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Bill Rowlinson – Printing Legend

When I was fairly new to practical photography, back in the 1970s, I came across a slim volume which, rather amazingly, was tucked away on a shelf in my local library. They didn’t have a large photographic section – I can only remember one other book, but, equally amazingly, that was Paul Strand‘s ‘Living Egypt.’

The very slim volume was an early edition of ‘The Print‘ by Ansel Adams, and very soon I was myself the proud owner of the latest 1968 edition of the same work, the bible for anyone wishing to become a master printer. Of course some things, even then were outdated and some materials that he mentioned not available in the UK, but although it covers the whole process of making photographic prints in great detail, it was always the principles that mattered.

From that book I taught myself to print, although other aids soon came along, and another vital step was a pilgrimage up Muswell Hill to the store above the pharmacy where Peter Goldfield had begun to import that holy grail of black and white printing papers, Agfa Record Rapid, and later with his partner Martin Reed, produced the Goldfinger craft book. Martin went on to found Silverprint, still in business selling fine photographic materials a few minutes walk from Waterloo station – and the Goldfinger book can still be download from the site as a pdf.

Darkrooms certainly had a magic, perhaps still have it, although we’ve seen some great losses – particularly when cadmium was taken out of many papers, making Record Rapid just another paper. Of course there were also advances, and in particular Ilford’s Multigrade papers giving a flexibility that almost persuaded me it was no longer vital to have two developer baths. And personally discovering that with sodium lighting carefully adjusted to avoid any fog that darkrooms didn’t need to be dark any more.

It wasn’t long before one or two people were asking me if I would print their work, and I briefly considered setting up as a photographic printer. But only very briefly, because although I enjoyed the challenge of printing my own work, I really did not wish to spend more of my life in the darkroom. And perhaps also because I knew there were people who did it so much better.

The current show at Photofusion – until 27 Jan 2010 – celebrates the art of arguably Britain’s finest photographic printer, Bill Rowlinson, who died in 2008, aged 78, leaving his collection of prints to Photofusion.

Many of us have worked late in the darkroom, making exposure after exposure trying to perfect the dodging and burning or the contrast of an area of a print, only to find once the prints are toned, washed and dried that the difference that seemed so critical in the safelight are hard if not impossible to discern in daylight, and I suspect that some of those in his collection may be ‘extras’ produced in this way, but certainly all those on show are excellent examples of the printer’s craft.

It’s helped of course by the fact that he worked with many of the best photographers around, making his name in the 60s printing for Sarah Moon (who I was delighted to meet and talk to over a couple of days in Bielsko in 2007.) Also in the show are several of his fine prints for Bill Brandt, as well as some works by Julia Margaret Cameron. Not that he was old enough to have actually worked with her (she died in 1879.) These prints will have been made from copy negatives of prints and were made for the Dimbola Trust which runs the museum in her house on the Isle of Wight (although I think from originals in another collection.)

There are also some intriguing pictures Rowlinson printed for the Kobal collection, along with work by other photographers including Barry Lategan, Jon Swannell, Clive Arrowsmith and Jimmy Wormser.

Of course, photography over the past ten years has largely moved to digital, and perhaps the age of the master printer is over. Quite a few of those remaining in London were at the opening last night, including Adrian Ensor, who spoke briefly about Bill Rowlinson at the opening and is appearing in a gallery talk there on 8 December together with Steven Brierley of Ilford and Richard Nicholson to talk further on Rowlinson’s work and “the evolution of photographic printing over the last 40 years.” You can also hear Adrian Ensor talking with Bob Miller about his contacts with Rowlinson and some of his uncoventional techniques on the Silverprint site.

Ilford did much to promote photographic printers in the old days, running their Ilford Printer of the Year award for around 25 years, starting in 1968. This was I think unique in that it gave equal billing – and the same generous prize money – to the photographer and printer. Rowlinson won his first Ilford Printer of the Year Award in 1975. Ilford – now Ilford Photo – formed from the ashes of the former Ilford imaging group by Harman Technology – exists to be “passionate about black and white” and is producing and promoting photography using black and white film and traditional darkroom techniques.

A short visit to the working darkroom at Photofusion brought back memories, but its several years since I’ve ventured into my own darkroom to make a print. Perhaps one day I’ll go back again, but with every advance in inkjet printing I feel it’s less likely.

Asylum: Christopher Payne

Many years ago I had the opportunity to photograph the interior of an abandoned hospital and there was certainly something in the atmosphere there that I responded to although I don’t think I truly managed to capture it in my pictures (though I think I did a bit better in a later project on abandoned workplaces in London’s docks which are on my long list of work to put on line at some point.) But it perhaps gives the work of architect and a photographer Christopher Paynes photographs in his recently published book Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals from the MIT Press a personal resonance they might otherwise not have.

Certainly I was very impressed by the slide show of this work, Emptied But Still Secret, on the NY Times Lens blog yesterday. For me it is very much the details that speak most strongly – the racks of patients’ toothbrushes, the bathtub in a vast area of floor and blue tiles, a white straightjacket hanging on a white wall, and the details of the beauty salon. Although some of the interior scenes are also impressive, it’s perhaps where the work becomes more architectural photography – and particularly in a couple of exterior views – that I lose interest.

Of course I’ve photographed many buildings myself, some well, many badly. Most pretty averagely, and these two images would appear to me to fall squarely into that category. A shame when the some of the other work is so strong.

Payne‘s web site does have some fine black and white architectural work – including a nice series on substations and some pictures from New York’s High Line.

Which reminds me of a quite different set of pictures that I wrote about some years ago, Joel Sternfeld‘s 2000-2001 High Line series, which can still be seen on the High Line site, where you can also see work by a number of other photographers, particularly in the section headed ‘Art Photography.’

Papageorge on Foto 8

A very thick copy of Foto 8 magazine came through my door the other day, but I haven’t had time to read it properly yet. But it does include a number of interesting features, including two by photographers I’ve previously written about, Michael Grieve and Edmund Clark. You can take a look at this twice a year publication online, but really you need to see the real thing – and the best way is to take out a subscription – and there is a special 50% offer on new and gift 2 Year Subscriptions until 16 December. It’s probably the best magazine in the world covering photojournalism.

Foto 8 also has a lot of content on-line in its blog, including an interesting interview in which Tod Papageorge talks to Mark Durden, in particular about Garry Winogrand and Susan Sontag. Here’s a quote:

Its always been puzzling to me that capacious minds like Sontags … look at a photograph and see not a picture, but the literal world held in their palm. With that, theyre revealing themselves to be no more sophisticated than the proverbial tribesman who believes that a photograph made of him steals a piece of his soul.

You can see more of Papageorge’s photography at the Pace/McGill Gallery.

Papageorge has always impressed me more as a writer than as a photographer, and in particular for his 1981 book ‘Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence‘. The book is long out of print, but the text – without the pictures it refers to – is available on the web as the first of a series, The Missing Criticism on Eric Etheridge‘s ‘Mostly Photos‘ blog.

The second article in this series, also by Papageorge, is his 2002 essay ‘What We Bought‘ on the work published under that title by Robert Adams in 1995. Unfortunately by that date I’d stopped buying every new book by Adams, as this first edition now sells for around £400 (but I do have first editions of the even more expensive ‘Denver‘ and ‘The New West‘, though like most of my books my copies are well-thumbed.) But newer editions of these books are available – and you can buy ‘What We Bought’ in and edition published by Yale University Press (Papageorge became Director of Graduate Study in Photography at the Yale School of Art in 1979) for £30 or less.

Photovintage and Voyage Imaginaire

Were I in Paris at the weekend I would go along to the Hotel Millennium Paris Opera on Boulevard Haussman on Sunday for the Salon de la Photovintage organised by the AnamorFose Gallery from Belgium. AnamorFose was founded by Xavier Debeerst in 1997 as a virtual Photogallery specialising in vintage and historical photography.

The gallery centres around Belgian photography and also pictorialism, but also included the work of modernist photographers such as Willy Kessels as well as contemporary work. Perhaps the best way to get a view of its character is to look at the catalogue, a 32 page PDF file.

Apparently the organisers of Paris Photo didn’t like the orginal name of this event, Paris Photovintage, and asked for it to be changed. But it is really all the events like this around the city that make a trip to Paris worthwhile.

Tonight I’m also missing several gallery openings, including “Voyage Imaginaire” at the Galerie Claire Corcia, with contemporary photography by Francesco Gattoni, Mathilde Maccario, Louise Narbo and Carolle Benitah. Last year I was impressed by Narbo’s work at the same gallery and wrote briefly on it. And from there, perhaps by another opening or two, I would have made my way to the best of the various parties going on in Paris.

But unfortunately my voyage too is only in my imagination, though I’ve been scanning pictures of Paris all day and editing them.

Consequences by NOOR

NOOR is an Amsterdam-based agency of nine documentary photographers which aims to “contribute to a growing understanding of the world by producing independent in-depth visual reports.” As well as encouraging and promoting the individual work of the photographers, “collective projects are at the core of Noor.”

You can see a little of one of these, Consequences by NOOR on-line at the moment, a slightly confusing blog on which more material will be posted later. The exhibition, which opens at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, December 7 – 18, 2009, looks at some of the crunch points of climate change around the world: “subjects include: a massive pine beetle kill in British Columbia, genocide in Darfur, the rising sea level in the Maldives, Nenet reindeer herders in Siberia, Inuit hunters in Greenland, a looming crisis in Kolkata, India, coal mining in Poland, oil sand extraction in Canada and the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest by Brazilian cattle ranchers.”

At the moment there is a single photograph and some text about each of the nine photographers, Francesco Zizola, Jan Grarup, Jon Lowenstein, Kadir Van Lohuizen, Nina Berman, Pep Bonet, Philip Blenkinsop, Stanley Greene and Yuri Kozyrev. It’s a distinguished list including a number of photographers I’ve written about in the past.

The latest post includes a video of Zizola shooting ‘A Paradise in Peril‘ in the Maldives, the lowest lying country in the world, and which will be one of the first casualties of the sea level rise caused by global warming and the melting of polar ice caps. In it Zizola talks about the situation and also a little about how he is trying to show it through his pictures, some of which are inserted into the video.

Zizola, born in Italy in 1962 and living in Rome, published the book Born Somewhere in 2004 after photographing the situation of children in 28 countries over 13 years. His latest book Iraq, part of an Amnesty International series published in 2007, contains pictures from the early months of the 2003 invasion. He has received many awards, including World Press Photo of the Year in 1996, seven World Press Photo awards and four Pictures of the Year Awards.

The Unseen Bert Hardy

It was a full house at the Photographers’ Gallery last night for Graham Harrison‘s talk on ‘The Unseen Bert Hardy’, and one from which I’m sure every member of the illustrious audience – including quite a few who had known the man – went away with their view of Bert Hardy changed, and wanting to see more of his unknown and unpublished work.

I think we all have a view of him – that perhaps comes in part from how he used to talk about his work – which sees him metaphorically as a skilled British craftsman in blue dungarees, a wooden folding two foot rule in his top left pocket and a pencil tucked behind his right ear – as well of course as a Contax around his neck, and the kind of attacking attitude you’d expect from a schooling in a gym on the Old Kent Road. Of course he was born a working class lad south of the river, just off the Blackfriars Road (he got a blue plaque there last year and of course has a seat in St Brides), he was a highly skilled technician – and as many of his published pictures and some of the new work last night attest, had both a great feeling for light and also the technical ability to use it, particularly what in the old days used to be called “contre-jour“. But he was more than that.

Part of his reputation comes from the comparison with Bill Brandt, and the famed Gorbals assignment in particular. It’s perhaps hard to understand why Picture Post (PP) sent Brandt on the job in the first place, because his rather splendid de Chirico-like views or the tenements are perhaps exactly what you would have expected of the man.

When PP panicked on seeing his pictures, they sent Bert to rescue the story. Or rather, as Graham Harrison pointed out, they sent the ‘two Berts‘, photographer Bert Hardy and writer Bert Lloyd. Lloyd, another south Londoner, had started collecting folk songs while working in Australia in the 1920, joined the Communist party in the 1930s and worked – often with Hardy – on stories for PP from around 1945-50, and was one of the pioneers of the folk revival, presenting folk as a live working class from rather than the effete activity of largely upper-class folk collectors. They worked together, “Lloyd engaged the subjects in conversation and Hardy photographed them” as it says below the poster for a show of Hardy’s work from Tiger Bay there fifty-one years after they were taken in 2001. The page also raises the question:

For generations, people in Tiger Bay have objected to how they have been represented by photographers, writers, journalists, social scientists and others. But they like Bert Hardys photographs of themselves and their community. Why is this so? What sort of documentary practice is this that local people find so alluring?

I’d like to think the answer is that it is one that is made by people like them who get down beside them and work with them, something that has very much to do with both Berts.

Another of the well-known projects on which they worked together was : The Elephant and the Castle, and you can still see 25 pictures from this – including quite a few not published at the time at the James Hyman site.

Back to the Gorbals. Through the party – and perhaps also through folk-song, though the two things were closely linked – Lloyd had a contact in the Gorbals, a Mr Mac-something (I was making notes in the dark and my handwriting is worse than Gordon Brown’s) who made the job considerably easier by taking them to the right places and to meet the right people.

Over his 16 years at the PP as its Chief Photographer, Bert Hardy shot over 800 stories and over 500 were published. 23 of the made the cover. He didn’t waste film and there were very few failures. When he was able to develop his own films, they were finer grained and I think sharper than those from the lab (and of course after PP, he went on to set up Grove Hardy, and there were several photographers present who had used them to print their work – including David Hoffman and Homer Sykes – as well as one of the printers who used to work there.)

Perhaps what came most clearly from the “unseen” work was a suggestion of a very much more complex photographer. As well as the warmth of vision, the humanity, the empathy with his subjects, there was an appreciation of the surreal – an aeroplane flying across the wallpaper behind a group at airforce training, a long row of people in lice-proof calico suits being sprayed, a half-naked yoga pose in front of so very conventionally dressed ladies and men on a line of sofas and chairs along the wall behind.

The talk was recorded, and I hope will be made available somewhere, either on Harrison’s Photo Histories web site or on the Photographers’ Gallery site. I hope what we have seen is just a first instalment and that Harrison will be able to go on and look at the rest of Hardy’s work in the archive to produce an exhibition and a book.

Although we’ve seen a few shows in recent years from PP photographers, there is still I think a lot to be found in the archive. When I tried to write about some of the other photographers who worked there it was hard to find their work for PP anywhere on the web as examples, and for most there were relatively few – and usually the same few – in publication. The Getty site isn’t that friendly and work is hard to find much by Felix Man for example. Unfortunately for copyright reasons what I did write on some of the others – Bill Brandt, Bert Hardy, Thurston Hopkins & Kurt Hutton is no longer on-line.

It’s perhaps time for a major show at one of the big London galleries to re-evaluate the work of all the PP photographers – including the stuff that only made it as far as the archive. It would be a great contribution to London’s increasingly successful photo festival, Photomonth, in a couple of year’s time. Or perhaps a season of shows at a smaller venue such as the Photographers Gallery? One small thought that comes to me is a tenuous Olympic connection – surely PP will have covered the 1948 games here?

Kingsmead Eyes

One of the many sections of the Guardian that usually goes direct into the recycling is the Family section, but on Saturday it had a rather striking self-portrait of a startled looking young Sally Hammond on the phone in a white dressing gown with pink stars. Sally had just got out of the bath and answered the phone, as no one else was available, and had just been informed of the death of a relative.

Sally is just one of 28 pupils from Kingsmead School in the London Borough of Hackney, who took part in a remarkable collaboration over 6 months with photographer Gideon Mendel, photographing their lives – friends, family, the estate, shops, Sunday Schools – things that appealed to them and they felt strongly about. Food features quite a lot!

Crispin Hughes, whose work I’ve written about on a couple of occasions, taught the children how to use the digital cameras they used on the project in a series of workshops, and in the pictures selected for the video on the Kingsmead Eyes site you can see that most of those involved were eager learners. At least one now wants to be a photographer when they leave school.

I wrote a a piece on Demotix a couple of months ago criticising a politician who compared Hackney with Baltimore as seen in ‘The Wire‘. It isn’t, but it is one of our more deprived urban areas, and the particular estate on which the school is – the Kingsmead estate – has a poor reputation.

It is a typical LCC red-brick pre-war estate of large 5 storey deck access flats – 980 in all – in courtyard blocks close to the Lea Navigation, just to the south of Clapton Park, and across the canal from Hackney Marshes – whose many football fields feature in some of the images and part of which will be a car/coach park of the London 2012 Olympics. This “village” estate of “Kings Mead” was officially opened by the King – George VI along with Queen Mary – in 1939. The flats were built to a high standard with modern facilities for the time, and the tenants who were rehoused from the slums of Bethnal Green and Stepney enjoyed their new luxury – even if they were a bit out in the country.

It was only in the sixties that they began to turn into undesirable slums, partly through neglect with shared stairways and decks as on many similar estates becoming dirty and sometimes dangerous places, and by the seventies estates like this had became sink estates, with the GLC rehousing problem families from across all London in them. Transfer to LB Hackney after Thatcher’s ridiculous abolition of the GLC (a policy based purely on spite) didn’t help and the estate became notorious after the death of a teenager during a homosexual orgy in one of the flats in 1985. There were also very high levels of burglary on the estate and many robberies on the streets by gangs of youths. Things began to pick up in the 1990s, party because of coordinated action by police and council to use injunctions, repossession orders and other civil remedies against trouble-makers, resulting in a rapid drop in crime, but also because of one of the establishment of one of the most radical “bottom up” community projects there, the Kingsmead Kabin, still running.

Regeneration funding was granted in 1995, and since then with the estate in charge of registered social landlord, Kingsmead Homes (Hackney) Limited, now the Sanctuary Housing Association, over £40 million has been spent on building refurbishment. Sanctuary Housing Association along with the governors of Kingsmead School supported the project.

As well as working with the 28 pupils on the project, Mendel also photographed every one of the 249 pupils at the school, using an old Rolleiflex. These portraits are shown as an composite image at the Kingsmead Eyes exhibition – on show at V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green until 7 Feb 2009 – giving as it says “remarkable diversity and origins of these children in more than 46 countries this becomes a truly global portrait, taken in a small Hackney school.”

But as the old theatre saying goes, “never work with children or animals” and in the video installation, which is part of the exhibition and can also be viewed on line makes clear it is their work – photographs, descriptions and poems – initiated and inspired by Mendel that really makes this project. (The video also credits Louise Nichols along with Gideon Mendel for Creative Direction, Mo Stoebe as Video Editor and Crispin Hughes for the Photo Workshops.)

But at the same time, Mendel also made his own documentation of the area. Knowing the work of this South African born photographer who has been based in London since 1990 Im sure it will be of a very high standard. You can hear him talking about his work, mainly on HIV/Aids but with also some other interesting issues raised particularly in the questions and his answers, on a long video made at the Front Line Club last year (1 hr 27min.)

This is another fine show as a part of photomonth, the East London Photography Festival which continues through November, and which opened at the Bethnal Green museum a month or so ago .

2009 Aperture Portfolio Prize

Congratulations to Moscow-based Alexander Gronsky, born in Tallinn, Estonia in 1980, who began working as a professional photographer in 1998 and joined the agency Photographer.ru in 2003. He was awarded the prize for his series ‘The Edge‘ which makes superb graphic use of large areas of white snow on the outlying parts of habitations in Moscow and Pastoral, looking at wastelands within the city, areas that are not rural nor urban, areas that lack definition.” These show them in use for various purposes by people (and ducks), abandoned and wrecked buildings, dumped rubbish, fires…

Edgelands around our towns and cities have often held a fascination for photographers, including Ray Moore who taught me a great deal and myself, and some of these scenes (not the ones with snow) remind me of areas I’ve walked in around the suburbs of London and Paris, a kind of liminal zone where normal life perhaps breaks down slightly and almost anything would happen, and that heap of clothes under a bush in the distance could just be a body.

You can also see these two projects, along with his ‘Less than 1‘ (the average population of the outer Russian areas in which those pictures were taken and some of his editorial work on his web site.

Congratulations also to runners-up Keliy Anderson-Staley, Off the Grid; Alejandro Cartagena, who got a mention recently as a ‘discovery’ at Fotofest, Lost Rivers; Maureen Drennan, Meet Me in the Green Glen; Jason Hanasik, He Opened Up Somewhere Along the Eastern Shore; and Mark Lyon, Landscapes for the People, which looks at some rather remarkable interiors with wallpaper landscape.

For once it’s a competition where I would almost certainly have come to the same conclusion as the judges, although I found almost all of the work interesting.

Half Life

Here’s a set of 30 pictures on Burn that I really enjoyed looking at, not least because as it says “ESSAY CONTAINS EXPLICIT CONTENT”. As always I thought that non-explicit photography would have to be very out of focus, and in fact most of the more sexually explicit images in the sequence deliberately utilise depth of field to soften the relevant areas.

The 30 square black and white images of ‘Half Life‘ were shot on medium format film and individually each has a certain presence and moodiness, while together they build up a description of a life-style, of relationships, of memories from a recent two year period in the photographer’s life.

You can see more of the work of Edoardo Pasero (b 1978 Milan) on his web site. On permanence is a series of pictures of tattoos on various parts of the male and female anatomy and is perhaps rather more explicit, but Scripta Manent will offend no-one with its images of old books, documents and a library, which also in some images uses limited depth of field to great purpose. His colour portraits, some of which are also semi-nude, are for me less interesting, though there are a couple that I like particularly, a woman with beads that look a little like giant smarties and a man sitting on shopping trolleys, both clothed. You can also see more of his pictures on IrisF64.

Fotofest – Birmingham Mark II?

I was a little surprised to see a picture by Vee Speers at the top of the press release for the Fotofest International Discoveries II show which opens today in Houston and continues until December 19. Of course I really love her pictures, but I’d hardly call her a ‘discovery’ given the amount of previous exposure of her work, not just the The Birthday Party, first shown in Australia in 2006 which is now on show in Houston, but also previous work including ‘Bordello‘ which first shown in Italy in 2002.

I first met her at Birmingham at Rhubarb Rhubarb in 2007, though she first attended in 2005. In 2007 her pictures were on the wall of the room where I was looking at portfolios, one of several fine photographers selected for the show Otherlands, though I’d seen her work previously in magazines. Surprisingly Birmingham doesn’t get a mention in the Fotofest release, although it was most probably there she met the senior curator of Fotofest, Wendy Watriss, who was a fellow reviewer.

Chinese artist Wei Bis re-staging of his 80day experience in a Chinese prison a sentence received for making a photograph. His large black and white photographs are minimal, showing a surreal relationship between near expressionless guards and disoriented prisoners. One of his images appears at the top of an earlier press release.

Alejandro Cartagena, born in the Dominican Republic lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico and at Houston he is showing large-format brilliantly coloured images of the dramatic and ever-expanding suburban development of the area. He has shown work widely in Mexico for around 5 years as well as contributing to international group shows. I particularly like some of the ‘NewWork’ on his site.

Minstrel Kuik Ching Chieh was born and raised in a Malaysian fishing village but she studied photography in southern France. You can see her work, including RRose which is being shown at Houston on her blog.

Christine Laptuta produces work about the mystery of land, its ambiguity, disruption and rhythm. She chooses to represent ordinarily vast landscapes in multiple printed miniature platinum/palladium contact prints.

The constructed landscapes of cities are focus for Rizwan Mirzas photographs. His shadowy nocturnal images reflect the tension between the mysteries of darkness and the lighting. Born in Liverpool he studied with John Blakemore in the early 1990s and also came to Rhubarb Rhubarb in 2008, although the previous year he showed at various galleries and festivals including PhotoEspana, Madrid, Spain. His work was also on show – not in FotoFest – in Houston in 2008.

Born Tokyo 1948, Takeshi Shikama has been showing his black and white photographs of trees since 2004, and “The Silent Respiration of Forests” first appeared in a Tokyo gallery in 2006.

Working between Seoul, London and Paris, Korean-born MiMi Youn was one of the three winners of the Lens Culture – Rhubarb Photo Book Awards in 2008 along with Kurt Tong who divides his time between China and the U.K and has photographed a little-known and officially banned element of ancient Chinese funerary practice; Joss Paper or Spirit Money.”