June, 2011 | Re-photo

Archive for June, 2011

What Camera…?

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

Probably many of you have read Vincent Laforet’s post from 3 weeks ago, What camera did I use to make this still picture? which has a photograph of a young girl at the top and invites you to zoom into the image actual size, asking you to guess what camera the picture was taken on.

The answer, which he reveals a couple of lines down the page, so I’m not really spoiling any secrets, is that it is a frame grab from a RED EPIC M digital cinema camera at 96 frames per second. As someone who wrote about RED cameras quite a few years ago I’m not surprised, though the quality is pretty breathtaking.

Laforet goes on to ask:

a lot of “big” questions such as: “Does the challenge of capturing “THE DECISIVE MOMENT” still exist when you can capture a 14 megapixel image at 120 frames per second? ” For someone who idolized Henri Cartier Bresson and worked on mastering the capture of that “decisive moment” for most of my career it is not a question I ask lightly. “Are the days of the “still camera” numbered?”

To some extent Laforet himself acknowledges that he is rather jumping the gun – this is a large and heavy camera which works best on the kind of support that an elephant could sit on shown in the picture of it lower down the page, and it costs in excess of $30,000. Of course technology always advances to bring things down in price and size, but I think we will be waiting rather a long time before something like this becomes both affordable and portable.

Cartier-Bresson and the other photographers of his generation took their pictures with a screw mount Leica (or a Contax rangefinder), cameras not dissimilar in size or appearance to the Fujifilm FX 100, and later with the larger but still relatively diminutive M series. These cameras were built around movie film, though they used twice the film area of 35mm movie cameras. But way back then it was possible to get fairly similar quality from movie cameras to that given by what were then called ‘miniature’ cameras.

So while there are perhaps particular areas of still photography – if I were a cricket photographer I’d be thinking seriously – where cameras like the RED Epic will find a niche, until they reduce in price to a fifth or less of the current wedge and will fit my pocket the FX100 and other similar still cameras are likely to remain the instrument of choice for those seeking the decisive moment.

Of course we will see a greater use of video in covering news, with quite a lot of it taken using the video modes of DSLRs, although many videographers greatly prefer to use dedicated video cameras.

Technology is of course changing, and perhaps more rapidly for video than for still photography at the moment. Earlier this year I splashed out on a new video camera which cost me around £25, though I paid almost as much for a high speed SDH4 flash memory card to fit it. It’s a very basic model – no viewfinder, fits on a key ring and is around 2″x1.3″ by 0.6″ and from memory weighs around an ounce but gives surprisingly good 1280×720 30fps video and sound. It isn’t easy to know exactly what you are recording and I haven’t yet really found a use for it – most people seem to use them as webcams, or helmet or dashboard cameras, although flying them in radio-controlled planes is also popular – but it really is amazing. Several people have made video reviews that give you an idea what it can do – such as this one, and there is a good FAQ on the same guy’s blog. But again I won’t be giving up the Fuji or the Nikons any time soon.

Posted in Photo Issues, Reviews etc, Technical | No Comments »

That Riot Kiss

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

Here -if you’ve not already seen it – is another great post from The Russian Photos Blog by Jeremy Nicholl giving his ten reasons why Esquire magazine was bonkers to suggest it was possibly the best photo of all time.

10 Reasons This Isnt The Greatest Photo Ever certainly made me laugh, and in the 10th – Its not even the best riot kiss photo ever – he links to a picture by a friend of mine who recently began to collect his old-age pension too, who took a better one in 1990 along with many other fine images of the Poll Tax riots.

I was actually rather surprised to find that Esquire was still alive and publishing, and really apparently doing commercially quite well, although not the cultural leader it was for a while in the 1960s, and having taken a brief look at it online from the link in the feature I can’t see myself bothering to go back again.

Of course we have been getting more of our own riots again in recent months and perhaps on Thursday – J30 – there will be more opportunities for photographing some kisses in unlikely situations, although I think it is only Tory cabinet ministers who are really getting worked up over the event at the moment. If they keep up their attacks they may provoke something but I think it more likely later in the year.

Posted in Photo Issues, Photographers | No Comments »

In Search of Atget

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

I published In search of Atget, my fifth book on Blurb this morning. The cover uses a slightly cropped version of the image above, and you can view the whole book on the Blurb site using the link above.

My introduction in the book is rather long to quote in full, but here are a few selected paragraphs that make my intentions at the time clear:

In the summer of 1984 I returned to Paris in search of Atget. It wasn’t one of the re-photographic exercises that were then in vogue. I had little interest in recreating the pictures that he had taken perhaps 60 years earlier; I was in search of his mind, wanting to know more about why he had photographed in the way he did, both on the broader level of his overall project and very much in the detailed way that he approached each image that he made.

…

My project was an attempt to discover more about Atget as a photographer and also a deliberate homage to him. The following year I put on a small show of these pictures at the college where I was teaching, ‘Paris Revisited – A Homage to Atget’, which attracted little attention.

…

I deliberately did not take books of his pictures with me to Paris and seek out the exact same views – I wanted more to think how I might photograph in the same sites (and others) rather than reproduce his images, although some turned out to be very similar.

This project was important personally not only for what I learnt about Atget but for the work it prompted me to carry out in the following 15 years on the streets of London. Without the inspiration of Atget which this project strengthened and focussed it would not have happened.

There are pictures in the book that turned out very similar to some of his, and those familiar with his work may recognise them, but I recognised that I was working from a very different cultural background. As it happens I don’t think I did photograph the Eiffel tower, but I did very definitely go to places and take pictures that had they existed he would have hated, such as this:

But here’s one I think he might have appreciated more:

The images in the book are nearly all from new scans of the negatives, with all the 55 or so larger images very carefully cleaned up – many of the negatives have suffered from tiny gelatin gobbling insects lunching out on them over the years. The images on this page come from earlier scans made for my Paris Photos web site, which has most of the others in the book on display as well as others from my visit to Paris in 1984 in the section Paris Revisited.

Posted in My Own Work, Photo History, Photo Issues, Photographers | 1 Comment »

Royal Snap

Monday, June 27th, 2011

I’ve strong republican sympathies, don’t have a great regard for the photographic sensibilities of the London National Portrait Gallery and am not a particular fan of Thomas Struth (though I found some of his early work of interest) so it perhaps isn’t surprising that I don’t greatly appreciate the recently released image of two elderly royals perched on a settee in the Green Drawing Room at Windsor Castle. Struth has in recent years seemed to concentrate rather on producing rather boring images of rather boring people, and this one runs true to form. Both of the sitters look pretty fed up with the whole thing, just waiting to get the photographer out of the way so they can change into something more comfortable and watch the gee-gees on the telly.

And although I don’t have a great pedigree as a commentator on fashion, isn’t it about time Philip saw his tailor, as he seems to have grown a few inches since those trousers were cut?

But it is actually cutting, or rather cropping that made me mention the picture at all. I’ve not seen the original, only the reproductions on two national media web sites. In the Independent, where you also can read one of the silliest commentaries on a photograph I’ve come across for ages, all highlight detail is missing from the image, which reproduces the fireplace at the left edge rather nicely and makes everything else look blown out and less than sharp.

In contrast Sky News decides to crop the picture drastically and fairly closely around the two seated figures, changing the format as if they can’t think of pictures except as 16:9. What was a picture of a rather grand room with two old people in it becomes just a picture of two sad old people, losing the whole point (such as it is) of Struth’s image. And although they’ve kept the highlights, they’ve added a blue or cyan colour cast.

I don’t think it is likely to be one of my favourite images, but it – and photography – deserves a better press than this.

Thanks to Jeff Moore who posted in The Picture Editor on Facebook bringing my attention to the image in The Independent.

Posted in Photo Issues, Photographers | No Comments »

Slutwalk

Monday, June 27th, 2011

Some years ago I went to one of the personal safety training courses run by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust that had been organised at my workplace. I was the only man in the group there, although much of the advice that was being given there was relevant to me as I made a habit of walking around obscure parts of London with a bag carrying almost £10,000 pounds worth of equipment on my left shoulder, stopping occasionally in some very isolated areas to display some of it to any prospective muggers.

I don’t know if it happens now at these courses, but among the personal advice given to us by the woman trainer was the suggestion that we could reduce the risk to ourselves from sexual assault by dressing in a deliberately unprovocative way. It wasn’t a part of the course that I felt particularly applied to me, but it caused no outrage among the others taking the course, who I think regarded it as sensible advice. And there was certainly some other advice I found useful, and its perhaps why I have yet to be mugged while taking picutres.

But as is often the case, what matters is how advice about behaviour is given and by whom, and for a male police officer to talk in a way that might be taken to suggest that some of the blame for a criminal act is due to the victim is clearly going to cause considerable offence.

Of course there is no excuse for rape under any circumstances, and the women on the slutwalk were certainly making the point clearly that “whatever we wear, wherever we go, yes means yes, NO MEANS NO.”

Being a man photographing women in a demonstration like this required a certain sensitivity that I don’t think all the photographers present showed. One of the many placards I photographed said ‘Don’t be so distracted by the underwear that you forget THIS MARCH IS ABOUT RAPE’ and it was a sentiment that I had tried to keep in mind throughout, with most of my pictures concentrating on those who were using the event to put forward clear ideas about the issues.

Of course I didn’t always agree with what the protesters were saying. I don’t for example think it sensible to call for Ken Clarke to go as the mass produced SWP posters did, if only because any replacement would almost certainly be a right wing bigot with less sensible views on almost every issue. Nor did I think I was “thinking like a rapist” when I was photographing a placard that accused me of it; what I was trying to do was to think how I could effectively get across the message that these protesters were trying to convey.

You can see quite a few more of my pictures from the event in Slutwalk London on My London Diary. Here are a couple more of my own favourites.

Posted in My Own Work, Photo Issues, Political Issues | No Comments »

Fuji X100 Update

Monday, June 27th, 2011

Version 1.10 firmware update

On Friday I spent rather a long time following the terrible instructions by Fuji to carry out the firmware update to the FX100. It would have been fast if I’d used a little common sense and done it my own way, but I was a little worried I might mess things up and so wasted several hours.

The Fuji site provided the firmware update along with a piece of software to copy it on to the card in the camera. Had they said you could simply copy it normally to the card and then perform the update it would have saved me a couple of hours, but their instructions told me I needed to install the Fuji software on my system, so I did.

I don’t know why, but I had to carry out the software install three times before it worked without an error message, although I think it still isn’t right, as it should start up when I plug the camera into the computer but it doesn’t.

I don’t intend ever to use Fuji’s MyFinePix Studio, but some time I may see if the SilkyPix RAW file converter does a better job than Lightroom on the FX100 files. Somehow I doubt it.

I suspect the only part of the software needed to perform the update the Fuji way is a driver or an information file so that the camera automatically installs as another disk drive on the computer when plugged into a USB port. Fuji’s over-fussy instructions also told me that I needed to remove all other USB peripherals except the mouse to carry out the file transfer. Which, if true, suggests their transfer program is terribly badly written. Which given my problems installing their software would not surprise me.

Having done it their way, I realise that I could instead simply have formatted a card in camera, then it in the card reader and copied the file in the normal way – no need to use the Fuji software at all. But I wasn’t going to risk having to confess I hadn’t followed the instructions to the letter if anything went wrong with the update and I needed to send the camera for service.

The card had to be formatted before being used for the upgrade, and looking at it, the FPUPDATE.DAT file is simply in the root directory, with nothing else on the card. All I really needed to do was to format a disk, put it in a card reader and copy that file across, then put it in the camera and carry out the upgrade – just as with other cameras. Fuji’s instructions might have mentioned this possibility – it is after all how most other manufacturers manage the process.

The Result – A New Camera

But having carried out the upgrade to firmware 1.10 (once everything is set up it takes around 90s) I have to say I’m very pleased, as it seems to address nearly all of the issues I had with the camera.

In particular it no longer locks up after turning itself off (Fuji say “”) but now it comthe shutter release button was required to hold down halfway for a few secondes on straight away.

The camera now notices when the lens cap is left on and doesn’t show the bright line frame. Setting the ISO when you’ve assigned that to the Fn button is simpler too – just press and turn the control wheel.

I gave up reading on the long list of 23 improvements – possibly the longest ever for a firmware upgrade, really more or less making this a different camera. There seem to be some improvements that are not included in the list too.

I’ve not really had the opportunity to try it out properly, as I’m currently resting under doctor’s orders with my leg up, but the whole way the camera works just feels a little ‘snappier’ and the battery doesn’t seem to run down at the same huge rate. I took a number of rather boring photographs out of my bedroom and study windows and in the back garden over the course of the day, leaving the camera on most of the time (letting it switch itself off) and the battery is still indicating full.

The picture quality from the FX100 seems to be more or less as I’d expect from the Nikon DX cameras, so no problems there. The upgrade irons out a few exposure problems I’d not come across, as well as at least theoretically putting some exposure control at your thumb tip when using A or S modes. (Actually you still need to use the Exposure Compensation dial which I have to keep taped up to do this.)

The camera also now tells you if you select the rather annoying ‘Eye Sensor’ mode by flashing up a little message (I guess someone must like it, but it seems to me to be a feature they only did because they could.)

The camera seems to do quite a few things more sensibly and I’m very much happier with it than I was before the upgrade. Though I’m sure I (and other users) will find a few more improvements to suggest for the next upgrade, 1.10 has really brought the camera to the state it should have been in before being released to the public. It just was not ready with 1.00 or 1.01.

Although it is a camera every photographer I’ve handed it too has fallen in love with – it feels good in the hand and the basics are exactly where you expect them, some problems still remain. This is a camera designed for small, delicate hands and although mine are perhaps less clumsy than the European average, the camera’s major controls, the Command Dial and Command Control are difficult to operate with the necessary precision; pressing the vital Menu/OK button at the centre of the Dial almost always selects one of the four functions obtained by rocking the dial, as also does attempting the rotate it. The button simply does not stick up enough.

There is a partial fix in the software upgrade, although the English text had me fooled.

1. The following functions can be rocked during shooting by holding down [MENU / OK] button over 3 sec.

DRIVE / Flash / White balance / Macro (set on the Command Dial 4 direction key)

In fact what this means is that these functions are LOCKED, making the control much more usable. You need to press the middle button for another 3 sec or more to unlock them.
The Command Control can be pushed left or right and is a rather curious slight knob that protrudes slightly from a raised housing on the back of the camera and springs back to the central position when released. I can seldom get it to perform whatever function the manual (and there is an updated version with the upgrade) suggests it should, and its main purpose appears to be to make the tip of my thumb sore, and occasionally when it should be altering exposure in A mode it instead seems to switch to the electronic viewfinder. It’s the one control I’d like to move more easily and more positively – and perhaps to have rather more use.

In S mode, where rotating the command dial is meant to adjust exposure according to the upgrade notes, it doesn’t seem to do so, rather keeping exposure constant while altering both aperture and shutter speed – but who knows, next time I try it I may find it works differently. Despite the great improvements I still get the feeling that this firmware needs some work on it.

In terms of hardware, both Command controls need a redesign for the Mark 2 version of the camera, although fortunately most of the time when you are actually taking pictures you don’t need to use them. And with the new firmware, most things work really well.

The shutter speed and aperture ring work fine, the shutter release seems around perfect, the auto-exposure (and the AEL/AFL button when using manual focus) is fine. For masochists who like to use the focus ring, that works slightly better – a chunkier kind of motion that actually moves the focus in a slightly jumpy fashion rather than the getting nowhere stirring the porridge it had before. But frankly you have to be some kind of nut to do it that way. In use the FX100 seems a simple and elegant and very unobtrusive picture-taking machine and I’m itching to get out and work with it.

Another welcome new feature in the upgrade is AF Correction for close focus, which puts a second focus rectangle up on screen to fix parallax problems in AF-S mode. As well as the normal white rectangle, a second slightly offset ‘corners only’ rectangle appears slighly offset from the centre of the frame as a reminder you have this set, and when the camera focusses on something closer than around 1.5 meters, the green focus confirmation rectangle appears at an appropriate place. It means the optical viewfinder is now fully usable down to less than a couple of feet. The electronic viewfinder also works pretty close, perhaps just a little closer, so you seldom need to remember to set macro mode.

The most informative discussion I’ve found on this update is on SteveHuffPhoto and I would have saved myself some time and effort if I’d read it before attempting the upgrade. Most of the problems that people are having seem to be either because they have card problems – it seems to be better to use a low capacity SD card such as the 2Gb I used rather than a recent high capacity one, or from a few Mac users, where I suspect the OS might sometimes be doing its own peculiar things with the card.

I find Steve Huff also has several other useful articles on the FX100, including The top 7 complaints of the Fuji X100 and how I get around them. Fortunately most of them have been addressed by the firmware update in one way or another, and Fuji do really seem to have been listening to what photographers (including many on other camera web sites) told them about the camera, which is good news for the future.

I’ve still to really make a great deal of use of this camera, though I’ve taken around 1500 pictures, few have been anything other than test shots, but I’m now pretty convinced that this is a classic, and one that will earn its keep for many of us. It is very much the kind of camera that Leica should have produced (and at a glance it is a Leica) but are never likely to manage (just as they never managed to produce the best compact ‘Leica’, the Minolta CLE, which is perhaps the closest to the FX100.)

Photographers are never satisfied. So yes, I’d have preferred it in all black. With a 28mm rather than a 35mm. The integration between lens and camera is such that it couldn’t be done with an interchangeable lens, but perhaps Fuji could provide a high quality screw in conversion lens for the front to give roughly double the focal length? (A 28/50 combination would have been ideal for this.) And of course it should take 49mm screw filters and a lenshood out of the box – Fuji’s failure to do so is inexplicable, but could be easily rectified for future purchasers.

Obviously it isn’t a camera for sports or action, but for what it does it is very usable indeed and delivers great quality. Large heavy SLRs and zooom lenses certainly win on flexibility, but if you can live with a fixed 35mm lens (and in the past I did for some years with a Leica M2) this is a great camera, and one that will fit my jacket pocket.crosoft office 2007 cost; Purchase Autodesk Autocad 2008 microsoft office project tutorial;
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A Golden Rule

Friday, June 24th, 2011

This week I stupidly broke one of my rules about digital images.

I’d been out on Monday on a family walk, had a very nice pub lunch and a couple of pints, and when I got home there just didn’t seem to be any urgency about transferring the pictures I’d taken from the card in my camera to the computer. There wasn’t any sort of deadline, and although I wanted the pictures – and there were a few that I thought might possible sell as stock, and I went to bed leaving the card still in the camera.

The next day I remembered I needed to transfer the files, but then I became absorbed in doing other things, and it didn’t get done.

Rather unusually, I didn’t need the camera with the card in until Thursday, having decided on a bit of a rest as I felt a little below par and there was nothing vital for me to cover. On the bus to where I was working I went through my normal camera check, setting the ISO to a sensible value for the conditions, making sure I was still on RAW and auto white balance, and making sensible settings for A, S and M modes. And as usual I pressed the play button to see if I had remembered to clear the card.

What I saw was the first frame on the card, and it was a picture from the event I covered on Sunday, and I thought I had forgotten to format the card. But stupidly I also forgot I had taken some pictures on Monday, and equally stupidly forgot to check the last frame on the card, and just formatted it.

I got home late, having gone on from taking photographs to an exhibition opening, and after falling asleep when I sat down in an armchair to have a cold drink, decided it was too late to bother with dealing with the pictures I’d taken and collapsed into bed. I didn’t fall asleep again straight away, and suddenly realised that those pictures from Monday had been on the card in the camera.

I leapt out of bed and checked the camera. Had I really formatted the card or was I just dreaming. I found I had. Just to make sure I didn’t do anything else stupid, I took both the cards I had used that day from the two cameras and left them next to the computer. No chance then that I could pick up a camera in a rush and manage to format my work again!

As I wrote the above, I was waiting fingers crossed (not the most suitable position for typing) while I hoped SanDisk RescuePRO* might come to my aid.

Unfortunately there was no happy ending. Although it found and recovered 648 files from the card, only two of them were from the Monday – and needless to say they were not the pictures I really wanted. The other 646 were those I’d taken on Thursday or from earlier occasions.

What I’d actually done on Monday I now remember was to take those two now recovered pictures, then realise that the card still had a couple of hundred pictures from Sunday on it. I’d protected the two new frames and then done a ‘delete all’ rather than a format, which had resulted in a card with a half a dozen protected frames from Sunday as well as these two new pictures. It had been those protected frames I had seen when I’d looked at the card and jumped to the conclusion it was full of work from Sunday.

I’d taken perhaps 200 pictures on Sunday, so those first two frames had space for around that number before them on the card. After the deletion it would start filling from the beginning again. The rest of my Monday files were thus at the start of the card and had all been overwritten after I formatted the card on Thursday and began taking pictures again.

The golden rule just has to be:

ALWAYS to take out the cards from your cameras when you get back from taking pictures

However tired you are.

And don’t put them back in camera until you have transferred (and backed up) the files.

*SanDisk RescuePRO came free with several of my SanDisk cards – according to SanDisk it comes with Extreme III, Extreme IV and Extreme Ducati Edition cards – but is otherwise a little expensive to buy. Most of the free programs I’ve tried either don’t seem to work at all, or find things and then tell you that you need to buy the software to actually recover them. One program I have found that does work is ZAR, which says helpfully and accurately: “You do not need a paid version of ZAR to do image recovery. This set of functions is provided free of charge.” ZAR has the advantage of recovering the file names, although slightly annoyingly it recovers .NEF files with the file type.tif and you need to rename them.
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Jiro’s Café Reopens

Friday, June 24th, 2011

Jiro Osugas installation, Café Jiro, in the Flowers Gallery in Cork St, London in May 2009 was for me certainly the wittiest art show I’d seen in years, and you can get some idea of it from my pictures in this blog and on My London Diary.

Jiro’s Café has now returned to life, with a significant difference: what was then a café in an art gallery is now an art gallery in a very real café, the Queen’s Terrace Cafe, just off the Finchley Road a few steps from St John’s Wood station. Rather than just walking around a gallery you can now enjoy morning coffee, a fine lunch or afternoon tea while surrounded by a unique work of art.

One whole wall – the longest display space in the small café – is covered by a panel that was in the previous Flowers show, but there are three large works for the new installation along with a number of smaller pieces – including three in the smallest room.

I spent a very enjoyable evening at the opening, talking to many old friends and meeting new. Most were finding a great deal of fun in sorting out the answers to a gallery quiz by Jiro, exploring a few of the historical and art-historical references in his work.

Drinking in the café you can find many famous figures, including Marx, Lenin, Che, Mao, the Queen and a ‘famous frog’ I’m not allowed to name.

Mireille Galinou, who had the idea for this cultural cafe, with arms folded

The Queen’s Terrace Café is described by Mireille Galinou who conceived and runs it as a cultural café, and has a programme of events which include:

a talk ‘Food in Art’ by Professor Michael Kauffman, former Director of the Courtauld Institute (Thursday 14 July, 6.00pm – £6.00 includes a drink)

a walk on pubs, hotels and houses in St John’s Wood led by Mireille, whose book on the history of the area, Cottages and Villas: The Birth of the Garden Suburb, was published by Yale University Press last year (Thursday 25 August, 6-8.00pm – £6.00 includes a drink)

Places for these events should be booked in advance, either at the café, by phone (020 7449 2998) or at queensterracecafe@bitinternet.com – places are limited and tickets are non-refundable.

The exhibition quiz, devised by Jiro Osuga, is available during the show, and on Thursday 25th August he will be there for a ‘Quiz Night’ when the answers will be revealed and prizes awarded for the best entries – entry £2.00 on the door.

There are also two special projects taking place based on the local area.

Gardens: I am working with Mireille Galinou on a documentary project where I do the easy job of taking photographs – mainly panoramic – of gardens while she works on “their basic historical pedigree… and their owners’ aims and recollections” for a publication and exhibition at the Queens Terrace Café.

Studios: Photographer John Chase is working on a second project on artists’ studios in the area. Judging from the many blue plaques I’ve noticed walking between gardens there may be quite a few – and the area seems to have been particularly popular with sculptors.

Posted in My Own Work, Photographers, Reviews etc | 1 Comment »

Like You’ve Never Been Away

Thursday, June 23rd, 2011

© 2009 Peter Marshall
Paul Trevor looking worried at the opening of a small show of his work in
the Museum of Childhood, Bethnal Green, London in 2009 – more here

One book that I can definitely recommend and that won’t break the bank is Paul Trevor‘s ‘like you’ve never been away‘, published by The Bluecoat Press in Liverpool and accompanying his exhibition of the same name at the Walker Art Gallery from 13 May to 25 September 2011.

Back in March Paul Trevor sent me a link to this BBC Merseyside feature, and somehow I simply forgot to write about it. It’s a good film that is worth watching, with Paul talking (and walking,) meeting some of those he photographed in 1975 and showing them his pictures, and he also talks about the “great loss to society” that we can no longer photograph children on the streets in the way he could then.

I was reminded about it again by a review of the book on the Online Photographer blog, which also prompted me to buy the book. You can read a little bit more about it and see a couple of pictures of the double page spreads there.

Being a lazy (and fairly poor) Londoner I haven’t made the trip to Liverpool for this or any the other events which are a part of Liverpool’s first ever international photography festival, Look11, which is nearing its end, which means I’ve missed quite a few shows and events I would have liked to have seen. Of course most things come to London some time, but perhaps this is unlikely for Trevor’s Liverpool show, though there is still plenty of time to go and see that.

There are around a dozen of his pictures from Liverpool in the 1982 Open University publication ‘Survival Programmes‘, a record of what is I think the last major documentary project in the UK, carried out by the ‘Exit Photography Group’, Nicholas Battye, Chris Steele-Perkins and Paul Trevor in the mid-70s, and most at least of them are in this new publication, with considerably better reproduction. They include what is one of his best-known images, Mozart Street in Toxteth transformed into a beach on a Sunday afternoon, kids playing in bathing trunks as a woman gleefully aims a hose at a kid been held aloft by a man in the doorway of these terrace houses opening directly onto the now wet pavement. Paul spent 6 months living in a flat in tower block in the area and getting to know and photograph the people there.

‘Survival Programmes‘ has long been out of print, but Trevor kept some boxes when it was withdrawn from sale and I bought a copy from him a few years ago, at rather less than you might expect were it published now. For him it is simply a way to give people who take an interest in his work the opportunity to have the book, although he would have preferred some of the other books he proposed to publishers to have been published. His approach is totally different from some photographers today who deliberately create shortages with limited editions to enable them to sell off copies later at high collector’s prices.

Trevor is I think an example of a photographer who was too good for Magnum, too focussed on what he wanted to achieve, and it is good to see his work getting a little attention now, though a proper showing of his work on London is long overdue (as I’ve often told certain museum and gallery curators.)

You can, as the Online Photographer instructs, with some slight difficulty buy ‘like you’ve never been away‘ on Amazon, as although it says ‘temporarily out of stock’, the ‘3 new‘ link takes you to a set of listings that includes the publisher, who charges a reasonable £2.80 for delivery bringing the total to £12.79 (as well as to another dealer already charging twice the price.) My copy arrived around 36 hours after I made the order. You could possibly save the postage by ordering from Amazon, who are currently out of stock, but I don’t know how long that might take.

The images are well reproduced – much better than in ‘Survival Programmes’ and there are many great pictures I’ve not seen before. My only gripe is that all the landscape format images are printed on a double spread across the gutter, a design decision I’ve seldom found acceptable in photographic books, and which probably means your copy will soon fall to pieces as keep viewing the images, although the book does seem well-made. It is a decision that contributes to the low price while still allowing the landscape images to be roughly the same size as a 10×8″ print, but I still don’t like it.

As the quote on the back cover by Annie Lord, of National Museums Liverpool says:

“This is an extremely warm and moving book about childhood, life and Liverpool in the 1970s.”

Grab a copy while you can.

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LSPF Gets Early Start At Photofusion

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

The London Street Photography Festival is billed to be in July and includes some interesting events, including a show of pictures by Vivian Maier, the Chicago nanny who only became famous after her death in 2009 and who I wrote about here last December. My thoughts about her work then included:

Interesting though her work is, it does not appear to have been innovative, and has long lost any ability to alter the course of our medium. At best it can retrospectively broaden and enrich its history.

The show at the German Gymnasium from 1-24 July (entry £3.50) includes 48 black and white and colour prints and “a selection of her fascinating silent films” about which I know nothing. A talk on her by John Maloof, one of those who discovered her work, has already sold out, and other events in the LSPF are also likely to be popular – this really seems to be the year for street photography.

The big exhibition in London remains ‘London Street Photography‘ at the Museum of London which opened in February and continues until 4 September 2011. In its first week people were queuing for more than an hour to see it, and museum attendances were I think around ten times those at the same period the previous year. With such a long run it isn’t crowded now, but still attracting a decent audience.

Photofusion kicked off the festival early with On Street Photography: A Woman’s Perspective which opened on 10 June and continues until 22 July with pictures by Anahita Avalos, Polly Braden, Tiffany Jones, Johanna Neurath and Ying Tang, the three London-based photographers with pictures from London, pictures from Mexico by Tehran-born Avalos (who now lives in Paris) and pictures from Shanghai by Ying Tang now living in Germany.

I spent some time at the opening in pedant mode wondering whether that should have been ‘Five Women’s Perspectives‘, as the photographers have little in common, and rather more time wondering whether ‘Five Perspectives by Women‘ would have been more accurate still. But in the end what is important is whether the pictures are worth looking at.

It doesn’t even matter if much of the work in this – and the Museum of London show – is not really what I would consider street photography, although at least The London Street Photography Festival (unlike the museum show which hedges its bets by quoting several) does have a working definition which Photofusion quotes:

un-posed, un-staged photography which captures, explores or questions contemporary society and the relationships between individuals and their surroundings.

The work that interested me most was something that I would probably call a documentary project rather than street photography by Tiffany Jones, a Canadian who lives in London and has photographed for a couple of years in a particular London bar.

The pictures are largely an upfront look at the relationships between people and the gestures that show these, and they also illustrate the advantages of digital photography in working in low and mixed light situations. Until recently, work like this would almost certainly have been in gritty black and white (as for example in Cafe Lehmitz by Anders Petersen in Hamburg in the late 1960s – one of the photographers Tiffany and I talked about at the opening) and the differences that this creates are interesting.

More pictures from the opening on My London Diary.

The event was also an opportunity for me to try out my new toy, the Fuji X100, which might almost be an ideal camera for street photography (if only it had been a 28mm f2 equivalent instead of the 35mm.) I’m still having problems sorting out the different views and so on, and I missed a few pictures, but the camera coped pretty well with extremes of contrast and some very different light levels in different areas of the gallery. Hints are emerging on the web of the first firmware update that will deal with a few little annoying glitches too – like the difficulty at times in getting it to wake up when it has gone to sleep.

I’m still finding it hard to force myself to spend around £70 on getting a lens hood, but it really is essential, not for preventing light shining on the lens but for keeping fingers out of it. Fingerprints on the lens gave a few of these shots rather more flare than I would like. I’m hoping China will come up with a cheap alternative via e-Bay for this, or at least for the metal ring that includes a filter thread. Rather than the expensive Fuji machined aluminium hood I’d quite like to fit a cheap flexible rubber one, as these avoid both vibration and reflections when shooting though windows and cost less than a fiver.

Posted in My Own Work, Photo Issues, Photographers, Reviews etc | No Comments »

Re-photo

Archive for June, 2011

What Camera…?

That Riot Kiss

In Search of Atget

Royal Snap

Slutwalk

Fuji X100 Update

A Golden Rule

Jiro’s Café Reopens

Like You’ve Never Been Away

LSPF Gets Early Start At Photofusion

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