Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

On the Buses

London’s first Street Photography Festival is now in full swing, and last night I was at the opening of what is perhaps the most impressive of the several shows, although not one that has received any great publicity. Seen/Unseen at the Collective Gallery down an side alley at 15 Camden High Street, a few yards from Mornington Crescent station is for various reasons an interesting show, and is open 7 days a week until 17 July, although a display of 8 of George Gerogiou’s images is also on nearby bus shelters until 5 Aug.

It was Georgiou’s images, taken looking out of bus windows, that held my interest, displayed on a grid of six screens in the gallery. At least during the opening, the light level in the gallery shining on the front of these largish monitors seemed to me at least a couple of stops too high for optimum viewing, more designed for the large prints by Mimi Mollica around the rest of the space.

Part of the interest was in recognising many of the views captured by Georgiou, but the work also reflected the near-invisibility of the photographer, recording unobserved from the window of the bus. Of course he is not the first to take advantage of this kind of privileged position (and most of us city photographers have done the same) but he has persevered at it in a way that few others have.

His work incorporates the reflections and irregularities that come from shooting through glass which is seldom clean, and although at times this gave the images a greater depth, there were others images where I found it simply annoying and wished he had worked harder to avoid these – as some other photographers have done. But then we would have had different pictures.

© 2011, Peter Marshall
Mimi Mollica
I found Mimi Mollica‘s images taken of people inside buses somewhat less gripping, at least in part because of their technical qualities. I felt they would actually have looked rather better on computer screens than as the large and rather garish blow-ups on the wall, and certainly felt they looked considerably better from a distance than close to, and I think better in my photographs than in reality. But others will certainly disagree.
© 2011, Peter Marshall
Grace Pattison, Brett Jefferson Stott and others listen to the photographers talking

Both Brett Jefferson Stott, the founder/director of the London Street Photography Festival and the two photographers spoke at the opening, and there was a large and appreciative audience including a number of other photographers. Brett in particular talked a little about the difficulties of photographing in public, which I think can easily be overstated. So far as buses are concerned I do of course have a little form, producing a set of black and white pictures on them which was shown at the Museum of London back around 1991.

On my way home I had a long time to wait at one of the bus shelters for the 168, and so had plenty of time to photograph one of Georgiou’s images on display there. And as often on my bus journeys I did take a few pictures out of the window, as well as one of my fellow passengers.

Another show in the LSPF not to be missed, which I’ve yet to see but which looks to be of great interest is Walter Joseph‘s ‘Street Markets of London in the 1940s‘ which is at the British Library until 31 July. It’s good to see the value of this work being recogised, I think promises to be rather more interesting than the much hyped Vivian Maier show.

A few more pictures from the opening will be on My London Diary some time in the next few days.

War Over War Photography

I’m not a war photographer, and probably I panic far too easily ever to have made a good one. The worst thing I’ve been hit by taking pictures is paint, though there have been some near misses from bricks, bottles, bags of flour, shoes and other handy urban missiles and over the years I’ve received numerous and sometimes all too convincing threats of violence both at close range and occasionally on-line by people who “know where you live.” And a few rather nasty moments, as when when guy was dragged back by his BNP mates after promising to do something totally anatomically impossible to me with my camera.

Like most photographers who cover demonstrations I’ve been hit, pushed and punched and spat at, mainly by the police,* but occasionally by the rabid right or fringe anarchists or even bulky men with Northern Irish accents and dark glasses. But usually when trouble starts I like to try and cover it from the sidelines rather than get stuck in, to think carefully about whether I want to go there.

Unlike most other photographers now covering such events in the UK I refuse to carry or wear a helmet, a decision that would not be tenable in most other countries, but then I only work in England, and seldom even outside London.

But though I don’t do it, anyone with an interest in the history and practice of photography has to have an interest in what has been an important strand in our medium, at least since Roger Fenton went to the Crimea. As well as Fenton, I’ve written in the past about a number of the great war photographers – Robert Capa, Gene Smith, Don McCullin, Stanley Greene are just a few that come immediately to mind.

So I’ve been following with great interest the controversy aroused by the ‘The War Photographers biggest story: themselves‘, a controversial point of view posted on the Duckrabbit blog on July 1, and in particular the responses to this from a variety of points of view. A follow-up post on July 4, with the improbably long title Christopher Morris, Shut up, stop thinking for yourself and kneel before the almighty war photographers pictures. Rafiqui., Err, maybe not tonight Chris highlights a perhaps rather tetchy and perhaps ill-thought out comment to the first piece by the one of our leading current war photographers, Christopher Morris of VII, and a response to that by Asim Rafiqui. Again interesting reading, with a growing string of comments. Really quite a war!

Duckrabbit truly has form in raising interesting questions about photojournalism, for example with Faking it how to win a World Press Award but get banned from a wildlife comp for life last February, and radio documentary producer Benjamin Chesterton and photojournalist David White have produced some great work. As well as the blog, their website also has some fine features, for example The Other (side of Sweden) which shows the work of photographer Joseph Rodriguez with young Muslims growing up in the city of Malmo.

* I take that back – the police have yet to spit at me.

Hawk’s Wings Clipped

Jay Maisel isn’t on my list of favourite photographers, but must rate as one of the better commercial photographers of the twentieth century, and there is certainly a great deal to admire in his portfolio even if very little if anything I would want to emulate. We obviously think and work in very different ways.

One subject we seem to agree on is copyright and I was pleased to hear that he had reached a settlement over the unauthorised use of one of his images – not my favourite picture of Miles Davis – by Andy Baio, some sort of internet entrepreneur who made a fortune selling a web company to Yahoo a few years back. For the USA it seems a rather reasonable cost settlement for what was a clear breach of copyright.

But apparently Maisel has become the target of a hate campaign spearheaded by someone who aims to put a million pictures on Flikr. I’ve only seen a hundred or two – mainly his most ‘faved’ images – by the pseudonymous Thomas Hawk, but they do seem to epitomise the worst of Flikr, and include what look like a few third-rate attempts to emulate Mr Maisel’s work that only increase my admiration for the originals.

Jeremy Nicholl in The Photographer, The Entrepreneur, The Stockbroker And Their Rent-A-Mob on his Russian Photos blog has yet another of his excellent pieces of research and reporting about Hawk and Baio, suggesting why Hawk should have an interest in stirring up a hate campaign against Maisel.

Perhaps what he fails to mention is what I think may really be the true motive. Jealousy. Even if Hawk/Peterson realises his million images on line there won’t be one that comes up to Maisel’s standards.

Anyway, read it and if you agree with Nicholl’s and my estimation of the integrity of this stockbroker employed by Stone & Youngberg in San Francisco – and at whose address his web site is registered – you too may want to click on their web comment form and tell them what you think.

Nice one Jeremy!

That Riot Kiss

Here -if you’ve not already seen it – is another great post from The Russian Photos Blog by Jeremy Nicholl giving his ten reasons why Esquire magazine was bonkers to suggest it was possibly the best photo of all time.

10 Reasons This Isnt The Greatest Photo Ever certainly made me laugh, and in the 10th – Its not even the best riot kiss photo ever – he links to a picture by a friend of mine who recently began to collect his old-age pension too, who took a better one in 1990 along with many other fine images of the Poll Tax riots.

I was actually rather surprised to find that Esquire was still alive and publishing, and really apparently doing commercially quite well, although not the cultural leader it was for a while in the 1960s, and having taken a brief look at it online from the link in the feature I can’t see myself bothering to go back again.

Of course we have been getting more of our own riots again in recent months and perhaps on Thursday – J30 – there will be more opportunities for photographing some kisses in unlikely situations, although I think it is only Tory cabinet ministers who are really getting worked up over the event at the moment. If they keep up their attacks they may provoke something but I think it more likely later in the year.

In Search of Atget

I published In search of Atget, my fifth book on Blurb this morning. The cover uses a slightly cropped version of the image above, and you can view the whole book on the Blurb site using the link above.

My introduction in the book is rather long to quote in full, but here are a few selected paragraphs that make my intentions at the time clear:

In the summer of 1984 I returned to Paris in search of Atget. It wasn’t one of the re-photographic exercises that were then in vogue. I had little interest in recreating the pictures that he had taken perhaps 60 years earlier; I was in search of his mind, wanting to know more about why he had photographed in the way he did, both on the broader level of his overall project and very much in the detailed way that he approached each image that he made.

…

My project was an attempt to discover more about Atget as a photographer and also a deliberate homage to him. The following year I put on a small show of these pictures at the college where I was teaching, ‘Paris Revisited – A Homage to Atget’, which attracted little attention.

…

I deliberately did not take books of his pictures with me to Paris and seek out the exact same views – I wanted more to think how I might photograph in the same sites (and others) rather than reproduce his images, although some turned out to be very similar.

This project was important personally not only for what I learnt about Atget but for the work it prompted me to carry out in the following 15 years on the streets of London. Without the inspiration of Atget which this project strengthened and focussed it would not have happened.

There are pictures in the book that turned out very similar to some of his, and those familiar with his work may recognise them, but I recognised that I was working from a very different cultural background. As it happens I don’t think I did photograph the Eiffel tower, but I did very definitely go to places and take pictures that had they existed he would have hated, such as this:

But here’s one I think he might have appreciated more:

The images in the book are nearly all from new scans of the negatives, with all the 55 or so larger images very carefully cleaned up – many of the negatives have suffered from tiny gelatin gobbling insects lunching out on them over the years. The images on this page come from earlier scans made for my Paris Photos web site, which has most of the others in the book on display as well as others from my visit to Paris in 1984 in the section Paris Revisited.

Royal Snap

I’ve strong republican sympathies, don’t have a great regard for the photographic sensibilities of the London National Portrait Gallery and am not a particular fan of Thomas Struth (though I found some of his early work of interest) so it perhaps isn’t surprising that I don’t greatly appreciate the recently released image of two elderly royals perched on a settee in the Green Drawing Room at Windsor Castle. Struth has in recent years seemed to concentrate rather on producing rather boring images of rather boring people, and this one runs true to form. Both of the sitters look pretty fed up with the whole thing, just waiting to get the photographer out of the way so they can change into something more comfortable and watch the gee-gees on the telly.

And although I don’t have a great pedigree as a commentator on fashion, isn’t it about time Philip saw his tailor, as he seems to have grown a few inches since those trousers were cut?

But it is actually cutting, or rather cropping that made me mention the picture at all. I’ve not seen the original, only the reproductions on two national media web sites. In the Independent, where you also can read one of the silliest commentaries on a photograph I’ve come across for ages, all highlight detail is missing from the image, which reproduces the fireplace at the left edge rather nicely and makes everything else look blown out and less than sharp.

In contrast Sky News decides to crop the picture drastically and fairly closely around the two seated figures, changing the format as if they can’t think of pictures except as 16:9. What was a picture of a rather grand room with two old people in it becomes just a picture of two sad old people, losing the whole point (such as it is) of Struth’s image. And although they’ve kept the highlights, they’ve added a blue or cyan colour cast.

I don’t think it is likely to be one of my favourite images, but it – and photography – deserves a better press than this.

Thanks to Jeff Moore who posted in The Picture Editor on Facebook bringing my attention to the image in The Independent.

Jiro’s Café Reopens

Jiro Osugas installation, Café Jiro, in the Flowers Gallery in Cork St, London in May 2009 was for me certainly the wittiest art show I’d seen in years, and you can get some idea of it from my pictures in this blog and on My London Diary.

Jiro’s Café has now returned to life, with a significant difference: what was then a café in an art gallery is now an art gallery in a very real café, the Queen’s Terrace Cafe, just off the Finchley Road a few steps from St John’s Wood station. Rather than just walking around a gallery you can now enjoy morning coffee, a fine lunch or afternoon tea while surrounded by a unique work of art.

One whole wall – the longest display space in the small café – is covered by a panel that was in the previous Flowers show, but there are three large works for the new installation along with a number of smaller pieces – including three in the smallest room.

I spent a very enjoyable evening at the opening, talking to many old friends and meeting new. Most were finding a great deal of fun in sorting out the answers to a gallery quiz by Jiro, exploring a few of the historical and art-historical references in his work.

Drinking in the café you can find many famous figures, including Marx, Lenin, Che, Mao, the Queen and a ‘famous frog’ I’m not allowed to name.

Mireille Galinou, who had the idea for this cultural cafe, with arms folded

The Queen’s Terrace Café is described by Mireille Galinou who conceived and runs it as a cultural café, and has a programme of events which include:

a talk ‘Food in Art’ by Professor Michael Kauffman, former Director of the Courtauld Institute (Thursday 14 July, 6.00pm – £6.00 includes a drink)

a walk on pubs, hotels and houses in St John’s Wood led by Mireille, whose book on the history of the area, Cottages and Villas: The Birth of the Garden Suburb, was published by Yale University Press last year (Thursday 25 August, 6-8.00pm – £6.00 includes a drink)

Places for these events should be booked in advance, either at the café, by phone (020 7449 2998) or at queensterracecafe@bitinternet.com – places are limited and tickets are non-refundable.

The exhibition quiz, devised by Jiro Osuga, is available during the show, and on Thursday 25th August he will be there for a ‘Quiz Night’ when the answers will be revealed and prizes awarded for the best entries – entry £2.00 on the door.

There are also two special projects taking place based on the local area.

Gardens: I am working with Mireille Galinou on a documentary project where I do the easy job of taking photographs – mainly panoramic – of gardens while she works on “their basic historical pedigree… and their owners’ aims and recollections” for a publication and exhibition at the Queens Terrace Café.

Studios: Photographer John Chase is working on a second project on artists’ studios in the area. Judging from the many blue plaques I’ve noticed walking between gardens there may be quite a few – and the area seems to have been particularly popular with sculptors.

Like You’ve Never Been Away

© 2009 Peter Marshall
Paul Trevor looking worried at the opening of a small show of his work in
the Museum of Childhood, Bethnal Green, London in 2009 – more here

One book that I can definitely recommend and that won’t break the bank is Paul Trevor‘s ‘like you’ve never been away‘, published by The Bluecoat Press in Liverpool and accompanying his exhibition of the same name at the Walker Art Gallery from 13 May to 25 September 2011.

Back in March Paul Trevor sent me a link to this BBC Merseyside feature, and somehow I simply forgot to write about it. It’s a good film that is worth watching, with Paul talking (and walking,) meeting some of those he photographed in 1975 and showing them his pictures, and he also talks about the “great loss to society” that we can no longer photograph children on the streets in the way he could then.

I was reminded about it again by a review of the book on the Online Photographer blog, which also prompted me to buy the book. You can read a little bit more about it and see a couple of pictures of the double page spreads there.

Being a lazy (and fairly poor) Londoner I haven’t made the trip to Liverpool for this or any the other events which are a part of Liverpool’s first ever international photography festival, Look11, which is nearing its end, which means I’ve missed quite a few shows and events I would have liked to have seen. Of course most things come to London some time, but perhaps this is unlikely for Trevor’s Liverpool show, though there is still plenty of time to go and see that.

There are around a dozen of his pictures from Liverpool in the 1982 Open University publication ‘Survival Programmes‘, a record of what is I think the last major documentary project in the UK, carried out by the ‘Exit Photography Group’, Nicholas Battye, Chris Steele-Perkins and Paul Trevor in the mid-70s, and most at least of them are in this new publication, with considerably better reproduction. They include what is one of his best-known images, Mozart Street in Toxteth transformed into a beach on a Sunday afternoon, kids playing in bathing trunks as a woman gleefully aims a hose at a kid been held aloft by a man in the doorway of these terrace houses opening directly onto the now wet pavement. Paul spent 6 months living in a flat in tower block in the area and getting to know and photograph the people there.

‘Survival Programmes‘ has long been out of print, but Trevor kept some boxes when it was withdrawn from sale and I bought a copy from him a few years ago, at rather less than you might expect were it published now. For him it is simply a way to give people who take an interest in his work the opportunity to have the book, although he would have preferred some of the other books he proposed to publishers to have been published. His approach is totally different from some photographers today who deliberately create shortages with limited editions to enable them to sell off copies later at high collector’s prices.

Trevor is I think an example of a photographer who was too good for Magnum, too focussed on what he wanted to achieve, and it is good to see his work getting a little attention now, though a proper showing of his work on London is long overdue (as I’ve often told certain museum and gallery curators.)

You can, as the Online Photographer instructs, with some slight difficulty buy ‘like you’ve never been away‘ on Amazon, as although it says ‘temporarily out of stock’, the ‘3 new‘ link takes you to a set of listings that includes the publisher, who charges a reasonable £2.80 for delivery bringing the total to £12.79 (as well as to another dealer already charging twice the price.) My copy arrived around 36 hours after I made the order. You could possibly save the postage by ordering from Amazon, who are currently out of stock, but I don’t know how long that might take.

The images are well reproduced – much better than in ‘Survival Programmes’ and there are many great pictures I’ve not seen before. My only gripe is that all the landscape format images are printed on a double spread across the gutter, a design decision I’ve seldom found acceptable in photographic books, and which probably means your copy will soon fall to pieces as keep viewing the images, although the book does seem well-made. It is a decision that contributes to the low price while still allowing the landscape images to be roughly the same size as a 10×8″ print, but I still don’t like it.

As the quote on the back cover by Annie Lord, of National Museums Liverpool says:

“This is an extremely warm and moving book about childhood, life and Liverpool in the 1970s.”

Grab a copy while you can.

LSPF Gets Early Start At Photofusion

The London Street Photography Festival is billed to be in July and includes some interesting events, including a show of pictures by Vivian Maier, the Chicago nanny who only became famous after her death in 2009 and who I wrote about here last December. My thoughts about her work then included:

Interesting though her work is, it does not appear to have been innovative, and has long lost any ability to alter the course of our medium. At best it can retrospectively broaden and enrich its history.

The show at the German Gymnasium from 1-24 July (entry £3.50) includes 48 black and white and colour prints and “a selection of her fascinating silent films” about which I know nothing. A talk on her by John Maloof, one of those who discovered her work, has already sold out, and other events in the LSPF are also likely to be popular – this really seems to be the year for street photography.

The big exhibition in London remains ‘London Street Photography‘ at the Museum of London which opened in February and continues until 4 September 2011. In its first week people were queuing for more than an hour to see it, and museum attendances were I think around ten times those at the same period the previous year. With such a long run it isn’t crowded now, but still attracting a decent audience.

Photofusion kicked off the festival early with On Street Photography: A Woman’s Perspective which opened on 10 June and continues until 22 July with pictures by Anahita Avalos, Polly Braden, Tiffany Jones, Johanna Neurath and Ying Tang, the three London-based photographers with pictures from London, pictures from Mexico by Tehran-born Avalos (who now lives in Paris) and pictures from Shanghai by Ying Tang now living in Germany.

I spent some time at the opening in pedant mode wondering whether that should have been ‘Five Women’s Perspectives‘, as the photographers have little in common, and rather more time wondering whether ‘Five Perspectives by Women‘ would have been more accurate still. But in the end what is important is whether the pictures are worth looking at.

It doesn’t even matter if much of the work in this – and the Museum of London show – is not really what I would consider street photography, although at least The London Street Photography Festival (unlike the museum show which hedges its bets by quoting several) does have a working definition which Photofusion quotes:

un-posed, un-staged photography which captures, explores or questions contemporary society and the relationships between individuals and their surroundings.

The work that interested me most was something that I would probably call a documentary project rather than street photography by Tiffany Jones, a Canadian who lives in London and has photographed for a couple of years in a particular London bar.

The pictures are largely an upfront look at the relationships between people and the gestures that show these, and they also illustrate the advantages of digital photography in working in low and mixed light situations. Until recently, work like this would almost certainly have been in gritty black and white (as for example in Cafe Lehmitz by Anders Petersen in Hamburg in the late 1960s – one of the photographers Tiffany and I talked about at the opening) and the differences that this creates are interesting.

More pictures from the opening on My London Diary.

The event was also an opportunity for me to try out my new toy, the Fuji X100, which might almost be an ideal camera for street photography (if only it had been a 28mm f2 equivalent instead of the 35mm.) I’m still having problems sorting out the different views and so on, and I missed a few pictures, but the camera coped pretty well with extremes of contrast and some very different light levels in different areas of the gallery. Hints are emerging on the web of the first firmware update that will deal with a few little annoying glitches too – like the difficulty at times in getting it to wake up when it has gone to sleep.

I’m still finding it hard to force myself to spend around £70 on getting a lens hood, but it really is essential, not for preventing light shining on the lens but for keeping fingers out of it. Fingerprints on the lens gave a few of these shots rather more flare than I would like. I’m hoping China will come up with a cheap alternative via e-Bay for this, or at least for the metal ring that includes a filter thread. Rather than the expensive Fuji machined aluminium hood I’d quite like to fit a cheap flexible rubber one, as these avoid both vibration and reflections when shooting though windows and cost less than a fiver.

Odo Yakuza Tokyo

Last November Anton Kusters was in London to talk about his project on the Yakuza, the Japanese crime family that runs the streets of Kabukicho, the red-light district in the heart of Tokyo. He had won the 2010 Blurb Photography Book Now Editorial Prize for 893 magazine, a report on his progress on the project every six months. I was impressed by his photography and his approach to the project, and wrote about it here on >Re-PHOTO, also linking to his blog on the project.

I’m not quite clear what the difference between a magazine and a book is – and there is a long history in photography in volumes that bridge that gap, with for example some issues of Aperture magazine have also been sold as books. But clearly Kusters saw 893 as a part of the process of which his first book, Odo Yakuza Tokyo, is a finished product. He writes about the difference here.

Like many photobooks, this is a fairly small edition, with a print run of 500 copies and is being sold through burn magazine, the web site stated by him and Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey in 2008 to encourage and support emerging photographers, and for which Kusters is creative director, as well as running his own web and interactive design agency based in Brussels. In the interview with Kusters, published on June 17, Harvey predicts the book will sell out in 2 weeks and he is probably not far off, so if you want a copy of something that will most likely become a collector’s item, load up the web page and hit the ‘Buy Now’ button without delay.

At 50 Euros it is not a huge expense, but enough to deter me from adding it to my already too extensive collection of photography books. Although some are now relatively valuable I decided long ago I was not interested in buying books (or anything else) as an investment, but tried to limit myself to those I felt would be important working tools. Perhaps I’m too old for this to be so. You can see 36 images from the book on the web page, and read more about the project on the web. It may well be something you want to buy, and almost certainly a good investment.

This whole project is actually one that makes me feel the photographic book is no longer as important as it was. Although Kusters would very much disagree, I think it is the magazines and web content that are actually important and the book at the end is really almost superfluous or perhaps attempting the impossible in trying to be a summation of the work, possibly ending up almost relegated to the function of a full stop at the end of a sentence. Which we could at least sometimes do without

Although I’ve not seen the book, I also get the feeling that it might for me be a little of a disappointment after the experience of seeing the photographer giving a live presentation of an incredible project. At the time I felt very strongly that it was and would make a fine audiovisual presentation, a DVD rather than print.