Photo Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Agence France Presse v Daniel Morel

Like many photographers I have a very clear view about the unauthorised use by AFP of Daniel Morel‘s images from Haiti.

Pure and simple theft.

It’s hard to see that AFP have any legal leg to stand on, having taken Morel’s images without permission from Twitpic and distributed them, in clear defiance of the copyright terms. The only way for them – and others who have used these images without permission – to restore any credibility with photographers is for them to issue a fulsome apology and pay up. With any luck the Southern District Court in New York will come to much the same conclusion before too long.

You can read more about the case in a summary in the BJP 1854 blog which also discusses the more than curious interventions of Visa Pour lImage photojournalism festival founder Jean-François Leroy, which it would be over-polite to call total nonsense.

You can read more about that on Duckrabbit, which has made a sensible response to his comments and has printed his reply to that.

Leroy argues that his response is similar to that of an insurance company. Perhaps so, but if so it is the kind of insurance company that goes to incredible lengths to find something in the small print that enables it to wriggle out of its clear moral responsibilities.

It’s hard to see why a previously well-respected figure like Leroy should take the stand that he has, supporting what seems a very clear breach of the law, and certainly actions which prejudice the rights of photographers and their ability to properly recompensed for their efforts.

Theft is theft. Really all there is to this case.

Getty Images became a sponsor of Visa Pour lImage in 2008. Getty is one of the few companies that have sided with AFP in refusing to compensate Morel. Many are making the connection between Leroy’s position and the interests of his sponsor, and he needs to do something positive in the interests of the future of the festival – even if it might mean losing sponsorship.

Surely it’s time for Leroy too to throw up his hands and say sorry, I hadn’t really understood what the case was about, and I got it wrong. If not before, I hope the court’s decision will be clear and will persuade him to do so.

Apprentice Boys in London

I’ve photographed various Protestant marches London over the years including the Apprentice Boys of Derry London Campsie Branch Club Annual Parade which takes place in late September. This year it just happened to coincide with the Pope’s visit, and to allow the protest against that to have a rally in Whitehall, the Apprentice Boys had to make an early start.

As with many events, the most interesting time is usually before they start, when people are usually in more interesting groups and also you can get closer to them and work from wherever you need to without getting in the way.

So this picture was taken just as they were getting ready to move off in 2006, and I’m standing right in the middle of two lines of men on the street. And in 2008 I made a whole series of pictures outside the pub where some of them were before the march, as well as others on the opposite side of the street.

That year I did at one point find myself being pushed away by a very large man with dark glasses suggesting it would be very unhealthy for me to keep taking pictures. But I think I was able to convince him that I wasn’t working for a communist newspaper and that he had mistaken me for someone else – and I didn’t point out the person standing just a few feet away who did fit the bill. But generally I’ve got a more positive reception and often received some appreciative comments from people who’ve seen the pictures on My London Diary.

This year, when I got to the meeting point half an hour or so before the march had been timed to depart there was no sign of anyone. I wondered if I had got the date wrong, but decided I hadn’t. I got on the tube and went to Westminster station as I knew they were heading for the Cenotaph, and as I came out of the station there were some barriers along the centre of the road so I knew that a march was coming. It’s hard to run along the streets that are full of randomly moving tourists, but I did my best and got to the Cenotaph just as the laying of wreaths was beginning.

I was held up slightly by one police officer who insisted I got back on the pavement as I came up Whitehall towards the Cenotaph. It seemed entirely pointless, but I didn’t have time to argue, so went across and then back into the middle of the road a few yards further on to take pictures.

As I got towards the back of the marchers taking a rest on Whitehall I was greeted by one of them with “We wondered where you were!”

I took a few more pictures as they moved off and past Big Ben, but it was hard to get what I wanted, and the scaffolding covering much of side of the Houses of Parliament didn’t help.

More pictures from this year on My London Diary. There are a few I like but I think 2009 and 2008 were rather better.

Pope Protest

I was surprised that over 10,000 people turned out in London on 18 September to protest against the state visit by Pope Benedict. It was obviously a pleasant surprise for the organisers too, and too much for the police to take in. They were reported as saying at a briefing before the event that they expected 2,000 and quite a few people published that as the actual turnout. Too many reports and comments in the press come from people who aren’t actually present at the events they are reporting on.

Photographers have to be there to take pictures. Even when newspapers use stills taken from film or TV coverage, the guys who made those have to be there. To photograph events you have to be in the thick of it, while it’s not unknown for writers to work from a nearby cafe or hotel room.

But many of the events I photograph are good places to be, where people are enjoying themselves, having some fun together while also making a serious point. Quite a few times there were placards that made me laugh, and some were a reminder that humour can be a powerful weapon.

Several of the speakers at the rally had everyone laughing too, though others were starkly serious. And at times I remembered that the women who were speaking about being abused as children were the ones who had managed to survive and flourish despite what they had suffered, and that there were others whose lives are still in a mess many years afterwards.

Most of the speakers were impressive. Richard Dawkins, who so often seems to comes over as a simplistic and blinkered atheist in radio interviews seemed far more impressive when allowed to develop his thoughts without constant questioning an interruption.

Barbara Blaine spoke powerfully in front of a placard with a picture of her as a young girl in her white first communion dress with the message ‘Raped at Age 8’.

You can read my account of the march and also see my set of pictures on My London Diary as always.

As often, when I was photographing the protesters before the march,the light was against me, as they were lining up with the sun behind them, though it was usually possible either to keep it out of frame by choice of angle, or to hide it behind a person or placard, but it made fill flash more or less essential. I’d probably have been using it anyway, usually a stop or more down so it has only a slight effect, but does ensure that people notice me. The first frame I take may often catch them unaware (and sometimes I turn the flash off to take several that way) but generally the flash catches their attention.

I was photographing a group of demonstrators protesting against child abuse by Catholic priests, among them a young woman with a placard ‘Where is the Love’ high above her head. I took several frames of the group, then one of another woman in the group with a placard ‘Your Taxes Paying For His Bigotry’ and then moved towards her, trying to work out if I could make a picture with her head and her placard a couple of feet above. Instead I got this picture:

She pulled down her top more or less immediately but a had time to take a couple of frames before we both more or less collapsed in giggles. I had no time to adjust the camera settings, so although she was very much exposed, the picture was a little underexposed thanks to the light pouring in from the bright sky.

“What was that about?” her friend asked and she wasn’t entirely sure, but she had intended it as a gesture of liberation against the sexual repression of the Pope and the Catholic Church.

I took a few more pictures of the group, and it was one of those later images that I actually used with my story that evening on Demotix, because I felt its message was clearer. Someone said to me later in the day when I told them the story, it would have been great had I been working for ‘The Sun’. But the bare flesh involved here wasn’t the kind of empty and gratuitous nudity which they and the Daily Star parade, but a political gesture.

Autumn Again

I looked at the weather this morning and was glad that I wasn’t celebrating the Autumn Equinox, as the forecast wasn’t good and it was raining steadily. But more importantly I had to be a little over 20 miles away, waiting at home for a new gas water heater to be delivered, and it arrived more or less at the time of the annual celebration by The Druid Order at midday on Primrose Hill, while the rain was still falling here. I hope the Druids were luckier.

Last year when I took this picture it was a fine day, and there were white clouds in the sky which help to even out the lighting, as well as giving the occasional patches of shade.

The weather was good too when I photographed the event in 2007, and perhaps made a better job of it.

It isn’t a difficult event to photograph, though it helps to have some idea of what is going on – as with most things. I’ve photographed The Druid Order a few times and a number of them have liked the pictures which helps, but like all such events you have to show a proper respect.

Although at times I may seem to be on the inside in these pictures I always respect the circle of druids and work from outside using a long lens when necessary. The Nikon 18-200mm (on DX) was very versatile for working here, with the second most useful lens probably being the 10.5 mm semi-fisheye used for the middle picture above.

Nikon do at last seem to be realising that it isn’t enough to produce cameras and bringing out some new lenses, particularly new lenses for the FX format – the 16-35mm and the newly announced 24-120mm f/4G ED VR, 28-300mm F/3.5-5.6G ED VR, 55-300mm F/4.5-5.6G ED VR, 35mm f/1.4G, 85mm F/1.4G and 200mm f/2G ED VR II. These are lenses that should have been available when Nikon launched back to full frame format, and I think may have come too late.

The big news at Photokina this year came from Fuji, with their sort of range-finder Fuji X100 expected to be available in March 2011 for around $1000. Many of us are already drooling over what looks like a replacement for the beloved Konica Hexar F, and also excited by the thought of an interchangeable lens model to come after this. But whether or not this emerges, the development by other manufacturers of Micro Four Thirds cameras such as the Panasonic DMC-GH2 is making many of us wonder if we can reduce the load on our shoulders.

When Nikon went digital it said that the DX format could give photographers all they needed, and they were probably right, although marketing and competition meant it was inevitable that they follow Canon along the “full frame” route. But both now may be left behind by the new generation of smaller electronic viewfinder cameras, leaving FX and DX DSLRs looking like those expensive dinosaurs still emerging as ‘medium format’ digital cameras. Of course they have their uses, just as 8×10 film cameras do, although most of the things they are used for could be done just as well by smaller lighter and cheaper cameras. Of course these just would not impress clients anything like as much.

Flying Visit

Years ago when I was photographing London’s Docklands I needed to get a picture with a plane taking off from London City Airport. The first time I wasn’t quite happy with what I’d got and I had to wait almost an hour for the next aircraft to appear.

London City got planning permission because they promised to have only a very limited number of flights and to use small quiet turbo-props that would take off at a steep angle and thus cause very little noise. How things have changed. Over 90% of the flights now are by noisy jets leaving the airport at lower altitudes and they already have plans to expand to 176,000 flights a year – almost 500 a day. Had levels of this kind (or the current level) been stated at the initial planning inquiry their would have been little chance of the airport being built in what is one of the most densely populated areas of the country.

It’s become a favourite place for the wealthy owners of private jets, as well as running scheduled services but is now aiming at a much larger market. It started very much as a premium service for rich businessmen who could avoid the lengthy delays at normal airports; your taxi from your city office could drop you at the airport door ten minutes before take-off and you could rush through the lounge passport in one hand, briefcase in the other and still catch your plane. Now you can get there on the DLR and need to allow a little more time as increased security and larger passenger numbers slow things down a little. But check in times still seem to be in minutes rather than the hours at Heathrow and Gatwick, so it’s perhaps not surprising it is getting popular.

Which is bad news for local residents – and the reason for their protest group ‘Fight the Flights‘ which is mounting a legal challenge against Newham Council’s approval of a rise in flights from 91,000 to 120,000 annually in the High Court this November.

The airport was set up for short haul flights, mainly to continental cities, but now serves a wider range of destinations including New York (check in time for BA customers with hand luggage is 15 minutes!) But the most contentious of these are domestic flights such as the services to Manchester from here and the other London airports – currently 38 flights a day.

From central London to central Manchester by train takes around 2 hours 7 minutes – and there is a train every 20 minutes during much of the day. The flight from either Gatwick or Heathrow – including checking – takes from 10 to 20 minutes longer, and the journey times from the airport at both ends are likely to add considerably more. Even with flights to Glasgow, the train journey of 4 h9m compares pretty well with the flight time from London City – including minimum check-in and exit times – of 2 h35m when you include the travel times to and from the airport.

But Saturday’s demonstration was not about convenience but about climate change. A typical rail journey from London to Manchester results in 15.9kg carbon dioxide per person, while the flight produces 52.8 kg – more than three times as much. Add in the amounts for the journeys to and from the airport and the difference is even greater.

We don’t need short domestic flights, the noise and hydrocarbon and other pollution they cause around the airports (air pollution around where I live near Heathrow is often above the accepted limits for various pollutants) both blights and shortens our lives. But man-made climate change has far more serious effects on the poor around the world through the destabilisation of climate that is already becoming evident through the increasing incidence of droughts, floods and hurricanes and rising sea levels. It is also the poor who are most threatened by the aviation industry’s attempts to move to using agrofuels. Almost all biofuel production is at the expense of the environment, clearing forests to grow fuel crops such as palm oil, or diverting land that was previously in use for food production, accelerating the rises in food prices, so that the poor starve.

The Campaign Against Climate Change demonstration wasn’t a large event, but the issues it raises are vital ones. Aviation is the fastest-growing source of greenhouse gases and it’s thus important that the richer countries such as ours tackle it and find ways to slow and eventually reverse its expansion.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
John Stewart of HACAN and Anne-Marie Griffin, chair of Fight the Flights
with campaign plane and banners

Photographically I couldn’t find a great deal to do, though the protesters did have an inflatable jet with some suitable slogans, and there was someone dressed as an air hostess with a label on her back ‘UneasyJet’. And of course the people involved.

Later my favourite mermaid appeared too. But I wanted to photograph her along with Phil Thornhill of Campaign Against Climate Change standing at the front of the top deck of the open top bus as it made its way towards Trafalgar Square. Easy enough to organise if I had time and money, but not when you get the idea and want to do it straight away.

One thing I often mean to bring with me but usually forget (it doesn’t quite fit in my camera bag) is a monopod. Given that and a remote release (which I don’t own) it would have been fairly easy. But I had to do with leaning backwards over the front rail of the bus, holding the D700. I took a few holding the camera at arms length, though it was hard to get the right angle. All the time I had to work with one arm, holding on tight with the other as the bus was bumping along the road.

You can see more pictures – and more about the demonstration – on My London Diary.

USA Upholds Copyright

In what was a surprise decision to many of us, a US court awarded a young British photographer, Lara Jade Coton , almost $130,000 in a copyright case over the use of a self-portrait she had made at the age of 14 on the cover of a DVD re-issue of the hardcore porno video apparently about a photographer and his model, ‘Body Magic.’

You can read more details on the Russian Photos blog, and also in a post made by the photographer on DeviantART when she discovered the abuse of her image in 2007, when she was only 17; there are also a number of pretty sickening comments to that message, as well as some sympathetic and sensible advice. Perhaps the most obvious was to find a good copyright lawyer and sue – which she did.

Coton also reports the successful result on her blog, with a link to the coverage of it on Plagiarism Today web site.

The surprise was the amount of the settlement awarded to photographer Lara Jade Coton, who had not registered the copyright of her photograph, which was apparently stolen from the DeviantART web site, with the US Copyright Office.

Received wisdom (and much legal advice) suggests that unless you register you can only claim minimal damages as opposed to the “punitive damages” available for the abuse of registered work.

Of course it was not just copyright abuse, but also defamation and other related offences and Coton’s lawyer had claimed $430,000 damages. The judge actually disallowed a claim for punitive damages on the grounds that the defendant’s actions lacked malice, although his actions towards her complaint appear malicious and dismissive.

The case got wide publicity in print and on the web in 2007, and there were reports that some of the more negative comments posted in response to these articles came from those involved in stealing the image.

This settlement is great news for Coton, but also for all the rest of us whose work is in danger of being ripped off by US businesses. Until now they could be fairly sure that most non-US based photographers would not have registered work their at the US Copyright Office and would thus not pursue the matter through the courts where if successful they could expect only minimal damages. This case should at least make them think again and perhaps decide not to steal images from the web – or if they do and are caught out, to come to a reasonable settlement.

Coton was fortunate to find “a wonderful lawyer in Florida Mr Richard Harrison of Allen Dell PA” who was prepared to take on her case, doing a lot of work in his spare time to help her. She also has some good advice to all photographers, “be wise about where you upload your images, the size you upload them and be smart about the steps you can take towards finding legal help when youve found your image being used inappropriately.” We should all congratulate her for taking on the fight.

Flag Burning, Photography & Politics

One of the things that stuck in my mind from Antonio Olmos’s talk at Photoforum last Thursday was the advice given to him that he passed on to us, that “if you find yourself surrounded by photographers, you are almost certainly in the wrong place.”

But at times at events such as Saturday’s demonstration and counter-demonstration outside the US Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square there was rather a crush and it couldn’t be avoided. However at one point I found myself facing a very large group of photographers and was pretty sure that I was in a better place than they were.

I’d been in the small crowd of Muslims Against Crusades taking pictures as they milled around on the pavement when I realised that their main man, Anjem Choudary, was beginning his speech and was able to get behind the front row of his listeners just a few feet from him to take pictures. I’d followed one man with a largish TV camera, and shortly afterwards there was another similar camera on my left shoulder. As often happens I had to move forward slightly to get their lenses out of my field of view, getting right up to one of the other MAC speakers.

Apart from wanting to photograph Choudary speaking, I knew that he was going to be around when they burnt the US Flag, so was a guy to stay close to. It would be good to get him in the frame as well as the burning flag, and if I could also have something recognisably the embassy in some of the pictures it would be a bonus. The most obvious thing was of course the eagle and flag – at half mast for 9/11 – on the top of the building.

After the speech the crowd became more fluid as the flag was produced and I was able to move slightly to where I wanted to be. And I more or less got the pictures I had wanted, although at some point another photographer squeezed down low – but not quite low enough – in front of me. Those burning the flag placed it and also the photograph of pastor Terry Jones (which was remarkably resistant to burning) the right way round so far as I was concerned too, and the pack of photographers on the other side made an interesting background for some of the pictures.

It would have been nice for all of us to have been able to move exactly where we wanted to get the best pictures, but of course that isn’t practical in such situations. There are always photographers saying “let’s move back so we can all get a picture”, but it seldom can work – and no hope at all in situations like this. You have to get in there while respecting the people working around you as much as possible by trying not to get in their way, and do the best you can.

Moving back occasionally makes sense, but generally it results in nobody getting a decent picture (and here we were in the middle of a crowd and couldn’t move back.) Capa’s dictum “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” usually applies.

As people continued to squirt lighter fuel onto the flames I would have preferred to be a few inches further away as it was getting uncomfortably hot. Some of the pictures are taken at 16mm and the flames were rather closer than they look.

Later, as I was standing around between the MAC and the EDL and talking with other photographers we decided there was little to choose between the two groups of extremist demonstrators (or come to that government whose embassy we were in front of, that had given the world Vietnam, Guantanamo and more.) We thought about living under a country ruled by either of the two groups. The MAC seemed slightly more civilised, but there were other things to consider. “Beer” I said, “at least under the EDL you could get drunk enough not to care.” “Bacon butties” added another, but the real clincher came with “Adultery!”

My own politics? Well, if anyone ever tries to form a Liberal Democratic Christian Socialist Anarcho-syndicalist Environmentalist Situationist vaguely Pacifist party I’ll probably double it’s strength as shadow minister for culture and sport, areas where I would have some really interesting policies. Photography (real photography that is) would certainly get a much better deal under our administration and the current art establishment would be in for a very hard time. As for sport I’m at least 110% for it and think we should all be encouraged to do some, though of course I’d institute a total ban on anyone getting paid for playing games. You’ll have to wait for the rest of our manifesto.

More about the MAC protest and more pictures on Demotix, where there is also a separate post about the EDL, who earlier had marched to the 9/11 memorial, laid a couple of wreaths and held a two minute silence for the 9/11 victims before coming to shout at the Muslim extremists. More pictures still in a few days time on My London Diary.

Brian Griffin at NPG

Last Friday evening Brian Griffin gave a talk on his photographs on display at the London NPG as a part of their London 2012 project until 26 September 2010 as a part of the late night opening there. I’d arrived over an hour earlier, having walked across from the Royal Festival Hall where I’d been meeting someone earlier who was on her way to an earlier start at the Royal Opera House, and thought I’d spend some time looking at the NPG collection and some of the other special activities on offer for the NPG’s ‘Late Shift‘.

I started by sitting for a portrait booth from ‘Take Away Art’ with Artist Joceline Howe hidden inside. I have to say I found the two minute sketch of me disappointing, and the figure could have been anyone in a silly hat and a fancy frame, though I did rather like the portrait of the young lady who sat before me, but then she was considerably more attractive anyway.

I also took the opportunity to look at the exhibited work from this year’s BP Portrait Award, and have to say I found that disappointing too. There seems to be a current vogue for producing painted portraits that have a photographic look to them, and most of them I would have found rather disappointing as photographs. There were some other portraits I found more interesting but none of them were among the winners.

Also rather disappointing was the display ‘Twentieth Century Portraits‘, photographs taken by Dmitri Kasterine, that was due to open the following day but was actually in place for the Late Shift. Kasterine (b1932, England) whose father was a White Russian and mother English, began taking portraits in the early 1960s for Queen and other leading magazines, and the works on display include many well-known figures from the arts. A few of the pictures are rightly celebrated, the icons by which we remember, for example, Francis Bacon, but in the main I found most a little ordinary.

I think there is some more interesting work on his web site, and a family group I rather like on his blog posted last month that shows he is still busy.

Walking around the gallery it struck me that many of the more interesting pictures on display are not actually portraits – and that quite a few of the portraits are actually rather tedious, including much of the modern work. This came home to me particularly in a gallery entitled Expansion and Empire, where one of the more fascinating works shows Queen Victoria presenting a bible to an African guest, and another Florence Nightingale receiving the wounded at Scutari. (There is also another large image of the Queen visiting the wounded and also a picture of the relief of Lucknow.) There are other portraits of Nightingale, the best of them certainly one of the small photographs on display but not shown on the web page. But it is the larger group images that dominate the room, and not just because of their size.

In a way I think Brian Griffin’s work for the Road to 2012 is a twenty-first century equivalent of these paintings of historical scenes, though of course he has not tried to portray actual scenes (though nor really do those historical examples.) But his work certainly does have something of their sense of theatre, although I don’t think Jerry Barrett or Thomas Jones Barker would have understood or sympathised with Anna Raybon‘s statement that the ‘Road to 2012‘ “was to be art, not PR“; clearly for them, even if the term was then unknown, PR and Art coincided.

His talk was fairly well attended although there was plenty of room for more. Introduced by Raybon, the NPG’s Commissions Manager, the event started with a showing of the film clip of the live performance by Griffin and musician Steve Nieve on the Late show in 1988, which you can also watch on YouTube. Entitled ‘The Big Tie‘, it shows Griffin’s work on Broadgate, with a very young looking Griffin both talking and singing.

Friday he didn’t sing, but engaged in a conversation with Braybon about project and the making of some of the pictures. At one point Griffin demonstrated how he posed models “like puppets“, pushing and pulling their limbs into the positions he wanted, engaging them as actors in producing the scene he wanted. But he and Raybon stressed, the scenes only really came to life when one of the sitters added something of their own, such as when a young boxer leaned out of the tight sculptural group of four figures and raised his gloves to the camera.

Like most of his pictures, this image of the ‘young ambassadors’ from an East Ham school who had played a large part in swinging the decision to London was based on a painting, Griffin had an image of it in his mind but only actually identified it several months later on one of his frequent visits to the National Gallery.

Some of the sitters also had their own games to play. Griffin had wanted to photograph then minister Tessa Jowell kneeling on the office carpet and draping herself onto a chair. But she came in and told him she wasn’t getting on her knees for anyone and he had to rethink. Is it just me that sees the picture that resulted with her arms out on a chair back as her with a Zimmer Frame?

Griffin also stressed the teamwork involved in making these portraits, working with Braybon and others including his assistants on location – usually with two hours to make a picture. Towards the end of the performance he brought four of that team up onto the stage to answer questions – something that certainly came as a surprise to his printer, Mike Crawford.

After the talk I went with Griffin and half a dozen of his friends to a show in the basement of the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury, ‘Fake Food & Fast Cars: The Pop Couture of Kate Forbes‘, an incredible display of the “highly conceptual costumes” created by this film designer. It continues until 2 October 2010, and is certainly worth a visit. I asked her if I might take some pictures, but failed to persuade her to move out of deep shadow in the dimly lit gallery.

Griffin, born in Birmingham in 1948, grew up in Lye, between Halesowen and Stourbridge in Dudley and his show at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris from November 19 2010 to January 23 2011, ‘the Black Country’ is based on his memories of growing up there, with portraits based on people he knew as a child, including his family.

A couple of weeks ago he went back there to photograph some of the places that played an important part in his growing up including Ma Pardoes (The Old Swan pub) in Netherton, Netherton butchers, The Black Country Living Museum and Solid Swivel Engineering. After showing in Paris the pictures will go on display in Dudley in 2012.

Kate Forbes worked with Griffin on this project to ensure that the costumes reflected the period and location of his youth. The single picture from it on the web page, My Mother, 2010 shows a woman representing Griffin’s mother when he was a child, with hands soaked in some kind of black oily substance, in a factory overall.

Carnival Thoughts

This year I didn’t spend as long as usual at the Notting Hill Carnival, arriving an hour or two later than usual as I was waiting for an gas engineer coming for an emergency service to our water heater on Sunday. The weather forecast hadn’t been too good and it did seem a little less crowded than usual.

Sunday is Childrens’ Day at carnival, and is always a little less crowded, while the Bank Holiday itself can get too crowded to move around easily in many parts of the area. I find it rather easier to photograph on the Sunday, although the Monday is a better day for partying.

There did seem to be fewer elaborate costumes than previous years – perhaps the recession is hitting the carnival. Certainly many voluntary groups are expecting cuts in funding from local councils if these have not already happened. But its always been the people that interested me more.

We got a little light rain, which didn’t dampen the atmosphere much at all, but dark clouds made a pretty drastic cut in light levels making photography a little trickier. But then it really poured down for a few minutes and I took shelter, while trying still to photograph the few braver souls who were partying on in the street.

Fortunately for them (though perhaps not for me, as I rather like the effect of the driving rain) although the shower was very heavy it didn’t last long. I was working at ISO 1250 and although the D700 is pretty waterproof I needed to keep just under shelter in that kind of downpour, so had the Sigma 24-70 set at 70mm. 1/160 s was just fast enough to get a sharp image despite the moving subject and gave rather nice streaks on the image.

Later the sun came out and the lighting got very contrasty. So working on Ladbrooke Grove I perversely decided to work in the trickiest area I could find for light. Fortunately Lightroom is able to work wonders if you shoot RAW (as I always do.)

Here’s an example, with some of the people in deep shade and others in sun. I’ve evened things out a little with some fill-flash (nominally at -1 stop with the SB-800) and exposed (probably more by luck than judgement) to avoid burning out the almost white houses in bright sun in the background. Here is what the file looked like when first imported into Lightroom:

Back in the days of film and darkroom printing it would not have been possible to make these kind of changes. Working with transparency, the starting point would have been completely burnt out in some areas – the situation hopeless. With colour neg there would have been similar highlight detail, possibly very slightly more, and with some fairly tricky burning I might have managed to bring out the blue sky and some of the building detail, but some of the more subtle changes would certainly have been impossible.

We do now have an incredible degree of control in the printing process, enabling us to change so much about an image with some precision. Back in the darkroom we could play around a little – as well as dodging and burning we could also try local warming of areas, swabbing them with concentrated developer or alkali, flashing and more, but they were all rather limited tricks and not exactly reproducible. Printing from the computer we can make precisely located and exact area adjustments of tonality, contrast, saturation, hue, sharpening etc.

Of course there may even be some people who prefer the effect of the original (as happened when I posted previously about how I’d improved a picture. But it wasn’t the way I saw the scene and didn’t reflect what I was thinking when I took it.

Peter Sekaer Overhyped

Peter Sekaer (1901-50) was a Dane who went to New York in 1918, setting up a business producing posters for shop window displays. In 1929 he joined the National Art Students League to study painting meeting Ben Shahn, who probably got him interested in photography and also introduced him to Walker Evans. In 1933 he studied photography with Berenice Abbott at the New School for Social Reasearch and assisted for Walker Evans who was photographing artworks at the Museum of Modern Art.

Sekaer also went with Evans on his Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration (FSA) trip to the South, taking some pictures of similar subjects as they travelled around together. From 1936 to 1942 he worked for various US government agencies including the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), the United States Housing Authority (USHA) and the Office of Indian Affairs, working briefly for the Office of War Information (OWI) in 1941.

In 1945 he gave up working for the government agencies (and the American Red Cross) to freelance, moving to New York in 1947 where he did magazine and commercial work. A heart attack killed him in 1950, aged only 49.

Solo shows of his work took place at the Witkin Gallery, New York in 1980, in Copenhagen in 1990 and at Howard Greenberg Gallery in 1999. Books were published alongside the latter two shows. Currently the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, USA, which recently acquired 70 vintage prints of his work has a show ‘Signs of Life‘, Photographs by Peter Seaker, which continues until Jan 9, 2011 and there is also an accompanying book.

Searching for pictures under Sekaer’s name at the Library of Congress produces surprising few results; a set of images of an FSA trailer camp at the Vultee Aircraft Plant in Nashville Tenesse, taken in May 1941 for the OWI, and two earlier images, only one of which is on line. The trailer camp pictures are undistinguished, a fairly dreary record of the site. The other picture shown, of mothers and children at the doorway of a brick home in a former slum area for the USHA, is a little more interesting but also rather routine.

The Library of Congress does include many fine photographs from the less well-known government agencies for which Sekaer mainly worked, taken by other better-known photographers – for example Arthur Rothstein. There are also some very run of the mill unattributed images. But unless I’ve missed something Sekaer appears to have produced little or nothing of worth for these agencies.

You get a rather more positive impression of him as a photographer by searching at the Addison Gallery of American Art which produces 17 results, one of which shows a page from a scrapbook containing 725 small prints by him (27 or 28 on the page shown appear to be contact prints including several frames of some subjects.) Not all of the other 16 pictures are on-line.

There are some nice touches visible in some of those which are. A young woman is posed behind a restaurant window in Charleston which has a cup of tea and a fish painted on it; the collar of her dress appears as a heart. But looking at most of them I can’t help thinking of rather stronger images of similar scenes by Walker Evans, Helen Levitt and others.

Sekaer’s ‘artist’ pages at the Howard Greenberg Gallery which include 25 images concentrates even more on those that make him seem heavily under the spell of Walker Evans. But frankly they just are nothing like as good. He isn’t a bad photographer, but just rather ordinary when compared with Evans – as most of us would be. But there are two or three images that perhaps show something rather more personal, all including people. Images 19 – Lousiville, 1938, with two women and a child with an upturned tricycle and 21 – Untitled, 1938, with and old woman wrapped in a shawl on her front step, for me stand out above the rest.

Sekaer was obviously a proficient photographer, and doubtless his work adds something to our knowledge of the era he photographed, and the book may well be of interest. It’s good to see publications and shows of some of the minor figures of photography – and there were very many of them – whose contribution to photography is more in their collective input than in individual work. There are hundreds if not thousands more like him, and it would be good to see more of them recognised for what they are. But don’t let’s make them out to be overlooked geniuses.

You can read more about Sekaer and the High Museum show in a feature in the New York Times. Apparerently 53 or the works in the museum were acquired from the Howard Greenberg Gallery, and the piece quotes Greenburg as saying that had he lived to promote his work “he would have had a great reputation.” Earlier the writer seems to suggest that Walker Evans is better known because he “lived into his 70s and promoted himself as an artist as well as a documentarian.”

I have news for Eve M. Kahn – and also Mr Greenburg (though I think he already knows it but also knows his business.) Walker Evans is better known because he was an incomparably better photographer.