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Paris – More Photo Off openings

There were I think nine shows with “vernissages” on Thursday evening and I’d sat down the previous night and worked out a complicated route to visit half a dozen of them, finding short cuts on the complex system of routes which make up the metro system. But in the end I only made it to three.

Thanks to my seeing so many shows in the afternoon, we got off to a late start, rushing to the station and just missing a train. Of course they are so frequent this shouldn’t had been a problem, but although the next arrived three minutes later and we got on it, it moved no further. There were announcements, but none gave any idea of how long the hold-up was likely to last, and after ten minutes we decided to jump off and walk to the first show.

Lieux de passage (Crossing Points) at Lieu37 in the rue des Petites Ecuries in the 10e was a group show with 5 photographers, three of them professionals and two amateurs, photojournalist Christophe Lepetit, artist and director Frédéric Lemaitre, Grégoire Vopel, Jay Lag, and neurologist Yves Samson. It was, as the programme promised a deliberately eclectic show, and included some strange revolving triangular blocks with images on the three sides, as well as some highly enlarged i-phone images, which I felt would have looked better very much smaller, perhaps around postcard size. And although I couldn’t imagine ever hanging one of the images on a wall, I could see them selling well as cards for sending notes. The most interesting work to me was the blurred images of empty corridors and similar scenes, one of which is on the show site (image 9) but there are no details available there about it, and I seem to have lost the information I had about this set of work.

It was hard to get Linda away from the gallery and on to the appropriate metro station to take us to the next venue, Galerie Goutte de Terre on the rue Godefroy Cavaignac in the 11e, where the show was Krung Thep: la cité des anges, photographs by Pierre Raimond of street children in Bangkok (its Thai name Krung Thep means ‘city of angels’.) The photographer was accidentally invited into the world of street children in the city and produced some powerful portraits of them. After phtoographing them for some time he was refused permission to continue his work, but the children themselves were happy to have their pictures taken but with their faces hidden, and these images were among the most striking in the show. These were images that engaged me powerfully, and was one of the more interesting shows I found in those I saw in the fringe festival.

From here it was a fairly short walk to the next opening, A stone never dreams / Une pierre ne rêve pas at Le 19 in rue Trousseau (also in the 11e.) Franz Manni, born in Italy in 1973, has worked as an anthropologist in a Paris museum since 2000 as well as as a photographer, and perhaps because of his work has excluded people from these photographs, which look instead at structures and patterns formed in nature by human interventions. There was a strange quality to his images of patterns in water flowing over a weir or piles of materials by walls that intrigued me, though I find it hard to put into words why. These are certainly highly metaphoric images which Manni calls a way of reclaiming our dreams. In the gallery along with the pictures were some poems from the book Land of Stone by the American writer Karen Chase, in which Manni says he found the same spirit as his images, and one of which provided the title for his show:

I am a stone / a stone is good / it sits on a field / it never worries / it never dreams /

The poems in this book resulted from two years of weekly meetings with a severely withdrawn patient, in a locked ward of a large psychiatric hospital outside New York. Ben had given up speaking and social interactions and as therapy she engaged him in creating poetry. They would pass a writing pad to each other, taking turns in writing a line, engaging in a struggle for him to come out of his silence. There is perhaps something of a similar struggle evident in these pictures.

By this time the three openings had begun to take their toll (it would have seemed impolite not to have a glass or two of wine while looking at the pictures), and Linda had left me to go to a lecture and concert. I took the metro to go to the next show on my list, but when I got to the address could find nothing, not even a gallery and certainly no show. Probably I had gone to the wrong place, but I never found out.

I took a few pictures walking the night streets, which although dark should have been possible at ISO 3200, but few if any were sharp. My problem was the 20mm not focussing correctly. Although it is an f2.8 lens it seems to have a problem in lowish light on the D800E, though I’d not really noticed before using it on the D700. On autofocus it hunts very noisily noisily and excessively for focus at times; I’d noticed this particulary when photographing pictures at Paris Photo, when it often entirely failed to focus when I put a focus point on the picture frame (which I thought should make its job easy), but was usually better on the edge of the image. So much of the time I’d given up using it on autofocus, using scale focus and expecting the depth of field to cover any inaccuracy. But at night the focus scale gets difficult to use (its not much in good light) and it’s also very easy to alter the focus without meaning to. Especially after a few drinks.

I stood on the street outside where I thought the gallery should be wondering where to go next, whether to spend longer trying to find the show or perhaps to go on to the next. It was perhaps getting a little late to go on to the next venue and I was hungry and tired and decided that this was perhaps a sign to me that I should go and eat and then rest.

Continue reading Paris – More Photo Off openings

Paris – Menilmontant

We took the Metro for the next show, but Ménilmontant is perhaps an unusual area of Paris, a large slab without a Metro station, though they ring around its edges, perhaps connected with its hilly nature. But I was pleased to have to walk up from Gambetta to the rue de Ménilmontant, as the 20e is one of my favourite areas of the city, although I didn’t have the time to wander as much as I would like.

It was a little hard to find the show we were looking for in the Pavillon Carré de Baudoin, though of course if you know it, then it’s impossible to miss, an impressive building, the only Palladian building in the area, built on a grand scale in several stages in the middle of the eighteenth century as a folly devoted to festivals and pleasures of the rich, and in 1770 it was given an impressive portico with four ionic columns. In the nineteenth century it became an orphanage run by the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, and later they ran it as a young workers hostel and health centre. In 2003 it was bought by the City of Paris on behalf of the Mairie of the 20e who opened it as an arts centre for the community with a national and international presence in 2007.

But there was only a small notice by the gate telling us about the show which we missed at first as we walked along the street trying to find number 121, and it was another couple of hundred yards down the street that we found a building with a number on it and realised we had missed our way. But before we retraced our steps we were attracted by a short and picturesque street, the Cité de l’Ermitage, and went down this cul-de-sac to have a look.

Guillaume Herbaut‘s show in the Pavillon Carré was overwhelming. It began quietly with a room containing Les Portes de Pripiat (2010), straight-on images of the doors of abandoned homes in blocks of flats in the city 3 kilometres from Chernobyl, showing perhaps the only remaining traces of the 30,000 people who had lived there. In the darkness of the next room was a showing of images from La Zone (2009-2011), Herbaut’s much acclaimed work in the forbidden area around Chernobyl 25 years after the disaster, and up the several flights of stairs was a room with some of these same images on the wall.

But the final part of the show had an intensity that is difficult to describe. 7/7 is a series of essays, a total of 95 images with short captions in seven stories that deal with some of the horrors of our civilisation and in particular with the effects that these have on environments and people: Vengeance killings under medieval codes of honour in north Albania; Oswiecim – the site of the extermination camp Auschwitz; Chernobyl again with the replacement town of Slavoutich – also declared contaminated in 2001, the survivors from Nagasaki, the second city to be devasted by an atomic Bomb, two days after Hiroshima; Ciudad Juárez, Mexico in 2007, one of the centres of the drug cartels, where more than 400 women have been murdered in atrocities since 1993.

There was a powerful atmosphere in the darkened room as people moved silently from image to image around the three sides of the large space. Some of the images were harrowing, but perhaps the most difficult were those that looked, at least in most respects so ordinary, so normal and even at times so beautiful.

If you read a little French it’s worth downloading the Press dossier from the Mairie site about the show, and it has a few images, though you can see more in the portfolio on Herbaut’s web site.

The show continues until 5 January, and is one that you should make time to see if you go to Paris. Herbaut, born in 1970 was one of the founders of the collective Lil Public and has won various awards for his work. You can also see several videos, including one on the Zone from the links on his site.

I was still rather stunned when we came out on the street. It was a pleasant way to relax a little by taking a stroll down the Villa de l’Ermitage, often described as a haven of peace in the middle of the city, full of greenery. I’ve photographed it several times before on previous visits.

From there we continued along some of my (and Willy Ronis‘s) favourite streets to the Bar Floréal, not a bar but another photography collective, founded in 1985 by three photographers as a studio, gallery and lab – and over the years the three have grown into a dozen.

Showing in the gallery there was Night and Day, the fine jazz photography of Jean-Pierre Leloir (1931-2010). You can read an obituary in The Independent, and also visit the official web site of his work. This show is on until 16 Dec 2012, and is certainly worth seeing if the subject matter – which includes some of the giants of rock as well as jazz – is of any interest to you, as it certainly was for me.

It was getting dark as we left, and we took a brief look for some nearby shows that were a part of the Photo-Off, but saw rather little of them – it was getting late and it was time to go and prepare for our evening visits.

Continue reading Paris – Menilmontant

Friday in Paris

For me the camera is really a diary (among other things.) When I can’t remember what I did on a particular day or when I did something, looking at My London Diary often has the answer, or if not it can probably be found in the files in my own \image directory, though searching through these has been a little more difficult since I got a new computer a year ago, as my favourite image viewer, an old version of ACDSee failed to install on 64 bit Windows 7 claiming it was incompatible.

Perhaps I should upgrade to a later version, but I suspect that it wouldn’t be the same, with tons more stuff I don’t need added through version creep. I’ve tried a few of the free programmes around (and some are very good at what they do) but they just don’t let you look through folders of images in the same rapid way – and nor for that matter do expensive offerings from Adobe, however good they are at other things.

Today I got fed up with it and downloaded a few more things to try, including the free version of ACDSee, but none seemed to really do the job and I was about to buy an upgrade, but when I logged in and then tried pressing the upgrade button on the web site it showed me nothing.

I don’t know why I decided to try and install ACDSeePro 8 again. I’d saved the file onto a CD in 2006 and surprisingly I could find it. Once I found the right product key (I have half a dozen from ACDSee to chose from various versions of the software) the installer ran; as before it gave a message telling me it wasn’t compatible, but to my surprise it still completed the install, and seems to be working fine. So I’m crossing my fingers and hoping things will stay ok. It really does allow you to go through those images fast.

Looking at the files from Friday is simple enough, and they quickly bring back my memory of a cold morning with Paris in a cloud, damp and not quite raining as we made our way to the rue de Constantine in the 7e, not an area I much like. The show at the Centre culturel Canadien there, In the middle of nowhere, with work by Pascal Grandmaison, Isabelle Hayeur and Thomas Kneubühler continues until 22 March 2013, so is one of the few I saw in Paris that you can still see, though I don’t think it would be worth a great detour. The venue is certainly very grand, though I was a little surprised to have to go through an airport-style security check to view the show.

You can see more of Isabelle Hayeur’s work on her web site. The houses from her ‘Model Homes’ series were for me the most interesting part of her work on show, though they had a coldness that was unsettling, and somehow some looked more like Lego than real. There were also some of her large panoramic landscapes, I think constructed from digital images to create views that didn’t actually exist, but it didn’t really seem enough of an idea to justify the very large and slightly boring images. The works combining under and over-water views were perhaps a little more interesting, although mostly I was wondering about technical stuff when I looked at them.

Thinking about the show as a whole I felt the curator had perhaps tried to cram too many things into her concept of ‘the middle of nowhere’, “an unplaceable placean absurdity, a paradox, a deception, an illusion, a brightnesswhich represents a fabulous subject for photography.” I rather got the impression she had actually just chosen work that she liked from the three photographers which could then be mentally shoehorned into this rather vague idea.

Pascal Grandmaison‘s work very little for me, with a very odd sculpture made using studio background paper, simply seeming to clutter the space it was in, and I failed to be impressed by a series of dull inkjet prints of deliberately empty images of what I think were fairly random pieces of ground. Perhaps there was a point to it, but I have to admit I failed to find it. Or was it just that these pictures were pictures of nothing much at all? If so perhaps it was in some sense a success that I thought they were not worth looking at, though really I think it was a waste of time.

Thomas Kneubühler‘s work had considerably more interest for me, with a fine night image of a hydroelectric station and a curious series of distant views of illuminated mountains at night, ski slopes with the lights blazing away in darkness and reflected from the snow, and some large modern office buildings at night, enabling us to look into the illuminated offices.

From there we walked though the now slightly more particulate cloud across the Esplanade des Invalides to the main show I wanted to see, at the Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, which was showing the European Photo Exhibition Award (EPEA), sets of work by Catarina Botelho, José Pedro Cortes, Gabriele Croppi, João Grama, Monica Larsen, Frederic Lezmi, Pietro Masturzo, Hannah Modigh, Davide Monteleone, Linn Schröder, Marie Sjøvold and Isabelle Wenzel. Three photographers under 40 had been put forward by four photography curators who themselves were selected one by each of four foundations – Fondazione Banca del Monte di Lucca (Italy), the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Portugal), the Fritt Ord Foundation (Norway) and the Körber-Stiftung (Germany) who backed the award. They were then given 6 months to work on a project inspired by the theme of ‘European Identities‘ after starting with a workshop in Hamburg.

It wasn’t always easy to see any connection between the work on show and the theme, but there were some interesting pictures and projects among the twelve. You can see all the works on the EPEA web site, and the work is currently showing in Lucca, Italy and will be shown in Oslo in 2013.

Finally before lunch we called in for a brief look at Capucine Bailly’s Clichés de clichés, showing at the Cosmos Galerie until Christmas Eve. Born in 1980 and brought up in Paris Bailly went to New York when she was 21 and studied photojournalism and documentary phtoography at the ICP in 2004, after which with 13 of her classmates she set up the agency Veras Images. Now she is based in Paris as a freelance with Cosmos Agency – and you can see her work on their site. The ‘clichés’ in the show are rather fun and extremely garish, with the quality of mobile phone images treated to a psychedelic filter, and there were a few I liked a lot, particularly an image of a woman with very red lips during the election celebrations at the Socialist Party. But while I would buy it as a reasonably priced postcard or perhaps tear it out of a magazine to pin on a board, I wouldn’t want to frame it on a wall.

After another rather good brasserie lunch we walked past theHotel des Invalides – now a military museum – and found there was another photo show to see on the wall facing the road. These were pictures from the Algerian war of independence, showing the Algerians who fought on the French side – the harkis – many of whom were massacred after independence. Although the large black and white prints looked interesting, they really were just a little too far away to have a real impact.

It was half mile or so to the Maison de l’Amérique Latine on boulevard Saint-Germain, where there was a very extensive show of the work of Cuban photographer Jesse A. Fernández (1925-86), De La Havane à Paris. Tours et détours, which continues until 28 Feb 2013.

You can do a quick 3 minute tour of the show on video, which gives some idea of the range of his work, with some interesting images from his native Cuba as well as the many fine portraits of artists and writers, made working with existing light. Fernandez was a fine photographer and his work should be better known, and this is a show well worth seeing.

There isn’t a great deal about Fernandez that I can find on the web, but you can read a short feature about him (in English) by one of the commissioners of the show.

Continue reading Friday in Paris

Paris: Thursday Morning

Paris Photo doesn’t open until noon, so I had the morning to see some shows outside before returning to continue my work inside there. I suppose the kind of people who buy photographs don’t like to get up too early – or perhaps there is some other reason for them keeping the hours they do. I suppose it does mean some people will come on there after work as it stays open until mid-evening.

It was raining slightly and rather cold as we left our hotel and walked to the Place de la Bataille-de-Stalingrad, where I’ve previously been many times to admire one of Paris’s great buildings, the Rotonde de la Villette, a classical cylinder designed by Claude Nicolas Ledoux and built shortly before the Revolution as the offices for the tax collectors and guards who took the taxes on goods entering Paris. Now it’s been renovated and La Rotonde is a restaurant, but I’d not come here to eat but to see a Magnum show that was about to finish which was on the open area between it and the Bassin de la Villete.

Surrounding a large closed tent were a number of double-sided stands, linked to the tent by a like the tentacles of an over-legged octopus. Each of the 36 carried a series of pictures of a young entrepreneur, the founder of a micro-enterprise, and they incorporated loudspeakers which told you their story. The photographs, as you would expect from Alex Majoli and Jonas Bendiksen, were competent, but this was largely good commercial work than portraiture with more depth. I listened to a couple of the stories, then left Linda listening and walked around the area taking more pictures.

The area has been tidied up a lot in recent years, and what was once a slightly disreputable place is has gone up considerably in the world, although with many of the old canal-side buildings having gone and new modern offices and other buildings having sprung up it is rather less interesting. Some find the métro aérien whose viaduct goes across the square ugly, but it is certainly truly Parisian, and I rather admire its heavy nineteenth century ironwork.

The trees are covered with bright yellow leaves – its the time of year when once I used to hide the colour film and work only in black and white, there are only so many autumn images I ever want to take – and I indulge myself a little, before turning back to the austere pavilion.

Eventually Linda has listened to enough of the stories and we leave, walking south down beside the Canal St Martin, past a couple of locks to one of my favourite Paris views – I have a salt print I made years ago hanging in my living room (I don’t quite go back to the Fox Talbot era, but got interested in trying out the historic processes including salt printing, platinum, gum bichromate, cyanotype and more that I had to mention in the history course I taught.) I like to go back there and see how it has changed and also try to make some slightly different views.

At this point I lost Linda who had gone to look at the park opposite while I was taking pictures, and I found I couldn’t get a signal to phone her. Eventually I saw her in the distance and we met up, but by now it was rather later than I’d expected, and we walked quickly down to the Place de la République, close to which were several galleries which were open from 11am. I’d written down the address of the first with the wrong street number, which made it hard to find, but being Paris, we found two other galleries with unlisted shows first, which were actually slightly more interesting.

Our next stop was one of Paris’s nicer galleries, la galerie Les Filles-du-Calvaire which was showing Corinne Mercadier‘s Devant un champ obscur. The lower floor (above) had a series of large colour prints of scenes taken in what seemed to be an empty and deserted building, all of which had been inverted to a negative.

On the upper floor were staged images, some involving people with blocks or balls. it wasn’t really my sort of work. There is what seems to be a full set of the images on the gallery site, and if like me you are curious about the negative images you can copy them and drop them into Photoshop and then invert them (Ctrl+I). Of course I wouldn’t dream of posting Mercardier’s images treated in that way here, but here’s a more or less random image from my own collection (actually a crop from a panorama I was working with yesterday) treated in the same way. The clouds certainly gain in menace.

I know of photographers who always scan their transparencies as negatives and then invert them, claiming that with their software and hardware they get better results, though I’ve never found that to be the case. But certainly the negative world is a rather strange case as many photographers know, and back in the days when we all used black and white film we got quite adept at mentally flipping negatives to visualise the positive they would print. Colour negatives added a different dimension (and an orange mask) that made this – at least for me – largely impossible.

The first negative prints in the world of photography of course date from before W H F Talbot, who produced them in camera in the 1830s as ‘photogenic drawings’ (and a little later as calotype negatives), to the cameraless experiments of Wedgewood and others, and at Paris Photo there were a few examples of prints from the earliest photographically illustrated book, the splendid Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions by Anna Atkins which she started to publish in 1843.

Mercadier’s large negative images were made from much more subdued subject matter than my trivial example, and the large expanses of white wall in the deserted building result in very dark images, powerfully so. They had a presence that I found lacking in the dream-like staging in her works in the upper gallery, which to me bordered on the ridiculous, a kind of game-playing of ultimate insignificance, bolstered by the kind of philosophical statements which the French education system glorifies and inducts.

It was time for an early lunch, taken in a brasserie full of Parisians, many noisily celebrating the arrival of the Beaujolais Nouveau, a triumph of advertising over common sense and taste. I had to work in the afternoon and stuck to a single glass of beer with my extremely tasty plat du jour, Beef bourguignon with some deliciously cooked pastry wrapped potatoes and bread, though a red, but certainly not Beaujolais Nouveau, would have been even more appropriate.

Continue reading Paris: Thursday Morning

Paris Photo – Wednesday pm

Wednesday afternoon was the press preview, followed by the ‘vernissage’ and I’d already applied for and received my press pass, so all I had to do was to find the entrance. It took me a little while, as I started by finding the very long queues for the Hopper exhibition and then turned in the wrong direction, managing to walk virtually the whole way around the outside of the building (and its a very large building) before finding Paris Photo. After managing to get into the steps leading down to the show I was then sent back to find the press entrance, where I was given some documentation and finally, having had by then half a dozen security men wave readers at my card, magic wands over my body and peering into my bag was allowed to enter.

I decided to start by trying to see every stand, walking around the show in a logical fashion so as not to miss anything, stopping when I saw anything that interested me, and taking notes, but the magnitude of the show soon defeated me, and too often my handwriting does also.

So the comments I’m going to make are somewhat fragmentary, and don’t really represent the show as a whole, but are some of the highlights, and in particular will concentrate on a few things that were new to me. Take it as read that there were many good – if now familiar – images by many well-known names, as well as a great deal of work that I found without much if any interest (and much of it printed very large in colour.)

On the Robert Mann stand, some black and white work from the last decade by John Mack in Mexico stood out, with some strongly graphic images, though perhaps a little old-fashioned. Nothing wrong with that and some of the best work there was from the 1930s in Paris by Fred Stein. They also had one of the few good Robert Frank prints in the show.

At the galerie Le Réverbère from Lyon there were several photographers of interest new to me, and I particularly enjoyed the work of Géraldine Lay (b1972), Les failles ordinaires, a series of images of ‘fault lines’ in ordinary reality, some of which have a rather Hopperesque quality. You can see more of her work on her web site. They were also one of several stands to be showing work by William Klein, and you there is a link to an interview with him on the Lensculture blog which I watched yesterday.

Another stand which caught my interest was Gungallery from Stockholm, not just for the work by Anders Petersen, largely familiar to me, but for a group of pictures by Gerry Johansson. You can see work from his various books on his web site, including Deutschland. Looking at his work I immediately thought of Robert Adams, and picking up the book Oglunda and opening it I found myself reading an appreciative foreword by Adams.

One area was devoted to the 30 short-listed books in the Photobook of the Year Award, and I’m pleased to hear that Anders Petersen’s City Diary – three straightforward volumes of photographs which to me stood out head and shoulders above most of the rest for both the quality of the photography and for the simplicity and effectiveness of its design – was the winner. Some of the others seemed to have been selected simply for their tricksy design despite the often banal images, and at least one seemed to lack all the basic qualities of an actual book. Out of the 10 there were only perhaps two or three I would have made space for on my shelves had I been sent copies for review – including those by Lise Sarfati and possibly Stephen Shore – though I didn’t think the print on demand volume showed his work too well. Overall, the standard of the First Photobook Prize was perhaps higher. Although I wouldn’t myself have picked the winner, David Galjaard‘s Concresco, it was an interesting set of pictures. Other interesting books were by Lucas Foglia and Jerome Sessini, and Cristina de Middell deserved a prize for humour for her images of the Zambian space program. She has just been announced as one of those short-listed for the 2013 Deutsche Börse photography prize. Though I hope it goes to Chris Killip, it seems unlikely and I can only agree with Sean O’Hagan about that and the nomination of de Middell.

The Magnum stand was perhaps a little disappointing, though a collection of images by Raymond Depardon mainly taken in the San Clemente Psychiatric Hospital in 1979 stood out.

There were tributes to Louis Stettner, marking his 90th birthday – and most of his best work was from his early years in Paris, so this was a fitting place, as well as to Martine Franck who died in August, aged 74.

Other shows within the show included one from the J P Morgan Chase Art Collection. It started well, with a couple of Cartier-Bresson‘s best (and one also-ran), and a couple of good Walker Evans images among his four and the same for Robert Frank. 11 by Eggleston seemed rather too many for such a small show, and then there were four Friedlanders and 3 Winogrands. After all this, the portrait of a farmer by Eve Arnold and two by Lynne Cohen came as rather an anti-climax. It looked as if the curator had got to that point and suddenly realised that there were no pictures by women in the show and searched desperately for anything that might fill the gap. Surely there are better images by women – these women or others – in the 6000 in the JP Morgan collection? Perhaps an Arbus or two and a Nan Goldin?

As usual many of the best colour prints on show, and quite a few of the black and white, were inkjet prints, though there were at least one hundred and one ways of making that less obvious to the label reader (and far too many pictures that didn’t have any label, as well as some that you would have had to get on your knees to read.) But there were vintage C-types, almost always recognisable by an overall orange or brown cast as they continue to decay, though this does not yet seem to have affected their prices.

There was, as in previous years, some interesting Japanese photography on several stands, and I was also amused by the photocollages of Toshiko Okanoue, at the Third Gallery Aya from Osaka which was showing the work of 4 Japanese women, with Ishiuchi Miyako, Yamazawa Eiko, Akasaki Mima and her.

There was so much more. Kertesz, another photographer who made Paris his home, had work on so many stands, but particularly on that of Vintage from Hungary. Weegee too came up on several, there were a few by Leon Levinstein I don’t recall having seen before. The Feroz Gallery, founded by Julian Sander, great grandson of August Sander had a nice wall of grandfather’s prints, while another stand had an unfortunate collection of bad copies made by Sherrie Levine, along with her lousy copies of Walker Evans, work which I can’t accept has any validity or place on an exhibition wall – the only place it belongs is as an exhibit in a copyright court.

By around 7.30pm I was exhausted, and since no-one seemed to be offering me any of the champagne they were drinking I decided it was time to leave and get something real to eat and drink.

Continue reading Paris Photo – Wednesday pm

GMT

We are now in my least favourite time of the year, with the nights drawing in and yesterday it was getting dark in London at 4pm, when I decided to come home. I actually quite like working in the dark or in twilight, but I hadn’t really got anything to do as the protest I turned up to photograph had failed to materialise at the time set for it. But this early darkness I find depressing, and wish we stayed all the year on our ‘Summer Time’. Things were of course better in Paris, where they enjoy around an hour more light in the evenings.

One of the things I always forget when the clocks go back or forward is to change the time setting on my cameras. This year at least it had the advantage that the times on my pictures taken in Paris had the correct local time, but those taken in the two weeks before I went and the day or two after I came back are an hour out.

Although the key clocks in my home all adjust themselves automatically, my cameras don’t, although at least it is only a matter of going into the Settings menu, selecting ‘World Time’ and – in this case – turning ‘Summer Time’ to off. Which I’ve just done.

But time-keeping is a rather weak point on the Nikons. I don’t think there is any simple way to synchronise the time between two camera bodies, and its tricky to get them right to the nearest second either with each other or with the time signal. For me it’s trying to keep the two bodies in synch which is the larger headache, and although I set them more or less spot on a few months ago, the D700 and D800E are now over a minute apart, so when I’m working with both and look at the pictures “in date order” they often are not quite so, and it can be a pain. I don’t really understand why this should be, as I’m sure the chips inside the cameras are capable of much more accurate time-keeping. And it would be nice to be able to easily connect up the two bodies in some way to synchronise them to a fraction of a second.

To save battery power I usually have the menu display set to automatically turn off after a short period, so to synchronise the two bodies I first need to set that to a longer value. Then you have to remember that the time stops when you are changing the date time setting. So I start by going into ‘Date and Time’ and logging on to 24TimeZones.com which despite transmission delays will give me the time accurately enough for my purposes – and anywhere around the world. I set the time on the camera a little in advance of the actual time and then press OK when the time on the screen reaches that setting. Repeat the process on the second body and the two are within a second of each other.

Then I put the cameras away, sit a while and remember I’ve forgotten to change back the setting to turn off the menus to save battery power, curse gently and get them out again to finish the process. I’ll do it immediately I’ve posted this.

We have to suffer in darkness until 31 March 2012. While I’m writing this I’m going to put the next few dates to change the clocks into my online diary – you can easily do this for the UK by using the link on this page of the GOV.UK site.

Photograph as Commodity – Paris 2012

I’d hoped to blog from Paris, but it didn’t work out – the WiFi at my hotel spent most of the week failing to connect and really I was just too busy to post anyway. Apart from the last 36 hours or so when I was considerably indisposed following a rather violent disagreement between a curry and my stomach which left me living on sips of water alone, spoiling my plans for a couple of really good meals with a decent amount of alcohol before my journey on Eurostar back to England I had a pretty good time there.

I have to say Paris Photo itself was perhaps a little of a disappointment, even though I had no great expectations. It’s certainly still somewhere where you can see an enormous amount of great photography from the past, including work by most of the real innovators and masters of the medium, but perhaps more than ever this year it showed its bias. It’s an obvious one, in that this is largely a dealer show, and dealers can only show the work that is available for sale. So, for example, a photographer like Atget was almost invisible at Paris Photo, despite his fairly huge output of work, as the great majority of his pictures were either sold by him direct to museums or became a part of museum collections – such as those bought after his death by Berenice Abbott. Other photographers, working before photography dealers and galleries really existed, seldom made more that a half dozen or so copies of any prints, and often their negatives have not survived for later prints to be made, or their estates have not allowed this to be done.

What dominated some of the stalls was work from many relatively minor figures from the post-war years who are still alive (or whose negatives are still available) being promoted because their work is available, whereas relatively little by photographers of much greater interest is still around outside of museum and other collections.

Contemporary work suffers – perhaps as always – from the quest for novelty by both photographers and in particular contemporary galleries. All too often this seems to be a turning against the peculiar link with reality which to me is at the root of interest in our medium. After a few minutes walking around the great hall containing the photo fair I never wanted again to see work in which people had painted on their photographs, punched holes in them, cut them up, processed them deliberately badly and so on. I’ve never thought showing contempt for the photograph a likely way to produce worthwhile results, but there were rather too many photographers and galleries at Paris Photo who seem to think so.

© 2012, Peter Marshall
There was a lot of good work by Japanese photographers on show – and some of the photographers were there

Despite the 37 new galleries and 91 that had been in previous editions, there did seem to be a dearth of exciting or even interesting new work on show. There was also a surprising lack of work by UK photographers from after the Victorian period, and several of the more interesting London galleries were not here – there were only 8 from London (including one I’d never heard of, and seeing the work they had brought I wasn’t surprised.) I met a friend from one of those missing and was told that their application to show this year had been refused. I was more than surprised given the poor quality of work on some of those who had been given space, and the large spaces allocated to some galleries with apparently fairly limited work to show.

Of course there were highlights for me – some of which I’ll mention in later posts and it was still worth attending, though certainly I’d not go to Paris for Paris Photo alone. If you have any interest in photography Paris in November is a pretty magic place, with around 80 exhibitions in the Mois de la Photo, another 100 or so in the fringe festival, the Photo Off, over 50 in the Saint-Germain-des-Pres Photo Festival, and what seemed to be countless other shows outside of these events, as well as shows of work for the Prix Pictet, the Prix de Photographie Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière – Académie des beaux–arts, the Prix Arcimboldo for creation of digital images, the Prix Carmignac Gestion for photojournalism. In six days there, most of which were spent going from show to show, I hardly scratched the surface, although apart from Paris Photo I attended seven openings, went to presentations on seven other shows, went to the Nofound Photo Fair, went into and walked around about 50 exhibitions and probably looked at almost as many through the windows and either decided it wasn’t worth wasting my time, or was unable to go in as they were closed. But there were quite a few areas of Paris I didn’t manage to get to, concentrating my time on the shows I particularly wanted to see and others in the same areas.

This was the second year Paris Photo had been in its new premises at the Grand Palais, and in most respects this was a better venue than the old underground site in the bowels of the Louvre, handy though that was for cafes and shops – and for the very pleasant gardens of the Palais Royal. It was less crowded, got less overheated and I had no problems of claustrophobia – if anything it favoured the opposite. On the downside it seemed less intimate, and certainly I bumped into far fewer people I knew as I made my way round. But perhaps with there being far less representation of living photographers from the UK and central Europe in this year’s event fewer of those I know bothered to make the journey.

I’ll write more about Paris Photo and a few of the things that excited me there and elsewhere in Paris in the coming days, and as a part of a ‘Paris Diary‘ that I’ll eventually put up on ‘My London Diary.’

Continue reading Photograph as Commodity – Paris 2012

PDF Publishing

Blurb now offers the choice of selling books as PDF versions, and I’ve now made six of mine available in that format. The obvious advantage is cost, and you can now get any of my books for a fiver (£4.99 to be exact) for the 8×10 volumes and a bit cheaper for the one smaller volume I’ve produced. They really are better bargains than paying the £26.99 plus carriage from Blurb for a printed copy, or even the £25 including carriage that I charge for direct orders to UK addresses.

Although I can’t deny there is something about the physical object, being able to hold it in the hand, leaf through the pages, open it at random etc, if you have a good quality screen the images probably look better on it than in print, and it’s certainly good to be able to see them a little larger, particularly the smaller ones.

As well as the cost of the actual book there are other advantages – virtually immediate delivery and no carriage costs, and also although the cost is much less, I get a far larger proportion of it. Buying the books as PDFs means you are supporting the photographer, while the printed book supports the printers and all the others involved. Blurb of course takes its share in both versions, and I don’t begrudge that as they make it possible and handle the sales.

1989: 20 photographs ISBN 9781909363014 PDF £3.99

Before the Olympics: The Lea Valley 1981-2010 ISBN 9781909363007 PDF £4.99

Photo Paris: 1988 ISBN 9781909363021 PDF £4.99

In Search Of Atget: Paris 1984 ISBN 9781909363045 PDF £4.99

2006: My London Diary ISBN 9781909363052 PDF £4.99

London’s May Queens. ISBN 9781909363069 PDF £4.99

If these sell I’ll think about making other volumes available as PDFs and also it gives new opportunities for publishing. With one exception I’ve limited my books so far to 80 pages simply to keep costs down to reasonable levels. It’s sometimes meant that I’ve had to use some pictures rather smaller than I would have wished and publishing as PDF removes most of the cost limitations. So perhaps some of my future volumes will have more pages.

Of course I don’t need Blurb to produce or sell PDFs. I can make them directly in InDesign (which I can also use to give greater freedom of design with Blurb) and could fairly easily set up a system using PayPal to sell them myself. But Blurb has some advantages and saves me a little hassle, and their charges for PDFs are at the moment reasonable. It’s useful to be able to produce print copies, and it is these print copies that I’m now currently assigning ISBNs to and depositing with the National Library.

Zombie Time

As usual zombies were thick on the ground in London in October, although the group who were putting in an early pre-Halloween appearance for charity on October 13 were a very much more organised group than most, on a charity pub crawl raising funds for St Mungo’s, a charity that really does help the homeless to help themselves. Despite the name it isn’t a religious organisation, but took its name from the patron saint of Glasgow, the home town of its founder, although it began with a house open for rough sleepers in Battersea, and it seems a very good cause which people can get involved with in different ways – giving money, fund-raising event such as this and volunteering to help in some of the over a hundred projects it runs.

So perhaps this event attracted a better class of zombie, as the undead aren’t generally noted for their charity, which perhaps just doesn’t usually go with eating flesh and brains, although most zombies I’ve actually photographed in past years have seemed to have a greater interest in drinking alcohol. And I was photographing them at the start of a day-long pub crawl around London, a fun event with a serious purpose.

There may well be a special connection between zombies and Glasgow, certainly my first experience arriving in the city centre there around closing time in the early 1960s was interesting, as was a week staying on Sauchiehall Street in the European City of Culture in 1990. Seriously it is a city I liked and we went back to stay there for a few days in 2008.

But probably the start of their day, around lunchtime, wasn’t the best time to photograph them, and things would have got a little livelier (perhaps not the right word with zombies in mind) after a couple of pub visits. Zombies are after all really creatures of the night, and despite the horror costumes (or because of them) some were still just a little shy.

The bright low winter sun gave me a few problems, and at one point I found myself needing fill flash but having the SB700 on the wrong camera, and no time to swtich it over in the fast-changing situation I made the wrong decision to keep on working without flash, forgetting completely the built-in flash on the Nikon D700, which would have helped at the flick of a finger. Stupid. I’ve just got out of the habit of using it, as the accessory flash units usually do a better job.

Of course it was possible to more or less rescue the images in post-processing thanks to Lightroom, but certainly some of the better pictures I took would have been improved with some fill flash. By the time I’d paused long enough to change the flash around the situation had disappeared.

The other reason it was probably a bad time was quite simply the huge number of other people around taking pictures. Perhaps later in the day they would have thinned out a little. This was an event that seemed to attract a real crowd of photographers, perhaps the kind of event that gets listed in amateur magazines as a photo-opportunity.

I had other things to photograph, and so wasn’t able to spend more time with them. I knew too that I would be photographing zombies again in a couple of weeks time.

More pictures on My London Diary: Zombies Invade London.

Continue reading Zombie Time

Perspective

I wanted to photograph the first anniversary of the unsuccessful attempt by Occupy London to go to the Stock Exchange which led to their camping outside St Paul’s Cathedral both because of an interest in the Occupy movement (see Occupy London Kept Out Of Stock Exchange), but also because I had been there last year, as well as seven and a half months later when they finally achieved – if only for a couple of hours – their objective.

I wrote more about the anniversary event almost a month ago in
Occupy London, and you can now see more pictures from the day on My London Diary in Occupy Global Noise Street Party.

One of the pictures I took early on that day, taken with the 20mm, was of a small boy kneeling in front of the very tall Cathedral door.

second version of the image. I actually prefer the original, which to me gives a greater sense of the looking up that you have to do when you are standing there under the portico, although the lower version gives me a greater impression of the huge scale of the door compared to the child. The ‘corrections’ also means that most of the tiles on the floor have to be cropped, which I think is also a great loss, giving a picture of a flat vertical surface rather than the three-dimensional quality of the original. And simply graphically the expanse of tiles is more interesting, whereas the narrow strip left of the lower image simply distracts. Somehow too, the lines and diagonals seem to direct my eye towards the child, an effect that is lost when they are reduced to the narrow band.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with correcting verticals, and it is something we all learnt to do in the darkroom days, though digital makes it considerably easier and more powerful. [You can also use horizontal correction and make the doorway rectangular, but this simply would look unnatural as you see the inside of the door frame at left, but not at right, so the image is clearly taken from that side.] We are seldom aware of the vertical convergence when we view a seen, and in some respects correcting it better fits out visual experience – as too does the kind of correct I often make from fisheye to cylindrical perspective. Sometimes it works, and other times, as I think in this case, the image is better left more or less untouched.

Continue reading Perspective