December, 2008 | >Re-PHOTO

North Circular Views: Benoît Grimbert & Me

Benoît Grimbert
A406 North Circular Road
École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Paris Malaquais
1 rue Jacques Callot, Paris
Nov 10 – Nov 29, 2008

A couple of hundred yards down a road on the Left Bank, lined with galleries and antique shops, we came to the North Circular Road.

Not of course the actual North Circular, which runs from Kew Bridge to the Woolwich Ferry through suburban London, but a Mois de la Photo show by Benoît Grimbert at l‘Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais.

You can see a slightly extended version of the 20 pictures on show there on his web site.

Benoit Grimbert (b1969) lives in Paris but travelled to London on several occasions to take a series of pictures along the length of the A406 North Circular Road. Unlike London’s South Circular which is almost entirely conceptual, the North Circular has a physical existence – and I’ve walked along most of its accessible parts (there are some elevated motorway style sections where I think pedestrians are not encouraged and possibly prohibited.)

So I was not just looking at a show of photographs, but a set of photographs of something I also know from my own photographs, several of which could be cropped to give virtually identical views.

If I went back to take pictures of the A406, I would work with a panoramic camera (and I have taken some pictures of it with one) as more suited to the idea of flow of traffic. Grimbert works to a square format and seems to be very much a man wedded to his tripod and spirit levelt, all restrictions that I think oppose the central concept of the work being about movement, traffic and flow. It ends up being very much a static view, one that concerns itself largely with the structures of various types which surround the road rather than the road itself or the kind of concepts which, according the text, it is concerned with.

The mismatch between technique and concept doesn’t in one sense particularly concern me. This is after all a show of photographs and it isn’t unusual (certainly in these days) for perfectly good pictures to be accompanied by a completely irrelevant sheet of academic jargon. But here I think the work was sometimes indecisively trapped between the visual and the conceptual (and the text from the show would certainly be a candidate for Pseuds Corner, except that I think that would be a concept the French may be unable to appreciate.)

Perhaps the problem I have with his work is that I know the North Circular. The following day I came across some of his pictures of Normandy – which you can also see on his web site – in a projection at the École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Paris La Villette. I found those more interesting than the A406, but perhaps if I was from Normandy I would have my reservations?

Actually I think not. I’ve cycled around Normandy and do know it at least slightly – and the same is true of another of the projects on his web site, Lisieux. Here the work is essentially about structures and their relationships to each other and his chosen techniques fit well with the subject and Grimbert’s intentions.

Grimbert presumably works with a medium format camera using 120 film and the prints are clear and detailed, though not especially so. (He claims that his colour prints are “tirage manuels argentiques” but there was no sign of the lack of bleach-fixing that this appears to suggest – perhaps the French doesn’t mean what it appears to – these seemed to me to be perfectly normal colour coupler prints.)

Peter Marshall Here are a few assorted digital images I’ve taken in the past couple of years on the North Circular – taken as parts of different projects. One day I’ll get around to developing and scanning the panoramic images that I also made on some of these visits!

Late evening in winter at Ilford.
There is a picture by Grimbert from almost exactly this point, but in rather different lighting.

Patrick Mourral: New-Age Archipelago

Larchipel by Patrick Mourral

Galerie Frédéric Moisan
72 rue mazarine 75006 paris
30 Oct – 29 Nov 2008

In rue Mazarine we came to ‘L’Archipel‘, a show of black and white and colour work by Patrick Mourral (b1976, Scotland), one of many shows in Paris that wasn’t a part of any festival. Previously shown in Strasbourg, it closed on 29 November, but I’m sure will be seen again elsewhere.

You can see a rather fast-moving and fast talking (in French) video about him and his work photographing modern-day nomads, new age travellers in Europe (we used to call them hippies.) It gets easier to understand when he talks about his work, and this téléAlsace feature does show quite a few of his pictures.

Archipel (archipelago) is the traveller’s metaphor for the level of the world they inhabit, straddling various countries along the roads to festivals, isolated areas in forests where they camp around their vans etc. They make only limited contact with the nation states over which they wander, seldom staying long in a place, sometimes doing short-term jobs or trading, usually on a cash basis.

Its a movement that got moving with the hippies in England in the ’80s and there are now thought to be more than 10,000 of them in Europe. Many, particularly in the earlier days were rat-race refugees from the middle classes who chose to live a freer if more spartan way of life, but in latter years many poor working-class inner city kids have decided that poverty and freedom on the road beats poverty and idleness in the slums.

The website of the galerie frederic moisan whose long white-painted space the show was in has some problems. You can view it in French but I had great problems in seeing things if I clicked on the ‘english‘ link, and even more if I attempted to access the English pages directly.

Mourral’s is serious work, a result of 10 years spent following and staying with the travellers, getting to know them and to be trusted by them. He presents a sympathetic but honest picture of them which is rather different from the sensationalist rubbish that often hits the press in the silly season (is that the whole year now?)

While the black and white prints on show were very impressive, Mourral’s colour work on display was ruined by over-saturated, garish colour, making it impossible for me to take seriously. This is a shame, as the images on the web, if still at times rather hyperreal, seem considerably more interesting than those in the gallery (although many are the same pictures.)

Colour ink jet is capable of producing more subtle and accurate prints (especially from digital files) than we have ever before enjoyed in photography. But it can also produce the kind of crude poster quality that does nothing for sensitive photography.

Gabriele Basilico, Vertical Moscow

Moscou Verticale
Mois de la Photo, Paris
la Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine
23 October 2008 – 30 November 2008

One of the really major shows in the Mois de la Photo, Gabriele Basilico’s Moscou Verticale proved more difficult to find than we expected, and had us checking the information in the programme very carefully.

The place du Trocadéro is really one of the bleaker areas of Paris, with the large empty square dominated by the two wings of the Palais de Chaillot, built on either side of an open terrace with its well-known view of the Eiffel Tower across the River Seine (and now thronged by young men trying to sell small models of the tower.) Built to impress for the 1937 International Exhibition it embodies every worst element of a classicized debased modernism, and houses a rather bewildering array of museums, badly signposted in what is almost a French art-form. Even though we knew where we were going it still seemed hard to find, and we were almost put off by the notices demanding an entry fee. But although you do have to pay to visit la Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, this and some other exhibitions were free.

I’ve long been a fan of Gabriele Basilico (b1944, Milan) and there were a few good examples of his work in one or two stands at Paris Photo. I own several books of his work, but I think this is the first one-person show of his that I’ve seen. Or at least it was a one-photographer show, because Basilico, wo trained as an architect before becoming a photographer, worked on the project with architect Umberto Zanetti , photographing and photographing from the seven curiously ridiculous towers around Moscow from the Stalinist era sometimes known as the ‘Seven Sisters‘.

These were built as showcases for the state, very much to outdo the skyscrapers of New York – and in terms of excess they certainly do. There is a story about Stalin receiving two quite different alternative plans for a building from an architect who had expected him to choose the one he preferred. But perhaps after rather too many bottles of vodka, the plans were returned with both approved by the dictator, and the architect had to build the two together on the same foundations. Looking at some of these pictures I did wonder if it was only two plans.

These are buildings so impressively bad that it becomes fascinating. You can see three of his black and white images of them on the Cohen Amador Gallery site (you are unlikely to be fooled by the caption which tells you one is in Naples.) Like the black and white images on show, these are inkjet prints, and at least as good as those he has previously printed on silver gelatin.

But while these black and white pictures were very much what we have come to expect from Basilico, the colour work on show actually taken from the ‘Seven Sisters’ took a radically different perspective on both the buildings and the rest of the city, looking down at sometimes seriously vertigo-inducing angles and often concentrating on relatively small building details.

In part the new direction may have come from working with the architect on this project, but it may also have some connection with Basilico having worked with another of my favourite urban landscape photographers John Davies (a couple of whose pictures were also in Paris Photo.) John is one of the photographers included on the Urban Landscapes site I run with Mike Seaborne, and which links to his own extensive site.

Although I can’t find any significant pictures of this colour work by Basilico on-line (we’d be delighted to put some on Urban Landscapes) pictures at Cohen Amador from Naples (probably), Bari, Barcelona and San Francisco show this new viewpoint, as do the 2008 pictures from San Francisco at Studio La Città.

Peter Marshall

(C) 2008, Peter Marshall
Grain Silos, Riverside Walk, East Greenwich (1982) (C) Peter Marshall I don’t often mention my own photographs of buildings (several hundred are in one of our national collections), but you can see some on the web. Perhaps the best site is London’s Industrial Heritage, but one of the first sites I wrote (and showing its age,) ‘The Buildings of London‘ has a few examples from the hundred thousand or so I took. (C) 2008, Peter Marshall
Art Deco Factory, Great West Rd, Brentford, 1980s © Peter Marshall

Burma: Thought under Military Control

MOIS DE LA PHOTO-OFF, PARIS
Birmanie, rêves sous surveillance
(Burma, Dreams under Surveillance)
Du 10 au 23 novembre 2008 aux Vôutes

The web site Burma, dreams under surveillance gives an excellent account of this project started in 2003 by the humanitarian organisation ‘Les yeux dans le monde’ to increase our awareness of the social and political situation in Burma.

On 13 November we went to the opening of a show of the photographs taken by Manon Ott and Grégory Cohen at Les Vôutes, vaults under the roadway at les Frigos, a former industrial complex now artists homes, studios and exhibition spaces, a block east of the new building of the National Library (Bibliotheque François Mitterand) in the XIIIe.

The work is also available as a book from Editions Autrement, published in May 2008, when the work was also shown at Les Vôutes with a two-day festival. The photographs are presented in four chapters: Peoples desire, Stories of resistance, Between survival and guerilla war and The border areas, and also includes appendices containing information about the country and its culture.

Although there were some powerful images on the wall, and in the projection on the screen at the end of the cellar, the added structure of the book gives a much tighter experience.

There were a number of images among the work that to me seemed perhaps more touristic than documentary, and at times I wondered about how the work had been affected by the difficulties of working openly in Burma, impossible for me to assess.

But there were also moving stories and powerful suggestions of a pervasive military supervision of all aspects of life (the mention of Orwell’s 1984 seemed only too true.) But there was also humour – and if you don’t know about the Moustache Brothers you can find out here and also see them on YouTube.

Wine-tasting for London Bloggers

Around 50 London Bloggers from the almost 400 members of The London Bloggers Meetup Group enjoyed a great time in the basement at Ember in Farringdon last night, tasting wines provided by wine bloggers from Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal, invited by Robert McIntosh of the Wine Conversation blog and Thirst for Rioja,to contribute some bottles of wine and a short video for the occasion.

Robert pours a wine sample

This is a photo blog and not a wine blog, so let me start by saying something technical about the pictures before getting down to the wine. I was working with the Nikon D300, starting with a 20mm f2.8 and then moving to a Sigma 18-125mm lens. As usual I worked in P mode, but with the SB-800 flash set to work at -2/3 stop to avoid any over-exposure. The flash was in TTL/FP mode, with a minimum shtter speed of 1/60, and I set the4 ISO to 1250 so that the dim light in the bar would add a little to those areas not lit by flash. Quality at 1250 is still pretty good on the D300, but with a D700 or D3 I would probably have prefrred to work at 2500 or 3200.

Glasses waiting for the tasting as Robert talks about the wines

I had the translucent dome diffuser on the flash to give an even spread of light over the frame – almost all the pictures I took were at 18-20mm. Apertures – set by the camera – were around f8, which with this wideangle gives plenty of depth of field. I worked with the camera on autofocus, selecting a focus area on the closest face in the picture.

The flash head was generally angled so that most of the light rteaching the subject was bounced from the slightly off-white ceiling. It coloured the flash a little, but I think the white point aedjusts for this as it is the main light, and leaving the camera on auto white balance gave good results. On shots where a part of the subject was close to the camera I generally swivelled the flash head away from that direction.

Enthusiastic bloggers towards the end of the evening

Despite the use of bounce flash in most of the pictures there was still considerable light fall-off evident in the images, which is where Lightroom 2.1 came in. In most of these images I’ve done some burning in of faces, arms and hands close to the camera and a little dodging of important but more distance areas. Using ceiling bounce, areas such as the tops of balding heads need considerable attention to bring them to a normal density. Somehow ears too can often seem too bright however you light things, and so need a little burning down too.

Of course there would be some advantages in using the flash away from the hot shoe, but this makes things far less convenient. And as I think these results show you can do surprisingly well with a flash on your hot-shoe.

Now for the wine – and it was a fine selection.

Thirst for Rioja
Robert’s own blog on the Rioja area for Spain and in particular the Bodegas Dinastia Vivanco, Bodegas Criadores de Rioja and Bodegas Carlos Serres which he represents. His video – his first – is perhaps a little too static and information filled. The wines he brought were a white Vivanco Viura Malvasia, Rioja, 2007 which I didn’t taste and Dinastia Vivanco Rioja Crianza, 2004, a really fine oak-aged red I’d be very happy to drink again.

Winzerblog
Winzer is German for Winegrower and Thomas Lippert writes about his daily work growing grapes and making and selling wine. His video tour of the estate has some nice touches but is far too jumpy. Thomas provided Riesling Kabinett Trocken 2007, Weingut Clauer which I didn’t taste.

Bodegas Tintoralba
Javier Navarro‘s site about this cooperative winery in Higueruela, a small town near Alicante, where almost all of the 1300 inhabitants belongs to the co-op. The video has a few pictures of it near the end. But what impressed me rather more was the smooth deeply coloured Higueruela wine – probably my favourite red of the evening.

Poggio Argentiera
Gianpaolo Paglia blogs for Poggio Argentiera, a young winery with two estates in Tuscany. As well as a video in which he talks about the area and its wines in English, you can watch another in Italian which shows you the area and the grapes, and very much makes me want to pay a visit there. The red wine, Bellamarsilia – Morellino di Scansano, was, as the web site says “perfect for every day, informal drinking, fantastic for parties, middle-of-the-week suppers at home or in a nice little eatery, or by the glass over lunch.”

Casa de las Vides
Emilio Saez Van Eerd from Casa de las Vides in Valencia, Spain sent us a video with some nice still pictures of the vineyard and winery (though I find the music over-obtrusive.) The CVP 2007 was another fine oak-aged wine, though not my personal favourite of those tested.

Cortes de Cima
Jose Eduardo J Silva writes a very readable blog (in English) about this family owned vineyard and winery in the south of Portugal. The vineyards look a little bleak in the video, which also shows the winery. The dark red fruity Syrah 2004 did, as it said on the video, make me want to have another glass, and I did. Another good drinking wine.

Justin Roberts of the Vinos de Jerez etc… blog persuaded Jan Pettersen at Rey Fernando de Castilla to supply their Antique Oloroso, and made a video interview with the man who made it. I’m sorry I didn’t get to taste it, but there is only so much I can drink, and I’ve never been a great fan of sherry, although one of the few perks of being a union rep some 25 years ago was that the boss used to always give me a glass if I went to see him late morning.

And I don’t often drink port, but at the end of the evening I just couldn’t resist some of Quevodo Port’s Special Reserve Tawny. Again there is a video, by Oscar Quevedo, the youngest member of the family who have been making Port for over 100 years in Portugal above the River Douro, and one of five bloggers on their site. An 8 year old fruity wine with 19% alcohol, it did really make excellent drinking, though I was very pleased I wasn’t driving the bus or train home.

Thanks, Robert!

Hitler at the 1948 London Olympics. And Jesus

Just a couple of the photo requests that even Getty Images couldn’t supply from its huge archive. The film Photograph Of Jesus by Laurie Hill, made in association with the Getty Images ‘Short & Sweet Film Challenge’ , on YouTube includes some other fine examples of requests made by picture researchers and also shows you the inside of the seriously large archive. And it does also supply those impossible images…

Belgian Architectural Photography in Paris

Lalibi documentaire, on show at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles opposite the Pompidou Centre in Paris until Feb 1, 2009 is a show of Belgian architectural photography and related imagery. It has three strands, the first showing vintage architectural work, the second contemporary architectural photography and the third ‘photographic’ imagery of imaginary buildings.

Architecture is of course an area where the ability to create images of buildings that do not exist has long been important. Every project proposal needs its artists representations of how it will look, and now these are more readily (and believably) produced using computer-generated methods, which can mimic photographs to the last pixel. At least some of the images in this section of the show are more genuinely photographic, produced by merging photographic images using Photoshop or similar software, and produced solely as art.

Early work is represented by Edmond Fierlants (1819-1869), an apprentice in Paris to the pioneering Hippolyte Bayard and one of the founders of the Société française de photographie in 1854. He returned to his native Belgium in 1858, and was commissioned by the state to photograph architecture in Anvers (better known to us as Antwerp), Brussels and Louvain (Leuven.) For the last two years of his life he devoted himself to portraiture in his Brussels studio.

Of more interest to me was the work from the modernist period, particularly that of Willy Kessels (1898-1974) one of the great architectural photographers of the 1930s. The show was certainly worth a visit just to see his work. Other photographers from the 20th century were Marcel Lefrancq (1916-1974) and Gilbert de Keyser (1925-2001) whose architectural details are also interesting.

Willy Kessels: Houses. Photomontage for the Book ‘atmosphere Brussels’, 1932
Credit: Museum of Photography in Charleroi, Inv. MPC 97/83

Although the contemporary architectural photography was uniformly of a high standard, I found little to particularly inspire me. Perhaps the most interesting piece was a grid of 35 images by Marie-Francoise Plissart showing the successive stages of demolition of the Tour Martini in 2001. Gilbert Fastenaekens‘s side walls of buildings were too bland even for my taste, and the images of Marc Wendelski too severely geometrical to really appeal – I longed to have some lines at odd angles to relieve the horizontal and vertical. I quite liked the dusk images of internally lit building by Marie-Noëlle Dailly, which had a strange lighting quality which made them seem rather less real than some of the fictive images in the third section of work.

Marie-Noëlle Dailly

The final section of invented images included some pictures that seemed more real than the actual architectural photography, but quite a few of them left me wondering why anyone had bothered to produce them. For me the work of Simon Boudvin (click on the minute artists name at top left, then select ‘already made‘) and Filip Dujardin stood out in this section, both for the actual quality of the work and the wit their work embodies. I also enjoyed the ‘Villa Malaparte’ by Martin Vierin, but this needs to be seen projected – a pity it isn’t on YouTube!.

Daring to Look

The latest issue of The Digital Journalist as always contains much of interest. One item that particularly struck me was a review by by J B Colson of the book by Anne Whiston Spirn, “Daring to Look,” which takes a new look at the work of Dorothea Lange and appears to give a much more detailed insight into how she actually worked. She concentrates her attention on the projects Lange undertook in 1939.

The link at the bottom of the page leads to a good selection of Lange’s work, mainly from the collection of the Library of Congress. You can of course go and see more there; a Creator serach on Dorothea Lange returns over 4000 records, and most appear to have digitised images. So here is one you almost certainly haven’t seen before!

Wife and sick child of tubercular itinerant, stranded in New Mexico, Dorothea Lange, 1936 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division,

There is a special feature on the variants of her ‘Migrant Mother‘ picture and if you would like your own print to hang on your wall you can download a 55Mb Tiff file made from the original nitrate negative (55 Mb may well take some time to download.) A 30Mb TIFF made from a print is also available, but shows considedrable damage to the print.

You can also read the story of this picture from another point of view. According to the grandson of Florence (Owens) Thompson, the woman in the picture, a well-dressed woman jumped out of a smart newish car and started taking pictures, getting closer with each shot. Florence decide to ignore her.

After taking the pictures, Lange is said to have told Florence who she was and that she was working for the Farm Security Administration and to have promised that the pictures would not be published. Next day they made the front page of all the newspapers.

Food Photographs

Food is often a problem for photojournalists when travelling or living in foreign countries and meals are often memorable for various reasons. On the The New Yorker magazine site you can watch ‘Tea and Wallaby” in which photographers Brent Stirton, John Stanmeyer, Olivia Arthur, Rena Effendi, Eric Bouvet, Lauren Greenfield, Eamon Mac Mahon, Carolyn Drake, Andrea Diefenbach, Jacob Aue Sobol, Aaron Huey and Stephanie Sinclair each talk about a meal they have had and a picture they took related to it.

I’m not a fan of food photography, whether the kind of thing you see in the glossy mags or Martin Parr‘s more garish kitchen kitsch attempts. But these pictures are rather better.

Photographers in Uniform?

Photojournalists in the USA, covering news on “federal highways” are now covered by a law that requires them – along with anyone else working on the highways – to wear high visibility ANSI 107-2004 class II vests. The US National Newspaper Association sells suitable items with the word PRESS on the back in large letters for $15.

Now well I wouldn’t want to go that far when covering most events, since our police in the UK seem unable to distinguish between press photographers and demonstrators, perhaps we should make their job easier? Although, given that the Met Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) have taken certainly hundreds if not thousands of pictures of me over the past few years I would have thought they should recognise me by now.

At more sensitive events I often work with a press card clearly visible, alhtough I don’t like to do so, because most of what I do – even there – falls within what should be part of the freedom of expression available to all citizens. I worked for years without a card when most of my income came from teaching, and if for some reason I was no longer eligible for a card it wouldn’t stop me working now – although it would make a few things impossible and would increase my chances of arrest.

Legislation in recent years has meant there is no such thing as an “innocent bystander“. If you are in a particular area and have been issued a SOCPA warning to leave and stay you are guilty of an offence, even if you take no active part in what is happening. I’ve objected and shown my press card when given such orders only to be told by police it makes no difference, but I think they are simply wrong. If I didn’t have a card I would be considerably more likely to leave rather than continue to take pictures.

Usually I carry my card in a holder inside a trouser pocket, in a holder on a cord around my belt, making it very simple to find when I need to show it and attaching it securely to my person (long ago I handed a card to a police officer and never saw it again.) In Summer I often wear a holder that fits on my belt that I can drop the card into – still in its holder – to wear it visibly, but easily take it out for people to look at.

But in colder weather I wear a jacket on top of the belt, and the only way I’ve found to carry the card visibly is in a holder that goes round my neck. Often I have at least one camera around there too, and things can get tangled, which is a nuisance. Cords around the neck also can be used to strangle, which can be a danger in tense situations. So usually the card stays in my pocket on its cord. I’m sure there must be a better solution to make it securely visible.

Not that having a press card is always of much help. At various events police refuse to treat journalists any different from demonstrators, and at times I’ve been told that the UK Press Card I have (a police approved scheme) “isn’t a real press card.”

Of course, the US item, published at the end of last month, reminded me of this year’s great April Fool hoax on EPUK, which provided a great solution for some of these problems – and fooled many – including a Guardian writer!