Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Irish Ghosts

I’ve been intending to write something about the current show at Photofusion, David Creedon‘s Ghosts of the Faithful Departed, since I went to the opening a couple of weeks ago.

David Creedon speaking at Photofusion

You can see roughly 20 of the images from this on Creedon’s web site – along with some of his other work, although I think ‘Ghosts’ rather stands head and shoulders above the rest. Some of the images on the web have an odd sparkle – perhaps over-sharpening – but otherwise it gives a good idea of the show.

I usually go to Photofusion openings more to meet people that to see the photographs, but this time they were certainly worth a look. Creedon captures well the sense of frozen time in many of these interiors with an eye for detail and a feeling for colour.

It is subject matter that is a gift for photography, at its heart a medium concerned with the freezing of time, and at the opening Creedon spoke clearly about his feelings and the work. These isolated derelict rural homes were where the remnants of families, single people who stayed behind to look after elderly parents when famine drove their brothers and sisters to seek work in England or America. The parents died, the carers, now elderly lived and died and they were simply abandoned, left to decay and rot.

The pictures provide evidence of religious obsession and other aspects of eccentricity common among the old who live alone and of course have a particular resonance for the Irish as a part of their national history. Those of us who can claim no Hibernian connection perhaps view them more objectively, and although I enjoyed the show I did sometimes feel the photography was a little over the top. Perhaps the printing could have been less dramatic (it reminded me at times of Cibachrome’s gross hyper-realism) and more senstive and nuanced. And sometimes I felt that images were too arranged, lacking that certain accidental character that for me characterises great photography. This was perhaps a Guiness of a show (and I enjoy a pint, particular from Dublin) rather than fine wine.

The opening was also perhaps over the top, with three speeches. The photographer acquitted himself well – and I would have liked to hear him talk more about the work. The diplomat was diplomatic, short and sweet, but the academic appeared out to prove he had no great love or knowledge of photography, which was rather a shame.

Most photographed event in the Universe

The Obama inauguration turned out to be a rather a non-event for many including some photographers who were trapped in an underground queue despite holding tickets. Jacquelyn Martin spent the day photographing some of those around her who didn’t get to see the event but were caught in the Purple Gate “Tunnel of Doom.”

One of Mustafah Abdulaziz’s images also seems to show a similar tunnel, but obviously he didn’t get trapped and managed to turn in a nice essay on the people who came to the event, even if he wasn’t anywhere near the President either.

Thanks to Ami Vitale who started the post ‘Most photographed event in History, ever, in the Universe’ on Lightstalkers with a picture of her first boss settled comfortably with his camera and cat at home in front of a large TV rather than nearly freezing to death like Chris Morris 150 ft up on a tower. Others have contributed their stories and pictures to the discussion (and thanks to Lisa Hogben for the link to Abdulaziz on Burn.)

Burn, “an evolving journal for emerging photographers… curated by magnum photographer david alan harvey” looks an interesting site, and one that go back to. It’s amazing to find that Harvey only started the site three days before Christmas – after a month it already looks an exciting and established site.

Obama

Certainly the new president seems to be good news for those still in Guantanamo – and perhaps it won’t be long before London can welcome back two former residents, but so far I haven’t been too impressed by the photographs I’ve seen of the event.

You can read the story of how Chuck Kennedy got his widely published low angle shot from a remote Canon 5D Mark II fitted in a Pelican case to muffle the shutter noise on Poynter Online (thanks to PDN Pulse for the link) but despite showing some great ingenuity I think it makes the president look rather odd and doesn’t really convey a great deal in the way of atmosphere. But of course I’m not from the USA.

Of course at a huge events like this, only one camera got that front row space and all credit to Kennedy for coming up with the idea and getting permission. But another picture, which doesn’t include the president, seemed to me to to say far more about the occasion and to show you don’t need special facilities to photograph major events. Published on the Heading East blog, it’s an image by New York freelance Rachel Feierman (her work is distributed by Sipa Press) and you can see more of her impressive work on Politics 08 and other projects on her web site.

Hoppé Mad

I have a great deal of interest in the photography of E O Hoppé – and indeed included him in my list of two hundred or so ‘Notable Photographers‘ that I put on line in 2000. I have a particular interest in him as I share his fascination with London, and like him have spent many years photographing it.

But today I got an email quoting an article from Luminous Lint which suggests he is a recently rediscovered early Photo Modernist and goes on to quote photography curator Phillip Prodger of the Peabody Essex Museum as comparing his pictures to those of Steichen, Stieglitz, and Weston. Frankly this is utter nonsense, not least because it’s hard to rediscover someone who was never lost – as my listing on a major photography site visited by millions demonstrated.

According to The Recession or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Photographs! Bruce Silverstein, one of my favourite photo dealers, whose New York gallery represents Hoppé, (and a show of his work including ‘Early London Photographs’ opens at the 24th Street Silverstein Gallery in February 2009) is quoted as saying “it is becoming increasingly clear that E.O. Hoppé played a major role in the evolution of Modernist photography both in Europe, having influenced the industrial images of Albert Renger-Patsch and Werner Mantz, and as well in the United States, where his images predate equivalent but better known works by Charles Sheeler, Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott.” I’m sorry Bruce, but I can’t take this seriously.

Quite a Hoppé industry is certainly developing, with a number of books forthcoming. Hoppé too was very industrious in his lifetime, and I have at various of his books scattered around the house, mainly for their topographic interest, including his ‘The Image of London‘ published by Chatto and Windus in their ‘Life and Art in Photograph‘ series in 1935, which was probably the closest he came to producing an ‘art’ book. Does it show a ground-breaking photographer? In no way, though the negative image on the dust jacket is interesting, considerably more so than the same image printed conventionally as Plate 1 of the book. Everything else about it’s 100 photographs is competent but rather ordinary, even pedestrian and at times hopelssly corny.

Hoppé, born in Munich in 1878, studied photography but became a banker and this brought him to London in 1900. Here he became a leading pictorial photographer, one of the founders of the London Salon – and the work which he was taking in the 1920s was still very much in that tradition – as can be seen in a number of the works from around 1926 on the Silverstein Gallery site, for example Middletown in the Snow. It could indeed be compared with pictures by Stieglitz – but those he took in the 1890s, and can hardly be seen as innovative. And somehow Stieglitz clearly has the edge – you feel the weather and the cold and the atmosphere rather than just a pretty picture.

Like many others, Hoppé was influenced by changes that were taking place particularly on the continent of Europe after the First World War, and in particular at the Bauhaus in Weimar from 1919-25, as well as the work of many other photographers who were beginning to exploit the possibilities of smaller and more flexible cameras. I don’t know what evidence there is to say that his work influenced people such as Renger-Patsch, but so far as I am aware – and on the evidence of the work I’ve seen – he was a follower of wider trends rather than in any sense an initiator. But his widely published work – in books such as ‘The Image of London‘ certainly did help to set norms, though I think others did it rather better.

It is interesting that both Hoppé and Sheeler photographed the Ford plant in 1926/7, and you can compare the their images – Hoppé and Sheeler. Then go back and look at a similar subject photographed four years earlier by Edward Weston, Armco Steel, 1922.
If you can’t see the difference, then you certainly shouldn’t be writing about photography.

Of course the article isn’t really about photography but about the market and market values. Hoppé’s work – or at least his more interesting images, such as those on show at Silverstein – may well be a very good investment, and like most non-USAmerican photographers is undervalued, but don’t let’s get the real value of his work out of proportion.

Inez Baturo – Polish Landscapes

The current exhibition at the Paris-based on-line Dmochowski Gallery features the work of a good friend of mine from Bielsko-Biala, Poland, Inez Baturo.

A week or so ago I wrote something about the ugliness of snow on trees and now have to eat my words seeing the magic which this gives to some of Inez’s pictures. As gallery owner Piotr Dmochowski writes, these are “misty, wistful and pensive visions” and have a powerful poetry, full of “nostalgia, memories and sad reflection.” I think there is something deeply Polish in them – as Polish as the music of Chopin.

But go and look at them on the web site – and there are some good large versions of the images on show. The pictures date from 1991 – 2008, with 2007 seeming to be a particularly productive year.

Dmochowski was born in Poland and works as a barrister and professor of law in Paris, but has devoted much of his time to promoting the work of Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński (1929-2005) with a gallery at rue Quincampoix in the centre of Paris from 1989-95. Work from the Dmochowski collection is now on show as the Beksinski Museum in Częstochowa, Poland, and the gallery is now an on-line one, showing mainly paintings.

Earlier shows of photography on the Dmochowski gallery have included the surreal recreations of dreams by Misha Gordin, who I was pleased to spend some time with on my last visit to Bialsko-Biala where we were both guests of the FotoArt Festival organised by Inez Baturo.

Other photographic shows at Dmochowski have included the controversial ‘To die so as to leave the hell’ with work by James Nachtwey, Don McCullin, Sebastião Salgado, Raymond Depardon, Joël-Peter Witkin, Dieter Appelt and Elizabeth Prouvost as well as of Beksiński’s own photographs, which include some powerful closely cropped heads using his family and friends as models.

Inez and her husband Andrzej Baturo are both photographers and run a gallery in Bielsko-Biala and publish photographic books. They are the co-founders of the Foundation Centre of Photography and the Programme and General Directors of the FotoArtFestival of international photography held in Bielsko-Biala. I met them both when I was invited to show work at the first festival in 2005, and again when I returned to speak at the second in 2007.

© 2007 Peter Marshall
Inez introduces a speaker at the FotoArtFestival, 2007

Inez listens to one of the talks

Sarah Moon and Inez at FotoArtFestival 2007

So, my congratulations and warm hugs to Inez!

Suit for Prince

It’s interesting to read, thanks to Cityfile that French photographer Patrick Cariou has filed a suit against Richard Prince and his gallery for using his photographs published in the 2000 book Yes Rasta in a series of paintings that were recently on show at Gagosian New York. Not least because the precendents suggest that Cariou is probably unlikely to win, despite a certain obvious justice in his case. Prince’s work clearly could not exist without his creative input, and to suggest otherwise seems to me to deny the creative input of Cariou’s work.

I rather suspect that if Prince’s work had been shown in Paris, the result of a case in the French courts would be rather different. I don’t have any time for the appropriation of photographs – but then I’m a photographer. I’d be happy if people wanted to use my work, so long as they were prepared both to acknowledge their indebtedness explicitly in both words and cash.

Odd moments

It takes me roughly 45 to 90 minutes to get to most places in London from home, with a train journey into Waterloo and then on by bus or tube. Over the years I’ve become pretty good at working out routes using public transport, though it can be tricky when engineering works sometimes close down half the tube at weekends, or events on the street (often those I’m photographing) disrupt bus services. The Transport for London Journey Planner is often helpful as a starting point,but can’t be relied on to suggest best routes or give an accurate estimate of journey times.

But often I want to photograph several events at different places, and these are seldom arranged at particularly convenient times. Even I can’t be in two places at one time! So it means prioritising, and perhaps leaving one event before it finishes and arriving at another late – or not at all. Other days I’ll have finished one thing and be waiting perhaps an hour or two for a second event to photograph, so what do I do in these odd moments.

Well, if there are other photographers I know about, we often go to a pub – or less often to a cafe, which can be very pleasant. But I’ve never liked sitting on my own in such places. Sometimes I’ll fit in some other photography, perhaps visiting an interesting or changing area.

I often used to try some street photography, but my current Nikon digital is rather large and clunky for this, and I’ve yet to find a good digital alternative for the Leica or Minolta CLE (no, the M8 doesn’t hack it.) Of course I could keep on shooting film, but the hundred or so rolls I’ve already go waiting for processing puts me off it. So for the moment I’ve given that up, though in good light there are compact digitals that are worth considering.

So what I often do if I’m on my own is visit galleries. Of course there are some photography shows, but I also like to visit art galleries – such as the Tate, Tate Modern, the National Gallery etc, but also sometimes the commercial galleries. It helps to be a member of The Art Fund because this gets me free into some places and shows where I’d otherwise have to pay – and if I’ve only got a short time it seems hardly worth it, though fortunately most of London’s major galleries are free.

So, having taken enough pictures of the Ashura procession in rather poor light (not helped by getting the exposure wrong by mistake on some of them – my usual trouble with pressing things when I don’t mean to) I turned into Hyde Park and started by taking some pictures of one of my many favourite places in London, the Italian garden.

Then I walked on in the direction of the Serpentine Gallery, walking past sign after sign pinting me towards the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain.

Princess Di never appealed to me and I kept away from all the popular outpouring following her death, and although I’d heard and read about the fountain I hadn’t bothered to go and see it, but since I wasn’t short of time I made the detour today.

Although many people had said some fairly rude things about the memorial when it was opened, I actually rather liked it. Perhaps the failing light on a dull cold day improves it, but I liked the feeling of a mountain stream when seen close too, and the overall view too was a pleasant surprise.

The show currently at the Serpentine Gallery, Indian Highway, (until 22 Feb) was also worth a visit, and for once some of the video, particularly Amar Kanwar’s eight-screen immersive video installation, The Lightning Testimonies, was really worth watching. But most of the work was enjoyable, if some of it perhaps a little too predictable, and I found the couple of photographic pieces of limited interest.

From there a short walk and a bus took me to Jubilee Place and the Michael Hoppen Gallery, which boasted a show, Secret City, by Robert Doisneau and Jason Langer (ending 20 Jan) along with another by Nobuyoshi Araki (ending 10 Jan.) Doisneau is one of my favourite photographers (I have quite a few) but there were only a couple of images by him I would have considered buying were I a rich man, and I’ve seen better prints of both. Langer’s work just seemed rather out of place in the company.

The Araki show I also found disappointing. Few of his ‘erotic’ images rise above the interest of dead meat and pairing them with giantly enlarged flowers does nothing to help. There has long been a market for ‘respectable’ pornography to decorate bourgeois walls but Fragonard did it rather better.

As often happens to me, by now I was running a little late and had to dash for the tube at South Kensington to take me up to my next event, the daily protest opposite the Israeli Embassy since the attack on Gaza began.

Clare Kendall and John D McHugh

Yesterday’s Photo Forum event in central London was well worth attending, with excellent presentations by both Clare Kendall and John D McHugh. I’ve only managed to get to four of the ten monthly sessions so far, and this was the best yet of those I’ve made, although I certainly did enjoy last month’s Christmas party.

You can see some of Kendall’s pictures from the Arctic tip of Canada along with other work on her Photoshelter site, and also read an article by her in The Ecologist. The area and Inuit people she shows are really experiencing the sharp end of global warming, with melting ice making travel difficult, igloos collapsing and more, and work like hers really brings it home to us.

Even though Kendall’s pictures show the area to be one of great natural beauty, I find it hard to understand why people choose to live there, and how they – and photographers – survive. London has been more than cold enough for me these last few days.

One point of minor technical interest was that she took two Nikon digital cameras, a ‘pro’ D2X and the ‘amateur’ D100, and it was the latter model that stood up to the extreme conditions when the pro camera came rapidly to a halt.

John D McHugh’s very impressive work from Afghanistan was I think made using a pair of Canon EOS 5D cameras, again not their truly professional model, although rather better suited in most respects to this kind of work. John first went to Afghanistan in 2006, financing himselg as a freelance for AFP (Agence France-Press.)

On returning to the UK he got a staff job covering routine press calls in London, but couldn’t stomach it. He resigned and went back to Afghanistan as a freelance, having been able to persuade the American forces to give him a “fighting season” embed. Five weeks into that, in May 2007, his unit was caught in an ambush in which eighteen Afghan and seven US soldiers were killed and four Afghan soliders, seven US soldiers and one Irish photographer were wounded.

McHugh, close to death, was from the start determined to overcome his serious injuries and get back to Afghanistan to continue his work, and amazingly he managed to return by November 2007.

In 2008 he returned there once more, this time working for The Guardian, who used his still pictures and video, as well as running some of his diary entries, which he had previously been posting on a personal blog.

McHugh’s pictures – all shown in black and white although many were used as colour images by The Guardian – are both dramatic and down to earth, showing very much the war as experienced by the soldiers whose lives he is sharing in the field. They show the tedium of waiting for things to happen as well as the usually organised chaos when things do – many as he says shot from a low angle for very practical kinetic reasons. His is coverage that is the next best thing to being there, but thankfully without us having to be there.

McHugh also made some interesting comments on being embedded, and how although he found a few of the rules a problem he was sometimes able to “wiggle” around these. As his work shows, the Americans gave him a tremendous degree of freedom, although apparently working with British forces is orders of magnitude more restrictive.

We also got a very good impression from his talk how limited the UK media reporting of Afghanistan is, and how many of those who are interviewed on TV and radio are either ill-informed or deliberately misleading. McHugh was also quite scathing of some of the military top-brass and the lack of proper coordination particularly when units are replaced that leads to a lack of a coherent approach by the US in the country. It was a talk and show that gave a real insight into the country which he so evidently is in love with.

McHugh’s work from Afghanistan in 2007 was recognised last year by the award in May 2008 of the inaugural 2007 Frontline Club Award.

Ballen on Lensculture

I was pleased to meet Roger Ballen when I was in Paris in November but didn’t have a lot to say to him, not least because I was busy drinking champagne and taking pictures. But fortunately my host at that party, Jim Caspar of Lensculture, did manage to sit down with him one morning in a Paris cafe and talk to him seriously about his work.

The edited 18-minute audio interview makes interesting listening. Jim sums it up well in his introduction when he calls Ballen’s photographs “both beautiful and profoundly disturbing“, and there is a slide show of 25 recent images you can watch while listening to it.

Ballen somehow seems to inhabit a parallel universe to the rest of us, one that only occasionally intersects with life as we – or at least I – know it. His is an intriguing and unsettling view, with flash deliberately used to create a kind of dislocation. But you can hear him talk about how he sees it and why in this interview.

You can see more of Ballen’s work on his own web site.

Facing New York – Online Photographer

Way back in 1992 I got Bruce Gilden‘s ‘Facing New York‘ to review. It was filled with powerful street images, taken close, often using flash. I can’t recall what I then wrote, but although I found the pictures amazing, they also appalled me, seeming at least in some cases to be going far beyond a line that respected the dignity of the subjects.

I’ve often taken pictures of people which have accidentally caught them looking idiotic, perhaps because of a particular gesture or momentary expression. I have a simple rule which is to try and think what I would feel if I saw a picture of me looking like that, and if I would be hurt.

It’s a rule I apply whether I’m taking pictures with actual or implied permission – for example of politicians speaking at public events – or photographing without the permission of those in the picture. Often there are good and entirely justifiable reasons to take pictures of people without permission, and I certainly don’t think that we have rights over our appearance, but I’ve always felt that as a photographer I have a responsibility to those whose pictures I take not to misrepresent them.

Perhaps its a difference in culture. Another New Yorker (Gilden actually comes from Brooklyn) often tells me that as a photographer I’m too nice, too soft, which is one of several reasons why my pictures aren’t as good as they should be!

I thought again about Gilden on reading The Online Photographer, which a few days ago carried a link to a video of him working on the streets of New York. It’s interesting to see the reactions of some of those that he photographs, which are fairly varied, with some clearly thinking it a great joke, while others look frightened or aggreived by the photographer’s actions.

The video also includes some of his stronger images from ‘Facing New York‘ and you can see more of his work on his Magnum pages. As is pointed out on the site, images on Magnum are published rather small and with intrusive visible watermarks that often make images almost impossible to view.

The discussion continues on The Online Photographer, which published a clearer version of one of his images on 1 Jan. A later related post there is entitled When A**holes Do Good Work.