Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Yuri Kozyrev

By the time I’d come to the third or fourth Tweet or Facebook post telling me I should look at Yuri Kozrev’s My Year on Revolution on the Time photo editors’ Lightbox, my expectations were considerably raised, and looking through his 64 pictures from the year they were not disappointed.

His is truly an incredible record of an incredible year (and of course there are many fine images from others too.) While there are a few that do little for me (and the opening crowd picture is perhaps unfortunately one – and without the recommendations might have put me off looking at the rest) time after time I found myself thinking “I wish I’d taken that” which is probably the highest accolade that photographers award.

Of course I’m not a guy who would get into many of the situations that Kozrev has been in over the years, preferring to keep in rather safer and less kinetic places, but there were some of his pictures that did make me think we share some approaches – even though he does it considerably better almost all of the time.

One of the tweets that took me to this site was from Photojournalismlinks, where you can find many more links to some more fine pictures from the year.

Shooting Under Fire

Shooting under fire gives a disturbing picture of the dangers faced by photographers around the world, too many of whom get killed or wounded covering the news.

After you’ve looked at t he pictures, you many also want to look at the web pages of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where on the front page it informs you that 43 journalists have been killed this year so far, and 890 since 1992, 556 “murdered with inpunity” and that 179 are in prison worldwide.

The CPJ, an independent, non-profit organization, was founded in 1981 and promotes press freedom worldwide by defending the rights of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal. They also have a very useful Journalist Safety Guide on working in hazardous situations, which can also be downloaded as a pdf.

In the UK, events are seldom life-threatening, although photographers do get assaulted, injured and threatened. But the only image in the 39 in Shooting Under Fire shows a football photographer at Anfield kitted up for working in driving rain. Uncomfortable perhaps, but hardly in the same league.

Fukushima

One item of kit I’ve never packed in my camera bag is a Geiger counter, though I have used one, in a previous life before I before I switched to photography, and I learnt some of what little physics I knew sitting at the very bench in Manchester where in 1909 Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, working under Ernest Rutherford “first split the atom”.

But for Italian photographer Pierpaolo Mittica it must be a pretty regular item of equipment. I read on Lensculture his story about his several visits into the No-Go Zone around Fukushima to document the situation there, before looking at the series of black and white images there. Certainly they catch the idea of an abandoned area – a bicycle thrown down, a teapot inside a former home with the words (in English) ‘TAKE IT EASY’, residents in masks and protective suits going back to reclaim belongings (although he also shows pictures of properties looted and wrecked by thieves), a worker from the plant praying at his family grave and more.

Missing from the presentation – and perhaps for good reason – are pictures of those “many people, most of them elderly, are still hiding out inside the zone, some of them with no visible protection” who he met.

Previously Mittica became well-known for his Chernobyl The Hidden Legacy (2002 – 2007) and you can see work from this as well as a number of other fine projects, including some in colour on his web site, which he dedicates to “Walter Rosenblum my great friend and mentor.”

Everybody Street

If only there were more hours in the day I would spend much more time on American Suburb X, particularly on ASX TV, where every time I visit I find more things to watch ‘later’. One particular series that I have found time for some is ‘Everybody Street‘, segments of a documentary about photographers who have used New York City street life as a common thread in their work. Director Cheryl Dunn was commissioned to make it by the Seaport Museum, New York and it was first shown at the museum in September 2010 in conjunction with the exhibit Alfred Stieglitz New York. Although I don’t really buy the link the museum and film-maker try to make between Stieglitz and street photography – although he was one of the first photographers to take an often hand-held camera out onto the city streets, his intentions were so very different – it is still well worth watching. On the museum site you can view the film trailer and links to clips showing Joel Meyerowitz, Bruce Gilden and Mary Ellen Mark.

ASX has a longer piece on Bruce Gilden, which near the beginning shows him being attacked by a woman who doesn’t appreciate being photographed as well as on Meyerowitz and Bruce Davidson.

Other photographers in the film, some of whom appear briefly in the trailer include Martha Cooper, Rebecca Lepkoff, Jeff Mermelestein, Clayton Patterson, Ricky Powell, Jamel Shabazz, Luc Sante, Tim Barber, and Bonnie Yochelson, and there are links to their work on the Everybody Street page.

Bonnie Yochelson, formerly the curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, is also the author of the book Alfred Stieglitz New York which was brought out to accompany the show, the first collected exhibition of his work on the the city since he organised his own show in 1932. As someone who owns the heavyweight two volume collection of his best works, and greatly admire a few images such as his Terminal I’ve never thought his pictures of the city of New York were his strongest hand, and certainly not the best images of the city architecture (the link to this picture in the Getty collection gives the photographer’s comments on why he took this image; it is difficult for us to look at it as he did then because of the enormous load of nostalgia; years ago I wrote about it being like going down the local bus garage to take photographs, though now I might even need to revise that term to ‘transport interchange’.)

Yochelson was of course also responsible for the fine ‘Changing New York‘ showcasing the work of Berenice Abbott, another photographer like Stieglitz I’ve written about at some length in the past (no longer on line, but you can read a review of the 1997 edition by Elsa Dorfmann) as well as viewing a fine selection of her work on-line at the New York Public Library. Berenice Abbott: American Photographer, with text by Hank O’Neal has of course been on my bookshelf since soon after it was published in the 1980s.

Press Freedom In Court

This morning, NUJ London Photographers Branch member Jason N Parkinson is in Chelmsford Crown Court along with BBC, ITN and Sky News resisting a production order application by Essex Police to hand over all his footage taken during the Dale Farm eviction on 19 and 20 October this year.

It is a vital case for the freedom of the press, as Jason explains very well in his post on the LPB web site. Jason is there with full backing from the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and legal support from Bindmans Solicitors. Several fellow branch members are in court to observe the proceedings, and have been allowed to Tweet from the court – and I am following these on #productionorder as I write this. At the moment the court is being shown some of his published footage.

Press freedom is vital for democracy, and under threat from various directions here – including at the Leveson inquiry. The case also demonstrates how vital it is for photographers (including videographers) to belong to a union which will support them personally as well as fight for the principles involved.

Stop The War – 10 Years

Stop The War held a launch party for their new book, a profusely illustrated graphic history of their 10 year campaign, at Housemans radical bookshop last night. The event was attended by many of the leading figures in the campaign, including Tony Benn who contributed the foreword to the book ‘Stop The War: A Graphic History‘ and made a short speech at the event. The book should be available now at all good bookshops, as well as direct from Stop the War.

In time I’ll put a few more pictures on line from this event on My London Diary – the site is currently running about a month behind GMT. Perhaps too I’ll post here my own contributions to the book, as well as possibly some of those that in the end didn’t get used.

Housemans is a fairly small shop with some narrow areas and at the start it was far too crowded to be worth making pictures, although I found myself standing next to Tony Benn when he made his speech and took a few frames. But most of the rest are from later in the event when numbers had thinned out considerably, apart from some of us photographers making the most of the free wine. I think the wine had slightly affected the D700 too (I had it with me from an earlier event I’d been covering) as rather fewer of the pictures that I took – all with the 16-35mm f4 – were as sharp as usual and the framing lacked the kind of precision that I usually aim for.

Many artists and photographers have contributed to the campaign through their work over the years, and have continued that in making their work available for this volume. A central section, ‘The Art of Politics’ includes images by such well-known figures as Banksy and Ralph Steadman, and throughout the book both as illustrations and in many of the photographs we see the work of David Gentleman, whose graphic posters have inspired the movement.

The book, produced under the editorial direction of Andrew Burgin, with Marie Gollentz as editor and design by Peter Palasthy is a fine piece of work and should win prizes.

There are photographs by around a couple of dozen photographers, including Guy Smallman who responsible for photography research (Ruth Boswell for the art research) with most of the pictures coming from from half a dozen of us, including some fine work by Paul Mattsson and Brian David Stevens as well as Guy himself. Many of the photographers and some of the artists were present at the launch, and several of us took pictures.

Fittingly the first section of the book is given over to photography, and after the art section the final part of the work is a ‘Graphic Timeline’ which attempts to list all of the many actions organised by the national movement (of course there were many more local events), illustrating many by posters and photographs, as well as thumbnails giving page numbers of photographs in the initial section.

Of course no photographer is ever entirely happy about how their pictures are published, although I was very pleased to have a few of mine included. But editors often prefer the wrong images, insist on cropping them, even take colour images and convert them (sometimes not particularly well) to black and white. The only way that photographers can get work treated exactly as they want it is to publish their own work – which is why I’m so keen on Blurb!

And after all I’ve been producing my own ‘graphic history’ of Stop the War, along with other protest movements for over ten years on My London Diary. I was amused when one of the other major photographers told me that he had used my site to identify the particular events where he took some of his pictures in the book.

Michelle Sank & Mary Turner

Yesterday evening’s Photo-forum, a monthly meeting “for working photographers across the spectrum to bring images, ideas, photo stories, approaches and work in progress for supportive debate and criticism” was a very special event, although not as well attended as most.

Of course we are coming up to Christmas, and there are many parties and other Christmas events taking place – there seem to be even more than usual this year, perhaps in some kind of reaction against the financial austerity. The weather wasn’t too great either, though London was nothing like Scotland, where people were being advised to stay home. Perhaps if I hadn’t have been coming up to London for a meeting earlier in the day and hadn’t known who was speaking I might have stayed home. There certainly was a powerful wind, and as I walked past the Occupy London camp at St Paul’s in mid-afternoon some tents were getting blown away and people were struggling to keep some of the structures up. And term had probably ended for some of the students who boost the audience whenever well-known speakers appear.

The format of Photo-forum is a simple one, with two photographers showing their work on the screen and talking about it, one before the interval and one after, often with some interesting questions and debate. It’s also a great opportunity to meet and talk with other photographers, both before the meeting, in the interval and especially afterwards in the pub, where we eat the free food paid for by a raffle drawn at the end of the evening for prints of the speakers’ work.

I’ve long been aware of the work of Michelle Sank, and have written about it here and elsewhere on several occasions, but it was good both to see a wider range of her work, as well as to hear her talking about it and her passion for photography. She also has a very fine web site, which again I’ve mentioned before, on which you can seem almost all of the work she showed last night, and which shows her various projects in depth. The site is a model of simplicity, clean, elegant and generous in making her work available.

Her practice is perhaps rather different from most of those in the audience, with art institution and gallery commissions enabling her to pursue what remain her very personal projects, but its social documentary aspect certainly makes it far more accessible and worthwhile to most working photographers than some things that appear on photography gallery walls, and I think those who had come to the event with little if any knowledge of her work were very impressed by it.

When I first saw her work around ten years ago, it stood out from what at the time was a host of new portraiture often with similar subject matter, including some by already well-known and much touted art-world photographers, because of the strong empathy between the photographer and the subjects. Clearly these were social documents as well as portraits and were made with a concern for the wider issues involved, and this was something that came out clearly in her comments as she showed the work.

Mary Turner‘s pictures often appear in ‘The Times’, but what she showed at Photo-forum was clearly something in which she had a strong personal involvement and interest. Unlike the typical news photographer (and many of our best press photographers are unlike the typical news photographer) she did not ‘jet in’ to Dale Farm for the highlights, but worked with the people living there from 2009 on, and is still following them now.

Although I only visited Dale Farm briefly on one occasion (and was very aware that I was not covering the story there in any depth), Turner’s pictures of the travellers in their vans reminded me very much of my earlier experiences, before I started taking pictures, of working as a student to defend travellers in Manchester against evictions and harassment by the local council.

Turner got to know some of the travellers extremely well, so that she and her camera became accepted as a part of their normal life, and her pictures display a great intimacy, as well as the lack of illusions about their lifestyle which she also made apparent in her sometimes laconic commentary. Her mainly wide-angle views of them both inside the trailers and outside on the site appealed strongly to me.

As well as the roughly 60 pictures from 2009-2011 which include some from weddings and other events off-site, she was also there for the ‘Last Days at Dale Farm’ shown in another set of images, where again her relationships with the travellers and the access that this gave her to their private lives makes her work stand out from that of other photographers, particularly in showing the reactions of the travellers to the eviction.

Like the others present on the morning of the invasion by riot police, she too has a picture of ‘Minty Challis, an activist and supporter of the Travellers protests against their eviction, October 19th 2011‘ holding up a crucifix in front the the blazing wreckage, and it is one of the better images from this ‘photocall’ for showing more of the scene, although probably much of the tighter cropping in the other images published was made by editors rather than photographers. But it was the next picture in the sequence, a darkened silhouette of people on a roof looking down towards the fire, the sun breaking through under dark cloud and a menacing row of gateposts at the left, like robots advancing inexorably on the site that I found more dramatic.

Turner’s pictures are a fine record of a way of life, and also of the destruction and the lawlessness of Basildon Council, bailiffs and police, ignoring the legal niceties and protections laid down by the courts in carrying out this eviction at huge public expense. They also make clear the nature of the site, laying bare any of the arguments that the long campaign made any sense in terms of planning law.

Although media interest largely disappeared after the dramatic events of October 19, the story is not yet over, and Turner is continuing to visit the travellers and record what is going on, and there are likely to be further developments after Christmas. Perhaps at some point a determined investigative reporter (unless Leveson outlaws them) may uncover the true back-story behind what seems to be Basildon Council’s determined long-term racist vendetta against Dale Farm which would provide an ideal text to accompany a book of these pictures.

If you are a working photographer based around London and don’t know about Photo-Forum it really is worth finding out more – and you can eamil the address on the web site to be put on the mailing list to be sent a couple of emails every month reminding you of the meetings, which take place on the second Thursday of each month in Jacobs Pro Lounge in New Oxford St.

My only regret about the evening was that I wasn’t one of the winners of the raffle.

New Breed

London-based Italian born photographer Mimi Mollica is the latest photographer to be featured on Verve Photo: The New Breed of Documentary Photographer, which highlights a fine series of pictures ‘En Route to Dakar’, taken along the 34 km internationally funded motorway under construction that links Dakar to the rest of Senegal.

Verve Photo is is a web site that every time I visit I find many things that are worth seeing. Among the highlights of my most recent visit was a link to A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan which examines thirty years of Afghan history. The multi-media presentation is based on 14 trips to Afghanistan between 1994 and 2010 by photojournalist Seamus Murphy (b.1959. Ireland).

On the right side of the blog page is a long list of all the photographers whose work has been featured. It’s an impressive and very long list and every one is worth exploring further.

Medyan Dairieh and Park Royal

I didn’t go out specially to take these pictures in an area of London I’ve hardly visited since I photographed it around twenty years ago and got to know fairly well. One friend who I often meet photographing events in London, Medyan Dairieh, was showing his prize-winning work from Libya. Working for Al-Jazeera, he covered the Libyan revolution very much from the front line, entering Tripoli with the anti-Gaddafi forces and being wounded for a second time in the siege of the final stronghold of Abu Saleem.

Medyan has already talked about his work in Brighton and there are plans for further showings of his photographs and video in other cities. Al-Jazeera has built up a reputation over the year for its reporting of events in the Arab world that has made the BBC and others look hopelessly out of touch and sometimes biased, and Medyan’s photography has played its part in their success.

Unfortunately I couldn’t attend the main event yesterday evening, but took a rather lengthy route home after photographing yesterday’s Climate Justice march to call in, look at the work and meet Medyan again, looking quite different in a smart suit than when we meet on the street, fairly late in the afternoon. It was more or less dark when I arrived at the show, and certainly night as I left at around 4.45pm, almost an hour after sunset.

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The event took place in Park Royal in north-west London, developed as London’s largest industrial estate in the 1930s. I think I first went there when Prime Minister Thatcher had just turned her back on British manufacturing industry in favour of banking, the city and services, photographing a bleak factory for sale on a snowy day as a part of a project on de-industrialisation, returning in later months to photograph some of the more interesting industrial buildings that I thought might soon be demolished.

I’d hurried past a small group of buildings as I came to the Islamic centre hosting the event that I had thought might be interesting to photograph, but hadn’t wanted to stop. As I walked from North Acton station I’d been thinking it would be interesting to visit the area again and photograph in better light. But when I came out, the light, mainly from the street lights, with a little still from the dark blue sky wih a few clouds, and also from the passing traffic, was creating a rather interesting and somewhat unearthly effect, so this time I stopped to take a few pictures.

It wasn’t a brightly lit road and I didn’t have a tripod. But nowadays that is seldom a problem. ISO 3200 on the D700 gives a nice quality, with a slight noise which is hardly noticeable at normal scales and quite attractive at 1:1. The 16-35mm lens is only f4, but even at 20mm I would want to stop down to at least that aperture for depth of field in an image like this. Without any exposure compensation set, the shutter speed of 1/30 was hardly a problem, though I made several exposures to be sure to get one that was critically sharp. The Coca-Cola can in the foreground just to the right of the tyre may not be visible on the web, but at 1:1 it is sharp, as is the text across the front of ‘The Kiosk’, though certainly this is easier to read in the second image from closer side.

To get similar results using film would have been difficult. I would have had to stick to a relatively slow emulsion, perhaps ISO 200, making a tripod essential, made calculations and then bracketed to cope with reciprocity failure, fiddled around with correction filters and then have kept my fingers firmly crossed until the prints came back from the lab, usually requiring a reprint to get the kind of results I wanted. Even then they would have been nothing like as good a colour quality as we routinely get from digital. Though some people like the odd colour that film produced; rather like those people who prefer their oil paintings seen through discoloured ancient varnish than after restoration, or their buildings before rather than after the years of pre-Clean Air Act grime has been removed (and sometimes I do too.)

I could remove the orange cast from the images too, but the orange light was a part of what attracted me to the scene, and removing it produces an unnaturally cold effect. I have reduced it a little from Nikon’s automatic white balance that I used when taking the picture.

Earlier in the day, as I’d been photographing the march looking down on it from Waterloo Bridge, I’d been quite surprised to find a photographer next to me using a tripod. I was getting shutter speeds of around 1/400th and using the 18-105mm felt no need for a tripod, particularly as I was leaning on a very solid railing to take my pictures.

Back in the old days of film, I would only have needed a tripod had I for some reason chosen to photograph the event on a slow film, such as Pan F or Kodachrome 25. Though I can’t ever think why I would have done so when Tri-X or Fuji 400 would have done a better job. But with digital, tripods are needed so rarely that I’ve almost given up on them completely. Tripods still have their uses, but mainly no longer to hold the camera steady (they have never ensured sharpness!*) I think the only use I’ve made of one in the last year has been to mark an exact spot in space to use when rotating a lens around its nodal point to make a panorama – which I was actually taking hand-held. The main rationale of a stand or tripod in a studio is also to precisely locate a camera.

I think there is a stage in photographers’ lives where tripods seem important and seem to them to mark themselves out as a ‘proper photographer’ – and for some years I went nowhere without one. But technology has changed and in practical terms they are now seldom more useful than a dark cloth. And yes, I’ve seen a photographer with an ordinary DSLR using one of those as well. Probably the moth has got mine by now, stashed away in a cupboard with one of my 5x4s. Doubtless there are still photographic courses where students are urged to use tripods, told that you need them to get sharp pictures, just like many are still told nonsense about film being better than digital, that darkroom prints are always better than inkjet prints and doubtless much other nonsense.

Strolling a few yards further on I came to the bridge across the canal. Park Royal had a great location for industry because of its situation between two of the main rail lines out of London, the Grand Union Canal, and road links including the A40 and the North Circular Road, though now I imagine only the roads are significant. It was really dark as I looked along the canal, hard to make out the two railway bridges. This time there was hardly any light at all, and one solution would certainly have been a tripod. But I held the camera on top of the flat metal of the road bridge and gave a six-second exposure. It was so dark that I didn’t notice the group of people on the canal towpath until after I’d take the first exposure.

On the back of the camera, the picture looked far too light, so I made a second exposure for half the time. Lightroom’s auto setting produces more or less identical results from the two, simply adjusting the exposure values. Theoretically the longer exposure should be a little less noisy, but I couldn’t actually see a difference, but surprisingly it was just a tad sharper – probably a heavy vehicle had shaken the bridge a little during the shorter exposure (another thing tripods don’t control.) Using the default values actually produces a picture that looks more or less as if it was taken on a sunny evening, the orange street-light becoming warm sun. I’ve tried to get to something a little closer to what I saw and felt as I took it.

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* I may sometimes have felt it would be useful to stuff some of my subjects, sometimes not only for photographic purposes, but it has never proved practicable, and a little selective unsharpness often improves images. The second major cause of unsharpness in my images is incorrect focus. Camera shake comes a poor third except where I’ve forgotten to set an appropriate ISO. Which happens. Too often.

Not For My Xmas Present!

I won’t be rushing out to buy a copy of Vivian Maier: Street Photographer which, according to Amazon will be available from 8 Dec, published by Powerhouse Books as a 128 page hardcover (ISBN-10: 1576875776 ISBN-13: 978-1576875773) at the pre-order price of £24.64. It’s cheaper in the US, and the Amazon page includes a one minute video which exposes the book and around twenty of her pictures, and makes very clear why I think the hype around her is unjustified.

Make no mistake, Maier was a good photographer. A very good eye who picked up stuff from all sorts of guys and made her own take of it. You can see in the video and the half a dozen images on the web site that she has learnt well from Walker Evans, from Lisette Model, from Lee Friedlander, from Henri Cartier-Bresson from Harry Callaghan and from others. What you don’t see, despite the several self-portraits, is any clue as to who Maier herself was as an artist.

It says in the text that she took over 100,000 photographs in a period from the 1950s to the 1990s, though overwhelmingly I think her work shows its 1930s roots. 100,000 over 40 years is a relatively modest output and not unusual for the keen amateur that she was, at 2,500 pictures a year, it works out at around 50 a week. It’s hard also to know how much of the back-story is true. Did she show her work to no-one, or was it that the people in Chicago she did show her work to didn’t find it of particular interest.

Mike Johnston on The Online Photographer seems considerably more convinced of the book’s worth than me. It seems a pleasant enough volume, but certainly nothing to get excited about, and I sincerely hope nobody buys me it for Christmas, though I’m sure there will be considerable media hype and many photographers are likely to find a copy jammed in their stocking. Please, please not for me.

There are obviously others who disagree with my verdict on her, and the featured comment by Sherwood McLernon says “I think of it as the book that I had hoped The Americans by Robert Frank would have been, but wasn’t.” which must deserve some kind of award.

I don’t know where McLernon was sitting waiting for the publication of ‘The Americans’ in 1958. Maier had hardly started in photography when Frank took 2 years and around 28,000 images to make the work in 1955-7. Published first in France, where Robert Delpire put his future with the family firm on the line to get it in print, it shocked the photography world, or at least those who saw it, as most of the reviews were extremely negative. Wikipedia quotes Popular Photography as deriding his images as “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness.”

The Americans is in no way a perfect book, but it became a seminal book, although it remains in some respects a difficult book. Maier’s work (both in the show and on the various web sites) is safe and easy to assimilate. If I wanted one word to describe it, I think “anodyne” would do nicely, whereas for Frank it would be “iconoclastic.” The mention of Frank is however interesting, as looking at her work in the gallery this summer, one thought that came to me was that despite her obvious talent and facility, she had never really got to grips with his work.

If you are looking for a present for a photographer with any interest in street photography and you find they haven’t got a copy of ‘The Americans’ then I suggest you buy that rather than this book. Maier’s work is easy listening while Frank’s remains challenging, even after I’ve known it since the 1970s when I was getting into the medium.

You might also want to look at Martin Parr’s pick of the best books of the decade, made for the PhotoIreland Festival in the Summer. Perhaps among a few of his choices I might endorse is John Gossage’s Berlin in the Time of the Wall – you can see a selection of the pictures at the Stephen Daiter Gallery, but even at the reduced price of $132 it’s a little expensive for my relatives.

Perhaps at some time I’ll try and write more seriously about my own picks of recent photography books, and I have another of my own Blurb publications arriving shortly.