Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

The God of Music Photography

On his Marshall Photo site it says:

Jim Marshall
February 3, 1936March 24, 2010
We regret to announce that Jim passed away earlier today in New York Citydetails to follow.

You can read a few more of those details in the New York Times and Rolling Stone, which shows a picture of him at Woodstock in 1969 with 4 cameras, at least three if not all of them Leicas.

Born in Chicago (he was no relation to me) I admired both his pictures and his working methods and attitude, and wrote about him in 2005. Here’s an edited version of part of what I wrote then:

His approach is simple, he always chooses to work with available light, the kind of photographer who carries a camera everywhere, with at least one Leica M4 around his neck even when he goes shopping. On assignment he works with at least two, one with a 28mm, the other a standard 50mm. He never changes lenses and if he needs more he carries more cameras. Most of his work is taken on Tri-X, nominally rated at 800ASA, although he works without a meter. The secret of his work is getting to know the subject, getting their trust and then getting his pictures.

He took some of the greatest pictures of jazz musicians as well as the big names of rock and roll, and created a legend through his attitude and behaviour. To his friends he was “grossly unpredictable, fabulously silly, unbelievably opinionated, completely charming, and thoroughly maddening” while others – in particular those who tried to cheat him – viewed him as a dangerous lunatic. To Annie Leibovitz he was “the rock and roll photographer” and I can only say ‘Amen’ to that.

NPR has an article with an audio appreciation of him, as well as a set of some of his best images. He got them by demanding “all access, no doors to be closed, no conditions” and the people he photographed trusted him. It’s something no one else will ever be able to do, with the industry now hog-tied by lawyers and control freaks.

Marshall was in New York to help organise the opening of a show at the Staley + Wise gallery, Match Prints, which pairs his work with pictures by Timothy White.

St Patrick’s Day

It’s taken me a week to get round to writing about St Patrick’s Day, mainly because I’ve been busy working taking other pictures and getting them on line since. If you want to keep up with what I’m doing then much of it appears on Demotix, and I post updates on my work on Twitter and Facebook. Here I try to reflect on things a bit more rather than simply cover events, and that takes time and sometimes there isn’t a great deal to reflect on.

St Patrick’s Day was a little different for me this year because I went to it with a photographer who has made covering these parades one of his specialities, although mostly in the USA where they take these things rather more seriously. And who comes from an American-Irish family and grew up in the the Bronx. I first saw John Benton-Harris’s pictures in ‘Creative Camera‘ many years ago and he had a fine portfolio in one of their year books, but little of his work is currently available, which is a great loss. I can only find 3 images on the web, none well reproduced, one from Derby Day and two (click on the thumbnails to see them) from St Patrick’s parades.

Before the parade John and I went to a couple of exhibitions, one the ‘History of Photography‘ on fairly permanent display at the V&A which seemed very much not to be a history of photography but some rather random items from their large collection (and perhaps mainly chosen for their size.) There are a few interesting images but it’s hard to see any particular justification for the particular selection. A couple seemed to be rather poor prints – the Robert Frank is damaged and the Don McCullin seemed rather too dark, and there were a few that the only justification for their presence was that they represented the fact that many photographs are bad. It did cheer me up a little to find that several of the better pictures were by photographers I know or have met. The one image that stood out for both John and I was probably the smallest in the show, Dorothea Lange’s ‘White Angel Bread Line.’

Also in the gallery is an exhibition about the first ever museum exhibition of photographs, held at the V&A in 1858. Consisting of work from the Photographic Society of London and the Société française de photographie there were the huge number of 1009 photographs on show, and you would have had to get down on your hands and knees to see some and stand on a chair to see others as they were hung 5 or 6 prints high from about six inches to what at a guess is around 7 foot. The photograph of some of them by the museum’s photographer is the earliest known photograph of a photographic exhibition.

We also dropped in to the Michael Hoppen gallery in Chelsea on our way to the V&A, but neither of us was impressed by the pictures of fashion photographer Fernand Fonssagrives (1910-2003), most of which were of his first wife, Lisa with her elegant torso covered with shadow patterns. It was something that Man Ray had played with earlier (and I suspect others too) but I couldn’t see any great interest in the work though some of the other pictures were of more interest. Lisa Fonssagrives became rather more famous as a model and after their marriage ended in 1950 she married Irving Penn, while Fernand went to Spain and became a sculptor.

And yes, I did take some pictures in Kilburn. Perhaps the one I like best is this:

though there are others, particularly some of the kids and the old ladies that have a charm (and sometimes an Irish charm.)

And I quite like this one of the English saint whose day it is. (The Irish of course came and kidnapped him from Somerset.) More pictures on My London Diary.

Friedlander’s Diet

I’m not sure that the video of Lee Friedlander compiled by Mark Schwarz has a great deal to recommend it, though it could perhaps be seen as an ironically satirical comment on a US American lifestyle, but I’m afraid it really is straight-forward piece of genial Californian whimsy for Mr Lee’s 75th birthday on 14 July 2009.

But the site, AMERICAN SUBURB X, does have a wealth of interesting material, including an illustrated article on Friedlander by Rod Slemmons, Director at The Museum of Contemporary Photography, and another by Carol Armstrong, professor of art and archaeology and Doris Stevens Professor of the Study of Women and Gender at Princeton University, written at the time of his 2005 MoMA show which may well enlarge your vocabulary, though I find her style akin to torture. But academics certainly get brownie points for that.

Of course lots more about lots of other photographers including Aaron Siskind and William Klein – and quite a few alphabetically in between on its ‘ASX Channels.’ As well as some whose names I won’t mention without mouthwash to hand.

Among the various articles, there is one by Paul Graham, from his presentation at the first MoMA Photography Forum on 16th February 2010, The Unreasonable Apple in which he likens the art world’s approach to straight photography to “the parable of an isolated community who grew up eating potatoes all their life, and when presented with an apple, thought it unreasonable and useless, because it didnt taste like a potato.”

Crossfire

Yesterday, as I read on PDN Pulse, an exhibition opened in Dhaka, Bangladesh with police barricading the doors of the Drik Agency where it was being shown.

The statement on Drik reads:

Drik Picture Library was forcibly closed down by the police today to prevent the launch of Pathshala, South Asian Media Academy, and the unveiling of a photography exhibition by photojournalist Dr Shahidul Alam, `Crossfire.’

From midday onwards, Drik was pressurised by RAB, police and Special Branch officials to close down the show on grounds that it does not have official permission, and later, on the grounds that it will create anarchy.

In its 20 years of existence, Drik has forged a unique position in the international cultural arena, which has earned Bangladesh a special place in the world of photography. The unfortunate event which was broadcast worldwide has tarnished the image of this democratically-elected government. We call upon the government to immediately remove the police encirclement, so that the exhibition can be opened for public viewing, and Bangladesh’s image as an independent democratic nation can be reinstated.

The show, with photographs by Drik’s founder Shahidul Alam and curated by Jorge Villacorte from Peru with research by Momena Jalil, Tanzim Wahab and Fariha Karim, was scheduled to be open to the public at the Drik Gallery until 31 March 2010 but currently can only be viewed on line due to the police action.

‘Crossfire’ gets its name from the statements issued by the RAB (Rapid Action Battalion) , a sinister black-clad group formed six years ago from members of Bangladesh Police, Bangladesh Army, Bangladesh Navy and Bangladesh Air Force which carries out extra-judicial killings and torture of people in custody. Set up in 2004 by Law Minister Moudud Ahmed, they have killed over 1000 people, whose bodies are then dumped in fairly random locations and a stock press release states that they were “killed in crossfire” between the police and criminals. A new word, “crossfired” has been added to the vocabulary.

As Alam say, the facts of these murders by the RAB are already largely well known, and a court which tried to investigate them was recently dissolved by the Chief Justice immediately before the Government was to give evidence. The installation at Drik in his words aims to “to reach out at an emotional level. I aim to get under the skin. To walk those cold streets. To hear the cries, see terror in the eyes. To sit quietly with the family besides a cold corpse. But every photograph is based on in-depth research. On actual case studies. On verifiable facts. A fragment of the story has been used to suggest the whole. A quiet metaphor for the screaming truth.”

The large format colour pictures show scenes where these killings occurred, and had to be taken in secret, often early in the morning – also a favourite time for the murders. The existence of the show also had to be kept secret, and it was only announced on the 16 March, when Where Death Squads Struck in Bangladesh was published in the Lens blog of the New York Times with a slide show of the pictures.

On ShahidulNews you can read more about Crossfire, with a Google Map giving details of many of the killings and their locations, and a dark video, ‘RAB Night Walk‘.

Shahidul Alam is Bangladesh’s best known photographer and his work has often before been controversial. Last November a show on Tibet at the gallery was closed down by the police following pressure from the Chinese government, and the web site was hacked and fake virus warnings put on it to deter people from viewing it. Thirteen years ago, as the Lens article relates, Alam was set on in the street by a group of men who pulled him out of a rickshaw, stole his camera and computer and stabbed him 8 times – in what he describes as “a particularly unsubtle warning” about his opposition political activities.

Jazz Loft

Great pictures, great atmosphere in an audio slide show on the NY Times site not to be missed W Eugene Smith and the Jazz Loft Project. There is also a short introduction to it by Jeffrey Scales elsewhere on the NYT site.

This was Smith’s largest project – a thousand or more rolls of film and countless hours of audio which took seven years for Sam Stephenson to research, producing a book, a radio series (I’m listening to the introduction as I write) and an exhibition, currently at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center until May 22, 2010 and later at the Chicago Cultural Center (July 17-September 25, 2010), the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (February 3-May 22, 2011), the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego (May 19-Oct. 7, 2012), and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona (late 2012, early 2013).

It’s a shame that at the moment there are no plans for this exhibition to come to Europe.

Smith was one of the first photographers I wrote about on line, and in many ways a legend in photography, not least for almost managing to bankrupt Magnum. He was also in some ways a very American photographer, not least because it was the attitudes in the US to press photography that his career was very much a battle against. In Europe at the time things were rather less ossified.

Mark Power on Tony Ray-Jones

Regular readers of my posts will know that Tony Ray-Jones is one of my personal photographic heroes, although I never knowingly met the man but we possibly attended some of the same openings and other events in London before his tragic early death in 1972. I also own several of his pictures, and one of the relatively few prints that he made himself hangs on my wall, from his ICA show. The others are cheap inkjet prints from the Science & Society Picture Library which I think are better quality than most if not all of the silver gelatin prints that have been made direct from his negatives. Although these now cost £15 for an A4 print (more than a 50% increase since I bought mine), the last time I saw a gallery show of his work the asking price for the inferior prints on display was more than 100 times this. Collecting good photography needn’t be expensive – just avoid the art dealers. Some photographers, including myself, sell their work at reasonable prices directly from the web too.

One of the essential aspects of photography has always been its reproducibility, the ability to make a theoretically infinite number of copies from a negative. (Of course this was not true of the daguerreotype – and this is just one reason why this is no longer a popular process!) The switch to digital, whether at the point of exposure or in scanning negatives, has made this process even easier. It has also revolutionised printing, enabling us to get more out of our negatives, particularly those where the exposure was not optimal – and apparently although Ray-Jones was a great photographer he was certainly not a great technician.

Although a few have sought to deny it, Tony Ray-Jones had an undeniably enormous influence on British photography in the 1970s, not just through his own work, but also because he and a few others were largely responsible for getting a huge swathe of mainly American photography, hitherto only known to a few cognoscenti (including of course some established British photographers who were well connected through international agencies) out to a new generation of photographers, through magazines and particularly ‘Creative Camera, where the then editor Bill Jay first published Ray-Jones’s personal work in the UK. You can read about these on Weeping Ash, a great web site by Roy Hammans which includes a great deal of writing on both Ray-Jones and Creative Camera, and of course quite a few photographs.

But what prompted this post was an article on the Little Brown Mushroom Blog, where Charlie B Ward has been asking photographers about the “first photo book that you can remember buying or seeing that really had a strong affect on you?” and Mark Power‘s answer was A Day Off Tony Ray-Jones (Thames and Hudson 1974). But of course he had something more to say about it in a story that includes wading into ice-cold water to photograph a whale and unrequited love, and makes interesting reading. Boringly I think I just bought the book from the Creative Camera Book Room.

You can still pick up copies at least of the US edition of this work at a not unreasonable price, but the recent volume Tony Ray-Jones (ISBN:095428139X) published by Chris Boot in 2008 is considerably better printed, far more informative and a better bargain.

Don McCullin

The show Shaped by War, the largest ever UK exhibition about the life and work of Don McCullin who is 75 in October, is on at the Imperial War Museum North until 13 June, though I’ll probably wait to see it until it comes down to London next year ( 7 October 2011 – 30 January 2012 – and it’s in Bath 11 September – 21 November 2010.)

But for the moment the exhibition has spawned a number of videos and features about McCullin on line, at the exhibition site, the Guardian, Channel 4 and doubtless elsewhere. Good to see him getting the coverage, although a pity there isn’t rather more difference between them. Perhaps the best of the current crop is on the BBC, where they have an audio slide show from the Today programme, which lets you see the pictures while the photographer talks (elsewhere you can see some very annoying camera work on his pictures.)

You can see rather more about him from last year’s show at the National Media Museum, and Frank Horvat had an interesting talk with him back in 1987.

PDN Top 30 for 2010

It’s always interesting to look at PDN‘s ‘Top Thirty‘, the annual choice of new and emerging photographers to watch made with the help of a number of industry figures, and this year’s crop is I think a good one. As usual there are a few names I already recognise among them, but mostly they are new to me. And most of them have work that I find interesting, and I’ll go back later and have a look through their portfolios – so far I’ve just clicked through to see the 3 pictures per photographer in the Flash presentation and read the brief biographies there.

This is the list of this year’s Top 30:

Levi Brown

Alejandro Cartagena

Scott Conarroe

Sumit Dayal

Clémence de Limburg

Gratiane de Moustier

Danfung Dennis

Lauren Dukoff

Matt Eich

Matthieu Gafsou

Marcelo Gomes

Deborah Hamon

Estelle Hanania

Ben Hoffmann

Sohrab Hura

Wayne Lawrence

Brent Lewin

Eman Mohammed

Adrian Mueller

Nick Onken

Alex Prager

Thomas Prior

Ben Roberts

Anna Skladmann

Andy Spyra

Gabriele Stabile

Peter van Agtmael

Elizabeth Weinberg

Yang Yi

Reed Young

You can still see the work from earlier years, including 2009 and also 2008 when I think they presented it rather better. Nice to have a list of photographers down the side of the page. And interesting to read them and reflect that the only ones I recognise now are probably the same ones I recognised when I first saw this list two years ago.

2007 is here and you can also access this and earlier years via the archive page, which conveniently also lists the winners from 1999-2007. Interesting to read through and find how many names are now familiar.

Photographing the Pope etc

Yesterday on Radio 4’s Front Row (its close to the start of this audio clip) I heard a ten minute interview with Lord Snowdon, born in 1930 and still working approaching his 80th birthday next Sunday. Although it’s customary in some photographic circles to knock him – and he was certainly born with a silver spoon in his mouth – I think it’s hard to look at some of the pictures, particularly his earlier work, and not be impressed.

My favourite book of his work continues to be his 1958 ‘London’, published when he was still just Tony Armstrong Jones and could write “I use a very small camera, little apparatus, and no artificial lighting at all” and got himself into the soul of London. After that there were still some good pictures but perhaps his mind was on other things. In the interview he mentions two photographers who he admires, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Irving Penn, and the influence of both men is fairly obvious in particular pictures. It was Penn that for me ruined his vision, but then I’m not a Penn fan (though I admire his technique.) If you are a fan of Penn – or more open-minded than me – you can see Irving Penn – The Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London until 6 June 2010, and it does make you realise that Snowdon never quite managed to join the same league as the master.

But the interview with Snowdon is well worth listening to, and includes his account of the picture that got away, when he spent days in Rome trying to photograph the Pope, and when he finally did get to see the man as he emerged from a helicopter, wasted the precious seconds going down in a deep bow rather than getting on with the job, and by the time he had got up the Pope had gone.

I’ve never tried to photograph the real Pope, but the other Sunday there was a demonstration against his planned visit later in the year, with not only a ‘pope’ but also some nuns – three of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence who were rather more colourful than the real thing.

There are a few pictures I quite like from the event on My London Diary though some perhaps don’t quite come off. I liked the idea of Peter Tatchell’s megaphone speaking directly to the pontiff, but the light was fading fast and getting everything right and just the right amount of unsharpness in the robes and mitre was tricky. It didn’t help that I needed to be slightly behind Tatchell and most of the time his head was turned away and I had to wait and catch moments to get a good profile.

It took quite a lot of attempts to get a usable frame, not least because I was shooting at 1/30 s or slower with the lens at around 50mm, and some were not sharp on Tatchell’s face. As he finished talking I rather kicked myself for not increasing the ISO – a couple of stops more would have given me 1/125 and made the job much easier – and with the D700 the results would still have been fine. It’s easy to forget you can do this when the light gradually fades, one of the big advantages of digital over film.

Marcus Bleasdale – Rape of a Nation

Marcus Bleasdale‘s The Rape of a Nation on Burn is a powerful set of 25 images from the “deadliest war in the world today” taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where 5.4 million people have died since 1998. Many of the 45,000 who die each month do so from readily preventable causes due to the complete collapse of the economy and any systems of health care.

As well as the strength of the images, I was also impressed by the presentation, with an interface that really works, and where for once it makes sense to click the “full screen” icon – which gave me excellent quality sharp 1560×1050 pixel images (though the size will presumably depend on your screen.) I was able to view the pictures at my own speed with captions appearing over a small strip at the bottom of the image on mouseover and a left-click changing to the next picture, and everything worked smoothly.

This is also a site that attracts some interesting comments on the work – and where the photographer himself replies. Well worth reading, and in his replies he does provide some links to sites which supply some powerful insight into the political and economic forces behind the war which was an aspect I thought lacking in the text when I first looked at these pictures on Burn.