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Editors and Photographers

The relationship between editors and photographers can sometimes be somewhat fraught – and the stories of the battles between Gene Smith and the guys at Life Magazine is one of the great enduring (and largely true) legends of photography. Of course it was a relationship that produced some of the classic photo essays, and although Smith was certainly not the greatest editor of his own work, without these battles I think we can be pretty sure his work would have been less well presented.

Balance wasn’t a concept Smith had a lot of time for, at least when it came to publishing his work, and he almost single-handedly brought Magnum to its knees during his relatively short time with them when he was photographing Pittsburgh, having started the job with one of the most illustrious of photo-editors, Stefan Lorant, who wanted 100 pictures to illustrate a book, while Smith had his own idea.

Although my essay on Smith is digitally “out of print” you can read a few comments about him and editing in a post here, Editing Your Work. Smith spent at least two years trying to edit the 17,000 images he made in Pittsburgh, but eventually gave up and around 45 years later (and some twenty years after Smith’s death) it took five years for Sam Stephenson of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University to produce the exhibition and book Dream Street, possibly the greatest testament to Smith’s photography and a book that should be on the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in documentary, but also a warning to photographers.

Like many photographers, I think I’m both the best and the worst editor of my own work. Best because I know it better than others and usually have some idea of what I was intending. Worst because I have a strong emotional involvement and am often distracted by things that are not actually in the picture but are more about the situation and process of making the image.

This train of thought was prompted by a piece on the Photoshelter Blog, written for photo-editors, Top 10 Ways To Make A Photographer Fall In Love With You. It’s the third in a series by Photoshelter co-founder Grover Sanschagrin which started with Top 13 Ways to Piss Off a Photo Editor and continued with Top 10 Ways To Piss Off A Photographer. All three pieces were based on asking a selection of either working photographers or editors and contain a great deal of sometimes obvious common sense.

Black in White America

On NPR you can see a short piece with 11 images about the re-issue by the J. Paul Getty Museum of the book Black In White America, by photojournalist Leonard Freed. He is one of nine photographers featured in their Los Angeles show from opening June 29 (until November 14, 2010) “Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography Since The Sixties” which also includes work by Lauren Greenfield, Philip Jones Griffiths, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Meiselas, James Nachtwey, Sebastião Salgado, W. Eugene and Aileen M. Smith, and Larry Towell. As yet there is little about it on their site.

You can see more about Freed (1929-2006) on the Magnum site, where as well as his photographer pages there is also a Magnum in Motion tribute. Looking through the 171 images from Black in White America there shows a really impressive body of work.

You can also of course see many of his other pictures, with some of the strongest coming from his book ‘Police Work’. There are altogether 16 of his features on the Magnum site, the earliest pictures from New York in the 1950s and the latest on Liberian refugees in the Ivory Coast in 1995. A truly remarkable career.

It was three years later that I had the privilege of attending a photographic workshop with him at Duckspool. You can hear him talking about his pictures in a couple of videos on You Tube, Part 1 and Part 2. Although I admired his work, he wasn’t a person I really warmed to, but he had some interesting stories to tell both with his camera and about his life. Though it was the work with the camera that was of real importance.

The review that I wrote about that workshop is still on line on the Duckspool site, although Peter Goldfield who ran the workshops is sadly no longer with us. This is one of the pictures from it that I took on the workshop (though now I might make a better scan!)

Robert Bergman

My copy of ‘Aperture 199′ arrived a while back, and while I glanced through it, the review by Andy Grundberg of the work of Robert Bergman didn’t greatly attract my attention, largely because I thought the photographs printed with it were not of any great interest. But a piece by Joerg Colberg in Conscientious has (as so often) attracted my attention, and he links to a feature on Aperture’s Exposures blog, Right on Time by David Levi Strauss in which he attacks Grundberg – and gets a reply – now with a link to the review.

It’s a spat that perhaps doesn’t interest me too greatly, but has led me to think more about Bergman. Perhaps the best place to start is with this piece on Real Clear Arts by Judith H. Dobrzynski which links to her piece in Wall St Journal with 11 photographs. There are also a few different images on Dazed. You can also see these pictures possibly a little larger at the US National Gallery of Art, which also has a 15 minute conversation between senior curator Sarah Greenough and Bergman, as well as a singularly uninformative list of pictures in their collection which are not available on line!

I’d actually love it if I thought that someone who had photographed for almost 60 of his 65 years before being ‘discovered’ was a great unsung genius – hope for the rest of us ageing photographers – but unfortunately I don’t think so on the evidence I’ve seen.

And do take a look at Aperture magazine. I can assure you there are more interesting things in it than this review.

David Hurn

I came into photography in the 1970s, and completely missed the great input that David Hurn made into creative photography in the UK in the 1960s, meeting him for the first time in the early 1980s, when I had a short argument with him in the questions following a talk he gave on one of his shows.

The show wasn’t one of his better efforts, and his reply to my question appeared to me to be entirely based on commercial rather than artistic criteria, so I’ve perhaps never warmed to the man as I should, though I do have his Wales: Land of My Father (2000) on the main bookshelf in my living room (along with a volume by one of the many photographers whose career was intimately bound to his, Josef Koudelka.)

Had I started in photography ten years earlier I might have got to know him better, and if I had been ten years younger I would certainly have yearned to attend the course that he ran from 1973-90, the School of Documentary Photography at the Gwent College of Higher Education in Newport, Wales.

David Hurn is now 74, and his latest book, Writing The Picture with poet John Fuller was published by Seren on June 5th 2010. You can read more about his remarkable life in a feature by Graham Harrison on Photo Histories, where there is also a link to the book, as well as to the title sequence from Barbarella in which a space-suited Jane Fonda weightlessly disrobes.

Harrison attributes former student Dillon Bryden as stating that Davids course engendered the work ethic and a very particular code of understanding, and although in many ways a strength, particularly in giving its students a way of making a living, it was perhaps also a weakness, pushing them down a particular route. But it was certainly a great shame when this vocationally oriented course was lost in the scramble for university and degree status.

In his piece, Harrison writes “David Hurn says the art establishment in Britain remains staggeringly snobby about photography, and is particularly resistant to photojournalism and documentary photography.” Despite the work of Hurn and others this remains only too true. Although he and other photographers did serve on the Arts Council in various ways, photography has never really got a serious look-in, though for a year or so in the 1970s it seemed it just might.

I’ve always felt it summed up the situation pretty well that, until 2001, the only money I had ever got from the Arts Council had been a couple of small payments from the Poetry budget. And in 2001 the money came from ‘The Year of the Artist‘ and again was not specifically for photography.

You can see some of David Hurn’s pictures on his Magnum page, and also worth reading is a piece on Hurn by the late Bill Jay, another vital figure in British photography in the late 1960s through Creative Camera and Album magazines. This starts:

While still in my 20s, I showed David Hurn my photographs, the results of more than seven years of struggle to be a photographer. It took him about 30 seconds to look through the lot and deliver his judgment: boring. Derivative, he said. You wont make it.

We have been friends ever since.

British photography might have had a rather different story had Jay not, as Harrison relates, been turned down for a post at the National Portrait Gallery.

Munem Wasif on Lensculture

I’ve several times mentioned the work of Munem Wasif here, and this photographer born in Bangladesh in 1983 was one of the ‘top five’ I picked from PDN’s ‘Top 30’ in 2008. He was also one of my choices for the Prix Pictet later that year, and although he didn’t win the main prize he was awarded the the commission to document WaterAids Chittagong Hill Tracts Project in Bangladesh.

So I’m pleased to see that on Lensculture you can now see a gallery of 30 of his images together with text by Francis Hodgson, head of the Prix Pictet jury, with an exclusive audio interview about this project, plus another short interview about his evolving style as a photographer. It’s an interesting reflection on the way that he works as well as giving more information about the story. You can also see more about him and his work at Agence Vu.

Save 6 Music

I’m getting rather behind with putting work on My London Diary, and so far I’m only somewhere in the middle of May and its June already. Yesterday I did manage to finish putting up pictures of a demo outside Broadcasting House to stop the BBC cutting a couple of stations, 6 Music and the Asian Network – more pictures here.

Broadcasting House is truly an ‘iconic building’, a phrase that seems to have come into the constabulary vocabulary here to mean almost any large building in London, but at least I had no problems in photographing it. But the building as a whole is perhaps a little difficult to integrate into pictures taken more or less next to it, though I did try once or twice. But really it worked better when I concentrated on the significant detail of the Eric Gill statue above the main doorway. Here’s another:

And of course, as so often with demonstrations it helps to get the message in the picture.

6 Music isn’t a station I listen to – it just doesn’t appear on my radio as it doesn’t broadcast on FM, though I could of course listen on-line. But what little I have heard of it seems to me admirable, very British and very quirky, and this showed in the slogans, placards, banners, dress and performances at the event, and I hope too in my pictures.

Although I took some straightforward portraits of the station’s presenters – who were of course appearing in their capacity as licence fee payers rather than presenters, it was a couple of pictures of Liz Kershaw bounding up onto the stage that interested me more; the first image unfortunately I didn’t get quite right, but the second (and there wasn’t time for more) I think catches her well.

It’s exactly as I saw and framed it – I seldom crop, though it’s not a religion, just usually things are stronger if I get it right when I take the picture. And this is 100% of the frame.

The Color Photographs of Irwin Klein

I’ve seen several references here and there to the work of Irwin Klein (1933-1974), whose life ended tragically with a fall from his Brooklyn window. After his death, all of his negatives, cameras and other gear, and most of his prints were lost or stolen. All that remains are a small number of vintage black and white prints along with a few colour slides.

While most people seem to be interested in the black and white prints (and there are some pictures I really like, although perhaps others that don’t quite come off) it is his colour work that I find more interesting. Perhaps because in 1972-4 when he was taking it there was much less colour work visible around and to some extent he had to find his own way, while his black and white follows more or less similar lines to a number of other fine photographers working around the same time.

There are two shows of his work at the Domeischel Gallery web site and he has an exhibition at the Madison Avenue, NY, gallery which closes at the end of this month. His black and white work, along with much of the other photography I found on the gallery site, is a demonstration of the immense influence of one of the great photographic ferments of the mid-twentieth century based around the New York Photo League. Although this organisation, based as it was around a humanistic and basically left-leaning progressive view of society was brought to a disastrous end by the rise of the cold war and McCarthyism, it’s influence has continued to power much of photography since.

There was just so much happening in photography in New York at that time, so many photographers, and so many good photographers among them. Klein was one of them, and although it is good to see his black and white work, some of which can stand comparison with the best, it perhaps adds just a little to a vast body of great work by so many. When I first looked at the site around the start of the show in March I found one or two outstanding and familiar pictures – such as his Minnesota fire image which fronts his black and white work, but didn’t feel overall that there was anything new to mention. I stopped looking before I came to his colour.

Irwin Klein’s colour pictures all date from the last two years of his life, 1972-4, and it was a time when photographers were just beginning to discover (or re-discover) colour as a vehicle for their personal work. If you wanted to be taken seriously as a photographer at that time it was black and white that mattered (a prejudice that still occasionally surfaces even in this digital age.) There wasn’t the same vast and accessible tradition as with black and white and photographers who took colour (and many of us did) were very much finding our own ways of trying to avoid the clichés of commercial and advertising photography.

There is certainly nothing of the chocolate box about Klein’s colour, which in some images clearly draws on his black and white work, but I think sometimes has a greater intimacy and is more personal. For me there is a feeling that these were pictures that he was making for himself rather than – as sometimes with the black and white – an audience with particular preconceived ideas. It is of course sad that what we see here is probably all or most that remains of his work, and I for one would have loved there to be more than these couple of dozen images.

An Invitation to Croydon

The short version of a post with this title might well be “You’re welcome to Croydon” but there is more too it (and that might be misconstrued.)

So I’ll spell it out. I’m taking part in a show of a small group of photographers that is taking place at the Croydon Clocktower. Here’s my version of the poster:

If you are within reach of Croydon, you are welcome to join us on Wednesday evening 19 May at 6.30pm for the opening. There isn’t a theme to the show, and I think some very different work from each of us. The show continues until July 12 and is open Monday to Saturday 9.30am – 5.30pm.

My six pictures are – like the one above – all about police and policing and I hope reflect my questions about who if anyone polices the police.

I’m not anti-police, but I do think we have to be very clear about their role in protecting democratic freedoms and over the past few years have perhaps been drifting rather dangerously towards a police state.

I’ve included one picture from Croydon, which for me revolves about an area a couple of millimetres square in the 24x36cm print, too small to see on line, so you will need to come to the gallery!

Croydon isn’t a bad place in some ways, and I’ve photographed quite a bit there over the years. One piece you can see on line looked at ‘Line 1’ of the new tramway system that opened there a few years ago. I think this is probably the nearest stop to the show:

This was one of the relatively few times I’ve worked with medium format – taken on a Mamiya 7.

City of London Needs A Flash Flashmob

Security guards and police in the City of London have been at it again. Blatantly disregarding the official advice to police from the Home Office, they are continuing to misuse the powers under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act to harass photographers.

The NUJ Photographers Branch has Grant Smith’s account of what happened to him yesterday, 10th May, and clearly the police acted wrongly. They should have protected his right to photograph on the street but instead acted in an aggressive manner and forcibly searched him despite his cooperation with them. They also took away his mobile phone, although a later comment states it was later returned to him.

I think photographers need to educate both the City of London Police and security guards around the city, and a good way to do that would be a flash mob. My suggestion would be for it to start outside the police HQ in Wood St, and from their to go on a tour around every site in the city where we know of incidents of photographers being stopped. I’d like it to be a Flash flashmob, because firing a few hundred flashes would be a way of making sure we were noticed.

For maximum impact I think we should do it at lunchtime on a weekday when there are plenty of people in the City to see it – and perhaps some city workers who are also amateur photographers might be encouraged to join in.

Of course others may come up with better ideas – and I’ll be happy to join in with whatever is suggested.

Sapology

Chelsea isn’t my favourite part of London, always a slow bus ride for me, either from Victoria or Clapham Junction, although yesterday I enjoyed the journey back as the evening lighting was beginning to work its magic as the bus made its way over Battersea Bridge, and I was feeling rather pleased after a pleasant hour or so at Michael Hoppen Contemporary with the aid of some interesting company, a couple of beers and some good photography.

The current show, until 5 June is one of the most interesting I’ve seen in that space which so often seems to be given over to mildly pornographic visions that doubtless sell well. But this show was different. Daniele Tamagni‘s “Gentlemen of Bacongo” is a fascinating study of a genuinely interesting phenomenon.

Les Sapeurs get their name from ‘Societe des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elegantes‘ – or alternatively from the English version, ‘Society for the Advancement of People of Elegance‘, and sapology is more than a look, it is (as one might expect in a Francophone society) a philosophy espoused by its exponents. Despite the poverty in the society in Brazzaville, Congo (or perhaps as a reaction to it) they aim for an elegance and style that is based on an idealised tradition of the English dandy, although sometimes allied with a flamboyant use of colour that would seldom be imaginable in our duller clime.

Many of the finely tailored suits are – at great expense, sometimes involving years of saving – from Saville Row and leading French and Italian designers – and are complemented by hats, shoes, ties, carefully folded and displayed handkerchiefs and gloves, along with cigars (seldom actually smoked) and pipes.

Le Sape has its own highly formalised aesthetic, at its base a ‘trilogy of colour‘, aiming for a perfection of effect within a particular choice of three colours. It even has a written set of ‘10 commandments‘ (actually only eight as numbers 9 and 10 are “Still to be written”) of which number 2 is “You will not sit down“. Clothes are for posing in, for appearing in on the street or at the bars at which the Sapeurs meet, for putting on a show.

Most of what I know about them comes not from the images on the wall but on the book of Tamagni’s work (Gentlemen of Bacongo, Trolley Books, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-904563-83-9 – and the site has a good slide show of ten images) which is more impressive that the show, enabling Tamagni to portray a much wider and more rounded view of his subjects. On the gallery wall they perhaps become a little too much like exotic specimens. It is hard to photograph people like this who are so conscious of their own appearance and image and are almost always posing, but he manages both to project them as they would like to be seen and also at times to get beyond that.

I first met Tamagni in Peckham in 2007, and I wrote about his contribution to a show there and, something I found rather more interesting, his work on black churches there, from which perhaps the most striking image in that show came. In the same year he won the best portfolio in the Canon Young Photographer award for Italy for his pictures of dandies from the Congo, and in 2010 he gained the ICP award for Applied Fashion photography.

Sapology has spread from the Congo as Sapeurs have gone abroad to live and work, and the opening night was made more memorable by the attendance of one of them from London, who had also brought along a collection of his shoes. As usual I couldn’t resist taking a few pictures, two of which you see above.

Also showing in the gallery are a series of portraits by Araminta De Clermont of young South African girls from the Cape Flats dressed up for their end of school ‘Matric Dances‘. For many of these young women it is the night of their lives and their families have planned and saved over the year to create a night of fantasy. She has photographed them very much as fashion models in the style of fashion magazines. Born in the Isle of Man she graduated in architecture before going on to study photography in London and South Africa. She now lives and works in Cape Town, where these pictures were shown in 2009.

Her first solo exhibition “Life After” at Joao Ferreira Gallery in 2006 looked at South African ex-prisoners and their tattoos. You can see six pictures with her comments in a Guardian slide show, Prison Ink.