Barclays

One of the first protests I took part in – as a protester rather than a photographer – was outside a Barclays Bank in Manchester in the 1960s, part of a campaign against their financing of the South African apartheid regime. Although the ‘Global Nonviolent Action Database‘ at Swarthmore University states “Student activists launched the Boycott Barclays campaign in 1969” and credits “students at London universities”, I’m fairly sure we did it before then in Manchester.

But of course Manchester did so many things first, and I sat for physics lectures at a bench with a small plaque recording “Rutherford first split the atom here” and later a short distance away shortly after 11 o’clock in the morning on June 21st, 1948 the computer age began, when the first stored program ran on the world’s first stored-program electronic digital computer, the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, better known as “The Baby“. As its father Freddie Evans later said “It was a moment to remember. This was in June 1948, and nothing was ever the same again.”

People often tell me that protest never works, but the Barclays campaign proved them wrong, though it did take until 1986 before Barclays completely ended its support for the apartheid regime. But Barclays have of course since been involved in many other ethically questionable activities including laundering money for Russian criminals, and, the focus of the protest I was photographing in October last year by  Frack Off London and Divest London in collaboration with Frack Free Ryedale, financing fracking in various communities across the UK.

The London protest was one of many at Barclays around the country, but this one was meeting in Golden Square and heading for an unnamed branch – which turned out to be at Piccadilly Circus. As we approached we met up with people carrying a sofa and other furniture which they hoped to set up inside the branch for to ‘Bring it Home to Barclays’ the effect the fracking they finance would have on communities – such as Ryedale.

The first protesters to arrive managed to rush into the branch but security there quickly closed the door before the furniture arrived, and rather than rush inside with the protesters as I’ve often done, I’d chosen to stay with the sofa – and it turned out to have been the right choice.

The protesters quickly set up their living room set up a ‘living room’ on the pavement outside while those inside held their banners up against the windows. A mother and daughter from Rydale where fracking has been approved around their home made themselves at home on the sofa with a picture of their house and a framed sampler embroidered with the Barclays eagle and the message ‘Home Fracked Home’. There wasn’t a lot of space to work, with other photographers and protesters crowding around, but with the fisheye and a lot of patience waiting for people to get out of the way I managed to get the whole scene – including two engineers with a fracking rig – into a picture.

And there was tea with hot water from the urn and specially made biscuits which tasted fine.

More at Bring Fracking Home to Barclays.

Continue reading Barclays

Haywire

Long ago, while still a fairly young and impressionable photographer back in the 1970s, I first came across the work of Lee Friedlander in the pages of Creative Camera and was immediately a fan (though I’d probably seen some of his work without knowing who it was by in jazz magazines and on record sleeves earlier.)

So a few years later when the same magazine announced a book of his photographs, self-published by the Haywire Press, I immediately ordered it by post from them. Lee Friedlander: Photographs was published in 1978, but it took a very long time to arrive, as I think neither Haywire – Friedlander’s own publishing business or Creative Camera were the most reliable of companies, but eventually it came and I spent a great deal of time studying it’s pages. I’ve got several more Friedlander books since, but it probably remains my favourite, and is still available at a fairly reasonable price secondhand – probably less, allowing for inflation than I paid in 1978.

It wasn’t Friedlander and Haywire Press’s first book, they began with Self Portrait in 1970, and I remember looking through it a year or two later, perhaps at the Photographers Gallery. I didn’t buy it, partly because I thought I’d already seen the best of the work in magazines, but largely because I simply couldn’t afford it. I did buy the second edition around 1998.

The year before Self Portrait, Friedlander’s photographs had been published in a book paired with etchings by Jim Dine, Work From the Same House, a slim volume with 33 black and white plates. An image shows the two artists, lying on a bed looking towards the camera but dominated by the sole of a shoe in the foreground. And it states:

Biographical details of Lee Friedlander are almost non-existent. Aside from being one of America’s leading photographers, recently exhibiting work at the Museum of Modern Art, he was born in 1934 in Aberdeen, Washington and lives in New City [sic] New York with his wife and two children. He is said to be right handed.

There is now rather more information on line, but I still learnt quite a few things from the video of the NYPL talk.  Work From the Same House was published by Trigram Press on the Kings Road in London and printed in Chatham, Kent. I think I once had a copy (it sold for 21s – £1.05 – when published), but being so slim it’s hard to find!

Thanks to a report of the first interview given by Friedlander in 30 years reported in PDNPulse, How Lee Friedlander Edits His Photo Books, I now know why he called his self-publishing company Haywire Press. You can see and hear the whole event at the New York Public Library web site, though at around an hour and a half long I’ve not yet found time to sit an watch all the way through. Friedlander, sitting with a camera around his neck, is interviewed by his grandson, Giancarlo T. Roma, and there are certainly some interesting moments, though as he was born on 14th July 1934, there are a few minor lapses of memory, but he seems in great shape for someone coming up to 83.

Of course Friedlander has taken many pictures since that 1978 book, and I’ve bought a few more of his books (and got others as review copies), including Like a One-Eyed Cat and Letters from the People, though there have been some areas of his work that have left me cold. But he has given us so much, and I’ll certainly be wishing him a happy birthday on Friday.

Bad Practice by Theori

I can only hope that the terrible fire at Grenfell Tower will not just bring to light the criminal actions by those running Kensington & Chelsea Council and its TMO but also the socially divisive housing policies of other councils which are increasingly failing the residents of their boroughs. Those who died at Grenfell died because they were poor and those responsible for their housing didn’t much care what happened to them. It isn’t just a local failure, but a national failure, and one expressed powerfully by Potent Whisper in his Grenfell Britain. Click and listen if you’ve not already done so.

It’s a failure that I’ve been documenting over the years, including social cleansing by Labour dominated boroughs such as Southwark at the Heygate and Aylesbury estates, in Newham with the Carpenters Estate and the disgustingly shabby treatment of the Focus E15 mothers and many more, most recently the £2 billion give-away of public assets by Haringey Council involving comprehensive demolition of roughly a third of their social housing. Of course it isn’t just these Labour councils who are at fault, but some seem to have embraced these anti-social policies with rather more fervour than the Tory-run areas.

Housing and food are the two most basic physical needs we have. Under the Tory government most of the responsibility for the second has been delegated to charity, with huge numbers of people having to rely on food banks to keep them from starvation, largely caused by the benefits system with its sanctions, cuts and administrative failures – which can leave some people destitute for long periods. Government cuts have given local authorities problems with meeting housing need, but the problems here are a long term malaise; Thatcher’s irrational hate of council housing was taken up and accelerated by Blair’s Labour under the title of ‘regeneration’ and austerity under the coalition was just another turn of the screw.

Some people in desperate housing need qualify for support from the local authority, though for others it is sofa-surfing or the streets (and the number sleeping on London streets continues to rise dramatically; 7,500 in 2015 and probably over 10.000 now.) Again in 2015, 48,000 London households were living in temporary accommodation – and that including 74,000 children.

London boroughs use companies like Theori Housing Management to provide temporary accommodation for vulnerable people they have a duty to care for, but rather like outsourcing of jobs, outsourcing of their responsibilities is a way of turning a blind eye to sub-standard and insanitary conditions. Of course the management companies will also play their part in the deception, putting on visits for council officials where they don’t get shown the damp streaming down the walls and the cockroaches and return giving the company a clean report.

Housing protesters from decided to bring the cockroaches with them to the protest outside Theori Housing Management’s offices in Walthamstow, a company used by many London councils including Waltham Forest and Newham, with two very large specimens – protesters dressed as them.

The protest was organised by residents of Boundary House and Focus E15 from Newham. Boundary House, managed by Theori, is not in London, but in Welwyn Garden City, which makes it difficult or impossible for those housed there to keep jobs or retain contact with friends or family in London and for their children to keep at the same schools – even an off-peak rail ticket costs £15. There were some residents and former residents present, but few could afford to travel and many were scared to complain in public. They complain of leaking roofs, mould on interior walls, cockroach infestation and say children could easily fall out of unguarded upper floor windows that appliances are dangerous faulty appliances, and large photographs stuck to the windows of Theori during the protest confirmed their stories.

Many had complained to Theori, but say they are hung up on, placed on hold for hours and called liars, ignored, insulted and patronised. So they had got in touch with Focus E15 (I’d been at one the weekly Stratford street stall when one of them had come to speak) and together organised this protest. Focus E15 themselves came together to oppose their own evictions and attempts by Newham council to move them into private rented accommodation in distant areas of the country away from nurseries, jobs and family – when a short distance from there hostel was a large council estate the council had forced most residents to move out from and kept empty for years. They argue and campaign to have people found homes in their own areas.

Cockroaches at Theori Housing Management

And back to Grenfell Tower, where we are now learning of the failure of Kensington and Chelsea to offer suitable homes to all but a small proportion of those made homeless. People want to stay in the area – but some have been told by officials that if they turn down properties a long way away they will be judged to have made themselves intentionally homeless. Rightly the nation has shuddered at this total lack of humanity and sensitivity towards these traumatised people – and I think the council has withdrawn the threat. But it is a threat that is routinely made in other cases in many if not all boroughs in London.

It isn’t even that there are no homes. There are said to be 1400 empty properties in Kensington & Chelsea at the moment, many of which would be suitable and could be bought by council or government. And nearby the large Silchester council estate is arked for demolition and new build gentrification in what has been described as “classic London social cleansing”.

Continue reading Bad Practice by Theori

Here from Down Under

It was a great privilege to be able to meet and photograph several leading figures from Australia who were here in London. If you look hard at the picture above, in the middle close to the bottom you can see a man playing a guitar, Australian Aborigine musician and activist Bunny Lawrie, one of the Jirkala Mirning people of southern Australia.

His unofficial performance in the Great Hall of the British Museum told the story of how BP, who the British Museum supports through its sponsorship deal which puts a cultural gloss on its murkier activities, were forced to drop plans to drill in the Great Australian Bight, and of the continuing fight to stop drilling by BP’s partner Statoil and others.

The British Museum’s collection holds a number of items from indigenous cultures around the world, many of which were initially taken by rather dubious means. When Captain Cook and his crew tried to make their first landing in Australia at Botany Bay in 1770 they were met by two Gweagal warriors with spears and shields. Accounts differ of the exact nature of that meeting, but it ended with Cook’s men firing muskets at the two men, one of whom, Cooman, was hit in the leg, and the warriors dropped their spears and ran.

When Cook returned to Europe, he brought with him around 40 spears and other artifacts that they found on the beach. Among these was the wooden shield which Cooman had held, complete with a hole made by the musket round. Rodney Kelly, a sixth generation descendant of Cooman was in England to demand the return of this shield to Australia, where it would be an important exhibit in a new museum to be opened in Sydney on the 250th anniversary of Cook’s landing. The following week he went to the museum to discuss the return of the shield, but unfortunately was met with a refusal – they are unwilling to part with any of the objects in the museum.

In the British Museum the shield is hidden in a display in a glass windowed cabinet, with little being made of its historical significance. Reflections make it difficult to view, and the lighting is low, presumably for conservation reasons, though with daylight coming in from the windows the UV levels may be higher than acceptable. Most visitors would not be aware of its presence, though it is featured on the audio tour, but today it did attract a small crowd as Kelly knelt in front of it to pay his respects to his ancestor and then talked about it and the events.

Later he posed with a reproduction of the shield in a catalogue in the museum bookshop. The photograph appeared to show it in better condition than it was now and he and the others expressed worries about its conservation, though it could simply be that the photograph has been a little tweaked to make the red ochre more visible.

For the pictures taken in the long gallery (The Kings Library) where the shield is kept, I decided that using flash would be inappropriate and obtrusive, though there were a few flashes from other photographers. Of course with the glass on the cabinets, reflections of the flash would made pictures taken more or less straight on impossible in any case.

Using the D810, most of the images taken there were at ISO 6400, a stop higher than I like to use, but even then with my 28-200 generally at full aperture, shutter speeds dropped to 1/20th of a second. Of course that lens is a slow lens, but a faster lens wouldn’t really have helped much as when filling the frame with people’s heads I was working at around 160mm focal length equivalent and needed the depth of field that f5.6 provided. Some were sharp enough to use, but quite a few were not. For some pictures a vibration reduction lens would have helped, but I think much of the blur was due to the people moving rather than the camera.

With the D700 I kept the ISO at 3200, the wider 16-35mm allowing me to use slower speeds with the lens wide open at f4. Once out into the Great Hall the light was much brighter and I was working at around ISO 1000 with the longer lens and ISO 400 with the wide-angle.

Give back Cooman’s Shield
Great Australian Bight Alliance
Continue reading Here from Down Under

We Are All Alba

In a recent statement the United Voices of the World union (UVW) announced that although the cleaners at the LSE recently gained the “historic victory which resulted in them being brought in-house after 7 days of strike action and the largest cleaners strike in UK history, the cleaners will be back out on strike for 3 more days during the LSE students graduation over one remaining issue of dispute: Alba Pasmino.”

People first became aware of Alba’s sacking after she stood up at the meeting which began the dispute at the end of September 2016 and told everyone about it, and the meeting then pledged to support her.

A couple of weeks later on October 14th the first major protest in the UVW campaign made the sacking of Alba its main focus. After a rally outside the LSE student union, cleaners, students and other supporters marched along Kingsway to the building where LSE and the cleaning company Noonan which the LSE had outsourced the cleaning to have offices and held a rally outside.

Alba again spoke, as did others, and there was a great deal of chanting ‘Reinstate Alba!‘ as well as drumming and blowing of vuvuzelas to ensure that everyone around knew what was taking place – and why. It was a demand repeated on many further protests and strike rallies.

Alba was one of the longest serving members of the LSE cleaning team, having worked there for 12 years and had become one of the cleaning supervisors.  Noonan claimed they were making her redundant because they needed fewer supervisors – and the number has halved in the past few years. The UVW have taken her case to an  employment tribunal but that cannot not guarantee her reinstatement even if the judge accepts that she was unlawfully dismissed.

The UVW say that after an agreement has been reached in the dispute, “Noonan’s newly appointed Account Director is keen to see Alba return, but his efforts to bring that about are being blocked, without justification, by the chest-beating director of LSE Facilities, Allan Blair, who is callously using Alba as a political football which is cruelly at the expense of her livelihood and well-being.”

Obviously the UVW as well as Noonan want to see this matter resolved without delay, and the union are now threatening a further 3 day strike during the LSE student graduation which begins next week on Wednesday 12th July.  I sincerely hope the LSE will see sense and settle before then, but otherwise the strike will go ahead, I will be there taking more pictures of the cleaners, and support from others will be welcome – check the Facebook event page for details.

Justice for LSE cleaners
Continue reading We Are All Alba

Cable St 80 years on.

I wasn’t of course at the ‘Battle of Cable St’, commemorated in a fine mural, as it took place nine years before I was born, but there are still a few who were there around, notably Max Levitas, who not only came to the rally, but spoke at it.

There was such a crush in front of the stage that I couldn’t get close enough to really see him, and was photographing over people’s shoulders and between heads, straining on tip-toe, and even taking some with camera held in the air, though on the D810 where the screen doesn’t tilt the Live View image is hardly visible in bright conditions. It was bright where I was standing, but not particularly on the stage where Max, who I’ve met number of times before, most recently just after his 100th birthday in June 2015, was sitting to speak. If his legs were a little weak at 101, his mind and voice were still strong. I needed ISO 3200 to combat camera shake, working with the lens wide open at 200mm (300 equiv) 1/320 f5.6 – though I found I needed to overexpose a little (+0.7) to get a decent histogram.

This is a fairly extreme crop, even from that 300mm view, taken with the camera in landscape orientation and cropped to portrait and then some. I only went into that rally when Max was speaking and left as he finished, though I had photographed other speakers elsewhere on the day. There were plenty of other speakers, but more interesting things were happening outside.

I’d started the day in ‘Itchy Park’, now Altab Ali Park, where some of those attending did looks rather more like the 1936 originals, and although I photographed as always now in colour, I was pleased to be able to give the image just a little of a hand-coloured look. There were plenty of speeches before the march, including by East End historian David Rosenberg, who I’ve listened to talking about Cable St on various occasions, and TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady who is someone I always enjoy photographing.

The march itself was something of an anti-climax, and disappointing in that for much of its route the march, celebrating an event when people really did show that the streets were ‘Our Streets’ marched along the pavements or cycle path instead. I’d gone on ahead on Cable St and so missed the only real battle of the day, when anarchist groups defied the stewards and police and insisted on marching on the road.

I’d gone ahead of the march to meet up with Class War who I had been told would be at the Cable St mural, setting up there for a rally outside the main rally in the park beyond, where they were joined by other autonomous groups including London and Merseyside Anti-Fascists, 161 On Tour, Hunt Sabs and the Italian Communists for a celebration with rather more panache and colour and better music.

Cable St has become a legend of the Labour movement. It’s perhaps worth pointing out that it wasn’t a fight with the fascists but with the police, that the Labour Party told people not to go, and the fighters were mainly the Jewish population of Whitechapel, Irish dockers and the Communist Party. And that the East End itself was full of fascists, with Bethnal Green just up the road a particular stronghold.

So that party outside in front of the mural really had more right to celebrate than Jeremy Corbyn and the other Labour Party members crowding on to the stage and into the park next door. And although one march was stopped, Mosley’s real defeat was not here but south of the river a year later, the Battle of Bermondsey on 3rd October 1937.

Continue reading Cable St 80 years on.

Housing

It’s hard not to get depressed when thinking about housing in London, though I’m fortunate enough not to have to worry on my own account. Though even when we bought the house we still live in, back in 1974 we couldn’t afford one in either of the two places we thought about in London, so had to go just outside the Greater London boundary.

We had lived for some years in rented accommodation, at first privately rented, and the first landlord after we were married was decent enough, except for the excessive charges for gas and electric on his slot-meters. We bought a paraffin heater. But the rent for two rooms – the top floor of a small house – was the equivalent of around £2.80 a week, less than a quarter of my income (and around an eighth of our joint income.)

Things were a little less comfortable and more expensive when we moved to Leicester for a year- and the agent for the flat didn’t want to know much about anything except collecting the rent, and it was a relief when I got a job in Bracknell to qualify for housing from the development corporation, a new and spacious two bedroom flat at a lower rent than we had been paying a private landlord for out rather dingy single room.

We were only there four years, but they were four years when the rent more or less doubled, as rents were being brought into line with market rents I think solely for politically doctrinaire reasons. It made it easier to decide to buy a house (though we had other reasons too) as the rent was now very little different to the payments on a mortgage.

Now, many years later, that mortgage is long paid off – and we even made a profit as we had been advised to take out an endowment mortgage so my housing costs are limited to upkeep, though being a property owner isn’t always a good thing. But when I look at the rents that people pay in London now (or even on the edge where I live) I realise that unless I owned the house I would probably have to move elsewhere. It mightn’t be all that bad – I could still afford to live in Hull.

Back when I was small, my father still looked after some of the handful of cottages that his father had built for the men that worked for his various small businesses, none very successful, but these properties were never meant to be a source of income, just somewhere for those who shared in his work and their families to live. Rent control meant that the income from them failed to pay for keeping them in order, and when they were sold with sitting tenants as a part of my grandmother’s estate they were almost worthless (though now they probably fetch approaching half a million.)

Now private landlords are hugely subsided by the government paying housing benefit and are allowed to charge what they can get, with the result that rents have risen through the roof. And the incredible rise of ‘buy to let’ provides a way for those with some capital to exploit others and make money for nothing.

In my ideal world we would have a land tax and the ownership of land and property would be severely limited – sufficient to needs rather than for investment or profit. It’s an assessment that could be reasonably generous rather than unnecessarily punitive. But in the unequal world we have, there does seem an urgent need to do something to make private renting more affordable, as well as ending the taxpayer subsidy of practices which are clearly against the public interest.

I’d also like to see an good supply of socially provided rented housing – council homes, enough for all those who want it, something that would rapidly bring down private rents. But after the election of Mrs Thatcher, social housing figures fell steeply, continuing down to a miserable 13,500 under New Labour in 2003. Corbyn earlier this year promised a Labour government would build and average of 50,000 a year in its five year term (50% of his target for all new homes) – returning to a level last recorded under Thatcher in 1982. But Thatcher’s main contribution was of course the ‘right to buy’ which has removed 1.87 million social housing homes since 1980, a large percentage of which are now ‘buy to let’ private rental properties.

But even more shameful than Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ is New Labour’s ‘Regeneration’ policy which, through the activities of London Labour councils such as Newham, Lambeth and Southwark has led to the wholesale loss of social housing, and a disruption of local communities that even the Luftwaffe failed to achieve.

Southwark’s prime example (though they are currently working on rather more) is of course the architectural award-winning Heygate Estate which was at the Elephant and Castle, an example I’ve mentioned before. In 2007 the council valued the estate at £150m, though they had been employing consultants and PR to demonise it for some years, and deliberately housing difficult tenants there. Despite this, 189 of those living in the 1,212 council homes had liked living there enough to become leaseholders, and the few properties I went in were spacious and in good condition, with the landscape outside coming into maturity as the trees planted when it was built grew. In many respects it was a well-planned and well laid out site and most of the building had been to a high standard, and with relatively minimal care it could have lasted at least another 50 years.

Southwark spent at least £51.4m on clearing that estate, but they sold it to Lendlease for £50m and a promise (very unlikely ever to be fulfilled) that they would eventually get some of the developers excessive profits from the site. To replace those 1,212 (the leaseholders property having been taken back for peanuts) homes, the new Elephant Park will just 74 homes for social rent. This one estate represents over one eighth of the total loss of 8,000 social-rented homes.

The protest on Thursday 6 Oct was outside the Stirling Prize Ceremony where Trafalgar Place, the first phase of Lend Lease’s development on the Heygate had been nominated for the prize. drMM Architects didn’t win that prize, but outside were awarded the Architects for Social Housing ‘O J Simpson Award for getting away with murder’ though they didn’t turn up to accept it.

The following Saturday I was in the neighbouring borough, Lambeth, celebrating the achievement of that council, also Labour, calling on it to stop demolishing council estates, closing libraries and driving out local businesses with the closure of the Brixton Arches. Among the estates being demolished or marked for demolition are Myatts Field North, Cressingham Gardens and Central Hill, the last such fine example of good architectural and community design that it is hard to believe was denied listingon other than political grounds.

ASH protest Stirling Prize
Stand Up to Lambeth Council
Stand Up to Lambeth March
Brixton Arches & More
Continue reading Housing

May 2017 Complete


Railways and canals in Manchester

May was a long month for me, and I’ve only managed to finish putting it on My London Diary (with just a few little things to tidy up) coming up for midnight on June 30th because I had to take something of a rest from work this week – for various reasons.

Too many things have happened recently in London and in the UK – including a general election, terrible attacks at Westminster and London Bridge and the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower. Fortunately I haven’t been directly affected personally by any of these, and have only covered them rather peripherally, but they have taken up a considerable amount of nervous energy and time writing about related issues rather than photography.

As well as photographing as usual in London, I spent a weekend away in Manchester, attending a conference and 50th anniversary celebration of a group I’ve been a part of for over 40 years which I was also asked to photograph. While I was up there I found a few hours to take a walk in Manchester – where I lived for 7 years back in the 1960s, mainly as a student – and also to take the tourist trail around Rochdale, a town I don’t think I ever visited when I lived in Manchester although I taught for two terms a short distance away.

May always starts with a heavy day, as I attend and photograph the May Day celebrations in London – and this year for once May Day was a bank holiday. Long days like that – and the long night afterwards editing and processing images – make me feel my age, and it now takes me several days to recover.

May 2017

End Gross Inequality at the LSE
Keep the Fox Hunting Ban
Picturehouse Strike for Living Wage
Sisters Uncut General Election Rally


Cyclists Tory HQ die-in against pollution
E17 Protest Against School Cuts
Red Cross act for Hunger Strikers
Golden Boat Award for Serota


Vote for decent, secure homes
Lift the Siege of Buenaventura
Grant Assange Safe Passage


LSE Cleaners strike for equality
March Against Monsanto
Focus E15 launch The Newham Nag


End media lies against Venezuela
Teen Voice says votes at 16
End dog and cat meat trade
Stop Deportation Of LGBTI Asylum Seekers
Cleaners protest at HSBC


Shut down Yarl’s Wood Prison


LSE Cleaners strike
Rochdale
Manchester
LSE Equality Life Not Money protest
DPAC against Tory Hate


May Day F**k Parade
May Day F**k Parade Meets
May Day Rally
May Day March
May Day March Gathers

London Images

Continue reading May 2017 Complete

Hugh Edwards

As friends including regular readers of these posts will know, I don’t generally have a very high opinion of curators – except for a few that I’ve known and have worked with. Too many have put on shows that server largely to illustrate their lack of knowledge and real interest in the medium and are clearly concerned only with building their own careers. And far too often money that would be better spent on photography and photographers goes into their pockets and into creating fancy displays which might enhance their reputation but often take away attention from the work presented.

But of course there are exceptions. Actually quite a few of them, including the obvious ones like John Szarkowski. Many of the best have been, like him, photographers and have had a real appreciation of the medium.

Thanks to a recent post Hugh Edwards: Unknown Icon by Kenneth Tanaka on The Online Photographer, I have now been made aware of another fine curator. Edwards (1904–1986) was Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he had already worked for 30 years, for his last 12 years there from 1959-70, during which time he organised 75 exhibitions, as well as regularly showing new acquisitions.

This was an important time in the evolution of photography, and one in which Edwards played an major role, giving Robert Frank his first American museum exhibition in 1961 and promoting many emerging photographers as well as building up a fine study collection of work by nineteenth and twentieth century masters. And his contribution is finely and extensively documented in the web site on him and the photography he championed and bought for the Art Institute collection by photography curator Elizabeth Siegel and a team of researchers.

Photography was one of his many interests; David Travis, Curator and Chair of the Department of Photography from two years after Edwards retired until 2008 writes about him at some length and remembers the rare and memorable evenings at his home when he would show his own colour slides made at “a roller skating rink in Harvey, Illinois”. In in a letter to Frank, Edwards wrote “I ran away from ‘culture’ and accelerated education to spend all my evenings in a large skating rink on the outskirts of Chicago for five whole years. There were many wonders there and I used to wish someone would catch them so they could be kept. Then I found your book and saw you had done it.” Travis comments that having seen Frank’s work “published, Mr. Edwards felt his own mission as a photographer could end.”

Those who can make it to Chicago can see the extensive show at the Art Institute also curated by Seigel, The Photographer’s Curator: Hugh Edwards at the Art Institute of Chicago which runs until October 29th 2017. But otherwise the web site is a fine tribute to an amazing curator and his legacy.

D-Day Wrap

Something which I meant to acknowledge earlier but slipped my mind after I read the post was the announcement by A D Coleman, ‘It’s a Wrap‘ marking the official end of “our team’s deconstruction of the myth of Robert Capa’s D-Day experiences and the subsequent fate of his negatives“.

The end came exactly three years after the investigation began with the publication of photojournalist J. Ross Baughman’s critique of the TIME video celebrating the 70th anniversary of Robert Capa’s D-Day photographs, and included further contributions from Baughman as well as from photo historian Rob McElroy and combat veteran and military historian Charles “Chuck” Herrick as well as Coleman’s own major contribution.

During its course it also referenced the work of others on this and related matters such as Capa’s ‘Falling Soldier’, and included a number of other guest posts, including one by Jim Hughes who in 1986 was the first to publicly challenge the Capa D-Day myth (and his review was quite probably the origin of my own total scepticism about the alleged ‘darkroom disaster’.)

It has been a remarkable series of posts, and quite rightly has received awards and nominations, and has changed entirely our view of one of the best-known events of photographic history, but also shed light on how that history is manufactured and by whom. History isn’t just facts, but a point of view (rather like any photograph) but in this particular case we know also know that much of what was claimed as fact is in fact fiction.

Of course we always knew that Capa was himself an invention, and a great inventor of stories as well as someone who photographed them powerfully. But even when we know more and can dismiss the embroidery the image remains. Of course like all photographers Capa took many weak images, some of which have found their way to gallery walls and books but there certainly remain enough to sustain his reputation.

We will still look at his pictures and be moved by them even when we know that the captions may be unreliable and some events may have been staged. And Capa did certainly put his life at some risk – even if rather less than he made out – on D-Day and probably more so on various other occasions, and of course later paid for the risks with his life, stepping on to a landmine in Indo-China. And his advice “If you’re pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” is still worth remembering.

Although officially the end, it certainly isn’t, and Coleman gives a number of areas that he or others will pursue, both about D-Day and Capa’s other work, and more widely in a critical look at the medium’s institutions, particularly the ICP.

Coleman states he considers “the basic research complete and the case effectively proven” and is “developing this material into a book, an exhibition, and a multimedia piece” about which he will give occasional progress reports, but apart from this unless there are some unforeseen discoveries or unpredictable surges of interest there will be no further posts in the series. I hope the exhibition will tour to some of the more prestigious institutions both in the USA and Europe and will perhaps help to end the promulgation of the myth.

Coleman concludes his piece with a comment on a New York Times article by Geoff Dyer, a man who writes about photography and who prides himself on not being a photographer; “I don’t just mean that I’m not a professional or serious photographer; I mean I don’t even own a camera” (in ‘The Ongoing Moment’ a book given me by someone who had probably read on the previous page “I suspect, then, that this book will be a source of irritation to many people, especially those who know more about photography than I do.” It was, though I’ve never managed to read to the end, always throwing it down in disgust at some idiocy within minutes of picking it up.)

Dyer’s ignorance clearly extended to never having heard of the doubts about Capa’s D-Day legend (despite a previous feature in the newspaper for which he was writing) and he writes “we know the precise historical moment they depict, what happened before and after, the reasons the pictures are so blurred” a statement untrue in every detail.

As Coleman comments “This uninformed balderdash of Dyer’s exemplifies the lamentable condition of writing about photography today. If you wonder why I have persisted with this investigation, consider Dyer’s elegantly phrased but fact-free nonsense a sufficient answer.”

It’s a Wrap