Category: Photographers

On Saturday The Guardian in its ‘Review’ section published an appreciation by Margaret Drabble of the work of landscape photographer Fay Godwin – and you can read it online too. It’s better online, as the single image which accompanies it, although smaller there, stands out much better on the screen than in the muted greys of newsprint, which also splits it unfortunately across the two pages of the spread.

It is of course a well-crafted piece, presenting much of the relevant information, but rather lacking so far as Fay’s relationship to the medium is concerned, and it contains at least one statement that I am fairly certain would have enraged her, when Drabble talks of her 1983 The Saxon Shoreway as an example of her “author-led publications“.  Indeed perhaps her only truly author-led work was her collaboration with Ted Hughes, Remains of Elmet (1979) which was one of her first and I think possibly her weakest works as a photographer. Drabble correctly describes this as a creative partnership between poet and photographer, but despite some fine images it is perhaps the only of her works in which she is arguably the junior partner.

The rules and attitudes of the publishing companies, which resulted in her early works – books which she had conceived,  and photographed, being listed under the names of the literary figures whose contribution other than their name was often rather minor (I can’t vouch for the actual words she used, and the phrase ‘I did everything but wipe his sodding arse’ that comes to my mind about one of them may well just be my own précis of her argument) with her simply as an illustrator remained a continual irritation to her, even after she gained the clout to get books such as Land (1985) under her own name.

I first met Fay at Paul Hill‘s cottage in Derbyshire, the Photographers Place in Bradbourne, where we had both gone to learn at the feet of Raymond Moore. She was then in her mid-forties and just becoming well-known in photographic circles as a landscape photographer. It was at the same place and probably the same time that I also met Roger Taylor who talks about her work  on the short video about the show, Land Revisited which continues at the National Media Museum in Bradford until 27 March 2011.

I never became a close friend, but we met occasionally at events and openings, and in many ways spoke the same language. Whenever we found ourselves together at a show we always took a tour around together, sharing our opinions (often unprintable) and enthusiasms about the work on the wall. We shared too some of the same influences – people like Moore and Bill Brandt who worked in this country, Paul Strand, and although we took it rather differently, the earlier US landscape tradition.

Brandt’s book ‘Literary Britain‘ was I think in many ways a fairly direct forerunner of much of her approach to landscape, and I think like me she would have preferred the perhaps rather gloomy 1951 original to the later more contrasty revision.

One of the texts on the National Media Museum site is by Fay, and in the previously unpublished ‘How Land Came About‘ her voice comes through very clearly, with a real sense of the frustrations she faced and felt in pursuing her work in an environment where photography was not valued by the UK publishing and media industries.  (Nothing has changed there!) There is also an interview with Fay from 2002 on the UK Landscape site.

Fay was fortunate in 1978 to receive a major award from the English Arts Council to photograph the British landscape during the brief period when they supported photographers rather than institutions. Work she produced from this provided the bulk of her show and book ‘Land’ (1985), perhaps the best of her books. The 2001 retrospective book Landmarks covers a wider range of her work as you can see her web site.

Fay died in May 2005, aged 74 (her website was updated to include some of the obituaries) and in 2008 “the entire contents of Godwin’s studio: negatives, contact sheets and exhibition prints (around 11,000 prints in total), as well as correspondence with some of her sitters including Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Doris Lessing” was accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by the government and is held by the British Library. You can see 128 of her images on their site.

I’ve written about her and her work on various occasions, most recently in a post here, Copying, Co-Incidence or Cliché? where both she and I made almost identical images of a sleepy stone lion at Chatsworth. Along the bottom strip of images on the page I link to containing her picture are thumbnails of a number of her finest images, and there are several others that are similar to pictures I’ve made and a couple that – at a glance – could be by Brandt. It doesn’t in any way detract from here as a photographer that this is so, but it does root her firmly in a tradition that she would have been happy to affirm, even if it seems not to have occurred to Margaret Drabble.

This is not a photo by Fay Godwin! Sleepy Lion, Chatsworth  © Peter Marshall, 1980

Thanks to Alan Griffiths of the Luminous Lint web site, which carries such a wealth of photographs for pointing out on Facebook a video interview with Joel Meyerowitz on featured on The New Yorker web site.

The clip is from a new 30 minute film by Cheryl Dunn,  on New York street photography, ‘Everybody Street‘, which was commissioned for the show the show ‘Alfred Steiglitz New York‘ just coming to an end at the  Seaport Museum  in NYC.

The Seaport Museum page on the film has links to the trailer and three clips which are on Vimeo. The trailer includes short comments from a number of the photographers, including Rebecca Lepkoff, now a remarkable 94 year old, who I wrote about some years ago as a part of a series on the New York Photo League, who has been documenting the city since the 1930s,  and as well as Meyerowitz there are also clips on Bruce Gilden and Mary Ellen Mark. Other photographers in the film include Tim Barber, Martha Cooper, Bruce Davidson, Jeff Mermelstein, Clayton Patterson, Ricky Powell and Jamel Shabazz.

Viewing Meyerowitz pretending to photograph on the streets of New York for Dunn’s camera made me very much wonder how that kind of behaviour would go down in – for example Peckham or Hackney, certainly without a film crew present.  But it – and his account of how watching Robert Frank at work – made him on the spot decide to throw up his job and become a photographer (he didn’t even own a camera at the time) also brought back some of my own thoughts and writing about photographing events on the street, and in particular this picture of mine from Notting Hill Carnival in the 1990s, about as a photographer becoming a part of the dance.

London has also had its street photographers, and they too are to be celebrated later this year, although not so far as I am aware in a film. But ‘London Street Photography‘, opening at the Museum of London on 18 Feb 2011 (until 4 Sept) includes over 200 street images from 1860 to the present day, and includes  the work of 59 photographers – including around 47 still living, many of whom are still working. I’ll write more about this show – I have a colour  picture on the museum leaflet for it – and the accompanying book at a later date.

If you’ve yet to come across the story of Vivian Maier (1926-2009), a Chicago nanny whose photography was discovered more or less by chance around the time of her death, read the Vivian Maier blog, written by John Maloof, a young Chicago estate agent who bought a box of her negatives for $400 at an auction sale in 2007 after she had defaulted on payments to keep them in a storage locker. Another group of collectors of her work has set up a Vivian Maier web site as well as another blog.

It took Maloof a couple of years to find the name of the photographer who had taken the work, and when he did and Googled it, all that turned up was a death notice written a few days earlier. Maier had slipped on ice and hit her head, and spent some months in a nursing home before she died age 83.  Maloof has been working intensively on his collection of her work and he contacted the other buyers from the sale and bought their boxes of her work. He has also made contact with some of her former employers and charges, and has been given some of her former belongings, including cameras, her collection of photographic book, and some tape recordings she made.

I’ve occasionally written that what we know about the history of photography is perhaps only the tip of an iceberg, with many photographers from the past whose work has simply not become known (and there are some good examples from the past, such as Bellocq, Lartigue and Disfarmer whose work was only discovered long after they took it.) Its a question that Blake Andrews has written about at greater length on his blog in a post ‘The Flame of Recognition.’  I’ve not seen a great deal of Maier’s work but it does seem to be a substantial body of work with some fine pictures that bear comparison with many well-known photographers, and an intriguing example of how work can develop apparently completely outside the art/curatorial/academic establishment.

Perhaps the film and the book coming out shortly will answer some more questions about her – including the mystery of why she abandoned her work with some 20-30,000 pictures on undeveloped films dating from the 60s and 70s in a total of around 100,000 pictures, many of which have still to be looked at by anyone.  The film is seeking funding on Kickstarter and the video introducing it and appealing for funds is worth watching.

It’s been a relatively slow-moving story, developing over a couple of years, but growing to an impressive level. An article appeared in The Independent  in November 2009 and there has been a long and continuing discussion on Flickr. Recently Chicago Tonight broadcast a 9 minute TV programme about her and the discovery by Maloof, and the first US exhibition (some has been previously shown in Norway)  from Maloof’s collection opens in Chicago on Jan 7, 2011.

Making comparisons, as some have done, between Maier and great  photographers of the American mid-century such as Robert Frank is of course to miss the point. Although her pictures may at times remind us of his work (or that of Lisette Model, Leon Levenstein and others) Frank’s importance to photography was not so much in the pictures that he took – some good, some not so good – or even his attitude and approach, but in the influence that his work had on several generations of photographers from the 1950s on. Interesting though her work is, it does not appear to have been innovative, and has long lost any ability to alter the course of our medium. At best it can retrospectively broaden and enrich its history.

Photography is in a very real sense a communal activity, and sharing your work with others is a vital part of this. For reasons that are not yet clear to me, Maier chose not to do so.

Many who do try to do so find themselves ignored or rebuffed at an early stage by the photographic establishment, and at least in the past it is probably true that we have a history that has been dominated by the best-connected and the thickest skinned.

It is significant that Maier’s work has not so far been taken up by any of the major museums or galleries or academic institutions, but has largely been promoted by outsiders and through the Internet – and in particular on Flickr. Institutional photography has still very much to adapt itself to the ever increasing importance of the web as the vital centre of the photographic community, for sharing work and increasingly for exhibiting and publishing photography.

It was a future that I saw and began to grasp fifteen years ago when I set up my first web site (Family Pictures, still on-line in more or less its original state though at a different location), although it was perhaps this early acquaintance that led me not to fully appreciate the potential of sites such as Flickr, which seemed to me too primitive in the way that it presented work. But it’s importance – as its promotion and discussion of Maier shows – was in establishing a new channel for the photographic community. Perhaps had it been around 30 years earlier her work would have long been a part of our shared history.