Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Facing Bruce Gilden

I’m not a great fan of Bruce Gilden, although I do still have a review copy of his ‘Facing New York‘ which Cornerhouse brought out here in 1992. But then I’ve never sold my review copies (plenty of reviewers made more money from doing so than writing reviews) though I have put some in the bin.

I think I did review it at the time, and it was a work I disliked but I recognised the power of his pictures, although in some respects the book seemed and still seems over-repetitive. They work made me uncomfortable, it seemed too much like being rude to people. Though if you are a New Yorker you are surely used to people being rude to you.

I mention the interview* with him in Vice by Jonnie Craig published a week or two back mainly because I rather like the paragraph at the start about street photography which ends with a definition of what it used to be:

“picture-taking informed by unchecked insanity, spontaneous joy, downtrodden souls, criminal behavior, spewing fire hydrants, and all the other varieties of filth and glory that can be documented by simply walking down an unfamiliar sidewalk. “

I think it’s the “unchecked insanity” and “spontaneous joy” that mostly appeal to me, and as Craig states, it is a far cry from the kind of thing that many people who like to call themselves street photographers are now producing.

It’s a fairly short read and I think gives a very clear impression of Gilden and comes with a few of his previously unpublished pictures. You can of course see more of his work on his Magnum pages, and I think he is generally a rather better photographer than ‘Facing New York’ made me think. Or at least there are many pictures that I like in his other work.

Vice seems to attract a particularly poor line in comments, but one of them says “Go look at Kurata Seijis book, Flash Up.” I googled a little, but only came up with the cover, which I looked and and thought of Daido Moriyama. And then Wikipedia tells me that he “practised under Daidō Moriyama in an independent photography workshop in 1976“, as well as that he was born in 1945, perhaps a vintage year for photographers. But the only other pictures I could find were some colour pictures that, at least out of context, could be seen as fairly generic travel work. So although it also apparently gets a recommendation from Messrs Parr and Badger, I can’t really tell you if ‘Flash Up‘ is worth a look.

*Thanks to American Suburb X to posting a link to this on Facebook.

Street View Photography

Last November in Paris I saw Michael Wolf’s ‘We Are Watching You’ and was underwhelmed. Large blow-ups of images from Google’s Street View (GSV) neither seemed particularly interesting or much to do with photography. As I’ve said in various other articles on work taken from TV screens I think photographers should be out in the real world and not looking at a box on which other people have put images for them to look at.

Apparently neither Wolf or other artists using GSV even actually find these images themselves, but get links to them from Internet forums which post up these kind of things. Pete Brook who has a fine blog ‘Prison Photography‘ has been looking at these projects and writing about them both on his own blog and on Wired’s Raw File. There in Navigating the Puzzle of Google Street View Authorship he tries hard to find some merit in such projects but I find the artists’ justification of their practice less than convincing, and Google’s claim to copyright difficult to argue against.

It seems hardly a big deal that each of the two artists he considers crops the GSV image differently (although often not very differently) and Michael Wolf’s attempt to equate this with framing by a photographer seems merely an attempt to mislead. Framing is very much about your point of view as well as about where you then put the edges, and in GSV the point of view is supplied by Google.

It’s also hard to take the analogy with Duchamp’s Readymades too seriously. He took objects – urinals, bicycle parts etc – and completely re-purposed them. GSV users simply take images and make smaller images from them, before blowing them up into senselessly big images for the gallery walls.

I find the whole thing a waste of space and resources, galleries, articles, discussion etc that could be used by real photographers making real images. For me it is the kind of thing that gives art and art photography a bad name.

Back on his own Prison Photography blog, in Photographing the Prostitutes of Italys Backroads: Google Street View vs. Boots on the Ground Brook looks at two contrasting approaches to the same subject matter, one by photographer Paolo Patrizi who actually went out on those back roads with a camera and researched the subject as well as taking pictures and the other a virtual tour using GSV by Mishka Henner. It is a comparision which makes the difference very clear. As he concludes:

‘Patrizis photographs return us to the shocking fact that that these women are human and not just bit-parts in the difficult social narratives of contemporary society. Works full of threat, fear, flesh and blood.

By comparison, Henners screen-grabs are anaemic.’

To me one is real photography, the other voyeuristic image collection. I find myself totally in agreement with Alan Chin who Brook quotes as saying:

‘This is about as interesting as cutting out adverts from magazines that have some connection and then presenting your edit as a work of art. ‘

Also by Brook on Wired’s Raw File is another piece, Googles Mapping Tools Spawn New Breed of Art Projects which looks mainly at Wolf’s work and in particular quotes from a BJP article that I linked to in a piece about what I considered the nonsensical award made to Wolf in World Press Photo.

It’s perhaps interesting that although in his earlier work Wolf relied on Internet forums to find the incidents he used, he now says that in more recent work he finds the scenes himself on GSV. I’m not sure why he finds this necessary or necessary to mention.

Also interesting – and perhaps it may one day be tested in court is his claim quoted here that because he actually photographs the screen, chosing which part of it to include in the image, he somehow creates something that belongs to him.

There are I think two good reasons why he is wrong. Firstly that copyright law would seem quite clear that if the work on screen is copyright of Google any reproduction of it will also be covered by their copyright. Secondly that Wolf’s work is essentially a mechanical reproduction of an existing work and lacks the artistic intent that is necessary for any new copyright to be created. Or interesting pictures.

Brassai & Tony Ray Jones

Thanks to American Suburb X for posting an interview with Brassai by Tony Ray-Jones that I first read around 40 years ago in Creative Camera magazine where it was published in the April 1970 issue.

Although I’d long had an interest in photography, at least since the start of my teens, money in those days was more than tight and in my family every halfpenny had to be accounted for. A twelve exposure black and white film developed and contact printed cost around half a day of my family income and was made to stretch over two years of our annual weeks at a seaside boarding house or with relatives in the country.

Then came the sixties and I was busy with other things – being a revolting student, getting degrees, getting married – and there was still no money and even less time for photography. It was only in my final year as a student, taking a training course for teaching that I could begin to indulge my interests, managing to spend most of that year playing in the university’s TV studio, taking courses in media studies (from the guy who had more or less just invented it), photography and film alongside my required teaching studies. AlsoI met a couple of real photographers, and, in the library, came across a rather strange magazine, Creative Camera.

The next year I was out in the world and earning money (if not huge amounts) as a teacher rather than scraping along on a student grant, and I bought a cheap USSR made camera and enlarger, and set up a temporary darkroom in the kitchen of our flat. And took out a subscription to Creative Camera, ordering too all the back issues that were available. Although the Zenith B and suitcase enlarger are long gone, I still have those magazines on the shelves behind me, along with most of the other issues until its sad end around the end of the century.

In the main the interview concentrates on the history of Brassai’s career and his view of the history of photography, interesting because of his part in it. I’m not sure how much of it was new information, but certainly most of it has been repeated by many others, including myself, in writing about Brassai.

Perhaps my favourite sections are those in which he talks about his attitudes to photography and to art, and in particular one section in which this remark appears:

I think that there are photographers who compose very well but who have no understanding of life or human things. There are others who have much human understanding but no feeling for form. I feel that it is important to have both because one must convey a living thing with strong composition.

Happy World Photography Day

I started off World Photography Day early for me, not only taking a picture but printing it out as a card a delivering it to the client (my wife) before 9am. Not a great picture of a rose but one that had more or less immediate use.

I only remembered it was World Photography Day a few minutes later when I read my e-mail from Shahidul News. Daguerre process had been announced by the French Academy of Sciences on 9 Jan 1839, but it was on 19 Aug 1839 that the French government made a gift of the process to the world.

Or at least to parts of it. Perhaps the reason we don’t make much of this celebration in the UK is that ‘the world’ for the French did not include us, and Daguerre patented the process here so those wishing to make Daguerreotypes in England had to pay for a licence.

This, along with our imperial need for Britain to have invented everything, doubtless contributed to this country always regarding W H F Talbot as the true inventor of our medium. Hearing about Daguerre’s announcement he rushed out some details of his ‘photogenic drawing’ and presented them within days, although it was not until a couple of years later that the calotype, almost certainly the first workable negative/positive process was introduced.

Now of course we have largely abandoned the whole family of processes that descended from that branch and perhaps even in the UK can acknowledge the priority of the French pioneers – Nièpce as well as Daguerre.

Shahidul News comes from photographer Shahidul Alam, the founder of Drik, and also on the blog is an interview between him and Shehab Uddin, which you can also read along with Uddin’s photographs of Dhaka’s pavement dwellers on the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund site.

In it Alam desribes “Driks photography-philosophyin telling rich and diverse stories without compromising the subjects humanitywe just had to create a whole space for ourselves. And now we are telling our own stories.” Drik really is an incredible and inspirational story and has led to a tremendous volume of great photography dealing with important issues across the majority world. You can follow some of the links in Alam’s blog to see some of it.

Photography may have started in France (and England) and perhaps came of age in the twentieth century in Europe and the USA. But now much of the more interesting work is happening elsewhere.

Anyway, I’m going out to celebrate the day by telling some more stories.

Mike Russell (1953-2011)

I was sorry to hear the news of the death of photographer Mike Russell who I know both as ‘Mike’ and as ‘Minimouse’ although I never knew why he had adopted this alias as there was nothing ‘mini’ about him, except perhaps his ego. In a profession where there are too many prima donnas, Mike stood out as a guy who was always concerned about others, always had a smile on his face and a welcome, someone it was always a pleasure to meet when photographing events on the streets.

Mike persuaded me to overcome my opposition to the ridiculously authoritarian ‘media policy’ of the Climate Camp and spend a day on site as one of the media team at Blackheath, and it was largely due to his efforts that despite the anti-media hysteria of some campers that there is such a good photographic record of what were some of the most significant environmental protests in the UK – and I should really have listened to him earlier.

Our last exchange only three months ago was a minor argument and ended in a typical suggestion from him “let’s get together over a beer and talk about it”, but sadly we never did. I and others will miss him on the streets.

More about his career in photography and aspects that I was unaware of, particularly his early adoption and pioneering of digital photography on the EPUK site, and his pictures on his website, including some from Climate Camp – in what he described as “An unashamedly self-indulgent collection of photographs that I’ve enjoyed taking” – are certainly worth a look.

Covering Tottenham

An article by Jason N. Parkinson and Jess Hurd, No Refuge Between Bricks and Batons, on the DART website gives a real insight into what it was like to be there (and why I’m glad I wasn’t.) Don’t miss the link to Jason’s video on the Guardian site, and also Jess’s pictures which I mentioned a couple of days ago in my piece about why I wasn’t there. The Guardian also ran a piece about covering the events on Tuesday, London riots: photographers targeted by looters, by Lisa O’Carroll and Caroline Davies.

Our Prime Minister, spurred on by mad Liberal Democrat MP for Wells Tessa Munt, is calling for the press and TV to hand over their images to the police. Neil Young in Keeping photographers and reporters safe in riots on the Up To Speed Journalism site clearly makes the case both on the grounds of the safety of journalists but perhaps more importantly on the safety of democracy for keeping to the procedures established by parliament in the 1984 Police & Criminal Evidence Act, (PACE) which defined our pictures and reports as “special procedure material” which to access police need to go to court and show is necessary for a specific case involving a serious crime. It truly is a valuable defence of a free society against our becoming a police state.

Usually I try to stick more or less to photography, but I’m finding much of the political comment about these events sickening. I’m not condoning what happened, certainly not in favour of lawlessness on our streets. But I think it is important to try and understand why it happened, and in particular why it happened now. The most interesting interview of all those I saw was by Darcus Howe on the BBC, notable not just for what he said and his attitude, but also for the ‘establishment’ response from the interviewer, which you can see dissected on a YouTube clip by Cenk Uygur from ‘The Young Turks, ‘the largest online news show in the world.’

These are not the first riots (or insurrections) we have seen in the UK. It’s a matter of record that they have all occurred when the Conservatives are in power and at a time when cuts were being made. Academic research confirms that such policies increase the chances of various events of this type, so ignore the writers and politicians who deny any such link. They are ignorant or lying or in some cases both.

Perhaps the most stupid comment I’ve read was that these events can’t be linked to the cuts, because government spending has actually gone up in the past year. Statistically it is inept, as the overall figure hides the cuts that have already been made because of extra spending in other areas, but surely even these commentators should have noticed the protests that have already taken place. Most important for the current events have been those over the loss of EMA from September for 16-18 year olds in full-time schooling, and over the increases in university fees. The protests at the end of last year were full of young people – and importantly in the earlier demonstrations they were subject to kettling, charges by police horses and often fairly random violence by some police.

I’ve photographed protest on the streets for many years, and in particular worked on the streets of Tottenham, Brixton, Peckham and most of the other areas of London that have been in the news. For what it’s worth (and certainly it’s worth rather more than the ignorant opinions of many of our MPs) the underlying issue is one of justice, or rather injustice.

The flashpoint this time appears to have been riot police attacking a 15 year old girl who asked them questions about justice outside a police station in Tottenham and was answered with batons. Behind that was the shooting of a man in a taxi, who we now know had not fired a shot – as police at the time told the press. Behind that were many, many deaths in police stations, in prisons, in a protest, in a police panic over terrorism and more; hundreds if not thousands of deaths where police and our legal establishment have hidden the truth, stretched out investigation for years and finally failed to deliver justice.

Of course that isn’t all. There are companies who pressure employees to work in hazardous situations or without proper equipment or training, leading to injury and death at work, with seldom any justice. Bankers who have been bailed out by the taxpayers and gone on to get bonuses greater than most of us earn in a lifetime. Property developers with doubtful deals and links to politicians. People getting honours who deserve jail.

Or looking at the other side of things. Silly prosecutions against peaceful protesters – such as those involved in the UK Uncut occupation of Fortnum & Mason. Protesters who get sentences out of all proportion to their minor offences – and now the same thing happening in courts to rioters, with magistrates using remand in custody for minor offences, as well as some ridiculous sentences.

People should be fined, or imprisoned or given appropriate jail sentences on the basis of what crime they have actually committed, not because courts want to make a statement. There have been some serious crimes – such as the burning of shops – and these deserve serious punishment, but most of the arrests have been for much more minor offences. Young people, particularly when drunk and led on by others in the heat of the moment often do pretty stupid things (like setting fire to cacti) and we should not be over-hard on them. Justice and not revenge needs to be the basis of how people are dealt with – and what is happening at the moment is likely simply to increase people’s feeling that they live under an unjust system, and to increase the likelihood of another Tottenham.

No Justice, No Peace is a popular chant at some protests, and one which I think we need to take seriously.

These are views that have very much been influenced by the events that I’ve photographed over the past years and the people that I’ve met doing so. Tomorrow I’ll get back to the photography.

Out Of Touch

I don’t have a smartphone and I live 20 miles out from the centre of London. I only heard that things were kicking off in Tottenham when there was a short (and it turned out later rather misleading) item on the radio news as I was thinking of bed. By that time my quickest way to get there would have been a couple of hours on my old bike and apart from the fact that it would have exhausted me to ride around 25 miles in the middle of the night, I thought everything would be over even if I did make it. I was tired, had drunk a few glasses of wine and bed was the only option.

I’d been sorry to miss the vigil at the police station earlier in the day, but again I’d only found out about it at the last minute. I’ve photographed community demonstrations against the police at Tottenham before. But if I had gone doubtless I would have taken my pictures and gone home after an hour or so, several hours before that peaceful event ended and well before the trouble flared.

Sunday morning the news was all over the Internet, with even some decent coverage on Sky, though it took the BBC a while to really catch up with what had happened. Friends of mine had posted on Facebook in the early morning that they had got home safe (if some were rather bruised) after a busy night, and I saw some of their pictures.

Everyone was expecting further trouble and I wondered vaguely about going to see what was happening. Earlier in the week I’d asked a friend if he’d like to come with me to photograph a couple of events that day, one not far from Tottenham, but he was busy with other things and I’d decided not to go on my own but to do other things. I thought briefly about changing my mind, looked at the weather forecast and decided there were things I could more usefully do at home.

It was almost certainly a sensible decision. When things get a little tricky on the streets you need to be in touch and to be with other photographers. A smartphone really becomes as essential as a camera, and at times if it can take a halfway decent picture you would be better off using a phone than a camera. Possibly it won’t be too long before DSLRs are relegated to history and the standard kit for photojournalists and press will be a videophone. And I did get some essential work I’d been putting off for a while completed.

Of course I knew that many of my colleagues – particularly those in the London Photographers Branch of the NUJ would be out there on the streets covering the events which were rightly a matter of great media interest. I’ve always seen my own particular niche on My London Diary as covering the events that don’t make the news, and to try and make them into news, or if not news to write them into our history. One of my pictures from an earlier demonstration against police in that area, when I was one of the few (if not the only) photographers present on a bleak winter’s day became part of a national museum display.

The best set of pictures I’ve yet seen from the events were by the Chair of the NUJ London Photographers’ Branch, Jess Hurd, working for Report Digital, remarkable both for their drama and their clarity. Apart from everything else they do show the remarkable capability of current DSLRs in low light; phones still have a long way to go.

These pictures came as no surprise, as so often her work does stand out from the crowd (and there are plenty of other good photographers in the crowd.) Until 28 August you can see her show of “10 years of intrepid work”… involved in people’s struggles for dignity and freedom around the world”, ‘Taking the Streets – Global Protest‘ at the Usurp Art Gallery in Harrow (close to West Harrow Underground, open Thursday to Sunday 2-7 Free admission.)

d’Agata Interview

Thanks to Jim Casper at Lens Culture for his tweet mentioning the interview with Antoine dAgata at Gomma magazine, which is worth a read. One of the people he mentions is Joan Liftin, who I met some years ago when I attended a Charles Harbutt workshop at the late and lamented Peter Goldfield‘s Duckspool. Joan sent me a copy of her book ‘Drive-Ins‘ which I reviewed on About.com when I was writing for that site, and is unfortunately no longer available. d’Agata goes on to mention Nan Goldin, who I wrote about at some length for About, and later produced a revised and updated version of my piece on her, Nan Goldins Mirror on Life for this site .

One of the last posts that I wrote for About, back in May 2007, was about Gomma Issue 3, when I noted:

there are some good interviews, with Daido Moriyama, Anders Petersen, Boris Mikhailov and Boogie. Along with Lise Sarfati, they also provide some great photographs, and there is plenty of other interesting work in the issue, for example the ambrotypes of Stephen Berkman (I mentioned his work with the Camera Obscura briefly eighteen months ago) and the highly personal black and whites of Danish photographer Jacob Aue Sobol.

Those names were all those of people I’d written about on About, and in the original there were of course links to those pieces, some short, but all linking to other information on the web. I’m still upset that the New York Times (the owners of About.com, at least when I dismissed) not only took all that resource off line, although without constant upkeep much of it would now be out of date, but more that there is still nothing on line which really replaces what I did. It was more or less a full time job, and I could not continue it without the financial support that About.com provided.

Gomma too has changed. Here is what it says on the web site:

Gomma Magazine, the printed six-monthly publication, was edited in London, printed in Italy and distributed worldwide through major distribution companies.

Unfortunately the publication of the magazine has been put on hold due to logistic issues, – however a relaunch plan for the magazine is currently being discussed. Also there are talks to create a small publishing house of high quality photography.

The Online platform Gommamag.com continue to be a valuable resource for photographers and visual artists. Its use and registration is free, although some new pay-per-entry structure has been installed so to avoid duplicate and flooding of the same info.

Having looked at the site, I’m not too sure what Gomma is, but there is certainly some interesting material there.

Stand Your Ground

On the 21 June, as a part of the 2011 London Street Photography Festival, six photographers, each accompanied by a videographer was sent to film in different areas of the City of London.

As it says on YouTube:

Some used tripods, some went hand held, one set up a 5 x 4.

All were instructed to keep to public land and photograph the area as they would on a normal day. The event aimed to test the policing of public and private space by private security firms and their reaction to photographers.

All six photographers were stopped on at least one occasion. Three encounters led to police action.

You can see what happened in some detail in the film ‘Stand Your Ground‘.

It had a particular interest to me for several reasons, not least because I know the photographers concerned and the places they were photographing in. They were all places where I’ve photographed over the years, mainly without problems, though I’ve come up against some of the same attitudes that these six people met. Mainly I’ve had problems when I’ve been in places we might think were public – walkways and estates that are open to the public but are actually privately owned. Years ago, so long as you didn’t hang around too long, you were unlikely to be noticed taking a few pictures, but now our every move is covered by surveillance cameras. There is a certain irony in the fact that because we are continually being pictured we can no longer take pictures.

© 2004, Peter Marshall
But a security guy is just walking away after telling me I can’t take pictures here in 2004.
I’d stood my ground an told him to go and check the law with his manager, and surprisingly he walked away to do so – I think he was new at the job!

What is positive about the film is the behaviour of the City of London police when called out by the security guards when the photographers refused to stop taking pictures. There is perhaps just a little unnecessary questioning of the photographers but generally the policemen in the film are quite clear on the law and on the right of the public to take photographs in public places, and make the position clear to security.

I have a feeling that there are still many police forces around the country where there would be a different response, so the City force deserve some credit. But clearly photographers apparently still need to make an effort to educate the security firms and their employees at all levels.

A couple of years ago I suggested that we – perhaps through the ‘Photographer Not A Terrorist‘ organisation which has organised previous flashmobs – should organise a mass photoshoot in the city. I wasn’t thinking of half a dozen photographers, but perhaps hundreds (or even thousands) all coming into the city at the same time on the same day and making the point that we have a right to photograph in public places.

Personally I’d like to go further and try to establish a right to photograph in all places freely open to the public at those times when the public are allowed to access them freely, which would return our right to take pictures in the estates like Broadgate and places like Trafalgar Square. With increasing areas of public space no longer being truly public we need to fight to retain our rights. But perhaps we should go one step at a time and start by asserting those rights we already have by law but which others try to deny in practice.

A Host of Pictures

Having made our way around much of the London Street Photography Festival, Paul and I required some refreshment, and not too far away in Smithfield was the Rising Sun. It doesn’t have a great line in photography, though there are some pictures of the Samuel Smiths dray horses on the first floor landing, which perhaps might be considered closer to street photography than some of the work we had seen.

We tore ourselves away from there having put the photography world to rights over a pint and made our way past the Golden Lane estate to Honduras Street and the Host Gallery, which was not taking part in the LSPF, although Panos pictures which shares the building was one of the sponsors.

Packed into the fairly small gallery (apparently soon to be extended onto a second floor) was a show in its way as interesting as any in the festival, although also one that I find in some ways annoying, if not worse.

This was a photography beauty show, the Foto8 Summershow 2011, with 150 photos chosen from 2853 submitted “on single image impact alone” by the Foto8 editing team and then from these the overall winner chosen by four “illustrious judges.” Although I think it’s somewhat demeaning to the medium and insulting to photographers to judge and exhibit their work out of context in this way, I did actually rather enjoy looking at it. It was fun even if I’m not sure it is harmless fun.

You can see the short-listed 150 or so images on the wall at the gallery, where they are identified simply by a number, or in a slide show on the web. In some ways the web show is better than looking at them in the gallery, where they crowd the walls and screens from top to bottom and it’s very easy to miss some images altogether. You get a pleasant soundtrack, though if like me you sometimes pause to look at a picture for longer than the 3 seconds required to squeeze 150 into around 8 minutes it does rather mess this up. Some images look better on screen than on the wall, where the standard of printing isn’t always equal to the work, and if you rest your mouse cursor on the ‘caption’ link you actually get to see the photographer’s name.

There are of course also advantages to being at Host and seeing what we used to call the “real thing”, a rather debatable concept in this almost 100% digital age. A few are actually rather better prints than the web image would suggest, and you can buy (for a remarkably low £2) the small red catalogue that has every picture on its own page with the photographer’s name and caption. For the price it is also remarkably well printed – and again some of these reproductions improve on the wall prints. Also if you go along in person, you can, as we did, vote for the ‘People’s Choice Award’.

None of my 3 votes went to any of the four pictures selected by the distinguished judges (one of their choices wasn’t bad, but still not among my 3 choices.) I’d made my choice ‘blind’, without referring to the catalogue, and was surprised on checking after voting to find that two of my choices were by the same photographer and my third a picture I’d not seen before by a friend of mine.

I don’t think you can take either the short-listing or the selection of winners and runners up with any more seriousness than Miss World or the Eurovision Song Contest, though it is obviously nice for those who get selected and win the prizes. But the show does present an interesting cross section of current work by the kind of photographers who go in for prizes.

For a rather more interesting and more serious view of photography I can of course recommend Foto8 magazine which comes out twice a year and “is regarded as the most exciting photojournalism and documentary photography publications today.” Better still, become a Foto8 member.