June, 2009 | >Re-PHOTO

Agustí Centelles (1909-85)

This morning I listened to the Today programme as I washed up the breakfast things and heard an interview with Sam Lesser, one of the seven remaining Britons who went to Spain with the International Brigade, all of whom have now been made Spanish citizens and given Spanish passports.

Sam Lesser in 2006

But of course as well as those thousands of brave individual who went to Spain to fight for freedom, there were many Spaniards also fighting.

And when we think of the photographs of the Spanish Civil War, probably we immediately think of Robert Capa – and in particular his ‘Falling Soldier‘ picture.

But of course there were also Spanish photographers. Or in the case of Agustí Centelles (1909-85), Catalan photographers. A photojournalist in Barcelona, he became an official photographer for the Republican government, and even managed to continue using his Leica when interned in the Bram refugee camp in France in 1939.

When he fled to France in February 1939 he took several thousand negatives with him. Later, when France was occupied by the Germans, he decided to return in secret to Spain, but left his negatives hidden in a house in France, as his pictures could have incriminated many Spaniards and led to their persecution by Franco. It was only 40 years later, after the fall of Franco that he could return and reclaim his work.

An exhibition of his work from 1936-9, “Agustí Centelles: journal dune guerre et dun exil, EspagneFrance 1936-1939” opened at the Jeu de Paume (Hotel de Sully site) in Paris yesterday and continues until 13 Sept 2009. You can read more about it in French on their site, and also in English on Art Knowledge News. There is also an extensive collection of his work on line at VEGAP – I’ve not yet looked at all 336, but what I have seen is enough to convince me that we should be thinking of him as the major photographer of the Spanish Civil War.

Too often we think of events that happen abroad – particularly in the majority world – only in terms of the photographs made by photographers from the Western agencies who travel there – almost as if photographs that don’t come from Magnum or VII or Getty or Reuters somehow aren’t real. Agencies such as Drik should have changed the way we see the South by now.

New Topographics Revived – No UK Show

In 1975, I was one of many youngish photographers to be excited and to an extent influenced by the work shown in an exhibition at George Eastman House curated by William Jenkins called “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” Not that I went to Rochester, but I read the reports in the US magazines, looked at books and catalogues, and at pictures which did come over to exhibitions here, and even went and did a workshop with one of the photographers included, Lewis Balz. (The full listing of those included: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel Jr.)

I think you can see a certain influence in some of the work I’ve done since then, particularly on the urban landscape, a genre central to the show. Without it I don’t think I would have set up the Urban Landscape web site, or produced many of the images on it – such as this of the DLR at Blackwall:

DLR Blackwall, 1994, Peter Marshall

The NPR article on the show, with a slide show of a dozen images that is worth viewing at full screen – for once you really do get larger images, not just fuzzier ones, is surely quite wrong to state that the paradigm shift this show produced “was imperceptible at the time.” To photographers such as myself it was as imperceptible as a thunderbolt.

The reason for the feature is that a new version of this show, new version of this seminal exhibition, organized by George Eastman House with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona opens at GEH on Saturday, June 13 and runs until Sunday, September 27, 2009. As well as 100 works from the 1975 show, it also has “some 30 prints and books by other relevant artists to provide additional historical and contemporary context.”

After Rochester the show will travel to eight international venues.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Oct. 25, 2009Jan. 3, 2010);
Center for Creative Photography (Feb. 19May 16, 2010);
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (July 17Oct. 3, 2010);
Landesgalerie Linz, Austria (Nov. 10, 2010Jan. 9, 2011),
Photographische Sammlung Stiftung Kultur, Cologne (Jan. 27April 3, 2011);
Jeu de Paume, Paris (April 11June 12, 2011);
Nederlands Fotomuseum Rotterdam, the Netherlands (July 2Sept. 11, 2011);
Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, Bilbao (November 2011January 2012).

Like me you may well be devastated but hardly surprised that no venue in the UK is on this list. After all it is a major photography show, so you can’t expect the Photographers’ Gallery or the Hayward or the Barbican to take much interest.

Top Taos?

I’ve never been to Taos, New Mexico but the The Church of St. Francis of Assisi is very familiar, having been photographed and painted by many. James Dansiger posted three photographs, by Ansel Adams, Laura Gilpin and Paul Strand – all intrigued by the forms of the rear of the building – the other day in Spirit West and asked readers to pick their favourite – and also to send in their own pictures.

Danziger says you can no longer take a view like Adams et al, as the adobe church is now surrounded by power lines and buildings. In Reader Comments, he includes a number of more recent photographs, which perhaps suggest the situation isn’t as bad as he suggests. His readers don’t manage to come up with any very great pictures – and display their lack of taste by preferring Adams to Strand. But more interesting is the image at the top of that second post, another image of the back of the church, inviting us to guess who took it.

Looking at it, and particularly the tonality and and hooded figure in the foreground my mind immediately jumped to the great Spanish pictorialist and master of the direct carbon process, Jose Ortiz Echague, but a closer look – by clicking on the image – told me I was wrong – perhaps misled by a poor reproduction of an indifferent print. I won’t give the game away, but look carefully at the top edge of that picture and you too may immediately come to the same – correct – conclusion as me.

You need a clue? Page down

Those Leicas were very fiddly to load! But even when he got it wrong he almost never cropped.

Pure Genius – Only 13 Years One Month late

I’m not sure now why the virtually only pictures I took at the ‘Pure Genius’ land occupation in 1996 were made on a swing lens panoramic camera. Perhaps there was something about the open spaces of that site – now occupied by tall luxury riverside flats – that made me want to think panoramic. But I exposed two complete rolls of film in the Horizon – 42 exposures, and just 5 black and white images, I think on a Leica.

The site was a large one, 13 acres, and by the time I took these pictures on May 6 the activists from ‘The Land is Ours‘ had already begun to transform the site, erecting buildings and preparing the land to grow crops.

I was reminded of this 13 years on by the news that a group inspired by this earlier ‘The Land is Ours’ action had occupied a long empty and overgrown site next to Kew Bridge as the Kew Eco-Village. I took a little detour to walk past there and take a look on my way home on Sunday but as nothing much seemed to be happening and I didn’t want to miss my train home (only hourly on Sundays) I didn’t try to make contact. Perhaps I’ll return another time when more is happening.

You can watch a video of the occupation, look at a local blog, Here Be Dragons (I met The Dragon – and Green Dragon Lane is just a few yards away) and follow KewEcoVillage on Twitter and there is a Facebook group too.

I made some quick scans from the 1996 pictures and have put nine of them on My London Diary . They aren’t great scans, as I made them like contact sheets, with the negs still in their filing sheets, so they are a bit dusty and a few of the negs were not quite flat… And using the Epson V750, some of these colour negs are a little too dense to give good scans, correct colour balance is murder, and you get some light leakage around the edges… Considering everything they are not bad at all on screen.

The Wandsworth/Battersea Guinness site remained empty for years after the TLIO occupation was ended forcibly after five and a half months. Eight years later, in June 2004, I returned and took this picture of the new flats that were going up, and work was still going on on the last block on the site last year.

The 1.8 acre site next to Kew Bridge has been empty and awaiting development since it was cleared in 1992. It should be a local scandal given the housing shortages (and high prices) in the area that the local council hasn’t stepped in at some point and taken over the land for social housing. Given the current economic climate, it seems unlikely that the current owners, St George West London Ltd, who bought the site in 2003, will be able to start building in the near future.

Their first planning application was turned down, and their second made last year for a 2 acre site including the next door pub includes a new pub, shops, offices and 170 residential units has not yet been approved. You can read more about the proposed development and its problems on the Strand on the Green site.

The Horizon that I bought cheaply around 1996 produces negatives around 56x24mm and they have a horizontal angle of view of approximately 120 degrees. The rotating lens produces what I think is called a cylindrical perspective. It has a nice clear viewfinder that is not 100% accurate but pretty good for it’s type and very bright. The built-in spirit level appears in the viewfinder making it easy to use this camera hand-held – for many pictures getting the camera level is essential, as otherwise the horizon will be nicely curved. When the camera is used upright, all vertical lines remain straight, but any non-verticals that do not pass through the centre of the image will be curved.

Incidentally you can still buy a very slightly updated version of the Horizon, the Horizon 202 (there are other models too) either under its own name or marketed as a Lomo. The difference is in the price – and possibly the guarantee – and of course you don’t get to call your pictures Lomographs, which may be an advantage.

I bought a replacement Horizon on eBay a couple of years ago for about half the cost of the equivalent Lomo in the bookshop of a well-known London gallery. The first lasted me around ten years of fairly regular use – several hundred films at least, though it had needed some minor repairs that I’d been able to make myself. Not bad value for a panoramic camera costing well under under £200 (now just slight over since the pound has gone down.)

More from Stratford Marsh

It saddens me a little now to walk on the Greenway across Stratford Marsh to remember what has been lost. The business estates and small works etc of course were not to everyone’s taste, although there were some modest but pleasing buildings among them, but there were some invigorating areas of minor wilderness, and some lush willow trees along the Pudding Mill River, along with some nice little touches of the picturesque.

© 2005 Peter Marshall
Willow trees by the Pudding Mill River on Marshgate Lane, 2005

The trees were at the left of this scene – June 2009

So much has now gone, and so many areas are now inaccessible – as for example:

You can see many more pictures of the Olympic area, including Stratford Marsh on my River Lea site, including some from the 1980s as well as since 2000. When I get time I’ll add more from the 1990s, when the waterways and footpaths in the area were all cleaned up and neatly signposted for walkers.

Saturday I went to take pictures to show the progress being made in covering the area with concrete for the Olympics, and made some more panoramas:

The opposite side of the Greenway to the Olympic stadium

You can see this rather larger, and also panoramas including the growing Olympic stadium and other pictures of the site on My London Diary.

Unfortunately the section of the Greenway south of the main railway line to Stratford High St is closed until Spring 2010, with a detour in place across to Pudding Mill Lane at Pudding Mill Station and down this to Marshgate Lane and Stratford High Street. This is to allow the roadway under the railway to be dug out to allow double-decker buses to pass under.

Poplar Walk

Poplar isn’t an area of London I know particularly well, although I’ve walked around it a few times and taken some photographs. I’ve found more to interest me just down the road in the Isle of Dogs, to the west in Limehouse, or along the Lea and Bow Creek to the east and north.

But it was very pleasant to take a walk around on Saturday afternoon in the company of around 18 other people and be led around by Bridget Cherry, who together with Charles O’Brien and Nikolaus Pevsner wrote the definitive volume on the architecture of East London in the ‘Buildings of England‘ series – she started work with Pevsner in 1968 and was editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides from 1971-2002.

The walk was one of half a dozen ‘Story of London’ trails organised by the Heritage of London Trust in association with Pevsner Architectural Guides, and although you’ve missed the chance to be guided personally by the experts you can still download a copy of the walk from the web site. (Or you can instead use the book, which includes rather more buildings and generally more detal than the walk, but is a little less convenient to carry than an A4 sheet.)

The walk started just below the stairs in this picture and related the buildings around Poplar High St and the East India Dock Road to the development of the area from the 17th century to the current day.

The most recent building mentioned on the walk is also one of the more controversial. Robin Hood Gardens, completed in 1972, has been encouraged by the council to get into very poor condition, partly by simple neglect but also by using it as a sink estate and permitting overcrowding. They want to demolish it and rebuild on the rather large site (and some people would undoubtedly make large amounts of money from doing so.)

© 2009 Peter Marshall
Narrow balconies overlook the park in the centre of the development; the outer side has wider ‘streets in the sky’ for access

Many tenants like the estate (though some hate it) and it still seems basically an excellent solution to a difficult problem, and a unique one. I was more than surprised to find it was not a listed building – it is a major work by two of our best-known architects – and shocked to hear that it was turned down. I’m sure the grounds must have been more to do with the politics of the situation than architecture.

Growing salad crops

You can read more about the area and the walk and see more pictures on ‘My London Diary‘

Police Try to Censor Protest

On Sunday Sikhs marched through London on the 25th anniversary of the storming by the Indian Army of their holiest site, the Golden Temple at Amritsar. Indira Ghandi had ordered the assault to capture or kill Sikh separatists who were in the compound at a time of year when it was also full of pilgrims.

It’s hard to be sure how many people were killed by the attack, but independent estimates suggest around 5,000, including many women and children, as well as hundreds of Indian soldiers and a relatively small number of Sikh militants.

A few months later, Mrs Ghandi’s Sikh bodyguards killed her. Following the assassination, high-ranking Indian politicians from her Congress Party incited mobs to indiscrimately attack and murder Sikhs, and thousands were massacred. Sikhs continue to fight for a nation of their own, Khalistan, through groups such as Babbar Khalsa International, and repression against them has also continued; Sikhs allege that “over 250,000 Sikhs have been killed by in an orchestrated genocide by the Indian government.”

You can see more about the march and rally before the march on My London Diary, where there are many more pictures.

One aspect that worried me was an attempt by the police to censor the placards before the start of the march. The officer in charge, Superintendent Raj Kohli, the Met’s highest-ranking Sikh officer, objected to a number of them because of the images on them, and a woman officer said that some might cause offence, particularly because they might be seen by children.

I didn’t think that the arguments the police put forward were in fact valid. Children would be unlikely to be able to interpret the images in any detail when they were being carried on placards in a demonstration, and I think they would have rather less impact on children than on adults. The placard that Kohli was most insistent about was different, showing a simple graphic of a person’s head seen in a gun sight, and the name of a prominent Indian politician who was implicated in the massacres of Sikhs. He saw this a clearly a provocation to violence, while I would see it more as an expression of what should the persons concerned deserve.

Although some agreement seemed to have been reached between Kohli and the protesters, many if not all of the disputed placards were carried in the march and can be seen in the pictures on My London Diary.

Kohli was carrying an A4 printout of the symbol of Babbar Khalsa International, a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act, 2000. This was present, along with the name Babbar, on many of the placards and banners that people carried in the march. So far as I saw the police took no action over this, perhaps because it would have involved dealing with thousands among those marching.

BKI and attempt to establish Khalistan certainly appears to have the support of a large fraction of British Sikhs, and more obviously so than when I started photographing Sikh events, perhaps around ten years ago. It’s only aim appears to be self-determination for the Sikh nation and I can see little reason why our government should feel a need to include it on the list of banned organisations. Though of course I wouldn’t want to express any approval or support for it, as that would almost certainly be an offence.

Gaia

Here’s a site I think is worth a look both for the photography on it and the idea behind it.
Gaia Photos mission is to “increase awareness about the challenges we are facing together on this planet and to promote understanding across all borders, physical or otherwise, of this world we share“, and to “promote quality and diversity in documentary photography.”

They are also looking for photographers around the world, and if you are “an active and professional freelance photographer or photojournalist” with “a ‘track record’ of working for publications or other media organisations“and particularly if you live in a country where they don’t yet have photographers (when I looked there was only one for the whole of Africa but already a couple for the UK) this could possibly be a place worth putting your work.

The site certainly has some interesting stories already posted on it, and looking through the names there I find a few I recognise, including Bevis Fusha from Albania who I met in Poland in 2005, and whose recent Facebook post led me to the site.

You can see much more of his work on his own web site.

But That’s My Picture!

Most photographers who put pictures on the web – or publish them in magazines – are likely to have the experience of opening a web site and finding to their surprise that one (or more) of their pictures is being used without their permission.

It’s a problem I’ve written about in the past and doubtless will return to. The first thing to do is perhaps to make sure it really is your picture – especially if it’s a picture of a popular place or event other people may well have had the same idea as you and produced a very similar image.

If it was taken from the web, it’s quite likely still to contain the metadata that you always include – such as your copyright message and contact details (and if you are not including these you should be.) If it was scanned from a magazine it won’t have your metadata, and of course some software discards much or all of it from web images.

Once you are sure it is your picture that has been used, you need to consider whether the use could be legal. If you sell images through an agency or picture library, the person using it may have a licence for the use they are making, and in some countries, particularly the USA, the concept of ‘fair use’ may give people rather more licence to use work without permission than in the UK. Probably the main area where such as use would normally be accepted here is in reviews of exhibitions and publications, where normally selected images are made available by galleries and publishers.

Photo Attorney Carolyn E. Wright, LLC, in her post Help! I’ve Been Infringed! provides excellent advice from a US perspective on the various options for dealing with this, starting with doing nothing at all and ending with going ballistic – or rather File a Copyright Infringement Lawsuit.

Although much of it applies in other countries, in the UK photographers are perhaps less greedy than in the US – or rather the law allows them to be. She warns against sending invoices at three times the normal rate for any unauthorised use – apparently fairly usual in the US – on thegrounds that you may otherwise get considerably more. Most photographers here are happy to settle for double, and invoice on that basis.

You’ll also need to decide whether filing with the US Copyright Office is worth the cost and they hassle involved. While she recommends it strongly, for those of us not based in the US I think it is considerably more debatable.

Spanish Tastes

I don’t think the organisers of what now seems to be an annual ‘Taste of Spain‘ in Regent St have really decided quite what the event is. I only bothered to go to it as I had to get from one of may favourite pubs just to the north of Oxford Circus, where I’d met up with a few friends, to Piccadilly Circus, where I could get a bus towards Waterloo. And of course I only needed to do this because Regent St was closed to traffic for this event. It didn’t put me in a better mood when I got to the bus stop and stood there waving wildly to the driver as my bus sailed past at some speed – there are just too many bus drivers with something against picking up passengers.

There really didn’t seem enough in the way of entertainment taking place – unless you find queueing fun. Not even a great deal of leaflets to collect and very little being given away.

Coming out of the pub I almost bumped into a guy with some legs over his shoulder and a companion with a bright pink wig. Fortunately he stopped and posed briefly for me, as I’d been busy talking and not at all ready to take a picture.

Photographically things were pretty straightforward, other than the sun which was a little low and usually in exactly the wrong place – one or two shots ruined by nasty flare (a little in this picture.) Everything here on a 20mm lens on the D700 as I couldn’t be bothered to get the other body out of my bag. Or because I really like working with just the one fixed lens when I can. A few are slightly cropped where I didn’t have time or couldn’t move in closer.

The only really interesting stand in Regent St was for Madrid, mostly taken up by reproductions of pictures from the Prado in large bright red stands. Favourite for the poseurs was Goya’s ‘La maja desnuda‘ and I took a whole series of various people in front of it. I’ve several of this scene, and o one of the things I like about it – difficult to see on this scale – is that you can clearly see the guy in it photographing his woman is framing out her body language which is what would give the picture its interest.

There is of course another photographer in the picture – Epson digital rangefinder on his stomach at extreme left, and being a mate of mine I’ll probably get to see his picture of the scene later. But I find I see through the viewfinder better when I hold the camera to my eye!

More pictures and ‘anthropologie’ on My London Diary. Where I also speculate about the copyright issues involved and that a prior trip to Madrid might have made Ruskin less shocked with Effie on 10th April 1846. Nowadays its rather easier to find porn on the Internet.