

It also seemed unnecessary, as most photographs are produced as actual photographic prints in relatively limited numbers – few photographers sell more than a few copies of any image as actual photographic prints, although they may get reproduced in thousands or even millions in newspapers, magazines, books or images on screen. Paradoxically while limited editions have been seen and marketed as a way to artificially produce scarcity, in many cases they will actually have resulted in more prints of an image being made.

Over the years many photographers have indulged in dubious practices on limited editions in various ways. Often an edition is not actually printed, but prints are actually made to demand, and may differ significantly from each other. Others have produced several limited editions from the same original – a practice that would be acceptable if made clear at the time that the first was being marketed, but perhaps not if decided on at a later date.

Of course there are positive aspects of limited editions. Some photographers like them because they feel they enable them to put a finish to older work and allow them to concentrate on new projects. Others see them as a useful marketing tool to make a living, and I’ve nothing against photographers making a living, although there are photographers who have managed it without limited editions.

The recent sale record-breaking sale of new prints of old work by William Eggleston has raised some interesting questions, not least about limited editions, with one major collector of his work who owns a number of his limited edition dye-transfer prints suing over the new limited edition of these same photographs. The details of the case so far are well covered in the three links from PDN Online that I won’t go into them further. It’s also interesting to read about them and the possible museum in Eggleston’s home town MemphisNewsPaper.

But this case also raises interesting questions about the photographic obsession with ‘vintage prints’, with the new large ‘pigment prints’ selling for an order of magnitude more than the orginal dye transfer edition. Possibly because they are better prints (though I’ve not had the chance to compare) and almost certainly because they are larger.

The new Eggleston prints are inkjet prints, or as the galleries prefer to call them ‘digital pigment prints.’ I don’t know on what paper, printer or inks these were made, but they are basically similar to those many of us can produce on our own printers, except for the size of 44″ x 60.

Craig J Sterling on Beyond the F-Stop comments “the digital print, in my opinion, has finally been legitimized … yes!” Looking around the giant dealer trade show in Paris eighteen months ago I’d certainly come to the same opinion, although as with these prints the labels went to great lengths not to include ‘I’ word; “inkjet” is still taboo in the trade. Sterling has also written about Limited Edition Prints, and includes the idea that it only became possible to produce true editions of photographs with the advent of digital – in the darkroom every print is an individual performance.

Although I rather doubt if the case against Eggleston will be successful (but I’m not a lawyer) it may perhaps serve to make photographers rather more careful particularly in those US states that have laws about editioning of art works. But what I would really like to see is more photographers adopting a democratic rather than an elitist stance towards selling photographs.

Eggleston’s work doesn’t need to be printed huge, and I’ve often thought that much if not all of it works better in books than on the exhibition wall (and the same is true of most photographs.) You can buy a copy of his ‘The Democratic Forest’, arguably his best book, for around £30 if you shop around, which gets you not just one but a sequence of 150 of his images for something like $578,460 less than that single large image of a tricycle. I know which makes more sense.