Photo History | >Re-PHOTO

Greenbelt Utopias

After yesterday’s brickbat, today a qualified bouquet for the New York Times and a Lens blog feature on Jason Reblando’s project ‘New Deal Utopias‘.

Of course, as so often, you can see the work better on Reblando’s own web site – and the NYT does supply a link to the front page of this – and it has also been featured on the Design Observer ‘Places’.

It’s a nice enough feature with the pictures, linking to some useful sites to tell you more about Ebenezer Howard and garden cities, and giving some basic information and links about the three New Deal planned villages of Greenbelt (and here), Maryland, Greenhills, Ohio and Greendale, Wisconsin, though one might quibble whether the pages Lens links to are always the most informative and whether Answers.com is a particularly useful and credible source of information. Though at least it is in one feature – on Wikipedia you have to hunt around a little.

Its perhaps surprising that there doesn’t appear to be a feature on these settlements on the New Deal Network‘s web site, but they were of course documented by the FSA/OWI under Roy Stryker (who does get a link – but one that doesn’t mention Greenbelt.) You can find links to the three towns in the subject index of the collection of their pictures on the Library of Congress American Memory site, which has roughly 570 pictures from Greenbelt, 120 from Greendale and almost 180 from Greenhills, all taken in the late 1930s and early 1940s, which provide a useful background to Reblando’s work. Among them are many photographs by

LC-USF34- 005639-E Library of Congress - Arthur Rothstein
Completed home. Greenbelt, Maryland. Arthur Rothstein, LoC.

Arthur Rothstein, (1915-1985), Marion Post Wolcott, (1910-1990), John Vachon, (1914-1975), Russell Lee (1903-86) and Carl Mydans, so Reblando is entering into formidable territory. Again it is perhaps surprising that there appears to be no feature on these developments on the American Memory site – perhaps it’s a part of their history that too many Americans would like to forget.

LC-USF33- 001440-M4 Library of Congress - John Vachon (1914-75)
Assistant community manager talking with members of maintenance crew, Greendale, Wisconsin, John Vachon (1914-75), LoC.

LC-USF33- 030018-M1 Library of Congress - Marion Post Wolcott (1910-1990)
Family on terrace in Greenbelt, Maryland. Marion Post Wolcott (1910-1990), LoC

The period of the New Deal and WW2 was arguably America’s finest hour – and certainly the FSA/OWI one of the truly great documentary projects. Since then, with Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Tea Party it has been downhill all the way, and any mention of social projects such as the Greenbelt towns must have the rabid right spitting blood into their tea cups and reaching for their guns. So it’s great that the NYT and Reblando are drawing attention to these visionary projects again.

On Reblando’s site you can also see two other housing-related projects, Lathrop Homes and Outside Public Housing, both of which I found more satisfying than his work on the New Deal Utopias, where I couldn’t really see what he was trying to show through the work. Perhaps it is a project on which he is still working, and I hope so, as I’m sure there is much more that could be done.

Although I’ve not visited any of these towns, Greendale in particular seems to have turned in to something of a curiously mixed celebration of a largely mythical American history, including “A Dickens of a Christmas… gazebo concerts, green markets, a reenactment of a civil war ncampment, a tour of Greendale Original homes, a vintage baseball tournament, and a garden-gazing walk.” Surely rich scope for an ironist.

Old Snow

The winter of 1978/9 we had snow fairly seriously, and in the last few days I’ve been going through my contact sheets from that time, including quite a few pictures taken in the snow.

I went up to another workshop at the Photographers Place in Derbyshire with Paul Hill and Ray Moore, I think in early January, and it seemed quite likely that we would get snowed in. I’m not sure that we would have minded all that much, as we were all having a good time, though of course we all had work to get back to. As usual we went out a few times together taking pictures, including a visit to a snow-covered Alton Towers, but one of the few images I now felt worth preserving was one from a walk on my own along a snow-covered lane. Most of those taken on the outings I seemed to be trying too hard to be ‘arty’.

It didn’t help that the Leica M2 which I took most of the pictures (though I think the one above was with an Olympus OM2) with turned out to have a shutter fault – perhaps it didn’t like the cold weather, and it gave uneven exposure, with a strip at the right hand edge of the frame getting rather less than it should. As soon as I developed the films it went off for repair (at excessive cost, being a Leica) but by then I’d ruined quite a few images. I did manage to print some of the pictures fairly well, dodging the affected area – at least the boundary was a nice straight line, so a simple straight piece of card held in the right place and height above the paper could do the job. And now of course with digital it would me much simpler to correct.

But we did manage to get home on time (I think with Peter Goldfield driving his van through the snowy roads), and I went back to work, but soon there was more snow, and there were several days when my colleague and I spent an hour or so trying to drive to work before finding roads closed or impassable. So I had a little unexpected time to wander around with a camera in the snow. But again most of the pictures I made seem now to have little interest. Again the exceptions were mainly those which were more straightforward – such as the surprisingly almost car-free Crooked Billet roundabout above.

Perhaps the best of my snow images from 1978-9 was a scene in the snow at Marble Hill Park, on the banks of the Thames in Twickenham, where a group of boys were cycling on the snow-covered grass. I only had time for a couple of frames as they were moving around, and the first, taken a second or two earlier shows a fourth cyclist going away to the right of the group. I moved to more accurately line up the cyclists with the house and managed to take this frame with just the three of them in a tight group in a near-silhouette against the snow. Although it has a wide-angle feel with that wide expanse of snow, I think the only lens I had for the Leica (fortunately now repaired and working well) on which it was taken at the time was the collapsible 50mm f2.8 Elmar. Taken in a hurry it also had quite a slope to the horizon and needed a little rotation and subsequent cropping.

Here was the only example of the ‘artier’ snow pictures I bothered to scan, and this shows the entire frame. I suspect when I took it I didn’t mean to include the black spot near the top right corner, but decided not to crop it. The picture has a certain mystery about it that I like (it could be an alien landing site) and I’m not going to dispel by telling anyone much about it!

Let Truth be the Prejudice

AFP photographer Hazem Bader photographed a Palestinian construction worker screaming in agony as an Israeli army driver drove a trailer over his legs on a construction site on 25 Jan. The Israeli army had turned up to seize the tractor and trailer as the Palestinians were building on land that they owned in an occupied zone where Israel has forbidden them to build. The picture – and it is a striking image – was widely published in the USA and the Israeli embassy in Washington wrote to the US newspapers alleging that the vehicle shown was stationary, that the worker was not injured and suggesting the picture was staged, and asking the newspapers to issue a correction, and to “to consider ceasing to publish the photographs of Hazem Bader“.

AFP have now issued a statement which includes a translation of the medical certificate confirming the injuries sustained by the worker and an interview where he describes what happened. Their press release, which includes the picture concludes:

In the light of these inquiries and based on the trust we have in our photojournalist, AFP Management does not believes that this event could ever have been staged.

Given the ferocity of the attacks against the AFP Photo service, we have decided to release this statement in order to set the record straight. We will not make any further comment.

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America continues to dispute the veracity of this image, although some of the points it raises appear to be minor quibbles, for example when they state that the confiscation operation would be a “civil administration mission where soldiers provide security“ rather than an army operation and so any driver would not have been a soldier. You can also read similar comments on the CiF Watch site, which also attacks Bader for the contents of his web site, which they say “quite consistently portray Palestinians as victims of Israeli villainy (something of a specialty for Bader), and further demonstrates an egregious pro-Palestinian bias decidedly at odds with any pretense of objective photo-journalism.”

I can’t tell you for sure about the exact circumstances of the particular image, I wasn’t there when it happened, though I have an opinion on it, but I can say something about photo-journalism. Having looked through a considerable number of the pictures on Bader’s site – with some difficulty as it is an exemplar of poor web design – I think his work as a whole seems very much in the fine traditions of the genre.

I thought of the work of one of the great heroes of the genre, Gene Smith. Would CiF Watch find his work at Minimata unacceptable because of his concentration on the tragic effects of mercury poisoning on the inhabitants of that fishing village?

The photo-journalist is a witness, one who tells the story that he or she sees; in Smith’s phrase “Let Truth be the Prejudice.” At its heart is subjectivity. It isn’t the same as bias or distortion. And there is fortunately no such thing as objective photo-journalism – which would be a real pretence.

But perhaps for me the the most important part of the story is not about the detail of a particular picture but about laws and ways of thinking that make it seem normal and acceptable that when people start building on land that they own, soldiers should come that their equipment should be confiscated at gunpoint and the building destroyed.

The Near and Elsewhere

Although The Near and The Elsewhere, showing at the PM Gallery in Ealing was in various ways a disappointment to me, I was still pleased that I had gone to see it (and it remains on show until 17 March, Tue-Fri 1-5pm, Sat 11-5pm) and would recommend a visit if you are in London – it’s a short walk from Ealing Broadway tube. Firstly because of the setting, in a 20th century extension of Pitzhanger Manor-House, once the country home of Sir John Soane who rebuilt most of it between 1800 and 1810. It’s a splendid building and well restored, owned by the London Borough of Ealing, and looking quite dramatic when I arrived there in the dark for the opening. Just along the road from Ealing Studios, it has its own film history having starred as the Tate Gallery and Kensington Palace among other places, even appearing in Doctor Who.

Inside, the gallery is a fine large space and perhaps demands some at least of the large images that are on display, although for me most of them were rather lacking in interest. My first disappointment – a minor one – on hearing about the show was to find that it had no connection with the blog of the same name. The second, on reading that it “shows the physical growth and loss of urban architecture in cities across the world” was to find that photographers who would have been at the top of my list for addressing such issues were almost entirely absent. And thirdly, on looking around, I found that much of the space was taken up with frankly boring art works many on a very large scale. But fortunately there were still some things worth looking at, and others will have different interests to me. I’m a photographer after all.

My favourite picture was one of Ferit Kuyas‘s images from his ‘City of Ambition‘, a project taken in Chongqing, the largest city agglomeration in the world with a population in the city of around 32 million. It is a view looking down from a height on a construction site, taken in 2005 with the slight mist seen in many of his images of the city which he tells me is not pollution but the fog that the city is famed for. It’s a wide angle view and the site is packed with small details; as you look at it gradually you realise more and more men are working on the site. Although it is quite a large print, 100x125mm, I found myself walking right up to it so I could see details with my reading glasses, then moving back to take in the whole picture. This is an image you can look at for a long time and still find new things in.

His other work in the show, Jialing River Shore, a diptych of a vast concrete space, reminded me of some images taken underground in vast reservoirs and comes from a couple of years later, when he was deliberately avoiding including a horizon in his images. The two pictures are views made from the same place but looking in different directions, with a part of the subject repeated on both (they are mounted together as a diptych in the opposite way round to the view.) There is a pleasing subtletly about the printing that was absent in some of the other works on display. Both of these works are in his book ‘City of Ambition‘ but neither seem to be on his web site, which does however have a fine selection of his work from the project.

One of Michael Wolf‘s distant views of Hong Kong’s blocks of housing was another impressive image, and I quite liked his 100×100, a set of 100 pictures of the residents of cramped 100 square feet single room homes in Hong Kong, a contrast to most of his images which are devoid of people. The relatively small images from this project are shown displayed as a tower block in a corner of the gallery, which works as an idea but does make actually viewing the upper images rather tricky.

Another interesting set of work was One million $ houses by Noel Jabour, showing buildings “turned into redundant monuments to greed” through the failed US mortage economy. These structures, like many of Kuyas’s images of Chongqing, emerge from the Galveston, Texas sea mist, giving them an air of unreality that mirrors the financial unreality which created them.

The invitation carried a dramatic image of a Shanghai house by Canadian photographer Greg Girard, whose book Phantom Shanghai captured the ruins of the pre-war international city, and were taken in 2005 just before (or as) they were being demolished, with highly theatrical night lighting and garish colour that somehow works. This was a pretty vast print, 210 x 180cm, and one of very few very large photographs that really merits its scale (and certainly the only one in this show.) The images are well reproduced well in his book, but ‘Rags, One Room Apartment, Liyang Lu, 2005′ in the print on the wall had one of the worst colour casts – a strong cyan – I’ve ever seen in an exhibition; it is unrecognisable as the same image in the book (and may perhaps be from another exposure made with different lighting.)

Girard’s book has an foreword by William Gibson, but it was another book, J G Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, that came to mind, and these pictures can truly be described as Ballardian, and I’ve just bought a copy on-line. Incidentally you can see a good set of Girard’s pictures on today’s New York Times Lens blog of US bases in Japan, Korean and on Guam, taken in 2008 – and this and more work on his web site.

I think Gregor Graf‘s work looks better on the web than on the wall; by digitally removing all signage and people from his pictures of cities he creates strangely alien places. Linz, in his Hidden Town – Situation 2, 2004 could be London or Warsaw, but the lack of textures makes it more than anything else resemble a cardboard model of a city than the real thing. Its a curious but perhaps just slightly more interesting reversal of those artists who build elaborate models to photograph.

Also in the show is work by Francis Alÿs, Sarah Beddington, James Casebere, Thomas Demand, Edgar Martins, Gaia Persico (who curated it), Peter Piller, Sara Ramo, Rachel Whiteread, and Cino Zucchi Architetti.

The gallery also has an interesting complement to this show in the small and almost monochrome paintings based on her recent photographs of small town America by Marguerite Horner, ‘The Seen and Unseen’ (closes 25 Feb) which I enjoyed seeing. It very much reminded me of the work made in similar places that formed a bedrock for much American photography of the last century, through Wright Morris, Walker Evans, David Plowden and others to Robert Adams.

1978 Protest

Among the old negatives I’ve been scanning over the past week or two are a few from protests, which may perhaps be the first pictures that I took of protests, back in April 1978. Ten years earlier I had been taking part in a great many of the events of that year, mainly in Manchester where I was studying at the time, but had been far too busy marching and occupying to think about taking pictures, and had no money for film. It didn’t help that my camera, a 35mm Halina, had never quite recovered from twenty minutes or so spent on the bed of the lake at Versailles a couple of years earlier, followed by my amateur attempts to clean it. The bladed shutter would sometimes stick open and the shutter speed was in the hands of the rust god.

I’d continued going to protests, though rather less frequently, in the 1970s, but although I’d bought working cameras by then I can find no pictures, either because I took none, or perhaps because I wasn’t pleased enough with them to keep the results. By then I was keeping down costs by bulk-loading black and white film from 100ft cans and doing in all my processing, mixing up developers from large bottles of hydroquinone, metol and other ingredients, and printing in my kitchen with a cheap folding Russian enlarger. It was a good learning experience, but much of that early work ended in the bin for various reasons.

Things really are much easier with digital, and rather cheaper. Learning the old way wasn’t any better for being harder, and those old-timers who think it is somehow better to learn photography using black and white film in manual cameras are clearly deluding themselves. Learning with digital is cheaper and faster, though which is better is a matter of how and what you learn from it rather than if you use digital or film. But I certainly did it the hard way.

In 1978 the equipment I took the the protests with me would have included a buggy with a son approaching two and a wife, along with Olympus OM1 (and possibly an OM2 body.) Unless I meant to take colour as well as black and white I probably left the OM2 at home, so the OM1 could hang around my neck, with a couple of spare lenses in jacket pockets or a small ex-army shoulder bag, along with a Weston Master 5 exposure meter. Then, no serious photographer would ever leave the house without an exposure meter, and particularly if you used transparency film, you needed the Weston with it’s weird white plastic Invacone to take incident light readings, waving it in the air like a wizard’s magic wand before every exposure. The Weston was a great piece of kit, workmanlike and with no battery to run out, but with an Achilles heel, its meter needle going over a large and highly legible scale visible through the thinnest and most fragile glass window imaginable. After I’d paid good money to have this replaced half a dozen times I saw sense, removed the broken fragments and glued a suitably cut thin sheet of perspex in its place.

The images on these early sheets in my negative files come from two protests in 1978, but unlike now when we have EXIF data, including dates and times, I can’t tell you a great deal about them that isn’t actually recorded in the images. Probably I had a few more details in a diary at the time, though I never felt it necessary to record things like exposure times and aperture – like most other photographers at the time I took a rough guess when photography magazines asked for such things.

Most of these early images are from one of several rallies in Trafalgar Square organised by Friends of the Earth (FoE) and supported by other groups against the re-processing of nuclear waste at Windscale. Estimates for the number who marched from Marble Arch to the rally on 29 April 1978 vary from around 12,000 to 30,000; it was an entirely peaceful event and the protesters dispersed without incident. A little earlier I had also take a few pictures at a Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF) rally in Hyde Park.

While now we are used to seeing results immediately, it would often take me several weeks at that time to actually get around to developing the films and then to contact print them. I was working full-time as a teacher and few of my images got published, and then only in magazines some time after the events. Sometimes one film contained images from several events if I had not used one of my cameras much – and I would seldom take more than 30 or 40 pictures at any event.

Placards are vital to make clear the object of the protest, though some are clearer than others.

Signing petitions, then as now was an important part of many protests. I think the hand with the pencil and the white forms in front of the dark coat on the top edge of the frame was a deliberate framing decision and not just chance:

________________________________________________________

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

________________________________________________________

Homai Vyarawalla

I have to admit not knowing the name Homai Vyarawalla before I read today of her death at the age of 98. She had the distinction of being India’s first woman photojournalist, though most of her pictures were published under the name “Dalda 13”, according to Wikipedia chosen because she was born in 1913, married at the age of 13 and her first card had the number plate ‘DLD 13.

However in an interview for the Indian Frontline magazine she says that she first met her husband, Manekshaw Vyarawalla, when she was 13, but they were not married until 15 years later (There is another good interview with her in The Hindu.) He was interested in photography, and she studied painting but became interested in the pictures he was taking and sending to the press. She began working with him, both in taking pictures and in the darkroom, and when she was 25 or 26 took some pictures of the girls from her art school on an outing which were the first pictures taken on her own that were published. But many of her early pictures were taken when out with her husband when he was working on his stories, and she would grab his Rolleiflex to take pictures, which were then published under his name.

She became well known as a photographer during the war years, when both she and her husband worked in Delhi for the Far Eastern Bureau of the British Information Service and were also allowed to freelance for magazines.

She took her last photograph – of Indira Ghandi – in 1970, around a year after her husband’s death. She left the profession partly because of the changing attitudes of photographers, who she felt no longer behaved with dignity and followed the rules, but also because of the increasing security that was making it difficult for photographers to work freely in the way she had been used to.

Not only was she the first woman to work in this field in India, she seems for many years to have been the only woman to do so, and it was only in the 1980s, a decade after Vyarawalla had laid down her camera, that a second generation of Indian woman photojournalists emerged.

A retrospective of her work was shown in 2010 , curated by Sabeena Gadihoke, and there have been numerous articles following her death, including in City Journal, The Hindu, and The Times of India. You can watch a lengthy documentary about in which this remarkable woman talks at length, but is perhaps rather disappointing in showing little of her actual work. Perhaps the best way to get a good idea of this is Google’s Image Search, where most of the black and white images on the first few pages are by her.

State of the Art B/W

I first came across the work of Jon Cone when he was making inks for Iris printers in the 1990s, although $150,000 price tag put me off using the system that he developed towards the end of that decade as ‘Digital Platinum’. When in 2000 he came out with his Piezography®BW software and inks for cheap desktop EPSON printers I immediately imported it from the USA and used it with an Epson 1160 fitted out with a continous inking system.

Prior to using it, I’d been reasonably happy with the colour prints I could make from this and other Epson printers using Epson’s own inks, but hadn’t felt that the black and white results were suitable for anything other than quick proofs. Piezography was different, and I was (and still am) stunned by the subtlety of the results. In the 1980s and 90s I had worked with various methods of hand-coating to make photographic prints on watercolour papers, including kallitype, palladium and platinum prints. Now I could get the same qualities as these more or less at the push of a button, with perhaps just a little more richness and depth if I used some of the more expensive coated papers such Hahnemuhle’s German Etching (and later, Photorag.)

I was lucky to have few problems with Piezography inks, while some other users had frequent blockages of the printer heads. I’d recouped some of the costs by reviewing the system for the British Journal of Photography, so felt a little remorse when those who had taken up the inks on my recommendation had problems. Some were caused by a failure to properly close down the Epson printers, but I think there was also something of a matter of luck with Epson quality control. Good Epson printers parked their heads so they were sealed off, but Friday afternoon models didn’t and I think Epson had more than its share of Fridays.

The 1160 was a four ink printer, and Piezography replaced the cyan, magenta, yellow and black with a black and three shades of grey, as well as supplying a much improved printer driver (a Photoshop plugin) for black and white printing which used those grey tones to eliminate any visible “dottiness” in the prints, and I think improve detail. For ultimate results I think you needed to produce files at 720 dpi, while there was no point in going above 36o dpi with the normal Epson driver.

A couple of years later, Jon Cone produced some improved inks under the name Piezotone, and these were available in different grey tones. I went over to using the ‘warm neutral’ set, and when Cone was beta testing these for use with the Epson driver rather than proprietary software I was one of the beta testers. So prints made with my printer were pretty good, as the profiles had been fine-tuned to work with it. Again some other users, thanks to Epson manufacturing tolerances, had slightly less good results.

Having been designed for my printer, the four ink Piezotones worked so well that I lost interest in the various improved systems being developed by Cone. Incredible though the K7 inks were, they would not work in my 4-ink hardware, and the gain in print quality seemed relatively small.

All my inkjet prints were matt, and I was quite happy with them. They had a quality that could not be matched on matt silver gelatin papers, which always had an inherent dullness to them, and matched that of the best non-silver prints (except for some carbon prints) but I still sometimes went into the darkroom when I wanted the different look of air-dried glossy silver gelatin, although once framed behind glass there was relatively little difference.

The next big change came with new fibre inkjet papers that promised to match fibre based glossy silver papers. Again I started printing on them with colour inks, using an Epson 2400, with great results. Epson’s Ultrachrome K3 inks include 2 grays and a black, and can also produce pretty good black and white images using Epson’s own ABW (Advanced Black and White) option, which also adds a little coloured ink to make the tones neutral (or cool or warm as required.) ABW isn’t perfect, but usually produces better prints than I can in the darkroom, although some find their slight change in tone under different light a problem.

I’ve also tried printing with the K3 inks without the colour inks using the Bowhaus RIP – and you can also do this with other RIPs including the Quad Tone RIP (QTR.) Unfortunately this gives a slightly unattractive tone to the prints.

To get significantly better b/w prints (others have described those made using ABW as subtle and dramatic) I think I would need to invest in new hardware, at least if I want to keep the ability to make both black and white and colour prints, as 4 ink systems such as my two 1160s are no longer supported. The Piezotone inks I’m still very occasionally using (and are working long after their best-before date) are being discontinued in March 2012.

More interesting than my own experiences is Jon Cone’s The State of the State of the Arts in Black & White, in which he tells the story of his various ink developments, including the “esoteric state of the art” system that he developed for Gregory Colbert‘s ‘Ashes and Diamonds‘ show, seen by more than ten million people. The giant (8.5 x 14 ft) prints were produced by “a complex monochromatic methodology with twelve inks” using a Roland printer on Japanese hand-made paper sheets and each took 18 hours to print. Although this system isn’t one that could be marketed commercially, Cone used it as the starting point for his ‘Special Edition’ inks.

Even if you are not particularly interested in setting up to make your own fine black and white prints, the article is well worth reading for the insight that it does give into the work of some of those who have mastered digital printing, along with examples of their work. It comes too on a new website, ‘The Agnostic Print’ which has a number of other articles that look as if they will keep me busy reading for some time.

Country Doctor

Gene Smith‘s ‘Country Doctor’ was instantly recognised as a major achievement when first published in 1948 in Life, though had he been alive and working now he would have been lucky to have got more than 3 or 4 pictures in print. The Life Classic feature shows the 28 that made up this essay, and elsewhere another 11 that didn’t make the cut.

It’s certainly good to be able to look back at one of the great classic photo-essays on line, though perhaps a pity that they don’t show the page spreads as they were published.

Thanks to NPR for pointing me to this feature from their own Revisiting ‘Country Doctor,’ A 1948 Photo Essay though I’m surprised that they decided to put their own set of a few images from it in the article rather than linking to the full (and better quality) set at Life.

Yesterday I visited the MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Final Show 2011 at the London College of Communication at the Elephant and Castle, entitled ‘Neither Snake Nor Lizard‘ which is supposedly open until Saturday, although unfortunately a few bits have already disappeared.

Probably the most impressive parts I could see were some of the books that the photographers had produced (using Blurb etc), along with one or two on-screen presentations. Other than those (and the videos may be on line) you are better off viewing the web sites of photographers that are linked from the show site. And certainly some student’s work did look better on screen than in the prints on the wall. This is perhaps as it should be, because if there is any outlet at all for documentary work it is probably either as books or as on-screen presentations. And photographic books as I read somewhere earlier today (and can’t remember where or the exact quote) are more of an “organised hobby” than a career option.

The work that I felt was strongest was almost entirely that which was more obviously documentary, whereas despite the course title some of what I saw seemed to lack the kind of purpose and clarity which is at the essence of the genre (and arguably of the medium as a whole.) I did begin to wonder at times whether the course had been designed to divert photographers from documentary rather than nurture them in it, and certainly some looked more like commercial or fine art photographers (which will make it easier for them to earn a living!) Fortunately they seem to have failed at least with some of the students and there was some work which showed the kind of dedication to the subject which might have gladdened Smith’s heart.

Eggleston – Early Colour

The unseen chromes of legendary American photographer William Eggleston gives an interesting second view of his early work. Eggleston took 375 transparencies to show John Szarkowski at MoMA which he selected from a collection of around 5000. Szarkowski cut the number back to 75 for the seminal 1976 ‘William Eggleston’s Guide’ and reduced that number still further to 48 for the exhibition catalogue.

Thomas Weski has gone back to the roughly 5000 Kodachromes (there were a few Ektachromes and Agfachromes in among them) which Eggleston made between 1969 and 1974 and together with the photographer selected a further 364 images which have now been published by Steidl in a 3 volume collection aimed at wealthy collectors (UK £220.00, US $345.00, EC 248.00), Chromes – you can see around 14 pictures on the Steidl site and rather more here.

Mark Holborn wrote an introduction for Eggleston’s book ‘Ancient And Modern‘ which mentions perhaps his most famous image, Red Ceiling, which most will be familiar with. The final image of the slideshow on ‘Wallpaper’ linked above, the blue volume of the three, came as something of a surprise.

RIP Kodak?

Load the BBC World service ‘Newshour‘ for 05/01/2012(2100GMT), click on ‘Listen now‘ to load the player and then drag the slider to 49.07 and you can hear a short piece with Graham Harrison (look at the 10 pictures on Kodachrome 64 pushed one stop) talking about the history and demise of Kodak.

The gist of what Graham says in this short interview is in his blog post ‘Kodaks Last Frame?‘ in which he comments on the likely end to the few remaining Kodak films with the Kodak Corporation being expected to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection some time in the next few days. It’s major assets which it is trying hard to sell, are now a number of patents on digital technologies.

Graham’s conclusion in the programme was that “Kodak was too big, not fast enough to adapt to digital” although I think that its problems go back rather further. Having invented photography for the masses and the great slogan “You press the button, we do the rest“, they retained throughout their history the complacent assumption that they really knew how to do the rest better than anyone else. Photography was after all their baby. *

And, as Graham went on to say, they did produce some great films which gave fabulous looks – particularly Tri-X, Kodachrome and, his own particular favourite, Ektachrome 64. On the blog he writes they “gave photographers a wonderful but limited pallet within which to express themselves” which gave me a very strange image involving fork lift trucks – I’m sure it was down to the spell checker. What he said and meant made more sense, that they had “a limited palette, but within that palette you could be very creative.”

Digital he went on to say is without the limitations of film, but that makes it harder to find ways to be creative with it, and he suggested it hasn’t happened yet.

While I’m very much in agreement with what he says about it being pointless to try and re-create a film look, I’m not sure that I agree with his suggestion that you “have to grasp the new medium and produce something new with it.” To me the great thing about digital is the purity, the naturalness of digital colour, and what really annoys me is when people Photoshop that to absurdity rather than accepting its own neutrality and working with it to make pictures. Colour has become in a way transparent, something we don’t need to worry about in the way we used to with film. It is now after all more or less how we see things. It’s perhaps too why I seldom now feel the urge to work in black and white.

For thirty years I did work mainly in black and white, with colour really being a little extra on the side. In the early years Tri-X was my favourite film, though I also liked the rather smoother look of Ilford’s FP4 and flirted with the almost grain-free detail of slow document films like Kodak Technical Pan, exposed at silly two-figure ISOs and developed in special soups for pictorial contrast. Then along came chromogenic films, introduced by Ilford, which gave low grain and smooth tones at ISO 400 and made that splendid Tri-X grit a special effect rather than a necessity.

Kodak were slow to respond, though eventually they emulated Ilford’s lead. In printing papers too, Kodak had largely exited the specialist market, discontinuing all their specialist materials leaving only rather ordinary products for the mass market; those of us interested in fine prints made them on Agfa paper, with Ilford’s Galerie and Multigrade later providing an alternative.

In colour, Kodachrome was king when I started, but in the mid-80s I jumped ship to the much more neutral colours and wider latitude of Fuji’s colour neg films. It wasn’t just the film, but also the Fuji colour paper, again with its cleaner colours and almost zero colour shift on burning or dodging. Fuji had done its homework on print life too, and produced considerably more permanent prints (as previously had Ilford for printing from transparencies with the very different Cibachrome) than the Kodak papers with their guaranteed fading and browning.

Perhaps it was the efforts that Kodak had to make to catch up with the superior films and papers from other manufacturers – and in the end they more or less did so – that made them take their eye off digital. But I think it was more that they were always essentially a materials company, and with digital the lead went to the camera makers – you didn’t need film any more.

Kodak had got an early start with digital, but really needed to buy in modern camera expertise and that didn’t seem to fit the way the company worked. They ended up making some very good sensors and selling them to people who knew cameras – including Leica, Nikon, Canon, Hasselblad etc. It was a true measure of the company’s desperate state when that successful part of the business was sold to Platinum Equity in November.

There are still people working with film. I’ve got old cameras I still would like to use sometimes – like the Hasselblad Xpan (and its 30mm lens), but somehow I never get round to it. Silverprint still list black and white films from 10 manufacturers, so the loss of one is perhaps not a great problem, but with colour it is now more or less down to Kodak and Fuji. But since Kodachrome ended with Dwayne Steinle processing his pictures of “his house, his family and downtown Parsons” on 29 Dec 2010, Kodak have hardly been a player.

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*Perhaps I should declare an interest. Kodak failed to offer me a job when I went to Harrow for an interview in 1966 as a research chemist because they felt I didn’t have a serious interest in photography as I didn’t belong to a camera club.