Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

McCullin Interview

I think that the interview between John Tusa and Don McCullin was first broadcast on Radio 3 in August 2002, so I’m not sure why it should surface again as a news item on Photo District News last week – or why they should write “John Tusa recently interviewed McCullin about his work, his anger, the public nature of grief and more.”

That said, it’s worth listening to – or reading the transcript – again, as McCullin has a few things to say and talks very honestly about his feelings and how vital they are to his photography.

There are several other interviews with McCullin on the web, including one in 1987 with photographer Frank Horvat, which has the advantage of including some of his pictures, and another from 1995 on Zeugma.

His pictures are not particularly well shown on line, though you can see a miserly few at the V&A and a small and relatively recent set from Darfur where he went for Oxfam on the BBC, first shown in 2007 – and there is also a short video on which he talks about them. Otherwise, a Google Image search is perhaps the best way to see more of his work online.

McCullin talks to Tusa about his liking to travel light: “I’m not like Father Christmas, from Dixons, standing there, covered from head to foot in equipment. “

Press Photography 2008

The results of the UK 2008 Press Photographers Year were announced on June 6, rather early when for the rest of us 2008 still has 7 months to run. Looking at the chosen pictures for the it is hard to reconcile this fine selection of work with the kind of visually illiterate trash that fills most of the papers that I pick up. Based on them, something over 90% of the pictures should really be of models falling out of their dresses or TV actresses looking even more boring than they do on the box.

The failure of photography in most of our press isn’t a failure of photographers, but a failure of editors – and often a failure to be willing to pay for better pictures when the crap comes cheap or even free. Scratch almost any freelance and you will find stories of editors and journalists saying how great the work is, then not hearing anything when you mention money, and finding that the publication has used a cheap image from an agency contract or even sent in free by a reader.

There is plenty of good photography here, and quite a few photographers I know (as well as those I don’t) are to be congratulated for getting their pictures among the 146 here, whether or not as winners of the 13 awards.

At risk of upsetting those I know who I don’t mention, there are two photographers here whose work I find outstanding. One is the Guardian’s Sean Smith, who gets the first prize for multimedia, and the other is Brian David Stevens, (also see his web site) who has some intriguing black and white work, including some of the best portraits in the selection and some interesting reflections that remind me slightly of the best work of Trent Parke, but are all his own.

This year a decision was made to enlarge the Sports photography sections, and the result is disappointing. There are a few fine sports pictures here, but rather too much that is simply very well done but perhaps rather uninspired. Some of my first published work was sports photography, but I soon saw the error of my ways. It is an area that tends to reward the retaking of similar images and to reject or sideline creativity – although there have been some fine exceptions over the years – and I can think of some fine work in World Press Photo.

OjodePez 13

Should you ever need to know the Spanish for ‘Fish Eye lens‘ it is ‘objetivo ojo de pez‘, which explains the name of the Madrid-based OjodePez magazine (link is to the English version) which recently invited Aaron Schuman, the Editor of the on-line SeeSaw Magazine to guest edit Issue #13, and you can now see work from it on line (and perhaps be amused by its little Capa falling soldier logo.)*

OjodePez13

Schuman’s issue is ‘This Land Was Made for You and Me‘, and his land is of course America, as seen by Ryan McGinley, Alec Soth, Jessica Ingram, Richard Mosse, Stephen Shore, Colby Katz, Kalpesh Lathigra, Todd Hido and Tim Davis.

It isn’t actually the work by the best known and most fashionable of these that appeals to me most, although all of the stories have their interest. I’ve seen this work by McGinley too often before; perhaps this isn’t Alec Soth at his best (though there is one image I like very much,) and certainly Stephen Shore‘s work here will not enhance his reputation.

But anyone with an interest in documentary photography will find much to attract them, and I particularly liked the work of Kalpesh Lathigra on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and Tim Davis‘s ‘Retail’, night images of simple houses in small-town America, their windows reflecting the garish retail neon of petrol stations and fast food outlets.

Also on the site are two videos related to the issue, with a 10 minute feature ‘Two Way Street’, shot for public broadcasting in California, in which Todd Hido looks at how he takes his pictures of models in carefully chosen hotel rooms and outdoor scenes, mainly at night, as well as editing them for a book. It is a video I found of considerably greater interest than the on-line page spreads. A shorter piece looks at ‘Hunting Rabbits‘ by Colby Catz, and there are other videos related to earlier issues – work from which can also be seen as well as other material on the site.

Although you can see a good selection of images on line, the text is reproduced too small to read easily, and you will need to buy the print edition for that and the essays by Geoff Dyer, Joerg Colberg, Michael Famighetti, Robert Fitterman and Aaron Schuman. Someat least of these writers appear prolifically on the Internet (who doesn’t these days) so you will have a good idea what to expect. There appears to be no UK distributor for OjodePez, though it is available in USA, Switzerland, Germany and Australia as well as Spain, but it may be available through some gallery shops etc.

Aaron Schuman‘s own Seesaw is one of the best of on-line magazines, and it’s a pleasure to view and mention again the Winter 2008 issue, including work by Reiner Riedler who I met at ‘Rhubarb’ last year, and others including ‘Lot 116′ an intriguing set of black and white images found in Brighton (UK), 2007 by Schuman.

* Note
The interface for OjodePez uses a lot of java, which on my machine it isn’t quite fast enough, and certainly not always intuitive. At first I got the impression that there was very little content on line and thought that perhaps I needed to subscribe to see more, but after a while I realised how it works. Regular users of the site – and I suspect the site designer – will doubtless regard it as a model of elegant and clear interface design.

Click on the picture to go to the first page of the story, then page icons in green at top right (though the may go on to the next line at the left) show the available pages – click the second of these to go to the next and so on.

Yard Sale Weegees

I’ve found the story from the New York Times about the lucky find of 210 vintage prints by Weegee, along with a number of letters written by him mentioned in several places. (Some features on the NYT require you to register.)

Two women from Indiana were driving back from a camping holiday when they stopped at a ‘yard sale’ outside a house in Kentucky, and a zebra-striped trunk caught the interest of one of them, so she bought it. Inside she found some old clothes, letters and photographs and almost threw the whole lot away.

Something made her feel they might have some value and instead she took the letters and photos to a dealer in Indianapolis, and the Museum of Art there now has the new items in their collection.

Apparently there are no unknown images among the prints, and the letters are not exactly enthralling, but it is still quite a find to pick up as junk when someone clears out their attic. They are thought to have belonged to Weegee’s companion in his later years, Wilma Wilcox, who died 25 years after him in 1993, but how they got to Kentucky has not been determined.

Weegee prints typically sell for around £5000 each, so that’s quite a trunkload, even if many of the images are from his later and hopefully less collectable work when he had decided he was an ‘artist’ rather than a photographer.

Usher Fellig was born in Gallicia, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, later (and previously) Poland and now in the Ukraine in 1893, but came with his family to New York’s largely Jewish Lower East Side when he was ten – and they changed his first name to Arthur to avoid anti-semitism. By the time he was 14 was supporting his family, taking on a number of badly paid jobs on the streets of New York, including working as an assistant to a street photographer, who taught him his trade.

In 1923 he got a job in the darkroom of Acme New Services, where he stayed for 12 years, although he apparently he occasionally got to take pictures when had to dep for photographers who were to drunk to work or otherwise unable to make their shift.

In1935 he left, and tried to find work as a freelance photographer. (Although in the radio interview – see below – he talks about sleeping on a park bench, things were not quite that tough and he had a small one room flat, but the bench was probably more comfortable on hot summer nights.)

For a couple of years he spent a lot of time hanging around next to the teletype desk at police headquarters, waiting for news of crimes to come in that he could rush out and cover. They should have thrown him out for not having a press card, but he managed without, and once he got a few pictures printed in the papers he managed to get one.

It was perhaps because the police got fed up with this guy hanging around that they allowed him to fit a police radio into the boot of a car – which was otherwise illegal. Although Weegee had undoubtedly developed a sixth sense for when and where he could find a picture on the street, it was this radio rather than a ‘ouiji’ board that enabled him to get to crime scenes before the pack.

The car also carried a portable darkroom a in the boot so he could develop his film and make contact prints, and a portable typewriter for captions and text – a full press kit which meant he could file almost as fast as today’s digital photographers.

He became known to everyone by the nickname ‘Ouiji (for what these days we more often call it a Ouija board) but then styled himself ‘The Famous Weegee‘ as people had trouble with the spelling. From 1940-44 he was on a retainer to the New York left-wing daily PM (for Picture Magazine, a loss-making newspaper which had no advertising on principle, but relied on support from an eccentric millionaire Marshall Field III, grandson of the founder of the famous Chicago department store.) It was during these years that he produced his most memorable work from the streets of New York.

He became well known, with a show at the Photo League in 1941 followed by one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1945. Getting assignments for Vogue in 1946 was probably the beginning of the end so far as his serious photography was concerned. He became convinced not just that he was a great artist, but that in order to be one he had to stop taking the kind of pictures that had made him one.

His book Naked City, which came out in 1945 (and is still in print) made him even more famous, and was the inspiration for the film of the same name (they purchased the title from him), a film noir classic shot on the streets of New York in 1948, which later spawned a TV series. All of human life is certainly there.

Weegee himself became the model for a photographer in the films of the period, complete with cigar and “4×5 Speed Graphic with a Kodak Ektar lens in a Supermatic shutter, all American made. I always use a flash bulb for my pictures, which are mostly taken at night. I work alone and don’t use extension lights, tripods, or exposure meters. I get snappy results from using Number 3 enlarging paper. ” As well as acting as a technical advisor in Hollywood he also had a number of small parts in films

Recommended Web Sites

ICP – Weegee’s World
http://museum.icp.org/museum/collections/special/weegee/weegee.html

Amber Online – Weegee Collection
http://www.amber-online.com/exhibitions/weegee-collection

Sound Portraits – Radio Interview from 1945
http://www.soundportraits.org/on-air/weegee/

Cornell Capa, 1918-2008

Cornell Capa, one of the last remaining of the classic generation of photojournalists who came out of Europe in the 1930s died in New York last Friday, May 23, 2008, aged 90.

Cornell was perhaps always overshadowed by his more flamboyant brother Andre, who re-invented himself in Paris in the mid 1930s as the ‘famous American photographer Robert Capa‘. When Cornell joined his brother in Paris in 1936, hoping to study medicine, he started working as a printer for Robert, and also for two of his brother’s friends, Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Seymour (Chim).

In 1937 Cornell moved to New York, and Robert helped him find a job in the darkroom of the Pix agency, and, in the following year, in the darkroom at Life magazine. He also had started taking pictures, and his first picture story was published in Picture Post in 1938. During the war he worked for the USAF in photographic intelligence and in 1946 joined Life as a junior photographer.

Cornell Capa joined Magnum in 1954, shortly after his elder brother was killed in Vietnam (another early Magnum member, Werner Bischof died on more or less the same day) remaining a member until his death and serving as president for four years.

After his brother’s died, Cornell was determined to keep the memory of his work alive and to continue to promote the kind of photography he had stood for, which valued human feelings and was dedicated to improving the human situation. He set up the International Fund for Concerned Photography, Inc.

The book and exhibition ‘The Concerned Photographer‘ which he edited in 1968 for the fund included work by Robert Capa and Werner Bischof, as well as Chim, Andre Kertesz, Leonard Freed, as well as by Dan Weiner who had been killed in a plane crash in 1959.

In 1974, Cornell foiunded the International Center of Photography in New York as a permanent home for the International Fund for Concerned Photography.

You can hear the voice of Cornell Capa in a short interview on NPR with Jacki Lyden, recorded in 1994. Much of his contribution to the interview is transcribed on the web page, but there is just a little extra about hearing it in his own voice.

You can also find an obituary in the New York Times and on the Magnum blog.

Because of the fame of his brother, it’s perhaps easy to overlook the fact that Cornell was himself a very fine photographer. While Robert Capa was certainly one of the best war photographers of his era, with iconic images such as that of the falling soldier from the Spanish Civil War and his grainy and distressed work on the beach on D-Day, a living testimony to his dictum “if you pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough“, his younger sibling had a true gift for finding a different way to view things, something that stood out from the obvious.

Changing Spaces at Photofusion

I usually like going to exhibition openings at Photofusion, though more often it’s the people I meet there that make it interesting than the pictures on the wall. Photofusion is very much a photographers gallery and most of the people at openings have a real interest in the medium. Its also a much more friendly place that most galleries, one where you can talk to strangers and meet new people, as well as bumping into old friends and acquaintances.

If anyone doesn’t know, Photofusion is London’s largest independent photography resource centre with a full range of facilities and services for pros, amateurs and students. Members can work in a well-equipped digital suite (or for the retro, darkrooms) hire a studio attend courses and events at reasonable rates, and Photofusion’s picture agency represents the work of many photographers whose work deals with social and environmental issues – including some of my own.

It’s also very handily placed in Brixton, 2 minutes walk from both the Victoria line tube and Overground station. When I did a project on people on buses Brixton was one of my favourite places to work, because there were just so many buses and people. I dropped in to Photofusion last night on my way back from photographing in the centre of London, a fifteen minute journey by tube.

The current exhibition, Changing Spaces, (until 21 June, 2008) has work by five photographers, Laura Braun, Mandy Lee Jandrell, Isidro Ramirez, Simon Rowe, Gregor Stephan and is a part of the Urban Encounters programme, a collaboration between Photofusion and the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths (part of the University of London, based at New Cross.) Curated by Paul Halliday and Catherine Williams, this also includes a conference, talks and workshops.

The show aimed to present different approaches by photographers to urban spaces, and is one of the more interesting currently on view in London, although I find some of the writing about it more than opaque. Here’s a short chunk:

Laura Braun’s move towards sub-urbanisation in the mid 1900s, show social and public spaces devoid of the photographs of Downtown Los Angeles, the once glamourous heart of the city, side-lined and in decline since the pressure of people however with the traces of their passing intact.

This certainly isn’t English as we know it, and must surely be the output of some deranged computer programme that strings together random phrases in an attempt to demonstrate artificial intelligence. But doubtless it will be clear to speakers of Acadamese.

Two projects of the five appealed particularly strongly. One was by Isidro Ramirez who gained a BA on the Editorial Photography course at the University of Brighton in 1998 and an MA in Photography and Urban Cultures at Goldsmiths in 2006. His pictures in the project What We Don’t See are of spaces in which blind and visually impaired people live and work, and show a fine sense of both space and light. I think they reveal considerably more about how the photographer sees than about how those who inhabit the spaces perceive them. Keeping spaces relatively open and uncluttered is of course essential when vision is limited, as we found when my late father-in-law used to stay in our untidy home.

Simon Rowe worked with Francesca Sanlorenzo and Ben Gidley of Goldsmiths on the 2004 Pepys Portrait Project. His work on show is “part of a larger project about the Pepys estate, present a portrait of a South East London housing estate as it moves into a new era. The project reflects a sense of the multiplicity of human and social relationships against a background of social change and regeneration.” Both this text and his pictures are models of clarity and show a real feeling for the people and place.

Some of the people in Simon Rowe’s pictures were at Photofusion for the opening

The Pepys estate in Deptford was built by the GLC, (Chief Architect Ted Hollamby,) in the 1960s on a prime 45 acre site next to the Thames to provide over 1,300 homes. Opened by Lord Mountbatten of Burma in July 1966, it was lauded at the time as a landmark in social housing, and gained a Civic Trust award.

Pepys Estate (C) Peter Marshall
Pepys Estate, 1982 (C) Peter Marshall.

By the 1980s, when the estate was handed over to Lewisham Council, the buildings had deteriorated through poor upkeep and the estate had become known for crime, vandalism and drugs. Problems were confounded by those of language, with many asylum seekers being housed there.

Regeneration started in the early 1990s, mainly refurbishing existing buildings, but came to a halt in 1998, with six blocks on the prime riverside sites not completed. Lewisham engaged in complex and highly doubtful moves, against considerable opposition from Pepys tenants, finally resulting in Aragon tower being refurbished as a private block by Berkley Homes (handy yuppy flats for over-paid workers at Canary Wharf) and the five low rise blocks being replaced by 250 new homes by Hyde Housing Association.

Robert Rauschenberg: Photographs

Suffering today from the annual and unwelcome reminder of ageing (though the presents are nice) I got to thinking about Robert Rauschenberg, who died two days ago on May 12, aged 82.

As the New York Times obit by Michael Kimmelman says

“A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.”

Although I have a book of his photographs (Robert Rauschenberg Photographs, Thames & Hudson, 1981, ISBN 0 500 54075 6) it seems to me that photography is the one medium about which this isn’t true, although of course he made considerable use of photographs in various mixed media works, both using his own pictures and solvent transfer prints from magazine images.

In the book Rauschenberg comments that he first took up photography as a young man, it was a “social shield“, covering up the perosnal conflict he felt “between curiousity and shyness“. In the interview published in the book with Alain Sayag, Rauschenberg says that while studying with Josef Albers (who he elsewhere said “was my best teacher, and I was his worst student“) at Black Mountain College in 1949 he became aware that he had to make a choice “I was serious enough or dedicated enough to know that I could not have at that point two primary professions“. Since at that point his photographic project “was to photograph the entire U.S.A., inch by inch” it’s perhaps good that he chose painting (later, in 1980-1, in his project ‘In + Out City Limits’, he did try to photograph at least parts of the country.)

Had Rauschenberg been as excited by other teachers at Black Mountain – perhaps Aaron Siskind or Harry Callahan, the history of art and photography would have been different.

Rauschenberg’s early photography was good enough for Edward Steichen to buy two of his prints – one a portrait of his friend Cy Twombly – for MoMA‘s photography collection – his first sale to a public collection.

The first group of pictures in the book are from the period when he had given up photography, and are perhaps the strongest, uncropped square format images with a strongly emotional content, although the often square-on approach to the subject and sensitivity to lighting carry suggestions of Walker Evans. His later work when he returned to photography (I think, from the evidence of the images with a 35mm SLR) in 1979-80 are more related to formal concerns and less personal, although many are still very interesting, concentrating largely on urban details. Many of them were from the project In + Out City Limits (1980-81) mentioned above, which was followed by other photographic projects, including Photems (1981/1991), and Chinese Summerhall (1982-83.)

Rauschenberg comments that for him photography is “a kind of achaeology in time only, forcing one to see whatever the light of the darkness touches and care” and goes on to state: “Photography is the most direct communication in non-violent contacts.”

Sayag asks him why he never crops, and gets this response:

Photography is like diamond cutting. If you miss you miss… You wait until life is in the frame, then you have the permission to click. I like the adventure of waiting until the whole frame is full.”

Rauschenberg was certainly a great artist, and had he devoted himself to the medium could also have become a great photographer.

Unfortunately very little of his photographic work seems to be available to view on the web.

Here is an example Untitled, ca 1952 though it is not in my opinion one of his more interesting images. There are also one or two fairly poor reproductions from In + Out City Limits: Baltimore, Los Angeles and a rather better exhibition poster for Los Angeles.

Who needs Oscars?

I have to admit to a certain feeling of ennui about the increasing number of awards for photography, especially so those that attempt to introduce something of the ridiculous commercial razzmatazz of the Oscars.

So I didn’t have very high hopes when I heard about the Sony World Photography Awards, especially when I learn they were to be held in Cannes. And although the Honorary Board members did include photographers Bruce Davidson, Elliot Erwitt, Martine Franck, Susan Mieselas and Martin Parr of Magnum, along with Nan Goldin, Mary-Ellen Mark, Rankin and Tom Stoddart. There are also some very well-known names in the other Academy members, along with a number of others whose photographic credentials are perhaps less credible. It was also a team lacking in international terms; far too many are from the UK and US, with only two from Asia, one from Africa and none from South America.

This week’s British Journal of Photography (some stories need a subscription to read online) has two interesting features on photographic competitions. One is about the SWPA (not to be confused with the WPA, which for all of us with an interest in photography is the Works Progress Administration), written by Su Steward (BJP editor Simon Bainbridge was one of the Academy, so perhaps she had to be even more careful than usual in what she wrote.) She gives an interesting view of the event and some of the problems, as well as commenting on the judging and winners, although the article has its own teething problem with a wrongly captioned image.

I did find it surprising, that after quoting the comment made over a Cannes Film Festival lunch that apparently kick-started the SWPA, claiming that there wasn’t “an Oscars for Photography” she failed to mention the “Lucies,” set up for that very purpose in 2003, when Henri Cartier-Bresson received the first Lifetime Acheivement Award. On the Lucie Award web site the front page quotes for Douglas Kirkland “The Movie Industry has its Oscars and the Photography Community has its Lucies.”

The 2007 Lucie Awards were:
Elliot Erwitt – Lifetime Achievement,
Kenro Izu – Humanitarian Award,
Ralph Gibson – Achievement in Fine Art,
Eugene Richards – Achievement in Documentary,
Philip Jones Griffiths – Achievement in Photojournalism,
Lord Snowdon – Achievement in Portraiture,
Deborah Turbeville – Achievement in Fashion,
Howard Zieff – Achievement in Advertising,
Heinz Kluetmeier – Achievement in Sports,
and the 2008 Awards will go to Richard Misrach, Josef Koudelka, Sara Terry: The Aftermath Project, John Iacono, Susan Meiselas, Visa Pour L’Image Festival, Herman Leonard and Erwin Olaf – with more details on the web site May 15.
I never attended the Lucie awards ceremony – despite being invited – partly because it didn’t seem my kind of event, but it surely deserves a mention in this context.

You can find more about the WPA event on its website – or buy the BJP. I’d just like to mention one of the winners, Giacomo Brunelli, who showed me his superb work at Rhubarb Rhubarb in Birmingham last year and I wrote about it for this blog, with a couple of examples, as well as introducing him to Luminous Lint.

Also in the BJP is an article first published on-line at Foto8 by two of the judges at the World Press Photo contest, ‘Unconcerned but not indifferent‘ by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chapman. They lift the lid off the proceedings there and also question the role of photojournalism, particularly as “photographs rarely break the news these days” or at least those that do are largely the products of ‘citizen journalism’, the blurred impressions from the mobile phones of those caught up in the affair. (When I wrote a guide to the photographs of 9/11 – first on-line on 9/12 it received hundreds of thousands of hits – I commented on the immediacy of such coverage, highlighting some of the more powerful examples.)

The BJP adds a little to the debate by publishing a reply by this year’s World Press Photo of the Year winner, Tim Hetherington, who argues that photojournalism remains as relevant today as it ever was.

I’ve been meaning to write for some time about the re-launched “all-new” biannual Foto8 magazine. 180 pages of essential reading for anyone with the slightest interest in photojournalism. If you are reading this are aren’t already a subscriber you almost certainly should be.

Photography as Intimidation

In October 2004 I wrote the following on My London Diary while covering the European Creative Social Forum‘s London Underwater 2050 Tour of the G8 Climate Criminals:

worrying was the deliberate police use of photography as intimidation, with the police photographer going out of his way to confront demonstrators, aided by two other officers.

i worry because i think it is an attempt to attack civil liberties, but also because such behaviour makes all photographers suspect. i can only work effectively if i gain the trust and cooperation of those whose pictures i take. perhaps it helps that photography is one of the activities that also arouses suspicion and intimidation by the police.

as i walked away at the end of the demonstration, this team ran 50 yards down the road and caught up with me, one calling “excuse me, sir” and tapping on my shoulder. i turned to face him, and found myself looking into the lens of the police photographer, who took my picture as his colleague started to question me about who i was taking pictures for. it seemed clear and deliberate harassment, intended to intimidate a photographer acting entirely lawfully, photographing on the public highway.

This was the first time that I’d come across the police use of photography in this way, and I was worried by it. Now it’s commonplace and few demonstrations take place without police harassing demonstrators in this way, without Fitwatch confronting the police FIT teams, and without police harassing photographers.

Fitwatch confronts the police FIT team at City Hall, May 2008

Like Marc Vallée, I was also photographed by police at the City Hall demonstration last Friday, while I was engaged in the subversive act of sitting on a wall and reading a book. I ignored them, but he had a long stand-off, camera in front of his face before the event, and also found the police camera pointed at him from close range later in the event. You can see his pictures on his blog.

An e-mail today pointed out to me a Guardian article: Police should harass young thugs – Smith by political editor Patrick Wintour, in which he reports home secretary, Jacqui Smith as urging police forces across the country to mount “frame and shame” operations stopping and photographing “identified persistent offenders on problem estates.”

The police have already used such tactics to photograph 14 young poeple “known to the force” on estates in Basildon. Wintour quotes a police spokesman:

“The aim is to target a small group of persistent offenders by openly filming them, knocking on their doors, following them on the estate and repeatedly searching them, as well as warning them in no uncertain terms that local people have identified them as lawbreakers.”

Smith is quoted as saying she wants “to create an environment where there is nowhere to hide.” I immediately think of Orwell’s ‘1984‘, although current-day surveillance techniques have perhaps outstripped anything he envisaged. As the article says, there may be “human rights issues about such tough tactics, especially if those harassed by the police have not been found guilty of any criminal offence.”

Marc Vallée receives medical attention after being injured by police in Parliament Square, October 2006.

Photography is not yet a criminal offence, indeed I have a letter from an officer of the Metropolitan Police confirming my right to photograph in public, written after a rather unpleasant encounter when two police threatened to fit me up around ten years ago. So far as I’m aware, Marc’s only offence has been to allow himself to be assaulted and injured by police, for which he received an out of court settlement earlier in the year.

Infinity

The New York International Centre of Photography (ICP) has been an important institution in photography since it was founded in 1974 by Cornell Capa – or rather even before that, when in 1966 he set up the International Fund for Concerned Photography to keep alive the kind of humanitarian documentary epitomised by the work of his brother Robert Capa and colleagues Werner Bischof, David “Chim” Seymour and Dan Weiner, all of whom had recently been killed. The ICP was set up as a home for the Fund, but since then has continued to develop, particularly with its expansion into new facilities in 1999-2001, which, among other things doubled its teaching space.

2008 is the 24th year of its annual Infinity awards, already announced but presented at a Gala ceremony next week. The Lifetime Acheivement goes to Malian photographer Malick Sidibe (b1935), who opened his studion in Bamako in 1962. His portraits have become very well known over recent years, and he won the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in 2003.

Another much younger African photographer I’ve written about previously is
Mikhael Subotzky (b1981) who gains the Young Photographer award. He was one of the more interesting photographers in PDN’s 2008 top 30.

Taryn Simon (b1975), whose work from An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar was one of the more interesting shows at the London Photographers’ Gallery last year gets the Publication Award.

Canadian photofgrapher Edward Burtynsky , another photographer I’ve written about previously elsewhere, gets the Art award.

Bill Jay, winner of the Writing award, will be a familiar name to many in the UK, although he left here – having edited Album and more importantly Creative Camera in the time it emerged from Camera Owner. Ity was a crucial start, although the magazines best days were under the editorship of Peter Turner.

More British interest – though again from an expat – comes with Craig McDean (b 1964) who gets the Applied/Fashion/Advertising Photography award. Born in Middlewich, Cheshire, he got into photography with pictures of his rocker friends, moving down to London to work for i-D and The Face. He now lives and works in New York, and his fashion pictures have been in W, American, French, and Italian Vogue, Another Magazine, The New Yorker in campaigns for Armani, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Hugo Boss, and Estée Lauder and many more.

Its a second Infinity award for American photojournalist Anthony Suau (b 1956) who gained the the Infinity Young Photographer Award in 1986, two years after he won a Pulitzer in 1984 for his pictures of the famine in Ethopia. He went on to add the World Press Photo in 1987 and the Robert Capa Gold medal in 1995 for his work in Chechnya, and now the Infinity Photojournalism award.

Suau has been a contract photographer for TIME magazine since 1991, and his Beyond The Fall (1989-99) is a 10 year photography project portraying the transition of the Eastern block starting from the fall of the Berlin wall. Based in Europe for 20 years, he now lives and works in New York City.

Diane Keaton, who wins the ICP Trustees Award is deservedly best known as the star of many films including Annie Hall, for which she won an Academy Award as best actress. She has always been passionate about photography and has published three books of her picrtures, starting with Reservations, a collection of photos of hotel interiors, published in 1980 (about which some reviewers also had reservations), as well as editing or co-editing several collections of vintage photographs.