September, 2010 | >Re-PHOTO

Photo-Forum

Photographers who live in and around London who missed last night’s Photo-Forum should be kicking themselves. Apart from Ray Tang’s excellent brownies there was great photography from Antonio Zazueta Olmos and Kieran Doherty, making this perhaps the best evening yet. If you did miss it you can follow the links to their web sites where you will find most of the pictures that the two showed, but it just isn’t the same as seeing them projected on a large screen and hearing the photographers talk about them.

You can of course get something a little more personal on blogs, and both photographers write – if not too frequently – about their work online, with Olmos on photomexican (though the last post was in 2008) and Doherty‘s started under his name in February this year.

Olmos impressed with his obvious love of photography, and in particular the black and white work which inspired him to buy a camera by Bruce Davidson, Robert Frank and others. And although he showed some fine colour work including set of pictures of Nicaraguan refugees he made it clear that black and white remains his first love. Some of his best pictures were produced travelling with just a single camera and lens (Leica M6 and 35mm) although at times he took a deliberate decision to slow down his work by using a Mamiya C330 twin-lens camera. He found that people loved to be photographed by this camera and the different approach it entails, bowing towards your subject as you take the picture with the camera held firmly against your stomach.

Olmos also passed on a great bit of advice he himself received, that if you find yourself surrounded by photographers when taking pictures, you are almost certainly in the wrong place.

In recent years most of his work for the Observer has been portraiture, and although he now usually has to shoot for the paper in digital colour he still prefers black and white film, and showed us a powerful and varied portfolio of these images.

Doherty worked for many years for Reuters, and although he praised the freedom they usually allowed him, there was still obviously a great pressure to come up with the kind of pictures they wanted, and he obviously did a great job at doing so. His work showed a great willingness to experiment, having new ideas and trying them out. But eventually he found he wanted more freedom and at a time when the recession was really hitting and all of us were finding things pretty tough (and he’d just taken out a large mortgage) decided to go freelance.

The most impressive of his work for me was a continuing project on Wooton Bassett, shot in black and white. He is also shooting weddings, but not in the old formal way, but very much in a photojournalistic mode.

At every Photo-Forum there is a raffle, with the cash collected providing food in the pub after the event, and the prizes are usually prints donated by the photographers who give the talks. And last night I was lucky and one of my tickets was drawn out of the hat. So I’m now the proud possessor of a print by Kieran Doherty.

Photo-Forum happens every second Thursday of the month, 6 – 8pm downstairs in the Jacobs Pro Lounge at 74 New Oxford Street London WC1A 1EU.

Doris’s 90th Birthday Ale

I don’t usually write about beer, but Doris’s 90th Birthday Ale is no ordinary tipple, and the Hesket Newmarket Brewery is probably one of the few things I find myself on the same side as unbonny Prince Charlie.

The brewery is an old barn at the back of a pub – the pub – in Hesket Newmarket, a small Cumbrian village about 15 miles south of Carlisle on the northern edge of the English Lake District. One thing that makes the Old Crown remarkable is that it is thought to be Britains first co-operatively owned pub, bought by a group of locals in 2003 when it would otherwise had closed. The cooperative had already bought the brewery in 1999 when Jim and Liz Fearnley decided to retire. They has set up the brewery in 1988 when they were running the Old Crown, and it became so successful that they had sold the pub in 1995 to concentrate on brewing.

Doris was brewed in 1989 as their first expermental full malt beer, at the time of Jim’s mother-in-law’s 90th birthday, and he jokingly referred to it as ‘Doris’s 90th Birthday Ale’, although he had intended to name it (like most of the other brewery beers) after one of the local fells, Skiddaw. The name stuck and Doris became famous around the world among real ale drinkers. It was the beer that Prince Charles drank when he visited the village as patron of ‘The Pub is The Hub’ campaign. You can see more about the pub, the beers and the brewery on a video on the pub web site.

Unfortunately the pub doesn’t open at lunchtimes Monday to Thursday, so I was unable to try the pub food with a pint or two and had to make do with tea and a bacon roll at the nearby post office/shop/cafe, which was nice enough. But we did visit the brewery, and were treated to a glass of one of the ales, and could buy bottled beers.

Travelling as I do mainly on foot and by public transport it’s hard to carry a great deal. Fortunately I’d left my Nikon 16-35mm at home, and its space in my camera bag was around the right size for a bottle of Doris’s 90th. Just a shame I couldn’t also accomodate the other half dozen brews on offer.

After arriving home, I had to let the bottle stand for a few days for the yeast to settle before carefully decanting Doris into a pint glass. It’s a clear orangey-brown liquid with a slight sparkle and a beer I could happily drink and drink… If I lived in Cumbria I could see myself having it rather often with a meal in place of wine. The brewery web site describes it as ABV c4.3% and a “full flavoured, fruity premium beer with hints of butterscotch, carefully balanced with bitterness from Fuggles, First Gold and Herzbrucker Haler hops.”

Although these beers are avaiable at a number of pubs across Cumbria, most of the pubs I visited or went past were Jennings houses, and Jennings Bitter, the original beer from their Cockermouth brewery is a very decent pint which won the CAMRA Award for the Champion Beer of the North West 2009.

Jennings is now one of five traditional breweries in Marston’s Beer Company, and for me makes another rather tenous connection with photography. Although the series of photography workshops I attended in the 1970s were based at Paul Hill’s ‘Photographer’s Place’ in a converted barn at Bradbourne, their real centre of gravity was a mile or two away at ‘The Gate’ in Brassington, where, as well as discovering much about photography I also came across for the first time, Marston’s Pedigree.

More pictures from The Photographers Place and also some from Hesket Newmarket and the nearby village of Caldbeck, where you can see the gravestone of the famous huntsman John Peel on My London Diary.

Peter Sekaer Overhyped

Peter Sekaer (1901-50) was a Dane who went to New York in 1918, setting up a business producing posters for shop window displays. In 1929 he joined the National Art Students League to study painting meeting Ben Shahn, who probably got him interested in photography and also introduced him to Walker Evans. In 1933 he studied photography with Berenice Abbott at the New School for Social Reasearch and assisted for Walker Evans who was photographing artworks at the Museum of Modern Art.

Sekaer also went with Evans on his Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration (FSA) trip to the South, taking some pictures of similar subjects as they travelled around together. From 1936 to 1942 he worked for various US government agencies including the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), the United States Housing Authority (USHA) and the Office of Indian Affairs, working briefly for the Office of War Information (OWI) in 1941.

In 1945 he gave up working for the government agencies (and the American Red Cross) to freelance, moving to New York in 1947 where he did magazine and commercial work. A heart attack killed him in 1950, aged only 49.

Solo shows of his work took place at the Witkin Gallery, New York in 1980, in Copenhagen in 1990 and at Howard Greenberg Gallery in 1999. Books were published alongside the latter two shows. Currently the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, USA, which recently acquired 70 vintage prints of his work has a show ‘Signs of Life‘, Photographs by Peter Seaker, which continues until Jan 9, 2011 and there is also an accompanying book.

Searching for pictures under Sekaer’s name at the Library of Congress produces surprising few results; a set of images of an FSA trailer camp at the Vultee Aircraft Plant in Nashville Tenesse, taken in May 1941 for the OWI, and two earlier images, only one of which is on line. The trailer camp pictures are undistinguished, a fairly dreary record of the site. The other picture shown, of mothers and children at the doorway of a brick home in a former slum area for the USHA, is a little more interesting but also rather routine.

The Library of Congress does include many fine photographs from the less well-known government agencies for which Sekaer mainly worked, taken by other better-known photographers – for example Arthur Rothstein. There are also some very run of the mill unattributed images. But unless I’ve missed something Sekaer appears to have produced little or nothing of worth for these agencies.

You get a rather more positive impression of him as a photographer by searching at the Addison Gallery of American Art which produces 17 results, one of which shows a page from a scrapbook containing 725 small prints by him (27 or 28 on the page shown appear to be contact prints including several frames of some subjects.) Not all of the other 16 pictures are on-line.

There are some nice touches visible in some of those which are. A young woman is posed behind a restaurant window in Charleston which has a cup of tea and a fish painted on it; the collar of her dress appears as a heart. But looking at most of them I can’t help thinking of rather stronger images of similar scenes by Walker Evans, Helen Levitt and others.

Sekaer’s ‘artist’ pages at the Howard Greenberg Gallery which include 25 images concentrates even more on those that make him seem heavily under the spell of Walker Evans. But frankly they just are nothing like as good. He isn’t a bad photographer, but just rather ordinary when compared with Evans – as most of us would be. But there are two or three images that perhaps show something rather more personal, all including people. Images 19 – Lousiville, 1938, with two women and a child with an upturned tricycle and 21 – Untitled, 1938, with and old woman wrapped in a shawl on her front step, for me stand out above the rest.

Sekaer was obviously a proficient photographer, and doubtless his work adds something to our knowledge of the era he photographed, and the book may well be of interest. It’s good to see publications and shows of some of the minor figures of photography – and there were very many of them – whose contribution to photography is more in their collective input than in individual work. There are hundreds if not thousands more like him, and it would be good to see more of them recognised for what they are. But don’t let’s make them out to be overlooked geniuses.

You can read more about Sekaer and the High Museum show in a feature in the New York Times. Apparerently 53 or the works in the museum were acquired from the Howard Greenberg Gallery, and the piece quotes Greenburg as saying that had he lived to promote his work “he would have had a great reputation.” Earlier the writer seems to suggest that Walker Evans is better known because he “lived into his 70s and promoted himself as an artist as well as a documentarian.”

I have news for Eve M. Kahn – and also Mr Greenburg (though I think he already knows it but also knows his business.) Walker Evans is better known because he was an incomparably better photographer.

PG Closure Enigma

The British Journal of Photography somewhat surprisingly announces as a scoop the news that London’s Photographer’s Gallery will be closing for a month from September 19.

I thought the closure had been long planned and remember going to a presentation by the architects who were overseeing the redevelopment last year. And when I got home after the opening of the current Sally Mann show on June 18th I wrote:

I was disappointed in various ways at the Photographers Gallery opening of a show of Sally Manns work yesterday evening, the last to take place in their current premises before they close for extensive rebuilding. But the show, The Family and the Land, which continues until 19 September 2010, is certainly worth at least a brief visit.

So I’m hardly surprised at the news!

But the feature on the Photographers Gallery is perhaps one of the few interesting items in the otherwise rather tedious September issue of BJP, and you can read it online.

It’s also hard to understand the headline that says ‘Photographers’ Gallery to close down for a year, answers criticisms‘ as it seems to me that it rather signally fails to do so in the article. I’ve been a member of the gallery since soon after it was founded in the 1970s (except for a short period where they lost my membership details) but find it hard to disagree with the criticisms that so many photographers have of it and its programmes.

Quoted by the BJP are Magnum’s Chris Steele Perkins (the BJP gets him to expand on his June statement I dont hate The Photographers Gallery, I just think theyre shit) and Brian Griffin, along with other figures in photography.

The Photographers’ Gallery is funded as if it was a major institution covering the whole of photography in the UK, its £852,693 grant being almost as much as the other photographic recipients – Photoworks, Impressions Gallery, Open Eye Gallery, Photofusion, Redeye Photography Network, Hereford Photography Festival, Four Corners Film and Pavilion put together. What we really need is something rather more like New York’s ICP or Paris’s MEP, rather than an organisation that seems to be pursuing just a particular niche which many of us feel is peripheral to photography.

You can read my thoughts about the differences between the PG and the MEP in a post from two years ago, Paris and London: MEP & PG, and more of my thoughts about the gallery in a post from the opening of the gallery at its new site, Zombies in Ramillies Street.

I’ve always supported public funding for the arts in principle and still do, but I often find it hard to do so when in so many areas so little of the funding flows directly into supporting arts practice and so much into questionable institutions.

Perpignan Winners

Lens has a nice feature on the top award winners at this year’s Perpignan Festival, with some interesting photography from Frédéric Sautereau winner of The Visa d’or – Daily Press for his work for French newspaper La Croix, VII photographer Stephanie Sinclair, winner of the Visa d’or Feature award for work for National Geographic & The New York Times Magazine and Damon Winter of the New York Times, winner of the Visa d’or News award.

It was indeed a very good year for photographers associated with the New York Times, although Lens would probably have run a similar feature even if their paper had not been involved.

So far as I can see in the awards page, none of the three winners or the other six nominated photographers is British or has any connection with any UK newspaper or magazine.

There are some fine British photojournalists, but we perhaps lack the kind of photographic culture that incubates great photography; few newspapers or magazines that publish more than individual images or encourage thoughtful photographic endeavour. So perhaps the lack of British names on the list isn’t too surprising.

Heathrow Celebrates

© 2010, Peter Marshall
John McDonnell MP, John Stewart and others with Stewart’s latest work ‘Victory Against All The Odds’
My father used to cycle past the orchards of Heath Row, then one of the most fertile market gardening and orchard areas supplying food for London. My mother grew up on a market garden a couple of miles south of where the airport now is; around ten years ago the last remnants of the orchard her father planted were dug up for social housing.

Then came the airport, and they changed its name to Heathrow. We got used to planes passing a hundred or so feet above our heads on their way to touch down. But the planes got larger and larger, and noisier and noisier. Then came the jets with a quantum leap in noise (and years later another leap with Concord, but fortunately there were few of them) and things became near impossible. Double glazing helped but meant you had to live with windows closed, and even then listening to the radio or holding a conversation was often difficult.

I moved a little away from the flight path, and when they built Terminal 4, the runway that took the planes closest to my house could no longer be safely used (bringing Heathrow down from its orginal five or six to a two runway airport.) But Heathrow seemed insatiable and unstoppable. T4 was going to be the last they would ever need, but then came Terminal 5. Again they would never need another runway or terminal, but within a couple of years they were saying it was absolutely necessary to have a third runway – and it wasn’t long before they were also planning T6.

Local residents in Sipson, Harmondsworth and Harlington whose homes would have been demolished or impossibly blighted if the third runway went ahead decided to make a stand, and founded the ‘No Third Runway Action Group‘, NoTRAG. I photographed its first major demonstration in June 2003.

They kept up their fight, and built up a coalition with other groups including most of the local councils in the surrounding area and with environmental groups such as HACAN, led by John Stewart. MPs too gave their support, including local MP John McDonnell (though my silly local MP preferred to support BAA – though it was his expenses rather than this that finally forced him to resign.) They fought the proposal at every level, with Greenpeace coming up with the idea of the ‘Airplot‘, a small piece of land in the middle of the runway site that ended up with over 80,000 beneficial owners – and I was one of them.The ‘Climate Camp‘ at Heathrow also did a great deal to raise interest and debate over the issues.

Over the years I photographed many more events related to the campaign. More marches, Whitehall demonstrations, the Terminal 5 Flashmob, and of course the Climate Rush on tour.

Airport noise caused by Heathrow effects much of West and Central London – several million people – and what had started as a local campaign soon became something much larger. And of course there were larger issues involved around the environment and a growing realisation of the accelerating damage that aviation was causing to it.

One important point came when the Conservative opposition came out against the proposal. Of course it was partly party politics, partly a matter of seeing the growing political importance of Green issues generally. And once they were in power they stuck to their decision, and the third runway is, at least for the moment, history.

But although the photographs aren’t so interesting the event that pleased me most was the celebration at the end of August – pictures on My London Diary. It was as John Stewart said, a ‘Victory Against All The Odds‘. Everyone said at the start it couldn’t be done, but it was. And I’m pleased to have played a part – if very small – in it too.

Ian Tomlinson Eyewitness

On Foto8 you can read the story by Vu photographer Michael Greive of how on 1 April last year he photographed Ian Tomlinson in his dying minutes. His first picture of the incident shows Tomlinson sitting on the ground shortly after the fatal blow by PC Horwood in the pedestrian street behind the Royal Exchange; Tomlinson, seen from behind, looks up towards police who appear to be ignoring his pleas. After taking this frame, Grieve turned towards a group of police standing to the right to take another picture as a record of the whole scene, and at the back of this picture is the officer later identified as Horwood, two hands holding a club with his face partly covered.

A few minutes later, Greive saw the same victim, clearly in need of urgent medical attention. Police had prevented protesters – including a third year medical student – and a news photographer from coming to his assistance; one of the protesters had called the ambulance service, but they asked to speak to the police and the request was ignored.

Grieve took further pictures as Tomlinson, finally attended by police medics, was dying. It was only several days later, when a friend told him that he could be seen taking a picture of Tomlinson on the film of the unprovoked assault by Horwood which a US investment manager had taken and later sent to The Guardian that the photographer realised exactly what he had witnessed.

Grieve was advised to contact the Tomlinson family’s solicitor with his evidence and was later interviewed by the IPCC who were investigating the case. He decided to cooperate fully with them, supplying high-res scans of his images, in the hope that these would help in ensuring a conviction. Among other things his pictures showed conclusively that PC Horwood was not wearing his serial number.

In his feature, illustrated by a number of the pictures he took, Grieve records his disgust at the failure to prosecute Horwood. It’s hard indeed to disagree with his final paragraph:

“But photography did not fail that day. It recorded evidence as best it could from professionals, amateurs, to the unauthored CCTV. All photographers acted with total professionalism, doing their job, and not, as the police may these days accuse us, acting like potential terrorists or paedophiles, or whatever they decide to pull out of the hat. It goes with out saying that the only individual who unleashed terror this particular day at G20 was wearing a police uniform with his face partially obscured and failing to wear his serial number. And though he may be reprimanded internally by the police force he has, in effect, got away with it. And we citizens have to fight our corner and watch our backs.”

As the farce of an investigation into this case and others has shown, the police are effectively above the law – particularly in dealing with protesters and with the working class and ethnic minorities. The law at every level is still very much a law for the rich and privileged.

My Own Day

I wasn’t around when Ian Tomlinson was killed, although I had been with the protesters as they made their way to Bank in the morning. By the time I’d followed a second group there the area was packed with people and it was impossible to move down past the Bank of England. As well as the protesters there were literally hundreds (if not thousands) of photographers and I decided my time might be better spent covering the other protests going on around London.

So I left the the demonstration at Bank a little after noon, going to photograph the Climate Camp as they arrived to set up camp in the middle of the street a quarter of a mile away in Bishopsgate. As I left, police had started to “kettle” the protesters, refusing to let them leave but were still allowing press to go out through their lines. Later I went to photograph the ‘Jobs Not Bombs‘ demonstration at the US Embassy and march to a rally Trafalgar Square – and police were by then refusing to let journalists back into the area around Bank. And by the time of the police violence against the Climate Campers I was back at home and in bed.

Earlier I’d seen a few minor incidents as police snatched some masked demonstrators apparently at random out of the crowds and stood among the TSG as some of them paced from foot to foot obviously itching for some action. They seemed to me more than eager for confrontation, and it was obvious that they were out to cause trouble and to have no interest in keeping the peace.

The murder of Ian Tomlinson (and despite the CPS decision it is difficult to describe it as anything but murder) didn’t surprise me, although I was shocked by it, as well as by a number of other non-fatal incidents recorded on other videos, including attacks on several journalists as well as protesters.

© 2009 Peter Marshall
Prof Chris Knight, one of the G20 Meltdown Organisers, and the officer responsible for the policing at Bank meet at the start of the Ian Tomlinson Memorial March

Later I attended a number of protests against the killing, including a march in memory of Ian Tomlinson organised by the people who had organised the event at Bank, now working with the Tomlinson family. Later came a candlelit vigil with the family and, after the announcement of the failure to prosecute, a further demonstration outside the offices of the DPP.

I think we haven’t heard the last of this case, either in the courts or on the streets. Perhaps it will even lead to action to curb police excesses by our parliament. But given the record that doesn’t seem too likely.