Photo Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Justice For Trayvon

Like most people – or rather everyone I’ve talked to about it – I was appalled at the shooting of Trayvon Martin, a teenager going home from his local shop after buying a soft drink and some sweets, shot by a white man who claimed he felt threatened by this young black in a hoodie, apparently sufficient justification to get away with murder under Florida law.

Although this was clearly a crime committed because the victim was black, it surprised me that the protest at the US Embassy did not attract much wider support from the left in the UK. Not only were the great majority of those at the protest black, but even most of the photographers I met there were. The SWP had as almost always produced a placard – this one reading ‘No Justice No Peace‘ and a few members were present with a bookstall but otherwise there was relatively little evidence of solidarity.

Trayvon was killed in Florida, but the racism which led to his death is active here, and as recent events have brought again to public attention, very much present in our police force. As I noted in my post Protest for Trayvon Martin on Demotix and My London Diary, the speakers at the event were introduced by “Merlin Emmanuel, brother of Smiley Culture, killed by police in his own kitchen, and speakers included Marcia, the brother of Sean Rigg, murdered in Brixton Police Station.”

The picture above is not the most flattering I’ve taken of Marcia Rigg on the various occasions I’ve met her since her brother’s murder, but the angle and framing were carefully chosen to include the American eagle and flag flying on top of the embassy building. And it was intended not to flatter but to show something of her righteous anger at both the killing of her brother and the deception and lies the family have met with from police, IPCC and CPS in trying to find the truth of what happened in Brixton Police Station and to get justice.

Flags very seldom fly out straight in London’s unpredictable breezes and it took quite a few attempts to get this how I wanted it, working at around 90mm equivalent using the 18-105mm on the D300 in very overcast light. A little flash helped to keep a sensible tonality in her face, though I had to bring it out more in post-processing – adding a little brightness and contrast in some areas and burning down the flare from the brighter sky on her forehead. The sky and the flag also needed burning in.

The picture was taken nominally at ISO1250 but with one stop of underexposure – so really ISO 600 – and stopped down to f ll to get the background fairly sharp, and this gave me a shutter speed of 1/320. Both my Nikon flashes are waiting for me to take them in to see if they can be fixed, and this was taken using a cheap Nissin unit, which I don’t find gives as reliable exposure. Looking at the results from this and the other events during the day made me order a Nikon SB700. It seemed a bargain (though I think six times what I paid for the Nissin) compared to the larger, heavier, considerably more expensive and only slightly more powerful SB910.

People had been asked to come to the protest wearing hoodies and to bring packets of the sweets Trayvon had bought – Skittles – and bottles of the soft drink, and there were many opportunities to take people posing with these. I don’t like posed pictures, but I did take rather a lot of them at this event, and a few made it to the web pages at Protest for Trayvon Martin on My London Diary. The one above at least shows a certain spontaneity, as well as featuring the two joint chairs of BARAC, Black Activists Rising Against Cuts, Lee Jasper and Zita Holbourne.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Cropping

I don’t like to crop pictures. Other than the slight adjustments that are sometimes needed to make the image a little closer to what I saw (or thought I saw) in the viewfinder, as even with digital SLRs the match is seldom perfect, and with some other cameras the differences are huge. Occasionally I’ll trim out an errant foot or bag or head etc that either wasn’t visible or I failed to notice on an edge, while usually keeping to the same aspect ratio. And just occasionally I’ll do rather more.

One of the first cameras I owned when I started out seriously in photography was a rough Russian copy of a screw fit Leica, and perhaps the way it most faithfully aped the original was the inaccuracy of its viewfinder. It’s always amused me that the high priest of anti-cropping who insisted on having his images printed in an oversize negative carrier so that the frame borders were visible, based on a philosophy of presenting the vision he saw at the moment of exposure had produced much of his early work on a camera which had such a poor correspondence between viewfinder and film image. It was perhaps a peculiarly French logic, and much though I admire his work and even adhere to his philosophy, I’m rather more of a realist and a pragmatist.

Of course, Henri Cartier-Bresson‘s purity was also tempered by expediency, and perhaps his most famous single image, that man attempting a leap across a puddle caught just before its inevitable watery end, is from less from the whole negative. He never cropped – except when necessary, something I think a good example to follow.

His attitude was made in a different environment to that we now exist in. Photographers were largely seen as craftsmen (they were mainly men) producing images for others to use, and were taught or expected to produce images that would be cropped. Many used cameras that produced a square format image, and deliberately photographed to allow their pictures to be cropped to landscape or portrait formats – the whole square was seldom used. ‘Filling the frame’ only really became important as a technical necessity with the introduction of what were then known as ‘miniature cameras’ that used 35mm film, particularly when using the fast films of the day (perhaps equivalent to ISO100) which were very grainy compared to later emulsions. It came in with ‘fine grain developers’ to do what their name suggests, as well as ‘acutance’ developers to produce apparently sharper results.

Now most photographs aren’t cropped, or at least not by the photographer, who shovels them on to Flickr and elsewhere usually straight from the camera, either unaware of the possibility of cropping or lacking any feeling of responsibility for the image. Though of course the on-line print services impose their standard unthinking crop on all they touch, just as the photo-finishers used to.

Anyway, here is one that I cropped:

and here is the full-frame version:

As you can see it has a problem. I was working in a very crowded area in a narrow pen for protesters opposite the Israeli embassy on Palestine Land Day, and making my way through the crowd the lens hood on my 16-35mm had been knocked out of position, producing the vignetting at top left and bottom right. Things were happening pretty fast and despite the obvious intrusion I took 8 frames in the few seconds before I noticed it – so much for my seeing everything in the frame! Working very wide-angle at speed it becomes impossible to examine every corner.

The 16mm actually makes things look rather less crowded than they were, and the woman’s wrist was very close to me. Now I’ve pointed it out, the lens hood at the top left of the cropped version is pretty obvious, but I don’t think otherwise it is too intrusive. If it had not been for the problem I had, I might well have cropped the original a little, as there is too much of the back of the woman on the right, and perhaps the Palestinian flag on the placard at the top pulls the attention away from what made me take the picture. Removing it does make the text ‘Free Palestine’ more important in the image.

Lens hoods are one of the weaker aspects of the Nikon system, although my habit of walking them into lamp posts doesn’t help. I’d done it with this one a couple of days earlier, and it hasn’t quite recovered, but better to damage a lens hood rather than around a thousand pounds of lens. Time though to go on e-Bay for another lens hood, though not a Nikon original as the copies are better and roughly a tenth of the price.

This is one I didn’t crop from the same event, with the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta Jews making their way through the same pen. It was evening and the sun was low and streaming in from the top right, and the lens hood didn’t cut the flare – so those are my out of focus fingers at top right. The framing is very tight on three sides of the image and it would lose too much from any crop. Somehow I don’t mind the irregular shape of those fingers – and they could have been a real part of the subject.

The main trouble I had covering the event was with the police, who just were not happy with me standing where I thought a photographer needed to stand, and I spent some minutes arguing with several officers to be able to photograph from in front of the barriers. Later a woman officer spent a minute or two trying to push me through a barrier while I was busy taking pictures and ignoring her before turning round to ask her to stop pushing me around; she wasn’t happy. But it certainly isn’t the job of police to get in our way and I was really behaving very reasonably while trying to insist on my rights and telling the police they were unreasonable. At least we can usually do that in London – but I certainly wouldn’t try it in Greece.

Eventually the resistance by myself and others paid off and the police did more or less stop harassing photographers, or at least those like me who do their best to keep out of the way of both police and the public. As well as the images where I had problems I took others that I think worked – which you can see on My London Diary in Palestine Land Day: Solidarity For Jerusalem.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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We Need A Noorderlicht Here

I’ve just been reading Pete Brook’s post Some thoughts on, and thanks to, Noorderlicht Photo Gallery following his experiences there with the highly successful show Cruel and Unusual which he co-curated with Hester Keijser which closes there on April 8. And successful isn’t in this case just marketing-speak. He writes:

Cruel and Unusual was extended by a week due to public demand. Visitor numbers have been substantial and the Dutch press went doolally over it. National radio, newspapers, magazine features the whole shebang.

As he makes clear, this show was not just important for showing some fine photography but mainly for the issues that it raised, and showing that photography can still have a substantial impact on how people think about social issues.

As grand an ambition it may sound, Hester and I hoped the show would be a warning shot across the bows of Europe: DONT REPEAT AMERICAS MISTAKES. DONT MASS INCARCERATE!

It’s a message that needs to be heard in other countries across Europe, and particularly in Britain, where our current government seems to have an obsession with aping failed US policies, in health and welfare, education, immigration and prisons. (Failed that is in providing solutions for social benefit, though highly successful in providing profits for the companies that increasingly run these services for – or rather against – us.)

But Noorderlicht has a great record in organising its festivals, inviting open submissions for its projects and tackling difficult or novel subjects. Reading Pete Brook’s post gives a real insight into the kind of place it is and why it works so well. It certainly made me feel that we need an organisation like Noorderlicht here.

Behind With The News

It isn’t often that My London Diary can claim a scoop, but I was interested to read a story in today’s Independent newspaper which begins “A new wave of disruptive protests will take place in London in May”and mentions OccupyLSX’s plans.

Just over a month ago, on Saturday 3 March, I posted a story on Demotix, and a couple of days later on My London Diary as Greeks Protest With OccupyLSX in which I wrote:

I was surprised to find a general meeting of OccupyLSX was still taking place there this afternoon. After spending some time discussing the role of the police in society, this then moved on to planning further events, possibly a major protest on May Day or May 15, the anniversary of the start of last year’s protests in Spain.

Of course we always have events occurring on May Day, and it was more the May 15 anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish protests that was the more significant date, as postings on various other sites have confirmed. I’m not sure why the Independent now thinks it is news. I took the picture above early on in the general meeting and by the time I left an hour or so later there were possibly almost twice as many present, doubtless including at least two or three undercover police, though occasionally at some events I think they are in a majority – Chesterton’s ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’ sometimes seems fact rather than fiction.

I was of course more interested in the Greeks and their protest, and most of my pictures were of that, taking place a few yards away from the Occupy general meeting, which also welcomed the Greeks and heard from one of them about the events in Greece.

Also not very new news is the film ‘Chimping’, which I learnt about on the dvaphoto blog, where they mentioned it a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve only just got around to watching. Posted on Vimeo by director/produced Dan Perez de la Garza, this is a film about what photojournalists do and the future of photojournalism, featuring “Pulitzer Prize winners Preston Gannaway and Rick Loomis, Emmy Award winner Paula Lerner, along with Todd Maisel, Chris Usher, Angela Rowlings, Edward Greenberg, Stan Wolfson, and Rita Reed” and although it has the copyright date of 2007, the issues it raises are still current.

Perhaps the most interesting comments come from Intellectual Rights attorney Edward Greenberg who describes photojournalists as “passive, ignorant, childlike and unwilling to stand up for themselves and as possessing the fatal flaw of many artists which is an overriding desire to be liked” and says “the pat on the head is unfortunately so important to the egos of many creative people that they forget they are in business… ” and that they have to make a living. He also talks about annual earnings for some photojournalists as dropping from $80,000 to $30,000 over the past five years, though even the lower figure would seem like a golden age for most now.

Of course it is no longer possible to dismiss mobile phone cameras as not having the quality that newspapers need – particularly now that rather than 1.5 megapixels we now have monsters including the 41 Mp Nokia 808 Pureview. It’s no longer pixels or even technical quality that separates the pro from the citizen; on one side you have the quality of vision and on the other being there in the middle of things when they happen.

Several years ago at an NUJ photographers conference I heard a speaker talking about the need for photojournalists to adopt a hybrid approach to selling their work, making use of exactly the kind of new sites that were setting out to market the work of citizen journalist, and I started trying to sell my work through some of them, as just one of a several ways of getting an income from my work. After a very slow start it is beginning to increase, while other sources of income have gone down.

A very different video which I also watched this morning is about perhaps the most famous film ever made about a photographer, Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window‘, made in 1954, and now turned into an incredible three minute single panoramic time-lapse video by filmmaker Jeff Desom and featured on PetaPixel.

Lea Bridge Road

Astute observers reading my account of the Leyton Marsh Olympic Protest which took place ten days ago (and was posted at the time with around half the number of pictures on Demotix) will have noticed the curious omission of what might perhaps have been expected to be the climax of the day, the arrival of the marchers from Occupy Finsbury Square at Leyton Marsh.

I’d seen this as the key moment of the day, and had gone on ahead by bus to Leyton Marsh (my knee was in no state to walk the four miles or so in any case) and had been busy taking pictures of the local residents and the site, and of another group of Occupy protesters who had made it separately (and had got very lost on their way.)

I’d actually left the Marsh to meet the marchers, but had become involved in other things, and when they actually arrived I was thirty years away in my own dream space of when I first visited the area, photographing some of the ways it had changed and completely failed to notice the small group passing by me a couple of hundred yards away. Fortunately a straggler from the march saw me and came over to tell me they had gone past and I hurried with her after them, but was just too late to photograph their arrival at the site.

Here are a some views of what used to be on the Middlesex bank opposite Leyton Marsh (which is on the Essex side) but is now occupied by some fairly boring flats and grassed open space.
© 1983, Peter Marshall

You can see these (cleaned up a bit) and some other pictures from the area in my book ‘Before The Olympics‘ – with a full preview available on Blurb.

I hadn’t done wandering down memory lane for the day. One of the first times I remember coming to London took me along the Lea Bridge Road where Leyton Marsh is, to the shop of Marston & Heard Photographic, then at 378 Lea Bridge Rd. In the mid-70s they purchased large remnant stocks of Ilford Bromide paper after Ilford started producing RC materials and also the entire remaining stock of Agfa Portriga Rapid. Those of us who were around at the time will find the page on Phototec on Maurice Fisher’s Photomemorabilia site of interest, and I had dealings with most of the companies mentioned over the years.

Photography at the time was still expensive and those of us who weren’t bankers, city merchants or company directors (as some leading amateur photographers were) relied on companies like Marston & Heard for cheap paper (they also sold benzotriazole, an anti-foggant that was often needed with it) and for tins of cheap film, which I think was often ends of 35mm movie stock.

I don’t remember how I got there at the time, perhaps by the same bus route as I used to get to Leyton Marsh from central London (though many buses then had much longer routes than they do now) but I do remember that I got off at one end and discovered that Lea Bridge Road was a very long road, though I think I probably only walked along half of its 5 km or so. Coming back loaded down with heavy boxes I took another bus.

Although most of their Agfa stock was the very warm-toned chloro-bromide Portriga Rapid, only available in a limited grade range, they also had smaller amounts of Brovira and Record Rapid. Brovira was a cold black and it’s only good point was that it was supposedly available in a very high contrast Grade 5, though by the time it got remaindered and sold to me I think it had lost a grade or two. But the small amounts of warm black Record Rapid were the beginning of a love affair that was later to take me to Muswell Hill and Goldfinger, and finally to Silverprint, ending when they had to remove the cadmium in the late 80s because of its health and safety issues. I never got on with the reformulated paper and soon switched to Ilford Multigrade FB – until Jon Cone showed the world how to print with inkjets for the new millennium.

His latest Piezography2, coming shortly, may even tempt me to buy a new printer to run it, perhaps the Epson Stylus Photo 1500 (which I think is known in the US as the Epson Artisan 1430) and has the big advantage of a wi-fi interface and could thus sit in my old darkroom as I’ve no room for another printer next to my computer. Cone says that the smaller drop size of these printers enables them to give comparable results to the top of the range Epson PRO 9900 printer while running with fewer shades of gray. With Piezography2 you will be able to print on both matt and glossy media without having to change over cartridges – it will include both matt and gloss blacks.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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More Women

Although I took these pictures just over 3 weeks ago, I’ve only just got around to adding them to My London Diary. I’d sent some off elsewhere on the day I took them and just forgot to add them to my own web site. I was having a pretty busy few days and they just slipped my mind.

Mornings just aren’t my best time at the moment, and I’d been up very late the previous night working on the pictures I’d taken at three events the previous day and hadn’t got as much sleep as I needed. It wasn’t a really early start, but I was still half asleep when things started around 10.30 am, and somehow I managed to leave the Nikon D300 on manual setting at a fairly unsuitable exposure setting for the bright morning sun – probably what I had been using in the dull rainy conditions of the previous afternoon.

Of course I should have noticed, and if I’d been properly awake would have done so, but I’d taken rather a lot of badly overexposed images by the time I looked more carefully and discovered my mistake. As usual I’d been working mainly with the D700 and the 16-35mm, just grabbing the D300 for the occasional image that needed a longer lens. And in the bright sun the images on the back of the camera looked OK, but I hadn’t checked either the exposure details in the viewfinder or the histogram.

Most of the overexposed images were beyond saving, and the few I could salvage – such as this woman with a peace symbol on her cheek – didn’t quite have the normal tonal quality. Most of the other pictures could only be turned into rather odd poster images, not the kind of effect that interests me.

It didn’t help that I was also having problems with the SB800 flash that had stopped working the previous evening, either because of the rain or through over-heating, and was now either not firing at all or giving unpredictable output (I’d been having some problems with it for a while.) There was a strong low sun and I really needed to use flash fill. b

I’ve now got two out of commission SB800s and am wondering if it is worth taking them in for repair or simply buying a new flash. In the meantime I’m working with a cheap Nissin unit that doesn’t always seem to do what I want. Nikon’s SB910 is bigger and heavier than I like, apart from being expensive and in the end I decided to go for the SB700, which I ordered today and should get early next week.

Not all my problems with ‘Women on the Bridge’ were technical. The press had been invited to a photo-call on the bridge at which some of the celebrities at the front of the march were to release white doves. But the event security stopped us from going up there, and I stood for a quarter of an hour in a slowly seething crowd of photographers muttering to each other but not quite deciding to push past security to get on with the job. Finally we were allowed onto the bridge and I ran up with the others, but we were still far too far away when the few pigeons flew up. Whoever was in charge of the event had got things seriously wrong. They had their own photographer and video there but not the press, and missed an opportunity to get the publicity they wanted. Of course it probably wouldn’t have been a great picture anyway.

Personally I also had a problem in that I could only recognise one of the celebrities who were there. I’d expected to find the names of the others on the event web site, but there was no information at all when I was writing my story. I don’t have a great deal of interest in celebrity, and don’t watch TV so there are few that I can recognise. Usually I have to ask the other photographers, but at this event I couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t stay for the speeches – when I might have found who some of them were, and I suspect some were very worthy.

And perhaps because I missed the speeches it was an event that for me seemed rather corporate and rather lacking in political edge. Held on International Women’s Day which came out of the Communist Second International, this somehow seemed too tame, too moderate, too uncommitted as a celebration of that event. Rather like getting the Chamber of Commerce to organise the events for May Day.

Students Protest Fees

Student protests this year have seemed rather muted compared to the event around the end of 2010, but the march a couple of weeks ago brought back memories of these, as one of the main foci of of protest was the forthcoming trial of student Alfie Meadows, rushed to hospital at death’s door after having been batoned on the head by police on Dec 9th and only saved after lengthy brain surgery, but now on trial for ‘violent disorder’, presumably for violently attacking a police baton with his head. The trial of him and four others began this Monday and is expected to last several weeks.

The tricky part of photographing protests is being in the right place at the right time, and often the interesting things happen without any warning. There were several places where I thought it likely that something might happen, and opposite Downing Street was one of them. So I made sure I was at the side of the march opposite the gates and waited as the front of the march moved passed me and suddenly a few seconds later everyone sat down on the road. Most of the photographers (and there were an awful lot there) were ahead of the march in front of the main banner, but I was able to quickly move into the crowd as they were sitting down and chose a suitable place to photograph.

I took a whole series of this animated young woman, working very close to her with the D700 and 16-35mm, and then was in an ideal position when Clare Solomon stood up and spoke.

This time I was working with the D300 and the 18-105mm and she was just over 2 metres away – the lens at 66mm (99mm equivalent.) I hadn’t known exactly what was going to happen, and the exact details came as a bonus, but I was in the right position because I’d thought ahead.

Of course it doesn’t always work out, and often- including a couple of times on this event – I’d anticipated possible outcomes that didn’t occur. But later, after the protest had reached its destination outside the ministry responsible for higher education I cam across a small group of clowns, and although they were not telling people what they were going to do, I was fairly sure they were going to do something, and it seemed more than likely from where they had gathered in a huddle that it was going to involve the bank opposite the ministry.

So I was ready when they started rushing around and screaming, and down on the pavement by the police standing at the bank door almost before they were. The light wasn’t too good and I didn’t get a picture that really satisfied me, but when they moved off and then rushed one of the cash machines I was still with them, and the pictures as they kissed this and then sat on the ground and burnt a £5 note were rather better, though by the time that happened there were so many other photographers around me that I couldn’t move.

You can see many more pictures from the march and protest in Students March Against Fees on My London Diary. And after that large event I went on to photograph a rather smaller event with a leprechaun leading a protest against fracking outside a conference – Frack Off Big Oil! Some days things just work out well, and this was one of them.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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The Legendary Jimmy Jarché

I’d forgotten how bad the adverts on TV are, not normally watching television. The ITV player doesn’t seem to let me fast forward past them, but at least you can mute them.

Perspectives – David Suchet – People I Have Shot on ITV1 about his grandfather, the famous Fleet Street photographer James ‘Jimmy’ Jarché (1890 1965) is worth watching, though there is perhaps around 500% too much of David Suchet for my taste. Actor Suchet was Jarché’s grandson, and grew up with him living in the family home; grandad taught him photography and gave him his Leica, and he doesn’t do badly with it (a very nice picture of sheep for example), but I’d have welcomed much more about Jarché and much less about Suchet and you do have to put up with quite a lot of his physical and mental wandering.

Jarché was really too good a photographer to need Suchet, and Suchet the actor doesn’t need the kind of self-promotion that he gets here. A more straightforward account of the photographer’s life and work – including a brief interview with his grandson – would have been a far better tribute to him, but unlikely to appeal to TV executives.

Of course Jarché is a name known to all with an interest in photographic history, if mainly for a single image taken in 1925 of naked kids being chased along the banks of the Serpentine, published in the Gernheims’ ‘Concise History of Photography‘ in the year that he died and which for many years was almost the only widely available comprehensive volume on the subject. And there were a number of other images I’d seen before in the film, along with some new ones.

It wasn’t a film that changed my idea of Jarché, who has always been one of the legends of British press photography, and in the somewhat farcical expert discussion (really these guys aren’t as stupid as this makes them seem) at the end of the film in the Michael Hoppen gallery, Colin Ford makes clear he isn’t quite ready to think of him along with Cartier-Bresson and the rest either. But if he is perhaps less well-known now than he might be, the fault lies with another organisation that appears in a rather better light in the film, Getty Images, in whose immense warehouses his images are stored.

Mad Men

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Burt Glinn, Leonard Freed, Inge Morath, Elliot Erwitt, Dennis Stock, Philippe Halsman, Cornell Capa, Bruce Davidson, Sergio Lorain and Eric Hartmann are not a bad eleven, and even if a few of the team aren’t on their best form, The Mad Men Era, Magnum/Slates ‘Today’s Pictures’ a week ago are an interesting selection.

The 19 images, which date from around 1958 to 1968, are largely from New York and from the offices of the advertising industry of the era, and doubtless some are from Madison Avenue itself and largely represent that kind of business culture. But as a set on that title, it would have been stronger had the selection been a little tighter, and I think there are several that really don’t fit (and one I’d have put straight in my own reject pile let alone Magnum’s.)

Though one of those I would have rejected as not really fitting the subject is one of my favourite images from the era, just from a very different culture and style to Mad Men. Sergio Larrain’s out of focus commuter in front of the escalator at Baker St is a part of a very different business and photographic culture to the rest of the batch.

Had I been editing a set of the same title from those on Slate, I would probably have ended with 12 pictures rather than the 19 here. Of course if I was working with Magnum’s library there would almost certainly have been others I would have wanted to add, but I think it makes a nice exercise to take this set and edit them, perhaps even sequence them.

I’m not – at least not for the moment – going to say which other images I think don’t really belong in the set either because they don’t belong or simply aren’t strong enough. I’d be interest to hear whether other people agree with me that there are pictures that would better have been omitted, and if so, whether they images they would cull are the same as mine. I’d argue that there are around two others than don’t really fit the theme, and about the same number that simply don’t quite make it as pictures or lack the kind of ironic viewpoint that is common to the rest.

Brassaï (Gyula Halász) on YouTube

A Facebook post this morning to a YouTube clip featuring the work of Brassai took me on a short look at other clips about him there and also to reflect a little on how photography should be reflected on screen.

The link was to BRASSAÏ Paris la nuit circuit Brésil and the pictures are well reproduced – and it can even be viewed full screen without losing too much, but you never quite get to see them (or can’t tell if you do.) It shows details and zooms around far too much for my taste; photography is a medium where the frame and framing (or in Brassai’s case, cropping) is truly vital. But the approach does bring over something of the interest and excitement in his work, and I can imagine people watching this and wanting to know more and to really see the photographs, just a shame that they were not shown as pictures before the camera played with them. I also found the music quite unsuited to the work – too staid and stately – and simply had to mute it after a minute or so to continue watching.

Brassaï, fotógrafo shows his pictures in their entirety, but perhaps not such a good selection, and the quality of reproduction is not as good – it certainly isn’t worth viewing this at full screen. The soundtrack, ErikSatie’s Gymnopedie No. 1, seems far more sympathetic to the subject matter. But there are images where it would have been good to zoom in to show details.

Ted Forbes in The Art of Photography talks breathlessly about Brassai and flips over a few pages of the book Paris By Night, but seems to me not to have little real insight into what Brassai was about (or even what photography is about) but determined not to let a microsecond of silence give the viewer time to think. What little Forbes has to say that is worth saying – largely the facts about Brassai – could have been said in a few seconds but he talks throughout at a great rate, as if he hadn’t bothered to write a script. Badly videoed with annoying slips of paper markers covering up some of the pictures and reflections on the pages and you hardly see the pictures. It fails to even show any of his best work. It seems to me axiomatic that in a video about a photographer you should let the pictures do most of the talking and concentrate far less on the presenter.

Another video with a fine musical soundtrack is Brassai with Phillip L Wilcher “CONSOLATION”, and again sympathetic is Paris by Night (Photographs by Brassaï) with many of his best pictures shown to the soundtrack of ‘Dark-eyed sister’ by Brian Eno & Harold Budd.

A search on YouTube putting in the name Brassai brings up many more videos, and I’ve already spent more time than I should this morning watching them. If you find a better (or an even worse) one than I’ve mentioned above, feel free to add it as a comment.

Thanks to Diana Sampey for her post on Facebook which led me to the first of these videos. Of course YouTube isn’t the only place you can watch videos. Another that I enjoyed this morning was on BBC News Magazine, where Elliot Erwitt talks about some of the picture sequences in his book Sequentially Yours.