Re-photo

I still get a great buzz from seeing my work in print*, and although once again it’s “only in Blurb” I still felt that same thrill as I ripped open the packet containing my latest publication, Photo Paris.

Although it’s a new book – I finished and uploaded it earlier this month but only made it public today when I’d checked my first ‘proof’ copy – in some ways it’s also rather old. I took the pictures  in 1988, twenty two years ago, and shortly afterwards assembled a number of the enprints from the visit there into a single copy of a book, made from cartridge paper sheets cut to page size and bound together using an office report binding system that punches a row of rectangular holes along one edge for a plastic ‘comb’ binder.  To make it look more like a proper book, I laser printed a cover to go around and hide the binder.  It’s still there on my bookshelves and over the years I’ve often taken it down to look through.

Although it looks rather amateur and is now showing signs of wear, it has one advantage over the new Blurb-printed edition, in the the pictures are genuine photographs.  But they were machine-produced prints with no dodging or burning and the colour is sometimes not quite how I think it should be. Although the printed work just lacks the kind of quality of a photographic print, at least I was able to work on the scans to get the pictures looking how I wanted them.  The print quality from Blurb is adequate though not spectacular, and I think the premium paper which I specified makes slightly less difference with colour than with black and white.

This is an extended volume – which has more than twice as many images as the original version – now 67 in the actual ‘Photo Paris‘ series, along with the view from the window of the flat I stayed in and the usual portrait of me.

Rather than working from the original, I made contact prints of all the negatives from the project using my Epson V750. Most of the negatives were already in transparent filing sheets and it was relatively quick and easy to simply put them on the scanner in these, although some I had to transfer to new sheets to do so. From these ‘contacts’, scanned at 1200 dpi so I could enlarge individual frames for a good look, I discovered a number of images I’d overlooked at the time, in some cases because the en-prints were rather poor.

I then scanned around a hundred images at 4800 dpi on a negative scanner – the Minolta Multi Pro, no longer made but still one of the best negative scanners around when equipped with third party ‘Scanhancer‘ diffuser and Xpander negative carrier. This was around 20 hours of work, with probably around the same time in Photoshop needed to get the scans into decent shape. Of course I didn’t need files that big for the book, but I’m also working for a show of some of these pictures in a couple of months, and if you are making scans it generally makes sense to scan at the highest optical resolution of the scanner in case you need a larger file later.

Scanning negatives doesn’t entirely take up your time for all those hours – it takes some time for each actual scan when you can occupy yourself doing other things. As I write this I’m actually scanning another book/exhibition project – Blurb is seriously habit-forming! But using Photoshop or some other software is too processor intensive and seriously slows down the scanner on my computer.

Computers are good for many things, but at this point I still find it best to go to physical prints. The next step was to make a set of small prints of these scans to continue with the selection and editing process. Although Photoshop can print out multiple images on each sheet of paper, I find it easier to use QImage for this job.

Our dining table is fortunately large enough to lay out all one hundred of the prints, and to start working out a sequence for the book and discarding any images that I didn’t want to use. Some photographers like to get other people to work on their books at this stage, but for me its a vital part of the creative process that I want to keep 100% under my control.

I think a photo book needs to have both some kind of structural idea, a start and a finish and a view about how you get from one to the other and the various themes that run through the work, and also be alive to and work with the graphic elements in the pictures.  If, as in this case you use pictures on facing pages you have to be particularly careful in selecting images that will work together, not least because although you design a book to be read from start to finish, many people will read it simply by turning to random spreads.

Looking through the book now, I think I made a pretty good stab at it, though perhaps there are one or two images I might have ordered differently, and one or two I might have left out. But had I done so I’m sure I’d now be thinking the reverse. I was surprised in making a new selection from the contacts how good my editing had been before – every single image from the original 25 is in the new book.

You can see around a quarter of the book on the preview on the Blurb site, although I’ve selected pages with some of my favourite pictures rather than just the default first 15 pages.  As always with Blurb, at £16.45 it seems just a bit expensive, and adding the postage makes it rather silly – though not so bad if you buy several books at once.

I’ll be showing a few pictures from the book in a show with two other photographers at ‘The Shoreditch Gallery‘ in the Juggler in Hoxton Market in October, and hope to bring some copies for a book signing at the opening at a slightly cheaper price – and of course if you come and buy one you don’t have to pay postage. More details on the show and an invite to the opening later. The show is a part of the East London Photomonth 2010, and the website for this is also coming soon!

* but I still require money for any commercial publication!

 
Shree Ganapathy Hindu Temple Chariot Festival, Wimbledon

This month I’ve photographed two Hindu chariot festivals in London, both from Tamil temples, and although they have had much in common, there was noticeably a different atmosphere to the two, and it shows in the pictures.

Shree Ganapathy Hindu Temple Chariot Festival, Wimbledon

Ealing was the larger and more showy of the two, with many more dancers and costumes, but although everyone was very friendly I found I didn’t want to stay long. At Wimbledon I felt much more at home; it was smaller, somehow a little more domestic and more caring and I stayed working there for twice as long and was very tempted by the invitation to stay and have a meal but after working pretty well flat out for over two hours decided I needed to go for a rest with a glass or two in the pub, and then get on with processing the pictures.

Shree Ganapathy Hindu Temple Chariot Festival, Wimbledon

Of course my view is an outsider’s view of these events, and may not reflect the realities for those involved in these religious festivals. But it’s very important that when I photograph events such as these that it is my point of view, and that I’m not producing Temple publicity.

So though I try to be sensitive to the event and observe so far as I understand them the protocols (like working without shoes) and not get in the way of what is happening, there may well be pictures that some of those in them don’t like. But fortunately, most of the time, the people I photograph react very positively to the pictures.

I also think its important to try and understand what is going on in order to photograph it, and at some religious festivals this is not easy. Hinduism claims to be the world’s oldest religion and seems to me the most intricate and dense, with a deeply philosophical approach and a language that makes it hard for me to understand. Getting the captions right can be problem but I like to try and give some idea what things are about and I’m always happy to correct any errors or make any necessary clarification, although I’m unlikely to alter my opinions. But the pictures are what I saw and how I saw it and I stand by them.

The largest of these festivals in London is I think the Sri Murugan Temple Chariot Festival in Manor Park, East Ham which I photographed last year.

I’ve just started work on scanning another of my early projects, really the first organised and extensive work I produced, on the urban development of Hull , or, to give its proper title, Kingston upon Hull.

Cafe, Hessle Road

I just walked into the city art gallery there one day with a small packet of prints and asked to see one of the curators. She obviously wasn’t expecting anything like I’d brought, took a brief look and then asked me to come back with more work at a later date. I think it’s still true that outside of London people are much more open and prepared to look at new work, and that was certainly the case in Hull at that time.

The prints I had made were quite small – around 5×7 inches, very sharp and printed rather intensely using Agfa Record Rapid – my favourite printing paper and something of a legend. I’d started using Agfa Portriga – a warm tone paper – a few years earlier, because it was being sold off cheaply after Agfa had stopped importing their black and white papers in the the UK and had been impressed. Then somehow – perhaps a note in a magazine or by word of mouth – that Peter Goldfield had set up a small company called Goldfinger to import another and even better Agfa paper, the more neutral Record Rapid, into the UK.

Muswell Hill was somewhere in London and I was soon catching a train and the underground and then walking up the long hill from Highgate tube station only to find that the address I had was a chemist’s shop rather than a photo store. Evemtually I decided to go in and ask, having come so far, and was told that I had indeed come to the right place and was taken to a door around the side of the shop where stairs led to a photographic Alladdin’s cave.

In there I met two fellow enthusiasts, Peter Goldfield and Martin Read, both of whom I got to know over many visits. Peter who was my age and I was to get to know better through workshops – at first when he gave me a lift up to  the Photographers Place in Bradbourne to see Lewis Baltz and later at the workshops that he set up and ran at Duckspool – sadly died last year. Martin had long continued the photographic business on his own as Silverprint – it celebrated 25 years in 2009 – a short walk from Waterloo station south of the river. It’s still the place to get the best of materials for black and white photography though it now also offers a wider range of products and services. And from the web site you can still download a pdf of the original ‘Goldfinger Craftbook‘ which when published in 1978 became the second essential piece of reading for any photographer wanting to produce fine prints (the first was of course the Ansel Adams Basic Photo volume, ‘The Print.’)

Pulman Street War Memorial, Hull

The show ‘Still Occupied – A View of Hull‘ took up the whole of the top floor of the gallery in 1983. I’d originally intended to show around 80 black and white prints, but by the time it came to hang, the number had grown rather and I’d also added some colour work, and I think the final total was just under 150.

This year’s show will be rather smaller, as I’m limited to an 8 foot by 4 foot panel. In the original show the 7×5″ prints were arranged in groups of 2 or 4, and were mounted behind specially cut window mats. This time I’m thinking of using a similar layout but simply printing the 2 or 4 images onto the same sheet of inkjet paper and showing them unmatted.

Although the show won’t have so many pictures, I’m also hoping to make another Blurb book, which may well contain thumbnails of most or all of them with a smaller and tighter edit of full page images. But I’ll also be making a slightly different selection the second time round and the picture above is an example. In the original show I used a vertical image which included the doorway and the war memorial to its left, and also the whole of the window above. Now I think the car with its broken headlamp and the shop window with its boxes of ‘Tide’ and other detergents has a stronger message.

There are a few more pictures from this project on the Urban Landscapes web site.