Month: October 2011

Speculation on Photographs (Part 2)

This is a continuation of Speculation on Photographs which includes a discussion of Erroll Morris’s exhaustive examination of the two Roger Fenton images from ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’, one with cannonballs on the path and the other without.

Morris seems to me to be unduly concerned with reality and with establishing a connection between photograph and reality. To him it really was important whether those cannonballs were where they landed, while to me it seemed unlikely in view of both momentum and gravity. (I wrote “You might also ask why so many balls should have stopped rolling on the smoother road rather than going down into the gully by its side, especially if you’ve ever played bagatelle.”)

Fenton was of course working before there were any well-established conventions about what was ethical in news photography (which he was more or less inventing), let along in art, and there can be no doubt that he saw himself as an artist, and that he was someone who carefully composed his pictures.  I imagine that he took one picture as soon as he arrived, unsure about whether it would be safe to stay long enough to make a second exposure, then set about getting things arranged in a more artistic fashion.

Soth goes on to show an example from his series Broken Manual which is a kind of re-creation of Robert Frank’s image through a curtained window in Butte Montana, though in various respects a very different picture. Without the reference to Frank’s earlier image it would I feel have very little interest, and I would certainly wonder why the photographer took it. He does give some answers to that question in the link he provides to How to Revisit an Iconic Photograph which includes some other of his re-creations of well-known images. Soth says that he learnt a lot from re-visiting these pictures, which I’m sure is true, but I feel that I gain much from looking at the re-results of his learning experience.

Another image he has used as a starting point and is illustrated in the article is Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’, and he raises an interesting point when he mentions that her “are dramatically out of focus.” It’s worth downloading the digital file LC-DIG-fsa-8b29516 made from the original negative from the Library of Congress to examine this claim (the link to the larger 55Mb file fails for me) which is used for the image below, displayed here to a smaller size – right click and select ‘ View image’ to see it larger. Unlike some of the other images on the LoC site, including some versions of this image, it does not appear to have been ruined by excessive sharpening* of the digital file (which doubtless seemed a good idea given the different standards of the 1990s), and apart from a difference in tonality is a good match for the vintage print reproduced there.

LC-DIG-fsa-8b29516 Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection. Public Domain

The image above is an actual 821×1024 pixel file, and I’m looking at it on my screen at actual size as I write, where it displays at roughly 8 x 10 inches (a twice linear magnification from the original 4 x 5 negative, made by Lange on her Graflex RB Series D. Working with this format and probably with the camera hand-held, depth of field would have been pretty minimal as a fairly wide aperture such as f5.6 or f8 would have been used to avoid camera shake. Film was slow in modern terms, and generously exposed negatives were desired.

Critical sharpness occurs more or less on the ear and check shirt of Florence Owens Thompson, and I suspect as Lange peered down into the reflex viewfinder that the squares coming sharply into focus caught her attention. The eyes are certainly not as sharp, but sharp by the standards of the day which were much less rigorous than ours.

Way back in the 1970s I happened to be around when a very distinguished ex-President of the Royal Photographic Society was setting up a panel of his work for a workshop about gaining the awards of that body, and made the mistake of commenting that the pictures on it  – prints around 20 x 16″ were unsharp – as they clearly were. He overheard my comment and I got very firmly told that I didn’t know what I was talking about, his pictures were sharp enough. By his standards they were, but not by our more modern expectations – and things have got worse now we are used to zooming in to the actual pixels on screen.

Soth is of course correct to say that the eyes are “dramatically out of focus” in that their slight unsharpness actually increases the dramatic effect of the image, although for me it is perhaps the blurring of the wrinkles on her forehead that is more telling. There is a contrast between the biting sharpness of the hair of the child at the right of the image and the softness of the woman’s face as she stares into an unknown but apparently hopeless future.

For me the most successful of Soth’s re-creations is clearly based on Ruth Orkin’s ‘An American Girl in Italy’. As he clearly says, what gives his picture and the original their “energy is that a real event took place.” Though I still think Orkin’s image works so much better that I would hesitate in showing the new work if it were mine.

*With scans, standards of sharpness and tonality have also changed considerably but differently over a shorter period, as scanner technology has improved. The Library of Congress (and on a much smaller scale myself) suffers from having been one of the pioneers of putting photographic images onto the web. Many of those old scans now look more like caricatures rather than reproductions of the images the represent, with drastic white fringing and obvious jpeg artifacts.

Speculation on Photographs

Alec Soth starts an interesting discussion with his The art of speculation on his Little Brown Mushroom blog, where he begins by quoting a series of Tweets by Erroll Morris which attempt to give a simple account of the principles of his new book Believing Is Seeing.

Perhaps the most contentious of them is the first:

1. All photographs are posed

which on an obvious level is obviously not so.  Morris makes it true by a redefinition of the word ‘posed’, as becomes clear in his discussion of the two Roger Fenton pictures of ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’, one with cannonballs on the path and the other without, where he writes:

Couldn’t you argue that every photograph is posed because every photograph excludes something? In every photograph something is absent. Someone has made a decision about what time-slice to expose on the emulsion, what space-slice to expose on the emulsion.

You can only argue this if you are prepared to alter the accepted definition of ‘posed’ to mean something intrinsically different to its normally understood and accepted meaning, of something that has been set up or re-ordered or arranged within the view of the camera.  Framing isn’t posing, nor is the selection of the moment, or indeed the other decisions we all make that affect the picture we produce. His is not just a silly and circular argument, but one that erodes our critical vocabulary.

The quotation comes from the third and final of his three articles on these two pictures, where his quest to establish without doubt the order in which the two pictures were made takes him both to numerous experts in photo history and interpretation of images as well as on a field trip to the Crimea.

Public domain: US Library of Congress cph 3g09217
You can download a 50 Mb file from the Library of Congress and print your own Fenton

You can read his full three part series on line starting at Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg? (Part One) which has links to parts 2 and 3.  It was certainly a painstaking exercise, but after I’d spent a couple of minutes reading a little of part 1, all I wanted to know was if he had established the answer – and whether it agreed with my own immediate photographic intuition on first viewing the image that the cannonballs on the path were perhaps rather too nicely scattered. I posted some thoughts on the matter here in Cannon Balls to Fenton when these articles by Morris were first published in 2007.

Morris’s argument – as I say above –  seems to me to be saying that if we redefine ‘posed’ to mean made using the kind of selection and abstraction that is always  involved in making a photograph (even those ones that, to quote Leon Neal, you only got “you only got … by accidentally dropping your camera as your ate your Big Mac, firing a frame of the subject … as they passed behind you“)  then all photographs are posed.  I object to this kind of abuse of language.  Let’s find the right word and use it rather than cheapen another that has a normally accepted different and useful meaning.

 Soth discusses Morris’s second point:

2. The intentions of the photographer are not recorded in a photographic image. (You can imagine what they are, but it’s pure speculation).

It seems a rather partial truth.  Soth makes the point that our speculations about the photographers intention are essential to our experience of the work, andI think it we can also say that the photographers intentions are also integral to the production of the work. Soth discusses a well-known image by Robert Frank, of the view from a hotel window in Butte Montana. Although Frank’s intentions may not be recorded in it, had they been different then he would have made a different picture. Or no picture at all.

Frank’s intentions of course made him take not just this picture, but a large number of others, and to edit and sequence them in a particular way.  And though his intentions may not be recorded precisely in the book or any individual image, both rule out many possible interpretations. What we imagine when we read the work is certainly not “pure speculation” but an impure speculation that runs with rather than against the evidence provided.

Of course each of us sees a different picture when we look at this (or any other image) constructing it from our own interpretation of what we see and what we know about it, our previous experiences and the environment in which we come across it.  We see a different picture every time we look at it, but we are likely to have both in our individual and our shared experience certain perceptions about it which are likely to be in common.  Photography isn’t just a medium, it is also a community.

Continued in Speculation on Photographs (part 2)

 

Northern Outfall Sewer 1990, 2005, 2010…

Saturday afternoon I made another trip to the Northern Outfall Sewer (aka Greenway) on Stratford Marsh, a site I’ve been to many times over the years since my first visit around 1982. But this time I wasn’t just going to take photographs as I have done over the years, but to talk about my work, along with four other photographers, and to take part in a discussion with them and the twenty or so others present in one of the sessions of the ‘Salon de Refuse Olympique’ (I think seriously missing an acute accent on the third word of the title) which was described as “An Olympian marathon of salon debates for forthcoming book documenting and highlighting critical creative responses to the official London 2012 Olympic Games site and Cultural Olympiad.”

Our session, held in the View Tube,  entitled ‘Imagining the Olympics‘ was led by Dr Ben Campkin, Director of UCL Urban Lab and assistant director of Architectural Research at the Bartlett School of Architecture and the other photographers on the panel were Chris Dorley-Brown, Alessandra Chila, David George and Giles Price. Gesche Wuerfel also down to take part was out of the country but had sent some thoughts.

I don’t know how it will emerge in the forthcoming book, but for the event each of us was asked to send 3 photographs and to use these to talk about our work.  So here are the three pictures I sent and below them the text that I wrote and used as a guide to my presentation.

© 1990, Peter Marshall
London Olympic site 1990
© 2005 Peter Marshall
London Olympic site 2005
© 2010, Peter Marshall
London Olympic site 2010

 Before The Olympics – The Lea Valley 1981-2010 and Beyond?

Two of these pictures are in my book ‘Before the Olympics – the Lea Valley 1981-2010’ and the third taken shortly after I put that book together. A dozen of my pictures of the Olympic site in the 1980s including the first of these three are now in a show that opened this morning at the Shoreditch Gallery in Hoxton Market, part of the East London Photomonth.

I made that 1990, the next 2005 and the last 2010. All made more or less where we are now, a place where I’ve taken quite a few photographs over the years. Much of the work from the area is on my Lea Valley web site, which gets around 250 views a day, a rather small fraction of the 3.25 million a year for all of my work, but the active time on the site for the average visitor of almost a minute is high in web terms.  I showed over 250 pictures from the site in a presentation at the 2010 London Documentary Film Festival after which I was asked ‘Do you have a book’ and thought to myself ‘Why not?, and a couple of weeks later I did – and Blurb made it an editor’s pick and got me to talk about it at their week of presentations in London last November.

I began photographing London in the early 1970s, but only began work seriously in the 80s, having produced and exhibited a major project on Hull, where I’d found a way to approach the city. I’d also worked in Paris, where ten years earlier I’d come across and been inspired by the work of Eugene Atget. Other influences included topographic works such as the encyclopaedic ‘Face of London’ by Harold Clunn and of course Pevsner’s ‘The Buildings of England’ series, though this was in some ways a perverse stimulus in that I was often more excited by what he left out than what he put in.

Back then, few people were in any real sense attempting to photograph London as a city, and the scale was daunting. There were no digital cameras, no GPS, no geo-tagging, no personal computers, no Internet. I started with the A-Z of London, which fortunately after a few years changed from its own system to use the National Grid. At the base of my project was the idea of building up a corpus of work that would include what I felt to be significant buildings and scenes to represent every kilometre square of Greater London (though of course some were much more productive than others.) It remains an unfinished project, partly because of the scale (there are probably around 2000 such squares in my slightly elastic definition of London) but largely because it has been overtaken by the Internet and the explosion of photography in the digital era.

But this work, some of which was bought for the National Building Record and some put on my first major web site on my own domain in 1996 – it was called  (in a nod to Pevsner) ‘buildingsoflondon.co.uk’. I saw the work as a resource and a jumping-off point for other projects, some related to geography and transport – including projects on the Northern Outfall sewer, below us, the Lea Navigation and other rivers, and, not far away, the Greenwich Meridian, but others which were more a cultural exploration, such as ‘Ideal Café, Cool Blondes and Paradise’. Another major theme was the de-industrialisation of London, reflected in part in my ‘London’s Industrial Heritage’ site. The first portfolio I put together on the Lea was part of an unsuccessful application for Arts Council support around 1983, but many photographers who saw it were very encouraging, including one now very influential in the photography world who advised me to give up the day job – teaching – and go full time.

More recently I’ve returned to photographing the people of London, on the streets, in festivals and particularly in protests, and have become better known for a site called ‘My London Diary’. This work brought me back to the Olympic site, both to cover the protests against the Olympic bid and also the unsuccessful efforts by the Manor Gardens allotment holders to be a part of what might have been a truly green Olympics.

Of course these three are not the only pictures that I took over the years from more or less the same spot – and had I had the time I could have matched them more closely from my files. On the way to the discussion I went and made several more panoramas, including one from the same viewpoint. And on Sunday I was back on Fish Island and Hackney Wick taking a few more images of the Olympic site, some of which I’ll share in a later post – and of course in My London Diary.

You Almost Never Need Releases

I’ve long told people that you seldom need releases for the use of pictures of people, property, logos etc, and it it great to find a lengthy posting by Dan Heller, who has written a book on the subject that states this clearly. And although Heller is clearly writing from a US perspective, I think that most if not all of what he has to say would also apply here.

Basically, in his Busting Myths about Model Releases, Heller states clearly that you would only need a model release to use a picture where it could reasonably be seen to imply that the person shown was recommending or endorsing a particular product.  To get a judgement against you, the claimant would have to show that the mythical man on the Clapham omnibus seeing the picture in the way it was used would come to that conclusion.

If you photos are not being used to promote some kind of product, then there is no need to worry at all.

In a follow-up post, Commercial Releases and Model Releases he suggests that we need to replace the idea that model releases are needed for commercial use a concept that more accurately reflects the law, that of ‘advocacy’. And basically if it isn’t ‘Advocacy’ you can use it for any purpose without any kind of release. In particular you can use pictures in books, exhibitions, your own portfolio and of course your own web site without one.

If, like me, you are often told that you are not allowed to photograph in a particular private place, the good news is that any pictures you take before that you can use how you like. Of course in many places that information comes on the the ticket  that you buy to gain admission or is on a highly visible notice at the entrance.

There are perhaps other ways in which a photograph might be defamatory,  an area into which Heller has not yet strayed in this series of posts.

He does mention that there are cases where the photographer may have signed an agreement restricting their use of the pictures before taking them in what he calls a ‘closed session.’  Obviously such restrictions are then binding, although in general other than for some types of private photography I think photographers should either decline to sign these at all, or to cross through any restrictive clauses before doing so. Better not to do the job than to have great pictures you can’t use.