Category: Reviews etc

Photo London: Fish out of Water

It was I suppose apt that I felt like a fish out of water as I wandered around Photo-London on the opening day yesterday. Its new venue, the old Billingsgate fish market, seems an excellent choice, airy and open, completely unlike the underground tomb in which Paris Photo is held.

What made me feel out of place and uneasy was in the main the work on the walls. Photo-London is supposedly dedicated to contemporary photography, meaning from the 1970s on, although a little earlier work did creep in, so I’d expected to see contemporary work. What I hadn’t been prepared for was the almost complete dominance of the show by large empty photographs. Of course shows like Photo-London are dealer shows, and the dealers follow the money, and big money is largely corporate money with vast office walls to fill.

Although the work in corporations may actually get done in open plan offices and cubicles often with virtually no walls at all, reception areas are designed to impress by scale, and 20×16 prints look rather small on a 30 foot high wall. As Photo-London showed, there is plenty of photographic choice for such spaces, from garish to minimal, to suit your company profile.

Of course not all big photographs are bad photographs, but in general I don’t think a large scale fits the medium well. Its most powerful statements have an intimacy that works better on a moderate scale, perhaps best of all in the pages of the photographic book.

Of course there was work that stood out for me, though relatively little. I’ll go back to the show (it runs until Sunday) and look at some again. Much of what attracted me was however familiar, for example – a fine set of work by Don McCullin as well as pictures by Chris Killip, John Benton-Harris and Ian Berry, all showing “How We Are”, (although three of these four are unaccountably missing on the walls of the Tate show) – but there was also work new to me (at least in actual print form) which I found exciting and hope to write more on later – so long as I can find images on the web. Along with much that confirmed my exisiting predjudices.

Portraiture in particular seems very much in a rut. Use flat lighting, stand your subject or subjects central, looking deadpan at the camera, photograph in medium or large-format colour and you seem to be guaranteed gallery space. Around ten years back this seemed fresh and new (at least to those who had never seen the work of August Sander, who did it so much better, if in black and white.)

Photo London opening
John Benton-Harris (2nd from left) with friends at the opening.

As openings go, its a rather dreary and disappointing event, with small cliques in the different gallery spaces and its hard to meet new people or have a real party. At least at Billingsgate you could go and sit outside by the Thames, although it was a chill evening on the north bank, even though the sun shone on the buildings on the other bank.

Peter Marshall

Missing Persons 5: James Craig Annan

Another important figure from the 1890s omitted from ‘How We Are: Photographing Britain was the second son of photographer Thomas Annan (whose work was included.) James Craig Annan joined the family fine-printing firm when he was 19 in 1883, and went with his father to Austria to the studio of Karl Klic to learn his novel photogravure process for the reproduction of photographs, for which they bought the sole UK rights.

The firm specialised in the reproduction of works of art, and in the early 1890s, James applied his skills to making carbon prints and photogravures from the negatives of calotype pioneers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. The Annan family had known Hill, and had moved from Glasgow to live in his Calton Hill studio in Edinburgh for the last year of Hill’s life.

At the same time, James decided to become a photographer, and his first show, on the company premises in Glasgow in 1892 made a great impression. His landscape work from Holland inspired Alfred Steiglitz, who went to a similar area of the coast and made a his own, in some ways similar image. Soon he was a member of the ‘Linked Ring’ and his work was shown to critical acclaim in London, New York, Paris and Russia, and later in many other cities in Europe, America and India.

James Craig Annan was included with Hill and Evans in a 1906 show at Alfred Steiglitz’s ‘291’ gallery in New York, as well as in the great show Stieglitz organised in Buffalo in 1910 which in some ways marked the end of the Pictorialist movement (and the Linked Ring dissolved in the same year.) Steiglitz published eight of his images from a trip to Spain in 1913 in ‘Camera Work’ the following year. This more or less marked the end of James’s photographic career, and he apparently took few photographs after this time. He retired from the family firm around 1940 and died in 1946, his photographs largely forgotten.

I’ve never fully appreciated the work of Annan, probably because of his use of photogravure as a printing method. I can testify from limited personal experience that this is an extremely tricky method. I made one print, largely to see exactly how it was done and never wanted to repeat the experience. It is a process that requires (and allows) great control. Although I can appreciate the photography of Annan, I find the prints themselves have too pictorial an aesthetic for my more ascetic taste.

There are many photogravures by other photographers that I admire, but his work has always left me with an uneasy feeling of compromise between the photographic and the pictorial, which to some extent characterizes almost all the art photography of this era.

Peter Marshall

Missing Persons 4: Frederick H Evans

No proper view of British photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century would be complete without the work of Frederick Evans. At a time when most photographers with any pretention as artists were busily engaging in making their prints look less like photographs and more like paintings through the use of rough papers and special printing techniques that allowed them to work on the image.

Evans followed instead the example of P H Emerson, photographing in a technically precise manner and printing on platinum paper, which produced a linear tonal scale and was not normally susceptible to manipulation. He was noted for refusing to retouch his work, relying instead on perfecting his technique. His images owed their effect to light, and he would sometimes spend hours, days or even weeks studying the effects of light in the buildings he wanted to photograph in order to find the time of day and light that would produce the photographic effect he wanted.

He valued the clear and delicate tonality of the platinum print to such an extent that when the material went off the market he made no more prints, refusing to use the cruder and less linear tonal scale of the silver print. Some of his images were also reproduced using the Woodburytype process, which uses a relief image on a lead printing plate to produce different thicknesses of pigmented gelatin – and hence different tones – on the paper – essentially a mechanically produced carbon print.

As well as his architectural studies, which certainly include some of the finest images of English cathedrals and their interiors, he also made a number of fine portraits, including justly well-known images of Aubrey Beardsley.

Evans was a leading member of the ‘Linked Ring’ group of artistic photographers. He was also the first English photographer to have his work printed by Alfred Stieglitz in his magazine ‘Camera Work’ in 1904, and 2 years later Stieglitz showed his pictures in his New York gallery, ‘291’, along with the work of D O Hill and James Craig Annan.

Peter Marshall

Missing Persons 3: H P Robinson

Looking at the booklet for the show ‘How We Are: Photographing Britain’ before making my way into the gallery I got a shock. The curators appeared to have omitted the very man who started the whole thing, W H F Talbot. I checked again – it couldn’t be true, and thankfully it wasn’t. They had simply placed him wrongly in alphabetical order under the letter F. So when I realised that H P Robinson was missing, I immediately looked for him under ‘Peach Robinson’, but he wasn’t there either.

Although Rejlander’s ‘Two Ways of Life’ showed a path for photography, it was one taken most enthusiastically by his friend Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901), who, over the years, starting with ‘Fading Away’ (a ‘touching’ deathbed scene which is perhaps hard for us to appreciate, but was only too common an experience in the era before modern medicine) produced a number of impressive works using similar combination printing techniques (such as ‘When The Days Work is Done’, as well as many fine portraits and landscapes.

fading away - HP Robinson
‘Fading Away’ is one of 12 images by H P Robinson available on the Free Information Society web site.

Robinson had trained and exhibited as a painter and was a great fan of Turner and of the Pre-Raphaelites, and he composed his works in much the same fashion, and dealt with some of the same subjects, including for example, a picture of “The Lady of Shallot“.

His use of combination printing continued to cause controversy in photographic circles, Robinson arguing that the aim of photography was to make beautiful pictures, and that the techniques used were irrelevant. He explained his appraoch in the influential book, “Pictorial Effect in Photography“, published in 1867, and was famously involved in arguments with another great photographer, Peter Henry Emerson, who favoured a more simply photographic approach to produce pictorial images.

Pictorialism to which both men contributed, remained a powerful influence in art photography for the next 40 or so years, particularly through groups such as the ‘Linked Ring’ (a strangely masonic guild established by Robinson and others when he left the Photographic Society in 1891) and various other seccesionist groups of art photographers based in other countries.

Although pictorialism was eclipsed in art photography by the rise of modernism in the early twentieth century, much of the debate between Robinson and Emerson had strong resonances in the 1970s and since, when increasingly fine artists began to take up photography and reject much of the purist orthodoxy.

Peter Marshall

Missing Persons 2: Oscar Gustave Rejlander

Rejlander, (1813-75), the son of an officer in the Swedish Army, had studied art in Rome and Paris before coming to England and trying to make a living as a painter. Once he saw a photograph, he realised tha this was the future, and in 1846 he opened a photographic studio in Wolverhampton.

As well as portraiture, his early work included a number of child portraits, some clearly erotic. He later married one of his child models, over 20 years his junior, who he had photographed since she was 14. Lewis Carroll was a collector of this early work and Rejlander, who became a leading expert, helped both him and Julia Margaret Cameron to set up as photographers. Rejlander’s later images of children living on the London streets in the 1860s attracted public attention to their condition.

Rejlander’s major contribution to photography was through his use of multiple exposures and combination printing. While other photographers may previously have used separate sky exposures largely to combat the lack of color sensitivity in all early photographic materials (being sensitive to blue light only, blue skies were over-exposed and lacking in tone if the exposure was made for the rest of the scene), he realised the potential of such methods for artistic purposes.

The best-known picture by Rejlander is his ‘The Two Ways of Life’, said to be put together from around 40 different exposures, painstakingly printed to give a virtually seamless image. It aimed to illustrate the choice between good and evil facing a young man at the start of life, a subject that gave considerable licence for posing models in various states of undress – so much so that when shown in Scotland, one half of the image was covered by a curtain. Read more about it.

Rather than include the image here, take a look at it on the George Eastman House website, where as well as this image you can go to the ‘thumbnails’ link and see their full collection of almost 70 images by Rejlander.

It would be a tricky feat to photograph such a scene today as a single exposure, needing a large studio with impressive resources of artificial lighting. In 1857 it was totally impossible. Using multiple exposures also helped in the tricky problem of finding models, with many playing different roles in the roughly 39 plate negatives he used.

At the time the image was highly controversial. Fortunately for Rejlander, Queen Victoria saw it and was amused, paying 10 guineas for a copy, which she gave to Albert, and he hung it on the wall of his study. With such royal approval, his reputation was made.

There was also a question of scale. At the time, all photographic printing processes were contact processes, producing images exactly the same size as the plate exposed in the camera. Most photos were small – ‘full plate’ size was 8.5×6.5 inches, and many cameras were half or quarter plate. By using a number of plates, Rejlander could make a larger print. The ‘Two Ways’ was 31×16 inches, bringing photography into the same order of scale as easel paintings.

Without doubt, photographs such as these had an influence on painting, and the work of pre-Raphaelites such as Millais often look peculiarly like these combination photographs. Photographs by Rejlander and others were indeed often used as source material, and combined together by painters to give similar results to those he obtained in the darkroom.

But his influence on other photographers was much stronger and more direct. Rejlander was a key figure in British photography in the nineteenth century, a pioneer in a number of respects, and has with considerable justification been called “The Father of Art Photography.”

Peter Marshall

Missing Persons 1 – A Whole Empire

The first missing person from ‘How We Are: Photographing Britain’ is not a person but a whole slice of our nation. Britain was the great imperial power of the nineteenth century, and the empire was in many ways the heart of the British nation. It, and in earlier years the trade in enslaved human beings which we’ve recently been remembering provided the wealth and the goods that made the nation work. Slavery in the British Empire was only ended a year or two before the invention of photography (and those freed people were often still working for the same masters under even harsher conditions.)

Much of the best British photography of the nineteenth century was made in India and to a lesser extent in other countries outside these islands. No history of British photography is complete without the fine work of photographers such as John Murray, Felice Beato, Robert & Harriet Tytler, Linnaeus Tripe, John Burke & William Baker and of course the incomparable Samuel Bourne who arguably in several respects took British photography to new heights.

Sameul Bourne, Darjeeling. Library of Congress LC-USZ62-76815
Samuel Bourne: Darjeeling, 1875/6

Of course, we should not stop there. India was a part Empire Britain and its citizens until independence in 1947 were British too. Another of the truly great nineteenth century photographers was Lala Deen Dayal who learnt his photography in the first engineering college set up in the British Empire.

Peter Marshall

The 3 ‘P’s

Let me introduce you to the 3 ‘P’s. They are what I feel makes any artistic project worthwhile, whether curating a photography show, making a body of work (including My London Dairy) or indeed, writing a column such as >Re:PHOTO.

Firstly and paramount, is that it should be personal. Something you feel strongly about, rather than perhaps something produced simply to meet a market or curry favour with a patron. Although of course many great works have also done those things.

Passion (C) 1997, Peter Marshall
Passion: Paris 1988 ©Peter Marshall 1988

Related, but not the same, is that it has to reflect a passion.

The final P, also related, is for point of view. It has to be there and it has to be non-trivial.

The 3 ‘P’s is of course a preciously contrived device to catch the attention. Earlier this year I wrote a rather more serious piece on the 3 ‘I’s of photojournalism (which, if memory serves, were integrity, inteligence and intention) and doubtless at some future date you will be treated to the 3 ‘W’s of Landscape photography. But the ‘P’s did reflect some of my thoughts on the current Tate Britain show.

In ‘How We Are: Photographing Britain’ curators Val Williams and Susan Bright certainly started off firing on all three ‘P’s but at some point appear to have been stymied. The Tate, perhaps wanting a rather different show, apparently brought in a review by the photographic great, good and celebs who covered the green with a great deal of balls, many of which had to be taken on board. “You can’t have a show without Bill Brandt” said some, fairly sensibly, but there were other rather wackier suggestions that also made the walls.

Quite a few reviews of the show have already appeared, of widely varying competence, though mostly favourable, although some writers do appear to have the mistaken impression that the show is come kind of history of photography in Britain. If you are reading this, you, like me, will probably have read all or most of them, and I’ve decided not to write at great length directly about the show.

Probably the best of those I’ve seen published was online at the Telegraph (may require free registration), by Richard Dorment, who puts the show exactly in its institutional context and then goes on to say: “this is not primarily a show about photography as an art form, or even about the history of British photography.”

Rather, as he goes on to say, it uses photographs to illustrate a social history by making use of them – and using them largely in contexts and ways that were not those of their authors. Reading the small booklet that accompanies the show you are certainly made aware of one aspect of this recontextualisation, when in the short section dealing with the period 1840-1900 they state “As the century progressed, women photographers were among the most skilled professionals in the UK” and in the following section, Into the Twentieth Century, “Women also continued to be a major force: making portraits, documentary photography and – as the Suffragette movement gathered pace – propaganda.” Personally I found material on the suffragettes (including images not taken by women) one of the more interesting aspects of the show, although perhaps evidence for the rest of these statements remains at best flimsy. But that women acheived as much as they did despite the social attitudes prevailing at the time is certainly worthy of celebration.

Dorment, like me, obviously found the show full of fascinations and he mentions some of them (I didn’t particularly share his enthusiasm fof the work of George Garland.) If you’ve not read this review (and who reads the Telegraph arts pages?) then do.

What I do intend to do, over the next week or two, is to make some posts on some of those missing from the Tate show, without whom any history of British photography is gapingly incomplete. ‘Missing Persons’ will hopefully do a little to fill that chasm.

Peter Marshall

Magnum May

Yesterday I had an afternoon out in London with three friends, all photographers. It was very much arranged at the last minute, (is there another way?) and we agreed to meet up at the Photographers’ Gallery at 1pm.

So of course Paul and I had to phone Michael and John and re-arrange it for 1.30pm as sorting out a few things on Paul’s computer took longer than I’d expected (that kind of job always does.) We met Michael at 1.30 and wandered into the gallery to look at the current show. It didn’t take long.

The stuff on the walls didn’t really have much connection with photography, although there were photographs. Most of them singularly devoid of any interest, and nothing I’d put on any wall, least of all that of a gallery of photography. I’m sorry, but I think photography galleries should show photography. Not third-rate art that makes use of photographs.

On the stairs leading up to the print room there were some real photographs, pictures of explosions by Sarah Pickering that I mentioned on About Photography when she won a Jerwood Award for another series two years ago. It was good to see the actual prints, although I didn’t feel they added to the work, which is perhaps best suited to be a magazine feature.

The print room is always worth a visit, with some old favourites on show (not always the same old favourites though.) Yesterday these included one of my favourite Thurston Hopkins images (you can currently still read a long feature I wrote on him at About Photography) of a kid playing a Red Indian coming up out of a manhole, as well as a rather substandard print of one of my favourite Bert Hardy images. The dodging of the vital central point of the image was so dodgy it would have made my wastebin rather than the exorbitant sum at which it was priced.

John still hadn’t arrived, so we went to wait in the Porcupine on the corner. In the past I’ve often sat and talked in the upstairs ‘Theatre Bar’ there with photographers and others after events at the Photographers’ Gallery. Once he arrived, we soon rushed off for roast beef at one of my favourite London pubs, the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street (though Fleet Street is now only a pale shadow of its old self.)

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to linger – it’s a great place for getting to know interesting strangers – but had to rush off to see some real photos. May seems to be Magnum month, and our route took in Martin Parr at Rocket, Alex Soth at Host and Ian Berry in the Magnum Print Room.

The last major project by Parr that I’d see was Mexico, and I found the work at Rocket rather more satisfying. In A8, Scotland he seems to be back to making real pictures rather than throwing a book together ASAP. The small prints for Parking Spaces were perhaps less impressive, more like a set of work awaiting an editor. This editor would say it was a promising start, but he would like to see some more work, but he’s a hard taskmaster. Long ago I asked another distinguished Magnum member at a lecture at the Photographers’ Gallery how he knew when he had finished a project. His answer (in my words) was when he could find someone who would publish it. Sometimes I feel it is too easy for some people to get stuff published.

Funnily enough, Parking Spaces is exactly as I suggested, an opportunity to be an editor. Having written my note above, I turned to the gallery handout, where I find that you are invited to select a portfolio of 12 images – for a mere £2500 – or £4500 if you hang around too long. Given the current prices of photographs, this represents excellent value for 12 Martin Parr images, even if the are only 12″x15″, indeed it is only the same price as a single 20×24″ image from A8.

Actually I think 12 is about the right number from this set of images. If you decide to buy, there is just a small chance you might get the right 12, so it should perhaps be seen as a kind of lottery. Of course you might just get me to select the right 12 for a suitable fee. I’d accept the same fee as Martin.

Another short bus ride took us to Host, and Alex Soth’s Niagara. Some great pictures (and here the large print size seems justified) but a disappointing show because there really was not enough on the wall to tell the story. Apparently this was the photographer’s call, but I don’t feel he got it right. It isn’t a big space but there was room for more. They needn’t all have been big prints – even some contact prints would have made this from a few great pictures into a real exhibition.

If you don’t know where the Magnum print room is, make sure you take the exact address or phone number or you will probably never find it. One small plate among others by the side of an anonymous door into a large office block is its only notice. Although the Ian Berry show ends today, there are other shows there.

Many of Berry’s prints were old friends, but I have to admit that there were quite of few of these I had forgotten were by him. His is work that particularly well sums up a vanished England past, which now feels suprisingly ancient history despite the comparatively recent date of his images. Did we really look like that?

When his book ‘The English’ came out in 1978, I remember feeling what an old-fashioned view it seemed, almost as if he was still photographing his childhood in the North in the 1940s and early 50s (he was born in 1934.) We all filter our experience through our own ideas of what makes a photograph.

Peter Marshall