June, 2010 | >Re-PHOTO

Editors and Photographers

The relationship between editors and photographers can sometimes be somewhat fraught – and the stories of the battles between Gene Smith and the guys at Life Magazine is one of the great enduring (and largely true) legends of photography. Of course it was a relationship that produced some of the classic photo essays, and although Smith was certainly not the greatest editor of his own work, without these battles I think we can be pretty sure his work would have been less well presented.

Balance wasn’t a concept Smith had a lot of time for, at least when it came to publishing his work, and he almost single-handedly brought Magnum to its knees during his relatively short time with them when he was photographing Pittsburgh, having started the job with one of the most illustrious of photo-editors, Stefan Lorant, who wanted 100 pictures to illustrate a book, while Smith had his own idea.

Although my essay on Smith is digitally “out of print” you can read a few comments about him and editing in a post here, Editing Your Work. Smith spent at least two years trying to edit the 17,000 images he made in Pittsburgh, but eventually gave up and around 45 years later (and some twenty years after Smith’s death) it took five years for Sam Stephenson of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University to produce the exhibition and book Dream Street, possibly the greatest testament to Smith’s photography and a book that should be on the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in documentary, but also a warning to photographers.

Like many photographers, I think I’m both the best and the worst editor of my own work. Best because I know it better than others and usually have some idea of what I was intending. Worst because I have a strong emotional involvement and am often distracted by things that are not actually in the picture but are more about the situation and process of making the image.

This train of thought was prompted by a piece on the Photoshelter Blog, written for photo-editors, Top 10 Ways To Make A Photographer Fall In Love With You. It’s the third in a series by Photoshelter co-founder Grover Sanschagrin which started with Top 13 Ways to Piss Off a Photo Editor and continued with Top 10 Ways To Piss Off A Photographer. All three pieces were based on asking a selection of either working photographers or editors and contain a great deal of sometimes obvious common sense.

Black in White America

On NPR you can see a short piece with 11 images about the re-issue by the J. Paul Getty Museum of the book Black In White America, by photojournalist Leonard Freed. He is one of nine photographers featured in their Los Angeles show from opening June 29 (until November 14, 2010) “Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography Since The Sixties” which also includes work by Lauren Greenfield, Philip Jones Griffiths, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Meiselas, James Nachtwey, Sebastião Salgado, W. Eugene and Aileen M. Smith, and Larry Towell. As yet there is little about it on their site.

You can see more about Freed (1929-2006) on the Magnum site, where as well as his photographer pages there is also a Magnum in Motion tribute. Looking through the 171 images from Black in White America there shows a really impressive body of work.

You can also of course see many of his other pictures, with some of the strongest coming from his book ‘Police Work’. There are altogether 16 of his features on the Magnum site, the earliest pictures from New York in the 1950s and the latest on Liberian refugees in the Ivory Coast in 1995. A truly remarkable career.

It was three years later that I had the privilege of attending a photographic workshop with him at Duckspool. You can hear him talking about his pictures in a couple of videos on You Tube, Part 1 and Part 2. Although I admired his work, he wasn’t a person I really warmed to, but he had some interesting stories to tell both with his camera and about his life. Though it was the work with the camera that was of real importance.

The review that I wrote about that workshop is still on line on the Duckspool site, although Peter Goldfield who ran the workshops is sadly no longer with us. This is one of the pictures from it that I took on the workshop (though now I might make a better scan!)

Robert Bergman

My copy of ‘Aperture 199′ arrived a while back, and while I glanced through it, the review by Andy Grundberg of the work of Robert Bergman didn’t greatly attract my attention, largely because I thought the photographs printed with it were not of any great interest. But a piece by Joerg Colberg in Conscientious has (as so often) attracted my attention, and he links to a feature on Aperture’s Exposures blog, Right on Time by David Levi Strauss in which he attacks Grundberg – and gets a reply – now with a link to the review.

It’s a spat that perhaps doesn’t interest me too greatly, but has led me to think more about Bergman. Perhaps the best place to start is with this piece on Real Clear Arts by Judith H. Dobrzynski which links to her piece in Wall St Journal with 11 photographs. There are also a few different images on Dazed. You can also see these pictures possibly a little larger at the US National Gallery of Art, which also has a 15 minute conversation between senior curator Sarah Greenough and Bergman, as well as a singularly uninformative list of pictures in their collection which are not available on line!

I’d actually love it if I thought that someone who had photographed for almost 60 of his 65 years before being ‘discovered’ was a great unsung genius – hope for the rest of us ageing photographers – but unfortunately I don’t think so on the evidence I’ve seen.

And do take a look at Aperture magazine. I can assure you there are more interesting things in it than this review.

Pagan Pride

The last Sunday in May I was photographing the annual Pagan Pride Parade in central London. It’s an event I’ve photographed several times before, certainly in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2008 where you can see pictures on My London Diary, and possibly in early years, when I was still using film. It’s an event that has being going for I think around ten years and has changed a little over that time but is still basically similar.

This year I remembered the one vital piece of equipment for the day, a pair of decently waterproof shoes, as one of the more important parts of the event is dancing around and through the fountains in Russell Square, a circle containing computer controlled jets which rise and fall, sometimes rather unpredictably.

For most of the pictures in this pool I used the D700 with the 16-35mm lens, both reasonably shower-proof, working with my a microfibre cloth clutched inside my left hand to wipe the splashed off the UV filter on its front. Nikon do make a very nice 14-24mm lens, but it has a bulbous front element which means you can’t use a filter – just like the Sigma 12-24 which I used in some previous years in this situation. I’m rather less happy keeping wiping a curved lens surface than a disposable filter.

Eventually the front element of that 12-24mm did get scratched and pitted, making it unusable, and although I was able to get it replaced, it did cost around £90 and take two months to get the job done. A replacement filter from Hong Kong would have been around a fiver with postage.

It isn’t easy to photograph the dancing, because the main thing about it is simply chaos, and it’s the kind of event where you just have to keep on working and hope to get what you want, but you are very dependent on the event itself, and perhaps this year it didn’t quite develop as much as it has on previous occasions.

From the pool the parade led on through Bedford Square and into the courtyard of the British Museum – an addition to its route which apparently began last year. It makes for some good backgrounds for pictures. I left the parade there as it headed back to carry on with its private events inside Conway Hall where photographers are not welcome and instead went to one of my favourite London pubs, recently restored to its Victorian splendour, the Princess Louise.

Quite a lot of pictures from this year’s event on My London Diary.

Lightroom 3

Lightroom 3 is now officially out, although I’ve not yet bought it but I certainly will. The upgrade price (from version 1.x or 2.x) in the UK is around £75 (the cheapest I’ve yet seen is £72.99 on Amazon with free delivery) and if you are a teacher or student you can get the full version for around the same price. It seems to cost a couple of pounds more to download, which seems odd to me.

You can watch some Adobe videos about it which as well as showing off the product do also give some useful advice. As yet there don’t seem to be any reviews of the final product that go further than the press release.

As well as the much improved noise reduction that we’ve seen in the beta versions, it now also has several new features I’ve long been asking for, though of course I’m still waiting to see how well they work. Chief among them is lens correction, allowing you to set up single-click profiles for automatically reducing geometric distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting. It should ship with profiles for some common Nikon, Canon and Sigma lenses, but Adobe will also offer a free tool for creating your own profiles for any camera/lens combination. You can also manually alter the corrections.

Also very useful is perspective correction, one of the few other remaining reasons why I sometimes need to export images to Photoshop. I can also see myself making use of the new image watermarking tool, though other features such as the film grain simulation and Flickr integration I’ll probably give a miss – unless it’s so easy I change my mind on Flickr (and watermarking might well help there.)

I was less than convinced by the ‘easy image importing’ in the beta – frankly it seemed rather more fuss than the present simple dialogue, and images didn’t always quite end up where I wanted, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

Something that isn’t made a great deal of, but I think many will find useful is the ability to use the tone curve just like the one in Photoshop. But perhaps even more important than all the little improvements it promises an overall performance increase.

A Bad Few Days for Lenses

I’ve just put on line at My London Diary the pictures that I took on May 22 at the EDL/Patriot March through Westminster. It wasn’t an event I felt particularly happy about covering, with several groups on the political right involved that I’ve photographed before. But though I may not agree with their politics and certainly not with the way that they express them, I think they have a right to honest coverage. And in the longer term I think photographing and writing about them clearly and as accurately as I can is better at exposing them than the kind of diatribe that I sometimes see elsewhere.

They complain about the coverage they get from the media generally, but although occasionally I think they have a point, generally they get the coverage they do because of how they behave both generally and in particular how they behave towards the press.

If you want accurate reporting, then it helps to have a clear press release rather than none at all, and it isn’t enough to keep repeating you are not racist, you need to stop supporters chanting racist slogans or insulting people.

Although things started off in a fairly friendly manner, towards the end of the event many of the demonstrators were threatening press photographers, pushing them away, grabbing their cameras and holding hands over lenses. It doesn’t make a positive impression!

© 2010, Peter Marshall
I wanted a higher viewpoint so…
However I have only myself to blame for an incident as the march started. While photographers were crowding around photographing the guys at the front of the march I decided I needed to lift a camera above my head for a ‘Hail Mary‘ to get a higher viewpoint. I had two cameras around my neck and as I lifted one, somehow the second, which I thought I was holding by its strap, crashed to the ground.

It was a D300, with a Nikon 18-200mm and an SB800 flash, making quite a heavy package and it landed on the tarmac road lens first, smashing the filter, with the batteries from the flash spilling out. Other photographers helped me to scrabble to pick up the pieces as the marchers moved forward, and one helped to remove most of the broken filter with a small knife.

Stupidly I cut my thumb rather deeply on the broken glass and spent the next twenty minutes or so dripping blood as I continued to photograph with the other camera having dumped the broken bits into my camera bag.

I put another lens – the 10.5mm fisheye on the D300 and was very relieved to find that it at least was still apparently working. Looking at it later there didn’t seem to be any obvious damage, though I perhaps still need to check the autofocus more carefully.

There was some minor damage to the SB800, breaking the hinges of the flash diffuser, but otherwise that too seems to be in working order – and I’ve been using it since with few problems. Perhaps when I have a moment I’ll take it in for repair, but it hardly seems worth the bother.

The 18-200mm was a different story. The filter thread had been damaged making it impossible to remove the remains of the broken filter, and although the lens looked physically sound, once I tried to zoom it became clear that there were some very serious problems. On closer inspection I’d broken quite a lot of the mechanism inside the lens and there were some bits of broken glass – lens elements – in the middle of the lens. It was fairly clearly beyond economic repair.

The Nikon 18-200 isn’t the cheapest of lenses, but I’d had it since it came out a few years back and it had already needed several repairs. The photographer who was standing next to me when I dropped it told me he was on his fourth of them! It really is an amateur lens, both in terms of performance and also lack of robustness, and one we only put up with because it is just so versatile with the huge zoom ratio. You can go out with it anywhere as your only lens and, so long as it isn’t raining and there is a reasonable amount of light it will be the only lens you will need.

So I wasn’t too upset over it. It was a lens I expected to have to replace in the near future, and one that I’d had considerable use from. And at least at home if not with me I had a replacement for it, making use of the Sigma 24-70 f2.8 and 50-200 f5.6 lenses to cover more or less the same range.

The following Monday I went out for a walk with a few of the family to Richmond Park, taking just this combination. Not quite as convenient as the 18-200, but better quality. Towards the end of the walk, disaster struck again, and the 24-70 refused to zoom past around 28mm. It was an almost new lens, hardly used since I’d received it as a replacement from Sigma for an earlier one that I’d had problems with.

The following day I packed it up and sent it back to Sigma for servicing. A few days later I got a phone call from them asking why I’d sent it as it seemed to be working properly. Whatever had caused the jam had been cured by the shaking as it went through the post! I told them in greater detail than in my letter and they went away to work on it, getting the lens back to me a few days ago.

But when I sent off the 24-80 I didn’t have a lens to cover between 35mm and 75mm which is a pretty important range, so I needed to find a replacement quickly. After a little research I ordered a Nikon 18-105mm rather than a new 18-200mm. Although it doesn’t have quite the range, most of what I take is at the lower end, and it is after all a 27-157mm equivalent, so a respectable telephoto.

But the Nikkor AF-S DX 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 G ED VR (to give it its full mouthful) has several other points in its favour. It is a smaller, lighter lens and a better optical performer in almost every respect than the 18-200, and seems considerably more robust – though still not a pro lens. And at less than half the price of its bigger brother it was irresistible. By noon the following day I had it on my camera and was back in business. When I know I’m going to need something longer I’ll take the Sigma 50-200mm as well.

David Hurn

I came into photography in the 1970s, and completely missed the great input that David Hurn made into creative photography in the UK in the 1960s, meeting him for the first time in the early 1980s, when I had a short argument with him in the questions following a talk he gave on one of his shows.

The show wasn’t one of his better efforts, and his reply to my question appeared to me to be entirely based on commercial rather than artistic criteria, so I’ve perhaps never warmed to the man as I should, though I do have his Wales: Land of My Father (2000) on the main bookshelf in my living room (along with a volume by one of the many photographers whose career was intimately bound to his, Josef Koudelka.)

Had I started in photography ten years earlier I might have got to know him better, and if I had been ten years younger I would certainly have yearned to attend the course that he ran from 1973-90, the School of Documentary Photography at the Gwent College of Higher Education in Newport, Wales.

David Hurn is now 74, and his latest book, Writing The Picture with poet John Fuller was published by Seren on June 5th 2010. You can read more about his remarkable life in a feature by Graham Harrison on Photo Histories, where there is also a link to the book, as well as to the title sequence from Barbarella in which a space-suited Jane Fonda weightlessly disrobes.

Harrison attributes former student Dillon Bryden as stating that Davids course engendered the work ethic and a very particular code of understanding, and although in many ways a strength, particularly in giving its students a way of making a living, it was perhaps also a weakness, pushing them down a particular route. But it was certainly a great shame when this vocationally oriented course was lost in the scramble for university and degree status.

In his piece, Harrison writes “David Hurn says the art establishment in Britain remains staggeringly snobby about photography, and is particularly resistant to photojournalism and documentary photography.” Despite the work of Hurn and others this remains only too true. Although he and other photographers did serve on the Arts Council in various ways, photography has never really got a serious look-in, though for a year or so in the 1970s it seemed it just might.

I’ve always felt it summed up the situation pretty well that, until 2001, the only money I had ever got from the Arts Council had been a couple of small payments from the Poetry budget. And in 2001 the money came from ‘The Year of the Artist‘ and again was not specifically for photography.

You can see some of David Hurn’s pictures on his Magnum page, and also worth reading is a piece on Hurn by the late Bill Jay, another vital figure in British photography in the late 1960s through Creative Camera and Album magazines. This starts:

While still in my 20s, I showed David Hurn my photographs, the results of more than seven years of struggle to be a photographer. It took him about 30 seconds to look through the lot and deliver his judgment: boring. Derivative, he said. You wont make it.

We have been friends ever since.

British photography might have had a rather different story had Jay not, as Harrison relates, been turned down for a post at the National Portrait Gallery.

Munem Wasif on Lensculture

I’ve several times mentioned the work of Munem Wasif here, and this photographer born in Bangladesh in 1983 was one of the ‘top five’ I picked from PDN’s ‘Top 30’ in 2008. He was also one of my choices for the Prix Pictet later that year, and although he didn’t win the main prize he was awarded the the commission to document WaterAids Chittagong Hill Tracts Project in Bangladesh.

So I’m pleased to see that on Lensculture you can now see a gallery of 30 of his images together with text by Francis Hodgson, head of the Prix Pictet jury, with an exclusive audio interview about this project, plus another short interview about his evolving style as a photographer. It’s an interesting reflection on the way that he works as well as giving more information about the story. You can also see more about him and his work at Agence Vu.

Save 6 Music

I’m getting rather behind with putting work on My London Diary, and so far I’m only somewhere in the middle of May and its June already. Yesterday I did manage to finish putting up pictures of a demo outside Broadcasting House to stop the BBC cutting a couple of stations, 6 Music and the Asian Network – more pictures here.

Broadcasting House is truly an ‘iconic building’, a phrase that seems to have come into the constabulary vocabulary here to mean almost any large building in London, but at least I had no problems in photographing it. But the building as a whole is perhaps a little difficult to integrate into pictures taken more or less next to it, though I did try once or twice. But really it worked better when I concentrated on the significant detail of the Eric Gill statue above the main doorway. Here’s another:

And of course, as so often with demonstrations it helps to get the message in the picture.

6 Music isn’t a station I listen to – it just doesn’t appear on my radio as it doesn’t broadcast on FM, though I could of course listen on-line. But what little I have heard of it seems to me admirable, very British and very quirky, and this showed in the slogans, placards, banners, dress and performances at the event, and I hope too in my pictures.

Although I took some straightforward portraits of the station’s presenters – who were of course appearing in their capacity as licence fee payers rather than presenters, it was a couple of pictures of Liz Kershaw bounding up onto the stage that interested me more; the first image unfortunately I didn’t get quite right, but the second (and there wasn’t time for more) I think catches her well.

It’s exactly as I saw and framed it – I seldom crop, though it’s not a religion, just usually things are stronger if I get it right when I take the picture. And this is 100% of the frame.

Another Niche For Film

In Digital Myths a month or so ago I tried to question some of the strange reasons that some people – even some photographers – still have for clinging on to film. I think for most it’s very much as Hilaire Belloc put it in his ‘Cautionary Tales for Children”, keeping a-hold of Nurse. That digital really is something better rather than something worse isn’t enough to remove the fear.

But film does still have its uses, and if you are planning a trek to the North Pole you might be advised to use it, according to a piece in the Amateur Photographer.