Pioneers of Photography

Historians may quibble at some of the detail of the three animations of early pioneers of photography produced by animator Drew Christie, for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which you can view on PDN Pulse but they have considerable charm, and I think provide a good introduction for those coming to Henry Fox Talbot, Eadweard Muybridge and Carleton Watkins for the first time.

I had some reservations about details when watching the first two short videos. The Talbot for example also mentions Daguerre but fails to mention Anne Atkins, who got in before Talbot with the first photographically illustrated book – and of course also fails to mention the many others who contributed to the development of photography on paper, and perhaps more surprisingly the Calotype process with its development of a latent image. It wasn’t just a further improvement on his earlier work, but a considerable leap. I had some quibbles too about the other local lad, Muybridge, but of less significance.

But I actually learnt a little about the life and various setbacks of Carleton Watkins, though not about his photographs which I was already familiar with. I have to admit to beinf rather more of a Timothy O’Sullivan fan – and the Library of Congress has over a thousand of his images on-line, many with seriously large files you can download.

Hackney Dreams

This was Broadway Market in 1979, and in Sharon’s Party Wear shop window was a small dress on a stand, standing on a curved plinth sandwiched between some highly patterned wall paper and the wire grid protecting the glass.

Above it on the wallpaper was a notice ‘Bridesmaid and Confirmation made to order‘. The dress seemed too small to be made even for a child to wear and was perhaps there as an example of the standard of workmanship, but the whole scene had for me a remarkable pathos, hard to explain.

Just along from there was ‘DREAMWEAR, The Lingerie Shops of London‘, but I could only dream, as the metal shutters across its front were firmly padlocked, never to open again, and next door even the corrugated iron was looking rather past its best. These pictures were among those in my book and web site London Dérives.

Of course there was a need for redevelopment, though it was rather greed than need that drove it, and even more than 25 years later the battle over the gentrification of the area was still raging, with the community fighting evictions – and losing to a dodgy council and corrupt developers. There is a film made for Channel 4 in 2007 by Emily James on her web site about the battle which makes interesting viewing. There certainly have been gains for the area but at the totally unnecessary loss of forcing out a number of small local businesses and a change in the nature of the area.

One of the few – if not the only property left that still retains some of the feeling of the old Broadway Market – is F Cooke’s, and that’s where I was heading on Thursday evening, not for a pie with mash and liquor but for a book launch.
Hoxton Mini Press describes itself as “an independent publisher based in East London making collectable photography books“, and I’ve so far collected two of them, the irrepressible ‘Shoreditch Wild Life’ by Dougie Wallace, now in its second edition, and the charming ‘I’ve Lived in East London for 86 ½ Years’ by Martin Usborne – now in its third edition, starring Joseph Markovitch, who “has left London only once to go to the seaside with his mother. He loves Nicolas Cage, has five sugars in his tea, would have married a six foot two Hispanic woman but in the end had bad chest catarrh and never had a girlfriend.”

Broadway Market is next to the Regent’s Canal, and I photographed here many times over the years, though finding those pictures now is something of a problem. In my latest book on Blurb, Canal Walks (as always I recommend the PDF version on ground of both cost and quality), a double page spread shows two images made on the route I walked from the bus to Broadway Market, including an image under the railway bridge from 1983.

I paused on my walk last Thursday evening to photograph from more or less the same spot, though with a rather wider lens, and although there are a few differences, I could still see much the same view, which includes several other places where I’ve made photographs.

Then came a spectacle that seemed somehow to me to sum up the very different Hackney of today to that when I first photographed here. F Cooke was rather different too, transformed for the night into a book shop, and with a large crowd on the street outside drinking from bottles of a craft ale, Five Points Pale, brewed in a railway arch under Hackney Downs station.

When the beer ran out I made my way home through a street familiar to fans of Throbbing Gristle, to catch a bus to Bethnal Green.

The Five Points Pale had gone down very easily, and perhaps had something to do with the rather odd hallucination I found myself photographing in Bethnal Green before taking the tube on my way home.
Continue reading Hackney Dreams

Punk London 1977

I’ve known Derek Ridgers a long time, I think all the way back to 1977 when he was making the pictures in his book Punk London 1977. He’d started taking pictures in the mosh pit at Hammersmith Odeon with a camera borrowed from work, where one of the advertising accounts he worked on was for Minolta cameras. He’d found he needed to use flash, and bent a wire coat-hanger to work as a flash bracket, and when I met him he’d just had a small portfolio of the pictures published in one of the photo mags I bought.

Like me a year or two earlier, he had wandered along to his local camera club in the largely mistaken notion that it would be a good place to find out more about photography. Like me I think he fairly soon found out his mistake, but also found that there were a small number of people in the club passionate about the medium, some of whom were actually pretty clued up about it and willing to share their experience.

These outcasts clustered together in a group that met monthly in the club room on a different night to the normal club meetings under the name ‘Group Six’. Six was about the maximum attendance, but the name came not from this but simply that it was the sixth small group set up within the club, which also had things like a portrait group. I don’t think there was actually a group called ‘boring club contest winning pictures’ but there certainly should have been and I think it existed under some different name.

Group Six were the ‘enfants terribles’ of the club, and at times were were pretty terrible, as when we performed a slide show for the club to the sound track of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, who in 1974 performed to a sold-out Albert Hall under the proud boast that they were the World’s Worst Orchestra. But just as the Portsmouth Sinfonia included musicians such as Brian Eno and Michael Nyman, so Group Six included photographers as talented and varied as Terry King and Derek Ridgers.

A break with the club was probably inevitable. We were too successful and the club committee decided to steal some of our success, taking over an exhibition proposal we had negotiated with a gallery after an earlier show had been a major success. The active photographers in Group Six became the nucleus of an independent group called Framework, which organised a series of workshop meetings and exhibitions over the next few years in West London, in most of which Derek took part, as did several other well-known names in British photography.

Group Six and Framework both worked – when they did work – because we brought our work to meetings and discussed it openly and honestly. Sometime with brutal frankness. Quite a few photographers couldn’t take it and only came once – though perhaps it still gave a useful counterpoint to their delusions of greatness, and I don’t think any walked out of the meetings and stepped under a train. But it was a tough school, and people had to learn to take criticism. Of course it wasn’t always right, and I remember one of my pictures that was ripped to pieces (only figuratively) at one evening session being praised by those same people a couple of years later on an exhibition wall.

It was a great learning experience I think for all of us, and the fact that we were so different in our interests and experience was very much a part of it. We explored and criticised photographs from all aspects. Some of us also went out occasionally taking pictures together, but I don’t think Derek ever did. His work was very focussed, and after we left the meetings while most of us were on our way home he would be travelling up to London to photograph in the kind of clubs the rest of us never went to – with the results you can see in Punk London 1977 and his other books. I thought back then and still think that his best work from that era was of skinheads.

You can read more about the show at which I took these pictures at Paul Smith celebrates 40 years of punk in The Guardian, and a nice article about taking some of them in Cuepoint. And in too many other places to mention that Google can show you.

I took a look at the pictures on the wall and went to have a chat with Derek and then wandered around the room full of people in the basement of Paul Smith’s shop taking a few pictures (and drinking a few of the freely flowing drinks, though avoiding those full of vegetation) and feeling rather out of place. Mostly I had no idea who I was photographing – other than Derek. You can see more of them in an album on Facebook, and perhaps later on My London Diary, though I’m not sure they are really ‘my’ London.

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Emergency in London

There wasn’t actually a fire at London’s City Hall, but there was certainly something of an emergency, with plans being debated that would cut 13 fire engines and 185 firefighters from the London  force. Cuts already made by Mayor Boris Johnson have already led to an increase in response times, and the new cuts will further endanger Londoners. If you have a fire now in London, it will take longer for the firefighters to arrive, and you chances of being rescued from a blazing building have dropped. So you need to be very careful.

Things can get worse, and if the current government remains in office they almost certainly will. It can’t be long until the fire service gets privatised and we will all be at the mercy of G4S or Virgin Fire. And perhaps rather than a universal service we will go back to the days of ‘fire marks’ on buildings, and if you haven’t paid your insurance the firefighters will simply watch your house burn down.

London no longer actually owns its City Hall; the oddly shaped mushroom which now houses the Mayor and London Assembly is only on a 25 year lease from its Kuwaiti owners, while London’s real City Hall, County Hall, diagonally across the river from the Houses of Parliament is a hotel and various tourist attractions, sold off after Mrs Thatcher decided London didn’t need an overall authority – one of her most disastrous and spiteful policies. Total madness.

Back to the protest, it had as its backdrop not just that curiously shaped glass monstrosity (it does have some interesting features internally) but one of London’s most iconic symbols, Tower Bridge. Getting to use them in the pictures was rather less straightforward. We were too close to City Hall, and it needed the 16mm fisheye to show it in any sensible fashion – as in the top image (converted as usual to make the verticals straight using FisheyeHemi.) Tower Bridge on the other hand needed a slightly longer lens to make it prominent – the image above was taken at 32mm using the 16-35mm on the D700.

And using the 28-200mm at 40mm in DX mode – 60mm Equiv – I was also able to bring the Tower of London into the scene. It was a little unfortunate that when I took this I hadn’t spotted that I still had the D810 set a -4EV from some night images the previous evening, and the result is somewhat gritty. Unless you zoom in on the camera back the noise isn’t apparent, and images often look rather dark. I noticed the mistake a few frames later and did try to retake some images with the correct exposure, but photons never flow through the same lens twice in the same way.

Using DFine (now free from Google) does significantly reduce the noise, but also results in a little loss of detail as you can see in these two small 100% crops


Before Dfine


After Dfine

Perhaps the best result would be to set Dfine manually to perform a little less noise reduction rather than simply leaving it on Automatic.  The full web size image above is without using Dfine. The image noise isn’t really objectionable, although the colour quality isn’t as good as if I’d given correct exposure.

You can see more images from Firefighters say cuts endanger London on My London Diary – and you can see if you can find any other pictures that were exposed at -4EV.

One person I’d not expected to be present was George Galloway, who was intending to stand as Respect Party candidate for mayor in 2016. He came seventh in the first round of voting, with 37,007 votes, 1.4% of the poll. At least he beat Britain First and the BNP.

Continue reading Emergency in London

May 2016

There are a couple of reasons why I’ve managed to complete my My London Diary postings for May so promptly. Firstly there always seems to be a little less going on around Bank Holidays, though I did cover the ‘celebrations’ at Harmondsworth over Heathrow’s ‘70 years of unrelenting aircraft noise for local communities‘ on the Bank Holiday itself. But I’ve also had some minor health issues with hay fever and a chest infection at the start and end of the month which meant I was too short of breath to go out and take pictures for a few days, but still well enough to sit at a computer and catch up with things. Fortunately I seem to be getting back to normal now, and am writing this before rushing out to catch a train and cover an event.

Continue reading May 2016

A Disturbing Trend

As someone of the same generation as Neal Rantoul it perhaps isn’t surprising that I share much of his thoughts about the increasing way in which “Photographic series or bodies of work are being explicated, explained, contextualized, rationalized, and elevated with text or verbal rationals” which he puts forward in A Disturbing Trend in Photography, published in his blog on his web site and reprinted where I read it on PetaPixel.

Like him I’ve often been to shows where the verbiage is far more impressive than the photography. His is a piece that deserves to be read in full, suggesting reasons for the trend, but perhaps at its centre is this:

Very often the craft of the medium is subsumed, indicating the artist has little interest in the inherent qualities of the discipline itself, using it simply as a vehicle for visual communication ….This constitutes a “literalization” of the medium or in effect a deconstruction of its inherently visual qualities resulting in an analytical and intellectual final result.

Here in the UK, this was something that we very much saw taking place in the late 70s, as photography established itself – or at least something called photography – in academia. Students I taught came back to visit us, showing huge reading lists, sometimes stuffed with works that really had very little relevance to photography, and bemoaned the fact that none of their lecturers seemed to want to teach them any practical skills or make the kind of comments on their photographs that would help them to express themselves more clearly. Some courses were fortunate to have technicians who were prepared to give the kind of photographic advice they felt they needed, but it seemed to be largely left to chance.

In the US, where Rantoul taught at university level for over 40 years there was of course a much greater tradition of craft-based teaching at the highest academic levels, as well as far more emphasis on the importance of photographic history, which perhaps provided a greater resistance to the trend he notes.

I’m perhaps more at ease with the combination of images with text than Rantoul – I have produced several pieces of work that combined image and text, and as well as the example of Robert Adams that he gives, can think of many other photographers whose work successfully combines both, including Minor White. Many pictures are enhanced by appropriate texts, but if I go to a photographic exhibition, or view the work in print or portfolio by someone who claims to be a photographer I expect a certain competence and facility in the use of the medium which is often and increasingly, as Rantoul states, lacking.

Technology has of course, as Rantoul says, made it much easier to make pictures. Many of those old craft skills are now largely redundant. Not of course that all photographers – even very good photographers – always mastered them in the past; many relied heavily on the darkroom magic of others, and it was always clear that a lifetime devoted to the Zone System never guaranteed a single interesting image. But certainly we now live in an age where passable mediocrity is within a button-push for anyone (though often I find myself looking at a set of pictures and thinking it was quite an achievement of someone to make something so bad.)

But taking good pictures remains as elusive as ever. Rather than encouraging students to strive towards this, often a long and difficult process, it is easier to teach people to write texts that obfuscate or even question the existence of ‘good pictures’  and which serve to hide or gloss over the weary and unfocussed images that accompany them.

My First Day with a camera in London

I find it hard to think back and imagine the first time I came to London with a camera, and have little memory of the occasion. What I do have is two contact sheets (and the corresponding Tri-X negatives) but the only information outside of the images are the file letters, 3k and 3l, probably assigned at a later date.

In my first few years of learning to be a photographer I tried to keep images from different types of subject in different files, and the ‘3’ seems to have been a general photography file, including sports, portraiture, theatre photography and more, with negatives and filing sheets at some point assigned the letters a-z in what now appears to be a fairly random order.

At the time I took relatively few photographs and didn’t feel the need for much of a system, though file ‘4’ seems to have been reserved for my pictures taken in Europe. Fortunately it wasn’t too long before I saw the error of my ways and began to file my black and white negatives in order of taking (or at least of processing) and, since April 1986, under the year and month of taking. Of course things are much easier with digital where everything comes with EXIF metadata.

Probably anyone with access to a newspaper library would be able to fix the date more precisely, as several of the pictures show the remarkable ‘Golden Hinde II’, a remarkable reconstruction of Sir Francis Drake’s galleon in which he circumnavigated the globe from 1577-1580, moored at Sugar House Quay next to the Tower of London, with crowds waiting to board.

The ship, usually known as the Golden Hind, was launched in Appledore, Devon in April 1973, although its ‘maiden voyage’ was only made from Plymouth in late 1974. At some stage before this it came to London where I photographed it.

Around this time I had just bought an Olympus 35SP to replace one of two Russian cameras I had been using. It seems likely that these images were taken just a few days before this arrived, as the last 9 frames of the second film show this in various images, including one close-up of the viewfinder which shows the rather dull view from our first-floor Bracknell flat from which we moved in August 1974.

From the trees in several of the London images, they were clearly taken in winter, and so the pictures must date from either late 1973 or early 1974.

The pictures will have been made using a Zenith B, a sturdy, tank-like Russian SLR. The ‘B’ model came without the built-in exposure meter of the ‘E’ but was available with the superior 58mm Helios f2 lens (of pre-war German design) and on the page linked – where it is the fifth camera down – I see that the type I used is now “very rare to find”.

I will have been using a handheld Weston Master V exposure meter, which had a large selenium cell, and came with a curious white plastic ‘Invercone‘ to enable incident light readings. Made in Enfield in north London – or rather ‘Middlesex’, these were incredibly reliable, needed no battery and had only one real fault – the wafer-thin glass above the needle, which was easily broken as the meter dangled free from its cord around your neck. After several expensive repairs I cut and glued some rather thicker perspex on top of where the glass should have been.

As well as the ‘standard’ 58mm I also had with me another Russian lens, a telephoto, probably the 135mm Jupiter f4, copied from the Carl Zeiss pre-war Sonnar.

Photography with this equipment was rather slower than with modern cameras, but it was probably more the cost of film that kept the number of exposures made during the day to 49 – and explains why there are no real duplicate images. Two frames are hopelessly over-exposed, probably because I forget the need to manually stop down the lens to the taking aperture after focussing. Two are ruined by slight fogging, a consequence of loading film into cassettes from bulk with a bulk film loader to cut costs. One is sadly out of focus, rushing to get a picture, and a few seem rather ordinary – such as two pictures of St Paul’s Cathedral.

There are also no really great images, though most have some interest, some rather more than when they were made because of the changes since they were taken – little smoke now emerges from Bankside Power Station. But there was one picture which I think became very important to me, of warehouses being demolished on the riverside beyond St Katharine’s Dock, which is really the only one of these I remember taking, and which prompted me to begin to explore London’s disappearing docklands.

See these and the rest at My First Day with a camera in London.

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Provoke

PROVOKE: Between Protest and Performance Photography in Japan, 1960–75 is an exhibition  at Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland from today, May 28 until Auguest 28th, 2016 and includes work by works by Nobuyoshi Araki, Eikō Hosoe, Kazuo Kitai, Daidō Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira, Shōmei Tōmatsu and others less well known (and including some anonymous works) associated with the remarkable magazine ‘Provoke‘.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the magazine was that there were only three issues, published in 1968-9 which were then largely ignored, but it has come to be regarded as “one of the most important photographic publications of the 20th century.”

For many photographers in the UK, our first real encounter with post-war Japanese photography came at the ICA in 1979, with the exhibition ‘Japanese Photography: Today and its Origin‘, curated by Lorenzo Merlo of Canon Photo Gallery Amsterdam, brought us face to face with the work of Hosoe, and a few years later, in 1985, the Serpentine Gallery played host to Mark Holborn‘s ‘Black Sun: The Eyes of Four‘ which included Moriyama, Hosoe and Tomatsu. I think both shows appeared without any mention of ‘Provoke’, or at least I can find no reference to it in their catalogues.

For those of us unlikely to get to Switzerland for the show, there is always the book. A hefty 680 pages I’ve yet to bring myself to buy, though at around £40 through the discount sellers it seems a reasonable bargain compared to Steidl’s limited edition ‘The Japanese Box‘ of 2001 with its facsimile publication of Provoke and books by Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira, copies of which are now offered for well over a thousand pounds.

Yannis Behrakis

Don’t miss the video with Yannis Behrakis talking on Greek Reporter about the work which led to him and the Reuters team working with him being awarded in the Breaking News Photography category in this years 100th Pulitzer Prize awards.

Greek Reporter also has another article about him worth reading, Yannis Behrakis: The Man Behind the Image, which mentions him heing chosen by The Guardian as the agency photographer of the year in 2015, for his work covering the refugee crisis and the economic crisis in Greece.

The Guardian feature shows an incredible range of powerful images produced in a wide range of situations from his 28 years as a Reuters photojournalist, and although I’d seen some of the pictures before, I hadn’t until now realised they were all the work of the same man.

Syria Again

Stop the War organised another protest against David Cameron’s motion to allow bombing of Syria on a weekday evening, with a rally opposite Parliament and a short march around Westminster via the Conservative and Labour Party HQs.  Like their previous protest, what struck me was the absence of views from Syrians, although there were some supporters of both the Assad regime and the Free Syrians at the rally.It was also noticeable that there was no condemnation of the Russian bombing of the Syrian opposition as well as Daesh.

Of course I wasn’t the only person to notice this and to comment on it, and Stop the War were forced into issuing  ‘For the avoidance of doubt‘ by John Rees, which makes seven points, the first of which begins “The STWC has never supported the Assad regime.” As I commented:

Well, it’s good to make that clear, because there have been many protests by Stop the War which Assad supporters have attended and appeared to be welcome, and by refusing to let Syrians opposed to the regime speak at this and other protests STW have certainly given that impression.

Photographically it was a night where I had a lot of problems. For a central London location, Parliament Square is remarkably dark, and working without flash was perhaps a little beyond the capabilities of the D700 and D810, though I did manage a few images. Things were a little better on the march, which at times went through some fairly well let junctions.

But perhaps the most challenging situation was when a large group of red-flag carrying protesters let off red flares. The image at the top of this post was taken without flash and an exposure which held the highlights, but they were really too extreme, and I needed to let these burn out.

Increasing the exposure showed up at least some of the background, and using a little flash let me bring people in the foreground up from the shadows. But I still don’t really have a solution for situations like this.

After the march there was another short rally, with rather a crush of photographers. I took a number of pictures working very close in to those speaking with the 16mm fisheye – including that above. With the wide view of that lens, flash isn’t generally an option – unless you are aiming for powerful vignetting – and I was working by available light, in this case augmented by someone’s video light. As usual changed to cylindrical perspective.

After the end of the official protest there were still hundreds of people milling around in Parliament Square and wondering how to continue their protest. But I was having a very bad case of wandering finger, somehow managing to shift the shutter speed on the D810 to ridiculous levels – it had reached ISO2500 before I finally noticed it. It’s quite remarkable that the flash continues to synchronise at these speeds, but most of the results were not usable. I knew things were going wrong, but in the dark and heat of the moment couldn’t immediately sort things out. So I went back to working without flash and changed to 1/50th second, but it was a little late, as police were approaching and people climbing down from the plinth.

ISOs really become pretty irrelevant under these conditions. This image was taken with the camera set at ISO2000 but with -4 stops of exposure compensation.  Which I suppose you could call ISO 32000.

Within seconds I had the flash and camera working together again, and was able to photograph the police questioning one man who had been on the plinth and then telling Focus E15 that they were not allowed to use a megaphone in Parliament Square. They were deciding what to do, but I’d had enough and decided it was unlikely much more would happen and went home.

More at Don’t Bomb Syria.
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