Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Chiswick House Gardens

For some years Raymond Moore lived in a room in a house on the riverside at Chiswick overlooking the Thames and just a short walk from Chiswick House Gardens, where Bill Brandt created some memorable images in the 1940s (but I can’t find them anywhere on the web) – though there are some by (Edwin Smith.) It’s only a fairly short train or bike ride from where I live, and was a place I occasionally took students to photograph in the past. My last visit there – on my own- was in 2004 and here are a couple of my images from then.

You can see more of my pictures from a walk in March 2004 from Brentford to Chiswick House. So far as I know, Raymond Moore didn’t make any pictures there.

Remember Ray Moore

For several reasons I’ve been thinking about Raymond Moore recently. Just before the New Year I was up in Derbyshire for a few days, and went through some of the places I visited with him in the 1970s while I was at one of several workshops with him, and this brought back a few memories of Ray and the other photographers I met there.

It’s only too likely that many reading this will be scratching their heads and wondering who Raymond Moore was. If there was an award for great photographers who have disappeared most completely off the critical radar he would certainly be in the running for it. Yet Ray was certainly one of the great British photographers of the twentieth century, up there with guys like Bill Brandt, and his work stands comparison with rather better remembered American photographers such as Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan.

Moore (1920-87) was the first living photographer to have a truly British show at the Art Council’s flagship Hayward Gallery in London; Brandt had beaten him to it by eleven years, but Brandt’s show was from John Szarkowski at MoMA rather than a home-grown enterprise. Earlier, Ray’s work had been shown by the Welsh Arts Council, the first living photographer to be given a show by by any of the UK Arts Councils.

But there are reasons why Ray’s work has drifted out of our sight. He was a painstaking printer, one of the best (like me largely self-taught from the Ansel Adams ‘Basic Photo‘ books) but made relatively few prints, and sold few during his lifetime, so virtually none appear in the art market, probably now the major driver of photographic visibility.

The largest collection of his work has for years been the subject of legal dispute and thus unavailable for museum shows. And the genre in which he worked was outside the traditional British obsession with social documentation (nothing wrong with that, but it isn’t all of photography) and in an area largely abandoned by academia in the UK in the 1970s in its Gadarene rush to theory.

British institutions have never had any real faith in photography and the kind of enthusiasm and support systems that exist in some other countries have never really developed here. Ray did have a few shows, but they were relatively few and far between, and few buyers, institutional or collectors, were buying work by contemporary British photographers in the 1970s and 80s.

Ray wasn’t well served by publication either, although his pictures appeared in various magazines, including Creative Camera, who also published a major portfolio of his work as the lead portfolio in their 1977 year book. Murmurs at Every Turn came at the time of his Hayward show in 1981. But these publications – and the slim Welsh Arts Council catalogue – were printed in the style of their time, with heavy blacks that lose the shadow detail on which Ray was always so insistent. His final publication, Every So Often, represents his work rather better, but all these are now relatively rare and expensive second-hand. However you can see them even if they are not on your shelves, as Weeping Ash has a tribute to Ray that includes virtually every magazine article and photograph published by Ray – and you can page through his books. The site also includes an essay which was the basis of a talk I gave about Ray in 2005.

By the time I met him around 1976, Ray had simplified and perfected his technical approach. Although in earlier years he had worked with medium format (and occasionally with larger cameras) he now worked with a Nikon camera and a single standard lens (I’m not sure whether it was a 50 or 55mm.) He chose to use a Nikon macro lens not because he wanted to photograph close-up but because he felt it was sharper and had a flatter field of view at normal distances. He mainly worked with Ilford FP4 film, relatively slow and fine-grained and a favourite with many photographers, espeically those doing portraits for its smooth tonality, exposing it around 2/3 stop more than its normal rating and I think preferring to develop to a slightly lower contrast than normal.

He had decided he didn’t need a larger negative to get the print quality he wanted, always printing essentially from the whole negative on an old Leitz enlarger (simple but one of the best ever produced for 35mm), making final prints around 14 inches wide. Ray liked to print with open shadows, and although he was a master of the craft always aimed to make prints that made people look at the images rather than trying to dazzle them with the print quality.

Although he admired the work of Brandt, he was not an admirer of the prints that he made when he moved to a more graphic approach, using higher contrast and often blank shadows.

Also on-line is a 2002 dissertation on Moore by photographer Neil Shirreff which looks at “his positioning in Britains photographic history, the perspective of Moore himself, and the perspective of a viewer engaging with one of his photographs.”

A new book on Moore is long overdue, although unlikely to emerge before the legal problems surrounding his work are resolved. It would also be good to see his work in exhibitions. The V&A does have a number of his pictures which can be viewed on request by visitors to the print room.

Ten years ago I wrote a short piece on my experience of attending the workshops with Ray and Paul Hill at Hill’s ‘Photographers Place‘ in the Derbyshire village of Bradbourne for William Bishop’s ‘Inscape‘ magazine, accompanying a few of my pictures of the people concerned – including some of Ray. I began to put this on-line at the time, but somehow the pages never got finished – until I found them and did the job this afternoon! Now on-line as Darbis Murmury.

More Walks through Paris 1896 & 2006

2006

In 2006 I was in Paris in November for the three days of Paris Photo but spent roughly a week there staying at a very pleasant (and cheap) hotel towards the north of the 9e. It was a healthy 25 minutes walk from Paris Photo and a little closer than that to the Gare du Nord, making it handy for those of us who travel on Eurostar (and fortunately that November we didn’t have snow, so the Eurostar was working well.)

Paris

I wrote a few pieces related to the show for the company I was then working for, About.com, which have long disappeared from the web, but the first real post I wrote for this blog, on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 11:51 pm was also on Paris Photo. It was only a short note, but it ended with the sentence:

But fortunately, there was much more in Paris than Paris Photo.

You can get some idea what that more was (though without the food and wine) from a set of pictures I put on the web shortly after, Paris: November which is now linked in from my new Paris site. These pictures were taken with a Nikon D200 in Paris and Stains, just to the north of the city.

On the revised front page of my Paris Photos site you’ll find a rather untidy list of links to most of the sets of Paris pictures that I have on line. There are a few more sets almost ready to add, but rather more waiting until I have time to do more scans.

An Early Amateur

Luminous Lint, an extensive collection of material assembled on-line by Alan Griffiths, now based in Canada, has an interesting album of photographs from An Unknown Street Photographer in Paris, 1896, curated and introduced by John Toohey who now owns the ‘small, olive green Kodak album with the handwritten inscription on the inside cover, “Paris, 1896“‘. It was thus taken when the Kodak revolution which brought photography to the middle-class masses had just begun.

Although I’ve not studied the work at the length that Toohey has (nor seen the other roughly 60 pictures not included in the generous selection on the site), I find his introduction to the album far-fetched. Looking through it I don’t think we can read in any great intentions by the photographer, although certainly it is produced with someone who at least occasionally had an idea of what they were trying to do. But I remain convinced that the more interesting accidents of the work are simply accidents, not least because the viewfinder on these cameras would hardly allow the kind of control that he suggests. Whenever you photographed anyone close to the camera you were likely to get pictures without heads or with only a part of them in the picture, and while you were concentrating on taking your picture on the street, people were only too likely to walk partly into them as you pressed the button.

Of course such accidental cuttings of the subject by the edge of the photograph were quickly recognised as a part of the machine’s syntax, and it has been suggested that they had some influence on the painters of the day, such as Degas, although similar effects also were to be found in some of the earlier Japanese artworks that more certainly affected artists of the late nineteenth century.

I grew up when family pictures were still taken on cameras not much different to the 1895 Pocket Kodak, larger but essentially similar models making small ‘snapshots’, though by then it was possible to get larger ‘en-prints’, but most of those in the albums were carefully posed, even if intention and result were even then not always close. In those distant days a 12 exposure film usually did families like mine for a couple of annual holidays (in Worthing or Lowestoft rather than Paris) and we relied postcards for the sights rather than photographing them ourselves.

Amateur photography was of course a craze of the 1890s, and by 1898 there were estimated to be around 1.5 million roll film cameras like the Pocket Kodak in use, with clubs springing up to support them. And there is good evidence that this unknown photographer was a part of one of these informal or formal groups that sprang up, as in some pictures we see seriously suited men with cameras. Most likely he looked rather like one of these, although Kodak from the start marketed their cameras to women also, and this small and lightweight camera would fit readily as into a handbag as into a large jacket pocket. Of course many soon lost interest in photography and took up that other craze of the age, the bicycle, which also features strongly in these images (and even a tandem!) Some Camera Clubs even voted to become Cycle Clubs, leading Alfred Stieglitz to comment in 1897 “Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze.”

It was also obviously the album of someone with a serious interest in photography, as well as the income to be able to afford to indulge it. There are 92 pictures in the ‘Paris 1896’ album, showing the use of at least 9 rolls of the size 102 film which gave 12 exposures (it was one of the first models to have a red window to read markings on the back of the paper film backing.) Probably he (or, less likely, she) took more, but not many more, as even these small 1.5×2″ pictures were relatively expensive and few other than outright technical failures were discarded.

The Pocket Kodak at around 51 x 76 x 102mm was reasonably compact cameras even by today’s standards, with a weight of around 170 grams, could as the name suggests be carried in a pocket. But it’s real selling point was ease of use – as the Kodak slogan said, “You press the button and we do the rest”.

There was nothing to set – focus was fixed, the single shutter speed was “instantaneous” (usually around 1/100s) and so long as you kept to the instruction only to work on sunny days and held the camera steady it would work. The hardest thing was to remember to wind on the film after each exposure and so avoid double exposures.

Of course other things could go wrong and very often did. The viewfinder was a small window on the top of the box which you looked into as you held the camera steady against your stomach, seeing a clear and bright but tiny image – which was usually rather less than would appear in the picture. Accurate framing was impossible (and a concept that hardly existed before the invention of the ‘miniature’ camera using 35mm film.) If you took pictures from a sitting position, unless you thought instead to rest the camera on your knee, it would probably also appear in your picture.

There is no doubt that this is an interesting album, but I think it is best to see it for what it is, rather than to drag in the names of Walker Evans, J H Lartigue or Andre Kertesz. And if you are going to do so, why stop there; surely the wishful mind could glimpse the harbinger of Cartier-Bresson and Friedlander here too?

Soth’s Top Ten

This is the time of the year when everyone who blogs (except me, and I’ve done it in the past) makes up their top 10 lists of something or other, and if few of the have the little bit of excitement we’ve seen in the UK in recent weeks over the Christmas number one in the pop charts (see The Day the Music was Resurrected if you’ve somehow managed to miss the story as it was presented in the Morning Star – rather more interestingly than in some other papers) they do sometimes have a little fascination. Most popular with photographers are lists of the year’s top ten photographic books, and there are quite a few of these around this year as always.

Alec Soth’s list on the Little Brown Mushroom Blog interests me for several reasons. Of course he’s a photographer whose work I admire, but there are two particular books he lists that caught my eye. Both that are at least in part familiar.

Soth writes about Robert Adams‘s 1985 book Summer Nights, “I used to be embarrassed that the 1985 edition was one of my favorite photobooks.” Well I’m not ashamed to say it has long been one of my favourites too, and the fact that the first edition is still available second-hand at under £20 reflects the fact it was popular as photographic books go – and I don’t entirely share Soth’s thoughts about the cover design. Of course it isn’t the 1985 volume he is listing, but a new version of the book with extra images, Summer Nights, Walking, again published by Aperture.

I wrote quite a lengthy piece perhaps 8 years ago about a then largely forgotten body of work by Chauncey Hare, again published by Aperture, Interior America. Depending on where you buy this a copy can cost anything from around £65 to £650 (though the latter price is from a”rare book dealer”) which perhaps reflects the rather more difficult nature of his images of American domestic interiors, though I was hooked on his work as soon as I saw some images projected at a workshop by Lewis Balz.

A day or so after my feature went on line at About.com (where of course it has long disappeared) I got an e-mail from Hare, who I think was surprised that anyone remembered his work and was bothering to write about it. By then pursuing a different career he was uncertain that he wanted to be written about, although after a few exchanges I managed to persuade him and got his permission to add a little material about his later life to my piece.

Again, Soth isn’t listing the 1978 classic, with its elegant and sober design by Marvin Israel and Kate Morgan, but a new volume from Steidl, Protest Photographs, which includes work form both Interior America and his 1984 This Was Corporate America along with other pictures. You can see 20 spreads from the book on the Steidl site, and as Soth says “I havent had time to wrap my head around this tome, but it only takes a quick glance to know that this book is a killer.”

I’ve not had time to look at all the other books that he lists, though I’d familiar with several – including one I think I’m most unlikely to buy or review.

Charlie Mahoney

On Burn you can view ‘A Troubled Paradise‘ , a fine audio-visual presentation by Charlie Mahoney about the Maldives, which “will likely be the scene of one of first humanitarian disasters due to climate change. The story also ties in to an interesting social-political situation.” He continues “I hope you find it interesting.” I did and I think you will, though as usually with presentations I sometimes would have liked to look at some of the images for longer or shorter.

You can see some of the same pictures – as well as other work by him on his own web site. He has an impressive list of clients, publications and awards- the latter including the 2009 Environmental Photographer of the Year Award, the 2009 International Photography Awards, the Life category of the 2008 Travel Photographer of the Year, the 2008 PX3 Prix de la Photographie for photojournalism, the 2008 SOS Racism Photography contest and the new talent category of the 2007 Travel Photographer of the Year.

Mahoney gained a BA in International Relations and Biology at Bowdoin College in Maine, USA and before his career in photography worked in investment banking and equity management. He has a Masters in Photojournalism from the University Autónoma of Barcelona, the city where he is now based.

It’s also worth looking at his dokumentary fotografr blog, where the latest post looks at a problem I’ve often mentioned here (most recently) – with a video of a US photography activist being stopped for taking photographs on the LA Metro. He comments “I was detained for a half hour in the metro station in Barcelona for the same thing two years ago. What can more can you say here?!?!” It happens in all sorts of places around the world.

Another video related to the problems of photographing in cities where increasing public space is privately owned is Love Police The Corporatization of Open Space on Bala Fria, which like Guardian journalist Paul Lewis in my link above, starts at the Gherkin in St Mary Axe.

African Photography

One of the aspects of my work over around 8 years for ‘About Photography‘ of which I’m most proud was the series of articles that made up the ‘World Photography‘ section. It was of course work that drew on previously published research by various scholars – one of whom, despite being clearly acknowledged for his work obviously felt I was trespassing on his private patch. But it also involved considerable research by me, both on the Internet and in published sources and brought photography in various countries around the world to the attention of a wider public.

There were some aspects that were particularly hard to find out much about, and African photography was one of these, though I did write a little about photography in Egypt and the Arab world in North Africa, about Drum magazine in South Africa and some South African photographers including David Goldblatt and Roger Ballen. And of course Seydou Keïta (see also) and Malick Sidibé from Mali, but there simply wasn’t the wealth of material that is now available – for example at sites like African Imagery – on line.

On the ‘A Photo Student‘ blog you can see that students on some MFA courses now get taught about Africa (and of course many other things – it’s a blog worth exploring, if it makes me feel that some UK courses are, from what I hear, not quite in the same league) along with some good illustrations and great links. James Pomerantz is a New York-based photographer who had gone back to school and is documenting the experience on the blog, where he has the freedom to do many things that I couldn’t do when working for a large company, particularly in terms of copyright, where I was unable to claim “fair use”.

One particular link that worries me is to a document I would have loved to have found a few years ago, An Outline History of Photography in Africa to ca. 1940 by David Killingray and Andrew Roberts, published in the journal History in Africa, Vol. 16, (1989), pp. 197-208, from the African Studies Association.

If you belong to an institution that subscribes to JSTOR you can access this free and legally, but otherwise you can only see the first page, which contains very little of interest unless you pay a $12 access fee. Unfortunately I think few public libraries subscribe to this service, although universities and a few schools and other institutions do. There is a link on ‘A Photo Student‘ to a full copy of the article, downloaded from JSTOR which I won’t repost here. Having written Writing for Free a while ago my thoughts over copyright are quite clear, although it is unreasonable that should you pay your $12 (or your institution a subscription) none of it will get to the authors of the article.

Little Brown Mushroom

Little Brown Mushroom Books were the publishers of Alec Soth‘s “The Last Days of W”, a self-published 48 page newsprint publication that came out at the time of the 2008 Paris Photo. Although I very much liked the pictures on the wall there, I couldn’t bring myself to pay even the lowish price asked for this because it just didn’t seem to me to do justice to his work – and it was better to leave it to my memory and what I felt were rather better reproductions on the web. The 10,000 copies soon sold out, and many have written in praise of the publication. Probably one day it will become a high priced collector’s item, although doubtless by then fading and falling to pieces.

Alec Soth used to have one of the more interesting blogs written by a working photographer – in my blogroll still, and most of us wondered how he ever found the time to do it. By October 1, 2007 he had obviously got to wondering too, and made his last post, though his archived blog is still on line and still makes some good reading.

But the good news – which I read in a new post there – is that he is now a contributor to a new Little Brown Mushroom blog, like the book company based at his studio address in St Paul, Minnesota, USA, where he is one of a team of six on the blog. (Check out Carrie Elizabeth Thompson‘s rather minimal web site too.) Little Brown Mushroom Books has also just published Lost Boy Mountain its first zine by another of the team, Lester B. Morrison – his first publication. You can of course find out more about it there, although again I don’t think I’ll be buying.

As the first post on the blog on Dec 12 said, “This is a place to talk about good books (our own and others)” and Soth has given his own response to The Future of the Photobook – currently under discussion elsewhere – in the blog. But following the death last week of Larry Sultan, Soth has contributed a generous and thoughtful post, Larry Sultan, Pictures From Home.

Charis Wilson

Thanks to James Danziger on his ‘The Year in Pictures’ blog I learnt recently of the death of Charis* Wilson, and he gave a link to her obituary in the New York Times which gives a good idea of her life and the support she gave to Edward Weston, as muse, driver, writer and companion during their eleven years together.

These were Weston’s most productive years and the book which she wrote – with Wendy Madar – ‘Through Another Lens – My Years with Edward Weston‘ , published in 1998, I think gives a real insight into his creative processes – definitely something to be read alongside his sometimes rather pompous but often fascinating Daybooks.

Her writing is a vital part of ‘California and the West‘ “with 64 photographs by Edward Weston” and as well as the text of the book based on the detailed logs she kept on their journeys, she wrote the Guggenheim application that made it possible.

Although biography can sometimes be a distraction from actually seeing and evaluating the work of photographers (and others) – and the intense fascination of many with Weston’s love life is perhaps a good example of this – it can also give insights into the work. ‘Through Another Lens‘ I think does that for the partnership between Weston and Wilson that led to some of his best work.

Of course Charis Wilson had a long and interesting life away from Weston – she was only 19 when they met, 30 when they separated and lived to 95. You can read a little more about that too in the NYT obit.

* from the Greek meaning ‘grace’ and pronounced ‘Karis’

Terry King at Photofusion

Some thirty years ago I was sitting in a darkened hall in Richmond where an elderly man, a long-retired advertising photographer, was talking about the small, high contrast black and white prints which he had entered over the years for the Royal Photographic Society annual exhibition. What was unusual about these photographs by Steinbock was that they contained not a milligram of silver, but had been made on ordinary drawing paper using some black pigment, gum arabic and potassium dichromate.

It’s a story I’ve told before at rather greater length, on the occasion of Terry King’s 70th Birthday celebration, also attended by the man sitting on my left in that hall, Randall Webb, who was later co-authored ‘Spirits of Salts: A Working Guide to Old Photographic Processes’ with Martin Reed of Silverprint.

Although I’d heard of the gum bichromate process before – it was highly favoured around the start of the twentieth century among those involved in the ‘Photo-Secession’ and the pictorialist movement of the time, including Edward Steichen and Robert Demachy – and had seen prints made using it, this was the first time I’d heard and seen anyone actually telling how he made these prints.

Later, probably in the pub next door, the three of us decided we were all going to have a go at the process. Gum arabic wasn’t a problem as cooks used it and tubes of watercolour are readily available, but potassium dichromate was more of a problem. But not for me, as I was then teaching chemistry and knew that we had vast quantities of it in our chemical store, over-ordered by previous staff in the days when it was used in large quantities for cleaning glassware, and promised Terry a bottle.

For Terry it was the start of a new career in alternative processes – and you can see some of the results on his Hands on Pictures web site. Together we went on to explore more or less the whole range of alternative processes: salted paper, kallitype, Van Dyke, platinum, cyanotype, carbon and more. For me it offered an interesting insight into the history of photography, but Terry found these processes the perfect expression for his own photographic work, and went on to research and produce his own variations – the “Rex” processes.

You can also see his work in a new book, ‘Beware the Oxymoron‘ which combines his photography with his poetry – and the preview gives you a good idea of both. I’ve enjoyed his poetry too over the years – particularly some of the limericks that he used to write every day on his short train journey in the days when he worked in a London office – and much more recently I spent an enjoyable evening at a Richmond pub where he and other poets performed their work.

Terry has also taught many others these processes, at colleges around the country (and abroad) and in courses at his Richmond studios. It was hardly a surprise to hear that his Gum Bichromate Workshop on Jan 9, sponsored by Ilford Photo to coincide with Photofusion exhibition about the art of darkroom printing featuring Bill Rowlinson and Richard Nicholson booked up rapidly (though when I looked the web site reported there was one place left.) Of course if you can’t get on this, Terry does offer longer courses on his Hands on Pictures site.

As well as this course Ilford Photo have also sponsored an experimental print workshop with Branka Jukic on 23 Jan – places still left – as well as a fully booked course in December on black and white photographic printing with Nick Jones.

Last One Out, Please Turn On The Light

Also showing at Photofusion until 27 Jan 2010 is Richard Nicholson‘s ‘Last One Out, Please Turn On The Light‘ a series of large colour prints of London’s remaining professional darkrooms begun in 2006.

These highly detailed images were taken using a large format camera using an open shutter in the dark and illuminating them with a series of flash exposures. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the work areas, and although the web site describes these as “chaotic rooms marked with the patina of time a world apart from the contemporary photographer’s shiny computer workstation” they are all much larger and rather tidier than my own darkroom. And perhaps too I’ve gone rather further into “personalising” my own un-shiny computer set up.

These images will have a particular fascination for those of us who are or have been photographic printers, and for those who know the work of the printers concerned – or know them socially, but it is perhaps work for a limited audience rather than for the wider public. They were certainly attracting a great deal of attention and comment on the opening night – where quite a few of those whose darkrooms were shown were present.

As one of the limited number of darkroom geeks, I would have liked also to have seen the other ends of their darkrooms – the wet side rather than just the dry bench with their sometimes magnificent enlargers.

You can see more from the series on Richard Nicholson‘s web site, where you can also see examples of his portrait work and an intriguing urban landscape series of garages and pramsheds in Tower Hamlets, which are really just my kind of thing.