Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Different Views

Bromley isn’t a town I visit often, out on the south east fringes of London, although I have been there a number of times to take photographs, both when I was carrying out my extended project ‘The Buildings of London‘ – when few areas within the M25 escaped my attention completely – and, more recently working on the project on May Queens.

Bromley is in the centre of the London May Queen realms, and I had hoped to get a set of my pictures of May Queen events ready for the group show that I helped hang in Bromley Central Library this lunchtime, but the first three months of 2011 have been too crowded with protests for me to get seriously to work on that, and instead I’m showing half a dozen of my Paris 1988 pictures, half the set I showed last year at the Juggler as my contribution to ‘Paris – New York – London’ and less than a tenth of the pictures in my Blurb book Paris 1988.

It’s a pity, since quite a few pictures for the May Queens were actually taken in the park just a few yards from the library entrance, where, after a parade through the town by five May Queen realms from the surrounding area – West Wickham, Hayes, Hayes Common a, Shortlands and Bromley Common, together with the London May Queen and her retinue, several of the local May Queens are crowned by the London May Queen in ceremonies that had their genesis around a hundred years ago.

I’m still hoping to produce a book on this, having narrowly failed to get a major museum to put on a show a few years ago. It would be nice to get it out for this May, but I think we are perhaps in for a spring of discontent that will keep me too busy, and I have a very important engagement out of London that will keep me from this year’s major event at Hayes.

The show continues at Bromley Central Library until Tuesday 19 April and is open during normal library hours. We are having a fairly informal opening next Wednesday – 13 April – from 6.30-8.30pm and everyone is invited to came and have a drink, see the work and meet most of the 8 photographers.

Although I’m not showing work on protests, there are some black and pictures from recent London events taken by Sam Tanner. Around the corner from them are some very different, almost abstract, images from a derelict fort by David Malarkey.

The group is formed of members of London Independent Photography who attend regular monthly group meetings to show and discuss their latest work. One of a number of LIP groups, this one used to meet in Twickenham, fairly close to my home, but has since moved away, first to Thornton Heath and is now in West Wickham, and I’m now rather an irregular visitor.

Bankers Prize

I arrived at Baker St a little early for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (DBPP) exhibition opening last night – held for this year only at at Ambika P3, in an area that looks like a disused engineering lab in the basement of the University of Westminster – while the Photographers Gallery is rebuilt. It remains on show until 1 May 2011 and the award will be announced on Tuesday 26 April 2011. After the London showing it will go to Berlin and Frankfurt.

So rather than hang around outside, I took a little walk around the area. Paddington St was where I first took a portfolio of prints to show a gallery owner many years ago. He spent perhaps half an hour looking through the small pile of work I had taken, enthusing about some of the pictures, looking through it again and again, before finally saying to me that he would love to show it, but it wouldn’t sell and he simply could not afford it. And in Chiltern Street I could look in the windows of the various closed galleries and shops, including the Atlas Gallery, showing the work of Herbert Ponting (although its web site doesn’t appear to mention this at the moment.)

But in general it’s a street full of what I regard as totally inessential shops, but also one which curiously seemed almost identical to most of the work on display for the DBPP when I finally arrived there. In what I think was an upmarket florists there was an impressive paper sculpture which came back to my mind when looking at the single over-large photograph of his work by paper sculptor Thomas Demand in the show, while many of the windows included advertising imagery that reminded me of the work of Roe Ethridge and Elad Lassry, although it was perhaps on average somewhat slicker.

Despite most of the rather empty wall space (and some empty of ideas even if there were pictures on it), the opening was an enjoyable evening, meeting a number of old friends and talking about many things, while drinking a few glasses of white wine. But there was really very little of photographic interest. If I felt for a moment that this represented the work that had “made the most significant contribution to photography in Europe, between 1 October 2009 and 30 September 2010” I would sell the cameras and take up fretwork.

It was very noticeable on the night that the only work that attracted any real interest on the wall from the large crowd was that by Jim Goldberg. His is the only photography of any significance in the show, although I think his approach in ‘Open See’ often defeats the object of his enterprise, making him more a scrapbook compiler than a photographer. As I’ve written before it is work that is very much better in the book Open See than on the exhibition wall. I was disappointed that some of what I feel are the best images from the 147 on the Magnum site from this long-term project which

“follows refugee and immigrant populations traveling from war-torn, economically devastated and often AIDS-ravaged countries to make new homes in Europe. Goldberg spent four years documenting the stories of Greek refugees from Iraq, Somalia, Congo, Ukraine, Albania, Russia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China, Sudan, Kenya, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Bulgaria, Palestine and Moldavia.”

His is the only photography of any significance in the show, and certainly the only project which would be worth supporting with the £30,000 prize money. But prizes such as this are always awarded more on grounds of fashion and art politics rather than merit. They create public interest in the medium while at the same time degrading it, and do nothing to stimulate really new creative work – for which the money would be much better spent on perhaps 5 or 10 smaller bursaries for emerging photographers or new projects.

Demand, as I’ve said and he has said, isn’t a photographer, but a sculptor who makes sculptural constructions to be preserved as photographs, with the sculpture then being destroyed.

As I also noted in Deutsche Börse Ditto when the short list was announced,

It would indeed be good to have a major prize for photography in the UK, and to have a major gallery that supports photography as well as eating a large portion of the public photography budget.

This comment that came even more firmly to my mind as I stood looking at this show and thinking of the tragically misguided decision of Arts Council England to cut funding to Side. If you’ve not signed the petition yet, please do.

April 1 Winogrand

On Joerg Colberg‘s Conscientious web site you can read all about the forthcoming publication of ‘The Complete Winogrand‘. Perhaps what really made me sure I was reading it on April 1 was the suggestion that he only took 300,000 pictures!

But elsewhere on the web – or if you take a trip to the Quad Gallery at Derby before May 8 – you can really see some of Winogrand’s colour street photography. I first came across these on Facebook, but I think it’s better to look at them on Nick Turpin’s sevensevennine blog, where they are accompanied by the answer given to Turpin by Joel Meyerowitz about Winogrand’s attitude to colour (the pictures are from Meyorwitz’s personal collection.) In essence I think Meyerowitz suggests that it was the problems at the time over colour printing that led to him not making a great deal of this work, although he happily showed slide presentations of it.

It is an interesting set of 20 images that clearly relate to the concerns of his black and white work, and I think – though I’ve not tried it – that several of them would probably be better pictures in black and white, while others clearly need and use colour. There are two of his colour images, dated ca 1963, in Bystander, but I think neither is a particularly good example of his work.

Looking at his newly published colour pictures, perhaps the first thing that hits me is how poor the colour is, that faded filmic look (which I know some love.) For me it is a barrier that I have to get over to see some of these pictures, though there are one or two it suits rather well. I’m not sure why they are like this, but if it reflects the prints that he had made back then I think he was generally right to stick to black and white.

Prix Pictet

I’m pleased to announce I was wrong.

In November, in the post Pictet Growth Shortlist I wrote:

I probably shouldnt condemn any of them to oblivion by naming them as my favourite for the prize, and in any case I think it should receive rather though more than my quick first impression. Particularly because it isnt just a matter of a single image, but really of a set of pictures, and that does need more consideration. But Mitch Epstein has long been one of my favourite contemporary photographers, Guy Tillims work I always find of interest and the show by Taryn Simon was one of the best in recent years at the Photographers Gallery. The only work that really appeals that was new to me was by Nyaba Ouedraogo. So probably those four are now the outsiders in the race!

Though when I actually saw the work on the wall in Paris I did change my mind a little, perhaps because I wasn’t entirely happy with the printing of Epstein’s work and there was one really interesting image by Burtynsky (see Thursday Afternoon in Paris 3e for my visit to the show and elsewhere.)

But despite my recommendation, Epstein has won, and you can see a slideshow of his 12 images, along with his accompanying text on Lensculture. The first image there, of Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond, West Virginia 2004, is the one that really caused me to have doubts when I saw it in Paris; to me the colour just looks wrong, particularly the grass (and I’m viewing it on a colour-corrected screen with a background image of a grassy hill next to a window that looks out on a lawn.)

I’m actually pretty sure it is wrong, because Mitch Epstein states in his Lensculture piece that he and his wife, writer Susan Bell, have created a web site to share this project, What is American Power? And the first image on this is also Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond, West Virginia 2004, but in subtle and beleivable (and probably realistic) colour. While the Pictet print – both for real and on the web – more resembles the kind of early inkjet prints we used to get before people had sussed out things like colour management.

It’s worth looking at the work on the web site, though I found the performance with swirling prints between each picture incredibly maddening, and really had to grit my teeth to click the next button each time. I can’t tell you how many pictures there are or get any real idea about the work as a whole because I couldn’t force myself to sit through more than around a dozen images. I can’t see any point in this kind of demented web design.

March 26

I don’t usually write here about the posts that I make on Demotix, preferring to wait until I have had time to take a longer look at the pictures I took and to sort out more of them for My London Diary. But it may be a little while before I get those from Saturdays events in London on-line here, while I spent most of Saturday night and Sunday writing stories and uploading images to Demotix.

Saturday was a long day for me, and not without its problems. Everything started fine and I arrived at Camberwell Green in time to watch the final preparations of the ‘Armed Wing of the TUC‘ who then proceeded to march to Kennington with their Trojan Horse, tank, Spitfire, the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse, armed Lollipop Ladies and the large ‘Capitalism Isn’t Working’ banner.

We walked to the South London Feeder March for the TUC demonstration (though for reasons best known to itself the TUC disowned all of the feeder marches) at Kennington Park, a location of some importance in the history of the labour movement, where there was a short rally before the couple of thousand or so there marched off to join the main march.

I left them after a few hundred yards to take the tube from Kennington into Charing Cross and went to Trafalgar Square. I should have been there before the TUC march according to the published timetable, but they had started early and were already streaming past when I arrived. So I spent an hour or so taking pictures of the marchers and the other things happening around Trafalgar Square then – and also took some more pictures of the march which was still passing around four hours later when I was at Piccadilly Circus. But both times included I probably saw fewer than a quarter of the approaching half a million on the march, so I called my Demotix feature Glimpses of the TUC March.

Then I saw the black bloc of anarchists taking a different route and followed them for the next 45 minutes or so. They were not really doing a great deal most of the time I was with them, and the police seemed largely to be ignoring them. I read a newspaper report that they “broke through” a line of police at the bottom of Regent St, but most of them simply walked by on the pavement which the police were not blocking, and the police made little or no attempt to stop the few who kept on the road.

Many of the protesters walked round police line on the pavement

A couple of police followed the group up into Regent St, and then down Conduit St. One anarchist account says they took this route as police were about to kettle them on Regent St, but there was really no sign of this happening, with just a few police in the distance. They let off a few fireworks and flares, and on Bond St a few made a rush towards a branch of the RBS, but the dozen or so police standing outside soon pushed them away. A few light sticks from placards were thrown and some paint sprayed, but little else.

On Oxford St they made a more deliberate attempt to rush into Topshop, but there were quite a few police as well as security men inside the shop. A lot of paint was thrown and there were scuffles as the police arrested one young man. I took a number of pictures of police holding him on the ground and then moved slightly back. Suddenly I felt a thump on my chest and found I had been hit by a ball of yellow paint, probably aimed at the police just behind me (although later some photographers were certainly deliberately targeted.)

I kept taking pictures for a few minutes – although both cameras were splattered with paint, there was none on the lenses and they were still working fine. Most of the photographers around seemed to be taking pictures of me now, and I’ve seen one on Flickr that gives a good idea of what I looked like. before retiring to a nearby public convenience and wiping and washing off as much paint as I could. You can see my pictures of the black bloc in Anarchists March on Oxford St, although events with them did get a little more interesting after I had left them.

Though I’m not sure why so much media attention is directed towards this very small group – really just a few hundred – and their activities. Though I would like it if the BBC and others actually took the trouble to find out who was who and what things were about, having just watched a video in which the BBC presenter refers to them as anarchists, Socialist Workers Party and UK Uncut. Or is it a deliberate policy to misunderstand and mislead?

A ball of emulsion goes a very long way, and although I wiped as much as I could off my jacket, the surface of my jumper, both cameras and elsewhere I gave up with a great deal of paint still on me, and feeling rather uncomfortable with a a slab of wet paint in my vest, shirt and jumper soaking my chest.

I spent the next hour or so with the very different UK Uncut who were holding peaceful protests, an outdoor comedy show and a party in and around Oxford St. Being covered in yellow paint is quite a good ice-breaker, but I hope to avoid it in future. There are a few pictures and some text at UK Uncut Party and Protest on Oxford St.

The I left with one of the groups that was making its way to a protest at an undisclosed location (following the red umbrellas) which turned out to be Fortnum & Mason’s, although I didn’t get there. At Piccadilly Circus I was feeling a bit fed up and decided it was time to go home and clean up, though I did hang around for a bit and take pictures of the TUC marchers still passing by.

Despite some of the stories in the press and broadcast on radio and TV, the UK Uncut action at Fortnum & Mason remained non-violent and the protesters were very careful to avoid any damage inside the store. Outside was apparently a different story, with other protesters having what several people have described as a riot, with some injuries to both protesters and police.

But when, by arrangement with the police, the UK Uncut protesters filed quietly out of the store, they were all photographed, handcuffed and arrested, and most at least were held in custody for around 24 hours before being released.

These peaceful and restrained protesters against tax avoidance and evasion made up the majority of arrests by police over the whole day. Few if any of those rioting on the streets were picket up, and I think most of the other arrests followed an unprovoked attack by police on people partying in Trafalgar Square later in the evening. I wasn’t there but have read the tweets and comments of friends who were, as well as what appears to be the most reliable account of the day’s events yet to have appeared in a major publication, by Laurie Penny in her New Statesman blog. Here she comments:

“With the handful of real, random agitators easy to identify as they tear through the streets of Mayfair, the met has chosen instead to concentrate its energies on UK Uncut – the most successful, high-profile and democratic anti-cuts group in Britain. “

This is a piece that has clearly hit a number of nerves among those who weren’t there and show little or no understanding of what is actually happening on the streets of Britain today, but although I may not always like her style, most of what she writes rings true.

I was I suppose lucky that I was only hit by paint. One of my colleagues was hit by a brick, needing nine stitches – and was lucky that it just missed his eye – and another had his camera smashed.

I’m not sure I’ll ever get all the paint off of my gear, but it still seems to be working fine. Given that they were already pretty worn it isn’t a great problem. I did have some anxious hours when the D700 stopped working after I’d been scrubbing it a bit too much and some water had penetrated, but it recovered after I’d dried it for a few hourse3 in front of my computer fan. Most of the clothes I was wearing are ruined, although I’ll perhaps keep the paint stained jacket and trousers for covering protests where similar things might occur.

Hughes Leglise-Bataille (1968-2011)

Photojournalist Hughes Léglise-Bataille along with six others, including his wife and sister-in-law were killed when the van in which they were travelling in Brazil was involved in a head-on collision with a lorry.

I first heard of Hughes Léglise-Bataille when his pictures of Demonstrations in Paris won the first prize for News Blogs in the NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism contest in 2007 for a dramatic silhouette of a protesters on the fence in front of a floodlit Assemblée Nationale. It was just one of 30 pictures in a set still on Flickr taken at a series of demonstrations against a new French employment law in March/April 2006.

I remember later reading a feature which mentioned his decision to abandon investment banking (a career for 13 years in Sao Paulo and New York) and become a professional photojournalist. From October 2009 worked for the French Agency Wostok Press, where you can see more of his work, including a set of recent pictures from Tahrir Square.

He continued to contribute his pictures to Flickr and to take an active part in discussions of the ‘Hard Core Street Photography‘ Group, where he was also known simply as ‘Hugo’.

You can see more of his work on his Photoshelter site, which features some fine photojournalistic images as well as some of his street photography, which I find of rather less interest.

30 For 2011

It’s always interesting to look at PDN’s annual ‘Top 30‘ choice of ‘New and Emerging Photographers to Watch‘, and interesting too to look at them a few years later, by which time a few will have become well-known and others we will have heard no more of.

This years batch include rather more than in previous years that I haven’t heard of before, and perhaps includes rather fewer photographers than usual who I think we will hear of in later years. The choices come from nominations by a fairly long list of people, (including few who I know and slightly fewer whose opinion I respect) which I think have – as you might expect from PDN – a strong US and in particular New York bias.

You can read what is at times an interesting discussion of the ‘Top 30’ on the A Photo Editor blog, though I’m not sure that I see many of those selected as “artsy, young award-winning, British hipster-ish types of shooters” and there is rather too much attacking people who make comments rather than reading what they are saying.

Empty Cup at Photographers Gallery

Thanks to Jeremy Nicholl who writes the Russian Photos Blog which I’ve often linked to here for a Tweet mentioning
Empty Cup: A Case of Copyright Infringement, posted by Vancouver based John Goldsmith on his blog. Goldsmith is a freelance photographer and currently has work in the Format festival in Derby. (This year seems very much the year of street photography with another festival in London and the show at the Museum of London; but too much is happening on the streets for me to photograph for me to find the time to get to Derby.)

I won’t go into detail about the Goldsmith article, as you should go and read it, but it involves the unauthorised use of his picture showing a woman in the window of a coffee shop reading a book by the Photographers’ Gallery and the architects O’Donnell + Tuomey responsible for the rebuilding of their premises (see my Zombies in Ramilees St.) Goldsmith registered his copyright at the US Copyright Office and posted the picture on Flickr where it quickly became one of Goldsmiths most popular images with “14,737 views to date.”

So far all he has received have been very unsatisfactory responses from both parties, with the PG director expressing some concern but passing the buck to the architects – despite the picture concerned having been displayed very large in the gallery window (where someone saw it and told Goldsmith) – and the architects refusing to accept any responsibility despite having made the image available to various magazines and web sites which published it.

I don’t know if Goldsmith belongs to a union or professional association, but had a similar situation occurred with one of my own pictures I would be pleased that I was a member of the union, who would support me in a legal case and I would expect to get a very welcome financial settlement. No reason why he should not do so without such support, but professional advice and support does make such things easier – and would almost certainly result in a faster and more beneficial result.

It’s an image that reminds me of pictures by Walker Evans, a man with a great love of windows, and indeed of others by various photographers over the years (even I think some of mine) but is a fine image, and I remember seeing it on the ‘Londonist‘ web site and thinking how inappropriate it was to be used in a feature about a gallery that over the past years has avoided photography of this genre like the plague. Of course, I suspect with it’s new-found high profile (and impressive audience figures at the Museum of London show) that if the PG were up and running it too would be jumping on the street bandwagon.

Back on the Russian Photos Blog, Dear Photographers, Lady Gaga Wants The Copyright On Your Work. Oh, And By The Way, So Do We makes interesting reading on a related topic, although I think the answer is simply to stop photographing ‘celebrities’ of all kinds. But I suppose some photographers need the money, and it is about all some publications use these days. Frankly I’d rather do weddings, which I think generally offer rather more scope for creative photography. Though I’ve only done three and none as a paying job.

6 Billion Ways at Rich Mix

6 Billion Ways at Rich Mix yesterday seemed to be a very vibrant event, although I only popped in for a few minutes, largely to see the photography there, including my own. Saturdays are working days for me and I covered two other events in London for ‘My London Diary.’

The bar area at Rich Mix with one of my pictures on screen

But I wanted to see how they were using the 40 pictures I had sent them from My London Diary, and I was pleased to walk in to the busy ground floor bar area at the centre of the event as one of my images appeared on a giant screen. But I was disappointed to realise that they were only showing half of the pictures I had sent – the full set is on the web for those of you who were unable to attend or missed half of them because you were there. I didn’t have time to stop and try and find out they were only using half of them, but it was particularly galling not only because I had spent most of a day getting the missing work ready for the project but because the half that they had lost had many of my favourite pictures in it, including this image I really like of Climate Rush and NoTRAG at Heathrow.

I’d met the Climate Rushers, including Tamsin Omond at the centre of the picture above – at Marble Arch earlier in the day when I was photographing the ‘Million Women Rise‘ march, and told her about the showing, including the picture above.

The projection included work by two other photographers, one with pictures taken at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia, which I would have loved to have photographed – and there were a couple of pictures I really liked. I’m sorry I can’t remember the name of the photographer and when I checked this set isn’t even mentioned in the programme. The other images were by Gareth Kingdon, ‘On the Sidelines‘, showing “South Africans left behind by the free market” in the Blikkiesdorp relocation camp, and included some 360 degree panoramas, which although interesting didn’t really project too well on a normal aspect ratio screen. I’d seen some before in print and on the web where they work rather better.

I felt all of three bodies of work on show would have benefited from some related text putting it in context. It did look as if those putting the show together had some difficulty with text – perhaps because of the software they were using. I’d offered to supply my work as a normal presentation, but they apparently couldn’t cope with this, so I had attached a brief captions along the bottom of each image which were visible, but I had also supplied a very short explanation about my work that was not used. Of course there were a few of my posters around the venues.

The sequence of three sets of photographs was also very short for the event – and most of the people sitting in the area had probably seen it go round dozens of times. It would haven been better perhaps four or five times the length, with work from more photographers.

Other exhibitions included Celebrate Peoples History, a collection of posters by artists in the US-based collective Just Seeds, which “remember and celebrate the struggles of ordinary people against injustice and for dignity, decent livelihoods and liberation from oppression” and Liberate Tate, which documented their interventions in major cultural institutions such as Tate Modern and Tate Britain against their acceptance of sponsorship from BP and Shell.

Also showing on some smaller screens around Rich Mix were a loop of photographs presumably taken for some of the organisations supporting the event (such as Friends of the Earth and WDM.) With a few exceptions, most were rather disappointing, with too many pictures simply concentrating on showing the t-shirts from the organisation concerned in various events and locations – often rather more PR than photography. Several of the organisations behind the event do employ excellent photographers to show their work around the globe and far better could have been made of these displays.

I wish I had more time to stay and take part in the full programme of this large event (it ran from 10am, including events at three other local venues and ending with a final plenary at Town Hall from 7 -8pm then a party after at Rich Mix until 1 am), but I had work to do elsewhere.

World Press Photo?

In Whats wrong with global photojournalism? Russian photographer Vladimir Vyatkin “ruminates on results from the worlds top press photography contest“, the 2011 World Press Photo, and I have a great deal of sympathy with his diagnosis:

International photojournalism is seriously ill, suffering from an acute cerebrovascular disease complicated by cardiac failure a common diagnosis for the many mortals who suffered significant physical and psychological stress as a result of the past years natural disasters, revolutions, ethnic conflicts, terrorist acts, government provocations and social and domestic tensions.

Of course you can avoid all that nastiness by sitting at home in front of your computer and walking around the world on Google Street View – and still win an honourable mention at WPP. It’s a prize that I think went to the wrong person – it was after all produced by those guys at Google – and for the wrong work, which clearly has nothing to do with photojournalism. You can read what Michael Wolf (who I think is otherwise an interesting photographer) thinks in an interview with the British Journal of Photography.

I saw his show show of work from Street View in Paris, and didn’t feel it was worth writing about, and still feel much the same about it. You can see more on Wolf’s own web site, along with some other work which I find of much more interest.

So my advice to all who want to succeed next year is to throw your cameras away, invest in some good ray-tracing or virtual reality software and start working on some pictures for WPP 2012. Or may be they will go retro and you should be in your darkrooms making photograms about the Arab revolution.