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Sochi Project

Catching up with the various blogs I like to look at through their RSS feeds I came across a link on Joerg Colberg’s Conscientious to a video on Rob Hornstra which looks at his practice of ‘slow journalism’ and the Sochi Project with writer Arnold van Bruggen in particular.

Hornstra is a photographer whose work I’ve liked since I saw work he produced for his degree around 8 years ago. His photography is straightforward but avoids the obvious and has a quirkiness that appeals. Talking about a picture he was taking of a singer in a restaurant in Sochi (the venue in Russia for the 2014 Winter Olympics) he says that there was a little fan at the side of the stage and a prominent notice for the toilet, so he knew it would be a good picture. The piece starts by him saying that he’s a photographer – or at least that’s what people say about him, but he thinks of himself more as a storyteller.

After graduating Hornstra was working as a bartender, and couldn’t find anyone to publish his book so he thought about self-publishing, but found that to print 250 copies would cost him 7,500 – far more than he could afford. But a work colleague said he would like a copy of the book and would pay in advance and handed him 30 dollars, and that led to a book that was financed by advanced sales – it took just a few weeks to sell enough advance copies to be able to print.The next book sold out in advance in 3 days, and the one after than in hours.

It’s a rather more radical approach than publishing on demand, and one which also gets your work out to more people. Making a book on Blurb only demands that you sell one copy, and I suspect the majority of works produced in that way only ‘sell’ a handful of copies, all or nearly all bought by the person who made the book, although some of us do manage to sell a number to personal friends and others at exhibition openings etc.

250 copies isn’t a sensible print run for a photographic book, and I imagine that Hornstra produced the later works in larger numbers, and the clip shows him sending off around five orders for his self-published works on what is supposed to be a typical day.

Sochi, a five year or more year project on the city that is hosting the winter Olympics with writer van Bruggen, takes the idea further, asking for subscriptions to fund the project as a whole. For a small donation – 10 per year – you will get access to documentation about the project on areas of the web site unavailable to the public, but as ‘Silver’ donor of “100 per year you will not only receive access to the website. You will also receive all the publications produced by The Sochi Project, including an annual report, exclusively designed by Kummer & Herrman. We will inform you personally of exhibitions, readings and presentations related to The Sochi Project and you are welcome to attend any of these for free.” ‘Gold’ donors – at 1000 per year or more – also get signed prints and articles, and “After five years you could be the owner of a unique collectors item.”

I don’t think I have enough spare cash to invest in the offer, although I suspect that it could well be a good investment at either silver or gold level, given the rapid increase in prices that some very ordinary photographic publications have seen over recent years.

Personally too, I don’t see myself finding it easy to attract enough advance orders to publish my next book other than on Blurb, but you never know. Perhaps I should be thinking about taking subscriptions for my planned extensive series on the ‘Buildings of London’, a small sample of which are on one of my early (and badly written) web sites, on-line since 1996, with additions and minor changes in 1998.

Currently I’m still thinking about how to proceed in publishing this work, but I think there will be two series, one for the black and white images and the second on the colour work I took at the same time. It would be hard to organise the work any other way than by when I took the pictures, and I’m thinking, at least for the b/w that this might mean around 30 volumes selected from the several hundred thousand images I took over around 20 years. It’s a daunting task – as was my decision in the early 1980s that I would photograph “the whole of London”. I can’t claim to have finished it, but I made a pretty good stab.

Earth Now

‘Earth Now‘ opened at the New Mexico Museum of Art on April 8 and remains on show until October 9, 2011. Looking at the response of American (US) photographers to the environment, it starts with the classic work of Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter and goes on to look mainly at work created since 2000 by around 30 other US photographers. As well as familiar names including Robert Adams, Mark Klett and Bill Owens, there are many new to me and the show includes a wide range of approaches.

One that interested me more than most was the work by Chicago-based photographer Brad Temkin who has made series on residential backyards and gardens, including one on rooftop gardens. My particular interest comes because I’ve spent several days recently photographing gardens for a project in London, including one on a rooftop with a spectacular view.

I was reminded of the show by a post by Paul Raphaelson in his ‘Contemporary Landscape‘ group on Yahoo, who thanks Kirk Gittings for pointing the show out to him. Raphaelson is one of the photographers whose work is on the Urban Landscapes site, which has a number of his pictures from his Wilderness project.

It’s some time since Mike Seaborne and myself had time to update the Urban Landscapes site, and we often get requests from photographers wanting to add their work, although relatively few of them present suitable projects. But perhaps before long we will get down to running it more actively.

Lebanon Bans Altneuland

I have to admit not having paid a great deal of attention to the 2011 World Press Photo before today. I almost always go and see the show when it comes in London, and it is due at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall from 10 November – 29 November 2011. But although I always find some work of interest, the overwhelming impression is always one of déjà vu. Yet more blood and though it is vital that photographers document such things and that they appear in newspapers, magazines, TV and on-line, I’m often uneasy about treating such images as aesthetic objects on oversize display on a gallery wall.

But there are always some images, some projects that stand out, and one that I will certainly be looking for in November is by Israeli photographer Amit Sha’al, brought to my (and the world’s) attention by being banned in Lebanon – with the result that the WPP show there closed early.

You can of course see his work in the winners gallery at World Press Photo – it took third place in the Arts & Entertainment stories category. I find it slightly annoying that in the larger slide-show view there I can’t find a way to read the captions, which I think are essential.

On Sha’al’s own web site, you get a little more of the story behind the project Altneuland which these images are a part of. The idea came from the novel Altneuland, written in 1902 by Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian journalist who is widely regarded as one of the founders of modern political zionism and thus a father figure of the state of Israel, although he died in 1904. In 1896 he published Der Judenstaat, a pamphlet advocating the restoration of a Jewish state in their historic homeland of Palestine, and the utopian novel Altneuland six years later set out the great advances this could acheive – for both Jews and Arabs – over the course of a generation, with two travellers revisiting the new state after a period of twenty years and noting the changes.

The English translation, published in the same year was entitled The Old New Land, a straightforward translation from the orginal German, but the Hebrew version of the book came out with the title ‘Tel-Aviv’, later adopted for a new city now Israel’s second largest.

Herzl’s vision of a Zionist state was very different to modern Israel. His vision was one of a nation where everyone (men and women) would have equal rights, where Hebrew would be one of many languages and Judaism one among other religions without special status. It was essentially of a humanist and mutualist state and he wrote: “It would be immoral if we would exclude anyone, whatever his origin, his descent, or his religion, from participating in our achievements.”

Sha’al collected black and white photos taken in Israel from 1926 to 1979and found the exact locations where the pictures were taken. He then photographed the pictures in these locations, holding the prints in his hand (resting on a tripod out of shot to keep it still) fitting them back exactly into their place in a wider scene. He writes on his web site:

The photos portray 3 different times: the old black and white photos, the present colored photos and the time that has passed between capturing both photos.

The third time mentioned is not a visual one, but a mental and emotional dimension, filled in by the knowledge we have of the dramatic changes that have occurred between the two times.

The pictures were on show in Lebanon for a week as a part of the WPP display there before anyone apparently noticed that Sha’al was an Israeli photographer and the Lebanese censors demanded that they be taken down as Lebanon and Israel are still “in a state of war.” To their credit World Press Photo refused to comply with this ridiculous and unacceptable request, and instead closed the whole show ten days early.

Life Through the Lens

Smartpress are a US on-line printing company dedicated to producing a wide range of high quality prints flyers, postcards, booklets and more and they have a blog that describes itself as ‘Your #1 resource for graphic design, photography and print!’.

One of the regular features on it are interviews with leading commercially successful photographers and I found several of these interesting although I don’t always particularly like the work – which includes sports, wedding, travel and stock photography. One feature that I did find interesting that was linked from these is Hendra Lauw‘s Sharing Space with the Dead, black and white pictures taken at Manila North Cemetery.

But what actually brought me to the Smartpress blog was an ‘infographic’ based on questions that they asked these photographers about photography which they invite people to share on their blogs, and I’m happy to do so:

Click to Enlarge Image

Via:Online Printing

Most of the advice is pretty sound, if obvious, but there are some things I find interesting here. Lynn Michelle says “Shoot anyone and everyone that you know, in the best and worst light that you can find” and I think that’s great advice for anyone wanting to be a portrait photographer or to photograph people. First because too many people think the only reason they don’t get on as portrait photographers is because they don’t have access to the famous – forget it and shoot “anyone and everyone that you know.” Second because I’ve always liked to use light that was “wrong” or difficult and many of the most interesting pictures come from doing so. And with digital you have nothing to lose and the huge advantage of seeing the results straight away.

And on the subject of digital, it was interesting to see an almost unanimous vote for digital rather than film. I can’t agree with Kerry Garrison that film is better for learning how to really use your camera – if anything it makes the learning process much slower and more painful – which is why before we had digital cameras I was using video cameras and Photoshop as teaching aids for people learning to shoot on film. And I certainly see little point in schools of photography teaching out of date craft skills except for historical interest (let’s all try wet plate!) But I do rather wonder what digital cameras Scott Kelby was using in the 1990s.

But the single thing that struck me most about the answers was the 90% for Lightroom against 10% for Photoshop. Regular readers of this blog will know it mirrors what I’ve been saying here for some time.

Michael Ward (1929-2011)

I don’t think I ever talked to Michael Ward, who started as a freelance in 1958 and worked as a photographer for the Sunday Times for around 30 years starting in 1965, but there are a few of his pictures I recognised when I read about him and his work.

Ward, who died last month, once calculated that he had covered 5,500 assignments over his career. In some respects he seems a rather typical British press photographer from an earlier age where things were rather less pressured, and, as Ian Jack notes in his obituary in The Guardian, Ward “wrote that he knew ‘as much or as little about the processes of photography as a decent amateur’.” Jack goes on to comment: “Technically, he knew he was far from accomplished. Aesthetically, he was never sure what separated a good picture from an indifferent one.”

Ward got his first picture published by borrowing a Rolleiflex from a friend, racing driver Stirling Moss, and taking pictures at the track while Moss was driving; one of them, a picture of Moss’s wife Kate, was published in Women’s Own.

You can examine a little of Ward’s photography on his website , where I think you get a very good idea of him from the stories he tells about some of the pictures and the people he photographed. He met and photographed many people I would have liked to have met, though they are not always fine pictures, but occasionally he captures a great moment.

He also handled some difficult stories, in particular the Aberfan disaster, but some of his best pictures are those of children which you can see in his ‘Portfolio 6’, in particular one that stands out from the rest of the images on the site, of five young kids – three white and two black – posing with their bogie and a tricycle in front of a Gents Hairdressing Salon on a grim street in Manchester in 1969. Although it is titled Racial Tension – Manchester they seem to be playing happily together and directing some large grins at the camera. It’s a picture I’ll remember him for.

Ward wrote an autobiography which included more than 200 of his pictures, entitled Mostly Women and it was published by Granta in June 2006, leading to a renewal of interest in his work and several more exhibitions.

Photographers Protest

I didn’t quite photograph myself, but for once I was as much taking part in a protest as photographing it, along with around 50 other photographers in an event organised by ‘I’m a Photographer Not a Terrorist‘ (PHNAT), an organisation set up a couple of years ago to protect photographers and the right to photograph largely as a reaction to a Met campaign which had involved posters and ads suggesting that anyone with a camera was suspicious and should be reported to them.

We’ve seen case after case in recent years of people being stopped, searched, arrested and otherwise harassed, often entirely illegally, by police and also by security personnel, and quite a few have made the national news. But the PHNAT protest was more about the way that more and more areas open to the public in our cities are now privately owned and patrolled (and under CCTV surveillance) by security guards with an unreasonable attitude to people taking photographs.

One of the more stupid and indefensible acts of political pique in British politics of the last century was the abolition of a London-wide authority in 1986, after which the headquarters of London government, County Hall was sold off to the sorry mix of hotels and commerce that now occupies it. Eventually at least some kind of sanity returned and we now have a Greater London Authority and a Mayor (if sanity doesn’t really describe the current incumbent) but it did not have a home of its own. The odd curate’s egg of of a building it hires for its home sits in a private estate called ‘More London’ with a huge area of public walkways on which photographers are not welcome (although thousands of tourists walk through it and photograph Tower Bridge.)

My biggest problem on the day was finding a tripod to take with me as the event organisers suggested. I do have a rather large and heavy one which used to support my 4×5, but I wanted something that was reasonably portable. It’s years since I’ve seriously used a tripod – and high ISO digital performance makes it less and less likely for my normal work, but I knew I had something smaller – but bigger than my plastic table tripod – somewhere. Eventually I ran it to earth in a box on top of my wardrobe.

I decided that the 10.5mm fisheye was going to be a very useful lens on the D300, making it possible to show the photographers and also the oddly-shaped City Hall, where a little spherical effect would hardly be noticeable. At a pinch in some images I could get in Tower Bridge as well. Of course I did some pictures with the 16-35mm on the D700 as well.

This is a 17mm picture at f20 to get plenty of depth of field, as I’m holding my own placard again. No depth of field scale on the lens, but I thought set at 2m most of the universe should be in focus.

Photographers City Hall Flashmob

Burke and Norfolk

Last night at a small meeting of photographers, one of my friends came with a copy of the recent book, Burke + Norfolk (published by Dewi Lewis Publishing) and I was greatly impressed by it, truly a handsome volume, and some stories to tell about an event he had attended with Norfolk at Tate Modern where work from it is currently on show in the Level 2 gallery until 10 July 2011. A second show of the work opens at the Michael Hoppen gallery in Chelsea tomorrow (May 13) until 11 July 2011.

Much though I like Norfolk’s work, to me the major figure in the book is John Burke, whose life and work I wrote about at some length in a feature ‘Baker & Burke: Photographers of India‘ in 2004, the eighth of a series of features on 19th century photography in India unfortunately no longer on line, linking to work by Burke in the British Library collection and elsewhere, and as I made clear, very much dependent on the researches of Omar Khan published in History of Photography in Autumn 1997 as John Burke, Photo-Artist of the Raj and his 2002 book From Kashmir to Kabul, a generous amount of which is available on line in a Google preview, which unfortunately does not include what Khan describes as the only known photo of Burke himself.

I don’t own the book, but it would be interesting to see, if only because Norfolk on the Hoppen site is quoted as saying “There are no photographs of him. In a couple of sketches we see him from behind, but never his face; that has to be more than just reticence, surely?” There are two sketches in the preview pages, but I think the answer to the question is in any case not really. Many photographers dislike being on the “wrong” end of a camera, and of course photography was not the ubiquitous medium it is now. I have very few pictures of my own ancestors of that period, and unless people took care to caption and conserve them most images of the time are now anonymous. Of course, Burke’s son Willie was also a photographer – having started as his father’s assistant, and might perhaps have photographed his father, but the only images of his I know about are a few in the India Office collection and they would be unlikely to include the family snaps.

You can of course see more of Norfolk’s (and Burke’s) work from this project on Norfolk’s own web site, which also has a transcript of a conversation between him and Paul Lowe about the project, and you can see him at work (not with a wood and mahogany camera that he mentions in that piece but with something more modern and possibly digital) in Afghanistan in a Tate video on YouTube. Also worth listening to is a series of 5 short audio clips of him talking to Jim Casper on Lensculture, along with 30 of his pictures from his series Forensic Traces of War.

The book is also I think a good example of the kind of production values that “proper publishing” can achieve, the kind of volume that makes me think there is still something that they can do that Blurb and other publishing on demand can’t, or can’t yet, match.

In The Black Country

© 2007, Peter Marshall
The New Art Gallery, Walsall, 2007
My previous post reminds me that not far up the road from Birmingham – you could indeed take the Soho Road and head for the M5 to get there – is Walsall with its fine New Art Gallery (I visited it in 2007) and showing there until 19 June 2011 is a show I wrote about when I attended its Paris opening last November, in a very different building.

Brian Griffin is giving a tour of his show and will undoubtedly “share his passion for the Black Country” as well as illuminate his photography on 4 June at 2pm – places are free but you need to book at the gallery on 01922 654400. It should be popular.

Birmingham Under Gods

A new issue of then online magazine lensculture is always worth reading, even if at times I don’t appreciate everything in it. For me the outstanding feature in the current issue is
Under Gods: Stories from Soho Road by Liz Hingley, the result of a two year project on the many religious communities -Thai, Sri Lankan and Vietnamese Buddhists, Rastafarians, the Jesus Army evangelical Christians, Sikhs, Catholic nuns, Hare Krishnas and others along a two mile stretch of a main road in inner city Birmingham.

It’s a project that obviously results from an in-depth approach, getting to know and be accepted by the various groups, and the images have a quiet strength, a spirituality that very much befits the subject matter, along with a fine use of colour. There are 40 images in the feature and every one was freshly seen, and the whole set work together beautifully.

Other features that interested me include Face to Face:Georgian Photography (you can see more work from the show here) and The Social Networ and Gazi Nafis Ahmeds pictures of same-sex couples and tough kids on the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh. You can see more of his photography on his own site.

Deaths in Libya

The news that photojournalist Tim Hetherington has been killed and three other photographers injured in Misrata after being hit by a RPG is shocking but hardly suprising. In the confused situation there, any photographer is clearly risking his or her life.

Although I heard it first elsewhere, probably the most reliable source for up to date information is the British Journal of Photography, which as I write has been unable to confirm the stories that Chris Hondros has also died from his injuries, but many other sources seem to be reporting his death too. Guy Martin and Michael Christopher Brown were also injured, but they are said to be ‘wounded but fine.’

Hetherington worked for Vanity Fair and you can read more about him there. I wrote about him briefly when he won one of his three World Press Photo awards, and mentioned his own web site, though it may currently be hard to access.

You can read more about Hondros on the New York Times Lens blog, as well as on his own web site. There are more links for both photographers and more information on the BJP site.

Yesterday I reported for Demotix on the protests in London for and against the UN intervention in Libya, and I think today’s news makes me a little more convinced that action was necessary, although for various reasons it has not gone far enough.