Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Trespassing on Gallery Walls

As always, Shahidul Alam writes a thoughtful article on photography in his Trespassing on Gallery Walls in which he looks at the peculiar nature of the photograph that empowers it. Something that means that as the art world ingests our medium, “It has led to concerned photography being considered passé. In the hallowed world of limited-edition copies, the fine art print is about the object and not its purpose. Form triumphs over content.”

As he goes on to point out, photography has at times altered the course of history, changing people’s views – and regimes such as that in Bangladesh continue to provide evidence of its power when they close down shows such as Into Exile: Tibet 1949 to 2009 and Crossfire. But do read his article, written as the introductory piece for the February issue of PIX, a photographic quarterly from India, where you can download this issue on the theme of Trespass. It contains some fine work, and I particularly enjoyed the black and white essays by Mark Esplin, Siddhartha Hajra, Aparna Jayakumar and Devansh Jhaveri.

Esplin’s digitally taken diptychs in City Builders (2010) pair portraits of New Delhi’s homeless with night images from the streets of the city. Hajra in ‘Opera Monorama‘ has photographed the performances of “Monorama or Rajuda (as he is commonly called in his neighbourhood)… a transgendered person who performs in closed community spaces during the spring season which is associated with Sitala puja.” It is sensitive and intriguing work. Jayakumar in ‘On the Wrong Side of the Equator” is working in the surreal world of the film set, a Bollywood recreation of an Angolan hamlet in India. Jhaveri in Trespass looks at the Hindu cremation rituals.

In his piece, Alam makes reference to the “amateur grabs of Abu Ghraib“, with which we are all familiar, but an earlier – and non-photographic post on his blog, Control by seed, written by Najma Sadeque, is about a far more serious grab which occurred at Abu Ghraib, the home of Iraq’s national seed gene bank.

Under the control of Paul Bremer, military head of the Provisional Authority in 2004, Order 81 dealt with plant varieties and patents. It allowed plant forms to be patented and genetically-modified organisms to be introduced. Farmers were strictly banned from saving their own seeds. Its “goal was brutally clear-cut and sweeping to wipe out Iraqs traditional, sustainable agriculture and replace it with oil-chemical-genetically-modified-seed-based industrial agriculture.”

As Sadeque writes: Its not for nothing international researchers have termed the deliberate annihilation of Iraqi agriculture the ultimate war crime.

Eve Arnold On Show

I went to see the Eve Arnold show in London yesterday mainly because I had some spare time between photographing a couple of events and it was just a short walk down the road. It was cold and wet outside, so spending time in a warm dry gallery seemed like a good idea.

I actually enjoyed the show, though it didn’t change my opinion of her as a photographer. The picture that really stood out for me was her portrait of Marlene Dietrich at work – and it was a very large print. Arnold studied photography briefly with Alexey Brodovitch, and according to her obituary in The Telegraph: “The class, which included ambitious professionals such as Richard Avedon, mercilessly criticised Eve Arnolds amateur efforts.” Brodovitch’s classes at New School for Social Research in New York have a legendary status as a tough school, one that worked by tearing people’s work to pieces – and those who could take it profited greatly.

Arnold talks about this with Colin Ford in the BBC Five Master Photographers Series recorded in 1990. She picked herself up and rather by chance set herself a testing project to meet the class assignment of ‘Fashion’, going into Harlem to photograph the informal black fashion shows that were held regularly in former churches there. That work gained plaudits when she took it to class – and later led to her getting the cooperation of Malcolm X for some more fine work, and after her husband sent it to Tom Hopkinson who published 8 pages in Picture Post it got her a place in Magnum, where, along with Inge Morath, she was the first woman member.

I spent a long time in the gallery, Art Sensus, just off Victoria St at 7 Howick Place. It’s not a gallery I’ve visited before, a large space on the second floor with a very expensive feel. The gallery says it “has a clear mission; to promote and support the very best up and coming contemporary artists on cutting-edge projects” though it perhaps isn’t clear how a photographer whose work was essentially formed in what was a relatively conventional style sixty years ago quite fits in with that, though I suspect her work is of more interest to me than anything else they are likely to show. The show is on until 27 April, and there is a page with links to a Radio 4 clip and reviews which may perhaps have a more balanced view then mine.

Although the exhibition page at the gallery concentrates almost exclusively on her pictures of Monroe and other stars, the exhibition is actually a fairly decent cross-section of her work. I spent rather more time watching a video the BBC made on her quite a few years ago (I think at the time of her Barbican retrospective in 1996) now than looking at the pictures – it is quite a long program, but I enjoyed listening to her talk. There are a few interesting stories told on it too.

On the wall next to where the video is being shown is a list apparently of every project that she took. Although someone on the video makes a comment on how many different things she did, the list seems to me to tell a different story, with a relatively small number of assignments even in her busiest years.

The V&A has recently acquired one of the better works from her later years, her picture of the ‘Brides of Christ‘ at Godalming, about to enter the nunnery.

Greenbelt Utopias

After yesterday’s brickbat, today a qualified bouquet for the New York Times and a Lens blog feature on Jason Reblando’s project ‘New Deal Utopias‘.

Of course, as so often, you can see the work better on Reblando’s own web site – and the NYT does supply a link to the front page of this – and it has also been featured on the Design Observer ‘Places’.

It’s a nice enough feature with the pictures, linking to some useful sites to tell you more about Ebenezer Howard and garden cities, and giving some basic information and links about the three New Deal planned villages of Greenbelt (and here), Maryland, Greenhills, Ohio and Greendale, Wisconsin, though one might quibble whether the pages Lens links to are always the most informative and whether Answers.com is a particularly useful and credible source of information. Though at least it is in one feature – on Wikipedia you have to hunt around a little.

Its perhaps surprising that there doesn’t appear to be a feature on these settlements on the New Deal Network‘s web site, but they were of course documented by the FSA/OWI under Roy Stryker (who does get a link – but one that doesn’t mention Greenbelt.) You can find links to the three towns in the subject index of the collection of their pictures on the Library of Congress American Memory site, which has roughly 570 pictures from Greenbelt, 120 from Greendale and almost 180 from Greenhills, all taken in the late 1930s and early 1940s, which provide a useful background to Reblando’s work. Among them are many photographs by

LC-USF34- 005639-E Library of Congress - Arthur Rothstein
Completed home. Greenbelt, Maryland. Arthur Rothstein, LoC.

Arthur Rothstein, (1915-1985), Marion Post Wolcott, (1910-1990), John Vachon, (1914-1975), Russell Lee (1903-86) and Carl Mydans, so Reblando is entering into formidable territory. Again it is perhaps surprising that there appears to be no feature on these developments on the American Memory site – perhaps it’s a part of their history that too many Americans would like to forget.

LC-USF33- 001440-M4 Library of Congress - John Vachon (1914-75)
Assistant community manager talking with members of maintenance crew, Greendale, Wisconsin, John Vachon (1914-75), LoC.

LC-USF33- 030018-M1 Library of Congress - Marion Post Wolcott (1910-1990)
Family on terrace in Greenbelt, Maryland. Marion Post Wolcott (1910-1990), LoC

The period of the New Deal and WW2 was arguably America’s finest hour – and certainly the FSA/OWI one of the truly great documentary projects. Since then, with Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Tea Party it has been downhill all the way, and any mention of social projects such as the Greenbelt towns must have the rabid right spitting blood into their tea cups and reaching for their guns. So it’s great that the NYT and Reblando are drawing attention to these visionary projects again.

On Reblando’s site you can also see two other housing-related projects, Lathrop Homes and Outside Public Housing, both of which I found more satisfying than his work on the New Deal Utopias, where I couldn’t really see what he was trying to show through the work. Perhaps it is a project on which he is still working, and I hope so, as I’m sure there is much more that could be done.

Although I’ve not visited any of these towns, Greendale in particular seems to have turned in to something of a curiously mixed celebration of a largely mythical American history, including “A Dickens of a Christmas… gazebo concerts, green markets, a reenactment of a civil war ncampment, a tour of Greendale Original homes, a vintage baseball tournament, and a garden-gazing walk.” Surely rich scope for an ironist.

London’s Overthrow

London’s Overthrow is a very different diary of London in Nov-Dec 2011, superbly written by China Miéville, part of which was featured in the New York Times, though their piece lacks the unity of the full work, which includes Miéville’s mobile phone images. In the NYT the text was accompanied by the very polished and polite images taken by Mark Neville for The New York Times. Although these are fine in their own way, and would look good perhaps in some company annual report or government document, they really have no point of contact with the visceral anger of the text.

Miéville’s images may sometimes be blurred and indistinct (in one example beyond the limits of legibility) but their emotion matches the piece splendidly. The NYT presentation is an unholy marriage that traduces both writer and photographer, an example of blatant visual illiteracy, an exhibition of stunning incompetence that should be a hanging – or at least a sacking – offence for the picture editor concerned.

My own My London Diary, as well as my work over the years elsewhere, touches on some of same events and themes that Miéville, though in a my own rather more reserved register.

Marketing Fools Rule

As with so many things these days its the guys in marketing that call the shots, even though they know nothing about things. And this is what seems to have happened with the official promotional video for the new Nikon D800, produced for Nikon Thailand for the launch in Bangkok (a very boring video which shows why such events are best missed.) The people who made the video just went and found some nice footage to use, just unfortunate that at least some of it wasn’t even shot on Nikon, and I doubt in any was actually shot on a D800.

One of the clips used in the video came from Norwegian landscape photographer Terje Sørgjerd, who notes on his Facebook page that he is sponsored by Canon and uses a Canon 5DII. According to the comments there, the promo also contained work taken from a Red Bull snowboarding movie – which again did not use Nikon – as well as some produced on a Samsung NX10.

Nikon have apparently said they will apologise to the photographer and state that the video was not produced by them but made by an external company, though that is hardly an excuse as they used it. They have also apparently agreed to pay Sørgjerd twice the normal fee for the use, though that seems rather low given what has happened. But on his Facebook page he says that Nikon “have taken every step to have the video removed, and will do everything possible to avoid this from happening again in the future. This matter is now fully resolved between the two of us“.

Of course it has given Sørgjerd a great deal of free publicity – including this mention here, as well as some extra but rather negative publicity for Nikon. The D800 should sell on its merits, and promoting it with images produced on other cameras seems entirely dishonest, though apparently such practices are not unusual in advertising. I remember being told by a photographer many years ago that his pictures that were used in the UK advertising campaign for a new Japanese camera had actually been taken on a Nikon and not on the make being advertised.

Nikon Rumours doesn’t so far as I know have any video shot with the D800, but they do have some genuinely made with other Nikon cameras including the D700, pretty clever as it doesn’t have a video mode, along with some taken with other Nikons. But I’m still waiting for proper reviews to tell me if the D800 is a body worth considering as a (larger format) replacement for my ailing D300. Perhaps Nikon will come out with the D400 some time this year – it has been rumoured as imminent since mid-2009, though as yet there is not even any agreement between the rumour-mongers as to whether it will be DX or FX!

Lea Valley 7 Mervyn Day 1

What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? is a film made by pop group Saint Etienne with director Paul Kelly in 2005, as a farewell tribute to the Lea Valley, just condemned to disappear. Filmed over a couple of months, this story of a wandering paper-boy (named after a West Ham goalkeeping legend) getting lost in an often dreamy lower Lea landscape is set on the day after the announcement that London has won the Olympic bid – July 7, 2005 – also the day of the London Bombings.

© 2004 Peter Marshall
Photographs in this post are from the Lower Lea around 2004-5 by Peter Marshall
Palletts and scrapyard at Canning Town.

So many of the images in the film are familiar to me, and it ranges fairly widely over the whole of the Lower Lea, occasionally jumping several miles at the turn of a pedal. It’s not of course meant to be topographically accurate, but to those of us who know the area it can be a little disconcerting, and there are a few pictures which actually show the River Thames that might mislead some into thinking the Lea becomes rather grander than it does. They seem to have pretty thoroughly combed the area from Bow Creek to Hackney Wick with a few trips further north in their search for images.

© 2004 Peter Marshall
Waterworks River and Warton House, Stratford High St
© 2005 Peter Marshall
F**k Seb Coe graffito on footbridge over City Mill River as it leaves the Old River Lea

The pictures and script – with voices playing the boy’s mother and father give a good feel of the history and community of the area, although again a few incorrect details grate. For example, the River Lea does definitely not start at Ware (but at Leagrave or close by at Houghton Regis), though perhaps this misstatement was meant to reflect what is a general lack of knowledge – even by those who live there – about the Lea valley, which isn’t really a concept for most of the population.

The music isn’t bad either, and the track list apart from the title track and and Mervyns Theme – Sugarhouse Lane, Hope Chemical, Eton Manor, Quartermile Bridge, Cosy Café, Lee Navigation, Pudding Mill Lane, Channelsea, White Post Lane, The Pylons, Parkesine, Lesney Factory, Swan Wharf, Pioneers, Trinity Wharf, Blackwall Reach – could more or less have taken from my captions and is a tribute to the real star of the film, the Lea valley.

Thanks to Tim Soar, a fine architectural photographer with studios in the Wick, for pointing me towards a full version of film – around 48 minutes – available on the web at Bambuser.com, which has resulted in me failing to do much work this morning!

There are also excerpts from the film at other sites. It’s a film you listen to for the music and watch for the views it gives of the area, although perhaps it overworks both the extreme telephoto and close-up detail, with too little of the kind of distance and context I like in my image above – and a part of that wall is in the film.

The film is really a great snapshot of the lower Lea Valley at a particular point in time (though with a rather pointless narrative imposed on it, and the uncut footage could perhaps yield more.) And as illustrations to this post I’ve included a few of my own pictures from roughly the same period. You can see more on my River Lea/ LeaValley site, or in my book Before The Olympics (it can be viewed in full in the Blurb on-line preview.)

In April, the Museum of London has me running a workshop based at the View Tube overlooking the Olympic site, Art of photography: Stratford and the Olympic Park, and I spent some time today planning it. Booking has only recently opened and there are still plenty of places left on the course which is on April 21-2.
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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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Photographer Meets Photographed

I used to be a great fan of the BBC, but experience in reporting events over the years as well as some aspects of their output have at least to some extent changed my mind, though they are still obviously rather better than many other broadcasters.I strongly support the idea of broadcasting as a public service and they do produce some very fine programmes in various genres.

But of course they are still over-manned, still over-complacent, and still deliberately misreporting many events. Still giving far too much air time to bigots, racists and climate change deniers. And still wasting far too much money on rubbish which may be popular but would be done more or less as well by commercial broadcasters.

One of the finest aspects of the BBC’s work has always been the World Service, today celebrating 80 years of existence, though celebrating this by massive cuts, leaving its long-time home in Bush House and insulting its retired employees.

Thanks yet again to Duckrabbit and a post by Ciara Leeming ‘The face of the Gujarat riots meets his photographer ‘saviour‘ for bringing an interesting piece from BBC News India to my attention.

In 2002, Arko Datta photographed tailor Qutubuddin Ansari praying for help during religious riots in Gujarat during which around a thousand people, mainly Muslims, were killed – the worst riots since Independence. It was a picture that summed up the fear and desperation of many, and was printed on front pages around the world.

A week later, Mr Ansari became aware of the picture for the first time, when a foreign journalist hunted him out in a refugee camp and showed him a newspaper with it across a whole page. It made him notorious and “followed me wherever I went. It haunted me, and drove me out of my job, and my state.” He lost half a dozen jobs and continued to be hounded by journalists. Ten years on, BBC Hindi’s Rupa Jha was present when a meeting had been arranged between the two men.

Datta has been in a military vehicle and had taken a few frames of Ansari with a telephoto lens as he had pleaded with the soldiers to rescue him and a few other Muslims from a Hindu mob. Then he told the soldiers to stop and do something, and he and others in the van said they were not leaving until they did something to help the trapped people.

Although Datta’s photograph caused Ansari considerable grief, the journalists’ insistence that the military take action almost certainly saved the lives of the trapped Muslims, as well as bringing what was happening in Gujarat to the attention of the world.

Towards the end of their meeting, Ansari tells the photographer “Nobody is to blame, brother. You did your job. I was doing mine, trying to save my life. Your picture showed the world what was happening here.”

Few photographs have the impact that this image does, either as a picture or on the subjects in it, or indeed on the world and on the photographer, but it is a reminder that photography can have consequences we fail to foresee.

This is not the only time Datta has returned to meet the subject of one of his award-winning images. You can watch a video in which he talks about photographing the aftermath of the Asian tsunami and how he retuned to find the Indian woman mourning a dead relative which was the World Press Photo of the Year in 2004.

POYi Flowchart

I’m often surprised and amused by how things link together when I’m looking at pages on the web, often finding things that link to posts I’ve made or thoughts I’ve had but not quite got around to writing about.

One of the latter was about another of those annual awards, POYi, (Pictures of the Year international) which is unusual in conducting its business in public, web-casting the judging with 99 on-line publicly open seats in a chatroom. The judging is spread out over most of the month, and has now more or less ended – so you will need to wait until next year to take part.

The Photojournalism Contest entry flowchart on the Shit Photojournalists Like blog has more than an element of truth in it, judging from the various shows and lists of winners I’ve seen over the years. Certainly they lead me to the conclusion I’ve always had about such competitions, “Save your entry fee and buy gear.” They also link to the POYi Chat Room Heroes blog, though I think you have to have been their to get much out of that.

One photographer who gets a particular mention is Melissa Little, whose work was apparently “pulled in, kicked out, pulled in, then kicked out again.” I don’t know what she had in for POYi, but you can see some interesting work on her own web site, where I find that in 2001 she was a student at the Eddie Adams Workshop and “have been honored to return for the last seven years as staff, where I’ve done everything from mow the grass and rake the leaves to documenting everything in sight as workshop photographer to leading, finding stories and coaching a team of 10 students. ”

I’ve not yet looked at all the awards for POYi, but did enjoy looking through the results for the ‘News Picture Story – Newspaper’ class, where first place went to
Michael Robinson Chavez (Los Angeles Times) for DECONSTRUCTING MUBARAK, second to Mads Nissen (Berlingske / Panos Pictures) for pictures of the LIBYAN REVOLUTION, third to Hiroto Sekiguchi (Yomiuri Shimbun) for TSUNAMI AFTERMATH and the ‘Award of Excellence to Craig Walker (The Denver Post) for his pictures of OCCUPY DENVER. And I mention this not just because there are some fine pictures in these stories (which are always of more interest to me than the single picture awards) but because of the controversy I may have mentioned earlier over World Press Photo, when some judges anounced publicly that they had seen no pictures of the Occupy movement worthy of an award. I don’t know if Walker’s work went to WPP as well, but certainly some other very worthy images did.

Urban Landscapes – Luca Tommasi

I’ve just updated the pictures in Luca Tommasi’s A changing China on the Urban Landscapes web site that I run with Mike Seaborne.

Although Mike and I are both based on the outskirts of London and much of our own work on the site is from London, we intended this as an international site, and of the eleven photographers whose work is on the site only four are actually from the UK.

We welcome contributions to the site, but insist that these show a serious approach to urban landscape, and on the site I give a brief idea of what this might mean. It isn’t just pretty pictures of a city, and it isn’t just architectural photography. Here is my check list from the site which explains my idea of what we are looking for :

Urban landscape photography

in some way describe a town or city

represents an attempt to understand our experience of the city

shows a dedication to the subject, expressed through a body of work rather than isolated images

concentrates on structures or processes rather than on people

may deal in either details or a broader view

If you have work that you think would fit, you are welcome to submit work and we have a page on the site that tells you more. Now that most web users are on broadband rather than dial-up we normally use slightly larger images, typically 600-800px larger dimension. Projects have to be accompanied by some explanatory text, and we also welcome relevant essays on the subject – up to around 5000 words.

I wrote a little more about this definition and the site as a part of a lecture I gave five years ago, which I presented in a series of posts on this site, including Architecture and Urban Landscape photography.

Like many things on the web, we run the site for love not for money, and there are no prizes or payment for having work on the site, which got a respectable 165,000 hits last year. Though of course – as with this blog – it’s the quality not the quantity of our visitors that counts.

Barnstorm – Eddie Adams Workshop

If you are a student or have less than 3 years experience working as a professional photographer (freelance or otherwise) you may like to consider applying for a place on this year’s Eddie Adams Workshop or ‘Barnstorm’, “an intense four-day gathering of the top photography professionals, along with 100 carefully selected students. The photography workshop is tuition-free, and the 100 students are chosen based on the merit of their portfolios.” Unfortunately only 10 of those places are available for non-US students.

It takes place from October 5-8, 2012 in Jeffersonville, New York, and although the tuition is free, those who get a place will need to pay their own fares to the event and also a flat fee for room and board ($375) at the Workshop. It all adds up, but the quality of the free tuition makes this seems a great opportunity.

For more information and to apply, see the Eddie Adams Workshop site. Described as “the premier tuition-free photography experience” it exists thanks to many volunteers – who over the years have included many well-known names among photographers and editors with Adams “shamelessly exploiting a lifetime of friendships and contacts” who over the years included Gordon Parks, Joe Rosenthal, Alfred Eisenstaedt and editors and picture editors of Time, Newsweek, Life, Fortune, The New York Times Magazine and Parade magazine and is currently sponsored by many of the leading names in photography, including Nikon, Adobe, ASMP, AP, B&H, Getty Images, HP, Manfrotto, PDN, Photoshelter and Sandisk.

Most people know Eddie Adams (1933-2004) for one particular image from Saigon, but he took many fine pictures. He began the workshop in 1988 and this is the 25th Barnstorm.