Category: My Own Work

Gardeners Delight?

‘The Gardener’ Jan Brykczyński (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2015)

I have to confess to being a colourist. Someone who seems more affected than the general population and by the art photographic establishment in particular by colour. I had to quickly leave one room in Photo London when confronted by wall-sized images with a particularly nasty thin yellow cast.

My first real job was as a colour chemist, in the research lab of a company making dyestuffs, where small differences in shade were vital. For various reasons I didn’t stay in it long but perhaps something of it stayed with me. When I began as a photographer in the early ’70s, carrying two cameras, one for black and white and another for colour, I was seldom if ever in doubt about what was a colour and what and black and white image and my work in the two was quite different. I was, as a then eminent photographer commented on my work, a colourist.


Jan Brykczyński talks to Diane Smyth at Photo London detail- apologies for poor quality

Few photographers now actually work in black and white, and most of those who do seem to think – if they think at all – in colour. Others certainly do think in colour, and Jan Brykczyński is certainly one of them, but his colour is rather different to mine – around R+3 B+7 different from both me and Photoshop, as I find if I put one of his images into that programme and examine the colour of a neutral shade.

It may not seem a great deal, but R+3 B+7 is enough to make me feel a certain nausea when I turn the pages of this book, and it gets in the way of my appreciating his imagery. I have a slightly smaller problem with the rather muted colours and contrast. Brykczyński uses a large camera (4″x5″?) and film, and likes to shoot on dull days, staying in and researching when the sun comes out, to lessen the technical problems of light and shade. Colour film has always been balanced for summer sun (or tungsten); back in the bad old days of transparencies you had to use CC filters when the sun went in to get the colour right, though with the switch to negative we got lazy and made the corrections on the enlarger and it almost worked. But breathed a huge scream of relief when digital gave us more accurate colour with far less hassle. Film has become relegated to a ‘look’, something one can apply to digital with what a less polite than me photographer referred to as ‘f**king up filters’.

I’m not criticising Brykczyński for having chosen a particular aesthetic with its desaturated and slightly unreal colour, just relating my own difficulties in approaching his work though a barrier which for me is hardly mountable but others may take in their stride; from his comments in the presentation at Photo London, the approach may in part derive from having to blend together images taken at different times in four very different areas. But personally I would have liked to have seen a book that represented differences in the conditions under which the images were made rather than attempt to minimise them for the sake of a perhaps spurious unity.


A very different garden image from ‘Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood’ by Peter Marshall’

As a photographer who has also produced a very different book on gardens I appreciate the problem of dealing with all that green. And back to that room I had to leave, some can live with (or at least work with) and pay very silly money for giant images I find nauseating.


Jan Brykczyński talks to Diane Smyth

So I struggled to appreciate this book, although the images there are at least clear. I felt for the photographer at the presentation, where his images on screen behind him and Diane Smyth of the BJP asking him questions were projected at a standard that would have disgraced an amateur gardening club in a run down church hall. It seemed a disgraceful contempt to the photographer and his work and the seriousness of his approach as well as to a paying audience. Some images from the position I was sitting, a few rows back from the front, were almost completely burnt out with the screen a glaring white.


I took pictures only when a few images were better projected

The project looks at urban gardeners in 4 cities in very different states of development and with very different histories, Nairobi, New York, Warsaw, and Yerevan in Armenia, and seems to attempt to suggest à la ‘Family of Man‘ that whatever our social arrangements and historical development, at base people around the world are much the same. It’s a thesis undoubtedly close to the heart of a multi-national Swiss-based giant like Syngenta, and behind the singular title ‘The Gardener‘ that the photographs, mixed together as they are in the book, rather triumphantly overcome.

Perhaps behind the book there is a rather more subversive mind than the company hoped for. Perhaps I should make myself a pair of colour-correcting spectacles to enable me to get to grips with it more adequately. But you may well not share my personal problem.

Boiko, Brykczyński’s series on  rural life among the Rusyn people (a small group of farming people who apparently consider the name Boyko derogatory) in the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains which became his first self-published book is a fascinating series (and  I have no problems with their colour), as too is the group of photographs of the sheep farmers of Árnes in Iceland that won him the Syngenta Award, with a grant to pursue the project and, later, to publish the book ‘The Gardener’.

Born in Poland in 1979, much of Brykczyński’s work has been on rural areas. He is a founding partner of Sputnik Photos, an international collective of photographers that focuses on transformation in Eastern Europe and post-Soviet states.

Continue reading Gardeners Delight?

Photo London

I wasn’t going to bother with Photo London. I’m rather busy and thought there were better things I could do with my time, so hadn’t bothered with accreditation. But a day or two ago I decided I could fit in a few hours there on my way to something else, and took up an invitation to a book launch (more of which in a later post) which included a complimentary day ticket.  If you have to pay, a day ticket costs £20 (concessions £17) and the show continues until Sunday 24 May.

There certainly are things worth seeing, particularly the first UK showing of a remarkable project by the late Iranian documentary photographer Kaveh Golestan in the in the Citadel of Shahr e No (New Town), Tehran’s red light district, a walled ghetto where 1,500 women lived and worked, between 1975–77. With the Iranian revolution the whole area was destroyed, together with many of the women in it.

Beneath the Surface, 200 rarely-shown photographic works from the Victoria & Albert Museum Photographs Collection, features a fine collection of work by William Strudwick (1834-190), an employee of the V&A. The museum purchased around 50 of his cityscapes, ‘Old London: Views by W Strudwick‘ in 1869, and then proceeded to disperse them around their collection, only re3cenly reuniting them for this show. There are some other interesting prints from a century ago or more, but the choice from the last hundred years was rather less interesting, with a number of good but well-known works, and some more contemporary work about which the museum may well feel rather embarrassed in another hundred years.

I was disappointed by the show of Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis series as large-format platinum prints. Frankly many of these images were more convincing on the magazine page. Making platinum prints doesn’t necessarily mean better prints as this exhibit proves. Elsewhere on some of the gallery stands there were rather better prints of his work and I think it is more suited to silver or inkjet.

The backbone of Photo London is of course the commercial gallery shows, and in the main I found these a little disappointing. There was an awful lot of large and rather empty images and a dearth of interesting photography, and the range of work didn’t seem to match that which I’ve seen at every Paris Photo I’ve attended. There were things that were good to see, but most of them I’d seen before, and very little that was new.

One of the more interesting was the series series Liverpool 1968, by Candida Höfer, black and white images made during a trip there when she was twenty-four years old. If anyone doubts the dire effect of the Dusseldorf school on photography they should go and study these images made long before she studied with the Bechers, whose work I admire but who seem as teachers to have inspired a huge pyramid of boredom, with just the occasional photographer and work of interest. They were I think at Galerie Zander.

Another set of pictures that I really admired was by Anthony Hernandez, Landscape for the Homeless showing at the Galerie Polaris stand. A book of these was published by the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany,in 1996 and there is an article in Unhoused. The book was a relatively small print run and is fairly rare and a little expensive.

Somerset House is a fantastic building, but a rather confusing layout which wasn’t quite clear to me from the exhibitor map, and I had to ask my way a couple of times but eventually I think I managed to find everything in the show, including the LensCulture area which is all on its own with a separate entrance, and where work by all 31 award-winning photographers of the LensCulture Exposure Awards 2014 was on show.


Raina Stinson, with her winning image ‘Alluring‘ at top left, holds the Lensculture Awards Catalogue

Also on the LensCulture web site you can see their view of Photo London – rather different to mine, but recommended.
Continue reading Photo London

Poverty College


NIKON D800E: 16mm 1/250s, f/8, ISO 200, -0.3Ev

My photography has only had the most tenuous connection with the Royal College of Art, in that the first photographer I got to know in person had recently studied there and was still on the buzz, and that I’ve occasionally made just a little fun of John Hedgecoe who founded the photography course there in 1965, or rather his enormous output of glossily re-packaged how-to-do-it manuals on photography. You can find hundreds if not thousands of his pictures on Topfoto, but while it would be impossible to knock the professionalism, I find it had to see any personal style. It is perhaps curious that someone who so effectively epitomised photography as a trade should have been the driving force behind the UK’s most prestigious photography course at a college of art, though of course it does much to explain the impact that later courses at Derby and Trent had on photography in the UK.

But in the past months I’ve visited the Royal College twice, though not actually going inside, but in the company of cleaners, who have been demanding that they be paid the London Living Wage now, not from September as the college has offered. It may seem a relatively minor issue, but if you are living below the poverty line (and the living wage is the poverty line) then even a small difference is vital. If you can’t afford to take the tube for example, your daily journeys to and from work may add an hour or two to your working day, and not having to choose between eating enough and heating your flat is a great liberation.

The cleaners were joined in their protest by quite a few students from the college and you can read more about what actually happened in Poverty pay at the Royal College of Art.


NIKON D700: 16.0-35.0 mm at 16mm, 1/250s, f/8, ISO 640, +0.7Ev

The protest was at lunchtime, at the light was good, slightly hazy sun that meant the shadows were not too harsh, although the March sun was fairly low in the sky, and despite using a lens hood there were some images with ghosting and flare. With the 16-35mm the lens hood makes a difference but doesn’t work as well as it might at all focal lengths. Lens hoods have their limits in any case, and the ‘petal’ shaped Nikon hood does its best, though at times a carefully placed left hand resting on it can add a little extra shielding (though often it turns out to be slightly less carefully placed than it seemed through the viewfinder and require a little cropping to remove it.)

But it’s impossible to avoid flare and ghosting, and generally zoom lenses suffer more than primes. Optically there is little otherwise to choose between them now, largely a choice between the discipline of working with a single focal length and the versatility of the zoom. With digital giving high quality at high ISO, the wider apertures of primes are of less importance most of the time unless you want to make creative use of limited depth of field (and I seldom do.)

The effect of flare can be reduced by a little local use of the adjustment brush in Lightroom, adding some contrast and clarity, along with a variable change in exposure. If it’s only mild it can be more or less eliminated, but usually I prefer simply to reduce the effect. As lenses age, they usually seem to give more flare, perhaps because their inner glass surfaces become slightly dirty. Certainly the 16-35mm, now getting quite elderly, seems to be giving more flare.

The ghosts can sometimes improve an image, and although in theory they could be retouched, I seldom try. Doing it well is very tricky. I don’t think I touched the green and yellow disks in this image, but sometimes where they grab the eye too much I have been known to desaturate the colour somewhat and sometimes darken them slightly with the adjustment brush. I don’t feel doing so affects the integrity of the image – any more than removing the spots from sensor dust, both are results of defects in the apparatus.


NIKON D800E: 16.0 mm f/2.8, 1/250s, f/8, ISO 200, -0.3Ev

When the protest moved around to the other end of the college, adjoining the Albert Hall I took some images using the 16mm fisheye to let me get close to the protesters and still show that building very recognisably in the background.  Using the Fisheye-Hemi plugin does then eliminate some of the curvature and produce less distortion of people away from the centre – like the woman at the left edge. In the fisheye view she would be rather curved, and in a similar position on the 16mm rectilinear lens she would suffer a sideways stretch.

Tilting the fisheye when taking the picture has however resulted in verticals that diverge fairly dramatically towards the top of the picture. It perhaps helps in this composition. You can correct the divergence in Lightroom, but only at the expense of losing much of the image.


NIKON D700: 16.0-35.0 mm at 19mm, 1/200s, f/7.1, ISO 640, +0.7Ev

You can see some distortion in the face of the woman very close to the 16-35mm lens who was walking past me. Although often called ‘wide-angle distortion’ you can also get it from standard lenses when working very close to the subject. The relative distances from the centre and edges of the subject differ and thus so too does the magnification.


NIKON D800E: 18.0-105.0 mm at 45mm (68 equiv), 1/200s, f/7.1, ISO 200, -0.3Ev

Which is why a longer lens is more suitable when photographing fairly tight images of people, and a short telephoto – around 85mm on 35mm format – is often referred to as a ‘portrait lens‘. But you can of course take portraits with any lens. Hedgecoe’s best work was as a portrait photographer, particularly in black and white, and some of his best images were what is sometimes known as environmental portraiture, showing for example an artist in his studio, made with a wide angle to show the person in their surroundings. Others have made effective tightly cropped parts of faces with very long lenses.
Continue reading Poverty College

Andrzej Baturo – 50 Years

It seems a very long time ago that I first met Andrzej and Inez Baturo in Bielska-Bialo, and it’s something of a surprise when I realise it was only 10 years ago.

You can read more about my first visit to Poland and the first FotoArtFestival held in Bielsko-Biala, Poland in June-July 2005, organised by the Foundation Centre of Photography there, with Andzej, the centre’s president as Art Director and Inez, the vice president as Programme Director in my Polish diary.

It was a fine festival, with an international cast of photographers, one from each of around 25 countries, with some well-known names including Eikoh Hosoe from Japan, Boris Mikhalov from Ukraine, and Ami Vitale from the USA, as well as work by the late Inge Morath (Austria) and Mario Giacomelli (Italy) and others. There was also a strong Polish representation, with soft-focus pictoriasm by Tadeusz Wanski from the middle of the twentieth century, and the much gritter group show ‘”Unoffical Image” – Polish photoreportage of the 1970s/80s‘ which included work by Andrzej Baturo.

Last year Galeria Bielska showed ‘Andrzej Baturo – 50 Years Of Photography‘ with around 200 images over the years since he began taking pictures in 1962. You can read an English version of the page about it, which quotes Andrzej as saying:

The photograph was first invented simply to record social realities, but with time, social documentary photography and reportage photography have both been raised to the status of art, much in the same way as the journalism of Hanna Krall or Ryszard Kapuściński are now considered great literature. I feel a close affinity with both these areas, and I’ve never been sure whether I’m more of a journalist than an artist, or the other way round.

The Polish version is here. Also in Polish, but worth watching for the images even if you understand little or nothing that is being said, is the video, Andrzej Baturo – 50 lat z fotografią. There is also a page about the show with some comments on his work on the Polish site Art Imperium, which I viewed through Google Translate.

There is now a crowd funding appeal for the publication of a book Andrzej Baturo – 50 years of photography. I’m not sure how well a link to the page through Google Translate will work, and if you understand Polish or have a browser that will automatically translate, you may find the Polish original works better. And even if like me you don’t speak Polish, the pictures speak in any language.

The various rewards available for supporting the publication are of course priced in Polish Zloty (PLN) and where items are to be posted, international postage would presumably need to be added. But 150 zł (about £27) for the 240 page hard-cover book with around 200 photographs seems very reasonably priced. But registering and using the Polish crowd-funding site might need the help of a Polish speaker and charges for converting currency may add to the cost.

Police nick Class War banner

The picture above shows three police officers grabbing a banner from a protester at the protest outside the ‘rich door‘  of the flats at One Commercial St, the door at the front of the building on the main street that the social tenants in the block are banned from using.  As I’ve mentioned in previous posts here and in My London Diary, residents in the social housing and their visitors have to use a less convenient entrance in an often dirty alley at the side of the building – the poor door.

The banner the police are taking is one that has appeared at some of these and other recent protests being carried by Class War, and has been seen by thousands. Many of those who have seen it have been noticeably amused, some clearly expressing agreement, and while some may have felt it unfair or inappropriate, I’m not aware that anyone has been seriously offended by it.

It’s a banner that does cause me some problems, and I usually refer to it euphemistically as the ‘Political Leaders’ banner.  Similar posters with individual images of the party leaders were published by Class War at the time of the last election, and one over-zealous police officer organised a raid on the home of a well-known photographer who had displayed them in his front window.

There are two words that I seldom use in the caption across the bottom of the banner, the ‘f’ word and the ‘w’ word. I can remember the shock expressed in the press when the first of these was first used on live TV in the UK, but now it, like the ‘w’ word is commonplace, though still to some extent controlled.

We don’t often say it in polite middle-class company, but for the great majority of the population it is a part of normal speech; when I first went to work in an engineering factory as a student it accounted for around 50% of the speech of some of the workers on the shop floor, and there would be relatively few sentences without it. Travelling around London on public transport or foot I overhear it in frequent use. We may dislike it or disapprove of it, but it has little power to shock or offend.

After police seized the posters in 2010, the photographer concerned had a surreal exchange with the police, which resulted in him replacing the posters in his window but with the word ‘onanist’ replacing ‘wanker’. Later, a court decided the police action had infringed his right to freedom of speech and expression, and the photographer was awarded compensation for the police actions.

After the protesters had lit flaming torches and a green smoke flare, a police officer decided it was time the police took some action. He went up to the people holding the banner and told them it was offensive and they must put it away.

They asked him if anyone had been offended by it, and fairly clearly no one other than that officer had been, but he and another officer then the officers then warned individually each person holding it that they were committing an offence and might be arrested, and then seized the banner.

One of the people holding the banner continued to hold on to it as the police tried to pull it away, saying they had no right to take it. After they had forced it out of his hands, he was led away, and handcuffed.

Eventually police reinforcements arrived, including a more senior officer, who appeared not to be too pleased at what had happened, but the arrested man was taken away to the police station and the protest continued more or less as usual.

The last I heard of the case was that the police were trying to get the man to accept a fixed penalty so that the case would not go to court, where a conviction might be difficult.

The photographs – as often in other events – make things appear very much more ordered than they were. One thing that is largely missing from my pictures are the half a dozen photographers also trying to photograph them, and the crowd of perhaps twenty protesters also trying to see what was happening and at times to intervene while the banner was being grabbed and during the arrest.

A wide-angle lens lets me get in close, but its also vital to try to anticipate how the scene will develop and where it would be possible to take pictures. It’s also important that while recording the actions of the police photographers don’t impede them. Most of these images were made with the D800E and the 18-105mm DX lens at 18mm – 27mm equivalent. I was working at ISO3200 but on some images there was a couple of stops of exposure compensation, so making it more like ISO12,800. The reflective strips on police clothing give problems with flash, and the exposure compensation stops these burning out, though quite a lot of burning in of them and the fluorescent green jackets was needed.

There is also a high degree of editing. Much of the time it was quite crowded and people were pushing and bumping into me and even though I was using flash some are not sharp. The light was also fairly poor for autofocus. And many pictures were rejected because of people getting in my way as I was taking pictures. Of course I will have got in their way too.

The flaming torches also present something of a challenge so far as exposure is concerned. Getting detail in those flames as well as the rest of the scene isn’t too easy even given the great dynamic range of the D800E, and there are a few pictures where I didn’t quite do it as well as I would have hoped.  But others seem to have held the detail in the flames well – with the help of a little flash and quite a lot of Lightroom.

You can see more at Police seize Class War banner.

Continue reading Police nick Class War banner

Through a Glass

For some years in the 1980s and 1990s I worked on a project for which the great majority of images were taken through windows. Some of those images eventually made their way into an ‘artist’s book’ that I produced one year during during the Christmas break around 20 years ago, under the title Café Ideal, Cool Blondes, and Paradise.

At the time I was working with colour negative film and having these trade processed with 6×4″ prints of every exposure, or occasionally when I was feeling rich, 7½x5″ (later I processed my own C41 and only contact printed films.)  And these postcard-sized images were pasted onto sheets of 12×8¼ cotton rag with a ¾ folded at the gutter end to paste to the previous sheet, eventually with a little sewing and thick cardboard covers made into a 64 page hardback volume with a short text and 54 images. It still sits on my shelf.

I showed the work to a couple of publishers, both of whom expressed some interest, but eventually decided not to publish it, or at least not unless I could come up with at least half the cost either from my own resources or from a grant, and I lost interest. A few years later, in 2000, I put a very slightly different version of the work on the web, where it can still be seen: Café Ideal, Cool Blondes, and Paradise.

Almost all the images were taken with a 35mm shift lens on an Olympus OM4 body, with a few using a 28mm; possibly some of the earlier work on the project was made with an OM2.

Of course some of the images I made depend for their success on the reflections, but there were many where the reflections made images impossible, or detracted from those I did make.

During the project I learnt quite a lot about reflections, starting with the fact that the polarising filter I always carried and which every magazine article and technical tome told you was essential seldom actually did what you wanted it to.

For many of the pictures I was able to work close to the window glass, and used a collapsible rubber lens hood costing a couple of quid (now from £1.12 post free on Ebay) pressed on to the glass surface to eliminate all reflections.  Also essential was a cloth to clean the outside of the window through which to photograph.

Sometimes, the dust on a window – often on the inside where I couldn’t reach it – added to the image, as in this image of tables inside a café, taken a short distance from the glass with the lens well stopped down. I’m not sure now whether the scratch was on the glass or a later addition to the negative!

What led me to think again about these pictures was a post by Michael Zhang on PetaPixel, about research at MIT into the removal of reflections from images taken through glass. When working through glass, reflections normally are a double image, with a reflection from both the front and back surfaces of the glass, and by searching for parts of the image that are seen double the software is able to distinguish the reflections from the rest, and can then reduce or eliminate them. Perhaps before long we will see a ‘reflections’ filter in Photoshop.

Zhang also points out that there are products that are more elaborate (and more versatile, not to mention rather more expensive) than my cheap rubber lenshood for allowing you to work through glass – such as the Lenskirt.  The price of around $50 puts me off, and it’s also considerably larger, though it will work with almost any lens. The days of lens systems like the Zuiko, where almost every lens I used had a 49mm or 52mm filter thread are unfortunately gone.

One of the other problems I faced was that window glass is often rather coloured, and although filtration when printing with colour neg might deal with this, when using a wide angle, rays from the edges of the subject travel obliquely through the glass with a longer path, sometimes leading to a noticeable colour shift.  It’s a problem that would be much easier to solve working with digital images than in the darkroom, where I sometimes resorted to dodging and burning with different filtration. I worked on scans of some of the images and wrote about it in a post here in 2008, Cafe Ideal, Cool Blondes and Paradise revisited.

I hope to publish a revised version of Café Ideal, Cool Blondes, and Paradise at a future date, in a new edit with some extra images and a few replacements. But finding the images and scanning the negatives will be a long job.  Along the bottom edge of some of the prints in the book and on the web are details of the date and location where the images were taken, which makes finding things easier, but over the years many of the negatives that I printed from have been filed out of the date sequence I nominally used.

Continue reading Through a Glass

Time to Act

Or rather well past time for some real action on Climate Change was the message of a large and largely unreported protest in London at the start of March. In my account at Time to Act on Climate Change I began “Over 20,000 protesters marched through London” and while it is hard to be definite about the exact figures at such events it was certainly a large protest.


Time to #AxeDrax

Over forty-five years ago, when I first began to think about environmental issues (and even to speak in public on them), climate change was something that would happen in the future, the stuff of post-apocalyptic fiction such as J G Ballard’s ‘The Drowned World‘, first published in 1962 (though I only read it much later.) Now it is very much with us, and among the pile of discarded papers I moved to find my keyboard this morning I came across an article about wine producers buying up estates in Kent and Sussex as the Champagne region is becoming too warm.


Champagne is perhaps the least of worries for most of this, though perhaps not for those in the 1% whose opinions driven by wealth really matter. But unlike many of those associated with global warming, one that is easily overcome by a simple shift of location. Less easy to solve the problems of countries such as the Marshall Islands or Bangladesh already suffering from rising sea levels and global climate instability.

Last September, ahead of the New York Climate summit we had another large march in London, the Peoples Climate March, about which I commented that it seemed to have been “taken over by various slick and rather corporate organisations rather than being a ‘people’s march’ and seemed to lack any real focus.”  Although some of those same organisations were backing this march, they were far less visible, and it was far more a march dominated by climate activists and grass roots organisations.

The important arguments are no longer I think about environmental or scientific details (though of course the detailed matters of ecology remain vital) but of politics – how we get the change we know is vital to save life on this planet, if indeed that is possible.  How are that small and wealthy elite – the 1% or perhaps rather fewer – to be persuaded to abandon their own increasingly insulated lifestyle of extravagance based on planetary exploitation for the sake of a future for the rest of us. Can it be achieved within the institutions – including governments – which they dominate or will it only happen through catastrophe or revolution?

Protests such as those I spend much of my time photographing often don’t acheive their aims, often indeed are asking the impossible, often are doomed to failure, but that doesn’t mean they are unimportant. There are sometimes small victories, but even more vitally they serve to bring issues into the open, to manage to break through the dictatorship of the elite over the public agenda, to slightly rock the government boat. They are the way that many things start to happen. And even in my gloom, especially in it, there is hope that something may happen over climate change. And much of that hope comes from the people that appear in my pictures and what they are doing.

The event began in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the largest public square in London, including the surrounding roads around 250 yards by 180 yards, enough to make a large crowd look fairly sparse. As the front of the march was leaving from the south-west corner, people were still flooding in to the square from Holborn station and High Holborn. It took around 35 minutes before the last of the march – which at the start was fairly tightly packed – to leave the square.  The “Over 20,000” was the organiser’s estimate, and my own guess would have been a little lower. But where most of the media talk about hundreds when thousands are on the streets a little overestimate helps to balance things.

I stayed taking photographs in Lincoln’s Inn Fields until the end of the march had got fairly close to the start point, and then rushed off to catch up with its front. I had the advantage of being able to take a short cut where the marchers went around the one-way system at Aldwych, and they had been walking rather slowly with frequent stops, and I caught up halfway down the Strand.


‘Renewables – I’m a Big Fan’. Fossil Free Pompey at McDonald’s

Ahead of us were several places where I thought some of the marchers might decide to make some kind of protest, and I kept close to a group who I thought might be involved in this. And as we approached McDonald’s I was not surprised when things livened up. But the police had also for once anticipated the action too, and McDonald’s had extra security staff on the door. Instead of trying to enter, people sat down in the road, and hundreds of other marchers followed their example, blocking the street and stopping the march.


Tina-Louise Rothery and friends on the Strand

The low winter sunlight made photography difficult, with areas of deep shade and bright sun. Working with an extreme wide-angle as I mainly was, using fill-flash was impracticable, and although I tried hard to avoid blown highlights I wasn’t always successful. After  making some pictures close to McDonalds I stepped over protesters who were sitting or lounging on the road to get across to a group of anti-fracking protesters towards the far side of the road and joined them to take pictures.  Among them were several, including Tina-Louise Rothery and some of the other ‘Nanas’ who I’d met at previous protests, who it was good to meet again. It does make working with the 16mm fisheye easier when the people you are photographing know you and are happy to be photographed at close quarters.


Time to Act on Climate Change

After a few minutes the protesters got up and the march moved on, though the corner of Trafalgar Square and turning down Whitehall.  Here the black bloc came to the front of the march, and I expected some lively scenes at Downing St.  There was a little shouting and they were joined by a small group of polar bears, but soon they were on their way again. On reaching King Charles St  they rushed off down it, followed by a small group of marchers. I ran down with them for a short distance, and then had to decide whether to stay with them or the main march.

Their protest might well have provided some images of clashes with police and of minor damage to property that would be likely to be used by the mass media. Thinking purely in terms of likely use of images and possible sales, I should have stuck with the black bloc. And I think like most photographers I welcome the adrenaline of confrontations. But I’m not happy with the way that such images are used by a press and broadcasting establishment dominated by the 1%, which picks on such things to obscure or denigrate the main issues. I vacillated, then turned around and ran back to photograph the main march as it came into Parliament Square.


‘Frack With Us Cameron and the Oven Gloves are Off’

I was anxious too not to miss the rally on College Green and the opportunity to photograph the speakers and the crowd there. Though there was relatively little press interest as the only major celebrity input came from a video link with Vivienne Westwood speaking from Paris. But there were some interesting speeches and speakers, including John McDonnell and Caroline Lucas, Matt Wrack and others, with Tina-Louise Rothery bringing Frack Free Lancashire activists with her and John Stewart coming on with some of the polar bears who had protested earlier in the day at Heathrow.


Almost corrected image of the Viking Longship and oil slicks against BP sponsorship of Art by ‘Art Not Oil’

At the end of the rally I had another choice to make. I could either go back north to Parliament Square and Westminster Bridge with activists likely to face confrontation with the police, or go south with Art Not Oil‘s Viking ship to protest on the steps of Tate Britain. Either would have taken me towards a station from which I could catch a train home, something my body was telling me it was time to do. Although Parliament Square would have been more exciting it was also more open-ended with perhaps hours of police kettles and confrontation, I went with the ship simply as a quick and easy option.  I’d done enough and needed a rest and dinner.

More at:
Time to Act on Climate Change
Climate Change Rally
Viking longship invades Tate steps
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Same Circus, Different Clowns

This isn’t a post about our general election, though I suspect the headline might do for the possible result, which might be a marginal improvement on the equally likely Same Circus, Same Clowns but isn’t I feel going to change things a great deal. Of course I shall still go out to vote, though only to register my opinion, which I think is important to do, however impotent politically.

But as Maximus – Same Circus, Different Clowns makes clear, this was an event about a different company taking over the administration of Work Capability Assessments for sickness and disability benefits from Atos, who have been so hounded (and justifiably so) by protesters that they have thrown in the towel.

People didn’t protest because Atos were conducting the tests, but because the tests themselves, based on box-ticking computer questions are generally agreed to be woefully unfair and inadequate, and mainly because of the way that Atos pressured those largely unsuitably skilled people administrating them to do so in a way that was grossly unfair to claimants. It’s possible, though perhaps unlikely that Maximus will do the job better, though they will still presumably have the same financial incentive to fail as many people as possible. No fair system would pay more for failing more or set targets for the number to be failed.

Of course the tests should be scrapped, and replaced by assessments based on medical evidence provided by properly qualified people, and protests will continue until this happens, and this was just the first against the new administrators, Maximus, a US company with a UK office close to the Dept of Work and Pensions.

DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) and other disabled groups represent people who have been hardest hit by the coalition government’s welfare reforms, with Minister Iain Duncan Smith cynically seeing them as an easy target. Events have proved him wrong; their disabilities have made them one of the toughest groups of protesters in the country, both on the streets and in the courts, where they have inflicted a number of defeats on the government – though the response has been largely for the DWP to ignore the verdicts.

DPAC are determined because so much is at stake for them – and many know friends who have committed suicide because of losing essential benefits or the continual harassment of regular incorrect assessments and appeals which eventually overturn these.  Their protests also rightly attract a great deal of public sympathy, not least among the police, who also fear the bad image that reports and photographs of them treating the disabled as they sometimes do the general population would give.

There is also a great reserve of often unused and under-appreciated talent among people with disabilities, some of which leads to their protests being more inventive and more visual than most. It’s always a pleasure to photograph their protests, and you are never quite sure what will happen, though it is likely that something interesting will. And the public appreciation of the poor deal they have had from the government does result in greater interest in the media – and my pictures of events involving the disabled have been more widely used than those of other protests.

It’s not everyday you get the opportunity to take a rather different image of Westminster Abbey complete with a flying pink pig, and I’m not sure I really made the most of it, though I tried a few times. You can read the account of the event and see more pictures at Maximus – Same Circus, Different Clowns.  As usual I was working with the Nikon D700 with 16-35mm f4 and the D800E with 18-105mm DX, as well as just a few frames with the 16mm fisheye on the D700. The top image in this post was made with the D800E, others all with the D700.
Continue reading Same Circus, Different Clowns

The New York Photo League

Like many of my articles, the piece on the Photo League I published in 2001 was based on work I had done earlier, either for teaching or for articles in a small magazine that I edited for some years, later reworking and adding material to them for publication.

And rather than relying on the images in books and magazines, and on slides I made from these as well as commercial film-strips and a few videos mainly recorded from TV, I had to find images and articles I could link to on the web.

Many of those links no longer work, but there is now far more material on the web and it is much easier to find than in the days before Google. So I’ve removed any links from this piece, and leave it to the reader to research those aspects that they find of interest. Anyway, here’s the piece from 2001 without those links:

The New York Photo League

Origins

The Photo League was one of the most important movements in twentieth century photography, its influence spreading wide from New York. Yet it remains one of the least well known areas of photography, with many half truths and some downright fiction in the history books and on web sites. In this feature I hope to state some of the main points about it, and also to state why I believe it to be so important. Along the way I hope to blow away some of the myths.

Of course, there are long scholarly and no doubt more accurate accounts than this, although some historians perhaps lose sight of the wood as they concentrate on the leaves. This is an outline only. In future features I’ll look in more depth at some of the photographers who were members or otherwise associated with the organisation.

Anne W Tucker, Clare Cass & Stephen Daiter’s book ‘This Was The photo League: Compassion and the Camera from the Depression to the Cold War’, published by the Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago in 2001 is probably a good – if expensive – reference for those who want more detail. Anne Tucker also contributed a chapter, ‘Strand as Mentor’, to the book ‘Paul Strand: Essays on his life and Work’ edited by Maren Strange, Aperture, 1990. Some information in this feature was taken from her and other essays in this book, including one by Walter Rosenblum.

The ‘Film and Photo League’ was founded in 1930, but its origins lay in the earlier Workers’ Camera Club of New York which had been active for some years. As the name suggests, this was a communist inspired organisation. Workers’ International Relief , which was the American chapter of the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe, part of the Communist International, sponsored the merger of the Workers’ Camera Club with an organisation of similar nature, the Labor Defender Photo Group, into the New York Film and Photo League.(FPL)

The object of the League was to make film and photographs that supported workers in their struggles against the bosses, that stood for the rights of the working people and fought for a better life for them. These movements drew their inspiration from the German worker-photographer movement organised by Will Munzenberg. They aimed to awaken the working class and train them in the use of film and photography in the production of politically committed pictures.

Film occupied an important place in Russian culture of the era, and the FPL also aimed to project a positive picture of Soviet cultural achievements in this area as well as producing it s on films. Although still photography was seen as important and the majority of members were still photographers, the movement in the early years was dominated by the film-makers, some, including Paul Strand were also well known as still photographers.

The late 1920s and 1930s were a period when intellectual life in the Western world was dominantly left wing. Capitalism was seen as having led to the carnage of the First World War and later the failures of the Depression. Following the Russian Revolution in 1919, a new society was being created in the Soviet Union that would lead to a freer and more equal society. Of course it didn’t quite work out like that in practice. At the time however, many if not most photographers in the USA shared the at least broadly socialist or left wing sympathies and hopes of their generation.

In 1935, various arguments within the FPL led to a three-way split; the film-makers who stuck more closely to party lines keeping in the FPL (it faded away a couple of years later) while those who wanted to make more ambitious documentary films formed a production company, Frontier Films. The still photographers, who largely took the side of Frontier Films, formed a new organisation, the Photo League. Frontier Films was closely allied to the Photo League throughout its existence. Paul Strand, the President of Frontier, was a member of the Advisory Board of the Photo League and played an important role in its activities until he left for France in 1949.

Activities

Although the split from the Film and Photo League marked a certain degree of distancing from the Communist Party, there is no doubt that a number of its leading members – almost certainly including Strand – were also party members. However many others were simply people who shared the general left wing views of the times.

After the split, the League had no support from outside bodies and was entirely dependent on membership fees and the charges for courses and lectures. It was open to all photographers, and had a bold belief in the true purpose of photography. In the document ‘For A League Of American Photographers‘, its executive board stated:

Photography has tremendous social value. Upon the photographer rests the responsibility and duty of recording a true image of the world as it is today. Moreover, he must not only show us how we live, but indicate the logical development of our lives.

The major figure in keeping the activities running over the years was Sid Grossman, described as an organisational genius as well as a fine photographer, but many others, including Walter Rosenblum (president for many years), Dan Weiner and Sol Libsohn played vital roles. Paul Strand was always on hand for advice and also taught and lectured (Rosenblum describes a class by him in his essay mentioned earlier). Aaron Siskind led the Harlem project for four years, and there were many others. All those involved in the League’s programs gave their time without charge.

Most of those who belonged to the Photo League, at least before the late 1940s, were working class New Yorkers, from the lower east side, from Brooklyn and from the Bronx. Most were in their teens and twenties when they joined; many were the sons and daughters of first generation immigrants living in these working class areas, and they were predominantly of Jewish origin. Few were professional photographers, most were working in low paid jobs

The League set up in a second floor loft – the former FPL premises in East Twenty-first Street. This small base became exhibition hall, meeting room, darkroom and school for the members.

They were attracted in particular by the low cost (the teaching staff were not paid) and high standard of the photographic tuition on offer. The League school, directed by Sid Grossman, offered courses in the techniques, history, aesthetics and practice of photography. As well as Grossman, a gifted teacher, and Libsohn who together ran the documentary class, there were also courses and guest appearances by many well-known photographers. Teaching in the photography classes was very much based on practice, with the students being sent out to record life in the various communities of Manhattan, taking photographs that were then criticised – at times extremely forcefully – and discussed in class.

The Photo League School was, at the time as Hal Greenwood noted in 1947, the ‘only non-commercial photo school in America‘, and in the years it was open, trained over 1500 photographers. It used a ‘progressive educational method: the student learns by doing’ which was unusual for its time and aimed ‘to help the student ‘discover the world; to develop a personal, philosophic, and visual perception which would load to an individual direction in photography’. Its success can be seen in the work of those who passed through it, and also by the later adoption of similar methods by many courses in photography in our schools of art. Unfortunately few of them did it anything like as well.

Hine and recent scandal

As well as Strand, other notable photographers, including Berenice Abbot and Margaret Bourke-White – sat on the advisory board and persuaded other well known figures to come and talk and also to exhibit their work, including Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Lewis Hine. Weegee had his first exhibition at the Photo League and became an enthusiastic member.

Hine, occupied a special place in the pantheon of the League. His campaigning around the turn of the century, fighting for better protection for children in the workplace (and the enforcement of existing laws designed to protect them) was the epitome of the type of photography they existed to promote, although their interests did range much wider to cover the whole range of what might be called expressive photography, and included almost anything but outright commercialism and the pictorialism of the amateur club movement. Their list of heroes very much derived from Strand’s views on straight photography, expressed forcefully in the 1920s in opposition to pictorialism. A typical list would include Stieglitz, Strand, Hine, Jacob Riis (the first photographer to record the conditions of the poor in New York), the FSA photographers, Atget, and Edward Weston, all photographers who used the camera without manipulation.

When Hine died in 1940, his collection of pictures and negatives was presented to the League; when the League was wound up, this collection ended up with the former president, Walter Rosenblum, eventually becoming a part of the George Eastman House collection. The provenance of some prints apparently signed by Hine but made on paper which was not produced until the 1950s has been a recent cause célèbre among gallerists and collectors, involving an out of court settlement and possible continuing legal action.

(‘Vintage prints’, generally accepted as those made by the photographer within a couple of years of the date of the negative, sell for a considerable premium over those made at a later date by other hands. Although later prints are often both better printed and in better condition, they never have the same rarity as vintage prints.)

Photo Notes

One of the other vital activities of the League was the publication of a monthly bulletin, ‘Photo Notes‘. By today’s standards this was very crudely reproduced, poor quality type from a stencil duplicator. Despite the lack of photographs, it became the most important photographic magazine of its times. Edited for four years by Rosalie Gwathmey, (other editors included Lou Stoumen) it gave details of the League’s events, published reviews of current photographic shows, and published both new writing on photography and also reprints of some of the classic articles.* Among those who wrote for it was perhaps the best-known critic of documentary photography, Elizabeth McCausland. Photo Notes was distributed free to museums and galleries and reached a large audience, attracting them to League events. Although the league’s actual membership was never high, many other photographers participated in its activities

The War

The USA entered the war in 1941, and most of the men in the League were of fighting age. For many of them the war provided an opportunity for photography. Among League members who served in the military were Walter Rosenblum (he was among those to land first on D-Day), Morris Engel, Sid Grossman, Morris Huberland, Theodore Gumbs, Sam Solomon, Bess Maslow (with the Red Cross), Louis Clyde-Stoumen, Maz Zobel, Sam Dinin, Kenneth Miller, Albert Fenn, George Gelberg, J P Connolly and Dan Weiner.

Those left at home photographed in various ways to support the war effort; a Photo Notes editorial urged members ‘to make photographs for the defense project which the League is working on. To make photographs of the people of America as they organize themselves to defeat fascism’ and to help the League ‘to utilize all the resources of the League, our exhibitions, our project, our school, our relationship with other organizations; with the aim of doing the most that we can towards the successful prosecution of this war.’

Subversive Activities

Editorial!

In the immediate post-war period the future looked bright for the League. Many old members had returned and there was an influx in new members, so much so that the League had got together the money for a move into new, larger premises, when a bombshell fell. The first the League knew about it was when they received a phone call from a newspaper, asking if they would like to comment on their listing by the Attorney General as an organisation subversive to the United States.

The group called an emergency meeting, at which Strand spoke eloquently about the need to defend democracy and our rights. You can read his speech in the ‘Special Number’ of Photo Notes, together with contributions by Walter Rosenblum, Ansel Adams, Barbara Morgan and others. Strand and Nancy Newhall drafted a protest telegram that was sent by the meeting to the Attorney General, congressmen and the papers, while Gene Smith was working on the draft of a more detailed letter. A petition was started. Following a suggestion by Barbara Morgan, Beaumont Newhall was appointed to produce a historical article to submit to magazines showing the League in the context of documentary photography, and work began on an exhibition, ‘This is the Photo League’ which included work by both Richard Avedon and Ansel Adams.

Special Number

The immediate result of the blacklisting was an increase in membership, with many noted photographers from across the USA joining in support of the organisation, seeing it as being a fight for photography and against political interference. However, as the years went on the cold war hysteria intensified. In 1949 there were further allegations made against the League and Sid Grossman was named in a trial by a former League member who claimed to have been recruited by him into the Communist party. Grossman was blacklisted and had to resign from his position in the League and abandon his teaching career.

Although the accusations against the League were clearly unfounded, in that its activities were photographic rather than political, in the paranoia of the McCarthy era, any well-founded suspicion that some of its prominent members were Communists was enough to prove guilt by association.

Paul Strand left to live in France as things started to become difficult for him, others found difficulties in getting work or passports because of their League membership, and so left. The school had to close; newspapers would no longer mention League events and so audiences for events dropped dramatically. Finally in 1951 it could no longer pay the rent and had to close.

For 15 years the League had provided a vital support mechanism for photographers in New York. It had educated them, given them encouragement and new ideas. It was a place to go to meet and talk with other photographers It had made an important contribution to the growth of photography and public awareness of photography in New York at a time when that city was becoming the world centre for photography. It was a movement in which others – notably pioneers such as Steiglitz, Steichen and others at the Museum of Modern Art – played a part, but it was the Photo League that brought photography to the heart of the city.

How the League would have developed, and the consequences for photography if it were not for the accusation is a matter of pure conjecture. In some ways it was very much a product of the 1930s and the spirit of brotherhood and selfless generosity and idealism of the times. Those involved still- in the main – look back in their eighties and nineties with justified pride at what they achieved, and their work is a legacy we can still enjoy.

Peter Marshall, 2001.

* Photo Notes was something I had in mind when I was editor of the magazine of London Independent Photography, LipService, in the 1990a. It did include images, but only as rather diagrammatic photocopies of photographic prints.

Five Year Growth

Someone asked me yesterday if the only thing I photographed was protests. It was a genuine query, because she had seen me working at every protest she had attended in recent months, but my answer was “not quite”. But I went on to say that there were just so many protests at the moment that they had more or less forced everything else out of my diary – and out of My London Diary.  I used to cover a rather wider range of events.

It’s perhaps partly the election coming on, though I don’t really see a huge decrease in the activity of protesters after May 7, whichever party or parties form our new government. The policies that are behind what seems to be a growing resentment and militancy were many of them begun by Labour although the screw has certainly been tightened by the Conservative-LibDem coalition government. To mix a metaphor, Labour might release a little of the pressure, but it still looks to me as if growing inequality is stoking up a boiler on its way to bursting point.

Other photographers occasionally ask me how I find out about all the protests I cover, but really it isn’t a problem. My problem is more about choosing which of the many going on to decide to attend. Yesterday there were half a dozen things in various parts of London I knew about (and some I only heard about after the event) but I only got to one. And the pressure of work is such that I’ve been getting over-tired, not getting enough sleep and finding that I have to stop work after a few hours -at times I begin to feel my age.

It’s been a few days longer than usual since my last post here, mainly because I’ve been out working every day, and its likely to happen again. Today I’m able to sit here writing this because I didn’t manage to finish yesterday’s work at the computer, simply falling asleep as I tried to write, eventually dragging myself off to bed. So this morning I had work to finish and also still needed to rest. Otherwise there were a couple of protests in the centre of London and another following on from yesterday’s protests in Brixton I might be photographing. But I need a day off. Perhaps when I’ve finished writing this I’ll go for a quiet walk, taking as usual a camera with me, but probably not making and photographs.


X-Pro1, 10-24mm, 20mm

Sometimes I still do manage to photograph things that are really a day off from protests, and there was one such at the end of Febraury, when I went to a party to celebrate five years of Grow Heathrow. I’d first visited the site very briefly shortly after it had opened, just a short walk from an extremely small plot of land I had become a “beneficial owner” of at Heathrow Airplot in Sipson as a part of the campaign against a ‘third runway’ for Heathrow, and had returned for a couple more visits over the years.  Every time I went I thought it would be my last visit, with court cases and evictions always looming, and it was something of a surprise to find they were still there and active after 5 years.


X-T1, 10-20, 10mm

I’d thought a little about taking photographs, and decided it would be an ideal occasion to use the Fuji cameras, taking with me both the Fuji X-T1 and X-Pro1 bodies. I had four lenses, the 10-24mm and 18-55mm zooms, the 18mm f2 and the Samyang 8mm fisheye, though I didn’t use this. I’d taken the 18mm in case I had to work in low light, though it only has a one stop advantage over the 18-55 zoom at the same focal length. It’s also a nicely light and compact lens which is handy to have on a body hung around my neck when travelling, and my favourite focal length, but in the end I only made a few images with it. Eleven out of just over four hundred. Most used was the 18-55mm (266) with just over half as many (142) on the 10-24mm.


X-Pro1, 18-55mm, 55mm

I like the optical viewfinder of the X-Pro1, but ended up taking more pictures with it using the electronic viewfinder and the 10-24 zoom, and wishing that I had two X-T1 bodies. One thing I did miss was a longer lens than the 18-55mm, particularly when photographing the panellists at a discussion where I could not move in closer. I’ve rather got used to using the 18-105mm on the Nikon, and if I ever decide to use the Fujis seriously would certainly buy something longer, perhaps the 18-135mm.


X-T1, 18-55mm, 37.4mm

I had the usual battery problems – I got through four in the four hours I was there, and occasionally the focus was just a little slow, but otherwise things worked fine. I’m getting used to using the exposure compensation dials, though moving the focus point around is still a little tricky. The X-T1 viewfinder is really good in low light too.

There was a huge advantage in using the Fujis in quiet conditions close to other people in that I could take as many pictures as I liked without being a distraction. I often feel intrusive when photographing with the Nikons, although I know the shutter sound is louder to me than to other people, it is still loud enough to be annoying. Almost as annoying as a Canon :-)  though less so than a cannon. With the X-T1 you can use the electronic shutter and all there is to hear is a slight whir as the lens focusses. Usually I leave the shutter in mechanical mode, which is pretty quiet, but does give you some feedback that you have taken a picture. Sometimes I found myself having to review an image to be sure I had really pressed the button.


X-Pro1, 10-24mm, 17.4mm

It was a pleasant afternoon, and good to meet a few old friends as well. Of course you can read more about Grow Heathrow and see more pictures on My London Diary in Grow Heathrow’s 5th Birthday.

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