The Photography Edition

Here is a low-res PDF version (450Kb) of the talk I gave to ‘The Photography Edition’ of the London Bloggers Meetup last night, where I was one of the four speakers with Chris, Madlen and Shimelle. I’ve added just a few words – including a rough figure for the visitors to here and My London Diary – and also links to the 3 stories I showed pictures from, No to the Crook, the Toff, The Fascist or Cop, March on the City – We Won’t Bail out the Bankers and Bromley May Queens Crowning.

I hope everyone enjoyed the presentations – they did seem to be well-received, and there were some interesting questions afterwards. One that I passed on, and regretted my chickening out afterwards was about the sheer volume of images currently being made (and uploaded to the web) and whether this was damaging to photography. Chris picked this up and gave a decent answer, and I sat there thinking it was a question I could write a book about but would find it difficult to say much coherent in a couple of minutes. Of course it is something that I’ve mentioned at times on this blog, and I should have at least have had a try.

Photography, as I think our four contributions had made clear means very different things to different people, a medium that can be made use of in many different ways. Perhaps one might ask a similar question about writing. There is an enormous written output publicly visible now, in blogs, on Twitter, Facebook etc, on web sites etc that simply didn’t exist a few years ago –  when if most people wrote it was in letters to friends or personal diaries or shopping lists. Much of the writing now on the web is mundane, much trivial, some illiterate. Much is technical or instructional. Our shopping lists may be very useful to us, but when people blog them I don’t have a great deal of interest.  But does all this mean that there are fewer – or more – good short stories or great novels? Probably not, though it may be harder to locate them in the larger pile of dross. Perhaps like gold where you need to dig a ton of ore for a gram or less of metal, though with less of the damage and strife that mining causes. (My report on last week’s ‘Carnival of Dirt’ is coming shortly on My London Diary!)

I’ve been fortunate to know one or two truly great photographers and to meet several more, but they are really very thin on the ground. Perhaps the one I knew best was arguably one of the greatest British photographers of the last century, but unless you are a photographer you will not have heard of Raymond Moore. Come to that, relatively few people could name any great British novelists or serious writers of the last 50 years, though I’ve mentioned at least one contender on these pages before. We probably have a good idea of what would be meant by ‘Dickensian‘ or  even ‘Joycean‘ but I think the only recent coinage that has joined these is ‘Ballardian‘.

One Response to “The Photography Edition”

  1. […] Peter Marshall – seasoned photo blogger Peter spoke about copyright, photographers rights, photographing people and public places. […]

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