January, 2010 | Re-photo

Archive for January, 2010

Céline Clanet

Friday, January 15th, 2010

I was looking at Céline Clanet’s web site – her work was recently featured in The Independent – a few days ago and meant to comment about it here but it slipped my mind . What I had meant to say was that if you want snow pictures, you could look at her work rather than bother to get cold going out and taking them during the recent white winter we’ve been having here in the UK. Lapland, as her pictures show, can do it rather better.

And mainly I did take my own advice and keep indoors and keep warm, though I did take my camera when I needed to visit the local shops, and even took a slightly longer route than usual to walk there, taking a few snaps on the way. But I don’t think I’ll be posting them on line, though some may find their way to Alamy or another library when I get round to it.

Back to Céline Clanet, a freelance photographer and graphic designer who was born in Chambéry, France and lives and works in Paris, the series I find more interesting on her site are not from Lapland but the other works, Une mélodie japonaise, Un mince vernis de réalité and Leur(s) petite(s) histoire(s). Her site gives the English translations, A Japanese Melody, A Thin Layer of Reality and Their short (Hi)story(ies). But perhaps its just because I don’t like snow.

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Nadav Kander on China

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

Nadav Kander wasn’t my choice for the 2009 Prix Pictet that he won, although I was only judging on the few pictures from his project that were then shown, along with those from the other 11 short listed photographers that were presented on Lens Culture.

But looking at his web site, (it needs Flash – use this link to avoid it messing up your browser by opening a new window – never in my opinion a good thing) where you can see 48 pictures from the winning project, Yangtze, the Long River, it would be hard not be impressed. There is also some fine work in other projects, and I enjoyed reading his biography, which starts with a picture of him wearing a bib in a high chair.

Thanks to the A Photo Student blog, I’ve just spent a very pleasant 10 minutes while drinking my morning coffee watching a video on YouTube listening to Kander talking sensitively about his pictures. Made in collaboration with the Royal College of Art in London, it gives you time to see the pictures and isn’t afraid to put up a black screen when Kander starts talking.

There aren’t any fancy effects to detract from the pictures, and though sometimes the picture fades are little slow for my taste, they go briefly to black between images with none of that annoying overlap that we had to endure in the early years of AV productions and still sometimes see on film (of course one time in a thousand it had some real point – just the other 999 that really turned me off.) It is a video at a pace that allows you to think, made about a series of images that stimulate thought and with some illuminating comments by the photographer.

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USA – 8 Years of Shame

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Yesterday, 11 January 2010, was 8 years since the USA set up the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, although some of the prisoners have been held longer in various black holes around the world either by the US or on their behalf by others. The choice of the site showed a disregard for international law, and the treatment of the detainees flouted the international conventions. You can read more about Guantánamo on Andy Worthington‘s site and book.

I’ve already posted pictures and text about the event on Demotix (where it made the front page), Indymedia and of course with more pictures on My London Diary so I don’t need to recount the details here. This was the picture that Demotix put on the front page:

Visually, the eagle is the obvious thing to include in the picture (and it would have been nice to have more of the flag too, but the lack of wind wasn’t really cooperating.) Obviously a symbol of USAmerica – why they put it there. But also a symbol of power and of freedom, the freedom to soar like an eagle, which the detainees don’t have. Instead of being free to spread their wings, their arms are manacled, and hands drawn back in, onto the hooded face. I liked the symmetry of the pose and I think I got the cropping just under the arms – and rather fortunately of the chain – just about right.

Another image I liked was of one of the speakers, Chloe Davies of Reprieve, which has provided legal defence for many of the detainees, over 50 of their clients have already been released- although over 30 are still held. I saw I could more or less line up the end of the megaphone she was holding with an appropriate message held by another of the protesters, “Release all innocent people” and it was almost as if this message was emerging from the megaphone.

I had to work very quickly, and wasn’t helped when I was trying to get in the exact right position when another person with a camera came and stood in front of me. So it could have been improved a little.

Most of these pictures were taken with the Sigma f2.8 24-70mm which continues to impress me both with its performance and its weight! But I also took a few mainly portraits with the older lightweight 55-200mm DX format Sigma. Apart from just a little vignetting at the wider end (cropped in some images) it really does a grand job. I’m not sure Joy Hurcombe will thank me (or Sigma) for this, but the full size original is really biting sharp and detailed, with not the slightest hint of camera shake despite being taken at 1/100s at 200mm focal length.

Some Tech stuff

Taking the pictures wasn’t a great problem, other than that while the guys in the orange jump suits were posing there was a bit of a scrum of press and others. And it was one of the dullest days you can imagine, though that was hardly a problem – I simply set the base ISO to 800 and the minimum shutter speed to 1/100th using auto-ISO on the D700. I had the camera on aperture priority at f8 and the I’d chosen ISO 2000 as the maximum ISO. So nearly all the non-flash pictures were taken at 1/100th at f8, though there we just a couple where even ISO 2000 wasn’t quite enough and they were exposed at 1/80.

Adding the SB800 flash appears to peg the ISO at the lower setting of the auto-iso limits m- in my case ISO800, while in aperture priority mode you of course set the aperture (and I left this at f8 the.). In aperture priority (or program mode) the slowest allowed shutter speed is set by custom function e1 – and I had that set to its fastest possible value, 1/60s (a shame it doesn’t let you set 1/125.) It was used for almost all the flash pictures, with just one or two having sufficient light to use a faster speed.

In fact the easiest way to use the flash is to work in manual mode, where you set both aperture and shutter speed, but if you want to switch rapidly from working with and without flash you then need to alter the manual settings or switch to another exposure mode as you switch the flash off – and it’s all too easy to forget.

One very simple mistake – which I made to start with but immediately noticed – is not to slide the flash quite all the way into the flash shoe. You can do this and still manage to turn the lock, and the flash will still fire, but I think on full power, usually resulting in severe overexposure.

Nikon doesn’t actually give much information about how the accessory flash units actually work with the camera in either the camera or flash manuals. But usually it just does work.

Actually the picture above was underexposed. I’d thought that the matrix metering would compensate for the largish area of sky, but it didn’t. Added to the -2/3 stop of exposure compensation I’d dialled in on an earlier shot to avoid clipping highlights, it was really a little too far under for comfort, but a little tweaking in Lightroom restored it to reasonable health.

Bright orange jumpsuits are a bit of a challenge, and Adobe’s standard camera profile doesn’t handle them well. I made my job much easier by using the “untwisted” profiles I wrote about a couple of months ago.

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Ban on Islam4UK

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

This morning’s announcement of the banning of Islam4UK came as a little – but not much – of a surprise to me, and is another sign of a growing loss of our traditional British acceptance of eccentricity and the more lunatic fringes of thought. Although perhaps the suggestion by Home Secretary Alan Johnson that this group of a very few men (and I think they were mainly men) possessed with the kind of peculiar delusions that were demonstrated in their plans for a revamped Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace (now sadly removed from their website) were a real terrorist threat are probably equally delusional. It is rather as if Parliament had decided to ban engineering in the UK and announced a ban on the works of Heath Robinson.

Islam4UK is a group I’ve twice missed photographing, once when I got tired and went home before a confrontation between them and several hundred in the ‘One Law for All’ campaign last March, and then last October when they cancelled their ‘March for Sharia‘ through central London, but a counter demonstration by both moderate and right wing groups still went ahead.

Al-Muhajiroun was quite probably more of a serious threat, along with Omar Bakri Muhammad (and both were banned some years ago.) But although Islam4UK claimed to be its successor (and its leader Anjem Choudary was previously one of Al-Muhajiroun’s leaders) it appears to have attracted little support and almost universal condemnation from British Muslims – but considerable attention for its media-grabbing proposals from the UK press. “Mad Muslims” seem always to be good for circulation.

In the BBC news bulletin that carried the announcement seconds after it was made public, the suggestion was made that another Islamic group, Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain, should also be banned. Bakri split away from this group in the 1990s, having helped to build it up, because he found its policies insufficiently radical.

I’ve photographed quite a few of their public events in London since a 2004 when they held a rally and march by a thousand or two supporters to the Pakistani High Commission against Presidents Bush and Musharraf, calling for a caliphate in Pakistan. They were back at the embassy again (now its Obama and Zardari) on 5th December last year but I was busy with other things.

In 2005 I photographed their “March For Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir And Chechnya … Before They Make It A Crime” which also opposed the extradition of Babar Ahmad* to the USA, the prescription of non-violent Islamic organisations (including Hiszb Ut-Tahrir Britain,) and other measures that attempt to silence legitimate political dissent.

Obviously Hizb ut-Tahrir is a considerably more serious political organisation, but although it aims to restore a Caliphate in the Muslim world, its states that it “does not work in the West to change the system of government, but works to project a positive image of Islam to Western society and engages in dialogue with Western thinkers, policymakers and academics.”

While I would not want to live in the kind of Islamic state proposed by Hizb ut-Tahrir and find some of their views inconsistent with my own understanding of human rights and equality (as some of those of more extreme Christian groups and others also are) I am not aware of any justification for banning their activities here in the UK, although I’m sure it would be a popular decision in Pakistan.

* Babar Ahmad, arrested and brutally assaulted by the Met Police in December 2003 (the High Court concluded he was the subject of a “serious, gratuitous and prolonged” attack and they paid uyp £60,000 compensation) has been held in prison without trial since the USA applied for his extradition on charges of being involved in web sites supporting Chechen and Afghan insurgents. A decision is expected shortly on the review by The European Court of Human Rights of his extradition case.

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Sudan Drums

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

Sudan was an area where British colonialism messed up in the nineteenth century with General Gordon being failed by the government and much more. From 1899 to 1956 it was essentially a British colony, and for the last 30 or so years run as more or less as two different countries, a largely Muslim north and a largely Christian south.

Although the south and the north reached some kind of agreement in a peace settlement five years ago following two lengthy civil wars, fighting and civil rights abuses continue, particularly in Darfur in the west of the country. The peace settlement called for a referendum in the south to decide whether to remain in Sudan in January 2011, and the international Sudan365 campaign which was being launched on January 9, 2010 brings together groups working for peace and human rights in Sudan and a free and fair referendum in a year (actually now just under 365 days).

Photographically it was a fairly simple event to cover , with demonstrators in a pen on the pavement in Whitehall, although the police were occasionally being a little unhelpful and quite unnecessarily attempting to keep the pavement in front of the demonstration clear rather than routing passers-by through the wide empty gap behind it, and I was occasionally asked to move. They also refused to allow the organisers of the demonstration to have speakers there – and to my surprise they failed to insist on doing so, unlike several previous demonstrations I’ve photographed there.

The event had attracted some media attention, though mainly from broadcast media rather than print, and BBC radio 4 had interviewed the major speaker, the Sudanese Archbishop Daniel Deng earlier in the day (and did so again on Sunday morning.) Of course we all want peace, but his interviews- and the well-received address he gave at the protest – seemed to me politically lacking (as perhaps too is Sudan365.) Perhaps not surprisingly he was feeling the cold in London, even with a red jumper under the purple.

Since the protest was called ‘Drums for Peace‘ it would have been nice if he would have actually beat one at least for a few minutes with everyone else, but he could not be persuaded to do so, presumably feeling it wasn’t the kind of thing an archbishop should do. Apparently he is meeting Gordon Brown on Monday- and I hope the other party leaders too.

I did photograph him speaking, but he held the microphone close to his face all the time and spoke without any gestures or expression and so the pictures weren’t great. A few of those when he was posing the the middle of the demonstration are a little better, but lack the kind of interest and dynamism shown by the demonstrators. And dark glasses are seldom a plus point when you are trying to make a portrait.

The second speaker was much more interesting to photograph, though again not easy, as there were only a few moments when she lifted her eyes from her typed pages. But there were some great faces in the crowd of demonstrators as you can see in the rest of my pictures from the event on My London Diary.

But by the time she had finished, I’d decided it was time for me to go also. Elsewhere on My London Diary you can see several other protests about Sudan I’ve photographed previously – all concerned with the continuing genocide in Darfur, in April 2007, Sept 2007 , April 2008 and May 2008.

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Aberystwyth – Chloe Dewe Mathews

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

Somehow Aberystwyth seems to me to be the last place a photographer would go for an interesting story, but London-based freelance Chloe Dewe Mathews has proved me wrong with her Hasidic Holiday: The Annual trip to Aberystwyth which appeared on Burn Magazine today. Apparently around a thousand orthodox Jews have taken an annual holiday together there each August, staying in the student village for the last 20 years or more.

Obviously Mathews has succeeded in gaining the confidence of the families she has photographed and given us an insider view of a community which likes to keep itself. On her web site you you can also see another rather different story about an annual visit to the sea, when tens of thousands of European Roma make a pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in late May for the festival of their patron saint, Black Sara. Her pictures from this are rather more emotional than those from Aberystwyth, but perhaps that is not surprising given the nature of the event. But the Welsh work has a clarity of colour and a precision that appeals to me.

There are a few pictures of the Jewish holidays by a Welsh photographer (who has also produced a book on Aberystwyth), Keith Morris, on the Welsh Photolibrary site (perhaps surprisingly, apparently the only 8 images on the site featuring Jewish people.) Like the Guardian link in the above paragraph I think these are interesting simply as an illustration of the difference between competent library images and some excellent photojournalistic projects.

I think it must be around 50 years since I last visited Aberystwyth, as a small boy with my family on a coach outing from an isolated village in mid-Wales where some of us were staying one summer. It wasn’t quite like the outing in one of Dylan Thomas’s short stories, but there were some similarities. We did eventually get there, after quite a few stops on the way, and about all I can remember about the place was that it seemed cold, windy, wet and grey. But it doesn’t quite look that way in Mathews’s pictures.

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Doctorow on Copyright

Friday, January 8th, 2010

I first read the speech by Cory Doctorow ‘How to Destroy the Book‘ before Christmas, but didn’t immediately mention it because although there was much in it that appealed to me I wanted to think about it a bit more.

Doctorow made the speech to a Canadian ‘National Reading Summit‘ in Toronto in the middle of November and the speech was printed by ‘The Varsity‘, a Toronto-based on-line student newspaper, a month later. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you should.

To put things simply, Doctorow stresses the centrality to our culture of being able to own and copy books and points out the threat posed both by mechanisms such as DRM licensing and the current attempts by the copyright industries (and in particular those from the US) through the the World Intellectual Property Organization and proposals to ‘update’ copyright laws in countries around the world. (Our very own Peter Mandelson gets a special mention for his weekend in Corfu with David Geffen which persuaded him to to come back and rewrite our own copyright laws.)

Doctorow as a creator has certainly put his works where his mouth is, insisting on his work being published DRM free and making his books available as free downloads (and they really look good on screen.) For him, scattering his work, to use his image, as freely as the dandelion scatters its seeds, gives “a fecundity to your work that allows it to find its way into places that you never thought it would be found before.”

As he says, most people first come across the work of authors without buying it. They borrow books from libraries, from friends – or download material from the Internet. Far from threatening the sales of books, these same people go on to buy those that they really like – because they want to own them.

It works because the product for sale, the printed work, has a physical form that people want to own. An electronic book just isn’t the same (and I think most of us are by now simply annoyed by those clever book-look interfaces on web pages with pages that ‘turn’ rather than simply doing what a screen display can do better.)

But does it work for other media? Perhaps less so for some, although I’d still prefer to have those few movies I own on DVD in nice packages with a title on the spine and some interesting material in the box – something the industry has rather too often failed to provide. Music too has failed to come up with anything to rival the LP cover in the post-vinyl age, though I still like to be able to run my eye along a row of CDs and choose the one I want, but perhaps I’m a dinosaur in this MP3 age.

And photography? I’ve certainly made much of my own work available in low resolution on the web – well over 50,000 images now on My London Diary and other web sites. Although almost all of it carries a copyright message, I’ve never intended that this should prevent people copying it for their own personal use and for research/study. Occasionally people do ask for permission to print pictures or use them in their academic work or even to print them on a t-shirt, and I would never normally refuse such individual requests.

I also make it clear that my pictures are available for use without payment by “suitable non-profit organisations” but that payment is expected for any commercial use. It isn’t a hard and fast division, though usually a reasonable test for me is whether the person asking to use pictures is actually getting paid for what they are doing. If the organisation can afford to pay them, it can afford to pay me for my work too.

By keeping my work copyright I can also try to prevent images being used by people in ways that I don’t want, for example by right-wing hate sites. Letters from a solicitor to the ISP concerned about copyright abuse have led to their removal, but unfortunately it is all too easy for these sites to move around to different hosts. Unfortunately Creative Commons licences – of any type – just don’t seem work in this way at all.

But as a photographer I also have something else to sell. Original prints and high res files for reproduction. And the Internet is a shop window for me, although the takings from it are not particularly high. I’m not sure I’m ever going to put high-res files onto the web without protection of some sort, though should I ever get round to publishing (almost certainly self-publishing) one of the books I’ve often started to produce I think it quite likely that I would make that available as a free PDF.

What I think is vital – and what Doctorow says – is that copyright, and in particular the international agreements on it, needs to take into account the interests of creators and users and not to be simply based on securing the profits of large corporate interests who are currently running the show in secret sessions of the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement or at villas in Corfu. People like Geffen would really like to keep copyright as their private beach!

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A New Year for Visura

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

Visura Magazine has come out every two months for a year and issue 7 now out is another great one, although I did spend a couple of days wondering why I couldn’t manage to see any pictures. I’m afraid at first I just thought that although they’d sent me an e-mail they hadn’t quite got the magazine on line!

It’s a flash-based site, and if like me you like to have several browser windows open on your screen you are likely to find the same problem that I had. Their web designer has placed the ‘Enter‘ link off to the right of the screen but decided not to provide a scroll-bar. I can scroll up and down without one, but not to the right. This link will take you inside, and once you do get in, you will see it tells you to use screen resolution of at least 1440 x900 for best viewing, but unless you are you probably won’t have made it to see this advice.

Visura is “an online, invitation only publication that features personal projects chosen by artists themselves“. It doesn’t have any advertising but does have a number of media partners, including the Lucie Foundation, the NYT Lens blog and Miguel Garcia-Guzman’s Exposure Compensation blog and the Summer Show and Aftermath projects.

Issue 7 includes intriguing multiple images from Tokyo by Miguel Rio Branco, a lengthy set of pictures of the second beat generation of Larry Fink‘s youth (the sixties), when he was a pot-smoking Marxist with a Rolleiflex his daddy had given him, pictures from a strife-torn Ingushetia by Andrea Bruce, more fine black and white in Joan Liftin‘s ‘Runaway’, a superb view of the magical island of Chiloe by Brigitte Grignet, Donna Ferrato with her M6 on the streets of Tribeca. There is also a large selection of Simon Robert‘s pictures from ‘We English’. I think these images, shot on 4×5″, work better when seen as large gallery prints, but on screen many seem rather dull. Other photographers featured include Visura’s Head Copy Editor John Sevigny, Ken Van Sickle and Evan Abramson.

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Darbis Murmury

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

Ten years ago I wrote a short piece on my experience of attending a series of workshops with Raymond Moore and Paul Hill at Hill’s ‘Photographers Place‘ in Bradbourne, Derbyshire for William Bishop’s ‘Inscape‘ magazine, accompanying a few of my pictures of the people concerned – including some of Ray.

The title ‘Darbis Murmury‘ came in part from my two-year-old son’s description of where I had gone for these weekends, but was also refers to Ray’s book, Murmurs at Every Turn as well as of course my own memories.

Ray’s comments on my own pictures were both critical and inspirational, and did much to set me off on my own route in photography. Seeing his work and his attitudes towards it and towards photography were also vital.

Today I looked for the article I wrote for Inscape and some of the pictures I had taken of people during the workshops, and found a half-finished web site I had written. Just a single page with the text more or less as it appeared in the magazine surrounded by almost 30 thumbnails linked to the pictures.

It took me a couple of hours to sort out the site and make a few corrections, but you can now see all the pictures and the text of Darbis Murmury, more or less as I wrote it and the web site ten years ago.

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Chiswick House Gardens

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

For some years Raymond Moore lived in a room in a house on the riverside at Chiswick overlooking the Thames and just a short walk from Chiswick House Gardens, where Bill Brandt created some memorable images in the 1940s (but I can’t find them anywhere on the web) – though there are some by (Edwin Smith.) It’s only a fairly short train or bike ride from where I live, and was a place I occasionally took students to photograph in the past. My last visit there – on my own- was in 2004 and here are a couple of my images from then.

You can see more of my pictures from a walk in March 2004 from Brentford to Chiswick House. So far as I know, Raymond Moore didn’t make any pictures there.

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Re-photo