Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Street Photographs

Yesterday The Observer added a great set of 12 pictures by Picture Post photographer Kurt Hutton* to its web site. In November 1939, shortly after the start of the Second World War, he was sent to Wigan along with two other photographers to photograph George Orwell’s Wigan. (Thanks to EPUK for the link to this in their weekly newsletter.)

It is perhaps surprising that Hutton doesn’t feature in the London Street Photography show, but it does contain some fine work by his fellow PP contributors Humphrey Spender and Bert Hardy, along with an unusually slack image by Felix Man. Also notably absent are Thurston Hopkins and John Chillingworth, and given that this is not really a ‘street photography’ show, perhaps Bill Brandt might have been there too. But of course there wasn’t space to include everyone.

But these Wigan pictures strike me as remarkable for several reasons. Not least that although there was a war on, the original PP caption to one of them included “The authorities asked to have all pictures left with them to be checked up. When the batch was forwarded on to us, this and other pictures on these pages were missing. They were considered unsuitable. We made new prints of some of those missing pictures.”

These pictures evoke their time very powerfully, and remind me of my own childhood. A dozen years later I might have been one of those urchins sitting on the street, although the street on which I grew up was a little more suburban and slightly less bleak. But we played on it much as they did. Two things have changed – there was little traffic and no parked cars, and parents who give their children the kind of freedom that we enjoyed would now be prosecuted for neglect.

But would a photographer dare to take similar images now, when photographing children has become such a suspect activity? And certainly any photographer taking pictures of the ‘Air Raid Precautions’ would expect to attract the attentions of the law. One unfortunate amateur photographer, physics teacher Rik Rutter, even got stopped by police for photographing a tourist attraction, the London Eye, in January, although now, as the Amateur Photographer report states he has received an apology from Commander David Zinzan of the Met police who confirms he should not have been stopped.

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*You can see a wider range of Hutton’s work on the Getty Images site which includes the Hulton Picture Library containing work by all the Picture Post photographers, and a search brings up over 3000 pictures. There is also a smaller selection, concentrating on celebrities and a few of his best-known images, available on the GettyImages Gallery site – search for ‘Hutton’.

London Street Photography

Last night’s opening at the Museum of London of the show London Street Photography 1860-2010 was a great occasion for London’s photographers, with many of the photographers featured present, although of course those from the earlier sections are long dead. But of more than 70 photographers featured, I was told that 47 are still alive, and quite a high proportion of them were among the guests last night.

Certainly the oldest among us was Wolf Suschitzky, born in 1912 and still looking well who formally opened the exhibition after a speech by the Museum’s director Professor Jack Lohman in which Mike Seaborne, Senior Curator of Photographs, who together with Curator of Images Anna Sparham put the show together, appeared as Exhibit A. The majority of images in it are from the Museum’s own collection, which Mike has built up tremendously in his years there.

Although Suschitzky was the sole living among the pre-war photographers featured, most of those in the next period, 1946-79 are still living and still working, and among those at the opening was Roger Mayne, born in 1929 and best known for his pictures of North Kensington in 2004. During our conversation he mentioned the much wider range of his work that many are unaware of, and you can see some of that on his own web site.

1946-79 covers a long period, and some fairly diverse approaches and style, from photographers such as Henry Grant (1907-2004) to Paul Trevor (b1947) and including among others, Tony Ray-Jones, John Benton-Harris and Charlie Phillips. Grant’s work stylistically would certainly fit him better in an earlier section – and perhaps seems most similar to that of photographers from the early years of the century, while that of some of the others in this section still seems strikingly contemporary. Perhaps the only thing that the work in this era of the show has in common is that the pictures were all black and white, and around the end of the 70s is perhaps the latest date it seemed possible to ignore work in colour.

One section of this is a group of anonymous images from a project carried out by the Richmond and Twickenham Photographic Society around 1962. It is perhaps surprising that none of the authors are known, and the pictures too are rather surprising for a camera club, even (or perhaps especially) one as prestigious as the R&TPS, which has produced at least five presidents of the RPS. Early in my photographic oddysey – around the latter half of the 1970s – I belonged to it myself (and almost got thrown out on sartorial grounds), but with some notable exceptions, the work that appeared regularly in the club was considerably less interesting than this.

The earliest colour image in the show is by Bob Tapper, from 1986, followed by one of mine from 1991, and the most recent black and white in the book (and I think the show) is from 1999, by John Chase, with all of the images from this century in colour, in part a reflection of the switch to digital, but also of the changing nature of the marketplace for photography.

I’ll write more about the show and my thoughts on street photography later – openings, especially ones like this with so many people to talk to (and I didn’t manage to get to talk to everyone I would have liked) are not the greatest times to actually look at the pictures, and the size of this show made it quite impossible for me to properly see it all. But I saw enough to say that this is a show well worth seeing, even if some of the pictures are not street photography (and unfortunately perhaps much current street photography isn’t really street photography any more.)

The show is open to the public from 18 February to 4 September 2011 and entry is free. The book, London Street Photography, published by Dewi Lewis Publishing, ISBN 978-1-907893-09-4, costs £14.99 ($25.00) and contains many of the best images from the show and is due for general publication in March.

The largest selection of pictures from the show I’ve found on line is at The Independent, and includes some of the best (and a few rather less interesting) images. The Telegraph has a longer piece on the show with 4 images, but manages to say very little, and unfortunately the Museum’s own web site gives it depressingly limited coverage; perhaps the budget ran out?

It was late when I finally left the bar next to the museum to make my way home through the streets of London, but I thought I would take a picture or two on my way to the station.

Love on the Left Bank from Dewi Lewis

The 2011 catalogue from Dewi Lewis Publishing (DLP) is worth downloading, if only to see the wide range of work available from this publisher. It includes several books of bodies of work I’ve mentioned here, including some I’ve written about at some length, such as Ed Clark’s Guantanamo: If the Light Goes Out, The Animals by Giacomo Brunelli, Vee Speer’s The Birthday Party and many more. At least one of those pieces I’ve written I’ve never got round to actually publishing, as I’m still waiting for the promised review copy, having written my piece on what I had seen of the work on show, and there are several others I would certainly have reviewed had I received a copy. But I’m just a blogger?

But one of the greatest services that DLP has given to the photographic community is through the republication of classic works, and the most recent of these is Ed van der Elsken’s 1954 photo-novel Love on the Left Bank, shot in a documentary black and white style. There is an interesting review that fills in some of the details, particularly about its star, the Australian artist Vali Myers who plays Ann, a bohemian later described by Patti Smith as “the supreme beatnik chick” around whom the book revolves.

What too is remarkable at the end of the catalogue is a very small section – I think just 17 books – of out of print titles. With some photographic books now going out of print in the blink of an eye, this reflects a real commitment to serving the photographic community.

Among the other reissues are a couple of classic works by Martin Parr, including his 1986 ‘The Last Resort‘ which really changed him from a photographer into a phenomenon. Although I felt the power of the work, it reflected an attitude towards the people he photographed that I felt very uneasy about, lacking the kind of respect I’ve always felt essential.

Also in the catalogue is the book London Street Photography 1860-2010 which accompanies the show opening at the Musuem of London later this week.

It includes the work of well-known photographers such as Paul Martin, John Thomson, Humphrey Spender, Bert Hardy, László Moholy-Nagy, Roger Mayne and Tony Ray-Jones as well as the work of many anonymous photographers whose contribution has been just as important in recording the story of the city.

And also includes the work of over 40 other named and still living photographers, and I’m pleased to be one of them, although like I think most I only have a single image in the book.

My picture has been used in quite a lot of the publicity for the show, and although I’ve yet to see it, one of my friends tells me it one of several images on a poster advertising the show he saw in Piccadilly Circus station the other day. You can see some more from the related series of work in Cafe Ideal, Cool Blondes and Paradise revisited on this site, which also links to a larger set on line. The title actually came from a book dummy I put together many years ago following a workshop with Dewi Lewis on book publishing and I hope to publish a greatly revised version through Blurb later this year.

I’m looking forward to seeing both the show (open to the public from Friday this week – and I’ll post more about it after seeing it at the opening) and the book London Street Photography 1860-2010, although the reports I’ve heard on the book so far are a little disappointing.

E3 Grime

Thanks to dvaphoto for the news that Simon Wheatley’s Don’t Call Me Urban! The Time of Grime was published by Northumbria University Press based in Newcastle at the start of the year. I wrote about his work with young Londoners in Lambeth and Bow when Magnum in Motion published a fine audiovisual presentation Inner City Youth, London on his work in 2006 (he joined Magnum as a nominee in 2005, and his work is still on their site although he left in 2008.)

The Don’t Call Me Urban web site is well worth a look, and as well as still images includes a video by Wheatley made on the streets of Bow with some of the ‘Grime’ artists who he got to know and who let him share and photograph some of their lives. The video and his photographs are a very direct and honest look at the lives of these young Londoners, perhaps oddly disconnected from their locale, living in a universe that only connects occasionally with the E3 others know.

January’s Professional Photographer magazine included an interesting interview with Wheatley about the work and his attitudes, including his need to write a lot of text to put the work into context, something I think some photographers fail to appreciate the need for. Without it work often becomes a voyeuristic enterprise. He also gives some idea of his current situation, living in Calcutta and “looking far beyond photography itself” while also “rediscovering a love of photography.”

Paris Shows: Tendance Floue & Vanessa Winship

Tendance Floue

I’ve spent some time searching without success for the first piece that I wrote about the French collective ‘Tendance Floue‘, a group of photographers who aim to explore their individual creativity in a dialogue together outside the normal limits of commercial media practice.

I think it was perhaps around five years ago, when their work was included in the Arles Rencontres and also gained an ICP Infinity Award that I became aware of the group on-line, and somewhere around the same time I saw a show of their work I think in the fringe festival during the Mois de la photo in Paris. Possibly it was in an brick arch under a bridge across the railway lines out of the Gare d’Austerlitz at Les Frigos, but I can’t be sure.

Tendance Floue (TF) literally means a fuzzy or blurred tendency or trend, and if the work of the photographers in the group does sometimes become a little too experimental for my liking, blur is not necessarily to be taken literally, but more as expressing a spirit of being prepared to explore outside the boundaries of particular conventions – such as that of sharpness – that the commercial practice normally demands.

I was slightly surprised to learn that TF is celebrating its twentieth anniversary, with the original five photographers now grown to a dozen. And celebrating in some style with shows in five galleries in the Marais in Paris from Feb 5-22nd.

Baudoin Lebon : Thierry Ardouin, Flore-Aël Surun and Patrick Tourneboeuf
Galerie Les filles du calvaire : Pascal Aimar and Mat Jacob
La galerie particulière : Gilles Coulon and Philippe Lopparelli
La petite poule noire : Bertrand Meunier
Hôtel de Sauroy : Denis Bourges, Olivier Culmann, Caty Jan and Meyer.

In the French press release that accompanies the show there is a handy map so you can plan a walk around all five (they include one, La petite poule noire, on the Boulevard des Filles du Calvaire I’ve not visited.)

If like me you are unlikely to be in Paris before Feb 22nd, there is plenty of work to explore on the TF web site, though some of it isn’t that easy to find. Perhaps the web site too is deliberately fuzzy. I also found that to see the English version of some pages I needed to load the French version first.

Not Only Rare Birds Sing

And if you can get to Paris, another current show not to be missed is ‘Not only Rare Birds Sing‘ by Vanessa Winship, at Galerie VU’ until 19 March 2011. You can see a selection of her work on the Agence Vu web site, as well as on her own site, where her blog shows her making the prints for this show.

Galerie VU’ used to be in the Marais too, but has now moved west to the 9th arrondissement, in Hôtel Paul Delaroche, 58 rue Saint-Lazare. The gallery is open Monday to Saturday from 2-7pm and you can leave your Velib handily close by at number 62. Do London galleries tell you where to leave your Boris Bike on their invitations?

Egyptian Embassy

Several of my friends are working in Egypt at the moment, producing some great work, but having seen what is happening on the streets there, I’m feeling rather glad that I’m sitting safely at home. Jason N Parkinson’s video Day of Rage – Cairo gives a great idea of what is happening.

Of course back in London there have been various demonstrations of solidarity with the Egyptians on the streets of Cairo calling for democracy and last Saturday I photographed two of them. Egyptians have been demonstrating outside the embassy more or less non-stop, and had called a larger demonstration for noon on Saturday, and it was this that I went to photograph, arriving around 11.45.

Rather to my surprise, when I arrived at the Embassy I could hear another demonstration taking place out of sight in the next street – all I could see from in front of the Embassy were a few women in Muslim dress, standing around and doing nothing. I walked the 70 or so yards to the corner and looked down the street to find the pavement on the opposite side filled by people from Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain. I wasn’t that surprised as I had been expecting to see them later for a protest at the Hilton Hotel over Bangladesh. They were there not to express solidarity with the people on the streets in Cairo who are calling for a democratic and secular Egypt, but to urge that the solution to the problem there – as everywhere else – is a Muslim Khalifah.

In Cairo, men and women protest together, and Muslims and Christian, and none of them want the kind of Islamic state than Hizb ut-Tahrir stands for. The Egyptian revolution isn’t an Islamic one but a secular protest, and the Egyptian protesters at the Embassy told me they had made that clear to Hizb ut-Tahrir, and were not prepared to have them join their protest outside the Embassy. (Much later in the day they made a similar point telling members of the Socialist Workers Party that they were not welcome either.)

I knew that Hizb ut-Tahrir would not like the report that I wrote about what happened, but it was an honest and accurate account of what I saw and what I was told. Within an hour or so of posting it on Demotix there was a hostile comment which appeared to have been written by someone who was not there, attacking me. So I almost certainly got it right. You can read about the event and see the pictures at Hizb ut-Tahrir Turned Away on My London Diary.

While I was photographing Hizb ut-Tahrir, the protest outside the Egyptian Embassy was growing and it had well over a hundred people present when I had to leave to cover another event, with more still turning up.

It had a very different atmosphere from the other event, with those present taking a more active role and everyone being offered the chance to speak. There wasn’t a set party line and the people were much more mixed in every way, not least with men and women both actively participating and standing together. Apart from the Egyptians, others had also come to show their support.

You can see more of this story at Solidarity with the Egyptian Revolution on My London Diary. Interestingly, although both stories were posted at about the same time and I noted both on Facebook and Twitter together, and the Solidarity feature certainly has the better pictures, the Hizb ut Tahrir story has attracted almost six times as many views. A little controversy perhaps helps.

While writing this I heard that four photographers who also contribute to Demotix are among those who have been attacked in Cairo in the last 24 hours. Two were beaten and arrested but later released, and another was rescued by the vigilantes he had been photographing, while the fourth managed to escape after being attacked.

BBC’s World to Shrink?

I suppose it was inevitable that there would be considerable media interest in a story about our major broadcaster planning sweeping cuts to what many of us feel is one of the most vital and nationally important aspects of its services – though to the people that run the BBC it seems to be regarded as a loss-making nuisance.

I’ve long felt that the BBC wastes most of the licence fees it collects and making TV programmes that may have high audience figures but that basically are little different to the offerings from commercial stations, including some which seem little more than thinly disguised promotionals for some industries. And we don’t even have a car manufacturing industry to speak of.

You can read more about it and see more pictures from the demonstration in Save the BBC World Service on My London Diary.

Photographically the biggest problem was that there were too many of us trying to take pictures and film in too small a space. I was lucky to be in the right place at least some of the time, although of course you largely make your luck by reading the situation and spotting opportunities that others have yet to see. So when Jeremy Dear, the NUJ’s General Secretary came to make his speech, I’d moved into what I thought would be a good position around half a minute earlier when I noticed it looked as if this was about to happen.

I’d chosen to stand where I could get Jeremy in a crowd with NUJ placards, and at the right of frame, Michelle with the flowers. Fortunately she was holding the caption ‘RIP BBC World Service’ so I could read it, and this particular frame appealed to me because of the expressions of those in it. In the picture it looks like a pretty decent little crowd (though most of it was out of frame) and there is enough of Bush House in the background to be recognisable to those who know it.

As I took my pictures, there were cameras to the left of me, cameras to the right of me, on top of me and I think shooting through my legs, and I was having to lean back with a little weight to stop myself being pushed forward by the crush. Of course I don’t complain about this, we all need to get pictures, and if I hadn’t been at the front I’d be doing exactly what these guys were doing in order to do so.

Most of us stick by the unwritten rules that come from having to work together, not deliberately getting in each other’s shot and if at times it happens and we point it out, mostly people apologise and try to move away. Because I normally shoot with a very wide angle, a lot of people do wander into my pictures unintentionally, and there are often other lenses poking into the corners or bottom of my images. Occasionally it improves the picture, but more often I just zoom to a longer focal length.

While we were there taking pictures, we were all rather astonished to see a reporter with a compact camera just walk in front of us all so that she could take some pictures. I was slightly less amazed, as this particular person had walked in front of me when I was photographing at an earlier event, and when I politely told her that I was taking pictures and she had just stood in my way she told me that she needed to get her pictures and refused to budge. If you read of a journalist being lynched by photographers it will be her.

Another rather annoying habit that is growing among photographers is that you suddenly see a camera in your viewfinder, held out in front of you at arm’s length by someone leaning over your shoulder. If this habit continues to increase perhaps we will all have to switch to ‘live view’ and photograph in this way to keep ahead of the people behind. It used to be just camera phones that appeared like this, but lately it has been pro DSLRs as well.

Before Jeremy had finished speaking, I decided I had more than enough pictures of him and the other protesters from that viewpoint, and made my way out (it wasn’t easy) to give other photographers a better view.

I would have liked to have photographed MP John McDonnell speaking a couple of minutes later, but this time I hadn’t got in the right place, and could find no way to get a decent view. Of course I’ve photographed him on many occasions and it would not have been a problem getting him to pose later, but I don’t like posed pictures.

At times like this there would be a definite advantage in being a foot – or even six inches – taller. Sometimes you can make up for it by holding the camera up above your head for a ‘Hail Mary’ shot, and some photographers now carry a monopod or tripod to enable rather more height. If I could fit one in my bag I probably would, but so far I’ve only done this for one or two panoramas where it enabled me to take pictures over fences such as that fortified Olympic fence.

The missing link in making this a more usable technique with pro cameras is a rear view screen that folds out and swivels. But such a device might well be rather fragile in the day to day knockabout our equipment gets.

You can actually buy wireless transmitters or plug in monitors for DSLRs with an A/V output, though they tend to be rather large and rather pricey (though photographer Robert Benson makes one – almost certainly illegal to use in the UK – in his garage for around $200), though good for those who want to use the video possibilities of the more recent DSLRs, though not those I use. But a fairly basic device of this type using a cable from the camera on top of the monopod would make such overhead pictures controllable.

Back to Bush House, here’s an image that shows more of the building:

I took it first with the 10.5mm fisheye, but those pillars don’t work quite as well with a curve in them, even partly corrected:

The Lightroom profile for this lens makes the mistake of trying to correct all of the distortion, resulting in a totally unusable image. Just for fun, I tried looking at this image in the Panini Viewer, which implements a rediscovered long forgotten projection used by Italian painters long ago, sometimes called Vedutismo, which has been available for some while for panoramas. The viewer software uses a low quality jpeg, but gives a better idea of the building.

© 2011, Peter Marshall
Fisheye mage saved from Panini Viewer and cropped in Photoshop
Later I’ll download other software that will let me do a better job, as the projection, which I’ve been using for around a year for panoramas, really does look to be a promising approach to “de-fishing” images.

Save the BBC World Service on My London Diary.

A Trip to Kingston: Muybridge Misappropriated?

I think I first became aware of the work of Eadweard Muybridge while I was in short trousers, on one of the visits we were treated to by two of our maiden aunts to London’s Museums. The Science Museum was only a short trip on the District line away from where I grew up, but London was another world, and one to which my own parents seldom if ever ventured. Back in the 1950s I’m not sure what kind of display the Science Museum in South Kensington had, and my memory of seeing the images of a jerkily flapping bird in flight may well be a later back-projection.

But when I read what is apparently the first published book on him, Kevin MacDonnell‘s ‘Eadweard Muybridge – The Man Who Invented the Moving Picture’ (ISBN: 0 297 99538 3) in 1972, a book whose photographic enthusiasm made up for its many errors, much of what it contained on his pictures of movement was already known to me from the history books, but the book did fill in many details on his photography as well as more about his extraordinary life. But the real revelation was to see his photographs of Yosemite, Alaska and Central America and to realise what a fine photographer he was.

It was perhaps shortly after that I first visited the display of his work in his home town of Kingston, a few miles from where I live on the edge of London, and was rather disappointed. Some years later we took students to see it at the Kingston Museum and it had I think improved, and as a part of the current interest in his work aroused by the Corcoran Museum show which closed recently at Tate Britain and will be on show again in San Francisco from 26 February to 7 June 2011, Kingston Museum has benefited from a Heritage Lottery grant of almost £50,000 for its own Muybridge exhibition.

Web sites worth looking at on Muybridge include Stephen Herbert’s encyclopaedic The Compleat Muybridge and the Muybridge Collection on the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames web site. But unfortunately although this latter contains much important material, particularly related to his movement work, there is little about his other photography. Their current exhibition (until 19 March 2011) concentrates on his hand-painted glass Zoöpraxiscope discs used in his lecture presentations. Based on his photographs, these are certainly unique artefacts but seem very much a sideshow compared to the actual images published in Animal Locomotion and the Human Figure in Motion (and now animated on screen by almost everyone, including in the past a number of my students.)

You can however view some of the photographically more interesting aspects of his photography from the Kingston collection in the ‘Image and Context‘ section of the Eadweard Muybridge: Defining Modernities site.

Also taking part in the Kingston celebrations is the Stanley Picker Gallery at the University of Kingston. I have to say that the most interesting part of my visit there was the walk to and from the site, through the streets of Kingston and then back along by the Hogsmill River, one of London’s lesser known streams.

The gallery currently contains two works by an artist which are based loosely on Muybridge’s work. One references his 1877 panorama of San Francisco – which can be viewed online in some detail elsewhere (and on the same site there is also an 1851 daguerreotype panorama of the Bay.) Muybridge’s work is remarkable for it’s detail and clarity, thanks in part to the large (indeed ‘mammoth’) plates on which he photographed it, but also to his careful choice of the day when the air was particularly clear. Perhaps too he had learnt something from his previous attempts the preceding year on a smaller – which had been destroyed in a fire. The 13 plates together produce a 17 foot long image covering a full 360 degrees and showing a remarkable precision in alignment.

It did occur to me that a more fitting tribute to Muybridge would have been to host a show of rather more interesting panoramic photography than the two works on show in postcard racks here, which were I think taken in the garden of 2 Liverpool Road, the house where he spent his final years in Kingston, though I think it has changed rather since he was there.

The single thing I found most interesting about the work on show in the gallery was the letter reproduced on the final page of the leaflet from David Leigh in California to Borough Librarian Mr Cross on Jan 24th 1949, sending him some information about Muybridge and which in a postscript says “I have read, somewhere, that he was drawing to scale, a replica of our Great Lakes, at the time of his passing.” This was presumably the inspiration for the work based on the Great Lakes which apparently made use of linoleum, which I also found of little interest.

I can’t however let pass the following error in the introduction to this work:

LINOLEUM Linoleum was invented by Frederick Walton in Staines, England in 1855.

Much though as a resident of Staines I might want to claim any honour it deserves, unfortunately this is just factually incorrect. Staines did have a long connection with lino, and in my youth this was certainly clear to one’s nostrils as you drew near the town, perpetually reeking of linseed oil. But Walton himself wrote to the Technical Director of the first Austrian linoleum company Felix Fritz, the author of ‘Das Linoleum und Seine Fabrikation‘ that he invented linoleum in 1861 (and it is described but not given that name in a British patent of the same year.) At that time Walton was still working in Chiswick, and had no connection with Staines; it was only in 1864 that together with some new partners he purchased the land on the banks of the Colne there to set up a larger factory to manufacture lino.

Should you wish to read Fritz’s extremely turgid tome there is a copy in the library of the Royal Society of Chemistry at Burlington House, but one of the two existing copies of an edited English edition is on a shelf downstairs, severely abridged and translated pro bono for Staines Musuem by Linda Marshall with considerable (uncredited) technical assistance from myself.

The lino in Staines, long the town’s major employer, celebrated its centenary by closing down around 1964. When we moved to Staines ten years later you could still sometimes smell the linseed oil around the old buildings, then a thriving nest of small workshops and warehouses. Now virtually no trace remains and all we have is a large car park and a bleak boring shopping centre.

This error may not be of great importance, but for me it was symptomatic of a lack of rigour in the work – and was just one of a number of statments that made me think “that’s not quite so.” And a quick check in Google or reference to Wikipedia would have corrected this particular error.

Kington Museum curator Peta Cook told the BBC that she was keen to change the fact that Muybridge although well known in America is not more widely recognised in Britain. They quote her as saying:

“He is London born, and he came back and died here, and this is an amazing collection in Kingston. I would like London to have as much pride in Muybridge as the Americans seem to have.”

I can only agree.

The BBC article suggests the reason for our relative neglect of him is “perhaps because he did the bulk of his work in America.” I have a rather different view. He is neglected here because he was a photographer. And I left Kingston feeling that this very British cultural refusal to acknowledge photography in its own right is very much reflected in the way this current opportunity has been at least in part wasted. Muybridge was a photographer, and a part of a photographic tradition; it’s a pity we can’t celebrate him as such.

Penny Tweedie (1940-2011)

News of the death of Penny Tweedie came as a shock to me, when I read her Guardian obituary which reports that she died on January 14 at the age of 70. I didn’t know her well, but he seemed in rude good health when I last talked to her when she gave a presentation at the NUJ Photographers Conference in May 2009, and was still very much taking an interest in photography and still taking pictures. She didn’t at all seem an old woman, but a very lively person of my own generation, still young in spirit. We looked together at a few of the pictures in the NUJ exhibition, and she complimented me on my work in it.

Tweedie came into the profession from Guildford School of Art at a time when women were widely patronised and discriminated against. She had to fight against prejudice – even from the NUJ, and succeeded because of her determination and talent – she showed she could cover all aspects of the job at least as well as the men.

You can see much of her work on her web site, including some of her better known portraits and some fairly recent pictures, such as those she supplied for the ‘Hospice in the Weald: Celebrating 30 Years Cookbook’ published last November. But her best work was made in the era when magazines published real photography and she worked for some of the best – National Geographic, Sunday Times, Observer, Independent and Telegraph magazines, using the money she made from them to finance less lucrative work, particularly for aid agencies including Oxfam. As for the Hospice book, she often gave her work for good causes unpaid.

In 1975 the BBC sent her to Australia where she photographed a series they were making about Explorers, but it was the Australian Aborigines she met there that became her great preoccupation, and produced some of her best work and her books This, My Country and Spirit of Arnhem Land as well as earning her a Walkley Award, Australia’s leading photographic award.

The Guardian article gives more details of her life and career, and includes near the end the chilling statement: “it seems despair at the world’s lack of use for her craft finally induced her to take her own life.”

Inscape 81: The Urban Scene

I’ve written previously about Inscape, the ‘small magazine’ of ‘Personal Work in Photography‘ edited by William Bishop, which included a small portfolio of my work from Hull in Issue 80, ‘An Architectural Theme’.

The latest issue, No 81, includes work from a dozen or so photographers on ‘The Urban Scene‘ but more interesting to me was the written content, including two articles that make a call for further discussion.

Carol Hudson tells of her experience of using an iphone and asks “is photography, as we know it, now dead (or at the very least in retirement)?” and wants to hear what others “think about the rise and fall of the photographic document.”

A longer piece by Andy Biggs, headed by one of the more interesting images in the magazine, his photograph of the lower half of a rambler and a dog on a concrete pillar (a trig point?) at ‘The Wrekin’ that reminds me of an early Martin Parr, has the title ‘Is contemporary photography for constructed images only?’ and takes a look at some of the trends in photography over recent years away from the “desire by photographers to take their cameras out and record the world around” which he thinks photography should return to (and it’s a position I share) and ends with the short sentence: “Please discuss.” You can read a version of this article (without that final sentence) on his web site.

A quarterly magazine such as Inscape is not perhaps the most appropriate place for a discussion, which would inevitably proceed at a very slow pace. Perhaps the editor of Inscape should consider adding a blog to the Inscape web site, on which you can take out a subscription to this publication, which is also available at some select gallery shops.

When Inscape started, the Internet was in its infancy, and the only way to produce a magazine such as this was in print, but although the quality of that print has greatly improved, it could now be produced more easily and gain a greater readership and a wider group of contributors on the web. And if you have a copy of the magazine, and compare this image with the version of it on page 35, unless your monitor is badly in need of replacement, you will see that even though the reproduction in Inscape is pretty good for a magazine, the web can beat it hands down.

From ‘1989’ – you can see the web version & book online.

I’ve been a subscriber more or less since issue 1 and helped in the production of some of the early issues and also have a personal interest in this particular one, as one of the three book reviews in it is of my own book, 1989. The other two are ‘Intimations‘, Poems by Veronica More with photographs by Tom and Cordelia Weedon, and Gerry Badger‘s ‘The Pleasures of Good Photographs‘.

Also in Inscape 81 is a review of ‘Paris – New York – London‘ the show I organised in October including pictures by Paul Baldesare, John Benton-Harris and myself. (The link above is to what Bishop refers to as my “learned and informative introductory talk” in his piece at the “wine-sodden celebratory evening.”) It certainly was a good night.

It’s encouraging to read anything about events such as this, and apart from in blogs (or at least this blog) there is little if any coverage of photographic events outside the few major galleries. Even though, as for example I said in my reports from Paris Photo, these are where the most interesting work is usually to be found (and of course plenty of the dire.)

The two pictures reproduced with the review are both in black and white in Inscape, so here they are in colour:

You can see more of the work from the show on the Paris – New York – London website, including some pictures by John Benton-Harris.

Contributions to the next issue of Inscape, on the theme ‘Work‘ are invited on the back page of the magazine, with a copy date of 21 March 2011.