Archive for October, 2010

Lost Steps

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

Lost Steps is a radio series presented by Malcolm Hopkins and produced by Nick Hamilton for Resonance FM, a unique radio station broadcasting in south London on 104.4 FM as well as live on the web. You can also download the programmes a few days later as podcasts.

On its web site, Resonance FM says:

Imagine a radio station like no other. A radio station that makes public those artworks that have no place in traditional broadcasting. A radio station that is an archive of the new, the undiscovered, the forgotten, the impossible. That is an invisible gallery, a virtual arts centre whose location is at once local, global and timeless. And that is itself a work of art. Imagine a radio station that responds rapidly to new initiatives, has time to draw breath and reflect. A laboratory for experimentation, that by virtue of its uniqueness brings into being a new audience of listeners and creators. All this and more, Resonance104.4fm aims to make London’s airwaves available to the widest possible range of practitioners of contemporary art.

and it describes itself as the world’s first radio art station. It came out of the London Musicians’ Collective and has been broadcasting since May 1st 2002.

Lost Steps is a weekly radio show which explores aspects of London’s artistic and cultural landscape with guests including artists, writers, film makers, bloggers, academics and publishers. Among the people who have appeared on it are a number whose work I admire, including writer Stewart Home and, in the last programme of the previous series, the creator of the amazing cult fanzine, Savage Messiah, Laura Oldfield Ford.

© 1990, Peter Marshall
The Olympic Site at Stratford Marsh in 1990

I met producer Nick Hamilton at the London International Documentary Festival in April this year where I was showing the work which is now in my first two Blurb books, 89, a fictional walk through North London, and ‘Before the Olympics‘ and we talked briefly about the possibility of my appearing on the programme later in the year.

Then he met me again as he chanced to be passing when I was photographing the ‘Life 4 A Life‘ march last month and I agreed to go on the show as the first in a new series of Lost Steps. When he emailed me about the details I sent him a link to the photographs I had taken, one of which gave him something of a shock. One of the pictures included members of a family he had known a some years ago in Hackney and he discovered that their nineteen-year-old son, who had been friends with his children, had been murdered last year.  The family had moved away to Eastbourne to get away from the violence and gang culture in London.

I spent an enjoyable afternoon talking with Malcolm and Nick last Friday about my photography of London – including the kind of work which is on my Buildings of London, River Lea,  London’s Industrial Heritage and My London Diary web sites, and the first half hour while we were in the recording studio can be heard this Thursday, 14 Oct 2010, at 10.30 pm and is repeated on Saturday 16th October at 6.30pm. It should also be on the  website from Sunday 17th October.

Perhaps fortunately the next couple of hours of our conversation around the corner at the Kings Arms in Newcomen St, interesting though it was, will not be broadcast!

Sam Lesser 1915-2010

Monday, October 11th, 2010

© 2005 Peter Marshall.
Sam Lesser, 2005

In the print edition of The Guardian on Saturday I read with sadness of the death of Sam Lesser, one of the few remaining veterans of the International Brigade that fought against fascism in Spain. It was a very short note and I hope they will publish a proper obituary at some point. Spain was important, not just for the left but for all of us, and the Sam Lesser was one of the more than 30,000 volunteers who went to fight for freedom – and around a third of them gave their lives there. He survived and continued through his life to follow his beliefs and work towards a better world.

© 2006 Peter Marshall.
Sam Lesser, 2006

I’d photographed him a number of times, and was impressed by his speeches, although I wasn’t present at the Spanish Embassy last year where along with the other seven then surviving British and Irish volunteers he was at last honoured by the Spanish Government by being made a Spanish citizen. According to the Morning Star obituary, his  “emotional anti-fascist speech” in “fluent Spanish” on that occasion reduced some of the embassy staff to tears. Characteristically it linked the struggles of his youth to the current day fight against fascism here and the rise of the BNP.

© 2005 Peter Marshall.
Sam Lesser speaks, watched by Jack Jones and John Pilger, 2005

Lesser took part in the fierce fighting at the University of Madrid shortly after arriving in Spain in 1936 which killed 24 of the first 30 British volunteers, but was wounded in a battle in January 1937. Hit by bullets from both sides, he was left overnight dying on the battlefield but saved by a comrade who insisted on going back to look for him the following day). After a period in a Spanish hospital he was sent back to England for treatment. He returned to Spain hoping to fight again but failed his medical and instead made radio broadcasts for the Republicans and worked as a journalist for the Daily Worker, escaping to France as the Republicans were finally defeated. You can read more in an interview with Angeles Rodenas which the Socialist Worker published four years ago, and you can hear him speaking in English as a part of the programme ‘Witness‘ broadcast on the World Service of the BBC.

© 2006 Peter Marshall.
Sam Lesser, 2006

During the Second World War he was again turned down for military service because of his wounds and he worked as an inspector in an aircraft factory. After the war he returned to journalism with the Daily Worker, the communist party newspaper, which sent him to many scenes of post-war conflicts. His experiences working in the Soviet Union and reporting on the Soviet invasions to crush the popular movements in Hungary and Czechoslovakia destroyed his faith in communism and he moved increasingly towards social democracy, even becoming a strong supporter of New Labour.

Lesser, who worked as a journalist under the name of Sam Russell, was in Cuba for the missile crisis, and spent a night with Che Guevara at the height of it (his interview was heavily censored by the Daily Worker, removing all Che’s more controversial war-like rhetoric) and he also reported for them on the Vietnam war. As a student I read many of his reports in the Morning Star (the Daily Worker was relaunched under this title in 1966), which often presented a rather more accurate overview of events at a time when much of the media was over-saturated by cold war rhetoric and US propaganda.

The Morning Star obituary also tells the story of his visit to Chile in 1973, where he arrived for a fraternal visit the day before the CIA-backed coup and was woken up early the following morning by the gunfire. His fluent Spanish (he learnt it while in a Spanish hospital bed) enabled him to pose as a Spanish engineer and move into the Santiago Hilton, later relaying his report to the Morning Star, where it made the front page with the headline “I Saw Democracy Murdered.”

© 2004 Peter Marshall.
Sam Lesser at the extreme right of 9 veterans of the Spanish Civil War , 2004

Sam Lesser was a founder of the International Brigade Memorial Trust which holds an annual commemoration every July at the memorial in Jubilee Gardens on the South Bank, at which the pictures here were taken. In 2009 he gave a spirited address there in front of the Spanish Ambassador, a month after he and the other veterans had been given their Spanish passports.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.
Sam Lesser speaking at the IBMT commemoration, 2009

Excalibur!

Saturday, October 9th, 2010

© 2010, Peter Marshall
UniSeco Mark 2 Prefab on the Excalibur Estate

On Thursday I got on my bike and cycled from Waterloo Station to the Excalibur Estate at Downham in Catford, whose streets are named after knights of the Arthurian Round Table. This is the only large example remaining of a number of prefab estates constructed as the Second World War ended for returning soldiers and their family. Although intended as temporary dwellings, they were basically well-made and equipped with all mod cons including fitted kitchens, refrigerators, built-in cupboards and heated towel rails.

For many years now, Lewisham Council has left the maintenance of these bungalows to the residents, and a few of them, along with rather more who have bought their homes, have made a real effort to keep them in good order.

Where tenants or owners – past or present – haven’t taken over the council’s responsibilities, these homes are in often in very poor condition. So bad that when residents move or die, they are no longer re-let, but allowed to become derelict.

As you can hear on a slide show at The Guardian, for the first residents who moved to these properties were impressed by the standard of the accommodation they offered, and the standards set by the Ministry of Works were high- more modern properties are built to rather meaner specifications. The minimum floor area was 635 square feet, though I think these are a little larger, and some have now been extended. Although they were meant to cost £500 each, the actual cost of these was, made by the Selection Engineering Company Ltd was well over a thousand pounds – some things don’t change.

One of the designers of the kitchens in the ‘service units’ – kitchen and bathroom – was the Czech industrial designer George Fejer who worked on them from 1943, and later was one of the team that worked at Hygena creating the British style of fitted kitchen.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
UniSeco Mark 3 Prefab on the Excalibur Estate

The UniSeco design – and around 29,000 were built – was perhaps the most innovative of all the various prefab designs built, with a distinctive modernist look, for example in the joined corner windows and the almost flat roofs.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
St Marks Downham – the council is talking to the Church of England about its future

The Excalibur estate, with 187 UniSeco Mark II or Mark III units and a prefabricated church – St Marks Downham – and church hall was assembled by German and Italian prisoners of war in 1945-6 on an area of public open space for the neighbouring Downham estate – with the promise that after the 10 or so years these temporary buildings were to last it would be returned as open space. For some years Lewisham council have wanted to demolish the lot and build new social housing on the entire site.

It is the only large prefab estate remaining, and residents and others pressed for its preservation and listing. English Heritage had advised the listing of 21 of the units, which would have enabled something of the character of the estate to be retained if on a much smaller scale. The Department for Culture Media and Sport reduced this  to six; four Mark IIs and two Mark IIIs, which although retaining these individual buildings will loose any real sense of the estate, although those chosen are a compact group and were selected because they were relatively unaltered – while some others have undergone considerable ‘modernisation.’ It still is not clear whether or not the church will be retained, though in any case it is of rather less interest.

One of the problems of renovating prefabs of this type is the large amount of asbestos sheeting and cement used in their construction, covering the timber and plywood frame.

I first came across and photographed the estate while walking the Greenwich meridian around 15 years ago – it runs through the middle of the estate – and was impressed by the feeling of openness and space. As some of the residents say, living there is the nearest thing to living in a village you can have in London, and some have made their homes look rather like country cottages, surrounded by flowers. Many have lived there for a very long time.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
One of the residents who doesn’t want to move – the sign says he’ll take the council to court
Others on the estate want to get out and live in something more modern and better maintained, and there appear to be two fairly well defined camps.  Lewisham, having promised for several years to consult residents finally organised a vote this year, and the results, announced in August were 114 votes for demolition and  regeneration with 89 against, with 21 of those entitled to vote not doing so.

Although the time-scale isn’t clear, the council are going ahead with the scheme which involves transfer to a housing association who will carry out the redevelopment. Current tenants who want to move back to the new estate when it is completed will be allowed to do so.

But I wouldn’t leave it too long if you want to visit the last example of one of our more interesting attempts at providing low-cost housing.

Inscape No 80

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

 © 1979, Peter Marshall
Street Games, Argyle St area, Hull, 1979. Peter Marshall

More years ago than I care to remember I enrolled on an evening class in the History of Photography being offered at the Camden Working Men’s College just down the road from Mornington Crescent (and doubtlessly coincidentally around the time the famous game of that name made its first appearance.)

It was partly a matter of curiosity – I’d never seen such a course offered as an evening class before, but perhaps more importantly, as I was teaching photography it could be counted as “in-service training”, both cutting down the pressure to go on far more boring courses and also meaning I could claim back both course fees and travel expenses from my employer. An added bonus was that the student card for this short course enabled me to claim a 10% discount from my favourite supplier of photographic materials for the next few years.

From the first session the lecturer, William Bishop, made it clear that although he had all the right art history tools he saw the course as an opportunity for him to learn about the history of photography rather than having a great deal of knowledge about it to impart.  It became very much a dialogue between him and those of the students – myself included – who knew rather more about photography and photographers, and one that proved constructive for us all.

A few years later,  Bishop, who had by this time been reduced by me to Bill in the interests of alliteration, decided to set up a ‘small magazine’ covering photography, producing the first issue of ‘Inscape‘ in Autumn 1992. Immediately I saw it, I contacted him and suggested he might come and make use of my equipment and desk-top publishing skills to improve the production quality, and we produced a few issues this way until he was successful in getting a grant to buy his own computer and scanner.

I had a few pictures in some of the earlier issues and the occasional one since, but I’ve not been a regular contributor to Inscape. My interests have perhaps moved rather in a different direction since those early days, and while the magazine has occasionally published work that interests me, there has also been much that has left me cold or worse.

Inscape is a word coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and there is a good short exposition of it on The Victorian Web by Glenn Everett. Inscape for him was essentially a both a Romantic and a religious idea, a revelation of the essence of a thing and an insight into the reason for its creation.  It is one of several attempts to describe the feeling that a particular moment or vision has a special significance.

© 1979, Peter Marshall
Betty’s Corner Store, Selby St, Hull, 1979. Peter Marshall

When we take personal photographs we are perhaps selecting selecting points of view on the real world that seem for us have some particular resonance – an “inscape” and hence the title of the magazine which

is about sharing our personal work, our personal photographic visions, with others. It is about appreciation rather than confrontation and argument, but it is not intended as a cosy corner to slumber in because it believes that the tradition of picture making that has personal meaning is alive and still developing.

It is something of a surprise (although I’ve kept up my subscription over the years) that Inscape is still going 18 years later. I think it started with five issues a year and is now quarterly, and the quality of the reproduction has improved significantly. The three pictures here are from a set of nine printed in Inscape No 80, at least some of which have a connection with its “An Architectural Theme“.

© 1979, Peter Marshall
Albert Dock, Hull, 1981. Peter Marshall

Others might be better suited to the theme of the forthcoming issue number 81, The Urban Scene, for which the copy date is 21 Dec 2010.  Like most small magazines (and unfortunately some very large ones), Inscape does not pay for contributions – the whole thing is very much a labour of love on a minuscule budget by Mr Bishop.

My set of pictures is only one of the contributions to the issue, with photographs by I think ten other photographers and written contributions by the Editor and the mysterious “mjp”.

© 1979, Peter Marshall
Fishers, Spring Bank, Hull, 1979. Peter Marshall

The magazine is now I think on sale in some very selected outlets and costs £3.60 or you can try through the web site, where back numbers are £2.50 post free in the UK. A subscription for 4 issues in the UK is £15.

There are a few more of my pictures from Hull on the Urban Landscapes web site, and I’m currently working through several years of photographs preparing a Blurb book on Hull which should appear later this year, under the title of my 1983 show there, ‘Still Occupied; A View of Hull‘, although the selection of images will be different to the 144 or so I showed then.

Meet Me in Paris?

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

© 2008 Peter Marshall
All ready to go to Paris

I think that I’ve now sorted out my trip to Paris for Paris Photo next month, along with my interpreter (not that I really need one, but my wife’s French is more than considerably better than mine, and both of us are extremely fond of the city.)  I’ve sent off for my accreditation, booked a hotel room (at the same hotel as last time, which isn’t perfect but is cheap), booked my tickets on Eurostar  – of course I’m not flying.

© 2008 Peter Marshall
Pont des Arts, Paris, November 2008

Although we met in Manchester rather than Paris, my wife and I spent our first holiday together there a couple of years before we were married, sleeping in separate twin rooms in a student hostel a nine miles south of the city centre in Massy-Verrières, then a rather large building site on the Luxembourg line, although we were in the older part of the town.  It’s the only year I’ve been in France to celebrate Bastille Day, where we went to the celebrations on the main square there,  where people really did dance to accordion music in the streets.

We went back there a few years ago on the day when the Tour de France was finishing on the Champs-Élysées, catching a train back to the centre which should have got us there in time to see it. Unfortunately the line came to a halt around 25 minutes before the cyclists arrived, with the driver settling down in a signal box to watch the finish.

You can read about my last visit to the Mois de la Photo in 2008 in a series of articles under the heading PARIS SUPPLEMENT.   As well as the trade show, Paris Phot, with dealers from around the world showing the work of their photographers, their are exhibitions across the city in the ‘Mois del la Photo’ and even more shows in the fringe festival. For a month, but particular around the few days of Paris Photo, the city is really alive to the sound or rather sight of photography.

In 2008, apart from Paris Photo, which is a great opportunity to see work by established photographers from around the world, I got to see around 40 other exhibitions, as well as attending several openings and a few other parties,  meeting many photographers from around the world I already knew and other new faces.

© 2008 Peter Marshall
One of the fringe shows was on the landings of a social housing block,
Cité des trois fushias, 20e

You can see many more of my pictures from Paris on my Paris photos site, although not from that 1966 visit, when I dropped my camera in a lake!

© 1973, Peter Marshall
This woman was walking along a back street in Montmartre in 1973.

If any of you reading this are going to be in Paris at any time between Nov 17-22 I’d be delighted to meet you – and if you are having an opening I’ll do my best to be there and to write about the work. You can e-mail me at petermarshall(at)cix.co.uk – or add a comment here.

74 Years Since Cable Street

Monday, October 4th, 2010

 © 2006 Peter Marshall

Grey though my beard is getting, I wasn’t at Cable St in 1936, but four years ago I was there for the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, which I described as:

“a joyous event, celebrating an important grass-roots victory for the labour movement, when the people of the east end stood up and took action, largely against the orders and advice of the organised Jewish and socialist leadership.

it was a real peoples movement when workers from London’s east end fought the police at Gardiner’s Corner and barricaded cable street to stop Mosley’s fascist black-shirts marching through their area.

(I’ve made a few minor corrections to the lower case original version.)

The festival started on Cable Street itself, and then those taking part came into the gardens where it was to continue for the rest of the day, coming past the splendid mural about the event. I’d decided to try to catch the group holding the letters making up the slogan ‘They Shall Not Pass‘ in front of it, and just about managed to do so, though the exposure wasn’t quite correct.

It was something that there was really no time to do, and of course I don’t believe in posing such things, so it was a minor miracle that it came out. It’s also an example of a file that I could I’m sure process rather better from the RAW file now compared to the rush job I did for the web in 2006. I’ve improved it a little working from a larger jpeg and added my copyright watermark for this post. But I get the feeling that I could get an improved result with Lightroom 3 on the original file. RAW software really has improved in the last 4 years.

© 2006 Peter Marshall.

I try not to pose portraits either, although I did ask some of those who had been there in 1936 to stand in front of the mural for me, and moved myself to get them looking in the direction I wanted. Of course by this time there where other photographers also taking pictures of them.  But I hope this picture expresses a little of the kind of spirit of those who stood up and stopped the fascists.

© 2006 Peter Marshall.

There were of course plenty of reminders that it is a battle that still needs to be fought – and at times on the street as well as elsewhere.

More of my pictures from 2006 on My London Diary, and you can read a number of eye-witness reports on the web, though not I think one by the man I talked to and suggested he write his story. One I like was written in 2005 by NUJ member Reg Weston.

More on AFP v Morel Copyright Theft

Monday, October 4th, 2010

Go to duckrabbit to read the latest on this clear case of image theft that I’ve mentioned several times before. Large agencies – and not just AFP – appear to to making an attempt to take over any images that don’t have the photographer’s name stamped across them in large letters.

As it says:

It’s no exaggeration to say that the arguments presented in court mean that this case, if it goes AFP’s way, could affect all photographers who use the web.

A few months ago I started putting a discreet but visible watermark on all images that I post on the web, but of course my images go to libraries without this. I’ve also written many times about the need to embed metadata in all images, and I’ve followed my own advice on this for some years.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
A discreetly watermarked image from June 2009

What I’d really like to see is a feature implemented on all new cameras (or at least all professional models) that adds a little black border to the bottom (or longer side) of every image containing our copyright message to every image that is taken – so that every picture we take is automatically labelled. It wouldn’t be too difficult to implement or make the images much larger.

It could of course easily be removed – even automatically – by users, but would put the onus on whoever did so to be sure they had the right to do so.

Is this an idea about cameras worth pursuing?

I didn’t mention it when I added a comment on duckrabbit, where I mentioned the need for photographers to join together to oppose these image grabs. At the moment I know my union has been quite supportive of some photographers over individual copyright cases. But if there are large numbers of photographers whose work is being used without permission by some of the large agencies, perhaps their is a possibility in the US of taking a ‘class action’?

Undesired: India’s Dying Daughters

Monday, October 4th, 2010

Thanks to duckrabbit for the information about the short (12 minutes) film ‘Undesired‘ by MediaStorm with photojournalist Walter Astrada you can watch on MediaStorm.  Don’t miss watching the epilogue – linked on the page as ‘Part II: More from the photographer‘ which includes some of Astrada’s powerful still photography as he talks about what he found.   ‘Undesired‘ is a powerful and moving film that makes the scandalous situation that most of us were probably at least vaguely aware about real in a very direct way.

Don’t miss watching the epilogue – linked on the page as ‘Part II: More from the photographer‘ which includes more of Astrada’s powerful still photography as he talks about what he found.

The film tells the story of some of the 40 million girls ‘missing’ in India through abortion, neglect and murder. You can also read more on MediaStorm in the feature ‘Mothers of A Hundred Sons: India’s Dying Daughters‘ by Shreeya Sinha, who was Associate Producer for the film, and made the interviews and some of the video, illustrated by pictures by Astrada, as well as elsewhere in a article by Swami Agnivesh, Rama Mani and Angelika Köster-Lossack published in 2005  by the New York Times and a story last year in The Guardian by Ciara Leeming.

Astrada‘s work on his Violence For Women project is also covered in an article in the on-line BJP by Olivier Laurent, who met him when he was showing his work at Visa Pour l’Image in Perpignan. Surprisingly I don’t think this has appeared in the print version, nor for that matter has anything else from Perpignan. Perhaps because BJP is now a monthly publication, and Visa Pour l’Image took place at the start of September, shortly after the September issue this and their other reports from  Perpignan was old news by the time the October print issue came out.

It’s a reflection of the magazine’s changed priorities that I could find nothing in that issue about Visa Pour l’Image, nor, for that matter about the largest photo event taking place in the UK at the moment, the East London Photography Festival, Photomonth 2010. In fact I’m finding it increasingly hard to see any justification at all for the print magazine, though of course it is difficult to survive just on the basis of web advertising (though About.com, who I wrote about photography with for almost 8 years managed it.)

You can see more of Astrada‘s work on the photographer’s own web site, including images from previous work about violence against women in Guatamela and the Congo. A former Agence France Press photographer he is now represented by Reportage by Getty Images.

An invitation

Friday, October 1st, 2010

Please come and celebrate with the photographers at the Shoreditch Gallery* from 6.30-8.30pm on 20th October 2010

(*Shoreditch Gallery is in the Juggler, 5 Hoxton Market,
just to the east of Pitfield St, reached via Boot St or Coronet St

Old St tube or buses to Great Eastern St / Old St / Shoreditch Church etc)


Paris • New York • London

 photographs by

Paul Baldesare • John Benton-Harris • Peter Marshall

Shoreditch Gallery

The Juggler
5 Hoxton Market
London N1 6HG

October 2 Oct – 29 Oct 2010

020 7729 7292 Gallery
01784 456474 Other information

Mon-Fri 8am-6pm, Sat: 10am-4pm. Closed Sun

Free admission

Work from three photographers,
three major world cities & three decades

http://parisnewyorklondon.co.uk/

Photomonth logo

Paul Baldesare
© Paul Baldesare
Devil of Threadneedle St, London, Paul Baldesare

Theatrical off-beat street images from the City of London
in the 1990s and Oxford St in the current decade.
Web

John Benton-Harris
“A taste of the Big Apple” from his much larger digital colour
investigation of his home town, that he began in the spring of 2006.
Web

Peter Marshall
© 1988, Peter Marshall
Paris 19e, 1988. Peter Marshall
“Photo Paris”, a poetic vision of Paris’s inner suburbs from
an artist’s book he produced in the 1980s
Web        Book
Copies of the recently re-issued book Photo Paris will be available for only £15 at the party.
Photographs by Paul Baldesare and Peter Marshall are for sale.

East London Photomonth Opens

Friday, October 1st, 2010

Tonight I was one of rather few people at the opening party of the 10th East London Photomonth, a festival which had been organised over the years by a Maggie Pinhorn of Alternative Arts along with her very small team.

There were quite a few other photographic events on last night – and I’d come to this as one of the several hundred photographers taking part, whereas otherwise I would have chosen to be elsewhere.

This year’s venue – Amnesty in Shoreditch – didn’t have the attraction of last years Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, and certainly the show there by Paul Trevor attracted a number of leading members of the photographic community, making it a very much more upbeat occasion.

Photomonth has grown into a pretty vast event – as we saw from a continuous projection during the evening showing the press images from the participating galleries (though unfortunately as too often at photographic events nowadays showing them not quite sharp so I kept reaching for my glasses only to find I was already wearing them. There are apparently over 200 events in the programme.

Photomonth is the only photographic festival we have in London and I’ve supported it over the years, organising shows for the last three editions, but tonight I couldn’t but feel that it needs to evolve. One of its great strengths is participation – anyone who can find a space can take part – but it is also, as that projection at times demonstrated, a weakness.

It seems to need a clearer focus, perhaps with a more central photographic core. The festival events do include some lectures but possibly there should be some more high-profile shows as a central feature – rather than the current rather peripheral events (and some of which I’d gladly see downplayed.) Comparing it with the Mois de la Photo in Paris, at the moment it seems to be almost entirely the fringe ( Le Mois de la PhotoOFF) with nothing at the centre. It isn’t just or even mainly about quality, although perhaps some lines do need to be drawn, and if you’ve visited Paris during the festival or read some of my accounts of it here you will know that some of the best work is to be found in L’Off.

(This picture was the only one where the low light levels in the hall became a problem. Digital has made it quite possible to work in almost any available light, but the girls (who were waiting to collect a bottle of champagne on someone else’s behalf) were in a fairly dim area, and at f4 there wasn’t quite enough depth of field.)

You can look at the full programme on line or pick up a printed version at any of the participating spaces which this year include a great many eating places in what is called eatyourartout.  On Saturday we hang our show Paris – New York – Londonat the Shoreditch Gallery, which is part of a café, The Juggler, though unlike some café shows you can see it easily without having to clamber over café clients. The gallery, although linked to the café has a separate entrance, and though I can personally recommend the rolls and coffee (and they sell one of the few truly drinkable bottled lagers) you can see the show without feeling that you have to buy anything. It was due to open on that day, but anyone who comes early will have to look at it on the floor rather than the wall.

Today I got the copies of my postcard for the show, and earlier in the week some copies of the Photo Paris book. The next post here is the invitation I’ve been busily sending out for our ‘opening/closing’ party on October 20th. We delayed it for a couple of weeks until John Benton-Harris gets back from another visit to New York. And if you are in London it really is an invitation to come and meet me and the others and to see the work.