Déjà Vu?

Saturday morning started for me opposite the Chinese Embassy, where supporters of a free Tibet were demonstrating on the 49th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising. I haven’t photographed there all of those 49 years, but it sometimes begins to feel a little like it, and this and the ensuing march through the West End certainly felt like watching a yet another repeat. All over again!

more 2008 pictures

Photographically it brought to mind two people, both in their different ways important teachers, although for me only at second-hand.

Alexey Brodovitch was art director of Harper’s Bazaar from 1938 to 1958, and among the photographers he nurtured there were Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Hiro, while his classes in New York (and New Haven) drew Diane Arbus and Tony Ray Jones and a whole generation of New York based photographers. One of the many whose work you may not know well, but has a great web site with work from 60 years of photography is George S Zimbel.

Brodivitch used to insist to photographers “Surprise me!” and told them that if they looked into the viewfinder and saw something they had seen before not to take the picture.

The other person who came to mind was Garry Winogrand (and it was Zimbel who turned Winogrand on to photography), whose work has always interested me greatly. Again I never met him, though I’ve used film of him in teaching (and a piece in The Online Photographer last summer included links to a TV video on him from 1982 and the recollections of O C Garza who studied with him at the University of Texas in the mid 70’s – both well worth looking at.)

In the video, one of several comments by Winogrand is “You don’t learn anything from repeating what you know … in effect so I keep trying to make it uncertain”

Saturday with ‘Free Tibet‘, too many things seemed familiar and I had problems with making things uncertain as I struggled with what Winogrand described as “the battle of form versus content.” But too many of my images were merely safe – and as he also said, “Most everything I do doesn’t quite make it. Hopefully you’re risking failing every time you make a frame.” Perhaps as usual I wasn’t risking enough.

You can see more of my pictures from 2008 on My London Diary, as well as some from previous years:

Free Tibet: 2000