Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Arthur Tress On The Street

Discoveries in street photography aren’t always what they are hyped up to be, but Arthur Tress‘s rediscovery of some of his early work holds more promise than most. Tress took around 900 photos during a short stay in San Francisco in the summer of 1964, and stored the prints that be made from them in a community darkroom there wrapped up in a parcel at his sister’s house when he went off to work elsewhere.

Forty-five years later in 2009 he came across them again and decided they were interesting, and took them to show curator James Ganz at the de Young Museum.

The show Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964 opened there on 3 March and runs until 3 June 2012, and there is just a little more information in the press release. If you – like me – can’t get to San Francisco, the best place to see them is on Tress’s own web site. Of course his later and better known work is also worth a long look. Accompanying the show is a book of the same title, and also worth reading is an interview with him by Jim Kasson from 2002 on the web site of The Center for Photographic Art in Carmel. Although I wrote about Tress’s work on several occasions on another site I’m surprised to find that this seems to be his first mention here on >Re:PHOTO.

The Listening Eye

There is a very nice essay on the work of Vanessa Winship on The Great Leap Sideways blog, along with a gallery of her work: The Listening Eye: the work of Vanessa Winship.

A site new to me, TGLS is edited by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa and describes itself thus:

“The Great Leap Sideways is a gallery space primarily, but not exclusively, dedicated to showcasing photography. The site comprises small and extended surveys of work by contemporary photographers alongside extended interviews, features, videos and extracts from texts that illuminate the practise of photography and its wider context.”

It’s worth taking a look at the Archive on the site too, which has some interesting features and interviews, though sometimes with a rather different outlook to mine, although it does feature several other photographers whose work I’ve mentioned here or elsewhere in the past as well as Winship.

Doisneau & Gentilly

Robert Doisneau was born April 14th 1912 in Gentilly, just outside the southern boundary of Paris, and already tributes are coming on-line to the man who produced so many pictures full of humour, human warmth and sometimes pathos. La Lettre de la Photographie has 47 unpublished images found in the archive of Rapho Photo Agency (now Gamma Rapho) and Le Figaro shows ten of the best.

For an overview of his life and work the Atelier Robert Doisneau is online and easy to navigate even if you don’t read French. A few years ago I visited the actual Atelier in Mountrouge, a short walk from Gentilly in the building where Doisneau lived and worked for more than 50 years until his death in 1994.

My picture is of the centre of Gentilly, and was taken on a very pocketable compact camera, the Canon Digital Ixus 400, in 2004. This was a 3.87Mp camera with a tendency to get round to taking the picture around a second or two after I had pressed the release and too often after I’d assumed it had already done the job and was putting it back in my pocket, but the basic quality of this image, taken at 1/500 f2.8 ISO50, was pretty good, though I had not had it very long and hadn’t then managed to tone down its default over-sharpening.

I’ve found it’s worth processing these images in Lightroom 4, which has enabled me to bring out a little more tone in the sky, slightly adjust the colour temperature to give a cleaner looking result and perhaps most importantly remove some of the fringing and most of the mild chromatic aberration. The final image is really a remarkable result from a sensor that is less than 1/20 the area of a 35mm negative. Although the image is only 2272×1604 pixels it would really make a pretty respectable A4 print, and at say 7×5 inches on a book page would be difficult to tell from one taken with a much larger camera. It’s only when I make a large print from one of the files from this camera that I remember why it’s worth carrying a camera about ten times the size and weight.

Behind With The News

It isn’t often that My London Diary can claim a scoop, but I was interested to read a story in today’s Independent newspaper which begins “A new wave of disruptive protests will take place in London in May”and mentions OccupyLSX’s plans.

Just over a month ago, on Saturday 3 March, I posted a story on Demotix, and a couple of days later on My London Diary as Greeks Protest With OccupyLSX in which I wrote:

I was surprised to find a general meeting of OccupyLSX was still taking place there this afternoon. After spending some time discussing the role of the police in society, this then moved on to planning further events, possibly a major protest on May Day or May 15, the anniversary of the start of last year’s protests in Spain.

Of course we always have events occurring on May Day, and it was more the May 15 anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish protests that was the more significant date, as postings on various other sites have confirmed. I’m not sure why the Independent now thinks it is news. I took the picture above early on in the general meeting and by the time I left an hour or so later there were possibly almost twice as many present, doubtless including at least two or three undercover police, though occasionally at some events I think they are in a majority – Chesterton’s ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’ sometimes seems fact rather than fiction.

I was of course more interested in the Greeks and their protest, and most of my pictures were of that, taking place a few yards away from the Occupy general meeting, which also welcomed the Greeks and heard from one of them about the events in Greece.

Also not very new news is the film ‘Chimping’, which I learnt about on the dvaphoto blog, where they mentioned it a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve only just got around to watching. Posted on Vimeo by director/produced Dan Perez de la Garza, this is a film about what photojournalists do and the future of photojournalism, featuring “Pulitzer Prize winners Preston Gannaway and Rick Loomis, Emmy Award winner Paula Lerner, along with Todd Maisel, Chris Usher, Angela Rowlings, Edward Greenberg, Stan Wolfson, and Rita Reed” and although it has the copyright date of 2007, the issues it raises are still current.

Perhaps the most interesting comments come from Intellectual Rights attorney Edward Greenberg who describes photojournalists as “passive, ignorant, childlike and unwilling to stand up for themselves and as possessing the fatal flaw of many artists which is an overriding desire to be liked” and says “the pat on the head is unfortunately so important to the egos of many creative people that they forget they are in business… ” and that they have to make a living. He also talks about annual earnings for some photojournalists as dropping from $80,000 to $30,000 over the past five years, though even the lower figure would seem like a golden age for most now.

Of course it is no longer possible to dismiss mobile phone cameras as not having the quality that newspapers need – particularly now that rather than 1.5 megapixels we now have monsters including the 41 Mp Nokia 808 Pureview. It’s no longer pixels or even technical quality that separates the pro from the citizen; on one side you have the quality of vision and on the other being there in the middle of things when they happen.

Several years ago at an NUJ photographers conference I heard a speaker talking about the need for photojournalists to adopt a hybrid approach to selling their work, making use of exactly the kind of new sites that were setting out to market the work of citizen journalist, and I started trying to sell my work through some of them, as just one of a several ways of getting an income from my work. After a very slow start it is beginning to increase, while other sources of income have gone down.

A very different video which I also watched this morning is about perhaps the most famous film ever made about a photographer, Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window‘, made in 1954, and now turned into an incredible three minute single panoramic time-lapse video by filmmaker Jeff Desom and featured on PetaPixel.

10 Photographers You Should Ignore

Bryan Formhals of LPV Magazine and photographer and blogger Blake Andrews (of photoblog B) make some hilarious and often oh so true comments on why would-be photographers should ignore the examples of Ansel Adams, Stephen Shore, Garry Winogrand, Alec Soth, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston and, er, Ryan McGinley. Surely they must be joking about him?

10 Photographers You Should Ignore is full of things I wish I’d written – in particular about the revenge of the banal in the comment on Eggleston. And even some of the things that I have written or said before are done far more wittily. Don’t miss it.

The Legendary Jimmy Jarché

I’d forgotten how bad the adverts on TV are, not normally watching television. The ITV player doesn’t seem to let me fast forward past them, but at least you can mute them.

Perspectives – David Suchet – People I Have Shot on ITV1 about his grandfather, the famous Fleet Street photographer James ‘Jimmy’ Jarché (1890 1965) is worth watching, though there is perhaps around 500% too much of David Suchet for my taste. Actor Suchet was Jarché’s grandson, and grew up with him living in the family home; grandad taught him photography and gave him his Leica, and he doesn’t do badly with it (a very nice picture of sheep for example), but I’d have welcomed much more about Jarché and much less about Suchet and you do have to put up with quite a lot of his physical and mental wandering.

Jarché was really too good a photographer to need Suchet, and Suchet the actor doesn’t need the kind of self-promotion that he gets here. A more straightforward account of the photographer’s life and work – including a brief interview with his grandson – would have been a far better tribute to him, but unlikely to appeal to TV executives.

Of course Jarché is a name known to all with an interest in photographic history, if mainly for a single image taken in 1925 of naked kids being chased along the banks of the Serpentine, published in the Gernheims’ ‘Concise History of Photography‘ in the year that he died and which for many years was almost the only widely available comprehensive volume on the subject. And there were a number of other images I’d seen before in the film, along with some new ones.

It wasn’t a film that changed my idea of Jarché, who has always been one of the legends of British press photography, and in the somewhat farcical expert discussion (really these guys aren’t as stupid as this makes them seem) at the end of the film in the Michael Hoppen gallery, Colin Ford makes clear he isn’t quite ready to think of him along with Cartier-Bresson and the rest either. But if he is perhaps less well-known now than he might be, the fault lies with another organisation that appears in a rather better light in the film, Getty Images, in whose immense warehouses his images are stored.

Mad Men

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Burt Glinn, Leonard Freed, Inge Morath, Elliot Erwitt, Dennis Stock, Philippe Halsman, Cornell Capa, Bruce Davidson, Sergio Lorain and Eric Hartmann are not a bad eleven, and even if a few of the team aren’t on their best form, The Mad Men Era, Magnum/Slates ‘Today’s Pictures’ a week ago are an interesting selection.

The 19 images, which date from around 1958 to 1968, are largely from New York and from the offices of the advertising industry of the era, and doubtless some are from Madison Avenue itself and largely represent that kind of business culture. But as a set on that title, it would have been stronger had the selection been a little tighter, and I think there are several that really don’t fit (and one I’d have put straight in my own reject pile let alone Magnum’s.)

Though one of those I would have rejected as not really fitting the subject is one of my favourite images from the era, just from a very different culture and style to Mad Men. Sergio Larrain’s out of focus commuter in front of the escalator at Baker St is a part of a very different business and photographic culture to the rest of the batch.

Had I been editing a set of the same title from those on Slate, I would probably have ended with 12 pictures rather than the 19 here. Of course if I was working with Magnum’s library there would almost certainly have been others I would have wanted to add, but I think it makes a nice exercise to take this set and edit them, perhaps even sequence them.

I’m not – at least not for the moment – going to say which other images I think don’t really belong in the set either because they don’t belong or simply aren’t strong enough. I’d be interest to hear whether other people agree with me that there are pictures that would better have been omitted, and if so, whether they images they would cull are the same as mine. I’d argue that there are around two others than don’t really fit the theme, and about the same number that simply don’t quite make it as pictures or lack the kind of ironic viewpoint that is common to the rest.

Brassaï (Gyula Halász) on YouTube

A Facebook post this morning to a YouTube clip featuring the work of Brassai took me on a short look at other clips about him there and also to reflect a little on how photography should be reflected on screen.

The link was to BRASSAÏ Paris la nuit circuit Brésil and the pictures are well reproduced – and it can even be viewed full screen without losing too much, but you never quite get to see them (or can’t tell if you do.) It shows details and zooms around far too much for my taste; photography is a medium where the frame and framing (or in Brassai’s case, cropping) is truly vital. But the approach does bring over something of the interest and excitement in his work, and I can imagine people watching this and wanting to know more and to really see the photographs, just a shame that they were not shown as pictures before the camera played with them. I also found the music quite unsuited to the work – too staid and stately – and simply had to mute it after a minute or so to continue watching.

Brassaï, fotógrafo shows his pictures in their entirety, but perhaps not such a good selection, and the quality of reproduction is not as good – it certainly isn’t worth viewing this at full screen. The soundtrack, ErikSatie’s Gymnopedie No. 1, seems far more sympathetic to the subject matter. But there are images where it would have been good to zoom in to show details.

Ted Forbes in The Art of Photography talks breathlessly about Brassai and flips over a few pages of the book Paris By Night, but seems to me not to have little real insight into what Brassai was about (or even what photography is about) but determined not to let a microsecond of silence give the viewer time to think. What little Forbes has to say that is worth saying – largely the facts about Brassai – could have been said in a few seconds but he talks throughout at a great rate, as if he hadn’t bothered to write a script. Badly videoed with annoying slips of paper markers covering up some of the pictures and reflections on the pages and you hardly see the pictures. It fails to even show any of his best work. It seems to me axiomatic that in a video about a photographer you should let the pictures do most of the talking and concentrate far less on the presenter.

Another video with a fine musical soundtrack is Brassai with Phillip L Wilcher “CONSOLATION”, and again sympathetic is Paris by Night (Photographs by Brassaï) with many of his best pictures shown to the soundtrack of ‘Dark-eyed sister’ by Brian Eno & Harold Budd.

A search on YouTube putting in the name Brassai brings up many more videos, and I’ve already spent more time than I should this morning watching them. If you find a better (or an even worse) one than I’ve mentioned above, feel free to add it as a comment.

Thanks to Diana Sampey for her post on Facebook which led me to the first of these videos. Of course YouTube isn’t the only place you can watch videos. Another that I enjoyed this morning was on BBC News Magazine, where Elliot Erwitt talks about some of the picture sequences in his book Sequentially Yours.

Tomasz Wiech’s Poland

Some of Tomasz Wiech‘s pictures in today’s NYT Lens blog feature Poland’s Great Adventure made me smile, which is a good enough reason to mention them here. They are part of a collection of work soon to be published as his book Poland, In Search of Diamonds of what is described as “absurdist and abstract work.” Fortunately although sometimes joyfully absurd, the work is never abstract, but very much situated in the real.

It’s worth going to Wiech’s own web site, where you can see a larger (and I think better) selection of this work – simply called In Poland. If the work appeals to you it is also worth going on to his po polsce blog which I think he uses to show his work in progress, with brief comments in both Polish and English. At the start he writes:

Blog is part of my project about Poland. It was made thanks to scholarship from Ministry of Polish Culture. Project tells about my country, that is nor pretty neither ugly. Nor catholic, neither secular. They tell about a country that is strongly influenced by history and tradition.

My own visits to Poland have impressed me both with the breadth of Polish photographic culture and also the support that photography (and I think other cultural areas) receives both from municipal and national authorities. It comes as a shock to someone used to the disdain of the British art mandarins who’ve always treated our medium as something to be handled at arms length in tongs while holding your nose – except of course when it happens to be made by people who are quite clearly doing art rather than photography.

Poland is in many ways a country of contradictions which make it a fertile ground for Wiech’s ironic observations. Even under socialist rule it remained a devoutly Catholic country, and in the rush to capitalism it still retains aspects of its socialist past – including the respect accorded to the arts.

There are other documentary projects and features also worth a look on Wiech’s site along with other work. I was moved by his Generation 1906, triptychs of eight people at the age of 100, though I would have liked to see these black and white images on a rather larger scale. He also has another blog, ‘Simple Observations‘ on which he posts the occasional image of something that he has observed, just as simple images without text, although people sometimes comment on them.

Backyards of Kiev

This week I’ve added a new gallery to the Urban Landscape web site, work by Herman Schartman (b1963) a Dutch photographer living in The Hague.

On his own web site he stated that he “is intrigued by the transformation of cities” and seeks “images that have an aesthetic appeal but may at a closer look raise questions about the people living in this place or the causes of the transformation of the landscape that is depicted.”

Schartman works on 4×5″ and has photographed cities across Europe. His first project on our Urban Landscape web site is ‘Backyards of Kiev‘, a fascinating set of ten black and white images, taken in the backyards of building blocks in that city. As in most other East European cities, these are public places but also very much places that the people living in these buildings let their private lives spill over into, often with intriguing results. As he says:

You will find lots of parking spaces, old derelict buildings and new high-rise buildings, gardens and trees. You will meet young women driving a SUV, an older woman delivering the bottles she collected, a man walking his dog, a couple drinking a beer or a security guard.

But the images he presents of of these places are not of the life which throngs them by day but the empty stages at night, with an atmosphere of their own, and often exquisite lighting depicted in highly detailed rich tonalities.

Submissions are always welcome to the Urban Landscape site, and the contribute page gives some details of what we are interested in. You should also look at What is an urban landscape? to see if your work is likely to be suitable.

Currently the photographers with work on the site are: John Davies, Philip A Dente , Lorena Endara, Pablo Fernando, Bee Flowers, Nicola Hulett, Peter Marshall, Paul Anthony Melhado, Neal Oshima, Paul Raphaelson, Herman Schartman, Mike Seaborne and Luca Tommasi, and includes work from Europe, Asia and North and Central America.