Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Trent and Narelle

Thanks to Magnum for a tweet pointing out a “Wonderful 30 minute documentary about photographers Trent Parke and Narelle Autio“, Trent Parke – Dreamlives (2002) – Australian Story which you can watch on Vimeo.

According to my computer its actually 25 minutes 17 seconds long, although perhaps it does seem longer as Magnum suggest. Although it does have a lot of interesting moments and comments – it was good to see some of the locations of pictures in ‘Dreamlives’ and also some more about the making of their joint book ‘The Seventh Wave’ I did end up feeling it would have been a much better 10 minute film.

But if you want to relax for a while with a glass or two of wine or a couple of beers 10 minutes would be a little short. So perhaps its a film about a very photographically driven couple for an Australian audience who perhaps won’t notice the title and the strapline “Newcastle’s own Trent Parke” omits to mention the female half while the film itself stresses the importance of them working together. And in case anyone is confused, that’s Newcastle, New South Wales and I think Parke was Magnum’s first Australian photographer.

Considerably more interesting photographically is his Minutes to Midnight, produced over a two-year period tavelling across Australia with his partner, and culminating with the birth of their first son in November 2004.

This 2006 Magnum in Motion essay is clearly to date the definitive presentation of this work, (the book is a 32 page pamphlet with only 20 images) and I think is a now a real classic. After completing it he stopped working in black and white and moved to colour.

Road to 2012 at NPG

The latest stage of the National Portrait Gallery/BT Road to 2012 project is on show (admission free) in the Studio gallery of the London National Portrait Gallery from now until 26 September 2010. It consists of a larger set of pictures from the project than previously shown by Brian Griffin along with some individual portraits of athletes by Bettina von Zwehl.

I think you can see all the pictures, along with much other material about how they were made on the NPG project web site although it seems to me to have an unnecessarily confusing interface to navigate. Of course seeing the pictures in reproduction on the web (click on them to see them larger) is no substitute for seeing the actual work.

I went to the so-called “Breakfast Launch” of the show (an entirely breakfast-free event) where one of the athletes pictures, rower Katherine Grainger talked about being photographed by von Zwehl.

Later I was able to photograph her standing beside the portrait of her (all photographs in this review are © Peter Marshall 2010, but included works by the photographers in the show in them are © Bettina von Zwehl – National Portrait Gallery/BT Road to 2012 Project or © Brian Griffin – National Portrait Gallery/BT Road to 2012 Project respectively.)

It and the similar pairing of young weightlifter Zoe Smith I think typify the problem I have with her portraits.

Somehow to me these portraits all look too much the same. And unfortunately they don’t seem to much resemble the real people who were used to make them. It’s a particular look which I think best suits sullen adolescents but none of those in the show fits that bill. They seem to be images that tell me more about the photographer than the sitter, which isn’t what I want from a portrait.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Roy Haggan won the Everyday People competition – his prize a portrait by Bettina von Zwehl – perhaps the most recognisable of those on show

As you can see, these pictures are surprisingly small – only moderately sized – and at this scale fail to demonstrate the kind of quality that the 8×10 camera can give. I’m not usually a fan of printing stuff large, but I do think these needed a greater scale, although I don’t think I would have found them any more convincing. One aspect of the larger format is that the subject stands out more from the background with the greater inherent depth of field, but here, combined with the over-lighting of the subject it often creates a kind of cardboard cut-out effect. Looking at a number of these I felt they would almost certainly have been improved by using only ambient light.

I know that von Zwehl is a very successful photographer and have admired some of her previous work, but I just don’t get these images. The gallery notes on the show describe them as “meditative observations of face, mood and physique” but I fail to find this in them. Doubtless it’s my loss.

I have long been a fan of Brian Griffin, and as well as producing interesting work he is always an interesting guy to talk to. These works show that he has lost nothing of his touch and the show includes several that can rank among his best over the years.

My favourite of the new works is one which I immediately christened “the conspirators“, perhaps a scene out of Hamlet, where David Luckes‘s right eye peers out over the shoulder of Simon Clegg. Both of them have a hand on the 395 page report written by Luckes in 2000 which persuaded the Mayor of London and the government to back the bid, and its white plastic spine is surely the murder weapon. Something very nasty is certainly about to happen! As we’ve now found out.

I’ve also included this image to show the framing of these works with a white border and a white frame, which I think as very effective.

There are others that struck me powerfully too. Ken Livingstone, posing with LDA Managing consultant Tony Winterbottom shows Ken pointing and Griffin makes powerful use of the frame with one finger pointing to his left exactly at its edge, and the other hand on the opposite edge above the open palm of Winterbottom, doubtless waiting for the cash to drop into it. Ken is of course wearing a red tie, the only touch of colour in the scene, taken in front of a dynamically sloping background at City Hall, reinforcing the dynamic thrust of Ken towards the frame edge.

Many of those in Griffin’s pictures are men in grey suits (and some women too) but one dramatic piece of colour is provided by architect Zaha Hadid in a group showing the Aquatics centre team. Like many of his works this also illustrates his very theatrical use of lighting (and also some superb printing of his work.)

There are just one or two which I don’t think work, some where perhaps he seems to almost be parodying his own work, and others that just don’t quite come off. But overall he is creating a powerful set of work. It may well be the best thing to come out of the Olympics.

[My own ‘Olympic’ contribution is the book of pictures ‘Before the Olympics: The Lea Valley 1981-2010.’]

Leon Levinstein at the Met

Like many with an interest in photography I’ve been reading the blogs and reviews from this year’s Arles Rencontres and from what I’ve seen I’m pleased I didn’t make the effort to go there. But one show I would like to see opened recently at the Met in New York, Hipsters, Hustlers, and Handball Players: Leon Levinsteins New York Photographs, 1950-1980.

Levinstein was really the guy who wrote the book of what we now call ‘street photography’, so perhaps it’s rather unfair of Ken Johnson in the New York Times to denigrate the show as “a compendium of street photography clichés.” Much of it only became clichés because others followed his lead. But then I find it very hard to take with any seriousness the writing of someone who can describe Tina Modotti as “a master of the genre” along with Weegee and Robert Frank. This isn’t by the way a criticism of Modotti, though I’m not her greatest fan.

Gallerist James Danziger presents a markedly more sympathetic view, though I’d take exception at his suggestion that Levinstein is “more known and appreciated by dealers and curators than collectors or even photographers“, as I think more than almost anyone else I can think of he is a “photographer’s photographer”, (as indeed the Economist describes him in a short piece with a small set of images from the show) but although I’ve not seen the show I do know his work and Danziger is spot on when he says “hes the real deal.”

Vince Aletti in The New Yorker gets to the nature of the work well when he talks of Levinstein as a loner “communing with New York at its grittiest, clearly relishing the experience” and producing work that is “brutal, brilliant, and uncompromising.”

In the Village Voice, Robert Shuster picks it as the only photographic show in his art recommendations and in a short piece compares him with Frank and finishes with the statement “Levinstein deserves wider recognition for recording the fleeting, quirky scenes of city life.”

The Met now has a decent short piece on him on their site, the real gem of which is a po0dacst with exceprts from a 1988 archival recording in which Leon Levinstein talks about his work.

The Howard Greenburg Gallery site isn’t my favourite – in my view a rather bad use of Flash, and if you have a recent Flash version installed you may well be told you haven’t got the correct one, but it will still actually work if you tell it you have. Under the ‘Artist’ tab if you scroll down you will find Levinstein and eventually a set of around 40 of his images.

Carl de Keyser & Google Earth

I meant to point out last week that Carl de Keyser has been answering questions on David Alan Harvey‘s ‘Burn‘, “an evolving journal for emerging photographers.” Some of the comments make interesting reading, though of course not everyone has “Two assistants in Magnum/Paris” who ” go around the entire European coastline on Google earth and put flags in places where they think I might find an interesting situation to photograph that reflects that idea of waiting for the big one.”

I’ve written about de Keyser’s work on several occasions and as well as on Magnum you can also see more on his own web site, and on the site devoted to his latest project Moments Before the Flood, involving the whole European coastline.

He is currently working in the UK, and on the site you can see his images from a number of places I’ve also photographed, including Hornsea, Withernsea and Skipsea, and I see that on Saturday he was in Brighton, photographing its derelict West Pier. Pictures are going up more or less as soon as they are taken and comments are welcome on the site.

Although I admire his photography, and there are plenty of good pictures, I’m not sure that I think that the project is really quite coming together, though I’ve only looked through the 80 or so pictures from the UK. It’s perhaps just a little too scenic (and in one or two cases too picture postcard) although of course the editing may well sort that out.

But sometimes looking at his pictures I do get the impression of a man in a hurry driven by a huge mission to complete, and driving at great speed from ‘flag’ to ‘flag’ around our coastline.

Hornsea, Skipsea and Withernsea particularly interested me because I’ve visited them quite a few times over the years (of course I’ve also been to many of the other places around the coast) and have photographed the effects of erosion there and along the whole Holderness coast. But I think I took my best pictures when I used a bicycle to get around, there is a lot to be said for working at a slower speed.

But Google Earth and Google Streetview and other mapping and satellite image services have very much changed the way we can look for subject matter.

I had a query yesterday about a picture I took in 1995 in London (its on the Buildings of London site I wrote in 1996 and have hardly updated.)

(Sorry it’s not a great scan, but technology back then was relatively primitive.)

Of course I could go back to my contact sheets from 1995 and find the image, and fortunately I had put down the details and was able to confirm that the street I’d given was correct. It also had a six figure grid reference, but that only locates it to roughly a hundred metres. Rather than just check on the map, I started with finding the street on Google Earth then used ‘Street View.’ And it wasn’t there – which is why I’d had the query.

Fortunately one of the other frames I had of the building showed the right hand corner where there was a street with a name I could read with a magnifying glass from the contact sheet, so I could tell exactly where it had been. Back to street view and I could also clearly identify the very dull red brick block that had replaced a rather interesting piece of 1930’s architecture.

Of course the new block has an extra storey and almost certainly made a decent profit by fitting more units into the same space. And probably the new building will be more energy efficient and with luck the roof won’t leak, often a problem with ‘modern’ buildings that were really designed with warmer drier climates in mind.

If I was in power I would insist that any new building that replaced an old one had to be at least as architecturally distinguished. But our planning system has little control over visual aspects of building, as you can see on almost any walk through London.

Section 44 Victory

Photographers in London yesterday celebrated the final nail in the coffin of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 nailed in the previous week by the European Court of Human Rights. It wasn’t just used against photographers, though I think we suffered disproportionately, and all that now remains is for the government to give it a decent burial.

There is some hope that some of the anti-photography laws such as Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 (and I think its section 56a of the 2000 Act) which makes photography of the police and military that might be of aid to terrorists an offence will go with it.

We held a small victory celebration at New Scotland Yard at noon on Sunday and stood around taking pictures of each other. On David Hoffman‘s sousveillance blog (that’s him above) you can see me gazing up to heaven holding a Mamiya Press, though it wasn’t actually mine but its owner felt my beard went better with it. Although I used to use medium and large format (when I had to) I never got around to buying one of these although I did rather lust after the 6×9 format (you could also fit 6×7 backs) and the rather splendid Mamiya 50mm on the model here, I think roughly equivalent to a 20mm on a 35mm camera. The widest lens I ever afforded for medium format was a superb but not particularly wide 65mm for a Mamiya 7 on the 6×7 format.

Things have changed so far as lenses and focal lengths are concerned. Forty years ago, 28mm was thought of as being exceptionally wide, although there were a few wider lenses they were really specialist items and few photographers used them. Come to that unless you were in a specialist field such as sports the longest telephoto in your kit was probably a 135mm, and my first 200mm was really something special. I didn’t find a use for the 300mm equivalent in my bag at this event, but it was worth fishing out the fisheye!

And the photographer at the centre of all this attention is none other than Jules Mattson who performed so well when wrongly arrested by police at Romford the previous weekend, also in the picture below.

More about the flashmob and more pictures from my set on Demotix – and I’ll put them with a few more on My London Diary shortly.

The Romford Incident

The arrest by police in Romford of young photojournalist Jules Mattson was a serious assault by police on the freedom of the press in this country. I suspect they initially picked on him thinking he was an easy target, but his behaviour was an example to us all, keeping calm, continuing to state clearly what he was doing and his right to do so, showing a far greater appreciation of the law than the officers. Throughout the confrontation in which he was eventually arrested by an Inspector Fish, he managed to continue to record the events, both on his i-Phone and also for much of the time continuing to take pictures with his camera which was on a strap around his neck, all despite having one arm twisted behind his back. Of course when police illegally took his camera away from him he protested – and couldn’t take pictures.

You can read his own account, hear the recording and see some of his pictures on his blog. Even though at one point police pushed him down some steps (producing the single expletive in the recording) he continued to argue his case politely. As you can hear, it is an altogether remarkable performance, and one that few, if any, more experienced photographers could have managed under the circumstances.

You can also read about the story elsewhere, for example in the Amateur Photographer, Boing-Boing, The Independent, The Register, Police Specials, Jack of Kent …

You can also see some of his pictures in Police, photographers and the Law, a feature on EPUK in which Civil Rights lawyer Shamik Dutta answers fifteen key questions on police powers and photography in Britain today.

I first met Jules a year ago taking pictures at an event I was photographing, and was particularly impressed that he managed to sell his work to one of the organisations taking part. Since then I’ve met him regularly at events and occasionally seen his pictures on his blog and elsewhere – he has managed a remarkable amount of work considering he has also been working for his GCSEs. As well as putting images into various libraries he has also signed with one of the more active agencies around. As a full-time student not studying journalism he probably does not at the moment qualify to be a member of the NUJ, but certainly will have the support of many in the union, particularly in the London Photographers Branch where many of us know him, and his father is a member.

Legal action against the police is bound to follow, and I understand that he has the legal advice of the very same solicitor whose work last week resulted in Marc Vallee and Jason Parkinson each getting £3,500 compensation for being pushed around and forced to stop working outside the Greek Embassy in London in December 2008.

Photo Books

The latest publication from Alec Soth’s ‘Little Brown Mushroom‘ press is Bedknobs & Broomsticks by Trent Parke and it is probably sold out by the time you read this, though perhaps if you get an order in immediately you will be able to get one, at least if you have an address in the US it can be shipped to. At $18 it isn’t particularly expensive for a 40 page book around 7×8 inches, but it ain’t cheap either presumably because of the low print run.

Looking at the sample pages on the link above, I didn’t feel inclined to buy it myself, but nowadays probably most people who are buying things like this do so not because they want the book but because they think it will be a good investment. A couple of years ago I bought a copy of Parke’s first book, the 1999 ‘Dream/Life‘, a considerably more substantial volume. Then it cost me about £40, though I had to pay carriage from Australia. Now, as M Scott Brauer points out on dvaphoto, the cheapest copy on Amazon is going for a mere $849.99, although a quick internet search did find one elsewhere at only $681. Still £400 more than I paid.

There has been a huge rise of interest in photographic books in recent years, pumped up by a few publications dealing with them that have promoted some at times pretty obscure and unremarkable titles. Fortunately most of the best photographic books over the years have sold fairly well, and in a number of cases have been re-issued with improved print quality and sometimes better design and editing – and at times a great deal of interesting new content. Probably the best example of this is Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’, where you can buy a recent edition on-line for less than £20. It’s a book no photographer should be without, though if you have the money and the shelf space, the Steidl ‘Expanded Edition’, an extremely weighty hardback is worth paying around double that for. (And if you can get Robert Frank to sign it you can ask an extra couple of thousand when you sell it!)

Unless you have a particular interest in bibliographic history, or are a collector, it isn’t worth buying any of the various earlier editions. They cost more and offer rather less. The Aperture edition I bought years back sells for anything from £60 to £350 and some others can be found around that price, while the first US edition sells for thousands – and around £10,000 for a signed copy. The book was first published in France and you can get a copy of that edition, in fairly reasonable condition for under £2000!

It really is madness. But at least in this case you can get the best edition cheaply.

But I think for photographic publishing the future – or at least the foreseeable future – is with printing on demand. Which is why I’ve started to put my work out through Blurb – and I’ve got another and very different book almost ready. It isn’t a perfect solution, and a few changes at Blurb – or another company offering a comparable services at similar prices but with fewer limitations would help greatly.

Joe Deal (1947-2010)

I’ve heard and read quite a few people responding to the news of the recent death of photographer Joe Deal by expressing their ignorance about him and his work. He was of course one of the photographers in the famed ‘New Topographics‘ show of 1975, which changed the direction of landscape photography and was recently revisted at George Eastman House (though their web site is rather uninformative – there is more at LACMA, and a feature on NPR.)

I first saw his work in reproduction that year, and a little later he was one of the photographers that Lewis Baltz discussed in some detail on his workshop I attended, showing work from his then current project on suburban housing along the San Andreas Fault Line in Southern California. Like many other photographers who worked in the urban landscape I found this show refreshing and it altered all of our work – and you can perhaps see this in at least some of my and other photographer’s projects on the Urban Landscapes web site – such as my Meridian, DLR and other panoramic series.

You can see a good selection Deal’s Fault Zone series and other work from the period on the Robert Mann Gallery site, where he had a show in 2004. There is an obituary by William Grimes in the New York Times with a slide show and you can also see a second show which begins with some of his more recent images at the Robert Mann gallery.

Lensculture 26

Lensculture issue 26 is now on line and as always there is much to look at, not least a preview pick of 40 pictures from the 2010 Rencontres d’Arles so that I can see what I will be missing from July 3-13 th (the exhibition programme continues until September 19th>.

I’ve thought about going there for years, but have never quite got around to it. Until around ten years ago there was a good reason, since it was always a very busy time for me at work, and it would have been difficult if not impossible to get the time off, but since then it’s largely been a matter of sloth and failing to persuade any of my photographic friends to accompany me.

Another feature I was very pleased to see was a selection of 16 images by Tony Ray Jones, a highlight of the recent Month of Photography in Krakow, Poland. I did a very good PR job on his behalf with a lecture at the 2005 FotoArt Festival at Beilsko-Biala (just a short trip down the road from Krakow) on the ‘Two Rays’ of British photography – Ray Moore and Tony Ray Jones, and again when I spoke in the same lecture hall two years later in a presentation of the history of British ‘street photography.’

You can see my pictures from Bielsko-Biala and a dairy of the 2005 festival there on line, though for copyright reasons I was unable to post my full lecture. I also kept an online diary in 2007, in which I promise to make a version of my lecture available – but as yet I’ve not managed to do so. There are some copyright issues that I’ve not found a sensible way to resolve.

Sally Mann at the PG

I was disappointed in various ways at the Photographer’s Gallery opening of a show of Sally Mann‘s work yesterday evening, the last to take place in their current premises before they close for extensive rebuilding. But the show, The Family and the Land, which continues until 19 September 2010, is certainly worth at least a brief visit.

I was a greatly impressed by Mann’s At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women which brought her to the attention of the photographic world when published by Aperture in 1988, although the quality of the reproductions failed to do justice to her work. (It was her second monograph, following Second Sight: The Photographs of Sally Mann which had been published in 1983.) At the time my students included many young women just a few years older than her subjects and a number of them were inspired by her work in their own projects. But it also disturbed some, as you can read in a thoughtful review by portrait photographer Elsa Dorfmann who felt uneasy about what she calls Mann’s manipulative approach.

Although none of the pictures from At Twelve are included in the current show (the programme notes state that she “first came to prominence for Immediate Family” which was exhibited and published four years later) I think it is more than arguable that ‘At Twelve‘ has had a much greater direct influence on other photographers, with an avalanche of projects dealing with girls in this age group since then.

‘Immediate Family‘ also published by Aperture four years later in 1992, but this time with seriously good duotone reproduction, also had a powerful effect both on me and my students. One smallish area of the gallery has a dozen or so images from this project, although I would have liked to see many more. Of the sixty plates in the book, only a handful are inclued in the show (The Last Time Emmett Modeled Nude, 1987, The Perfect Tomato, 1990, Vinland, 1992, Candy Cigarette and Emmet, Jessie and Virgina, 1989.) There are over 30 images on the Houk Gallery site (the last of those listed is titled EML there, which includes one or two others on the gallery wall.

Immediate Family caused a stir that went well outside the world of photography, with accusations from the right that it was child pornography and promoting pedophilia. There is a long essay by Valerie Osbourn which makes some of the controversy clear and also has some good descriptions of some of the images concerned. Before leaving for the opening I heard a rumour being spread by one a well-known photography critic that this show would be raided by the police who would demand the removal of some of the works. Given the choice of images it was perhaps just an illustration of that particular man’s warped sense of humour. But it was something that occasionally worried me when I was using Immediate Family in my teaching, and a few of my students obviously were rather disturbed by her images.

Having photographed my own children and others in my family in the previous twenty years it was something that neither surprised or disturbed me – and I had indeed been shocked at the powerfully negative response to a few of my own pictures when I had shown them in public in the 1970s.

There are people who have a problem with showing children and family life as it really is rather than in some idealised way, although Mann’s work goes beyond just doing this, with some carefully constructed tableaux. As she writes in her introduction to the book, “Many of these pictures are intimate, some are fictions and some are fantastic, but most are of ordinary things every mother has seen.” And at least some fathers and uncles too.

Later, Mann turned to wet collodion, learning the process from two of the modern masters (now fairly numerous), though perhaps deliberately avoiding becoming too competent at it. It’s much ‘artier’ if you don’t quite get it right (or perhaps more accurately in her case in every sense get it spectacularly wrong.) One or two of her pictures in the series Faces, giant close-ups of the faces of her now rather older children from 2004, have a real touch of the Julia Margaret Camerons, though others to me lacked any presence.

Applying this technique to the kind of American landscapes of the Civil War in rural Georgia and Virginia certainly had a powerful resonance, and the best of this work is impressive, and the accidents and degradation of the process powerfully evocative while on other prints it seems merely an irritating affection. Size too is an issue in her work (and of course the art market) and there are images in this show that I think would actually be more powerful at 8″x10 ” than at 40×48″ or whatever. (Her latest show, Proud Flesh, returns to a more sensible size.)

What Remains is in some ways a disturbing set of images, its subject matter the decomposing bodies at what seems like a rather ghoulish research project in Tennessee. There is a warning notice in the gallery that some may find the work disturbing, though I think I found it annoying. One of the photographers I met at the gallery would have liked to have seen these pictures made with high definition using modern film, camera and lenses. In a way I think she was right, and they would have been more effective, but I’m not sure I would have wanted to view them. I was reminded of many years ago when one of my students photographed in the local hospital mortuary, and I was very relieved to find that the low light conditions there meant that all her pictures were blurred by camera shake.

Immediate Family remains by far the most important series of Mann’s career, and it has never been shown in any depth in this country – and to this extent the current show (an edited version of a touring exhibition from the Museum of Modern Art, Sweden) was a disappointment. It was amazingly her first solo show in the UK, and tried to do too much but ended up doing too little. A second disappointment was that the photographer was delayed and not present at the opening. The third came at the bar. Fortunately there are some decent pubs within a short walk of the gallery, but it may account for what seemed a rather thin attendance for the opening of one of the rare shows of genuine photographic interest at the venue.

You can read an interview feature with Sally Mann by Blake Morrison on the Guardian site, and see more of her pictures, including images from Faces and Proud Flesh on the Gagosian Gallery site. She is also featured in the episode ‘Place‘ made in 2001 on the Art:21 site which also has clips and interviews about the wet collodion process and other aspects of her work.