Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Bill Jay (1940-2009)

I never got to know Bill Jay, though looking at his site I found one small thing that we had in common; both of us were first published in Practical Photography. I got seriously involved in photography a little after he had given up editing Creative Camera and just after the splendid but short-lived year of issues of his own magazine Album. He had moved to America, at first to study with Van Deren Coke and Beaumont Newhall at the University of New Mexico, and then going on to Arizona State University where he founded the Photographic Studies program. I heard stories about him (few of which could be repeated in print) and later read many of his essays and several of his fine books on photography, and saw his portraits of photographers.

Bill Jay died peacefully in his sleep last Sunday, in Samara in Costa Rica where he had recently gone to live. His web site show the great debt we owe him as well as his great generosity, offerening free downloads of his many articles about photography, as well as 11 of the of 12 issues of Album. I’ve a few of the original issues, but I’ll certainly download the rest to complete my set (or rather almost complete it, as issue 9 is missing,) though they are around 15-20Mb each, so don’t try this on dial-up.

Jay had a great love for photography, and was a decent photographer, as his portraits of photographers and others show, but looking at the portraits of the perhaps 30 of so in his list that I’ve met, there are few that really seem to catch the person for me; his real strength was as a writer. Writing about photography well isn’t easy and many of his articles required a great deal of painstaking research as well as the actual writing. Thanks to him we know a great deal more about some of the less obvious aspects of our medium, but perhaps more importantly his writing has inspired others – photographers included – to think and appreciate the medium more deeply.

Sanguinetti wins Grant

Alessandra Sanguinetti has been awarded this year’s $50,000 National Geographic Magazine Grant for Photography in a competition open to all professional photographers which illustrates the “magazines ongoing commitment to documentary photojournalism.”

You can read more about the grant and see portfolios by the two previous recipients of this award, Jonas Bendiksen and Eugene Richards at the magazine, which doubtless will soon also feature Sanguinetti’s work. But as these names suggest, competition for the award is extremely tough.

Perhaps the most intriguing of the projects on Sanguinetti’s web site is a set of pictures taken from 199-2001 “The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams”. This series in continued in “The Life that Came“, an exhibition at the Yossi Milo Gallery in 2008. The work follows the life of thse two young women, cousins who grew up on a farm near Buenos Aires, with images inspired both by their inner life and experiences as they move into adulthood.

Sanguinetti joined Magnum Photos as a nominee in 2007 and you can see more of her work on the Magnum site, although I find their overprinted copyright message particularly intrusive on work like hers. Pictures on the site include her work on domestic animals and a series of pictures – mainly portraits – from Palestine.

As PDN quote Susan Smith of National Geographic saying, she “has an original way of seeing that brings freshness to a subject…”

Guggenheim Grants

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has contributed greatly to photography over the years.

Ansel Adams, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Diane Arbus, Lewis Baltz, Harry Callahan, Paul Caponigro, William Christenberry, Imogen Cunningham, Roy De Carava, William Eggleston…

These are just a few of the more famous photographers who have been awarded fellowships in the past – I soon got tired with reading through the listings.

Great works like Walker Evans’s ‘American Photographs‘, Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans‘ and Edward Weston’s pictures for ‘California and the West‘ would not have been possible without them. Of course as well as names familiar to everyone, there are also those in the Guggenheim lists who are less well known – and even some of those with photography prizes who I’ve never heard of.

Photographers only form a small proportion of the over 16,000 fellows it has supported in 85 years, and, as it tells you on the State of the Art blog, 7 of the 180 fellowships this year went to photographers. You’ll find all 7 mentioned there with one of their pictures and at least in most cases a link to more work.

Many in the UK will have come across landscape photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper, Professor and Senior Researcher in Fine Art, The Glasgow School of Art. His exhibition True opened at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London last Friday (until 30 May 2009.)

Another photographer among the seven honoured who I’ve written about several times is Brian Ulrich. I’m pleased to see that his work has been recognised in this way.

Where was St George?

I spent much of the day on April 23 looking for St George around the centre of London, and was largely disappointed. Celebration of our patron saint’s day still seems to be pretty low key, and I found a handful of members of the English Democratic Party in Trafalgar Square trying to drum up support for a national holiday every April 23. At least this year – unlike last – they were allowed to visit our National Gallery in the square, which was also putting on some related events. Apparently last year they were refused entry for wearing the national flag.

Others were in the square expecting something to happen, but without success, though when I returned later things were a little livelier. Meanwhile I knew that the theatre group, The Lions part, were giving some performances during the afternoon in Southwark and I went to take some pictures of St George and the others there.

There were other things going on that I missed, some on purpose. Boris took a trip to the City for some cheap publicity, and Southwark Cathedral and St Georges Church were also marking the day with events.

I went back to Trafalgar Square on my way to the Photographers’ Gallery, and found around 25 young people having a noisy time on the plinth below Nelson, and then another theatre group who had come out from their show in the National Gallery decided to put one on in the square also – with a little more audience participation than they are used to.

The latest show at the Photographers’ Gallery didn’t detain me long, though as always I read the texts and looked at the pictures and other objects. As before the most interesting work was on around the edges, in the print room (including a couple of nice prints by Thurston Hopkins – which reminded me very much of my own games on the streets in the 1950s) as well as work by Guy Tillim I’ve mentioned before. Although I appreciate a wide range of work across all the genres, the PG doesn’t seem to be showing much of quality outside the odd bit of photojournalism these days.

In the main show, the work of Gerhard Richter stood out rather more than head and shoulders above the rest (perhaps from the ankles up?) , though I don’t think the small photographs which he has over-painted actually have a great deal to do with photography or being a photographer – and there are some rather more interesting examples on the web site.

One of those admiring Hopkins work with me was Shimelis Desta, formerly the court photographer to the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, some of whose work was shown in the Photographers Gallery in 2007. You can see a CNN film about how he managed to get this work out of the country on YouTube. He tells me that he has more interesting images than those that were chosen by the curators for that show, so I hope that one day we will see more of his work.

Photoshop – Several Steps Too Far?

A day or two ago I came across a link to a feature on the Danish Press photography site, Pressefotografforbundet, which was an English translation of an earlier post about the Danish Pictures of the Year competition. Klavs Bo Christensen who had sent in pictures on a story he shot in Haiti had been asked by the judges to submit his RAW files for the images concerned, and they had then decided to disqualify his work.

The competition rules state that pictures entered:

“must be a truthful representation of whatever happened in front of the camera during exposure. You may post-process the images electronically in accordance with good practice. That is cropping, burning, dodging, converting to black and white as well as normal exposure and color correction, which preserves the image’s original expression.”

Having seen the work – which is on the site – I’m surprised that it’s disqualification has aroused any controversy. It clearly – at least to my eyes – goes far beyond what I would consider “a truthful representation” and takes the work more in to the province of illustration rather than of photography. Had I been one of the judges I would have turned it down as inappropriate without feeling the need to examine the RAW files.

RAW files are not of course image files, and need suitable processing. In the article this is done as a comparison to the submitted images using the default setting of Adobe Camera Raw, and clearly a little more is needed on all three images shown. Unless I’m in a tearing hurry, I seldom accept the default ‘Autotone‘ result from Lightroom. As I used to in the darkroom, I’ll often do a little dodging and burning, and with the digital file I’ll usually also take advantage of the ease with which you can open up the shadows a little. The default settings often compress the highlights rather more than I like, and again I’ll correct this. And the auto setting normally fails to produce either high key or low key images and should I have been aiming at these effects, a more drastic tonal rearrangement is called for.

I may not get it right, but my aim is always to produce images that look photographic, where the viewer essentially isn’t aware of the process but in a sense feels they are looking through the picture to what is depicted, retaining the essence of the photograph as some kind of a trace of the original scene. For me the photograph is very much a ‘window’, although I always felt that Szarkowski was totally wrong to suggest that it could not at the same time be a powerful ‘mirror.’

Of course it has always been possible to use photography in different ways, for example to give a negative of the scene, or to solarize or posterize the image. But such graphic effects are designed very much to distance the photographically produced images from the original photographic expression, what we might call an experimental approach rather than the realist approach that is central to photojournalism and documentary work.

So I’m 100% behind the judges. This work, with its extremes of saturation and local contrast should never have been entered for the competition. There have been some images in other competitions – even World Press Photo – that I’ve thought perhaps have gone a little beyond the acceptable, but these are more extreme.

I’m not saying that they are bad pictures, but that the treatment is unsuitable for the purpose. If pushed I would say that two of the three shown clearly don’t work very well, and although the default conversions from RAW do still need a little tweaking, clearly there is a better photograph that could have been made from them than the pictures the photographer sent in. With the third, the bottom image on the page with a yellow chair and a blue concrete beam, this graphic treatment is rather more successful. It is also rather harder to tell from the default processed RAW file exactly what a more photographic approach could have achieved from this file.

These pictures were taken up yesterday on The Online Photographer, where there is quite a lot of discussion both of yesterday’s post and a follow-up today.

As Mike Johnston says there “If you like the wretched excess of the overhyped, overcooked style, go for itit’s your hobby; you own it. They’re your pictures.” And there are certainly plenty of people on Flickr who do seem to like it. It makes me cringe, and it certainly isn’t appropriate for photojournalism.

Great Advice, Fine Eyes

Seen on the 100 Eyes blog, a post Great Advice for Photographers, written by Dawoud Bey and originally published on his own blog, What’s Going On.

It’s worth looking at and reading, even if much of it is things we already know (Bey originally posted it as ‘Advice to a Young Artist‘) and some of it at least we have already taken to heart and put into practice. I’ve also given and written similar advice myself many times over the years, but it’s still good to see it pulled together so well.

Bey’s second point is ‘Put in 10,000 hours’, which may not appeal to those hoping for instant success, but hard work is needed to develop your ideas and to keep on growing. But five years of full-time work (less if, like many artists you are a workaholic) is a good basis for success, though not of course a guarantee.

Another sentence that stood out for me in the piece was this:

Your work should be something that you would be doing regardless of whether the larger market ever responds or not. Making art has to be your own particular obsession.

But what I think comes out time and again in the piece is the importance of working in a community, and taking a part in that community, sharing your work with other people and also sharing your ideas. It’s something that applies not just to the ’emerging artists’ Bey is writing for, but also to the author himself.

When I started in photography, there was very little advice available, and most of us floundered, while a few, often through just happening to meet the right people at the right time, made great strides.

If you’ve not yet seen 100 Eyes, the ‘beta issue’ of a “new web publication aimed at bringing compelling photography to the web” founded by Andy Levin a former Contributing Photographer at Life Magazine who lives in New Orleans, do take a look. Most if not all of the work in this issue is from photographers in his area, and I particularly liked the grittily abused HP5 of Kevin Dotson, not least because the soundtrack to his slide-show is for once both appropriate to the subject matter and also one of my favourites, Petite Fleur by the incomparable soprano of the great Sidney Bechet. And I’m pleased that we get the full track, although the pictures begin a reprise before it ends.

Stephen Shore Video

Just watched this on ‘A Photo Editor‘ – nine and a half minutes with much of the time Stephen Shore talking about how he works and well worth watching.

Shore of course has long been a favourite photographer of mine, particularly for the work he published in 1982 in ‘Uncommon Places‘ of which I have a well-thumbed copy. But I enjoyed seeing him and listening to him talk about the medium. And it made me go and find the book and look through it again.

William Eggleston is another of my favourites, but the video of him featured on the same site made by his son Winston I found far less interesting. It’s a bit too much Gee I like my dad and I think his pictures are great for my taste, and one or two pictures where I’d hoped he tell me a bit about them he simply passes without comment. Better to look at the books for yourself I think.

Lens Culture

Despite apparently spending all his time making posts on Twitter, Jim Caspar has also managed to put some interesting material on Lensculture recently. Some examples:

For fans of Ansel Adams, there is a link on his blog to a mildly engaging video of the man saying nothing very much or very original.
Most of us will find the transcript of a lengthy interview with Malick Sidibé, born in Mali around 1935, fascinating, and it comes with an interesting gallery of his work.
And a really interesting set of pictures by Japanese photographer Shigeichi Nagano from his book Hong Kong Reminiscence 1958 with a review by Marc Feustel

Helen Levitt (1919-2009)

Helen Levitt, who died in her sleep at her Manhattan home on Sunday 29 March, age 95, was truly one of the finest photographers of the twentieth century. She photographed on the streets of New York where she was born for over 70 years, becoming very much a photographer’s photographer. Although she lacked the public profile of Henri Cartier-Bresson, she was a photographer very much in the same mould, but perhaps more lyrical, and the best of her work certainly ranked with his.

Inspired by the work of H C-B and Walker Evans, she bought a Leica in 1936 and began taking pictures, getting her first solo show at MoMA in 1943. You can read more about her in the piece I wrote in October 2007, Helen Levitt – Street Colour and another post the following month after visiting her show at the Fondation Cartier-Bresson in Paris.

Also on >Re:PHOTO is John Benton Harris‘s review of a show by her and Henri Cartier-Bresson last year in New York, Kings of the Street.

Fontcuberta interview on Lens Culture

Although I’ve known the work of conceptual artist Joan Fontcuberta for years, it was only in 2007 that I met him in person, when he was showing Landscapes without Memory at the FotoArtFestival in Bielsko-Biala where I was speaking.

Although I wasn’t impressed by the work that he was showing – computer generated landscapes that seemed to me of no photographic interest and not essentially different from the ray-traced images that I had seen many others – including my own sons – produce in the past, he gave a superb presentation particularly about two of his projects which it seems to me achieve an exceedingly rare successful combination of the photographic and conceptual.

Most impressive for me was his collaboration with Pere Formiguera – Dr Ameisenhaufen’s Fauna and I was also very impressed by the Sputnik Project.

On Lens Culture you can see a selection of his images, including some from these projects (and some of those I find of less interest) and also listen to a 20 minute audio interview made by Jim Casper with Fontcuberta in late 2005 in Paris. It repeats much of what I heard him say in Poland, but if you’ve not hear him talk about his work is well worth a listen. (You will need to make sure your browser allows the site to pop up a window to listen to it.)