Category: My Own Work

David Plowden – Vanishing Point?

I’ve written before – elsewhere – about David Plowden. His ‘Small Town America‘, published in 1994 by Harry Abrams in NY (ISBN 0810938421) remains one of my favourite records of America – just one among around 20 of his books, and he was among the list of around 250 ‘Notable Photographers‘ I first put on-line around 2000.

He is also one of the photographers whose work is included on David Sapir’s Fixing Shadows, one of the earliest web sites to feature fine collections of ‘straight photography‘ (and on which I was proud to be included as the first UK photographer on the site.)

So it was a little surprising to read on The Online Photographer a review of his retrospective publication ‘Vanishing Point‘ starting “David Plowden may be the best photographer you never heard of.” Surely there can be few with a serious interest in photography who didn’t visit the old ‘About Photography‘ or ‘Fixing Shadows‘ – I ask tongue in cheek, although back in 2000, there really were not too many other serious games on the block.

But of course there are people with a serious interest in photography – even some photographers – who were hardly out of nappies in those primitive days of the web, and now we are overwhelmed with material. Then I had problems finding sites worth writing about because there was so little available; now I have problems finding sites worth writing about because there is so much.

Back to David Plowden, a fine and unassuming gentleman who I met a few years back, and a great photographer. Reviewer Geoffrey Wittig puts it well: “Walker Evans without the condescension.” His work is clear, precise statements, beautifully seen and presented. As the review also says, it is perhaps low on irony, but it is full of a kind of love and reverence for the subject.

Plowden’s lack of visibility in some circles largely resulted from a difference of opinion between him and curator John Szarkowski, and he never made it to the Czar’s pantheon. There seems to me to be a certain irony here, in that some of Szarkowski’s own photography has a very similar character; perhaps their failure to connect was some kind of turf war on the curator’s part.

Plowden of course kept on at the photography for some 50 years, and at 75 has a show – as Arthur Gross points out in a comment to the review (do read it) – at the Catherine Edelmann Gallery in Chicago (until Dec 29, 2007.) You can also find his work at the Lawrence Miller Gallery, but the definitive site is his own David Plowden website.

Vanishing Point (ISBN-10: 0393062546) is an expensively produced book and one that needs a strong table to rest it on, with some 350 pages. Fortunately it is heavily discounted from suppliers such as Amazon and would be a very acceptable Christmas present for many photographers, including myself!

Larry Clark at the MEP

The Maison Europeenne de la Photographie (MEP) is perhaps my favourite space to go to look at photography, and I only wish we had something like it in London, though of course a part of its charm is that it is just a few yards from the busy pavements of the Rue St Antoine where you can eat and buy real French food along with the ordinary Parisians. I’ve spent many happy hours and days wandering the Marais, and if it has lost a little of its charm over the years under the relentless spread of boutiques it remains one of the great urban experiences.

Marais, 1973
The Marais in 1973, from Paris, 1973 (C) Peter Marshall

Larry Clark‘s “Tulsa, 1963-1971” is one of three major shows currently there (until 6 Jan, 2008) and is an extensive showing of his work, most of which appeared in the books ‘Tulsa‘ and ‘Teenage Lust‘.

An important part of the show was an edited version of a film in which Clark talks about his life and work. This was in English, but with French subtitles. These provided an interesting comment on the differences between English and French ways of thinking, as in many places they diverged. While Clark’s responses were American laconic, the translation was French philosophical.

Clark’s story is probably too well known to need a detailed exposition, and as I managed to lose my notes (it was a very good party on Thursday night) there may be a few misplaced details in this outline, but I don’t think it really matters.

Clark was born in 1943 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which, from memory, Oscar Gaylord Herron – also from Tulsa – described in his ‘Vagabond‘ (1975) as the jewel in the bellybutton of America, bang in the middle and as number 10 on the list of Soviet missile targets. His father was a door-to-door book salesman, but when business got really bad, left the job and worked with the family business that Clark’s mother had established. This was in baby photography, going to homes and photographing newly-born infants.

When Clark was 14, his father came home one day, took a look at him sitting around downstairs and told him he looked like a piece of shit before going upstairs and hardly ever coming down again or talking to Clark. Family life took on a very curious quality, with his father staying upstairs, eating food which his wife took up to him, although Clark also writes that his father gave him three dollars every Friday to go out.

At his school in one of the poorest areas of the city, Clark mixed and befriended many other kids who also had trouble at home. Kids who arrived at school beaten and bruised; girls who were screwed by their brothers and probably their fathers and more. Hanging out with these kids he learnt how to extract amphetamines from inhalers – his three dollars bought three of them – and get high.

Also at 14, he began to help his mother taking baby pictures, and in a year or two he was a photographer, taking these on his own. Clark realised that he needed to get away from his family, and at 18 left home to go to study photography at Layton School of Art in Milwaukee (Wisconsin). It was there he saw the work of W Eugene (Gene) Smith in Life magazine, and realised that there was rather more to photography than taking baby pictures.

When he returned home, he began to take photographs of his friends and their wayward lifestyle, very much as one of them. Then the army claimed him for a couple of years and after that he moved to New York, trying unsuccessfully to make a living as a photographer. There he met and photographed Gene Smith and also the friends he made – again on the fringes of society.

He left New York and went back to Tulsa with the idea of making a film, telling the truth about the things that were happening in America, with the kind of people that he knew. He bought a camera and sound equipment, but then found it impossible to work on his own. Looking at his photographs he decided instead that they could be a book, although there were gaps in his record that he need to fill, and he went back to photographing his friends to do this.

There is a very strong sense is which the books are like films, showing a story in a very similar way. Clark felt that photographers before him had stopped short, there were things about America that they were not prepared to show. Drugs weren’t supposed to exist in America, nor for that matter was sex (and certainly not incest) and he was determined to show the truth about the kind of life he had been a part of.

Although he exaggerates – there were photographers who had photographed virtually all aspects of the American underbelly as well as those who concentrated on Mom and apple pie – he did so in a much more personal and considerably more intense manner, pulling few if any punches. When Ralph Gibson‘s Lustrum Press brought out Tulsa in 1971, it certainly created a stir.

But in reality, little it showed was news. It may not have featured widely in pictures, but Kerouac’s ‘On The Road‘ was published in 1957 (I picked up my paperback copy on a second-hand bookstall in Hounslow in 1963) and there were plenty of other books. Kerouac’s cast of friends were of course rather more literary, but there was still plenty of sex, drugs and aimlessness, if rather less anger than in Clark’s work.

Clark was able to work the way that he did because he was living – certainly at times – the life that his friends he photographed were living. As he says in Tulsa, “once the needle goes in it never comes out.” He worked with a Leica to avoid the clunk of the mirror with an SLR, the quieter, lower tone of the slow cloth shutter getting in time, as he says, almost musical.

As well as anger, there is also a lyricism about some of his work. In one of my favourite images, a woman sits back in a chair, seen from the side, injecting herself in the right arm. Above the waist she wears only a white bra, and she is lit strongly from the window at top left of the image. The bright light on the white fabric, and also to a lesser extent on her skin are diffused, perhaps by a little greasy fingermark on the lens or filter, creating an incredible glow.

Clark’s work influenced many young photographers, but was also important as a source of inspiration for films such as Taxi Driver and Drugstore Cowboy, and both Martin Scorsese and Gus Van Sant are great fans. When Clark saw Drugstore Cowboy he thought that this guy was treading on his turf, and when they met at an opening, he told Van Sant that he wanted to make a film. This led to ‘Kids‘ (1995) and other films followed.

Large Image Collections on line

MOCA search gives 182 results
Addison Gallery search finds 134 images from Teenage Lust and Tulsa
LACMA search shows 132 images

Other sites

Larry Clark on Myspace
Official Website – under construction in Nov 2007 – but try later.
Luhring Augustine
Artnet
Pavement
Salon
Larry Clark

Peckham or Paris?

If I wasn’t going to be in Paris on Wednesday, I would be heading instead for Peckham, where the Peckham Literary Festival 2007 kicks off with two events I’m sorry to miss (though I could hardly have attended both.) The festival programme continues until Sunday and so far as I can tell contains no photography, although earlier in the year I wrote about the show ‘Peckham Rising’ at one of the festival venues, which included photographs by Thabo Jaiyesimi and Daniele Tamagni.

Things have been happening in Peckham this year – and I was also there for the Human Rights Juke Box and the I Love Peckham festival. If you can’t get to any of the events you can listen to a little of the music which will be performed at the festival from the new album “Psychogeography” described as “ a collection of dark but warm songs about losing vital limbs, nursing small birds, conversations with insects etc.”

It’s hard for me to see Paris clearly – it has so many memories. Some of them are in the pictures I took there in 1973, on my second visit to the city (now all this site should be working – apologies to anyone who found some missing images earlier.) These are are couple of salted paper prints I made in the 1980s.

And no, I never made the edition which is referred to on the print above, which was a kind of joke. I think I probably made 3 or 4 prints – and they were all different.

Last year, going to Paris and trying to fit in Paris Photo, the Mois de la Photo and the incredible fringe festival, the Off, in five days there I had little time to take pictures during the day (not much at night either) but I did manage to put together a set of work, Paris November, which does include a few pictures inside the photo fair. I won’t need to tell you guys that you can go on to the next image by clicking on the main picture – or choose any other image by clicking on its thumbnail.

Local Events, Local Papers?

I’m not sure if any of my local papers (5 titles, four of them free come through my door each week, several on a fairly direct route to the recycling bin) bothered to send a photographer to our local Remembrance Day parade and service. I did see one other photographer there, although I think he only took a couple of pictures – but that could have been what the paper wanted.


Remembrance Day in Staines

Or perhaps the local paper photographers were among the many people using phones and compact digitals to take pictures – particularly of the brownies and scouts in the parade? Doubtless I’ll find out on Thursday when the several hundred pages of advertising accompanied by a few snippets of news comes through the letterbox (or the following week – as two of them simply recycle stuff from the one we still pay for, in the hope it will one day have some news.)

Twenty years ago,  we used to tell our keener photography students it was worth getting in touch with the local papers, taking a few pictures along and asking if they could cover an occasional story. It got them a little pocket money, and one or two eventually ended up with full time jobs, or even in Fleet Street. (Now of course a memory, though the few times I’ve dropped into the old pubs there in recent years I’ve ended up talking to guys from the print, revisiting their pasts.)

Now, forget it.

PR shots, handouts and free snaps from people and organisations who want publicity provide 90% of the photos, with the rest coming from a few remaining poorly paid and overworked staff.

So if anyone in Staines wants to see pictures from the Remembrance Day parade and service – and it was a well attended event – they can look on My London Diary.  I went there to photograph it because I wanted to take some pictures to mark the occasion, but didn’t want to cover the national event in Whitehall – too much security, too little access. I could have gone to any of the hundreds of other such events around the country rather than Staines, but that’s where I live.

Peter Marshall 

Cafe Ideal, Cool Blondes and Paradise

And now for something completely different, and yes, its also something I prepared earlier.

The first version of this work was I think was shown as colour prints in 1992, and I also made a book dummy at around that date. This particular selection of images dates from 1996 and first went on line in 2000. It comes from a very extensive project, certainly thousands of images, still in the files behind me. It was made as a work with 3 sections – Cafe Ideal, Cool Blondes and Paradise – each getting its title from one of the images in the section.

I was proud of the original web design, but it proved too difficult for many visitors in 2000. I wanted simplicity, with just the title graphic at top left, the image with its caption. The title is an image map and allows you to jump to the different sections, while clicking on the image takes you to the next picture (and will eventually take you through the whole work.)

When I got perhaps the twentieth message from an AoL user telling me they could only see a single page with one picture, I added text links at the left of the page to go to the different sections.

But I didn’t want to lose the simplicity of the navigation through the images. So I added some text to a front page on the site that told people what I had thought would be obvious. This front page also has a short introductory text to the work.

Perhaps some touches in it are too obvious – each section starts, for example with a door or gate – but I still like it. One day I’ll do another edit, going back to those files, and bring it out as a book, perhaps with some text.

Peter Marshall

Sutton Show

I don’t much relish hangings, even though fortunately those which I’ve experienced have been of an artistic nature. Today’s at Sutton Library in south London (or for those who still believe the Post Office, Surrey) was a rather lengthy slog, and the show with the hardly inspiring title ‘Eight Photographers‘ remains on show only until Nov 15th, and on the 16th gets taken down to make way for a barn dance.

So those of you inclined to venture south of the river (or who even live there) will need to get your skates on if you wish to see it (and don’t go on Monday as the library is closed.) My contribution is eight images from ‘My London Diary‘ chosen a little at random from the 24 that appeared earlier this year in ‘Another London‘ at Kingston Museum (or rather the 20 that were still in their frames, unsold.)


‘Kiss-It’ protest against violence in Mental Health treatment, London Feb 2005.

Among the other seven egos laid bare on the white walls are a number of photographers I’ve known for a long time, including Sam Tanner, whose images of his own mother’s last years are a sensitive, loving, poignant and very human document. David Malarkey has caught and enlarged the diffraction of light in a way that can be very striking, especially when glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, although they also have an unusual quality seen close to. Carol Hudson‘s four panoramic images come from her local street, and one which includes a startling pink pedestrian blur along with a static figure, other people and a bus particularly caught my attention. Tony Mayne was the only among us to have worked to give the show some particular local interest, his three blocks of nine images each showing people on the high street a few yards away. Also exhibiting are Nick Hale, Darren McCloy and Len Salem.

Sutton Library looks a superb library, in a new civic centre for the London Borough of Sutton, just off the High Street, a short walk from Sutton Station (it felt further when I was carrying 8 framed pictures.) It has a nice exhibition space, although unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a coherent arts programme there (and I certainly can’t find any details of this show on the London Borough of Sutton web site), and it is also used for other types of event – such as the barn dance. Ask Sutton not me if you want details of that.

A Busy Day

When I talked about my pictures from ‘My London Diary’ in Poland, most of what I did was unscripted. One of the pictures I’d chosen (all from 2006) was from the end of October:

and looking at on screen it seemed a good opportunity to talk about the different events I had done on that day – and the kind of thing I might be doing again in London the following week.

Last year, I’d started with a protest in East Ham to keep Queen’s Market, then come up to Trafalgar Square for the annual demonstration against deaths in custody by the United Friends and Families, before going on to a pub off Oxford Street to photograph the Halloween ‘Crawl of the Dead‘ in the West End which produced my chosen picture.

This year, I was a little busier, as more was happening in Westminster. As well as the United Friends march, I also photographed Kurds protesting at the prospect of Turkish incursions into Iraq, a Pro-Life (anti-abortion) rally, as well as the ‘Peace Train‘ and a few other things around Parliament Square. And then, it being more or less Halloween again, another ‘Crawl of the Dead, this time starting from a city pub.

It was an interesting day, but I wasn’t so happy with my pictures of the zombies, partly because my Nikon SB800 rather inappropriately decided to give up the ghost. Working with the unit built in to the D200 is not the same.

China, Burma protests

In the gloom and rain of last week I photographed two protests in London connected with China, which seems to be making just about everything we use now. Wednesday was the anniversary of the confinement of Aung San Suu Kyi, 12 years under house arrest in Burma. Around a hundred people turned up opposite the Chinese embassy in Portland Place for an hour’s vigil – as the Burmese regime depends on Chinese support. Then they walked along to the Burmese Embassy for a further protest. I left them there, although they were to continue to Parliament Square for a candle-lit vigil.

It was a tough event to find ideas for photographs beyond the obvious – masks and monks. The Global Human Rights Torch Relay the following day was more promising, but the weather wasn’t – a fairly steady light rain for much of the time. This called for the 2008 Olympics to be moved from Beijing as the Chinese human rights abuse is not compatible with the Olympic ideals – as too had some of the placards – like the one above – on the previous day.

The torches certainly added a little colour and the ‘Greek Goddess’ was attractive even if she didn’t look particularly Greek. But I had problems – perhaps due to the rain – when my flash started to behave erratically. Nikon’s flash – especially with i-TTL units such as the SB800 is one reason to prefer Nikon to Canon, though the full-frame Canon 5D works so well at high ISO you might choose it and work by available light.

But even the D200 can do pretty well in low light compared to film:

This was at the candlelit vigil opposite the Chinese embassy, and I think the semi-fisheye effect works well for once.

Peter Marshall

Bielsko-Biala Diary

Photo festivals tend to keep you pretty busy, with meeting and talking to other photographers, but I like to find time to take a few pictures too. While I was in Bielsko-Biala last a just over a week ago for the 2007 FotoArtFestival , I kept a diary, and took some pictures both of the place and of the festival to illustrate it.

I’ve had to censor the diary a little for publication, and get rid of the libellous remarks and wilder thoughts, but I hope there are still a few controversial passages. You can read what I really thought about some of the shows, and see a little of what photographers get up to at such events.


On my way to the theatre in Bielsko-Biala


Friday lunchtime – I was sitting next to Joan Fontcuberta and Sarah Moon


Early on Saturday morning in a smoky Gallery Wzgorge

I’ve not finished the diary – still some material from the final day of the ‘Maraton’, the final party and a couple of pieces on some of the shows to add. Then there is my own presentation, the final session in the Maraton, and I also intend to put the text and some of the pictures of it on line as well (copyright issues mean I cannot use them all – but wherever possible I’ll link to the same or similar images.)

All the pictures I made in Poland were using a Fuji Finepix F31fd. Would I buy one again? Probably not, but some of them aren’t bad. But not having a viewfinder is still a pain.
You can also read the diary – and some of my presentation – from the 2005 FotoArtFestival on line.

ROOF UNIT at [ space ]

First I’d better declare an interest. Actually I’m not sure I need to. This is – I hope – a very personal blog, one that reflects my own personal involvement in the medium of photography, and my conviction that if it isn’t personal, it isn’t worth saying (or photographing.)

But I was at [ space ] in Hackney on Friday night partly because my own work was appearing in the ‘Roof Unit Foundations’ show there, though I would have gone in any case to see the Brian Griffin show also opening there (see separate article.) My pictures in it are ones I now feel a certain distance from, as I took them in 1983.

Roof Unit is a group of photographers based in a former soap factory in the East End. I met one of them, Toby Smith, at an ‘Olympic Symposium’ held at [ space ], an arts complex in Hackney, in June, (where I also saw what will almost certainly be the best film to come out of the London 2012 Olympics.)

Toby talked at the symposium about his bid for a photographic contract for the games, made together with Photofusion, based in Brixton. I contribute work to the Photofusion library and I’ve been connected with it – if fairly peripherally – since its earlier incarnation in Webbs Road when I joined a ‘Men’s Group’ run by Crispin Hughes.

I met Toby again at a Photofusion opening on the day before the contract was announced (it didn’t go to Photofusion, although their bid was credible enough to get to the final stages) and naturally talked to him about my work in the Olympic area and the Lower Lea generally since the early 1980s. He was interested and later took a look at my River Lea site, and I was delighted to be invited to take part in the Roof Unit show in Hackney with a group of 4 colour pictures from those I had made around 1983.

This is a picture from the edge of the main Olympic site, and a scene that when I saw it made me exclaim ‘Man Ray’, although I have really no reason to think the wrapped object is a sewing machine. I’ll put the other 3 of my images at the bottom of this piece :


Bromley by Bow, 1982.
Lightjet print on dibond, 30x20cm. Peter Marshall

Back in April this year, after I’d photographed the Manor Gardens Allotments – now sadly lost to the Olympic juggernaut – I wrote: “part of the charm of the allotments at the moment is that they are a little run-down and the plot-holders huts have a very personal and rather heath-robinson quality. a still life photographer could spend their life here and never exhaust the subject matter.” The three images by Gesche Wurfel provide a powerful illustration of the fact, working precisely and in square-format colour. I particularly liked Shed 2, with its perfect balance between inside and outside lighting connecting the interior with the allotments and its use of colour, particularly the glowing orange plastic spade, the reds of the window frame and the yellow hedge outside.

Rita Soromenho‘s bunch of dandelion heads collected on a walk by the Lea were also glorious for their colour and richness, transmuting these wild and so-common plants into an image of sumptuous beauty. The fine detail and glow against the black background produced in this image made on a scanner gives an amazing realism.

Jason Larkin adds a touch of human interest in his two pictures taken in one of the many small factory units on the site. Heads peer out between stacked white boxes of scotch salmon, and a crudely tattooed hand cuts through a slice of rich orange fish. Of course all of the work on show implies human presence, whether in the eerie night-time pylons of Anthony Marsland (one suspects putting the cables underground was a decision made largely on doubtful aesthetic grounds) or the goal-posts of East Marsh by Mark King, seen in dramatic light and one of a number of sporting facilities to be lost during the Olympic development, in this case I think for a coach park.

Chris Littlewood’s three Ebb and Flow images show the patterns left by the rise and fall of water and waste, soon to be a thing of the past above in the site area with the building of a lock on the Prescott Channel, which may enable the use of barges to carry away spoil from the building sites, but perhaps more importantly will protect the delicate noses of the athletes and corporate guests for whom the Olympics is staged from the sewage sometimes carried upstream on the tide.

Reinaldo Loureiro‘s untitled C-type print reminded me of the travellers caravans I was invited into for tea many years ago when helping to protect them from police harassment in Manchester. The same mixture of kitsch religious images, plastic flowers and everyday life – in this case a plate of biscuits and a beer can. Toby Smith‘s Silo 7 is very much the kind of view of derelict industry that has excited some of my own work over the years, and I would have welcomed seeing more of his work, even if that meant smaller prints. Jon Wyatt‘s panoramic image of the ‘Greenway’, the path on the Northern Sewage Outfall, shows it in dramatic light with a fine mass of grey clouds. I wasn’t sure whether it might have been improved by rather less of the brown of the path in the foreground, but perhaps this was a deliberate reference to what lay under the photographers feet on its route to Beckton.

Outside in the corridor are two large light boxes with Duratran lambda prints by Allesandra Chila. These ‘Olympian Visions’ were (I think) of a group of volunteers tidying up one of the filter beds of a former water works and a view over the rooftops of Hackney Wick. I’m not sure exactly from where this was taken, but many of us will have spent considerable time waiting for Silverlink and contemplating a rather similar view. Although I found these prints impressive, I also felt a little disappointment when I moved in for a closer view, which gave me grain or texture rather than the greater detail for which I had hoped.

Also in the show were Peter Ainsworth, with an image of fridges piled up behind a wall and a white van parked in front, Sophie Gerrard with a picture of a lock-keepers house on the Bow Back Rivers (an interesting lock, recently restored,) and Wendy Pye, whose Ipod slideshow gave us some fleeting glimpses around Marshgate Lane and the Old River Lea; too fleeting for me – I would have liked to see more images and a slightly slower presentation rate.

It’s an interesting show, combining a variety of approaches to the area, much of which will disappear and whose whole character will be changed over the next few years, a change which I can only view with considerable regret.


The Lea Navigation carried timber to many timber yards. Upper Edmonton, 1983.
Lightjet print on dibond, 20x30cm. Peter Marshall


Ponders End, 1983.
Lightjet print on dibond, 20x30cm. Peter Marshall


Hackney Wick, 1983.
Lightjet print on dibond, 20x30cm. Peter Marshall