It was in the late 1970s that I got to know Clare de Rouen, who was then running the bookshop at the Photographers’ Gallery, and we were both members of a loose group who often found ourselves drinking at talking – mainly about photography – in the upper bar of the Porcupine on the corner of Great Newport St and the Charing Cross Road after various events at the Photographers’ Gallery (then in Great Newport St.) She was a striking figure, truly an Egyptian goddess; I had come across her a few years earlier at the ICA where I was a very infrequent attender, but it was only later that I came to know her.
At that time the Photographers’ Gallery was still of interest to photographers, and I would go to see all the shows there, as well as many of the meetings, including those of a ‘Young Photographers‘ group that met there, where we would bring work and various well-known names would sometimes drop in and show their work and look at ours. It was a lively group, and often gave the Education Officer whose job it was to look after us something of a hard time, particularly as she was significantly less well informed about photography than most of us.
The group was a part of the educational aspect of the gallery that was important to earn its charity status and Arts Council grant, but was I think rather unpopular with the management – and they jumped at the chance to get rid of it when a small group of largely amateur photographers who had been to workshops at Paul Hill’s Photographers’ Place in Derbyshire went to them with a proposal to form ‘London Independent Photography‘. Though the gallery, having encouraged and backed that group, very quickly withdrew any support after it was set up and it continued on an even more independent basis – as it still does.
Bookshops played an important role in my development as a photographer, and the people who ran them were vital. At first for me it was the Creative Camera Bookroom, but after that closed the Photographers’ Gallery bookshop largely took its place. When you went into either of them, you didn’t just browse the books (though you could if you wanted) but met people who were enthusiastic about the books that they stocked and would talk intelligently with you about them. There were fewer books published in those days, and whenever I went in Clare would be keen to show me something she thought was good and that I would be interested in. And I was never a great customer in terms of spending – in the early days I couldn’t afford to buy many books – and later much of my collection came as review copies.
Later she moved a little up the Charing Cross road to Zwemmers, where the small photographic book shop she ran there was impossibly crowded with books, many of which were otherwise unobtainable in the UK, including a large selection of Japanese photography, almost all of which was new to me. I spent hours one afternoon going through book after book, at last coming across one that I simply had to buy: Fushi Kaden, photographs by Issei Suda*. I’m not sure why the 100 largly square format images had such a strong resonance, and the short English text at the back of the book told me very little. There is more in Japanese that I can’t read, but the English was of little more use, containing the mysterious sentence “It was not, however, until he produced the photographs using mirrors (appearing in the later section of this present work) that Suda established his own style.’ My only guess is this may be a reference to a change in camera, perhaps from his original Rolleiflex TLR to a simiilarly square format SLR. Next time my son comes to stay I’ll see if he can make sense from the Japanese, though all he normally reads is Manga.
What got me thinking about Issei Suda – and then about Clare de Rouen – was an article in the NY Times Lens blog today, Japanese Swordsman With a Camera, which has 14 of Suda’s pictures along with some text by Rena Silverman. I think all but one of the 14 are in the book that I bought, published in 1978 and are on show at Miyako Yoshinaga in New York until Oct 18, 2014.
The best place to see his work on-line seems to be Charles Hartman Fine Art, but you can also see a good selection of his images on ASX and a video there looks at two books, one by Hiromi Tsuchida and the second by Issei Suda. It’s also worth looking at Only Photography, which has some well reproduced images and also the cover of the book that I bought back in the 1980s. There is also an exhibition of 40 prints and a lengthy text on Facebook from Trans Asia Photography Review but the images there seem just a little lacking in contrast to me.
Later Clare opened her own bookshop further up the Charing Cross Road, upstairs above a sex shop, and showed work mainly of young photographers on the stairs. By then I had no more room at home for books, and seldom bought any. Openings there were impossibly crowded and I think the last time I saw her I greatly embarrassed myself when I dropped a bottle full of beer, handed to me out of a tub of ice and water, the wet neck slipping through my fingers. She quickly and efficiently cleared up the mess and handed me another bottle.
* I’ve just searched for this on AbeBooks and the only copy listed there is from a Spanish bookseller, for around £300 including shipping, so it was a good investment.
