Archive for the ‘Photo History’ Category

Hands Off Iraq, George Galloway & Tony Benn

Saturday, March 2nd, 2024

Hands Off Iraq, George Galloway & Tony Benn – Saturday 2nd March 2002 saw a huge protest against Britain becoming involved in the US plans to invade Iraq and depose Sadam Hussein.

Hands Off Iraq, George Galloway & Tony Benn

It’s hard to know how many marched that day, though I think there may have been around half a million of us on the streets of London,but it was certainly a very large march though not quite on the scale of that on 16th February 2003. Unfortunately I had to miss that one as I had only come out of hospital the previous day and could only walk a few yards.

Hands Off Iraq, George Galloway & Tony Benn

George Galloway, then Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin, has come back into the news recently by winning the Rochdale by-election. He along with Tony Benn and others was one of the founders of Stop The War following the US invasion of Afghanisatan and the coalition organised this and other protests against the invasions of Iraq then being prepared by the US Miitary. Galloway was and still is a flamboyant figure and a powerful speaker, though I was rather more attracted to others in the movement such as Tony Benn, who appears in more of my pictures.

Hands Off Iraq, George Galloway & Tony Benn

But then as now, I wasn’t at the protest to photograph celebrities, but to tell the story of the event, mainly through photographs of the ordinary people taking part. Of course my pictures concentrate on those who caught my attention, sometimes by their expressions and actions, but more often through their banners and placards which link them to the cause they were marching for.

Hands Off Iraq, George Galloway & Tony Benn

Although I’d been photographing protests for some years – occasionally since the 1970s and more intensively since the 1990s, my pictures had simply gone into picture libraries and a few exhibitions and few had been used in the mass media.

Hands Off Iraq, George Galloway & Tony Benn

Shortly after Indymedia, a global network of independent news media was set up in 1999 I began publishing work on the UK site – and some of it may be still be available on the now archived site. This was of course entirely non-commercial, and had a very limited readership on the left, among anarchists and the security services.

But I also set up a new web site of my own, My London Diary, which is still available online, though its now several years since I have added new work. Although I have unlimited web space there is a limit to the number of files my web server can handle, and I was very close to this. Covid also played its part in various ways.

In the early years of My London Diary I was still working with film and only had a black and white flatbed scanner. So the pictures for Hands Off Iraq online were all in black and white, though I will also have taken some in colour, but so far I’ve digitised few colour images from these years. The 24 black and white images on My London Diary will have been made from 8×10″ black and white press prints submitted to a picture library and scanned on a flatbed scanner. In 2002 although many magazines were printed in colour the main sales for news images were still black and white, though things were rapidly changing, and I was soon to begin moving to working mainly in digital colour.

Here, with a few corrections is the text I put on line back in 2022 with these pictures:

The Stop the War, Hands off Iraq demonstration on 2 march was a large sign of public opinion. people were still leaving Hyde Park at the start of the march when Trafalgar Square was full to overflowing two and a half hours later.

Police estimates of the number were risible as usual – and can only reflect an attempt to marginalise the significant body of opinion opposed to the war or a complete mathematical inability on behalf of the police.

Tony Benn told me and other photographers it wasn’t worth taking his picture – “it won’t get in the papers unless I go and kick a policeman” but he didn’t and he was quite right.

More pictures on My London Diary


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Hull Revisited December 2005

Tuesday, December 19th, 2023

Hull Revisited December 2005: Usually I sit down to write these posts and tell some kind of story about the events or places that I photographed on a particular day or walk or project. And the pictures in this article were all taken on 17-19th December during a short visit to Hull.

Hull Revisited December 2005

But when I looked at them they didn’t look as you see them now, and my first thought was about the colour and quality of the 49 images that I’d posted to the web back in 2005, and rather than writing about them I decided to try and improve them a little. Going back to the original RAW images taken on a Nikon D200 would have been the best way to do this, but would have been very time-consuming and instead I simply worked on the 600×400 pixel jpeg images that I’d put on-line.

Hull Revisited December 2005

Back in 2005 the RAW conversion software available was pretty much in its infancy and often required considerable judgement to get anything like the most from the images. Using the current version of Lightroom would have enabled me to improve the images considerably.

Hull Revisited December 2005

But time was short, and instead I spent perhaps 30 seconds on each image, bringing them into Photoshop in batches and then using its auto-color and and auto curve correction on each. On a few I had to modify the auto settings, fading the correction or tweaking the curve a little, but most were done fully automatically, and the improvements in some cases were dramatic.

We’d gone to Hull mainly to celebrate the 60th birthday of an old friend, and stayed at the large and architecturally interesting home of another friend, as well as to visit my mother-in-law in her nursing home. But I found some time to get out and photograph parts of the city I’d first photographed in the 1970s and 1980s as well as find some new scenes to photograph. Here I’ll post a few of them, but you can see more on My London Diary.

More on My London Diary



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FotoArtFestival Diary 2007 – Poland

Sunday, October 22nd, 2023

FotoArtFestival Diary 2007 – Poland: In 2007 I was invited to speak at the second FotoArtFestival in Bielsko-Biala, Poland and made a fairly lengthy illustrated diary of my visit. I’d been there two years earlier at the first festival there in 2005 and had enjoyed the event greatly, although it was not without a few problems, but it had been a great success.

FotoArtFestival Diary 2007

I’ve been reminded of this in recent days by several things. Firstly by seeing pictures from this years FotoArtFestival on Facebook, the 10th of these remarkable events still being organised by the wonderful Inez Baturo from 13-29th October 2023.

FotoArtFestival Diary 2007

Also on Facebook recently I’ve been seeing again and admiring many of the pictures by Misha Gordin, (1946-2020) who arrived in Krakov on the same flight with me. His conceptual images constructed in the darkroom are powerful and quite remarkable. I still can’t quite imagine how he produced some of them, though my diary says what he told me about his methods. You can read more about his pictures in a 2007 article by A D Coleman on his Photocritic International site, Misha Gordin: Reflex of Freedom.

FotoArtFestival Diary 2007

And on a quite different Facebook group, someone recently posted an image from Bielsko-Biala that jumped off the screen. It wasn’t one that I had taken, but of one of the most famous doorways in the city that I had also photographed. I posted as a comment a picture the had taken in 2005 – the top one on this post.

FotoArtFestival Diary 2007

I hadn’t gone there on either of my two visits to take photographs and in terms of photo gear on both occasions had travelled light, with just a pocketable digital camera, intending simply to create a diary of the event. In 2005 that was a 3.9MP Canon DIGITAL IXUS 400, but by 2007 I had upgraded to a 6.1MP Fuji FinePix F31fd. As you can see from the pictures in both my 2005 and 2007 diaries, both were pretty capable little cameras.

Bielsko-Biala is a city in southern Poland around 240 miles from Vienna which became an important centre for the textile industry in the 19th century when it was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and became home to many wealthy industrialists. Many had homes built in styles then popular in Vienna, particularly Art Nouveau and there are some fine examples in what is often called “Little Vienna”.

I rose early and walked around the centre of the city before the festival venues and events began taking pictures as well as walking with the others between events. My diary also has some brief reviews of some of the shows in the festival by Michal Macku (Czech Rep), Karol Kallay (Slovakia), Stasys Eidrigevicius (Lithuania/Poland), Aleksandras Macijauskas (Lithuania), Michael Kenna (UK), Walter Rosenblum (USA), Jose Luis Raota and Pedro Luis Raoto (Argentina), Franco Fontana (Italy), Judit M Horvath and Gyorgy Stalter (HUngary), Joan Fontcuberta (Spain), Misha Gordin (Latvia/USA), Lukas Maximilian Huller (Austria), Sarah Moon (France), Alex ten Napel (Holland), Mitra Tabrizian (Iran/UK) and Dalang Shao, Du Shao and Jiaye Shao(China) as well as accounts and pictures of some of the festival events. Most of those who were able to attend are in my pictures in my diary.

You can read all 16 pages of my FotoArtFestival Diary 2007 online – with many more pictures. I’ve made no real changes other than correcting the date at the top of each page. Probably many of the links in it will no longer work and those who reach the end will find will find that I still haven’t managed to put my talk from 2007 online. Copyright problems are probably insurmountable.


Joan Liftin (1933-2023)

Saturday, January 28th, 2023
Joan Liftin at Duckspool, 1993

I didn’t really know Joan Liftin who died recently well, but met her when I attended a workshop led by her husband, Charles Harbutt (1935-2015) at Duckspool in Somerset in the 1990s. I was impressed by some photographs she showed there and both she and Charlie were sympathetic and made helpful criticisms about my own work as well as expressing some views on photography which influenced me. Later she sent me a copy of her first book, ‘Drive-Ins‘ which I reviewed for the photography site I was then running for About.com, long defunct.

I heard about her death on The Eye of Photography, where you can read an obit by her friend, the photographer Brigitte Grignet, though unless you are a subscriber you will not be able to see more than a couple of her photographs. But you can see more on Liftin’s web site, which has a few pictures from each of her three books.

There is a lengthy podcast interview with her on ‘Right Eye Dominant‘ where she talks at length about her life and career at Magnum, ICP and more, working with almost every photographer whose name you will know. The sound is a little rough but her character which attracted me really comes across. Close to the end she talks a little about Harbutt and his work. You can also hear her talking on the B&H Photography Podcast. There is a written interview with her on Visura magazine, which in many ways I prefer to a podcast, though it was good to hear her voice again.

Harbutt played an important part in my own photography, particularly through his book ‘Travelog‘ published by MIT in 1973. This was one of the first photography books I bought and opened my eyes to different ways of working. His workshops were legendary, and it was one of those which inspired Peter Goldfield, who I met in the 1970s to leaving Muswell Hill where he had set up Goldfinger Photographic above his pharmacy in Muswell Hill and set up the photography workshop at Duckspool and I wrote about this at the time of Peter’s death in 2009.

Liftin’s web site also has links to a post in the NY Times archive, Moving Freely, and Photographing, in Marseille, with text by Rena Silverman and 16 photographs, though again access may be limited if you are not a subscriber. There are also links to some other features on her Marseille book on her site.

Liftin wrote an introduction to The Unconcerned Photographer published in 2020 which includes the text of a lecture given by Harbutt in 1970 which first publicly expressed his views on photography.

Bill Jay and Album

Wednesday, July 20th, 2022

Although I’d had a strong interest in photography since my early years, probably first inspired by magazines such as Picture Post in my childhood, followed by the gift from a middle-class relative of a large stack of pre-war National Geographic magazines. In my early teens I saved for well over a year from my minimal pocket money and Christmas and birthday gifts to buy a Halina 35mm camera – and then spent more years becoming familiar with it before I could afford to buy a film and pay for it to be processed; it was only a dozen or so years later that I had both cash and the opportunity to seriously take up photography.

That was around 1970, and it was at an interesting period in the history of photography in the UK. One of the key things for me at the time was coming across a magazine on the top shelf at a newsagents called ‘Creative Camera‘ which changed my ideas about our medium.

I can’t now remember which was the first issue I bought, and though I’ve kept my copies from back then I also in the following years bought some of the earlier issues to add to my collection, along with some early issues of another and far more short-lived publication, Album. This lasted only for a dozen monthly issues, and I think I came across it at its end and was one of those who responded to a plea to subscribe at the time of what turned out to be its final issue. This was a great disappointment, and it didn’t help not to get my money back despite the promises. You can now read all 12 issues online.

Much later I heard stories from some of the many photographers who had sent in portfolios to Album and had not had them returned (I never heard anyone tell me their work was returned) about their photographs having been sold without their knowledge or consent. At the time I didn’t myself have any work worth sending.

I didn’t at the time know personally any of the people who were behind these two publications and I’ve found it interesting to watch recently the film ‘Do Not Bend‘ about Bill Jay and more recently to listen to the series of podcasts by Grant Scott ‘In Search of Bill Jay‘, still being added to.

During the years concerned I lived in Manchester, Leicester and Bracknell, all well away from where things were happening in London, though I did briefly become a member and go to some photographic events at the ICA, possibly still when Jay was around. But I never go to know any of the small clique at the centre of things then, though I came across some of them later through Creative Camera, the Photographers Gallery, which I belonged to for well over 30 years before giving up my membership in disgust, and elsewhere.

Grant Scott has certainly been thorough with his research and has pointed out in the podcasts a number of errors particularly in the accounts of the early years of both magazines by Gerry Badger. But there is a problem common to all such research in that it largely relies on recordings and publications along with some very fallible memories of those key players still living. There is a very large body of writing and recording of Bill Jay himself, and though Scott has already pointed out some of its inconsistencies, I think he has perhaps not taken full account of a deal of self-aggrandisement within Jay’s talks and writing.

And although London with Album and Creative Camera was certainly the epi-centre of a new life for photography in the UK, things were happening around the country in many ways in the 1970s and though Jay certainly was at its centre at the start he left the country having helped light the fuse.

I came to spend quite a lot of time (and money) at the Creative Camera bookroom in London and did later send my work to that magazine, with several rejections before a small group of pictures appeared in the last of their albums.

Jim Hughes wrote about Bill Jay in a post on ‘The Online Photographer’, Bill Jay’s Vision, in 2012, and he quotes from two speeches by Jay that make interesting reading. I’ll end with two short excerpts from these quotes – but do click and read the rest, including Hughes own comments and those by others at the end of the article:

“I have no desire to be considered a photographer. I got into photography because I loved the medium and I admired the people who became photographers.”

“And my big fear is that the histories of photography in the future will be based on the photographers who were saleable through galleries, not through the best photographers in the medium.

“We need people who understand the history of the medium and have standards, who are saying ‘photography has something extraordinarily important to say about our culture, our society, our political system’—these are the things we should be looking at and caring about.”

Bill Jay – ICP Infinity Award acceptance speech, 2008


The Future of the Photographic Magazine

Thursday, February 10th, 2022

I seldom these days think or write much about contemporary photography or the future of photography, though it was something that was a part of my remit as a working journalist for some years a while back. Nowadays I seem to be too busy with my own work – both current and past – to think or write much about anything else.

But I’ve recently been intrigued by a Twitter thread by John Macpherson, better known as duckrabbit, a photographer and author of one of the few photography blogs I read regularly and admire greatly for the principled stance he has taken in recent controversies over Magnum and Child Abuse and other issues.

I have to admit I don’t actually take any real part in Twitter, never having found out how to sort the wheat from the incredible volume of chaff. I post (when I remember) tweets linking to pictures from current protests and events which I’ve posted in Facebook albums, but that’s about all. So the link to duckrabbit’s thread came to me by a ‘Your Highlights‘ e-mail from Twitter.

The thread is difficult to follow, but it seems that the British Journal of Photography has been sold or is in process of being sold and its Twitter account with 250,000 followers has been asset stripped from the company.

The sale appears to be to a company engaged in the promotion of NFTs, and BJP appears to be morphing into ART3A brand new platform bringing the best lens-based art to the metaverse” offering these as rather intangible Non-fungible tokens for sale through an outlet, OpenSea.

Having read and tried to understand what an NFT is, I still have no idea why anyone would want to own one. Certainly it is something far more to do with the art market than with photography. It’s worth reading the thoughts of Jack Lowe on them in his ‘Are Aspiring Photographers Being Used to Prop Up the Grave New World of NFTs?’

Magazines have played an important role throughout the history of photograph up until now. The BJP can trace its ancestry back to the 1854 Liverpool Photographic Journal, though it only became the BJP in 1860, but it wasn’t the UK’s first as the Journal of the Photographic Society (now the RPS Journal) has been publishing continuously since 1853.

Probably the most influential of all was Camera Work, published by Alfred Stieglitz from 1903-1917, which set new standards for photographic publishing and helped bring photography into the galleries and museums. Established firmly in the era of pictorial photography and promoting Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession, its two final issues launched the new Modernist photography of Paul Strand which was to become dominant in the following decades. The US-based Aperture magazine later became the most prestigious of all photographic magazines, though its book publishing is arguably even more important.

Here in the UK, several magazines have been important in our photographic history, including the illustrated magazines around the Second World War, notably Picture Post, which although based on photographs were not aimed at a photographic audience but a mass one. More narrowly when I came into photography at the start of the 1970s, Creative Camera was the Bible for many young photographers, introducing us to a new way of seeing, particularly from American photographers.

There were other influential British magazines too, including Camerawork, obviously named from the earlier US publication but with a very different approach, and many others, but for many years BJP remained at the centre of British Photography.

Part of BJP’s appeal was that it covered all areas of photography except amateur photography, being a trade journal, publishing exhibition listings and reviews, news items about new equipment, materials and services etc. Its reviews of cameras were always by professionals who actually used them rather than re-hashing the spec sheets and PR releases and while not greatly embellished by detailed charts or test results gave a very practical view. Many of the articles commissioned, particularly under the editorship of Geoffrey Crawley (1967-87) were by leading experts in their respective fields, and his example was largely followed by Chris Dickie and Reuel Golden.

For many of us working in photography it was essential reading to keep in touch with photography in the UK every week (from 1864 to 2010.) Like most other magazines mentioned above it then underwent a dramatic change, becoming a very different publication, appearing monthly and largely devoted to portfolios of images from the fine art fringe of photography. I didn’t bother to renew my subscription as I already had subs to several other magazines which did similar things but usually better.

In 2016, the BJP turned to equity crowdfundingto monetise our global digital audience, expand on our competitions and events, and sell access to our unique 160+ year archive.” Many of its subscribers responded and became shareholders in a company that was set up so as to retain control in the hands of its major shareholder. The company was asking for more investments as recently as June 2021, but the latest confidential e-mail tells them that for a total of £1.8 million invested they will only get £50,000 back – which if my calculation is correct is less than 3p for every £1 invested.

Finally, an article by photographer, educator and photographic author Grant Scott on his United Nations of Photography web site written in 2020 is titled IS THERE A FUTURE FOR THE PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINE? His answer after a lengthy look at how photography magazines have worked and his own experience is “Sadly, I don’t think so.” And his final two sentences:
You may agree with me or you may not, but whatever your opinion please answer just one question. When was the last time you bought a photography magazine?”


Pioneering Women of Photojournalism

Saturday, April 3rd, 2021

CNN recently published the article ‘These are the pioneering women of photojournalism‘ a story by Kyle Almond highlighting the website Trailblazers of Light, started by award-winning photojournalist Yunghi Kim who has covered stories all over the world for Contact Press Images and is best known for her story documenting South Korean “comfort women,” sex slaves used by the Japanese military during World War II.

Trailblazers of Light now lists more than 500 women who since the late 19th century have made significant work, reporting from around the world, including in war zones and other dangerous places, breaking their way into what is still – as a 2015 study by World Press Photo, the University of Stirling and Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism confirmed, very much a male dominated world.

The CNN article is illustrated by over 30 photographs of some of these women at work, some familiar names, and others I was not aware of, each with short notes about their careers.

I think there are at least ten of them who had got as a mention when I wrote about photography including the history of photography for a commercial web site, and some I had featured at greater length such as Dorothea Lange and Berenice Abbott. It was clear to me back then that our history of photography has been dominated by men and that there were many women whose work had been sidelined and largely forgotten, and whose work demanded greater attention.

I was also finding many contemporary features by women photographers that greatly impressed me and I could link to on the site. And on the streets where I worked it was also clear to me that although women were much outnumbered by men, their numbers among those whose work I admired were rather more equal, perhaps because women have to work harder to be recognised.

Naomi Rosenblum (1925-2021)

Monday, February 22nd, 2021

Naomi Rosenblum, the celebrated author of two landmark histories of photography, her World History of Photography (1984) and A History of Women Photographers (1994), died on February 19th, 2021.

Her work widened our knowledge of the history of photography and gave it a more international perspective as the ‘World Photography’ in the title indicates, and it was an inspiration to me later to try and write about the history and development of photography in countries around the world when I wrote online for ‘About Photography’.

Similarly her book on women photographers opened up a wider area for study, and was of particular interest to me as many of my better students were women. Of course there were women who had become well-known as photographers and who I had featured in my courses – Julia Margaret Cameron, Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott and others spring obviously to mind, but many others had been sadly sidelined from previous histories, often mere footnotes to the work of their male colleagues.

Together with her husband, Walter Rosenblum she did much to promote the work of Lewis Hine, and of the photographers of the New York Photo League, where Walter had met both Hine and Paul Strand and had become its President in 1941 before his war service. Naomi had also been involved with the Photo League, although she was not a photographer. As a designer she designed the cover of ‘Photo Notes‘, the influential magazine of the League (Edward Weston praised it as the most worthwhile magazine dealing with photography.)

I’m sure there will be many detailed obituaries of Naomi Rosenblum appearing and I’ll not write one here. But I do have fond personal memories of meeting her back in 2007, in Bielsko-Biala, Poland. For me the most important exhibition at the FotoArtFestival there was the early work of her late husband, ‘Message from the Heart‘. Naomi was there to launch the Polish version of her ‘World Photography’ and also, like me, to give a lecture, and her daughter, film-maker Nina Rosenblum came to present her film about her father, Walter Rosenblum: In Search Of Pitt Street.

It was a great privilege for me to go with Naomi and Nina around the show of Walter’s work and to hear their stories about him and the pictures. We talked too at some of the meals and events, and in the lecture hall – where I listened to her lecture and they to mine. There was actually some overlap the two, hers on the New York Photo League but rather more wide-ranging and mine on street photography in London, and it was interesting for us to compare our slightly different thoughts and wildly different presentations.

There is just a little more about our meeting in the lengthy diary I put on line in 2007 about my experiences at the FotoArtFestival. It includes brief thoughts on many of the of the exhibitions and events as well as photographs of the festival and of my walks around Bielsko-Biala.


Magnum called out

Saturday, December 26th, 2020

Magnum holds a hugely important place in the history of photography, and many of us grew up with a concept of photojournalism that was largely based on its founding photographers, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, William Vandivert and David “Chim” Seymour (three of whom only heard about it after the meeting in Paris.) From the start it was a co-operative and importantly the photographers retained copyright, and they divided up the world between them.

Magnum of course flourished and grew, but retained its basic structure, owned and administered entirely by it photographer members, employing staff to support them. As well as the full members who are shareholders and vote at its annual meetings, there are also nominees, associates, contributors and correspondents who have no voting rights. A Wikpedia article gives more details, and includes the sentence which is perhaps relevant now, “No member photographer of Magnum has ever been asked to leave.”

I don’t know how complete the list of members (of all grades) on Wikipedia is, but it names over 130 photographers, many now deceased or withdrawn from Magnum, almost all of the familiar names, and including many of the best-known photojournalists of the last 73 years. Among them is American photographer David Alan Harvey, active since 1993 and a full member since 1997.

Magnum began with five male photographers, though both the Paris and New York office heads were women (Maria Eisner in Paris and Ruth Vandivert in New York) and among those in the members list only around 20 are women. It could be seen as a photographic ‘old boy’s net’ and perhaps its structure and membership have both contributed to the current controversy over both some of the work available in its digital archive and its perhaps sluggish response to allegations of sexual abuse.

As Kristen Chick points out in her special report, Magnum’s moment of reckoning in Columbia Journalism Review, it was only in 2018 that Magnum issued a code of conduct for its members in 2018 while in the same year boasting that it had not received a single complaint against any of its photographers. 

Chick’s article rapidly disposes of that assertion, pointing out that complaints had been made nine years earlier over inappropriate behavior by David Alan Harvey but that no action was taken by Magnum until a scandal broke on the web. In August 2020 Fstoppers reported that Magnum was selling explicit photographs of sexually exploited minors on its website, including pictures taken by Harvey in Bangkok in 1989; this led photojournalist Amanda Mustard to tweet “alleging that sexual misconduct allegations against him were an open secret in the industry.”

Chick’s report goes into some detail about the allegations made by eleven women against Harvey, and also what appears to be a very inadequate response by Magnum. The exploitative photographs were withdrawn from their web site but apparently remain available through other suppliers, and although Harvey was suspended and an inquiry launched into his behaviour, the report demonstrates that it and Magnum have failed or refused to listen to women making complaints.

And perhaps rather surprisingly, although Magnum proudly claimed it had drawn up a code of conduct for members, it refuses to make this public.

Do read the full report at Magnum’s moment of reckoning in Columbia Journalism Review.

Shortly after I wrote this last Tuesday (22nd Dec) Magnum issued a statement that they were “deeply upset to read the allegations about David Alan Harvey that have been reported in the CJR” and that they “will immediately investigate them and consider the appropriate action.”

What this omits is any mention of the several allegations that Magnum failed to investigate earlier that are mentioned in the CJR report, and the apparent shortcomings in the investigation that resulted in his clearly inadequate one year suspension.

According to the report, Harvey’s behaviour over several decades was widely known among other photographers, and Magnum is an organisation run by its photographers; it seems more than likely that at least some of the other members were aware of it – yet nothing was done before the organisation was forced into action by the furore in August 2020.

Japanese hand colour

Wednesday, October 14th, 2020

Although I knew something about the history of Japan and of photography in the country in the nineteenth century, and had written a little about it and in particular the work of European photographers such as Felice Beato, the video in ‘How colorized photos helped introduce Japan to the world‘ from VOX which was featureed on Digital Photography Review with a useful introduction showed me much that I hadn’t previously known. It was particularly interesting to see the comparisons between some of the photographs and Ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings.

The introduction of photography led to redundancies among Ukiyo-e artists (as it did to miniature painters in Europe) and some found new employment using their skills in photographic studios hand colouring prints in a much more subtle manner than in other countries. Soon some of them were becoming photographers too and setting up their own studios. I haven’t read Photography in Japan 1853-1912 by Terry Bennett which the video credits, but it looks an interesting volume.

Japanese art was in the same period being taken back to the west and had a strong influence on many western artists, and I think largely through them on photography around the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the 20th century which can clearly be seen for example in some of the work exhibited by members of the Photo-Secession some of the best of whose work was published by Alfred Stieglitz in his fine magazine Camera Work.

Recent years have seen a new interest in hand-colouring of old pictures, now made much easier by digital means. It’s something that while it may add some life and a greater sense of reality to old photographs I find rather upsetting when applied to many well-known images. As a photographer I feel that there is a disrespect in changing what was a carefully considered black and white image into one in colour and I imagine the photographers turning in their graves at how their work is being done to their pictures.

It also bothers me because the digital recolouring is creating a false reality – as hand colouring could also do. For a long time we had on a mantelpiece a hand coloured picture of my wife sitting in a Manchester park wearing a red jumper; it had been hand-coloured and although the grass had been coloured in a fair approximation to its actual colour, her green jumper was not. It’s a trivial example, but what the colouring produces is false colour and fake reality. For most subjects it probably isn’t a great problem but it seems to me to undermine one of the fundamental aspects of photography, the physical link between subject and depiction. The camera with our help lies but it doesn’t invent.