Photo Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Heathrow Climate Camp

I grew up under the flightpath into Heathrow, reaching up from my back garden I could almost touch the planes as they went over a couple of miles from touchdown. I still live around the same distance away. Back in the 1950s we resented the airport for having stolen productive orchards and farmland and being a noisy and smelly bad neighbour. In the 1960s I became a climate activist of sorts at a time when ‘Friends of the Earth’ were only Californian weirdos. We understood then about global warming and that human activities were beginning to have often entirely unpredicted effects on ecosystems.

Heathrow from its inception was in the wrong place, too close to built-up areas. Had they been open about the plans it would almost certainly have been turned down as an unsuitable site in the 1940s, but the public – and the authorities – were deceived. Since then, the airport has broken every promise it ever made about expansion, taking over more land, causing more pollution. I supported the efforts to stop T5, marched with the protesters against the third runway in 2003.

Of course it provides a great deal of local employment, but it is still long past the time for a start to be made on running down the activities there, rather than continuing the program of expansion.

So will I be photographing the Heathrow ‘Climate Camp’ set up to the north of the airport yesterday? Regrettably I think not. Despite being entirely in sympathy with the movement’s aims, I can’t stomach the restrictions they have seen fit to impose on photographers and journalists:

Media wanting access to the camp will be invited to come on site between 11 AM and 12 noon. All visits will be over and journalists off site by 1 PM at the latest. Journalists will be given a tour of the site, accompanied at all times by two (or more) members of the media team, who will carry a flag to make the journalists/photographers identifiable. Journalists will be required to stick with the tour and will not be allowed to go into marquees or meetings and workshops unless invited at the agreement of all participants.

These are not conditions I can work under. Such draconian news management isn’t something I want anything to do with. So the camp itself will not get the kind of sympathetic coverage that I might otherwise have provided, and I know many other left photojournalists are equally disappointed. You can read Sion Touhig’s blog and his comments – along with some rather unconvincing attempts to justify the policy. Marc Vallée is there doing his best to cover the event, and I wish him the best of luck. I’ll probably try to cover some of the things happening on the outside later in the week.

Rhubarb Reviewfest

The centre of Rhubarb Rhubarb (R-R for short) for photographers is undoubtedly the reviews, although for reviewers it is perhaps the hotel bar! We kept the bar at the Burlington Hotel busy until late, a comfortable place, although the choice of beers was abysmal and the prices high. (The Burlington is one of if not the best hotels that Birmingham has to offer, rebuilt at the turn of the 20th century and refurbished for the millennium, although with much of its character retained, including the slightly quirky 1902 bathroom fittings in my room.)

(C) Peter Marshall
It was good to meet some friends from other events, including Karol Hordsiej from the Foundation for Visual Arts in Poland and Jim Caspar of Lens Culture, one of my favourite photography web sites (see links at right), along with a number of people I’d corresponded with but never met in the flesh. Mainly the reviewers were curators from galleries and institutions, editors from magazines and book publishers along with a few representatives of agencies. The galleries and publications included some of the major institutions in photography, such as Aperture, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Sothebys, the Photographers’ Gallery, George Eastman House and more. Most of the reviewers came from Britain, Europe, Canada and the USA, but there were a few from elsewhere – including Yuting Duan from China.

Reviewers and photographers at Rhubarb Rhubarb
When I’d registered as a reviewer I had been working for About.com, Inc as Photography Guide for almost 8 years, creating a large on-line resource on the medium, but by the time I got to Birmingham I had shifted my territory. Luminous Lint is a web site created by Alan Griffiths, and describes itself as “the ultimate online resource for collectors and connoisseurs of fine photography – authoritative reference materials, online exhibitions, expert analysis, commentaries and reviews, press releases, calendars of important events such as auctions, exhibitions and shows, a specialist online bookstore and much more.” By the time I arrived at R-R I’d contributed just two pieces to the site in what I hope will be a long and productive relationship.

Also of course I’m writing for this site, “Re>PHOTO“, which I hope will give a more personal slant on photography than would be appropriate either for ‘About Photography’ or ‘Luminous Lint‘. At About.com, the editorial policy – quite rightly – prevented me from promoting my own photography or that of my friends, although there were several hundred of my pictures scattered around the site, largely as illustrations.

Essentially I think I was at R-R as a photography critic. Someone who likes to look at photographs and write about the experience – or in this case try and talk about it. Of course, the various gallery curators and editors present are also critics. What surprised me a little was that there were no reviewers listed as simply as photographers (though some of those present were also photographers) or as independent critics, and perhaps only one representing an academic institution (although rather more actually taught.)

Most of those I’ve shown my own work to and had useful comments from have been photographers – including (in no particular order) Raymond Moore, Paul Hill, John Blakemore, Ralph Gibson, Martin Parr, Lewis Balz, Paul Trevor, Fay Godwin, Charlie Harbutt, Leonard Freed and many other less well-known names.

Of course some of those reviewing in other capacities are also photographers, but I think fairly small minority. I believe strongly that photographers are the most important sector of the photographic community, and that the medium in a very real way belongs to us. The other guys are parasites, feeding on us for their living, although I don’t intend that term in a pejorative sense. They are necessary and at times useful, and the relationship can be one that benefits photographers as well. But there is something wrong when these people, rather than the practitioners drive the medium.

Peter Marshall

Rhubarb Rhubarb: Images now on line

As promised, images from Rhubarb Rhubarb are now on ‘My London Diary‘

As well as pictures of the main event, from the launch above and the portfolio reviews at Curzon Street Station there are also pictures from the party:

as well as other occasions during the event – such as the mystery trip:

I’ve also included a few images that I took walking around the area.

The pictures were shot on a Leica M8 digital camera, mainly using a 35mm f1.4 lens that Leica say is not compatible with the camera. Equipped with the necessary IR cut filter, and with an appropriate Leica lens code applied to the mount with a black ‘sharpie’ fine point permanent marker, it seems to work perfectly.

The party shots were made wide open working at ISO 2500. Lighting was generally non-existent, with some flashing coloured effect lights, and it would have been pretty impossible to work with film. People were moving quite a lot and with speeds of around 1/30-1/90 I sometimes managed to avoid blur. Thanks to digital I was saved from either having to dance or to go to bed early.

Peter Marshall

Rhubarb Rhubarb: Ian Wiblin

Rhubarb Rhubarb (this year’s event was 26-29 July) is a festival with various aspects, including the seminar “East Meets Eastside” on the Thursday afternoon which I was unable to attend, although the reports of it were intriguing. Another is the exhibitions held at the main centre of the event, which this year for the first time was Curzon Street Station close to the centre of Birmingham, as well as at associated venues. The New Art Gallery at Walsall was one of these with a show of colour work by Ian Wiblin, “Recovered Territory“, which continues there until Sept 9, 2007.

The art gallery is a fine modern building in the centre of Walsall, standing out among some indifferent modern sheds and remaining proud Victorian relics as a symbol of the possibilities for regeneration of the area. I arrived in Birmingham on Thursday afternoon just in time to jump on a coachfor the short trip to Walsall, along with a few of the other reviewers, volunteers, organisers and others at the festival. We were then treated to the full Birmingham experience of a traffic jam on the motorway, along with a short circular tour around Walsall’s town centre when our coach driver missed the gallery first time round.

Inside the gallery a warm welcome awaited us, along with some even more welcome refreshments, before we took the lift the the top floor, where Ian Wiblin’s work was on show. This is a fine exhibition space, with large windows giving a view over the surrounding town (unfortunately a little rain meant we were unable to use the roof terrace), and a 30 foot or so high ceiling which perhaps rather dwarfed the small colour images on show, well spaced out on the tall white walls.

The old Polish city of Wroclaw had a largely Germanic population from the 13th century, and in 1741 officially took on the German name of Breslau, later becoming one of the major cities of Prussia. By the start of the Second World War, the Nazis had cleared out remaining Poles along with most of the Jews, and the city became a Nazi stronghold, the last German city to fall to the allies after a long siege by the Red Army. Almost three quarters of the city was destroyed, and many of the German civilians were killed. The rest were evicted in a post-war settlement, Stalin sliding Poland toward the west, incorporating Breslay under its Polish name of Wroclaw. The city gained a new Polish population displaced from Lwow, (renamed Lviv and added to the Ukraine), along with rather more Poles from Warsaw and Poznan.

In Wroclaw, as in the rest of the “recovered territories” large investments were made to remove traces of its German past, including the removal of many German signs and inscriptions and the restoration of many of the ancient building in order to promote a partly or largely mythical Polish past.

Wiblin first visited Wroclaw shortly before the fall of communism in 1989, producing the series of images “Wroclaw” shown at the Photographers Gallery, London (and elsewhere) in 1990. He returned to the city for a few days in 2006, working in colour to produce “Recovered Territory.” The title refers both to the lands incorporated into Poland following the war and also to his personal impression of the change from a state-controlled communist city into a capitalist one. As with his earlier black and white work, these carefully framed fragments showed an intense and often unusual, sometimes surprising vision, glimpses that reflect past history that are often compelling, sometimes strangely uneasy. Perhaps I found the need for some text on the walls – perhaps equally fragmentary – to anchor these visions to their context.

In Wiblin’s previous black and white work from Wroclaw as well as in the images in “Night Watch“, the book from his year in residence in Cambridge in 1994-5, Ian’s printing added greatly to the impression that the images created, its dark charcoal greys and glowing lights being very much integral to the syntax with which he worked. Here the images were in colour and in a much more neutral key; perhaps an area which he might exploit more fully. But it was a show I found intriguing and powerfully evocative, and I look forward to more work by him in colour.

It was perhaps a shame that there were not more of us on the visit – and that there were not more shows around the area as a part of the festival. And although it was good to see those that were taking place at Curzon Street Station, they could perhaps have been made a more positive feature in the programme. Since much of the work was in the review areas, viewing was really only possible in the breaks during the day. Some of the photographers who only attended for a single day will probably not have seen much of this work.

Curzon Street Station is a fine building, the first station linking Birmingham to London, built in 1838, and built to impress. Although the tracks are long gone, the building still impresses, dominating the largely cleared area around it and providing light, airy spaces within, although in some aspects in need of refurbishment. With some investment it would make a fine centre for photography and digital imaging.

I was fortunate to be reviewing in a room containing perhaps the best of these shows, ‘Otherlands‘ with some exceptional work by a number of photoographers including Vee Speers, and Reiner Reidler (of whom more in later features), and there were aslo some pleasing works in the more public areas such as the stairways and landing, notably a set of John McQueen‘s colour pictures showing the once proposed Birmingham Ship Canal with a toy liner cruising the city. There were also a few images I related less positively to, including a pair so badly off-colour that it made me feel ill to view them, but fortunately such things were rare.

More of my impressions from Rhubarb shortly.

Peter Gwyn Marshall

Rhubarb Rhubarb: Three Canons

Having just returned home from four days or so in Birmingham (the one that calls itself the “Heart of England”,) where I was one of the many portfolio reviewers at Rhubarb Rhubarb, the annual International Festival of The Image, I’m still suffering from picture shock, overwhelmed by images and many hours of meeting with old friends and making many new ones.

It was my first Rhubarb, and now I can’t think why I’ve stayed away so long, having enjoyed much of it immensely. However I am looking forward to my first decent glass of wine since last Wednesday, having refused to contemplate the 500% mark-up which appears to be the norm in some posher Brummie hotels and restaurants. (And although the lunches at Rhubarb itself were excellent (and rhubarb-free), our limited research suggests an inverse relationship between the expensiveness of dining establishments in the city and the quality of food on offer. Do rich Brummies really so lack taste? And can this blog become even more irrelevant? Rumour does suggest the Pope may be Catholic.)

It really seemed to be a fine event, rewarding for photographers and reviewers alike, and in the coming weeks once I get back from a short holiday I’ll look at it and some of the more interesting work that I saw in more detail. And perhaps show some of what went on in the photographs I couldn’t stop myself taking – like this one:

Before I put down my computer and pick up my bucket and spade, I hope to find time to make a couple of posts. This first one is some advice for all those people who bring portfolios to such events, although I hasten to add many of those I fortunate to see were in no need of it, presenting their work in an exemplary manner. But sadly not all.

Three Canons for Reviewees

Be still, let your work speak and your reviewer think. Say only what is necessary.
When making your pictures think for yourself; when preparing to present your work, think of your audience.
Erase the word memory from your memory, your statements, your discourse. Let your work be memory, if so, then no one will need to be reminded.

Of course there should be a picture to accompany each of the precepts. For the moment you will have to make do with three from the event, two from the sort of formal opening and book launch at the end of the first full day, and one which gives an idea of the interior of the Curzon Street station. This was the first time that Rhubarb Rhubarb was held there and the picture shows a quiet moment during the day.

More features and more photographs about ‘Rhubarb Rhubarb’ on this blog later – and I’ll also put up some galleries on ‘My London Diary’ in a week or two.

Peter Marshall

Queens and Looking Glasses

My own notions about Queens are largely based on those of Lewis Carroll (an interesting photographer in several ways) in ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland‘ and its sequel. Queens – like the Queen of Hearts in the Dormouse’s tale were apt to come out with “Off with his head!” at the slightest provocation.

So I was shocked to hear on the BBC News one morning this week, that photographer Annie Leibovitz had dared to tell the Queen to off her tiara, and surprised that her maj’s reported response was as mild as saying “I’m orf” (shouldn’t it have been “We are orf” or perhaps “One’s orf”? At the very least Annie would surely have ended up spending a night or two in the Tower of London.

So it came as no surprise to learn that the whole thing appears to have been an ill-advised publicity stunt, using a clever bit of cutting, or that, having carefully allowed the story to play to maximum effect, the big bosses of the Beeb were down on their knees grovelling for the royal pardon.

It’s a sad story. The BBC, and in particular its ‘World Service’, has a proud record that has led to it being a trusted around the world – and listened to in many situations, even at times and places when it was illegal. TV has of course its own needs to present constant noise and controversy, frenetic and demotic, that at times override sense and taste, and always sacrifices subtlety.

For those with a little knowledge of photographic history, there was a certain sense of the similar, remembering the famous image of Winston Churchill, taken by Karsh immediately after he had apparently snatched Winston’s trademark cigar from his mouth, and there was baby without his dummy glaring into the camera, apparently on the edge of bursting into tears.

At least Annie wasn’t said to have snatched the tiara – and once anchored by the Queen’s hairdresser this would probably have taken some doing (and headlines ‘Annie Scalps Queen’). The pictures she made aren’t bad, if perhaps not her best work. But good portraits don’t always arise from making your subject comfortable, and some well-known for the apparent psychological depth of their images have taken quite different approaches. Paul Strand is said to have told his subjects where to stand and then to appear to have ignored them, although obviously he was waiting for the expression or stance that he wanted.

I thought a little about this yesterday, when another photographer butted in (perhaps unintentionally) while I was setting up a photograph and proceeded to give all of the people in it clear and precise directions as to what to do. Well, it isn’t the way I like to work, though of course I do sometimes need to attract people’s attention, and I like to work with people and let them react to me and what I do, but not to direct them.

Peter Marshall

Szarkowski Dies

“one’s point of view is formed by the work one chooses to write about, because it is challenging, mysterious, worthy of study, fun.”
John Szarkowski ( interview with Mark Durden, 2006.)

It would be hard to overstate the importance of John Szarkowski to photography, so I suppose it is inevitable that some of the obituaries following his death following a stroke last Saturday at the age of 81 have done so.

Great that Szarkowski was, he didn’t invent photography, and its progression into commercial galleries and the art world would certainly have ocurred (although undoubtedly rather differently) without his presence. One or two writers also need reminding that photography had started to play a significant role at the Museum of Modern Art some 25 years before he arrived there in 1962.

He built his work – as he always acknowledged – on that of others, notably Beaumont Newhall and Edward Steichen. Walker Evans, whose work had a key role in Szarkowski’s pantheon, had his first show at the museum in 1933, thanks to Lincoln Kirstein and Alfred Barr, and his major outing there, “American Photographs” in 1938, a year after Beaumont Newhall’s groundbreaking “Photography, 1839-1937“. (Kirstein, a wealthy “friend” of the museum, was also largely responsible for the publication Walker Evan’s classic book to accompany his show there.) Szarkowski’s 1971 retrospective of Evans was very much following in Newhall’s footsteps.

Szarkowki’s immediate predecessor at the museum, Edward Steichen, had given sterling service as the captain at the helm of photography, doing much to increase its popularity as an art form, particularly with his record-breaking “The Family of Man“.

But of course Szarkowski’s acheivements were immense. During his time as director from 1962-91, the museum set out a coherent direction in photography with shows such as “The Photographers Eye“, (1966), the catalogue from which remains an important text for photographers. “New Documents” (1967) introduced the work of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, giving a new impetus, and one that few critics of the time were ready for. Similar reactions greeted “William Egglestons Guide” in 1976, although here the main problem for many was that Eggleston worked in colour. These shows and others changed the course of photography.

Among his other writings, “Looking at Pictures” remains one of the most engaging books on photography, and certainly one that has inspired many writers on photography, as well as encouraging photographers to think more deeply about their own work. If you don’t already own a copy, I’d suggest you go out right now and buy or steal one.

One of the great treasures of MoMA is perhaps the finest collection of the works of Eugene Atget; most came when Szarkowski acquired the Berenice Abbot collection. The set of four volumes, “The Work of Atget” by Szarkowski and Maria Morris Hambourg that were published from 1981-5 are a fine work of scholarship superbly presented.

Szarkowski retired as director in 1991, although fortunately he continued to both curate shows and write, but he was no longer the emperor of photography. At times he must indeed have had grave doubts about the new clothes worn by some of the new emperors who took his place, and photography does sometimes seem to have lost its way and be moving down strange paths with odd bedfellows.

In recent years there have been several shows of Szarkowski’s own photographs. As might be expected, they show a great care and lucidity of thought. However his much greater legacy to us is through his work as a curator and writer.

Peter Marshall

Alec Soth: Badgering Parr

I take back almost all of those bad things I may ever have said about Gerry Badger, whose writing long ago in the British Journal of Photography was surely designed to wring the most from curmudgeonly misers by using twenty five words where one would have been more appropriate, surely sacrificing clarity for another thousand words at their ridiculously low rates.

His account, recently published by Alec Soth under the heading Badgering Parr is a hilarious story of Magnum’s recent New York sheenanigans. What makes it even more hilarious are the responses of some of the readers, some of whom show a complete inability to comprehend irony – and I assume Soth’s introduction was meant to provoke such AOL responses. I’m not going to join in the controversy about the description of Deborah Bell as ‘fragrant‘ but she is certainly one of the nicest gallery owners I’ve met. (As one of the comments points out, the word is a reference to a notorious British court case.)
I’m rather less certain that Martin Parr’s photography of the event was also meant to be a joke, though I rather hope so. Surely he cannot be serious!

Soth also quotes a letter from Philip Jones Griffiths, surely the greatest of Welsh photographers, and the man whose Vietnam Inc, made such a clear indictment of the Vietnam War that had me in tears as I read it, written in opposition to Parr’s Magnum entry. It is an interesting document, and I wonder how different Magnum would have been today had he swayed just one more Magnum member to vote against Parr. Not just Magnum, but photography too.

I’m in many ways a fan of Parr. He sometimes makes images that I stand in front of and feel are exactly right and why didn’t I have the nous to do it like that. But at times he does things that make me feel uneasy, or that I just don’t like. Some of these party pictures make me feel that, but others I’m afraid are just, well, boring. I didn’t know Martin had it in him.

But do read the whole piece. As they say on the Internet, it had me ROTFLMGO.

Plossu and Sandberg

In a way it wasn’t a suprise to find Alec Soth, a photographer whose work I greatly admire, and a guy who obviously knows his photography and writes about it well, hadn’t heard of Bernard Plossu. After all, Soth is an American.

In my 8 years at About Photography (currently my material is still on line, but I am replaced by a shadowy grey presence and no longer contributing or updating content) one of my major aims was to show a largely American Internet public that photography existed outside of the USA.

It wasn’t so much a crusade as a mere statement of fact; the great flourishing of photography that had made America (and particularly New York) the centre of photography from the time of the Photo League, past the Family of Man and on through the reign of Szarkowski at MoMA has more or less burnt itself out, but in its magnificence had blinded the public, particularly in the USA, to the existence of photography elsewhere. Many of us – including some leading Usanian* curators – had just begun to discover the riches of Latin America, Africa, Nothern and Central Europe, Arabia, Asia and elsewhere.

Of course I made sure to cover American photography – that is photography from the USA. As well as American (Usanian) photography I also covered wider American photography, including photographers from Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and most of the other countries of the continent. (I worked alphabetically by country for Central and Latin America, making it as far as Peru before my time was up, so here’s an apology to Uruguay and Venezuela.)

Outside of the Americas, I wrote on photography from Australia, India, China, Japan (I had plans for much more on this), a little on Africa, on Arab photography, as well as of course on Europe including Russia. There were of course many gaps still, and editorial pressures had unfortunately forced me to turn my main attention to other things over the last year. But so long as the material is on line you can find out more about photography in Albania or Iran, about my favourite Greek photographer, about at least two great Turkish photographers, and even a little about photography in Java.

So of course I’ve written a little on Bernard Plossu, and most of the links, including the one to documentsdartistes which has the best collection of his work on-line still work. He was one of the 200 or so photographers who featured in the ‘Directory of Notable Photographers‘ that I produced soon after taking the site on (and had more recently been augmenting in the Photographers A-Z), and got occasional mentions thereafter, such as in the feature on Contretype, a leading Francophone gallery in Brussels, for which he produced his ‘En Ville‘(2000), perhaps one of his more interesting works, with over a hundred images of the city.

Soth also has some information and pictures on Tom Sandberg (b 1953), one of the most acknowledged Norwegian photographers today. Sandberg’s own web site is still under development, but you can view some of his work at Galerie Anhava

Peter Marshall

*It’s revealing that despite the evident cultural aggression in the appropriation of the term ‘American’ (first objected to almost 200 years ago,) it remains as normal usage and alternative terms such as ‘Usanian’ have not made the mainstream.

Gillian Laub – Testimony

Gillian Laub (b1975, Port Chester, NY) is a New York based photographer who completed a BA in Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin before studying photography at the ICP in New York. Her show at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York, An American Life, closes tomorrow, July 7, 2007, and is a series of large colour images that show often intimate moments in the life of her own extended family, in Florida, New York and the suburbs. It’s work that gives an insight into the life of some Americans, and certainly very proficiently done, with several images that I like considerably (Grandpa eating on the beach at Naples, Florida for example) but overall I had a certain feeling of deja-vu, not least because I photographed a very different family some twenty or more years ago with occasionally similar results.

Well, families are families, although in some ways it is what is in the background of these pictures that that is of more interest, setting Laub’s particular family in a social context, and perhaps seen most clearly in ‘ Jamie Practicing for the Family, Armonk, NY 2003′.

What I find considerably more interesting than ‘An American Life‘ are Laub’s images from Israel and Palestine, some of which were shown earlier at Bonni Benrubi, and can be seen in the fine PDF portfolio ‘Beyond Wounds‘, as well as on Laub’s own web site. This work, some of which is in her newly published Aperture book, Testimony, seems to be of entirely a different and higher order of magnitude. These images of Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, displaced Lebanese families, and Palestinians all caught up in conflict in the region, taken over a four year period have an incredible depth and complexity.

If you are in London next Thursday, 12 July, 2007, you can hear Gillian Laub talking about her book at the Photographers’ Gallery at 6.30pm, followed by a book launch and signing in the Bookshop. It’s a free event, and no booking is needed.

Family Album was the first web site I ever wrote, and is still on the Internet (with some very minor changes to the code.) I also wrote a feature for About.com, Family Pictures at About Photography, which became one of my more popular features on the site. The discussion about the problems of nudity in images of children it contains surprisingly caused some controversy, although only around five years after it was put on line.