Category: Photo Issues

Milton Rogovin

For images by Rogovin, open a new window on the Rogovin website while reading this essay.

New York Origins

Milton Rogovin‘s parents, Jacob and Dora, were Lithuanian Jewish immigrants; Jacob had arrived in New York in 1904 and Dora came the following year with their year old baby Sam, and they set up a shop selling household goods on Park Avenue in New York’s Harlem. Their second son was born in 1907, followed in 1909 by Milton. His first language and that of his family was Yiddish.

Business started to get tough after the First World War ended in 1918, and in 1920 the family and shop moved to Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, but Milton travelled in to Manhattan to attend Stuyvesant High School. From there he went on to Columbia University where he qualified as an optometrist in 1931.

By then the depression had hit, the family store had gone bust, and his father died of a heart attack four months before he graduated. Work as an optometrist in New York was hard to find and sporadic. In 1938 he moved to Buffalo to take a job there where there was more opportunity.

Politicisation

The depression and his own experiences, particularly the failure of the shop and his father’s death made him become politically active, and he helped to set up the Optical Workers Union in New York City. He continued his union activities after moving to Buffalo, losing his job there in 1939 when he picketed two of his boss’s offices.

He had met Anne Snetsky (later Setters) at a wedding in Buffalo in 1938, where they argued about the Spanish Civil War – he was highly concerned while she was then indifferent to the cause – and fell in love. They were to remain life-long lovers and comrades until her death in 2003.

With Anne’s encouragement and the support of the union, he decided to set up in practice as an optometrist on his own, on the edge of Buffalo’s deprived working-class Italian Lower West Side.

War Years

Anne and he got married in 1942, which was also the year Rogovin bought his first camera. Later in the year he volunteered to serve in the US armed forces, training as an X-ray technician before being assigned to serve as an optometrist. During his training he entered and won a photo contest at the training school with a picture of a waterfall taken on his new camera.

In 1944 he was posted to a hospital in Cirencester in the west of England, until the end of the war in Europe.

Back In Buffalo

After war service, he returned to Buffalo, where his brother (also an optometrist) had been keeping the practice running, and they worked as partners. He continued his political activities, becoming the librarian for the local communist party, as well as being active in the union, taking part in encouraging black voters to register and other political campaigns.

Mexico
Rogovin and Anne made their first visit to Mexico in 1953, where they met a number of left-wing Mexican artists and then and in subsequent visits over the next four years he made a number of photographs there.

He was by this time developing a greater interest in photography, showing pictures in the annual Western New York Exhibition at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo in 1954 and 1958.

Red Scare: “The Top Red in Buffalo”

Cold-war hysteria in America was growing, and in 1957 Rogovin was summoned to appear before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Rogovin invoked his constitutional right to refuse to testify rather than cooperate in any way, but became the subject of various newspaper headlines which labelled him as ‘Buffalo’s Top Red.’

In the following months his business fell off dramatically; some who thought of themselves as loyal Americans wanted nothing to do with ‘Commies’, while others felt that they too might suffer from similar smears if they continued to associate with him.

Many photographers and other artists also suffered from McCarthyism. The New York Photo League, the most important and vital photographic organisation of the era – one that changed the history of photography and had many leading photographers as members (and to their credit others joined to try and protect it after it had been named) – was forced to close. Paul Strand chose to leave America and live in France to avoid the persecution. Any American who dreamed there could be a better and more equal future was open to attack.

Store Front Churches

Rogovin was left with time on his hands as the business collapsed. William Tallmadge, a friend and professor of music at Buffalo State University, was recording music at one of Buffalo’s Afro-American Holiness Churches and invited him to come along and photograph.

The experience decided him to dedicate his life to photography. Progressive political activities had become virtually impossible in Buffalo and he felt his “voice was essentially silenced, so I decided to speak out through photographs.”

After working with Tallmadge for three months, he continued to photograph in Afro-American churches in Buffalo for the next three years, learning the skills that he needed. He went on a two week workshop with Minor White, who showed him how to use the bare-bulb flash technique that he continued to work with for the rest of his career, and worked out how to photograph black faces in a way that achieved proper gradation with their darker skin tones.

White also gave him advice on shutter speeds, suggesting that rather than use 1/125th which had the effect of freezing the movement of his subjects, he should use a slower speed, perhaps 1/25th, which would give a slightly more dynamic quality where there was some movement.

His approach when photographing people was simple and straightforward. He would ask permission to take their picture, set up his camera on its tripod and let them decide how to pose. The only thing he would ask them was to look at the camera – he liked to see their eyes – as was perhaps natural for an optometrist. The camera meets the gaze of the subjects, giving his work a powerful directness.

Minor White was a great supporter of his work, and published pictures from the project in his magazine, Aperture, getting W E B Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP (National Association of the Advancement of Colored People) to write an introduction.

Family of Miners

Rogovin was not making money from his pictures at this time. Fortunately Anne was still able to carry on with her teaching in special education and support the family and his work, as well as helping him in developing his projects.

In 1962, they read about the problems in the coal industry and in particular for Appalachian miners, with declining production as the car industry leading to lower demand for coal. As well as increasing unemployment there were also the health problems faced from working under appalling, dusty conditions underground, with most or all eventually succumbing to silicosis.

A letter to the mineworkers union president got them an introduction to the union office in West Virginia, and during Anne’s summer break they travelled there to see and photograph the workers. They were to return for the next eight summers to continue the work.

In 1981 he began a larger project which he called ‘Family of Miners’, starting again in the Appalachians. The following year there was a show of his work on the store front churches and working people in Paris, and he came and photographed miners in the north of France, then in 1983, support from the Scottish miners union enabled him to photograph miners in Scotland.

In 1983, he received the W Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography and was able to extend his work on miners to other countries, eventually including China, Cuba, Germany, Mexico, Spain and Zimbabwe

Neruda and Chile

On 1967, Rogovin sent a letter to the great Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, requesting his help in producing a series of photographs of the people and the country with Neruda’s writing. Some of the pictures were published in the Czech Revue Fotografie in 1976 later the project was published as ‘Windows that Open Inward‘ including poems by Neruda.

Lower West Side

By 1970, Rogovin was deliberately cutting down his remaining work as an optimetrist to spend more time on photography. However it was not until many years later, around 1978, that he was able – with family support and his wife’s income – to give this up to be full time as a photographer.

His next major project began in 1972, when he decided to document the Lower West Side. The Italian population there when he moved to Buffalo had moved out to wealthier areas, and had been replaced by Puerto Rican and African-Americans. It was now an area with high levels of crime, drugs, alcoholism, prostitution and high unemployment.

At first people there were very suspicious of a white guy with a camera, regarding him as a spy sent by the police or other authorities. With the help of Anne, he slowly get to know people and gain their trust, enabling him to photograph them in their homes as well as in public.

When he took his Hasselblad and set it up on a tripod, he noticed that people came up to him and asked him how much it had cost. He took the hint and decided it would be more sensible to use his old Rolleiflex instead – and it was his preferred camera from then on, used for most of his best pictures.

The Rolleiflex – like the Hasselblad – has a focussing screen on the top of the camera, requiring the photographer to bow his head to look down at it. This reverent attitude towards the sitter contrasts with the more aggresive direct view, aiming at the person with an eye-level viewfinder. It reflected his attitude to those he photographed.

Three years of work in the Lower West side led to his first major exhibition, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. He organised a smaller show in the Lower West Side itself with buses to the gallery so that those he had photographed and their friends would see the work.

He returned to photograph there in 1984-6, at Anne’s suggestion producing ‘Lower West Side Revisted‘ which pairs these pictures with the work a dozen or so years earlier in diptychs. He managed to locate over a hundred people he had photographed previously – and found many had the pictures he had made hanging proudly on their walls.

Following his recovery from surgery for a heart problem and prostate cancer, again prompted by his wife he returned again in 1992-4, again photographing the same people thus producing some outstanding triptychs taken over a 20 year period, showing them at radically different stages in their lives. These produced the book ‘Triptychs: Buffalo’s Lower West Side Revisited‘ (1994.)

By 1997, cataracts in both eyes and fading sight forced Rogovin to sell his camera and shut up his darkroom. But being unable to photograph was too frustrating and he had surgery in 1999, which restored his vision, and he bought back his camera.

In 2000, with Anne and broadcaster Dave Isay, he returned to photograph in the Lower West Side for a fourth time. They managed to find 18 of his original subjects and photograph them to produce a series of ‘Quartets’. Isay had worked with photographer Harvey Wang, who produced the award-winning documentary short film ‘Milton Rogovin, The Forgotten Ones‘ (2003.)

Workers

In 1976, inspired by a Bertolt Brecht poem, ‘A Worker Reads History‘ he began to photograph workers at the steel mills and car factories around Buffalo.

A picture of a steel worker and child feeding ducks outside their home published in the Illinois Historical Society journal led him to extend his work. When he had photographed someone at work, he would go back with a print and a request to photograph them at home with their families. His workers are not just workers, not just a small cog in the machine of production, but people, individuals with their own lives outside of work.

In 1987, he returned to photograph these people again, now out of work, as steel production had ended in the area.

In 1993, his book ‘Portraits in Steel‘ was published, with interviews of the subjects by Michael Frisch.

Working Methods

Working with 120 roll film, Rogovin could make 12 images on a roll, and to keep costs down he usually fitted three or four people or groups onto each roll, taking only 3 or 4 frames for each of them.

He did all his own darkroom work, developing the film and them contact printing it to choose which of the frames to enlarge. The Rolleiflex (and Hasselblad) produce 6×6 cm negatives (actually around 56mmx56mm) making the contacts easy to assess. Normally he would chose at least one image of each person and print it carefully, dodging and burning as required to bring out the most from the negative, to make sure that he had a good picture to give to the subject.

The bare bulb technique is a good method of getting fairly even light in small rooms. As its name suggests, it uses a bulb holder with a bulb but no reflector, so that light is given out in all directions more or less evenly. Shooting as he usually did in small rooms, this produced in a lot of light bouncing from walls and ceilings as well as some direct illumination.

Special flash guns or slaves can be bought for bare bulb use, or you can get bare bulb effects from an ordinary flashgun by using an attachment – a large translucent bulb on the front of the flash. You do however need a fairly powerful flash as the light, being spread out is considerably less intense than with a normal directional flash.

Rogovin worked almost entirely in black and white. He decided that colour was a distraction that took people’s attention away from the subject and into thinking about the colour of the clothes or surrounding objects.

Colour would of course have added considerably to his costs and to the complexity of the processing and printing. Black and white is very much more straightforward to process and print yourself, while colour is generally best handled by machine rather than hand processing.

Influences on his Work

Although Rogovin was aware of documentary photography and was a friend of Paul Strand, as well as having respect for the work of photographers such as Lewis Hine, Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White, he has said that his major influences came not from photography but painting, and in particular the work of Goya and Kâthe Kollwitz.

It is perhaps hard to understand this, looking at the very photographic quality of his work. Of course the paintings may interest him more and inspire him to get out an make images, but the forms that these take are rather more clearly based on the photographic sources.

One particular film by Luis Bunuel, ‘Los Olvidados‘ (1950) did have an important impact, and is reflected not just in the title of his book ‘The Forgotten Ones’ (he liked it so much that he actually used the title for two books, the first in 1985, and then in 2003), but in a devotion throughout his working life as a photographer to photograph ordinary people rather than the rich and famous. In its concern for ordinary people and their often forgotten lives his work obviously resembles Bunuel’s film, but it lacks the surreal symbolism which is central to Bunuel’s vision.

Peter Marshall, 2007

Other web links on Milton Rogovin, some of which provided information for this feature:

Milton Rogovin web site
Library of Congress: Milton Rogovin
Luminous Lint – Milton Rogovin
N Y Times A Sympathetic Lens on Ordinary People
NPR: Milton Rogovin
Afterimage: Robert Hirsch Interview with Milton Rogovin
The Forgotten Ones (book – with pictures on line

David Plowden – Vanishing Point?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paris Photo – The Empty Centre

The ‘Central Exhibition‘ of this year’s Paris Photo was ‘Landscape Photography in the UniCredit Collection’, and was a part of this year’s focus on photography in Italy. The show included around 30 works by 10 photographers, some extremely large images.


Upper Level: BMW – Paris Photo Prize; Lower Level: Central Exhibition

Unfortunately, on the basis of the work presented here, the collection has not bought particularly wisely. There was plenty of evidence elsewhere on various exhibition stands that Mario Giacomelli (1925-2000) was a fine photographer, but the few prints displayed were at best unconvincing. Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992) was an interesting colour photographer at a time before colour became respectable, but the vintage prints were disappointing, perhaps due to the ravages of time. There were a couple of nice prints by Mimmo Jodice (b1934) – but again better and more appropriate work elsewhere. Most photographers will be familiar with the work of Franco Fontana (b1933), and there was a good exhibition of his work in the FotoArtFestival at Bielsko-Biala last month, but again the work here was somewhat disappointing. Perhaps the only photographer whose work in this section impressed was Gabriele Basilico (b1944), though again there was better work by him elsewhere in PP.

UniCredit, one of the major European banks, was founded in Italy and started to collect contemporary Italian art, particularly photography, in 2004. Presumably they are not short of money, and apparently the collection includes 500 photographs, but on the basis of this show, they would not appear to have spent wisely.

An Italian photographer I met at PP told me that, like many other Italian photographers she had talked to, she felt that this show – along with the two other sections of the invited Italian presence, Statement: Italy and the General Section, “an overview of Italian photography from the 1950s to today” – actually failed to provide an adequate representation of photography in Italy today, but rather reflected the artists represented by the relatively small number of Italian galleries who were taking part in PP.

I rather hope she was right, otherwise the future of photography in Italy appears depressing. The 5 photographers I’ve mentioned above were all born before 1945, and there seemed little evidence here of exciting new work.

Helen Levitt on Show – Paris

One of several highlights of my trip to Paris was a visit to the Helen Levitt show – I mentioned it and wrote a little about her last month. Paris transport is currently on strike, with restricted and unreliable services, and to reach the Fondation Cartier-Bresson a little south of Montparnasse from the city centre location of Paris Photo, was a lengthy and rather tiring experience – part of a day in which I covered over 10 miles and was largely on my feet from 9am to 3am the following morning. Fortunately this was in Paris, where almost every street has some interest (and my walks are always longer grow in the taking, as I can’t resist a detour down any street that looks particularly enticing.)

Which brings me to one small complaint about the gallery space. The exhibition was shown in two large white-walled galleries, images in a single line around the wall, the centre of the room a largely empty space (with a rather lost looking display cabinet.) Nowhere at all to sit and rest and reflect on the work. Even when I haven’t had to walk, visiting such shows is a tiring exercise. The look of the rooms would also be improved by some simple elegant benches or other seating in their centre, and it would be so much more pleasant a place for the serious contemplation of photography.

There are chairs on the top floor, up a couple more flights of stairs, in a room devoted to the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Here were a dozen or so of his best-known works, including 3 or 4 of his best images. The interior of the building is modernist and compliments the work of the master well, but perhaps felt just a little austere for Helen Levitt.

In the lower gallery (on the first floor) was a fine showing of her work on the streets of New York from the late 30s and early 1940s. As you can see from the feature I mentioned previously  (and also the other links in that feature) Levitt achieves a wonderful sense of capturing natural activities on the street, helped of course by the use of the relatively small and inconspicuous Leica camera (one of HC-B’s from that period is on display in a cabinet on the top floor, reminding us how much smaller they were than the current M series – I had my M8 in hand to compare.) She also made use of a device that enabled her to be looking away at 90 degrees from her subjects when taking pictures, so that although many of her subjects appear to be clear she is they, they think she is photographing something else.

It was interesting to see the several variants that she had made of some images, shown as her small reference prints she made, roughly 6×9 cm in size – a method that enabled her to see the work better. I do think it was a mistake to mount these in window matts which did not allow the viewer to see to the edge of the print and beyond, especially since the top lighting in the gallery cast a deep shadow across a significant strip across the top of each of these small images. But I also think it is an inappropriate treatment for work prints.

In the main these showed that Levitt moved relatively little when making her images, with at times a slight investigation of different framings. Often it was more a matter of taking a series of images as the children got on with their play. It was particularly intriguing to see the other versions of her image of black boys climbing and playing on the imposing porch of a otherwise rather bare brick building. In the selected image, one clings to the top of the porch, either about to climb up or let himself down , with another boy crouching down on the top looking at him, while another pair stage a boxing match to his right. The figure next to the crouching child has his fists up in a fighting stance, while the boy dead in the centre of the lintel, turned away from the photographer, apparently lands a powerful straight left to his left eye. A fifth figure hides behind the right-hand column, arms and legs on each side and peeping out at the woman with the camera. The image is a glimpse of the kind of dangerous activities that boys will get up to, emphasized by the height of the doorway and the risk of falling, both from that precarious grip of the clinging boy and the play-fighting on the top.

Another striking image of boys playing on the street shows two of them holding up the empty wooden frame for a mirror, with the broken shards in the gutter in front strong evidence as to what has rather recently happened. A couple of boys are examining them carefully as the others look on, none more intensely than the boy on a bicycle we see framed in place of the mirror. So intense that one can imagine that it was his stare (or perhaps something rather more physical, as if he had tried to ride through that mirror) had shattered it to fragments.

The show also had a few examples of Levitt’s work from Mexico, shown along with the similar images by Cartier-Bresson; it was his work – including these images – that inspired her to photograph people – after seeing it she lost interest in pictures of buildings or landscapes.

The upper floor concentrated mainly on her colour images some from the 1960s but also later work. These pictures were published as the book ‘Slide Show‘, which was also on display in the gallery. The book is actually considerably more impressive than the show, partly becuase I think the selection of images is a little different, but perhaps more importantly because of the sequencing and also the quality of the images.

It was interesting to be able to compare the actual prints on the wall with the versions on the printed page, and I spent some time doing so. In almost every case there were significant differences, and in most cases the book version was preferable. That the exceptions were mainly some of the dye transfer prints is perhaps unsurprising.

Probably some of the other colour prints may have changed significantly since they were produced. They were not so obviously poor as some of the high-priced vintage prints on offer in Paris Photo, but certainly the book prints had a ‘cleaner’ look and often had better shadow and highlight detail. I think the few prints on display in Paris Photo may have been better examples than some here.

I find her colour work uneven, with some finely captured little happenings, while a few left me rather cold and sometimes puzzled. Perhaps the images I like best are the more dynamic, where Levitt has captured the moment, such as the woman reading her newspaper on a windy street corner, rather than those that simply seem to me to be about colourful scenes.

Despite my quibbles it was really splendid to see such a collection of Levitt’s best images on display, and when I left well after an hour after I had arrived (together with the walking it meant I was rather later than I had intended at the MEP, and at the party after that) but feeling uplifted by the experience. Coming out from the Impasse in which the gallery is located and turning across the main road to the rue de la Gaite in the fading light I did feel somewhat gay, my tired steps a little lighter as I danced past the sex shops and theatres.

Watching photographers: Sang Tan

When I first started taking pictures regularly of events in London, one of the first photographers I got to know was the late Mike Cohen (1935-2002), whose pictures were regularly used in socialist publications, particularly the Morning Star. Photographers often spend considerable time waiting for things to happen, and we often found ourselves together discussing politics and photography.

You can learn a lot about other photographers by watching how they work – where they chose to stand, how they move around a situation, how they interact with the people they are photographing… Of course most of the time at events I’m busy watching the way the event is developing and thinking where I should be, and how I might get a different picture… But you can’t help seeing what other photographers are doing, and getting some idea of how they work.

And of course, they are watching you. Certainly most of us know the feeling of finding a situation and working with it, only to realise ten seconds later that there are photographers on both sides as well as one shooting over our shoulder and another crouching in front or shooting between our legs. Its best to take it as a compliment rather than worry about it, and of course it’s one we are likely to claim repayment for before too long when we see another photographer who appears to have found something interesting.

Mike was a guy who knew who everyone was – he’d photographed working class struggles for over 30 years – and was always a great source of information. He once paid me what I think was a compliment, describing my way of working as ‘fly fishing’ whearas he was a coarse angler, getting in there and working away. His approach was certainly a reliable method of landing some big fish. Unfortunately little if any of his great record of events over the years is available on-line.

Another photographer I meet occasionally at events is Sang Tan, and watching him work it is clear that he is thinks carefully and differently about his pictures, often finding a unique way to approach a subject. He seems to be keeping very busy lately – and looking at the editorial portfolio on his new web site, the reason is clear.

The pictures there include work from several events I also covered (see My London Diary) and while I may have taken some pretty decent snaps, his usually have an unusual clarity and vision. He also covers many of the kind of high-profile events I like to avoid (or can’t get into – and usually both apply) which make his work much more commercially publishable.

Also on the web site is another side of his work, black and white street photography. We’ve seen a lot of nonsense in the past couple of years about a new street photography in London, as if there were not many photographers around who have been – and still are – working in the genre. And, as this site clearly demonstrates, producing considerably more interesting work than has been in those recent ‘new‘ shows.

Of course one of the many problems that photography still suffers in the UK is extremely partially sighted curators. Speaking about John Benton-Harris‘s move from the USA to London in the late 1960s in Poland recently, I talked about him “moving from a New York where he knew everyone who was everyone in photography, to a country where there was nobody to know.” Forty years on I’m not sure things have really changed that much.

Peter Marshall

What do you wish you’d known?

EPUK (Editorial Photographers UK) had the great idea of asking a selection of their members what they wished they had known when they started in the business. As might be expected, they got some rather varied answers, including one from the guy who regrets keeping “the can of compressed air, the can of WD-40 and the can of spray mount on the same shelf“.

 

Had he read my advice, he would have known he should in any case have been using a Hurricane or Rocket Blower on his sensor and not wasting the planet on doubtful products, which are tricky to remove. And almost certainly non-archival, though that was probably the least of his worries.

 

You might like to guess some of the other things before you go to the article. But while there, don’t miss the link to Sqweegee’s Blog on the site. The latest posting is about the Plodshop Creative Suite, “developed by Warren Terror Software, is designed to address major security issues in industry standard photo manipulation software such as Adobe Photoshop and Tesco PhotoRestyle.”

Paris Photo

Next week I’ll be at Paris Photo, a vast trade fair for galleries and publishers held in the rather claustrophobic underground Carrousel du Louvre in the centre of Paris and open to the public 15-18 November. I’m looking forward to it, but with some trepidation – last year I suffered a panic attack at one point and had to run for the fresh air.

It is big. 104 exhibitors from 17 countries – 83 galleries and 21 publishers. Some of the stands are pretty large, with hundreds of pictures on display – others smaller or having very large pictures. 40 of the best-known photographic magazines from around the world are there too, along with a special exhibition of Italian photography, and two major photographic prizes, the Prix BMW – Paris Photo and the Prix SFR Jeunes Talents (you can click on the names to see their work.) The Prix BMW, this year on the theme of ‘water’, has an illustrious list of photographers entered by the exhibitors at Paris Photo, including Alessandra Sanguinetti, Wout Berger, Trent Parke and Boris Mikhailov, and the winner will be announced at the show.

It is also an opportunity to meet many photographers, including over 30 who will be signing their books at the show. I’ll also be hoping to see a number of friends among the artists, dealers and others at the show – and perhaps even at a party or two or in one of the bars in the area around.

I’m there for 3 days – or at least parts of 3 days, as it’s best seen in a number of visits, with some time out to stroll around the city and do other things.

You can get a little idea of the range of work on show there – even if you can’t make it to Paris – by looking at the show preview on the Lens Culture site, which includes 120 images from the show, which you can see either by using the ‘next’ button or going into gallery view to see the thumbnails.

The Golden Notebook

Notebooks have played important parts in my photography over the years, but the on that I’m thinking about now is perhaps Doris Lessing‘s finest book. I thought about it again a few weeks back when she was announced as the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature, and more particularly when the author of one of the photo blogs I occasionally read celebrated the award by bemoaning the fact it had yet again not gone to his favourite American author.

As it happens Mr Colberg, I’m quite a fan of Philip Roth too, but had I been on that committee, my choice would still have gone to Ms Lessing, who after all did publish one of the more significant novels of the twentieth century 45 years ago in 1962. Her award can hardly be said to be premature.

I’m not sure what her novel itself has to tell us about photography directly, although I think it gives some interesting insights into the theme of subjectivity and the place of the artist in society which are germane, as well as more importantly, being an interesting read. With the paperback edition at almost 600 pages you do however need a fairly large pocket to carry it with you on your travels – which is where I have the time to do most of my reading.

But the author’s preface, some 16 or so pages added in 1971, is more directly relevant, because it deals – as well as with this particular book – with the role of critics and criticism, and with the stultifying effect of our worldwide systems of education on both the enjoyment and production of literature. Unless you are Rip Van Winkle and have just awoken after rather more than his 20 years, you will know that photography too has undergone a revolution, or perhaps rather a takeover by the academics, curators and critics in a not dissimilar fashion.

As Lessing describes, children from an early age are taught to think of everything in terms of success, of failure and comparison, as if literature (or photography) was a horse-race. They are also taught to mistrust their own judgement, and rather to find and rely on the opinions of authorities. What is educated out of us is the ability to be imaginative, to enjoy and to trust our own experiences and to make our own judgements.

It is a preface worth reading (although I never like to read prefaces, or at least not until after I’ve read the book. when I am in a position where I can decide what I think of the preface.) It’s also a book worth reading, but for different reasons, starting most importantly with enjoyment.

As someone who tries to write about photographs and photography, I often ask myself what I am doing and why. But certainly it has to start with the pictures and with my experience and then my analysis of that experience rather than from some kind of theoretical higher ground.
And when I read much critical writing by others, I often wonder whether the writer has ever stopped and really looked at the photographs they think they are writing about, and certainly am often sure they have never let themselves really experience them.

In my  talk in Bielsko-Biala last month, one of the many things in my performance that wasn’t in my script was reading a quotation from Lessing’s preface; partly because of its relevance to the developments in photography since the 1970s and to being a photographer, but also because what I was trying to do was to speak in a very personal manner, to share some of my own experiences and judgements about the work of other photographers as well as my own work. As I said there, unless your work is personal it isn’t worth doing, but if it is only personal it isn’t worth doing either.

Photographers’ Rights

When I was in Poland recently, I attended a meeting about the setting up of the Association of Polish Art Photographers, and my ears pricked up when there support for ‘Photographers’ Rights‘ was mentioned. I was a little disappointed to find out that they were largely concerned about copyright.

Copyright it a battle that photographers won many years ago, and our rights are generally clear and enshrined in international conventions, and even recognised in similar laws in most of those countries that have little truck with international conventions – such as the United States. Of course these are rights that need continual defence against rights grabs both direct by the big corporations and indirectly by them through the promotion of ‘orphan rights‘ and other similar proposals I’ve written about in the past.

Of course photographers often have skirmishes with individual organisations that use our work and somehow neglect to pay for the right to do so, and there are well-publicised cases of photographers who have made many thousands of pounds, often from just a few days of chasing up such abuse. Last year I made several hundred pounds myself, although mostly my work is used without permission by people with no funds to chase.

So copyright is essentially sorted, though vigilance is vital to keep it so. What interests me more are moral rights. Since I keep on coming across photographers who have no idea what moral rights are, I’ll explain them below, but unfortunately I have to start by saying that the UK 1988 Copyright Act, while introducing them, did so more or less to say that most publications – newspapers, magazines, yearbooks etc – could ignore them. News photographs were also specifically excluded from protection under the Act, and they do not exist for work which you did for which you were on a company payroll (but as with copyright will be yours if work was commissioned from you.)

Of course, where you are able to set a contract for the use of your work, such rights can be included in the terms of the contract, and certainly Magnum was set up in part to make sure that this was done.

Most Moral Rights, unlike copyright, also have to be asserted, by means of a suitable statement associated with the work – either on the work itself or in a contract or agreement for the use of the work (see below.) They also attach uniquely to the creator of the work during his/her life. Unlike copyright you cannot assign moral rights – although you can waive them by a written signed statement (read the small print on any contracts carefully, and cross out any such clauses if you can.) But while you are alive, no one else can claim them, whatever you sign. You can assign them in your will – and if you fail to do so, those you have asserted will automatically pass to whoever holds the copyright in your work.

So what are the moral rights that apply to photographers?

  • Attribution: the right to be identified as the maker of the work – to have your name clearly shown wherever and whenever the work is used.
  • Integrity / No Derogatory Treatment: the right not to have your work treated in a derogatory fashion – for example by cropping, distortion, additions or deletion.
  • No False Attribution: this right exists without the need to claim it, and covers the use of your name with work you did not create.

A further moral right which also concerns photographers is that of privacy. This restricts your use of pictures you have been commissioned by persons to produce which are of a personal or domestic nature. If you wish to show or use such commissioned work you should ensure you have written permission to cover your usage – a suitable model release.

IANAL – I’m not a lawyer – and if you want to use law you should take legal advice. But if you simply want to assert your moral rights, a statement such as ‘Peter Marshall asserts his moral rights as the creator of this work according to the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act, 1988′ is probably sufficient.

Any newspaper will of course provide copious examples of photographs were the moral rights of photographers are ignored (and of course even though the law does not make them enforceable, moral rights still exist.) I’d like to see a concerted effort by photographers to get all publications to recognise at least some of the moral rights of the people whose pictures they use.

We should start by demanding attribution. When dealing directly with publications I always do so; some photographers I know have a policy of asking for a payment of twice there normal rate if work is not attributed.

I’d also like to see a campaign to attack a different mode of false attribution, where images taken by photographers are credited simply to agencies. Getty, Corbis, Reuters, Alamy etc never took a photograph, and, except with older work where the name of the photographer was not recorded, I’d like to see the photographer’s name always given along with the agency.

Bielsko-Biala Diary

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

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


On my way to the theatre in Bielsko-Biala


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


Early on Saturday morning in a smoky Gallery Wzgorge

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

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