Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Brian Griffin – Olympic Portraits

I was in two minds as to whether to accept the invitation to the National Portrait Gallery‘s launch of the NPG/BT Road to 2012 Project. The decision to have the games in London is arguably one of the greatest British tragedies of the 21st century to date and it’s legacy for the Lea Valley and East London likely to be only slightly less damaging than Enola Gay’s flight over Hiroshima in August 1946.

But of course the games are going to happen in around a thousand days time, and it’s good to see anything positive that comes from it – such as this project. Brian Griffin is certainly one of the best portrait photographers currently working anywhere in the world at the moment, and it would he hard to think of a better person to photograph those people connected with what is – whatever I think about it – a major project. The six images unveiled today are the first of 20 by him, and commissions to other photographers will bring the total to 100. I hope those others chosen to work on the project will also be chosen on merit rather than, as so often happens in such things, for political reasons.

I’m not against sport. In my youth I played for various teams, getting a medal myself at the age of ten as a part of an all-conquering wolf club soccer team that included three players who went on to play professionally and at 16 I knocked over ten seconds off my Borough’s record for the quarter mile, finishing a hundred and fifty yards ahead of the next runner. But in my view games are for playing rather than watching and taking part is more important than winning. I think its a part of the Olympic Ideal, which doesnt seem to have much part in our official professional programme for sport.

Sandy Nairne, the Director of the NPG opened the event and was followed by rather predictable speeches from Lord Coe and Dame Kelly Holmes, but it was photographer (or artist) Brian Griffin who was the star performer, talking about some of his experiences in making the pictures and his thinking behind them. Above the speakers throughout the presentation was his picture of four from the thirty East London young people who went to Singapore to support the games bid, and he told us how he had decided to from them into a single sculptural group, but when he had taken what he thought was his picture, Alex Loukos in his red boxer’s helmet, jumped out from the group and made the image that he quickly captured and we saw on the screen.

Although Brian stressed that he thinks about his work as a fine artist, he still has the openness to the moment that makes his work truly photographic, and nowhere was this shown more in the set of six images that was unveiled at the event than in a picture of four civil engineers in hard hats under the Olympic stadium which for me – and several others at the event whose opinions I respect – was the outstanding image of the set. I was told that he has also taken a very fine portrait of Lord Coe, but this is apparently being held back for a later date.

You can see all six pictures on the NPG site, under the heading ‘The First Commission’ and read some of Brian’s comments about them on the London2012 blog. (Unfortunately Im not allowed to post the pictures here at a size I think useful so you will need to click on the links to see the work.)

Brian writes there “So, for example, the portrait of Jonathan Edwards and Denise Lewis. The colouration of this image, in the steel and glass environment of the building, echoes the feeling from a painting by the pre-Raphaelite Sir Edward Burne-Jones. The portrayal of Denise also leads me to the Edward Burra painting ‘Harlem’.”

In front of the actual print, my immediate thought was “Beam me up Scotty!”, and there is a definite “Star Trek” feel to this image, exaggerated perhaps by Jonathan’s hair looking like he’s got his hands on the Van der Graf machine and a slightly unreal quality about Denise Lewis’s skin tone and gesture which is a little more apparent in the actual print than in reproduction. However you see it, it remains a striking image.

Of course all of the pictures are excellent in their own way, and it was a bonus to have a number of the sitters present at the event. Not only could we see them with their pictures, and at least in some cases photograph them, but also I was able to catch one of them, triple-jumper Jonathan Edwards, getting his own back by taking Brian’s picture in front of his portrait.

It was good – as always – too meet Brian again, and also of course some other old friends and a few new ones. But as I left the picture below flashed into my mind and I felt a sudden sadness about the missed opportunity to make this a Green Games and incorporate the Manor Gardens Allotments into the site – and to see how Brian might have photographed Hassan and Sam and all the others.

© 2007 Peter Marshall
Sam Clark tries some of Hassan’s cake – which was great – while I wait for Sam’s sausages
Manor Gardens Allotments on the Olympic site, April 2007.
Peter Marshall

More pictures from the NPG/BY Brian Griffin event on My London Diary shortly.

Jane Bown

Last Thursday I read a post on Twitter about the Guardian Interactive feature on Jane Bown, which accompanies a show of her work next door to the Guardian at Kings Place, on until 21 Nov 2009 and a new book of her work.

The site has an excellent collection of her portraits and a video in which she talks about her time at Guildford School of Art studying with Ifor Thomas, her first assignment for the Observer in 1949 and some key sessions since then, including photographing the Beatles, The Queen, Francis Bacon, Samuel Beckett and others.

She has really had an incredible career as a portrait photographer, and I’ve always admired her simple and straightforward style both as a photographer and a person. Once well-known for carrying her camera in a basket, she never worried much about equipment. She got an Olympus OM1 with a standard lens when it came out in the early 1970s and is still using it. When the Queen, awarding her an MBE, asked what she did, the reply was “I’m a hack.” Later she got a CBE and when both women were 80 the Queen sat for a session with her.

You can also view an earlier presentation on her work, made at the time of the publication of ‘The Unknown Jane Bown’ and an essay about her written in 2007 by Germaine Greer. Photographers will find some details interesting, such as her “40-year-old Olympus OM1 cameras, with a 50mm F2.5 lens” wondering how she managed to get the camera in 1967 when Olympus only announced it in 1972 and thinking that the lens looks rather like the more familiar and very fine f1.8 that most of the rest of us used, but it still makes interesting reading.

Bert Hardy Talk

Years ago I remember going to hear Bert Hardy talking about his own work at the Photographers’ Gallery. It was an entertaining evening, but a rather predictable one, as by that time he had a rather carefully worked out script that he followed almost word for word about his life and work on every occasion. It was good to go and see him and watch him perform, but there was little if anything new in the actual content.

The selection of pictures too was predictable. Not least because back in the “good old days“, the “golden years of photojournalism“, photographers worked for hire and the publication owned the pictures, which in the case of Picture Post, disappeared into the Hulton empire. Getty, not am organisation I usually have much praise for, deserve credit for having preserved material that might otherwise have been lost from the Hulton Archives.

And on November 10th, 2009, Graham Harrison is giving a talk, The Unseen Bert Hardy, showing images recently rediscovered in that Picture Post collection at the Photographers Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW, at 7:00pm. The PG also has a nice little selection of his images for sale on line, although the thumbnails are a little misleading*. Harrison, whose Photo Histories site I’ve mentioned before and should visit more often (don’t go there unless you have a lot of time to spare!), was able to look through hundreds of original Picture Post contact sheets and find many Hardy pictures and stories that were never used.

There is a taste of what is in store in Doorstepping a city: how Bert Hardy captured life in Barcelona during the Franco dictatorship on Photo Histories. Spain was under the powerful thumb of Franco’s fascist dictatorship and times were tense as a general strike was taking place in Barcelona as Hardy arrived. Some of his pictures were published together with a story by James Cameron in ‘Barcelona: city in ferment‘ on April 15, 1951, but the others have just sat in the archive until now.

Although Hardy had got into photography with a Leica, in Spain he was using a square medium format camera, presumably a Rollei or Rolleiflex*. This gave the distinct advantage in tense situations of working with a camera held at waist-level with a quiet shutter. One disadvantage was its fixed standard lens, but this was an age where the publishing climate didn’t expect the kind of close intrusion and ‘big close ups’ we take for granted in the press today. Much of the time he was on the street the camera was probably largely hidden in the folds of his coat. It must also have helped that people generally were much less aware of cameras and their possibilities than today, although some of his subjects have clearly realised they are being photographed, most seem to have remained unaware of the photographer.

Cameras then were simpler beasts, and although they lacked the automatic functions that we now take for granted (but curse when they let us down) experienced photographers could set the aperture and shutter speed they would need without having to look at the camera (and without of course the help of a light meter.)

Focus with medium format might need some attention, but experienced photographers became precise judges of distance, in more active kinds of work preferring to set focus by scale rather than relying on the much slower process of viewing the image on the viewing screen. For many situations they would focus in advance on a particular distance – perhaps 10 ft – and then move or wait to be at exactly that distance when taking the picture. (This is something street photographers still do, even with modern cameras that may have autofocus, though generally using closer distances and wider lenses with greater depth of field to give a zone of focus ; turning off autofocus – and autoexposure – cuts the lag between pressing the release and the picture being taken.)

Framing with the larger negative was also less of an issue, although some of the contacts on the slide show suggest that at times Hardy did it with great care. In general photographers were advised to leave plenty of space around the subject to allow for cropping that was almost always applied by editors both to fit images into the page layout but also as a way of showing they were doing their job (sometimes even when it meant ruining the pictures.) Only two of his eight images printed in the Barcelona story are used in the square format they were taken, although that figure is probably higher than average and perhaps reflects the higher regard for images by Picture Post than most other publications.

* On the PG site, all the thumbnails are square but many of the images aren’t, having been taken on 35mm. Presumably apart from his Blackpool girls on the promenade rails, taken with a Box Brownie, the remaining square format images were largely made with a Rollei.

Quite incidentally in this set of pictures I notice the Spanish dancer in his 1954 image complete with leering British sailors in a Gibraltar bar is wearing pants under her swirling skirts, while I was embarrassed to find from some of the pictures that the flamenco dancer I photographed in London a few years ago wasn’t. Only slightly embarrassed, but I did choose not to publish the images that had revealed more to a fast shutter speed than was clearly apparent to the naked eye.

Paris Photo 2009

I don’t think I’m going to make it to Paris for Paris Photo this year, although I always enjoy a visit there and there is so much to see not just at the show but also elsewhere in the city. Even though this year it won’t be ‘Le Mois de la Photo’ – which only takes place every other year – there is always a lot of photography to see at this time.

It’s also a good place to meet a few old friends from around the world, and those who live in Paris, including Jim and Millie Casper. Lensculture is one of the truly essential photographic sites and partner in Paris Photo and Jim has put a great set of one hundred and sixty-seven images on line from the show to whet your appetite for a visit there. I just don’t have time to write about them all, but there are some fine images there (and just a few things I hope never to see again.) But I can’t resist mentioning a lovely Inge Morath colour image I’ve not seen before. There are also of course other things worth taking a look at in the new ‘issue’ of Lensculture.

Just thinking about it again to write this short note has made me think again, tempted by the idea (and I’ve even downloaded the accreditation form.) But given the value of the pound and my lack of commissions and sales at the moment a trip like this is very hard to justify, at least to my accountant and the tax man.

You can read and see rather more than the above two pictures from my trip last year in a ‘PARIS SUPPLEMENT‘ on My London Diary. And perhaps I’ll save up to make the trip again in 2010.

Taken in London at TINAG

This Is Not A Gateway (TINAG) is a voluntary organisation that creates arenas/platforms for those whose point of reference is the city. Working across disciplines, TINAG encourages inter-cultural dialogue and rigorous production through four strands: FESTIVAL, SALONS, PUBLICATIONS and ARCHIVE.

The TINAG 2009 Festival is taking place now – 23 – 25 OCTOBER 2009 – in Hanbury St, Spitalfields, between Brick Lane and Commercial St, just across the road from the old Spitalfields Market. And on Sunday morning in a session that starts at 11.00 am, Paul Baldesare and myself will be doing a 5 minute presentation on our show Taken in London. Assuming the technology works, we will be projecting all 41 pictures from the show during that time, as well as talking very rapidly!

You can download the festival programme as a PDF, and it does give details of all the sessions and events in Hanbury St, though I was disappointed to find that there was no listing of the events outside this area – such as Taken in London.

Prix Pictet announced later today

The winner of the Prix Pictet will be announced tonight, and you can see the work of the 12 selected finalists on Lensculture.

The twelve are:

Darren Almond, UK
Christopher Anderson, Canada
Sammy Baloji, Congo
Edward Burtynsky, Canada
Andreas Gursky, Germany
Naoya Hatakeyama, Japan
Nadav Kander, South Africa
Ed Kashi, USA
Abbas Kowsari, Iran
Yao Lu, China
Edgar Martins, Portugal and
Chris Steele-Perkins, UK

I’d find it very hard to pick a winner from these, although there are two or three photographers whose work I’m surprised made it to the last 12, and I don’t think are showing anything like there best work here. Of course in most cases I’ve only seen the work on the web, though there are a few pictures I’ve seen before elsewhere.

If I had to choose, I think it would be between Naoya Hatakeyama and Ed Kashi, so those are probably two without a chance if my record at predicting such things stands.

As well as the £60,000 prize to be announced by Kofi Annan, honorary president of the Prix Pictet, at the Passage de Retz Gallery in Paris today, there will also be a commission for one of the twelve photographers.

Three came along at once…

Sometimes demonstrations seem to be like London buses, and after you’ve waited ages, three come along at once. It happened last Saturday, when as well as the three events in London I did get to – if rather briefly to two of them – there were also demonstrations I would have liked to cover in Swansea and Ratcliffe-on-Soar. But I’d decided I wasn’t up to the roughing-it that joining in with the Climate Swoop to photograph what was planned as a 24 hour action.

I’d actually visited Ratcliffe-on-Soar a few years ago – and it has been pretty popular with photographers, not for the tons of carbon dioxide it creates, but simply visually, and it did have its attractions.

But I think since I was there they’ve put up a rather better fence, and last weekend there were a thousand or two police getting in the way of the view. If you want to see some pictures from the demonstration, one of the better sets of images I’ve seen is by Fil Kaler, and there a quite a few videos that give some of the atmosphere from – here’s a poetic one on Blip.TV and you can also see how a Climate Camp medic came to the aid of a policeman who had collapsed – and there are more videos on that site. Perhaps surprisingly, one of the fuller reports of the swoop was on CNN, just a pity they didn’t use any of the decent pictures that were available – but presumably they have a contract with Getty that means their pictures are dirt cheap or even at zero marginal cost. Just a pity they aren’t rather better. The three photographers I know personally who did go there all got considerably more interesting pictures.

Swansea too has its attractions, but it was a long way to go for what was expected to be a rather small demonstration by the right-wing EDL (or possibly WDL – Welsh Defence League) and rather more than three times as many in a counter demonstration by Unite Against Fascism. I’ve so far only found one picture of this protest on the web.

In London I had a busy day, starting with the Tamils, then rushing to Knightbridge for an anti-fur march before going back to Westminster for a demonstration against forced deportations of refugees back to the still terribly unsafe Baghdad. But each of those deserves its own post on the blog.

Violet Isle – Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb

Burn has a truly beautiful set of images from the book Violet Isle by Alex and Rebecca Norris Webb from Cuba, together with a Q&A session with the two photographers.

It held my attention particularly because a few days ago I wrote Viva Cuba! Havana Cultura, but there are several really breath-taking images among the dozen on show, and you can see them at a decent size without the usual Magnum watermark.

Given the treacle speed that I seem to be getting from the web today it took me quite a while to see all12 pictures, but it was worth the wait.

Mitch Epstein’s Power

In last Saturday’s post on the Lens blog at the New York Times you can see 15 pictures by Mitch Epstein from his new book American Power and on the NYT itself you can read an article by Randy Kennedy about the six-year project that led to the book.

The pictures are well worth a look – faintly reminiscent of at least one recent project on the UK, but to my eye rather more interesting – and the story is also worth reading. Photographing power stations – even with an 8×10 – attracted the attention of law enforcement, and at one site he was told by an FBI man If you were Muslim, youd be cuffed and taken in for questioning. On another occasion his camera was mistaken for a missile launcher!

On Epstein’s web site you can also see work from some of his earlier projects, Family Business (2000-2003), The City (1995-1999), Vietnam (1992-1995), Common Practice (1973-1992) and Recreation (1973-1988.) Artnet also has an online catalogue.

Born in 1952, Epstein studied at Rhode Island School of Design before going on to study with Gary Winogrand at Cooper Union in 1972-4.

He was one of the long list of photographers featured in the book by Sally Eauclaire that defined ‘The New Color Photography‘ in 1981 (it included among others Harry Callahan, William Christenberry, Mark Cohen, John Divola, William Eggleston, Emmet Gowin, Jan Groover, Len Jenshel, David Hockney, Les Krims – who refused to let her use a picture, Helen Levitt, Joel Meyerowitz, John Pfahl, Stephen Shore, Sandy Skoglund, Eve Sonneman and Joel Sternfeld) and also in the more focused vision of her later volumes ‘New Color, New Work‘ and ‘American Independents.’

John Benton-Harris – Surprise Party

We should as a photographic nation be celebrating today, with features in the colour supplements and photographic magazines, the 70th birthday of one of the most important figures for British photography in the second half of the last century, who happily is still going strong now. But you are unfortunately unlikely to read about it anywhere but here.

Yesterday I was privileged to attend the surprise birthday celebration for John Benton-Harris in the sports club opposite his home in Croydon, with his family and a decent smattering of photographers.

Those of us who were around in the 1960 and 70s remember the great breath of fresh ideas that came across the Atlantic and re-vitalised the medium here. Two people in particular, both separately students of Alexey Brodovitch in New York and New Haven, played a greater role than any others by coming and working here. One was British, Tony Ray-Jones, who died tragically young – only 30 – in 1972, having produced the work that was published posthumously as ‘A Day Off – An English Journal‘ in 1974. The other was an American from the South Bronx who took leave from his post as a photographer in the US Army in Italy to photograph Churchill’s funeral in 1965. While in London he met a young woman who changed his life, and as soon as he was able, moved to London and married her, continuing his photographic career here. You can see both of them in the picture above.

Two years ago at the FotoArt Festival in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, it was slightly daunting to take to the stage immediately after the notable historian and writer of ‘A World History of Photography‘, Naomi Rosenblum, particularly as the talk I was going to give had a considerable overlap with the lecture on the history of street photography she had just given.

My ‘On English Streets’ used illustrations from the work of John Thomson, Paul Martin, Sir Benjamin Stone, Margaret Monck, Bill Brandt, Martin Parr, Paul Trevor and of course John Benton-Harris, as well as some of my own pictures (I’d talked there about Tony Ray-Jones on a previous occasion or he too would have featured.) Here is my script for the part of the talk which was about John:

His vision of England certainly in the early years here – was very much based on the ideas about it he had picked up from films set in the country, particularly those made by British film studios. But his view as an outsider certainly made him more aware of the class differences here and the key ways in which they are signified and in particular the importance and readings of hats, which appear in so many of his pictures.When John met another Brodovitch graduate, Tony Ray Jones in London, and found they shared many ideas (Ray Jones had studied at Brodovitch’s class in New Haven, and they had not met in the USA.) Both had the experience of having worked in a supportive visual environment that they found almost completely lacking in word-centred Britain, where no one seemed to care about photography. It must have come as a shock to John to have moved from a New York where he knew everyone who was anyone to a London where there was no one to know, although Ray Jones would have known exactly what was in store when he returned here. Together they provided an energy, a dynamic, that catalysed others to shake up of the dusty world of British photography, particularly editors Bill Jay and Peter Turner, who took over from Jay at Creative Camera. Benton-Harris curated several influential shows with Turner, particularly American Images: Photography (1945-80) at the Barbican in 1985.

The new breeze that ran though British photography affected all of us, perhaps reaching its apogee in volumes such as Creative Camera Collection 5, which featured, as the first of three major portfolios, 27 images by Benton-Harris (as well as a well hidden set of three pictures from me.)

Those coming to the party had been sworn to secrecy, but were asked to nominate their favourite image by John, and these had been printed up to poster size and were stuck up around the sports hall for the party – you can see some in the background of these pictures. I’d printed out the presentation slides for his section of my talk as a small present and was pleased to see that my choice included several of other people’s favourites.

Also on display was a series of pictures of John as a young man with a camera on the streets of Rome, taken by his friend George Weitz, there at the party (I’m afraid the link to the piece I wrote on John for About.com no longer leads to it – like the several thousand other pieces I wrote for them it is no longer available on line.)

Part of the reason why John is not as highly known as he should be is that it is not easy to see his work, much only available in long out of print books and magazines. A reasonably diligent search on the web only reveals a couple of pictures of him and two poorly scanned images of St Patrick’s Day, neither his best work on the theme. We really need a well-produced book of his work from the first twenty or so years in England, as well as other publications covering his later work.

Probably the best way publication is still the major portfolio in Creative Camera Collection 5 mentioned above, still available secondhand at a very reasonable price in the USA, though more expensive here – and prices of this and the other CC Year Books do now seem to be rising fast. (My favourite on-line bookseller lists a copy at a US bookseller for £6.47 below an ‘ex-library’ copy apparently in poorer condition from a UK store for £56, though most copies are in the £16-25 range.)

But it is also unfortunate that credit wasn’t always given to him for the things that he did do. The catalogue for the ground-breaking Barbican Show American Images 1945-80 does state in the acknowldegements “Peter Turner and John Benton-Harris have been the motivating force behind the show and without their unstinting efforts as organizers, American Images would never have happened” and it carries a short note by him and about him, but essentially it marginalises his contribution to a show which was almost entirely dependent on his contribution and insights, if slightly diluted by the efforts of others.

Unforgivably he was not even included in the index to the catalogue, and the front cover which should have stated ‘Organised by John Benton-Harris & Peter Turner‘ simply says ‘Edited by Peter Turner‘.

It is also hard to understand why use wasn’t made in the catalogue of his personal knowledge of many of the photogrphers included (which was essential in putting the show together) to provide greater insight into their lives and work. As his occasional contirbutions to this site show, John is capable of writing with considerable force and insight.

John has recently returned from another extended trip to the USA, doubtless with many interesting digital colour images as on his recent previous trips. I also hope he will write up his thoughts about some of the shows that he saw there for this site. It would be nice if here or elsewhere he would also share some of his images with us.

More pictures from the party on My London Diary.