Mile End, 2002. When things still happened on film
And were better in black and white.
There will be an unusual hiatus before my next post.
My latest Facebook status put it simply:
“Time to go into hibernation for the Jubilee…
A week should do it, see you all then“
Another photographer whose work deserves to be better known is the Catalan photographer Agustí Centelles (1909-85), one of the earliest to use a Leica, and whose work on the Spanish Civil War has perhaps unfortunately been eclipsed by the fairly small body of work – and one image in particular – by Robert Capa.
Capa’s negatives from that era, lost for decades after he left them in Paris in 1939, were discovered some years ago in Mexico City, and the three cardboard boxes containing his work along with that of Gerda Taro and Chim (David Seymour) and a couple of rolls by Fred Stein, together known as ‘The Mexican Suitcase‘, were finally handed over to the ICP archive in 2007. Many of the more interesting images from them were already known through their reproduction in magazines of the time, but having the negatives obviously allows these to be seen in their context.
Centelles began an apprenticeship to a photographer in Barcelona where he grew up in 1924 and ten years later became a freelance photojournalist. In 1936 he photographed events in Barcelona after the July military upraising and was then sent to the Aragon front as an official photographer. In 1939 he fled to France as Barcelona fell to the Nationalists, taking with his cameras and his 4000 most important negatives in a suitcase. The rest of his work was seized by Franco’s troops along with other Catalan government material and stored in what became the Spanish Civil War Archive in Salamanca.
In various internment camps in France he managed to continue with his photography, managing to get a French press card and later a job in a photography studio, and was soon taking pictures for forged ID cards for the French Resistance. In 1944 several members of his group were arrested and he left his negatives behind in Carcassonne, fearing that if he took them back to Spain they would compromise many of the , fleeing back to Spain where he spent two years in hiding before giving himself up to the Spanish authrorities in Barcelona. After his trial he was released on parole and became a successful advertising and industrial photographer.
It was only in 1976 following the death of Franco when his press card was restored that he felt able to go back to collect his negatives from France and he spent the rest of his life restoring and cataloguing these images. In 1984, the year before he died, Centelles was awarded the Premio Nacional de Fotografía from the Spanish Ministry of Culture for his work. Since his death his work has been promoted by his sons, who were determined to keep his archive together, and it was acquired by the Spanish Ministry of Culture in 2009 for 700,000 Euros to be held in the Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica de Salamanca.
Looking through his images there were a few that were familiar to me, though I had not remembered the name of the photographer. In 2001, Magali Jauffret reviewing a show of Spanish Civil War photographs for the French newspaper l’Humanité, recognised the immense value of his work in her piece published under the headline ‘Agusti Centelles aussi grand que Capa‘. As a record of the Spanish Civil War his pictures are I think rather more valuable, although Capa certainly took the best-known image from the conflict and of course went on to do much else.
An exhibition with forty of the Spanish Civil War Photographs of Agustí Centelles (The French Suitcase) was shown at New York University in Oct-Dec last year, and you can watch a video with some of his pictures from that show, Centelles in_edit_oh!
There are a couple of other YouTube video’s I’ve also found worth watching (though depending on your musical tastes as often with such things you may like to be ready to mute the sound on either or both of them), Agustí Centelles – Spanish Civil War and Agustí Centelles, fotógrafo de la historia.
A feature on the Times Quotidian, Three Suitcases: Walter Benjamin; Agusti Centelles; and the Hypothetical Suitcase of Baltasar Garzon Part One by Janet Sternburg, adds some interesting detail about Centelles, and suggests that his work only became internationally known to the photography world after the first French showing of his work at the Jeu de Paume in 2009. A comment on the article points out that “the first exhibition of Centelles work in France was in 2004, in Carcassone” and that it was shown in New York in 1986. The Paris show mentioned above in which at least for one reviewer he was a star was at the Hôtel de Sully in June-Sept 2001. But I make no claims about it being the first.
There is an interesting post on the NYT Lens Blog from a few weeks ago, Touring the Nanny-Photographer’s Past by Richard Cahan in which he writes about a visit he made to Saint-Bonnet-en-Champsaur in the Hautes-Alpes near Gap, France, a village which now has a population of around 2,000, but was perhaps rather smaller when Vivian Maier, born in the Bronx, lived there with her mother who had been born near there in the 1930s. Maier was then between 6 and 12 and they returned to live in the USA around the time of the start of the war, but she came back in 1949 and 1959 to take photographs.
Cahan is writing a book together with Michael Williams, Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows, which will present her photographs in the context of her life, making use of the 18,000 Maier negatives owned by Jeffrey Goldstein who accompanied him to France.
On their trip they found very few people who actually remembered Maier, but more who recognised themselves and others in her images. For them in particular these photographs have great value, but so more generally do these, and many other collections from the past for all of us.
The NYT is a subscription site, but allows a limited number of free visits per month, and it’s worth using one of them to read this article and view the 20 or so pictures that illustrate it. And of course the web site of her work from the negatives owned by Goldstein (linked above) is worth a look.
Although I’m still not impressed by the super-hype about Maier as a great street photographer and she was definitely not a great innovator, she was an excellent photographer and her work certainly has interest and value. I’m not sure I would ever particularly want to own the book (shelf space here is limited and the $85 pre-order price could be put to better use) but I welcome it becoming available, and I’m sure it will be interesting to read. Though at that kind of price it perhaps is not likely to make my local library. But the future for most photographic publishing is perhaps the e-book (after a further generation or two of development of better reading hardware.)
I’ve never visited the French Photography Museum of Bièvres, although it is only a short trip from Paris on the RER and only a short bus ride (or a longish walk) from where I stayed on my first visit to Paris. The River Bièvre one of two streams through the small town, features in some of Atget’s photographs taken around the start of the twentieth century in the 13th arrondissement in the south of the city, but was at that time being hidden below ground, though I walked along some of its course in the city in 1984 when photographing for my project Paris Revisited – more recently published as ‘In Search of Atget‘. But I’ve yet to visit Bièvres for real, though I spent some time today both on the web site of this ‘village at the gates of Paris’ with a remarkable number of clubs for its just over 5000 inhabitants.
Paris 13e, August 1984 Peter Marshall
One of these associations is the Photo Club Paris Val-de-Bièvre, founded in 1949 by Jean Fage (1905-1991) and his son André Fage, the news of whose death aged 85 on April 16, 2012 I read in La Lettre de la Photographie (in English.) They also founded the annual Bièvres Photo Fair and began the collection of equipment and images that became the first French museum of photography, opening to the general public in premises provided by the council in the early 1960, and in 1964 the Association du Musée Français de la Photographie was formed. The collection was donated to the Conseil Général de lEssonne in 1986 on condition that it remained in Bièvre and that a new museum be built to house it.
You can see the museum on its web site, and as well as viewing some on-line presentations including a general history of photography, portraits of artists by Sabine Weiss and anti-Nazi photomontages by Marinus, you can also wander for ages around images of the many items in its collection. I think there are images on line of 11759 items, and although the site is is French it is still easy to navigate. The museum is an incredible monument to the two men who founded it.
Robert Doisneau was born April 14th 1912 in Gentilly, just outside the southern boundary of Paris, and already tributes are coming on-line to the man who produced so many pictures full of humour, human warmth and sometimes pathos. La Lettre de la Photographie has 47 unpublished images found in the archive of Rapho Photo Agency (now Gamma Rapho) and Le Figaro shows ten of the best.
For an overview of his life and work the Atelier Robert Doisneau is online and easy to navigate even if you don’t read French. A few years ago I visited the actual Atelier in Mountrouge, a short walk from Gentilly in the building where Doisneau lived and worked for more than 50 years until his death in 1994.
My picture is of the centre of Gentilly, and was taken on a very pocketable compact camera, the Canon Digital Ixus 400, in 2004. This was a 3.87Mp camera with a tendency to get round to taking the picture around a second or two after I had pressed the release and too often after I’d assumed it had already done the job and was putting it back in my pocket, but the basic quality of this image, taken at 1/500 f2.8 ISO50, was pretty good, though I had not had it very long and hadn’t then managed to tone down its default over-sharpening.
I’ve found it’s worth processing these images in Lightroom 4, which has enabled me to bring out a little more tone in the sky, slightly adjust the colour temperature to give a cleaner looking result and perhaps most importantly remove some of the fringing and most of the mild chromatic aberration. The final image is really a remarkable result from a sensor that is less than 1/20 the area of a 35mm negative. Although the image is only 2272×1604 pixels it would really make a pretty respectable A4 print, and at say 7×5 inches on a book page would be difficult to tell from one taken with a much larger camera. It’s only when I make a large print from one of the files from this camera that I remember why it’s worth carrying a camera about ten times the size and weight.
I’d forgotten how bad the adverts on TV are, not normally watching television. The ITV player doesn’t seem to let me fast forward past them, but at least you can mute them.
Perspectives – David Suchet – People I Have Shot on ITV1 about his grandfather, the famous Fleet Street photographer James ‘Jimmy’ Jarché (1890 1965) is worth watching, though there is perhaps around 500% too much of David Suchet for my taste. Actor Suchet was Jarché’s grandson, and grew up with him living in the family home; grandad taught him photography and gave him his Leica, and he doesn’t do badly with it (a very nice picture of sheep for example), but I’d have welcomed much more about Jarché and much less about Suchet and you do have to put up with quite a lot of his physical and mental wandering.
Jarché was really too good a photographer to need Suchet, and Suchet the actor doesn’t need the kind of self-promotion that he gets here. A more straightforward account of the photographer’s life and work – including a brief interview with his grandson – would have been a far better tribute to him, but unlikely to appeal to TV executives.
Of course Jarché is a name known to all with an interest in photographic history, if mainly for a single image taken in 1925 of naked kids being chased along the banks of the Serpentine, published in the Gernheims’ ‘Concise History of Photography‘ in the year that he died and which for many years was almost the only widely available comprehensive volume on the subject. And there were a number of other images I’d seen before in the film, along with some new ones.
It wasn’t a film that changed my idea of Jarché, who has always been one of the legends of British press photography, and in the somewhat farcical expert discussion (really these guys aren’t as stupid as this makes them seem) at the end of the film in the Michael Hoppen gallery, Colin Ford makes clear he isn’t quite ready to think of him along with Cartier-Bresson and the rest either. But if he is perhaps less well-known now than he might be, the fault lies with another organisation that appears in a rather better light in the film, Getty Images, in whose immense warehouses his images are stored.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Burt Glinn, Leonard Freed, Inge Morath, Elliot Erwitt, Dennis Stock, Philippe Halsman, Cornell Capa, Bruce Davidson, Sergio Lorain and Eric Hartmann are not a bad eleven, and even if a few of the team aren’t on their best form, The Mad Men Era, Magnum/Slates ‘Today’s Pictures’ a week ago are an interesting selection.
The 19 images, which date from around 1958 to 1968, are largely from New York and from the offices of the advertising industry of the era, and doubtless some are from Madison Avenue itself and largely represent that kind of business culture. But as a set on that title, it would have been stronger had the selection been a little tighter, and I think there are several that really don’t fit (and one I’d have put straight in my own reject pile let alone Magnum’s.)
Though one of those I would have rejected as not really fitting the subject is one of my favourite images from the era, just from a very different culture and style to Mad Men. Sergio Larrain’s out of focus commuter in front of the escalator at Baker St is a part of a very different business and photographic culture to the rest of the batch.
Had I been editing a set of the same title from those on Slate, I would probably have ended with 12 pictures rather than the 19 here. Of course if I was working with Magnum’s library there would almost certainly have been others I would have wanted to add, but I think it makes a nice exercise to take this set and edit them, perhaps even sequence them.
I’m not – at least not for the moment – going to say which other images I think don’t really belong in the set either because they don’t belong or simply aren’t strong enough. I’d be interest to hear whether other people agree with me that there are pictures that would better have been omitted, and if so, whether they images they would cull are the same as mine. I’d argue that there are around two others than don’t really fit the theme, and about the same number that simply don’t quite make it as pictures or lack the kind of ironic viewpoint that is common to the rest.
Just published on Blurb is my first e-book, London’s May Queens, also available considerably more expensively as a paperback.
I’ve written quite a few times here and elsewhere about my photographs of London May Queens. I’d lived in London for most of my life and knew virtually nothing about them until I was writing a presentation about Tony Ray-Jones to deliver in Poland in 2005 and my imagination was stirred by a picture of a large group of May Queens under a very large maypole which was captioned as being at Faversham in Kent.
Rather idly I Googled about May Queens, and found very little, but enough to make me fairly sure that the event he had photographed was the ‘Merrie England and London May Queen Festival’ not at Faversham but at Hayes in south-east London (still often known as Hayes, Kent although now in the London Borough of Bromley to distinguish it from Hayes, Middlesex – now in LB Hillingdon.) Rather to my surprise I came across an article in a south London newspaper web site which mentioned the festival and gave the date for 2005, and I decided to go along and photograph it.
You can see the results on ‘My London Diary’ for May 2005 – some way down the page, where I also give a very brief history of the event. Photographing young girls might present some challenges, and I started by going to the event organisers and talking with them. Once they found I was not from the local press they were a lot happier with me being there – they were worried that some of the girls taking part might be embarrassed if their pictures were printed in the local papers.
It was the start of a lengthy project, made longer by most of the events taking place over a few weeks of the year, and weeks when I’m usually fairly tied up with other events, but three years later I had enough work to be promised a show at one of London’s better venues – only for it to be cancelled at the final stage when suddenly money became short.
All of the work in the e-book/book London’s May Queens has actually appeared on My London Diary where there are probably around a thousand of the 12,000 or so pictures I took of May Queen events. But the pictures on the web are always a rush job, and every one of the 72 images for the book has been carefully reprocessed from the RAW file and they are really like exhibition prints compared to the proofs on the web.
I’ve also written a rather longer essay on May and May Queens and the Merrie England and London May Queen in particular, although I still have hopes of one day producing a larger and more scholarly work by a suitably qualified friend with a more thoroughly researched text making much more use of the original sources than my own effort. Though perhaps my more straightforward account is more suitable for a wider audience.
I set out from when I started producing this book around 4 months ago with the idea that it would be available both in print and electronic format. Blurb offers to convert your normal book project into an e-book, and it does seem to look very similar. There is one major limitation in that only a very restricted range of fonts can be used in the e-books, so I have to choose a different font to my previous works.
I had another small problem in that Blurb’s e-books are in an iPad/iPhone format for use on Apple® iBooks®, and I don’t have that kind of equipment. So I’ve only viewed the e-book using the Firefox EPUBReader plugin, where it seems to work fine except for the front and back cover where there are some slightly odd differences from the book, with the images being shown a little out of correct proportion. I hope this is just a glitch in the plugin rather than in the actual file.
The big advantage of the e-book, apart from being rather handy for those who have an iPad or iPhone is of course price. The e-book download costs only £2.49 rather than the £26.94 for the print version. The difference is even greater when you’ve added Blurb’s rather excessive delivery cost of around a fiver for the book, and of course you get it by download in a minute or two rather than the 10 days or so for printing and postal delivery. There is a short preview – 19 of the 80 pages – of the book available on Blurb.
Here’s the back cover:
My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
To order prints or reproduce images
________________________________________________________
As always, Shahidul Alam writes a thoughtful article on photography in his Trespassing on Gallery Walls in which he looks at the peculiar nature of the photograph that empowers it. Something that means that as the art world ingests our medium, “It has led to concerned photography being considered passé. In the hallowed world of limited-edition copies, the fine art print is about the object and not its purpose. Form triumphs over content.”
As he goes on to point out, photography has at times altered the course of history, changing people’s views – and regimes such as that in Bangladesh continue to provide evidence of its power when they close down shows such as Into Exile: Tibet 1949 to 2009 and Crossfire. But do read his article, written as the introductory piece for the February issue of PIX, a photographic quarterly from India, where you can download this issue on the theme of Trespass. It contains some fine work, and I particularly enjoyed the black and white essays by Mark Esplin, Siddhartha Hajra, Aparna Jayakumar and Devansh Jhaveri.
Esplin’s digitally taken diptychs in City Builders (2010) pair portraits of New Delhi’s homeless with night images from the streets of the city. Hajra in ‘Opera Monorama‘ has photographed the performances of “Monorama or Rajuda (as he is commonly called in his neighbourhood)… a transgendered person who performs in closed community spaces during the spring season which is associated with Sitala puja.” It is sensitive and intriguing work. Jayakumar in ‘On the Wrong Side of the Equator” is working in the surreal world of the film set, a Bollywood recreation of an Angolan hamlet in India. Jhaveri in Trespass looks at the Hindu cremation rituals.
In his piece, Alam makes reference to the “amateur grabs of Abu Ghraib“, with which we are all familiar, but an earlier – and non-photographic post on his blog, Control by seed, written by Najma Sadeque, is about a far more serious grab which occurred at Abu Ghraib, the home of Iraq’s national seed gene bank.
Under the control of Paul Bremer, military head of the Provisional Authority in 2004, Order 81 dealt with plant varieties and patents. It allowed plant forms to be patented and genetically-modified organisms to be introduced. Farmers were strictly banned from saving their own seeds. Its “goal was brutally clear-cut and sweeping to wipe out Iraqs traditional, sustainable agriculture and replace it with oil-chemical-genetically-modified-seed-based industrial agriculture.”
As Sadeque writes: Its not for nothing international researchers have termed the deliberate annihilation of Iraqi agriculture the ultimate war crime.
I went to see the Eve Arnold show in London yesterday mainly because I had some spare time between photographing a couple of events and it was just a short walk down the road. It was cold and wet outside, so spending time in a warm dry gallery seemed like a good idea.
I actually enjoyed the show, though it didn’t change my opinion of her as a photographer. The picture that really stood out for me was her portrait of Marlene Dietrich at work – and it was a very large print. Arnold studied photography briefly with Alexey Brodovitch, and according to her obituary in The Telegraph: “The class, which included ambitious professionals such as Richard Avedon, mercilessly criticised Eve Arnolds amateur efforts.” Brodovitch’s classes at New School for Social Research in New York have a legendary status as a tough school, one that worked by tearing people’s work to pieces – and those who could take it profited greatly.
Arnold talks about this with Colin Ford in the BBC Five Master Photographers Series recorded in 1990. She picked herself up and rather by chance set herself a testing project to meet the class assignment of ‘Fashion’, going into Harlem to photograph the informal black fashion shows that were held regularly in former churches there. That work gained plaudits when she took it to class – and later led to her getting the cooperation of Malcolm X for some more fine work, and after her husband sent it to Tom Hopkinson who published 8 pages in Picture Post it got her a place in Magnum, where, along with Inge Morath, she was the first woman member.
I spent a long time in the gallery, Art Sensus, just off Victoria St at 7 Howick Place. It’s not a gallery I’ve visited before, a large space on the second floor with a very expensive feel. The gallery says it “has a clear mission; to promote and support the very best up and coming contemporary artists on cutting-edge projects” though it perhaps isn’t clear how a photographer whose work was essentially formed in what was a relatively conventional style sixty years ago quite fits in with that, though I suspect her work is of more interest to me than anything else they are likely to show. The show is on until 27 April, and there is a page with links to a Radio 4 clip and reviews which may perhaps have a more balanced view then mine.
Although the exhibition page at the gallery concentrates almost exclusively on her pictures of Monroe and other stars, the exhibition is actually a fairly decent cross-section of her work. I spent rather more time watching a video the BBC made on her quite a few years ago (I think at the time of her Barbican retrospective in 1996) now than looking at the pictures – it is quite a long program, but I enjoyed listening to her talk. There are a few interesting stories told on it too.
On the wall next to where the video is being shown is a list apparently of every project that she took. Although someone on the video makes a comment on how many different things she did, the list seems to me to tell a different story, with a relatively small number of assignments even in her busiest years.
The V&A has recently acquired one of the better works from her later years, her picture of the ‘Brides of Christ‘ at Godalming, about to enter the nunnery.