Degeneration

Although I wasn’t able to see the show ‘Degeneration‘ by the collective Human Endeavour which is upstairs at the Bellis Gallery, 8-9 Kings Road, South Lanes, Brighton until Friday 14th Nov (Wed-Sat 10-30-18.30, Sun 11.30-16.30) I did meet briefly with one of the photographers, Alex Currie, who has kindly sent me four of his images:

These are pictures taken with great deal of respect for the subject and with care using the movements of a 4×5″ camera. Together with the other work I’ve seen on this project they well reflect the objective of the project, stated to be

to take a critical look at the state of housing and regeneration in the 21st century, and the implications and complex nuances this may have on some of the poorest in society,reliant upon social housing.

As they make clear, much of what they are recording has not occurred by chance and cannot be blamed on the architects and builders, but is the result of deliberate policies.

After several decades of neglect, consecutive governments have overseen the gradual disappearance of social housing, due to Right To Buy and a lack of new housing stock built, arguably fuelling the necessity to own rather than let that has instigated the artificial inflation of the housing market. This opens up many questions as to why this was allowed to happen, has fuelled the rise in homelessness and poverty and left the majority of people living in social housing trapped in so called ‘sink estates’.

There are indeed examples where blocks similar to many of those shown in this project have been sold to private companies and refurbished to become luxury flats. But for councils and social housing associations the alternative of demolition (sometimes also creating a little local spectacle through the use of explosives) attracts, perhaps because of the financial incentives available, or simply because over the past 40 or 50 years we have become increasingly a throwaway society. Or perhaps sometimes because of the profits that others can make.

The house I live in was built around 1880, condemned in the 1950s and still (with minor alterations and occasional maintenance) performing its original function reasonably adequately. It wasn’t well built, didn’t use the best of materials, but the design was basically sound. The prefabs I photographed a few days ago, made in 1945 were only meant to last 5-10 years, but some are still in reasonable condition, and their owners and tenants happy to remain living in them. So it is a very good question why so much of the building around the 1960s are now considered only fit for demolition (although some of those I knew erected in Hulme in the mid 60s were in a terrible state within months of completion.)

The answers lie not among the planners and the architects but in the politics of the era (and perhaps things have not changed much.) I’m currently reading a book by a friend of mine, Franklin Medhurst, ‘A Quiet Catastrophe: The Teeside Job‘ (ISBN: 978-0-9566550-0-40 in which he tells the story behind his dismisal as Director of the Teeside Survey and Plan in 1967, largely because of his insistence that pollution be taken into account in the location of housing in the plan. The two men who fired him were Hugh Wilson, responsible for Cumbernauld, recently voted by its residents the “second crappiest town in Britain” and Lewis Womersley, responsible for the Park Hill terraces in Sheffield that feature on Currie’s site as the first picture in his project, Redundant Ideals. Its also worth looking at the other two projects on his site, which include one ‘Nonscape‘ which turns out to be black and white images of central Croydon.

This is a very different view of the place than on my own website where I have a set taken a few years earlier in 1991 along the then recently opened tram line. Looking at the two I think his work looks to be older, and not just because it was taken in black and white rather than in colour. Unusually my Croydon Tramlink was taken on medium format (and I also took some panoramas that have have yet, 9 years later, to be added to the site) but after that I reverted to using 35mm with a shift lens.

Finally, one thought that I left Brighton with, from the theatre opposite the station:

Brighton Photo Fringe

There are an impressive number of shows in the Brighton Photo Fringe Open this year, and some are of a very high standard, others of course rather less so. Organising events such as this must be extremely tricky and I suspect those responsible will be a little frustrated at some of my nit-picking after all their hard work. But I hope they will be taken (and are meant) as constructive suggestions to improve the festival in future years, especially for visitors coming from outside Brighton.

As with the Biennal, several of the venues – including the major ‘Fringe Focus‘ – were closed on a Tuesday. Some other shows listed either did not exist or I was unable to find them. It would be considerably more helpful to divide the shows in Brighton into areas each with its own local map and fuller key rather than the large area map provided. This would enable precise locations to be shown – numbers which are seldom actually present on the streets are of little use. Finding the work – for a visitor to Brighton – was something of a logistical nightmare and there were a number of shows that I looked for but could not find at all, and some I did eventually find were invisible from the street – not even a small ‘Brighton Photo Fringe notice in the window – and so could easily be overlooked. Then there was the gallery I walked past three times, and twice the door was locked with a notice saying ‘Back Soon.’ Nothing the organisers can do about that of course.

Although the map gave opening and closing dates for shows, to find which days and at what times they were actually open meant consulting a separate booklet, arranged in a different order to the map list and not making use of the numbers on the map. Again with so many shows – and doubtless more in 2012 – it would also help if this were broken down into geographical areas. It was actually hard to find a copy of the booklet, so many who visit this year will only have the map, so it is unfortunate that these details were not on it.

The show I was most sorry to miss was ‘degeneration‘, a project by the collective ‘Human Endeavour‘ which “is a study of key areas across Britain” – Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, Salford, Sheffield, Birmingham, Cardiff, London and Portsmouth – “of 20th century housing that has slowly fallen into decline and is now due for regeneration.” It’s a project that fits very well with my own interest in urban landscape – for example in my work on Hull – that arose out of an active grass-roots involvement in the redevelopment of Hulme and Moss Side, Manchester when I lived there in the 1960s.

So far all I’ve seen is a nicely printed folding card with one image by each of the photographers, Alex Currie, Richard Chivers, Simon Carruthers and Oliver Perrott and a well-illustrated web site. This is the third show by this collective and the second to receive Arts Council support. Looking at the work on the web, I was particularly impressed by the pictures from Glasgow by Alex Currie and Richard Chilvers.

It was interesting to be reminded again of the work of Michael Ormerod, (1947-91) a British photographer who took to America very much in the footsteps of Robert Frank and Stephen Shore. Ormerod died in a motorbike accident at the age of 44 in Arizona in 1991, and shortly afterwards there was a show of his work at the Zelda Cheatle Gallery as well as a book to accompany this, ‘States of America‘.

While I quite like some of his large colour images, I can’t help looking at them and thinking that other photographers – such as Shore – have done it rather better. I get a similar feeling too about his black and white, which perhaps also leans too heavily on American precedent without really establishing a voice of his own. Ormerod was a pretty good photographer and I quite like his work, but… You can see for yourself at the Crane Kalman Gallery.

Was he one of the UK’s leading photographic talents at the time of his death in 1991 as the exhibition text suggests? It’s something you could say (if you were an art dealer) about any of several hundred photographers of the time – many of whom might well have taken rather similar pictures on a trip across the USA, and some did.

The USA was also the source of another show on the fringe, shown in JB’s American Diner on Kings Road. I found this a more interesting view of America than Ormerod’s, partly because it played a little further from some of the stereotypes but I think largely because it’s subject was so much more clearly defined, with Kit Fordham focussing his attention on ‘Bascom Avenue: The Unloved Hear of San Jose, California.’ The show starts here on Fordham’s web site, although I think the colour was better on some of the prints than in some of these on the web.

There was a synergy between the show and the surroundings that worked well and it was the only venue where I really felt I had to take some pictures myself. It can be hard showing work in cafés and shops and this was a great example of how it can really work well.

But the outstanding show of those I saw was ‘Closer‘ by Stuart Griffiths, even though looking at his web site I see very clearly how much stronger a show this could have been. I find it hard not to see the presentation at the Phoenix as an example of a kind of curatorial vandalism, pushing his work into a rather different aesthetic. Of course I’m not a great fan of the cult of the curator, which I think has been a curse on photography, particularly in the UK, for the last forty or so years. The show still worth seeing for the rawness of some of the images, but afterwards look at the web site and see how much more it could have been. It’s a pity that they didn’t get around to adding labels to the works (obviously actually a deliberate decision but equally obviously an poor one) but you may be lucky and be given a list of them if you view the show.

I’m not sure how much the smaller room given over to small pictures and letters from Griffiths’s time in the Parachute Regiment from 1988-93 where he became a unit photographer with the Intelligence Section in Northern Ireland actually adds to this as a show. What is perhaps much more relevant is the film about his life, Isolation, was shown as part of the Photo Fringe at the Electric Palace, Hastings on 10 October, and will also be projected at the venue for this show, the Phoenix, Brighton, on 30 October. You can read about it in The Guardian which also has a gallery of his pictures. Isolation had its World Premiere at the 2009 Edinburgh Film Festival and from there you can watch a short trailer which includes some of his still images.

I could see no point for the use of three very similar portraits shown in the installation picture above – and it suggests a kind of indecision that although doubtless a decision by the curator seemed to suggest that the photographer was unable to arrive at the image he wanted. Griffiths actually chose a different image from the session for his web site in the series ‘Back From the War’, where you can also see some of the other powerful images that were not selected for the Brighton show.

It was, despite the weather forecast, a pleasantly sunny day for a walk around Brighton, although at times a little frustrating. As well as those I’ve written about I saw quite a few other shows which for various reasons – largely that they didn’t particularly excite or interest me – I’ve not mentioned. I’m very aware of having missed much of both the Biennial and the Photo Fringe, partly because some things were not open, but also because this is a very widespread festival – as well as the more outlying areas of Brighton & Hove there are also Fringe shows in Chichester, Lewes, Peacehaven and Portslade and the Biennial also has related photography shows in Portsmouth, Bexhill, Chichester and Eastbourne. There are of course all kinds of events too taking place in Brighton and elsewhere, making this a considerably more exciting event for photographers based in the area.

For some years Brighton has been establishing itself as a major photographic centre in the UK, and in many ways I think more important and certainly more vital than London, which has largely failed to develop a photographic culture, largely due to the stultifying effects of some of our major institutions, but also because of its sheer size. This year’s festival marks another step along that road.

Inscape No 80

More years ago than I care to remember I enrolled on an evening class in the History of Photography being offered at the Camden Working Men’s College just down the road from Mornington Crescent (and doubtlessly coincidentally around the time the famous game of that name made its first appearance.)

It was partly a matter of curiosity – I’d never seen such a course offered as an evening class before, but perhaps more importantly, as I was teaching photography it could be counted as “in-service training”, both cutting down the pressure to go on far more boring courses and also meaning I could claim back both course fees and travel expenses from my employer. An added bonus was that the student card for this short course enabled me to claim a 10% discount from my favourite supplier of photographic materials for the next few years.

From the first session the lecturer, William Bishop, made it clear that although he had all the right art history tools he saw the course as an opportunity for him to learn about the history of photography rather than having a great deal of knowledge about it to impart. It became very much a dialogue between him and those of the students – myself included – who knew rather more about photography and photographers, and one that proved constructive for us all.

A few years later, Bishop, who had by this time been reduced by me to Bill in the interests of alliteration, decided to set up a ‘small magazine’ covering photography, producing the first issue of ‘Inscape‘ in Autumn 1992. Immediately I saw it, I contacted him and suggested he might come and make use of my equipment and desk-top publishing skills to improve the production quality, and we produced a few issues this way until he was successful in getting a grant to buy his own computer and scanner.

I had a few pictures in some of the earlier issues and the occasional one since, but I’ve not been a regular contributor to Inscape. My interests have perhaps moved rather in a different direction since those early days, and while the magazine has occasionally published work that interests me, there has also been much that has left me cold or worse.

Inscape is a word coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and there is a good short exposition of it on The Victorian Web by Glenn Everett. Inscape for him was essentially a both a Romantic and a religious idea, a revelation of the essence of a thing and an insight into the reason for its creation. It is one of several attempts to describe the feeling that a particular moment or vision has a special significance.

When we take personal photographs we are perhaps selecting selecting points of view on the real world that seem for us have some particular resonance – an “inscape” and hence the title of the magazine which

“is about sharing our personal work, our personal photographic visions, with others. It is about appreciation rather than confrontation and argument, but it is not intended as a cosy corner to slumber in because it believes that the tradition of picture making that has personal meaning is alive and still developing.“

It is something of a surprise (although I’ve kept up my subscription over the years) that Inscape is still going 18 years later. I think it started with five issues a year and is now quarterly, and the quality of the reproduction has improved significantly. The three pictures here are from a set of nine printed in Inscape No 80, at least some of which have a connection with its “An Architectural Theme“.

Others might be better suited to the theme of the forthcoming issue number 81, The Urban Scene, for which the copy date is 21 Dec 2010. Like most small magazines (and unfortunately some very large ones), Inscape does not pay for contributions – the whole thing is very much a labour of love on a minuscule budget by Mr Bishop.

My set of pictures is only one of the contributions to the issue, with photographs by I think ten other photographers and written contributions by the Editor and the mysterious “mjp”.

The magazine is now I think on sale in some very selected outlets and costs £3.60 or you can try through the web site, where back numbers are £2.50 post free in the UK. A subscription for 4 issues in the UK is £15.

There are a few more of my pictures from Hull on the Urban Landscapes web site, and I’m currently working through several years of photographs preparing a Blurb book on Hull which should appear later this year, under the title of my 1983 show there, ‘Still Occupied; A View of Hull‘, although the selection of images will be different to the 144 or so I showed then.

Undesired: India’s Dying Daughters

Thanks to duckrabbit for the information about the short (12 minutes) film ‘Undesired‘ by MediaStorm with photojournalist Walter Astrada you can watch on MediaStorm. Don’t miss watching the epilogue – linked on the page as ‘Part II: More from the photographer‘ which includes some of Astrada’s powerful still photography as he talks about what he found. ‘Undesired‘ is a powerful and moving film that makes the scandalous situation that most of us were probably at least vaguely aware about real in a very direct way.

Don’t miss watching the epilogue – linked on the page as ‘Part II: More from the photographer‘ which includes more of Astrada’s powerful still photography as he talks about what he found.

The film tells the story of some of the 40 million girls ‘missing’ in India through abortion, neglect and murder. You can also read more on MediaStorm in the feature ‘Mothers of A Hundred Sons: India’s Dying Daughters‘ by Shreeya Sinha, who was Associate Producer for the film, and made the interviews and some of the video, illustrated by pictures by Astrada, as well as elsewhere in a article by Swami Agnivesh, Rama Mani and Angelika Köster-Lossack published in 2005 by the New York Times and a story last year in The Guardian by Ciara Leeming.

Astrada‘s work on his Violence For Women project is also covered in an article in the on-line BJP by Olivier Laurent, who met him when he was showing his work at Visa Pour l’Image in Perpignan. Surprisingly I don’t think this has appeared in the print version, nor for that matter has anything else from Perpignan. Perhaps because BJP is now a monthly publication, and Visa Pour l’Image took place at the start of September, shortly after the September issue this and their other reports from Perpignan was old news by the time the October print issue came out.

It’s a reflection of the magazine’s changed priorities that I could find nothing in that issue about Visa Pour l’Image, nor, for that matter about the largest photo event taking place in the UK at the moment, the East London Photography Festival, Photomonth 2010. In fact I’m finding it increasingly hard to see any justification at all for the print magazine, though of course it is difficult to survive just on the basis of web advertising (though About.com, who I wrote about photography with for almost 8 years managed it.)

You can see more of Astrada‘s work on the photographer’s own web site, including images from previous work about violence against women in Guatamela and the Congo. A former Agence France Press photographer he is now represented by Reportage by Getty Images.

An invitation

Please come and celebrate with the photographers at the Shoreditch Gallery* from 6.30-8.30pm on 20th October 2010

(*Shoreditch Gallery is in the Juggler, 5 Hoxton Market,
just to the east of Pitfield St, reached via Boot St or Coronet St
Old St tube or buses to Great Eastern St / Old St / Shoreditch Church etc)

Paris New York London

photographs by

Paul Baldesare John Benton-Harris Peter Marshall

Shoreditch Gallery

The Juggler
5 Hoxton Market
London N1 6HG

October 2 Oct – 29 Oct 2010

020 7729 7292 Gallery
01784 456474 Other information

Mon-Fri 8am-6pm, Sat: 10am-4pm. Closed Sun

Free admission

Work from three photographers,
three major world cities & three decades

http://parisnewyorklondon.co.uk/

Photomonth logo

Paul Baldesare
© Paul Baldesare
Devil of Threadneedle St, London, Paul Baldesare

Theatrical off-beat street images from the City of London
in the 1990s and Oxford St in the current decade.
Web

John Benton-Harris
“A taste of the Big Apple” from his much larger digital colour
investigation of his home town, that he began in the spring of 2006.
Web

Peter Marshall
© 1988, Peter Marshall
Paris 19e, 1988. Peter Marshall
“Photo Paris”, a poetic vision of Paris’s inner suburbs from
an artist’s book he produced in the 1980s
Web Book
Copies of the recently re-issued book Photo Paris will be available for only £15 at the party.
Photographs by Paul Baldesare and Peter Marshall are for sale.

UK Customs

I won’t comment on the Brighton show by seven-year-old Carmen Soth (with a little help from her dad, Alec) , because I’ve not seen it. Part of the Brighton Photo Biennial, (BPB) it goes on show at the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery from Oct 2nd – Nov 14th 2010 and you can read rather more about it in The Guardian. I first heard about it on Soth’s Little Brown Mushroom blog, where you can see Carmen’s shooting list.

Soth came to the UK around the end of March this year with his family to work on a commission for Brighton, but on arrival was told by an immigration official that as he didn’t have a work visa he could not do so. The official threatened him with immediate deportation, but finally let him stay for a holiday with his family, warning him that if he took any pictures he could get two years in jail.

So he went around with Carmen, who had his digital camera and took the pictures with a little help and advice from Dad. But I guess if she comes back to the UK she’ll be facing those two years banged up in Holloway.

It’s a story that illustrates the mess we are in over immigration, where government and opposition have for years been engaging in a bidding war to see who can look toughest for the right wing press. But it also threatens the right of all journalists to report on events in other countries – or at least on those from other countries to report on what is happening in the UK.

Frankly I’m amazed that neither those running the BPB nor Magnum of which Soth is a member had the right connections to get an incandescent Tessa Jowell on the line from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and a few heads bashed together at the UK Border Agency, the decision reversed and the official concerned given a rather stiff reprimand.

Practically we now seem to be one of those countries for which you need a second passport that does not mention your profession as a journalist or photographer and which you need to enter as a tourist in order to carry out your job.

Actually I think the show may well be worth a visit. Years ago I gave my son, then around the same age, a cheap plastic ‘Russian’ camera when he would sometimes accompany me taking pictures. I think he produced some more interesting results then than he sometimes does now.

I wrote an article to go with some of his pictures and submitted it to the Amateur Photographer, with some silly title like ‘Easy, Peasy, Shutter Squeezy‘. It was the only piece I sent them that they didn’t publish, the editor telling me that they felt their readers might feel insulted by seeing that a seven-year-old could do better than them.

Three Cities, Three Photographers

The basic idea behind the show ‘Paris, New York, London‘ was a simple one – three cities, three people, each with their own ‘mini show’ of pictures from one of them – which I came up with it sitting in a pub around a year ago with Paul Baldesare.

We had just finished a two person show together in the Shoreditch Gallery, a small venue with space for perhaps 35 pictures of an average size for photographs, with some double hanging. It has actually got smaller since I first organised a show there, with one of the three walls (the fourth is a large window) now covered with storage and longer available for hanging.

Shoreditch – and particularly Hoxton where the gallery is – is an up and coming area of London, and the Shoreditch Gallery is one of two rooms occupied by a pleasant café in a small square called Hoxton Market, just a few yards from Hoxton Square which now has some pretty heavyweight art galleries.

Paris, New York, London is the sixth show I’ve organised in this space on an annual basis. The first three were mixed shows for a now defunct charity group called the London Arts Cafe, including painting, drawing and photography and included work by some fairly well known names in the art world – and we produced a printed catalogue for each of them. And perhaps because they were mixed shows rather than simply photographic shows, I sold pictures at all of them. Since then I’ve organised three purely photographic shows. The first, when the gallery still had three available walls, was English Carnivals, with work by four photographers, myself, Paul Baldesare, Bob Watkins and David Trainer. Last year, down to two walls, I took one and Paul the other with a show ‘Taken in London‘.

Three cities for ‘Paris, New York, London‘ is going to be a little of a squeeze. As the third person, Paul and I decided to invite John Benton-Harris to show some of his recent digital work from New York with us. Both Paul and I have known John for some time; Paul was a student of his years ago and I’ve several times written about his work, particularly pictures of the English and St Patricks’s Day – as well as lecturing about him at the FotoArtFestival in Bielsko-Biala in Poland. We liked the work he was now doing with digital particularly on his trips to New York and thought it would be good to have it in the show. Some of the pictures were taken with the Nikon D70 camera I’d done a deal with John over after I’d moved on to a D200 a few years back, though he now has several more digital cameras.

I think I originally wanted to call the show ‘London, New York, Paris’ though I’m not sure why I thought that sounded better. Perhaps because like the two previous shows it was going to be a part of PhotoLondon, the East London photography festival. But when I came to register a domain for the web site around the beginning of the year, that name wasn’t available, so it became ‘Paris, New York, London.’ As always with our shows, the actual selection of photographs for the show was left to each person involved, though we agreed that we would have a maximum of 12 pictures each, and that these should form a coherent group of images.

I started photographing Paris in 1966, but that year I dropped my camera in the lake at Versailles while getting into a rowing boat with my wife-to-be, and the water did nothing for my holiday snaps. The camera never really recovered either, though it was around 4 years before I could afford to replace it. Four years shooting on film with a shutter speed set on 1/125 that could be anything between around 1/30th and 4 seconds wasn’t a great start to my photography. But in 1970 I splashed out around £30 on a Russian Zenith B with a 50mm f2 lens and really got started in photography. In 1973 I went back to Paris and took some of the pictures that made up my first published magazine portfolio and you can see that work, along with some from later years on my Paris site.

In this show I have a dozen colour images from 1988, which were selected from the 65 or so in my latest Blurb book, Photo Paris, a slightly revised version of which with some of the reproduction improved is now available. Direct from Blurb it costs £16.45 + carriage, but at the show party (date to be announced) I’ll have copies at &15. And if you insist I’ll sign them.

Photo Paris was taken over a few weeks in August 1988 when I was staying in a flat in Montreuil, just outside the Paris border to the east, one of the settlements around the city that make up the ‘banlieue’ which saw riots a few years ago. The area in which we stayed – like much of Paris – still then had much of a village feeling (unlike many of London’s ‘villages’ which exist only in the minds of estate agents.) Quite a few of the other images are from Belleville and Menilmontant, largely working class districts on the slope at the north-east of the city. It’s an area that the great Willy Ronis made his own through his superb images of the 1950s (and in 2008 I walked his favourite walk.) But back in 1988 I probably hadn’t heard of Ronis and I made my own way around the area, parts of which were being radically modernised, though little trace of this appears in my pictures. I was interested in evoking a past age at least as much as recording the present.

Paul Baldesare‘s contribution to the show from London contrasts two decades and two areas, with images from the City of London, including some of those he showed in ‘4 On London‘ in the 1990s with those from his more recent pictures of London’s shopping Mecca around Oxford St.

You can read more about “A taste of the Big Apple” by John Benton-Harris on the Paris, New York, London web site, where there are four of his 12 pictures from the show. I’m particularly pleased that I was able to print 8 of his images for it.

Rather than having an opening, we decided to have a show party later in the month, to which all will be welcome – I’ll post the details as soon as they are confirmed.

The show opens on Saturday 2 October (although I think we may actually still be putting the work up if you come early in the day) and closes on 29 October. Mon-Fri 8am-6pm, Sat: 10am-4pm. Closed Sun. The Shoreditch Gallery is at the Juggler Cafe in Hoxton Market, which is just to the east of Pitfield St, down either Boot St or Coronet St, a few yards north of Old St. Lots of buses stop near and the nearest tube, Old St, is about 5 minutes walk to the west.

On Show in London

One of the things that I really miss with the revamped monthly British Journal of Photography is the ‘On Show’ listings. Although they were never comprehensive, they gave a pretty good selection of the photography shows in London and around the country, particularly those whose details were not covered by other listings.

There were some gaps, and in particular a number of commercial art galleries never bothered to tell BJP about their shows (and just occasionally some of the more important public galleries too.) But often I’d rip out the page when I was catching the train up to London and thought I might have a little spare time to take in a show, and I’d spend a few minutes on my journey deciding which exhibitions to try and get to.

For a while you could also access ‘On Show’ on line, I think even for a month or two after the magazine went monthly, but it no longer appears either in the printed monthly or on the web site, and I’ve not yet found a decent alternative. The monthly BJP does have an exhibitions page, but it’s hopeless, listing just a few exhibitions that have already appeared in the Sunday papers, or are on elsewhere in Europe or the US.

Of course there are listings sites, but most of them seem defective so far as photography is concerned. Photography-now is an international site and its UK pages do include the major shows and quite a few of the commercial galleries, but not many of the other venues. Probably the best site that I’ve so far found is Spoonfed, where you can search for photography in London but the format makes it near to impossible to use sensibly – if you click on the link to see all of September’s shows you will find that a show that is open 20 days in the month gets 20 listings.

Despite the problems, I managed to find a couple of photographic shows to visit yesterday afternoon and both are certainly worth a few minutes of your time.

Chris Beetles, in Ryder St (a short walk from Green Park tube) is showing a good selection of Edward Weston pictures printed by his son Cole Weston, and you can see all 37 of them on the gallery web site. The show is on until 25 Sept 2010. Cole, who died in 2003, was the youngest of Weston’s four sons, and although he was a photographer himself was better known for printing his father’s work.

Prices for the prints on show range from £4000-10500, and personally I would rather spend a considerably smaller sum on one of the finely printed books of his work (and I actually have several.) Cole’s prints were considerably cleaner than some of his father’s – those in this show seemed without blemish – but somehow they seem to lack a little of the intensity of those his father printed (and even of some of the fine reproductions in books.)

At the Michael Hoppen Gallery in Jubilee Place, off the Kings Road (the buses stop a few yards away at Markham St) are two shows that certainly offered a greater challenge, by two of Japan’s best-known post-war photographers, Daido Moriyama, (b1938) and Shomei Tomatsu (b1930.) The Tomatsu show is due to end 9 Oct 2010 and Moriyama 10 Oct 2010.

Moriyama is the more challenging of the two, a self-consciously avant-garde photographer impressed by the work of William Klein, Weegee and other American photographers and artists, who early in his photographic studies worked for three years as an assistant to Eikoh Hosoe. On Japan Exposures you can see an interesting presentation of his early magazine work, looking at two Japanese books of his work from 1965-1970 and 1971-4.

© 2005 Peter Marshall.
Eikoh Hosoe looks at his camera phone in a pizza place called Alcatraz

and takes a picture of me!

Moriyama worked on the city streets, often at night, with a 35mm camera, often taking pictures without the benefit of the viewfinder, and pushing Tri-X far beyond its design criteria. Printed high contrast and on a large scale his work is often reminiscent of Pop Art’s use of dot screens (and the Moriyama foundation’s web site presents them as coarse halftones.) His work epitomises the aesthetic behind the influential Japanese magazine Provoke, “are-bure-bokeh*” or “rough, blurred, out of focus.” Started in 1968 in Tokyo by photographer and writer Takuma Nakahira and others, the magazine, which published Moriyama’s work in it’s second issue, had a short publication history (three issues) but started a movement under it’s title including many young Japanese photographers of the era.

Although the Provoke photographers (including Yutaka Takanashi, Koji Taki and Takahiko Okada as well as Nakahira and Moriyama) very much saw themselves in revolt against the photography of the past – and that very much included Shomei Tomatsu – looking at the older photographer’s work now the similarities are rather more marked than the differences, and he is now seen very much as a precursor of ‘Provoke’.

It’s a show that is very much worth going to see, particularly for the presentation of Moriyama’s work on a scale impossible in print. There does now seem to be a considerable publishing industry devoted to his work in Japan, though rather fewer seem to be available in this country. A new monograph, Daido Moriyama: The World through My Eyes (ISBN-10: 8857200612) is to be published by Skira on 12 Oct 2010, and Daido Moriyama: Shinjuku 19XX-20XX, (ISBN-10: 3775717293), pictures from a Tokyo district he became obsessed with, is still available at a reasonable price.

While in the gallery I also looked through the fine book ‘The Skin of the Nation‘, produced for Tomatsu’s first retrospective outside of Japan which was shown in New York, Washington, San Francisco and Winterthur,Switzerland in 2004/6. And no, I’m not surprised that it didn’t make the UK. It’s perhaps unfortunate that one image by Tomatsu – a beer bottle melted by the heat of the nuclear holocaust at Nagasaki – has been so successful that it has obscured his other work. Before I started to write about the show I went on line and ordered myself a second-hand copy.

*Bokeh here does not mean the excessive pre-occupation with the rendering of out of focus areas which bedevils some areas of the Internet, but simply that things are not rendered sharply because they are not in focus.

Brian Griffin at NPG

Last Friday evening Brian Griffin gave a talk on his photographs on display at the London NPG as a part of their London 2012 project until 26 September 2010 as a part of the late night opening there. I’d arrived over an hour earlier, having walked across from the Royal Festival Hall where I’d been meeting someone earlier who was on her way to an earlier start at the Royal Opera House, and thought I’d spend some time looking at the NPG collection and some of the other special activities on offer for the NPG’s ‘Late Shift‘.

I started by sitting for a portrait booth from ‘Take Away Art’ with Artist Joceline Howe hidden inside. I have to say I found the two minute sketch of me disappointing, and the figure could have been anyone in a silly hat and a fancy frame, though I did rather like the portrait of the young lady who sat before me, but then she was considerably more attractive anyway.

I also took the opportunity to look at the exhibited work from this year’s BP Portrait Award, and have to say I found that disappointing too. There seems to be a current vogue for producing painted portraits that have a photographic look to them, and most of them I would have found rather disappointing as photographs. There were some other portraits I found more interesting but none of them were among the winners.

Also rather disappointing was the display ‘Twentieth Century Portraits‘, photographs taken by Dmitri Kasterine, that was due to open the following day but was actually in place for the Late Shift. Kasterine (b1932, England) whose father was a White Russian and mother English, began taking portraits in the early 1960s for Queen and other leading magazines, and the works on display include many well-known figures from the arts. A few of the pictures are rightly celebrated, the icons by which we remember, for example, Francis Bacon, but in the main I found most a little ordinary.

I think there is some more interesting work on his web site, and a family group I rather like on his blog posted last month that shows he is still busy.

Walking around the gallery it struck me that many of the more interesting pictures on display are not actually portraits – and that quite a few of the portraits are actually rather tedious, including much of the modern work. This came home to me particularly in a gallery entitled Expansion and Empire, where one of the more fascinating works shows Queen Victoria presenting a bible to an African guest, and another Florence Nightingale receiving the wounded at Scutari. (There is also another large image of the Queen visiting the wounded and also a picture of the relief of Lucknow.) There are other portraits of Nightingale, the best of them certainly one of the small photographs on display but not shown on the web page. But it is the larger group images that dominate the room, and not just because of their size.

In a way I think Brian Griffin’s work for the Road to 2012 is a twenty-first century equivalent of these paintings of historical scenes, though of course he has not tried to portray actual scenes (though nor really do those historical examples.) But his work certainly does have something of their sense of theatre, although I don’t think Jerry Barrett or Thomas Jones Barker would have understood or sympathised with Anna Raybon‘s statement that the ‘Road to 2012‘ “was to be art, not PR“; clearly for them, even if the term was then unknown, PR and Art coincided.

His talk was fairly well attended although there was plenty of room for more. Introduced by Raybon, the NPG’s Commissions Manager, the event started with a showing of the film clip of the live performance by Griffin and musician Steve Nieve on the Late show in 1988, which you can also watch on YouTube. Entitled ‘The Big Tie‘, it shows Griffin’s work on Broadgate, with a very young looking Griffin both talking and singing.

Friday he didn’t sing, but engaged in a conversation with Braybon about project and the making of some of the pictures. At one point Griffin demonstrated how he posed models “like puppets“, pushing and pulling their limbs into the positions he wanted, engaging them as actors in producing the scene he wanted. But he and Raybon stressed, the scenes only really came to life when one of the sitters added something of their own, such as when a young boxer leaned out of the tight sculptural group of four figures and raised his gloves to the camera.

Like most of his pictures, this image of the ‘young ambassadors’ from an East Ham school who had played a large part in swinging the decision to London was based on a painting, Griffin had an image of it in his mind but only actually identified it several months later on one of his frequent visits to the National Gallery.

Some of the sitters also had their own games to play. Griffin had wanted to photograph then minister Tessa Jowell kneeling on the office carpet and draping herself onto a chair. But she came in and told him she wasn’t getting on her knees for anyone and he had to rethink. Is it just me that sees the picture that resulted with her arms out on a chair back as her with a Zimmer Frame?

Griffin also stressed the teamwork involved in making these portraits, working with Braybon and others including his assistants on location – usually with two hours to make a picture. Towards the end of the performance he brought four of that team up onto the stage to answer questions – something that certainly came as a surprise to his printer, Mike Crawford.

After the talk I went with Griffin and half a dozen of his friends to a show in the basement of the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury, ‘Fake Food & Fast Cars: The Pop Couture of Kate Forbes‘, an incredible display of the “highly conceptual costumes” created by this film designer. It continues until 2 October 2010, and is certainly worth a visit. I asked her if I might take some pictures, but failed to persuade her to move out of deep shadow in the dimly lit gallery.

Griffin, born in Birmingham in 1948, grew up in Lye, between Halesowen and Stourbridge in Dudley and his show at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris from November 19 2010 to January 23 2011, ‘the Black Country’ is based on his memories of growing up there, with portraits based on people he knew as a child, including his family.

A couple of weeks ago he went back there to photograph some of the places that played an important part in his growing up including Ma Pardoes (The Old Swan pub) in Netherton, Netherton butchers, The Black Country Living Museum and Solid Swivel Engineering. After showing in Paris the pictures will go on display in Dudley in 2012.

Kate Forbes worked with Griffin on this project to ensure that the costumes reflected the period and location of his youth. The single picture from it on the web page, My Mother, 2010 shows a woman representing Griffin’s mother when he was a child, with hands soaked in some kind of black oily substance, in a factory overall.

Photo-Forum

Photographers who live in and around London who missed last night’s Photo-Forum should be kicking themselves. Apart from Ray Tang’s excellent brownies there was great photography from Antonio Zazueta Olmos and Kieran Doherty, making this perhaps the best evening yet. If you did miss it you can follow the links to their web sites where you will find most of the pictures that the two showed, but it just isn’t the same as seeing them projected on a large screen and hearing the photographers talk about them.

You can of course get something a little more personal on blogs, and both photographers write – if not too frequently – about their work online, with Olmos on photomexican (though the last post was in 2008) and Doherty‘s started under his name in February this year.

Olmos impressed with his obvious love of photography, and in particular the black and white work which inspired him to buy a camera by Bruce Davidson, Robert Frank and others. And although he showed some fine colour work including set of pictures of Nicaraguan refugees he made it clear that black and white remains his first love. Some of his best pictures were produced travelling with just a single camera and lens (Leica M6 and 35mm) although at times he took a deliberate decision to slow down his work by using a Mamiya C330 twin-lens camera. He found that people loved to be photographed by this camera and the different approach it entails, bowing towards your subject as you take the picture with the camera held firmly against your stomach.

Olmos also passed on a great bit of advice he himself received, that if you find yourself surrounded by photographers when taking pictures, you are almost certainly in the wrong place.

In recent years most of his work for the Observer has been portraiture, and although he now usually has to shoot for the paper in digital colour he still prefers black and white film, and showed us a powerful and varied portfolio of these images.

Doherty worked for many years for Reuters, and although he praised the freedom they usually allowed him, there was still obviously a great pressure to come up with the kind of pictures they wanted, and he obviously did a great job at doing so. His work showed a great willingness to experiment, having new ideas and trying them out. But eventually he found he wanted more freedom and at a time when the recession was really hitting and all of us were finding things pretty tough (and he’d just taken out a large mortgage) decided to go freelance.

The most impressive of his work for me was a continuing project on Wooton Bassett, shot in black and white. He is also shooting weddings, but not in the old formal way, but very much in a photojournalistic mode.

At every Photo-Forum there is a raffle, with the cash collected providing food in the pub after the event, and the prizes are usually prints donated by the photographers who give the talks. And last night I was lucky and one of my tickets was drawn out of the hat. So I’m now the proud possessor of a print by Kieran Doherty.

Photo-Forum happens every second Thursday of the month, 6 – 8pm downstairs in the Jacobs Pro Lounge at 74 New Oxford Street London WC1A 1EU.

Please come and celebrate with the photographers at the Shoreditch Gallery* from 6.30-8.30pm on 20th October 2010

Paris  New York  London

Shoreditch Gallery

October 2 Oct – 29 Oct 2010

Work from three photographers, three major world cities & three decades

Paris New York London

Work from three photographers,
three major world cities & three decades