Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Miley who?

Thanks to David Schonauer at American Photo for an almost totally incomprehensible link to an amusing video clip about some photographs by that most mis-spelt of photographers, Annie Leibovitz . I’m pretty good at the typos myself, and names are one thing a spell-checker isn’t a lot of help on – even if I can be bothered to sue (sorry, I mean use) one. For Leibovitz, mine gives various helpful suggestions including Bovinely.

Once, having written and published several features and posts about Leibovitz, I received a very irate e-mail from a reader, complaining I had spelt the photographer’s name wrongly. I did a quick search on all the features and found that my correspondent was right – I had got it wrong on I think 2 out of 20 or 30 occasions I’d used it. But it gave me great satisfaction when I replied to be able to point out – of course very politely – that she had herself used an incorrect spelling in her complaint to me.

The non-story that prompted the clip is about some mildly ordinary images of a 15 year old I’ve never heard of, Miley Cyrus, who apparently appears in some American TV series called Hannah Montana, trying rather unsuccessfully in my adult male opinion to look sexy. The picture which show large areas of her back and right arm, neither in my opinion the most erotic of areas, was taken for and published by Vanity Fair. Personally I would have been inclined to put them on the spike, but I guess having committed huge expense to stylists, hairdressers, assistants and a celebrity photographer you really have to use the stuff.

Once the tabloids had held up their hands in inaccurate shock horror at these “topless” images, the Vanity Fair server was brought to its knees by America clicking to view. Hard to understand why, since around 50% of the population share similar similar characteristics, and many of them in rather greater abundance. It isn’t exactly hard to find nudity on the internet, and perhaps I’ve been lucky, but most of that I’ve come across has been less clichéd than this image. For a particularly po-faced commentary on it you can rely on Murdoch’s London The Times, with
Shame on you Annie Leibovitz, Carter and Miley Cyrus’s parents. His New York Post was at least accurate in describing the pictures as “near nude,” which, as Schonauer writes, “is a Rupert Murdoch way of saying ‘not nude’.”

A while back I wrote about Leibovitz’s portrait of Mrs Windsor (or Saxe-Coburg-Gotha as the family were once known, before a German connection became less fashionable) suggesting that the affair was perhaps a publicity stunt. This too, and I suppose by writing this I’m colluding in the whole sorry sordid business. But the clip by Stephen Colbert did make me laugh.

Steichen Portraits – National Portrait Gallery

Americans visiting London sometimes express surprise at coming across the National Portrait Gallery close to Trafalgar Square, so perhaps I should make it entirely clear that the show of portraits by Edward Steichen (1879-1973) is not at that venue, but in the National Portrait Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Fortunately some 21 of the portraits are in a web gallery, and a good reminder of why, as the site reminds us, in the 1920s Vanity Fair called him “the greatest of living portrait photographers” although this was perhaps coloured by the fact that he was being taken onto the staff as chief photographer for Condé Nast publications.

There are several very fine photographs among those on the web, including his well-known self-portrait as a young artist and his dramatic image of J P Morgan, both made in 1903, although perhaps the selection of later images misses some of his best. You can see a wider range of his work on Luminous Lint, or of course on Google Images, which includes one of my favourite portraits by him, of Greta Garbo, hands on head. It’s interesting to see it along with other images of the star on the Greta Garbo page (click on the images for larger versions.)

Here is something from my notes about the Morgan picture:

Use of the gum process, together with high contrast lighting led to a powerful effect. Morgan sits on a chair, facing the photographer squarely. Virtually all of his dark suit merges into the dark background, leaving his face with it’s piercing eyes staring intensely out. The lighting falling at an angle across his hand and on the arm of the chair produces a sunlight shape that can only be seen as a dagger in his grip, grasped and menacing. Also emerging from the dark background are Morgan’s white business collar and his watch chain – clearly symbolising the industrial process by which human labour was combined and synchronised to the clock.

The show ‘Edward Steichen : Lives in Photography‘ opens at the Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy today, until June 8, and then travels on for a showing in Madrid. A collaboration between the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography and the Swiss Musée de lElysée, curated by William Ewing and Todd Brandow, it has already been shown in Paris and Lausanne, but surprisingly there is no British showing planned for this major show with over 250 original prints and considerable supporting material.

Or rather it isn’t surprising, just a reflection of a continuing lack of real recognition for photography in the UK.

May Comes in April

Climate Change seems to be noticeably with us, with the hawthorn around the local footpath in blossom for a couple of weeks – and the generally early flowering of the May actually made the news headlines last week.

Gathering the may is an ancient British custom, when young men and women went off together into the woods in the early hours of the morning, ostensibly to cut branches of blossom, bringing these back to decorate the houses in the village to mark the coming of Spring. Doubtless there was much drinking of ale proffered in return for the gift of the boughs, and not a few maidens and masters nipping back to the woods, but Henry Peach Robinson made it a rather less raucous event in his carefully constructed rural idyll, ‘Bringing Home the May’, made in 1862.

Robinson was one of the first masters of the constructed image, although it was Oscar Rejlander who had led the way with his ‘Two Ways of Life‘ in 1857. This was a dramatic combination print made from 30 negatives, whereas Robinson’s ‘May’ made do with only nine (you can see them on-line in this pdf, and a thumbnail of the final print here.) While such feats are now made ridiculously simple with Photoshop, he had to do things the hard way, printing each negative in turn onto the same sheet of paper, although the fact that he would have exposed each negative for long enough to produce a visible image rather than developing the paper made registering the images rather simpler. Few photographers in those days developed paper, almost all images were made by printing out – and many photographers continued to work in this way well into the 20th century.

Robinson and other photographers worked by combination printing largely for technical reasons. The most common use of the technique was to add an interesting sky to a print. Until close to the end of the 19th century photographic emulsions were sensitive only to blue light, and areas of blue sky were far denser on the negative than they should be, resulting in very pale or ‘paper white’ skies. ‘Sky negatives’ were made by giving several stops less exposure than was needed for the rest of the image – and many photographers had their favourites with fine cloud formations and used them on a number of pictures.

Robinson often – it not always – sketched out in detail how he wanted his pictures to be before he made his exposures, and it was doubtless easier to set up smaller parts rather than an overall scene. The people in his pictures were actors, models or friends and it might well be possible to use one of them in different roles in the same image – as Rejlander had done in his picture. The actual country people didn’t suit the idyllic view he wanted to give of rural life, they were doubtless too coarse, dirty and often disfigured, although he did aim for a certain authenticity, noting that country girls could easily be persuaded to sell their clothes for a few shillings.

Another important reason for working from multiple negatives was quite simply size. Almost all nineteenth century photographs are contact prints. To make a print the size of his ‘Bringing Home the May‘, approximately 40 x15 inches, would have needed a camera that took a plate that size. It was easier to work with something rather smaller and build up the final result.

If you really want to know all there is to know about H P Robinson, you may like to download David Lawrence Coleman’s 2005 dissertation, ‘Pleasant Fictions: Henry Peach Robinsons Composition Photography‘ from the University of Texas, which includes some well-chosen illustrations at the end of its very informative text.

Looking at his pictures – which he regarded essentially as art – I find it hard not to think of advertising photography. But then I get the same feeling about most of the constructed photography that has appeared in galleries over the last 30 or more years, although the advertising sometimes seems less false.

Crowning the Hayes Village May Queen, April 2008

Along with this image, Robinson exhibited another, entitled ‘May Queen’, which unfortunately I can’t locate on line. But other Victorian artists and writers took an interest in these traditional May festivities, and John Ruskin in 1881 established the May Queen ceremony at Whitelands College in Chelsea, the oldest recorded continuing May Queen event (Hayfield makes a claim to this, but despite an ancient tradition, it’s procession had to be revived in 1928, rather later than the start of processions at Brentham in 1906.) The Whitelands celebration survived the move of the college to East Putney and its incorporation into Roehampton University, although they now crown a ‘May Monarch’, alternating between sexes.

May Queen procession in Hayes, Kent, 2008

More pictures from last week’s Crowning of the Hayes Realms.

Ryan McGinley’s Lost Summer

In the past I’ve written appreciatively about the work of Ryan McGinley, thoough I wasn’t greatly overwhelmed by his Oscars portfolio. I have to admit I share much of Joerg Colberg‘s doubts about his current work on show at the Team Gallery in New York, although I’ve only seen it on the web, not in the flesh (and there is plenty of that in the show.) James Danziger, in another blog on my regular reading list, suggested that the opening of this show on 3 April was “the place to be in New York this week (if not the entire spring)” and goes on to includes most of the publicity from the Team web site. But it’s worth looking at his blog on the show, not just because it saves you a bit of clicking to see some of the pictures at a viewable size (Team does really need a site redesign) but for the comments that others have added.

McGinley is now 30, and frankly seems to have got lost, perhaps seduced by becoming too well-known. From being someone who said “I eat, sleep, move and breath photography 24-7” and trying to photograph the whole of his life and his fantasies, he has moved into everything being a production. “In the summer of 2007, for example, he traversed the United States with sixteen models and three assistants, shooting 4,000 rolls of film. From the resulting 150,000 photographs, he arduously narrowed down the body of work to some fifty images, the best of which are on display here at the gallery.”

Perhaps if he fired the models and assistants and got a life again the work would be more interesting – or he could have tried perhaps a million shots. Getting his inspiration from “the kinds of amateur photography that appeared in nudist magazines during the 60s and early 70s” may not have been such a good idea, though it may explain why the word that sprang into my mind on seeing this stuff was “insipid“. Actually some aren’t bad, but even the better images seem to me to be a kind of pastiche. One reminds me of my least favourite (but incredibly commercial) American painter of the 20th century, others I’ve seen on poster stalls in markets, as nude pictures of reader’s wifes…

One picture I do rather like is Firework Hysterics, which has a kind of medieval touch to it, and has a curiously flat figure floating in a starry black sky, though I have a suspicion that it works far better at the 272×400 pixels of the web site than as a 40×30 inch C-Print.

McGinley sprang into the photography world when still a student at Parsons School of Design in 1999, by printing a 50 page book ‘The Kids are All Right‘ on his computer, selling 50 copies and sending another 50 free to magazine editors and artists that he admired – including Larry Clark, who had photographed the young McGinley a part of his 1990 series “Skaters“. He also put up a show of this work in an empty area of a building being refurbished on West Broadway in New York in 2000. His initiative got him work for magazines while still a student and into a group show in a New York gallery in 2002, as well as shows in Berlin and Milan. In 2003 became the youngest artist to have a one-person show at The Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as shows at the Rhode Island School of Design and in Toronto. The ICP were perhaps a little slow in waiting until 2007 to give him the Infinity Young Photographer Award. The New York Times ran a feature on him at the time, as well as publishing my piece on About.com (no longer available on line.)

Tiny Vices has links to pictures of a number of his projects, including work from ‘Sun and Health‘ and ‘Irregular Regulars‘ and some more pictures elsewhere from I Know Where The Summer Goes.

Silverprint

It’s a while since I last visited Silverprint in Valentine Place, off Webber St, a few minutes walk from Waterloo Station in south London. With the shift to digital in most aspects of photography, my requirements for photographic materials in general have dropped greatly. I seldom make actual prints, viewing images on screen, supplying work as digital images.

Even for exhibitions I’ve supplied work digitally. The 24 pictures I sent to Brasilia travelled by e-mail (all 96Mb) and I’ve previously written about my excitement when the prints, made by the best lab in Brazil, in Sao Paulo, were unwrapped for hanging. I’ve not actually seen the extremely large print made from my file I sent to Hungary for the touring ‘Europe Of Culture – The Culture Of Urbanity‘ show, and even for the two shows across London in Hackney which I had pictures in last year the images were sent as files.

This picture was in ‘Out and About in Hackney ‘at the Hackney Museum

The pictures for the Roof Unit show at Space went digitally because we had decided to print using Lightjet, and I have to admit they were very nice prints, although probably I could have done as well on the considerably cheaper Epson R2400 I normally use.

But most of my older work on photographic paper was made on materials imported by Silverprint – and it’s precursor in Muswell Hill, Goldfinger, where I benefited from the advice that was available both personally from Peter Goldfield and Martin Reed and in print in the old Goldfinger craftbook. Later came an encyclopaedic Silverprint Ag+ manual and Silverprint magazine that became Ag+ magazine.

You can read the latest news from Silverprint on their web site and one of the more interesting additions to their range is InkAID, which enables you to coat almost any surface – including traditional fine art papers, metal, plastic and wood veneers, so they can used to make decent ink jet prints – assuming of course that you can feed them through your printer.

Also available as a large download(10Mb) from the site is an article by a photographer I mentioned recently, Angus McBean, written and photographed by him for ‘Homes & Gardens‘ magazine in March 1977. This describes the restoration by him of his Elizabethan house, and as might be expected he certainly makes it into something theatrical if not a place I would find comfortable to live in. The photography is of course extremely professional, but frankly rather ordinary, and unless you have a particular interest in period homes your time would be better spent at the rather eccentrically designed Angus McBean web site.

Reasons to Celebrate: Bilal and Bert

It’s always good to be able to celebrate things connected with photography, and today I’ve received a couple of pieces of good news.

Firstly, the US military have said they will release AP photographer Bilal Hussein today, two years and a few days after his arrest. As the e-mail from the Free Bilal committee stated, “It seems the nightmare will soon be over. Let’s just wait to see the photos and the video of our dear colleague truly free to celebrate.”

Secondly a small cause for celebration in London SE1, where a public vote by more than 5000 local residents has recognised Bert Hardy (1913-95) as worthy of a blue plaque at his birthplace in Webber St, just a short walk from one of my favourite photographic suppliers, Silverprint.

Hardy is best known for his warmly human pictures of people, many of which from the period around the 1939-45 war appeared in Picture Post, and your can see over 20 from around the Elephant in 1948.

Hardy, who got a job at a nearby photo-processing plant on leaving school aged 14, was one of the first British photographers to work professionally with a Leica, starting by using it to photograph cycling events.

Editor Tom Hopkinson recruited him to work for ‘Picture Post‘, and his war pictures so impressed him that Hardy became the first photographer to get a byline in the magazine.

Hardy’s great asset for Picture Post was his ability to go anywhere and get on with the people he had to photograph, whatever their social background. He really was interested in people and his photographs show this.

He was called up and sent as a photographer to cover the armies advancing across Europe after the invasion, photographing the Rhine crossing and many other events. He was among the first allied soldiers to enter the concentration camps and photograph there.

After leaving Picture Post he did some advertising work and set up a photographic printing business, Grove Hardy Ltd, in Burrows Mews, Southwark.

You can now find many of his images on the web, as well as several pirate copies (not in the links below) of the short text I wrote about him some years ago!

James Hyman Gallery
Getty Images
Google Images

Burt Glinn (1925-2008)

Burt Glinn, one of the first batch of American photographers to join Magnum (associate members with him in 1951 were Eve Arnold and Dennis Stock) died on April 9 of kidney failure and pneumonia, aged 82.

You can see more about him on both Magnum and the Magnum blog. In the 1960s he was also the President of the ASMP and you can read a lengthy interview about his life and work made with him over the phone by the editor of the ASMP bulletin in January 2007.

Glinn was a real hard-working photographer and a fighter for photographer’s rights. He got what was perhaps his best-known picture by arriving “late and out of breath” at the Lincoln Memorial when Kruschev was the first Soviet premier to visit America, and was too late to go up in front of him with the rest of the press – so he shot from behind with a Nikon and a 50mm lens, making just a handful of exposures with the press motioning him to get out of their picture, and was soon moved away by security.

Portraits and Paps

If one thing is certain it is that the inquest verdict on the deaths of Di and Dodi will not end the conspiracy theories surrounding what actually happened leading up to their deaths in Paris in the early morning of 31st August 1997.

Its also clear that the blame attached to the paparazzi that “the speed and manner of driving of the following vehicles“, in the views of the majority of nine jurors “caused or contributed to” the crash will do nothing to improve the image of photography.

Of course it is the very same public that deplore the way the paps acted on that evening who also fuel the apparently insatiable appetite for the celebrity snaps that more or less fill our popular press, spawning a ridiculous number of magazines and web sites and are becoming more and more common in what we used to think of as the serious press.

Blaming the paps is an irrelevance. They are the driven not the drivers in this situation. I don’t know why other jurors dissented from the majority verdict, but I hope it might be because they take a similar view to me.

Assuming you aren’t royalty but just an ‘ordinary’ celebrity and want to avoid the attention of paps, it isn’t too hard. Try – as at least one person has done – buying a number of sets of the same fairly normal clothing – and having same look each time you go out. Make yourself reasonably available to press photographers, dress and behave sensibly in public. Be polite to photographers and don’t assault them or employ others to do so, but don’t be too cooperative. Look at them and give them a nice smile (which they will soon come to hate) and just shake your head when they ask you to do silly things.

But of course most of those taking part in the circus thrive on it; celebs get the photographers they deserve, which is perhaps why the pages I flick through rapidly on the free sheets or see people sitting beside me on the bus or in the tube reading are full of such ordinary and banal images of them.

Last week I went to the National Portrait Gallery in London, largely to see a show of pictures of brilliant 18th century women, the original ‘Bluestockings‘. There were some good portraits, though of course none were photographs (and the set of modern photographs connected to the show failed to interest me) as well as some very interesting books and other artefacts, but while there I did wander around the other rooms of pictures. The work on show changes from time to time, but there are usually a few good photographic portraits on show as well as rather more paintings that hold my attention.

The show ‘Born 1947 – Camera Press at 60‘, which closes on 20 April 2008, celebrates 60 years of the UK’s largest independent photographic agency with specially commissioned portraits of celebreties who are also 60, along with some of founder Tom Blau‘s informal protraits from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Blau (1912-1984), was a Jewish Hungarian reporter and photographer who was born and brough up in Berlin, leaving Nazi Germany in 1935 to come to London. Here he worked as a freelance photo researcher and in 1938 was employed to help set up an international photo library, Pictorial Press, was owned by three Hollywood producers. In 1947, after having become a British citizen, Blau put up £2000 to found his own agency, Camera Press. His grand-daughter, Emma Blau, (b1975,) currently has one picture on display in Room 39 of the NPG, although my favourite image in that room is Angus McBean’s 1950 print of Audrey Hepburn.

Images and the Press

Thursday this week at the Old Lecture Theatre, Westminster University in Regent St, London, at 7pm, Media Workers Against the War are hosting a debate ‘Iraq 5 years on – How the media sells war and why” with Dahr Jamail, Iraqi independent journalist and author of “Beyond the Green Zone“, the Guardian‘s Nick Davies, author of “Flat Earth News“, Kim Sengupta, defence and diplomatic correspondent of the Independent and Lindsey German, national convenor of the Stop the War Coalition.

The venue is 2 minutes walk north of Oxford Circus and tickets can be bought on line – £5, £3(concessions.)

In their mailing, MWAW give a number of links to the ‘iconic’ image of the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad, the most memorable image from the Iraq invasion until we saw those pictures taken by soldiers of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, showing clearing how this event was staged for and misrepresented by the media. One of the best of the links is an interview with eye-witness Neville Watson on Australian TV, together with footage of the scene in a You-tube video.

For a rather different story about photographing the news, read the Reuters blog, in which their senior Bangkok photographer Adrees Latif describes how he took the pictures of the killing of Japanese video journalist Kenjii Nagai which have just won Latif the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography.

Latif’s story gives a real description of the problems of covering such protests. You can see a larger version of his winning picture on the Pulitzer site. Also on the same site is the series of nineteen colour images, an intimate chronicle of a family coping with a parent’s terminal illness, which gained Preston Gannaway of the Concord Monitor her Pulitzer for Feature Photography.

Chinese Torture Torch Relay Shames Olympic Ideals

Four years ago I photographed the Olympic torch relay as it made its way through Brixton.

Brixton torch

At the time I described it as a rather sad non-event, which seemed to lack the kind of real community involvement that might have made it worthwhile. Unfortunately the whole Olympic movement has become so tied up with the commercial exploitation of sport that it is now impossible to see much evidence of the original ideals that led to its foundation.

It was an organised but low-key event, with little apparent security and I was able to stand only a couple of feet from Frank Bruno and as Davina McCall as they carried the torch, which had arrived by taxi and was accompanied by dancers as it made its way along the high street.

Davina
This is Davina and not Frank

Sunday was in contrast a giant security operation, with crowds of police, and a rather sinister phalanx of Chinese security men. I’d chosen the Bloomsbury leg as the torch was to have been carried there by the Chinese ambassador, but these ‘secret’ plans were altered at the last minute (she carried it instead in Chinatown) apparently as police decided it would be too dangerous. Instead the torch was smuggled through hidden inside a vehicle, with no sign of it visible to the waiting crowds. About all we got to see – apart from a huge security operation were some very silly looking dancing girls.

There were probably around a thousand demonstrators for human rights in Tibet on and around Great Russell Street, mainly penned behind barriers in Bedford Place, roughly ten yards back from the road. Probably about the same number of Chinese with pro-Olympic banners and flags were allowed to remain behind banners along the route. This seemed to me to be a very debatable taking of a particular side by the police.

Police hold Free Tibet protesters outside the British Museum

Similarly when the motorcade had passed, the police attempted to detain the Tibet supporters, while allowing others to disperse freely. The crowd pushed through a double line of police close to the Montague Street junction but were held for some minutes further down the road before eventually being allowed to disperse down Coptic Street. Presumably this was a delaying tactic to stop them catching up with the Chinese ambassador in Chinatown.

By this time I’d decided it was probably too late – given the traffic disruption caused by the event and the likely crowds – to get to a worthwhile position in Whitehall (a BBC reporter who had been in Bloomsbury and hurried there had to rely on a man standing on a wall to tell her what was happening less practical but not entirely unknown for a photographer, and at least one of Henri Cartier-Bressons well-known pictures from India was taken by a man up a pole he handed his Leica. But I did walk down to see the crowds in Trafalgar Square, arriving just minutes after the relay had left. The square was still full of people, with crowds of Chinese arguing heatedly (if seldom very cogently) with mainly British human rights demonstrators, and the police in general seemed to be doing a decent job of preventing actual conflict, warning those who became overheated or abusive.

Police step in
Police try and cool down the argument

After a short while they decided to clear the square, and I got on a bus to go the Tibetan Freedom Torch Relay in Argyle Square. More pictures from the London Olympic Torch Relay on My London Diary as usual.