Nan Goldin

I’ve always beeen a little ambivalent about the work of Nan Goldin, and it seems a totally appropriate reaction.  A recently published feature on her on Dangerous Minds is labelled with the topics: Art; Drugs; Queer; Sex; Unorthodox; often I wonder if my own interest in the pictures might be labelled prurient. Not that I would consider them pornographic or abusive (unlike the Gateshead police). But I certainly find her work interesting.

The article, Being human: Sexuality, gender and belonging to family in Nan Goldin’s photography (NSFW) might not be safe for your work, but seems fairly tame for mine and includes a fairly short video of Goldin talking about her life and work. Although she speaks with great candour, and her work has made aspects of her life very public, I sometimes feel she does not entirely admit (perhaps even to herself) the control she exerts in making her images.

Commenting many years ago I wrote about her work “It only offers us glimpses, framed and caught with more or less skill by the person who directs it – and Goldin’s control as a director is remarkable.” Even when she is in bed and using a long cable release to a camera placed earlier on a tripod across the room.

One of the skills that distinguish good photographers of events develop is that of visualising a scene from a different viewpoint.  When you may see something happening while you may immediately make an exposure even though you are not in the right position just in case,  but the first reaction is to think where your camera should be to best photograph the scene, and to try to get there.  If the camera is fixed and you are in a different position, choosing the right moment to press the release is not largely a matter of chance but again of visualisation. And of course after the event editing, selecting the images that work best.

I first wrote about her after seeing her work in the book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, (you can see a 42 minute video version to a soundtrack by The Tiger Lilies on Vimeo, but it seems incredibly slow moving compared to her slide show which I saw – and there are various other shorter versions on YouTube) which she described as “the diary I let people read” and revised the piece as Nan Goldin’s Mirror on Life in 2002 after seeing her work at the Whitechapel Gallery, and again in 2007 to put on this site.

Still Life

I suppose like most photographers I’ve occasionally taken what might be labelled a ‘still life’ but it has never been a genre that has held my interest in photography. Some I’ve done because people have asked me for a particular purpose, like recording the flowers that my wife has been sent or a birthday cake she made, though these are perhaps not truly still life.

Here’s the start of what Wikipedia has to say:

A still life (plural still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, or shells) or man-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, and so on).

The whole article is worth reading, and the Wikipedia MediaViewer shows images of some great examples, none of which is a photograph, though the last example is a computer generated image.

More often I’ve photographed inanimate objects as objets trouvés, and perhaps an important point that the definition above omits is the element of arrangement in creating still life compositions.  So looking at the Pencil of Nature,  Talbot’s image of a fruit bowl

A Fruit Piece LACMA M.2008.40.908

to my mind qualifies as a still life (if perhaps a rather poor one) while other images including ‘A Scene in a Library’ and ‘Articles of China’ are not, as although the photographer has carefully framed the pictures he has not (or not effectively) arranged the objects for the purpose of the photograph.

Licenced under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org wiki/File:Articles_of_China.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Articles_of_China.jpg
Articles of China” by William Fox Talbot – The Pencil of Nature, 1844.

There have been relatively few photographers who have made still life images that I find of much interest. Perhaps the best of these was Josef Sudek, who produced some truly fine examples. Of course many other photographers produced some fine still lifes, including Edward Weston (and many of his nudes were more still life than nude.)

What sent me thinking about this, and almost made me miss a train starting to write about it on Saturday morning, was a Facebook post about an article in Vice magazine, No More Lazy Still-Life Photography, Please , by Vice photo editor Matthew Leifheit, which includes illustrations by another phtoographer whose work in the genre I’ve also long admired, particularly for her colour work, Jan Groover. Again, Google Images is a good place to see a large selection of her work.

As Leifheit writes “any 13-year-old with a camera flash can throw some pineapples onto a brightly-colored backdrop and call it art. ” But making a really satisfying still life with a camera is I think something rather more difficult. Perhaps even more difficult than doing it with a paintbrush.

Dirty Weather

At lunchtime on Jan 28th I was with the cleaners, but it was certainly very dirty weather. Bouts of driving rain and gusts that blew umbrellas inside out if not out of your hands. I was in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a large open area now a public park, in the centre of London.  Not as well known as some others, but it is the largest public square in central London, and was first laid out around 1630, and many of the buildings around date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Dickins based his ‘Bleak House‘ on one of them, and the east side is formed by Lincoln’s Inn itself. For a long time filled with lawyers, the square is now being increasingly colonised by the London School of Economics, better known as the LSE. In the Thatcher era, when we first saw large numbers of people living on the streets in England, Lincoln’s Inn Fields became home to many of them, until in 1992 a tall fence was put around the grassed area of the square with gates that are locked at night to keep out the rough sleepers.

The Royal College of Surgeons of England moved here (as The Company of Surgeons) in 1797, though they built a new building in 1833 with a splendid portico, which still faces onto the square; most of the rest of the building was rebuilt after it was destroyed by a German incendiary bomb in 1941.

I was here because although the RCSE is “committed to enabling surgeons to achieve and maintain the highest standards of surgical practice and patient care” (according to its mission statement) it isn’t yet committed to paying its cleaners enough to live on.  Unison was here to protest for the London Living Wage, contractual sick pay and holidays for the people who clean the building, as well as for them to be treated with dignity and respect by their managers. Like many companies and organisations, the RCSE would almost certainly be ashamed of treating any of its own employees so shabbily, so they pay another company, Ocean, to do their dirty work for them.

Cleaners at the RCSE belong to Unison, and the protest was mainly by cleaners and supporters from other Unison branches, particularly in the University of London, including a number I’ve met and photographed before in Living Wage and  ‘3 Cosas’ campaigns.

Although I always carry a small folding umbrella in my camera bag (weather in the UK is often changeable) I hate to use it while actually taking pictures. But soon after the protest started the rain came down so hard there was no real choice.

It’s hard to hold both an umbrella and a camera to photograph in a high wind, and it was tiring on my left wrist. I had to stop quite a few times to turn the umbrella around after it had blown inside out to get the wind to blow it back again, and I didn’t stay very dry underneath it, but without it I would have got soaked, and there was nowhere nearby to shelter. A few images were ruined by drops of rain on the lens filter, though yet another thing in my left had was my microfibre cloth to keep wiping the lens clear with.

At times too, the gusts pushed the umbrella down and into my field of view. But I kept on taking pictures, and there were some compensations. The union flags held by some of the protesters blew well in the strong wind, and otherwise rather dreary areas of pavement look much better when wet, and sometimes have good reflections. And the rain also brought out the umbrellas in Unison (and other) colours.

But I was pleased when I had to leave, shortly before the scheduled end of the protest, as I was cold and wet, and it was good to get to some more sheltered places away from that large fairly open square. And as I did so the sun came out.

I met some of the same cleaners (and Unison reps and organiser) the following lunchtime at SOAS, where campaigns over the years supported by students and SOAS staff have resulted in some successes, but the cleaners still want parity of treatment with staff directly employed by the University.  They say ‘One Workplace, One Workforce’. Outsourcing adds complexity and extra layers of management and can only cut costs by cutting the pay and conditions of workers. Time to get rid of it.

SOAS Cleaners demand Dignity & Respect
Cleaners protest at Royal College of Surgeons
Continue reading Dirty Weather

POYi 72

I’ve not yet had time to look at all the pictures from the winning entries in the University of Missouri School of Journalism‘s 72nd annual Pictures of the Year International competition, though I can say that there are some fine images among those I have viewed on the POYi web site.

One photographer who gets a number of mentions is Brad Vest, 2011 Alexia award winner, with a portfolio of 40 images from Memphis local newspaper The Commercial Appeal winning the Newspaper Photographer of the Year award, as well as two mentions in the Newspaper Issue Reporting Picture Story category with first place for “Last One Standing” about the last public housing project in Memphis and an Award of Excellence for “Paul Joseph Oliver” on the lives of the family and friends of a Marine after his death.

The competition has its roots in 1944, when

the Missouri School of Journalism sponsored its “First Annual Fifty-Print Exhibition” contest. Its stated purpose was, “to pay tribute to those press photographers and newspapers which, despite tremendous war-time difficulties, are doing a splendid job; to provide an opportunity for photographers of the nation to meet in open competition; and to compile and preserve…a collection of the best in current, home-front press pictures.”

For many years it was a USA only contest, and was run jointly with the NPPA, but since 2001 it has again become solely the responsibility of the Missouri School of Journalism, and an international competition (POY became POYi), and has slowly become less dominated by US photographers and organisations, though still keeping a very US flavour and not quite yet POYI. Funding for it comes from endowments and also sponsors Fujjifilm, US cable and satellite company MSNBC, National Geographic as well as the entrance fees to the yearly competition.

There is also an archive with many thousands of winning images (either 41,766 or over 60,000 depending on where you look) over the years, starting from 1943. It gives an interesting overview of the changes in news photography over the years.

The Missouri School of Journalism has always had a clear view of photographic ethics, and the USA generally has a rather more clear view on news photography than pertains in the UK. It was something I was made very aware of when I spent 7 years working for a US company from London, and which I applauded. Although there may be disagreement about whether the best work won in some categories, there is unlikely to be the kind of controversy that the WPP has recently attracted. The staging in Je Suis Chaleroi? would certainly never have been thought acceptable here.

Stuck in the right place


Dame Vivienne Westwood: 18-105mm DX, 105mm (157mmmm)

I think I made some good images of the speakers at No Fracking Anywhere! in Old Palace Yard in front of Parliament on Jan 26, but despite this and my support for the issues, it wasn’t an event I really enjoyed covering. And although I’m on good terms with many of the photographers present and like to meet them while covering events, this was one of those times when there were just far, far too many of us.


Bianca Jagger: 18-105mm DX, 90mm (135mm)

The reason for the huge interest was undoubtedly the fact that two ‘celebrities’ were among the speakers, Bianca Jagger and Dame Vivienne Westwood, and once they had both spoken the ranks thinned out considerably, making life rather easier.


Caroline Lucas MP: 18-105mm DX, 38mm (57mm)

Fortunately when I saw that the speakers were to be using a relatively small trolley as a makeshift stage, along with a few other photographers I realised things were going to be very tight. Two rather large and tall press photographers had stationed themselves rather close to it and bang in the centre in front of the microphone, establishing where the front line of photographers would be, and I went and stood at their side. Ideally I would have liked to be a metre or so further back, but knew that if I moved back others would simply come in front of me.  I  was also glad they had chosen to stand in the middle, as I seldom if ever like to work from dead centre, not least because the microphone is then always in the way.

Soon there was a vidographer pressing on my right shoulder, and several rows of photographers behind. At one guy’s request I put my camera bag on the floor in front of me so he could work through the narrow gap between my thighs and those of the man on my left, whose shoulder I was being pushed into. Other photographers were poking lenses over both my shoulders, and there were others further back trying to take pictures over our heads,  easier over mine than the two six-footers to my left, though at least one photograph was up on his step ladder.


Joan Walley MP: 18-105mm DX, 66mm (99mm)

I don’t find it easy to stand in one place, hardly able to move an inch, difficult at times even to swivel my upper body around, for over an hour. Much of that time there was little or nothing taking place to be photographed, but having got a good position I didn’t want to move and lose it until things were over. But by the end of that time it was getting quite painful, suffering in both legs and my back.


Tina-Louise Rothery: D800e, 18-105mm DX, 18mm (27mm)

There were other photographers to the left of the ‘stage’, some actually sitting on it, though I think they will have had little opportunity to take photographs of the speakers, and would probably have been better off drifting away to photograph the rest of the protesters. But unless I wanted them in my pictures (and generally I didn’t) I couldn’t work with a very wide lens. Most if not all of the pictures I took in that hour and a quarter were with the 18-105mm lens, enabling me to show speakers from the waist up at the wider end to tightly framed heads at the long.

D800e, 18-105mm DX, 42mm (63mm)

There were fortunately a number of people with placards and banners, as the area of the Houses of Parliament behind the speakers from my position wasn’t really too exciting.


John Ashton, Former UK Government Special Representative for Climate Change: D800e, 18-105mm DX, 28mm (42mm)
There are quite a few more portraits of these and the other speakers, as well as other pictures from  the event at No Fracking Anywhere!


The only picture in this post with the D700 and 16-35mm – at 21mm
Many of the press photographers sped away to file their images of Dame Vivienne as soon as she ended her speech, making it a little easier to photograph the rest of the event – and I could even use my favourite 16-35mm wideangle.  I rather liked this group around the Greenpeace House, with Julian Huppert MP, Norman Baker MP, Bianca Jagger, Caroline Lucas MP and John Ashton, though the hand at the right of the image is perhaps a little annoying.
Continue reading Stuck in the right place

Parliament Square Saga Continues

After the CND rally against Trident replacement, several hundred of those taking part walked the short distance to Parliament Square and stepped over the low wire with warnings against trespass to protest with Occupy Democracy on the sacred grass.

It was the latest in a series of protests by Occupy, part of their attempt to introduce real democracy to the UK which has certainly resulted in some strangely extreme responses from parts of our establishment, particularly London’s Mayor and his private security force. Though there have been times when I would not have been surprised if they had called in the troops.

There are relatively few of Boris’s Heritage Wardens, but they seem to have been able to call on the Metropolitan Police to make some very doubtful interventions in the square. Its something that has been going on for some years; long before ‘Occupy’ it was the peace protest by Brian Haw and his associates, and later the Democracy camp that attracted their attention.

It has never quite seemed rational to me, perhaps because I’ve always considered Parliament Square to be a missed opportunity in London. Until fairly recently it was an almost impossible to reach square of grass, surrounded by traffic with no way to reach it except putting your life at risk and hoping not to be run down as you dashed across in the gaps. Now at least there are several light-controlled crossings to the central area, though still not one at the most used and most needed crossing point at the corner leading to Parliament St.

As grass goes, for a country which invented the lawn mower and prides itself on the quality of its lawns, from the striped close-trimmed gardens of suburbia to the sacred turf of Lords, Parliament Square, at least as long as I’ve known it, has always been a disgrace. It starts by being badly drained, but has never had the kind of care it requires and probably suffers from the wrong kind of grass.

But for an area at the centre of a World Heritage Site, the whole area is wrong. Closing the roads along the south and west sides might be a good start, but it also needs some sensible landscaping, which could also replace or cover the ugly defences around Parliament, while providing equally effective protection. We should long ago have had a competition to redesign the square, probably including smaller areas of grass with larger paved areas where protests and celebrations could occur. Although given the official lack of any care for the grass the current fanatical attempts to prevent protests on it are nonsensical, if the area was improved it would be sensible to try and make it more robust.

On this occasion at least the police behaved sensibly and did nothing but keep an eye on things, despite what appeared to be a certain amount of jumping up and down from the ‘heritage wardens’.

I listened briefly to the wardens complaining to the police, thenspent some time talking with an officer at the corner of the square where a crossing is needed, near the statue of Churchill. It seemed the police had no worries about a few hundred people having a peaceful meeting on the grass, but did fear that there might be some who wanted to show their hatred for Churchill by desecrating his statue on the 50th anniversary of his death on 24 January 1965. Although many revere him for his inspirational leadership in the Second World War, there are others who cannot forgive his hostility to socialism and the 1926 General Strike, support for the Black and Tans in Ireland, anti-semitism and opposition to Indian independence and other policies.

The protest caused no trouble and dispersed peacefully, though by that time I was home and eating dinner. There are a few more pictures at Occupy defy GLA ban on Democracy.

Continue reading Parliament Square Saga Continues

Trident Rally


Photographers sometimes complain that Jeremy Corbyn always closes his eyes when speaking. Well, not all the time

After the scarf and the short march (see ) came the rally in a fairly crowded Old Palace Yard opposite Parliament, and again CND had organised things fairly well for the press, with a reasonably uncrowded area between the crowd  and the fairly low stage. It was possible to move fairly freely around – although limited by the presence of other photographers and videographers.

It is mainly videographers that cause a problem for photographers, and on this occasion one that had set up a little way back and perhaps on too low a tripod and was then objecting to any photographers standing in line closer to the stage.  I suspect my bald patch appears in some parts of his video, though I tried hard not to obstruct his view of the speakers – and he could have avoided me by zooming more tightly. Mostly I think it is people who aren’t used to working in crowded areas like this who cause such problems.

In general still photographers cooperate well with each other; most of us try hard not to get in the way of those who get there before us, and work over their shoulder or to one side. One more recent problem is with those who now use backpacks and are often just not aware when these are rudely pushing against others. Shoulder bags can get in the way, but it’s more obvious as they tend to come off your shoulder.

There is a definite advantage to being tall and able to work over the heads of others – and often press photographers will bring step ladders with them. I’ve never bothered with carrying one around, though I have sometimes thought about using a folding stool which would give me a few more inches. There are some very light ones that wouldn’t be a great burden to carry.


Heather Wakefield, Unison’s Head of Local Government, Police and Justice

On this occasion, apart from that one videographer who was something of a pain, (and perhaps he will learn from the number of photographers who walked across his video)  it was fairly easy to move around and to get in something like the right place for photographing most of the speakers.

For me there are two main aspects to finding the right place, the placement and use of the microphone and the background. There isn’t one right place, as different speakers approach the microphone differently, some almost swallowing it, and others standing back. Usually I prefer to see a face unobstructed by the microphone, or, failing that, to see clearly most or all of the mouth. And eyes are often vital. Some people stand like statues as they speak, while others move and look around. Faces differ, and an angle that works with one speaker will not for others. Taking all your pictures from the same place would in any case be rather boringly repetitive – an easy trap to fall into.


CND veteran Bruce Kent

Backgrounds are often a problem, and this had a rather ugly roof over the stage which features in most of the images as I was working roughly from the level of the speakers feet. Mostly this is a little subdued by being out of focus, working at fairly wide apertures with fairly long lenses (mainly 100-300 mm, with the Nikon 18-105mm DX on the D800E and the Nikon 70-300 FX on the D700.) At the longer end it becomes hard to get enough depth of field on faces, and all too easy to autofocus by mistake on the microphone rather than the eyes. Sometime, when speakers make interesting gestures, you have a choice of whether the focus is on the hand or the eyes, and it’s one that the camera may make for you as you rapidly catch the moment. Some cameras have ‘face detection’ which might help – unless you want the hand sharp.


Julie Ward, Labour MEP for the North West of England

Mostly getting good images is about watching and being prepared to catch the moment. It’s only too easy to get the moment after, perhaps when the speaker’s eyes have closed or the pointing hand dropped half out of frame. Digital makes things easier by letting you know what you have taken – and this is one of the few times I actually sometimes look at the previews when I’m working – and sometimes delete images. The good thing is that most speakers repeat themselves, if not in what they say in what they do. If you fail to catch that glance up the first time you can be ready to do so later.


Lindsey German, Stop the War, waiting to speak

It’s also good to keep an eye on what else is happening on the platform. Sometimes the best pictures come before or after people speak – and on this occasion this was important for the background as well, enabling me to get away from that roof.  The picture of Lindsey German waiting to speak with a clear graphic behind her is far better than any I managed while she was speaking.

And of course the rally is more than the speakers (though pictures of well-known names are more likely to be used) but the audience may well be more interesting.

You can see some of my other attempts to photograph these and other speakers and people in the audience at CND Scrap Trident rally at Parliament.

Continue reading Trident Rally

Wrapping up the MoD


The start of the scarf passes in front of the MoD, held by Heather Wakefield of UNISON, Rebecca Johnson and CND Chair Kate Hudson

I don’t much like photographing the ‘big’ protests which attract a lot of media interest because things often get too crowded and too organised by stewards and police to make it possible to work as I like to do, and I was pleased to find that although CND’s ‘Scrap Trident’ protest was a decent size, it wasn’t like that at all. True, there were a lot of photographers present, but there weren’t any of the media scrums that make life unpleasant, and the stewards were helpful, doing their job and not getting in the way. Groups like ‘Stop the War‘ could learn a lot!

There were perhaps a couple of thousand protesters, though it wasn’t easy to count, as much of the time they were rather spread out, so it was a decent size for a protest. Perhaps surprising there were not more, since there are few people who aren’t politicians or have shares in companies who might benefit from spending huge amounts on weapons systems that will never be use who don’t feel that the huge sums of money involved in replacing the UK’s Trident missiles is a waste of money – that, as the placards at the protest said, would be better spent on Education, the NHS or, well, almost anything.

Our independent nuclear deterrent has for many years been fictional, a very minor part of the US nuclear deterrent; we maintain the fiction to keep the place in some interenational bodies as a ‘nuclear power’. Other countries which have nuclear weapons – like Israel – prefer to keep quiet about them, so haven’t got invited, and North Korea didn’t get an invite after testing one (perhaps because our intelligence services know it was one of three designed in Israel, assembled in South Africa, shipped to Oman in a covert UK goverment operation supervised by Dr David Kelly and then stolen by a Zimbabwean arms dealer who sold it on the black market – or am I just reading too many conspiracy theories?) Perhaps we should just spread some stories around about Trident having been given a new lease of life and use the money for something useful.


A woman with a vintage ‘No More Hiroshimas’ placard that her mother had carried to Aldermaston on the first march in 1958

Back to real life, the protest did raise some problems. How does one photograph a scarf wrapping around four sides of the block containing the Ministry of Defence, around 0.7 miles in length? The answer has to be in rather small lengths, as otherwise it just gets too small to see. But you also need a longer view to show it really is a long piece of knitting.

I’d previously photographed a much longer length of this knitted peace scarf, around ten times as long, stretched out between the UK’s two atomic bomb factories in the Berkshire countryside, Aldermaston and Burghfield. I’d gone on a bicycle and ridden along the length and back, taking pictures of the scarf being put into place, and then after it was joined up, run along beside part of it taking picutres for the 15 or 20 minutes that people held it up – and it had worked out quite well.

But this was different, with the scarf being carried around by the protesters walking around the block. I started by photographing people as they gathered for the protest, including a faith group who started from a service at St Martin’s in the Fields before marching down Whitehall with a shorter length of scarf to join the rest of the protesters. It wasn’t quite clear what time they would be leaving, so I’d asked my wife who was with them to phone me when they were coming out of the church. She did, but it was fairly noisy where I was photographing and I missed her call, but decided I would go up and take a look and arrived in time for a few pictures before they started off.

For the wrapping of the block, I started with the leaders at the front of the scarf, who walked together with several banners, setting off at a rate that the people joining up lengths of scarf behind them couldn’t catch up. Working at first fairly close to them so that I could show their faces and read the messages in the piece of knitting they had chosen to lead the event, as they passed the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall I drew back a little to get a more general view of the banners in front of the building.

I stayed there to take more pictures as others went past, though it proved impossible to get a good clear view from a distance to show a really long line, as there were so many tourists and others walking along the pavement in front of the scarf. It wasn’t entirely satisfactory as you can see my shadow in every image. Then I ran in the direction the scarf was going, hoping to get some pictures including the Houses of Parliament – and particularly Big Ben – in the background.  There were two problems here. Firstly because of the direction the scarf was being carried around, coming up Bridge St if I could see Big Ben I was looking at the backs of the heads of the protesters, which seldom makes for good pictures.

In the past I’ve sometimes managed to photograph people walking in this direction in front of Big Ben by working close to the corner where they turn into Victoria Embankment, working close to them and with a very wide angle. That didn’t work very well either, partly because most of the marchers were walking between me and the scarf and the scarf wasn’t very visible, partly because of the many tourists in a rather small space with the marchers, but mainly because the sun was shining directly into the camera lens.

I tried working in the realatively small area of shadow thrown by the tower of Big Ben, but still couldnt get what I wanted. I did manage to take a few pictures on or close to the corner with my back towards the Houses of Parliament, but by the time I’d moved a little down the street to where the Houses of Parliament were visible behind the scarf the sun was shining in my lens again.

I rushed on to photograph a part of the long line of marchers going past the long frontage of the Ministry of Defence on this site, managing to find a length of scarf with a decent number of people carrying placards as well as the scarf. When the scarf came to the Ministry it had turned around in the gardens in front and then gone back along the fence at the back of the gardens, just a few feet from the wall of the building so another long row, but less interesting and again the light was causing a little of a problem. Cloudy days often make life easier for photographers.

The front of the scarf had stopped where it started, just past the main entrance to the Ministry, and there was then a period of waiting for all those around the block to make their way around and come together again, and for most of the knitting to be rolled up again.  Finally it was time to set up for the short march down Whitehall and past the front of the House of Commons to end up at Old Palace Yard for a rally.

I did get a  picture as they walked past Parliament with Big Ben to show it, though it wasn’t one of my better examples.  You can see more pictures at ‘Wrap Up Trident’ surrounds Defence Ministry and Christian CND against Trident Replacement
Continue reading Wrapping up the MoD

2015 PDN Top 30

If you want to be featured in PDN’s Top 30 your best bet is either to be born in the USA or to go and live there, as do I think all but about six of this year’s crop (and two of that six are in Vancouver, which only around 30 miles over the border.) Having said that, there is still much interesting photography, and, perhaps unsurprisingly some of the more interesting is from those four more distant. Give yourself plenty of time and go and enjoy.

Rather than otherwise influence you on the work of this years pick I thought it would be interesting to revisit the Top 30 of ten years ago, 2005, and begin by asking how many of those featured you have heard of. It’s hard to be entirely sure, but for me I think the answer perhaps five or six, but most seem to be having succesful careers if not becoming household names:

Kevin Cooley
Cig Harvey
Mark Zibert
Andrew Zuckerman
Christa Renee
Matt Stuart
Jesse Chehak
Eri Morita
Farah Nosh
Chris Mueller
Eric Ogden
Joao Canziani
Colby Katz
Dave Anderson
Jehad Nga
Erik Almas
Jessica Todd Harper
Hayley Harrison
Karine Laval
Steve Giralt
Casper Dalhoff
Emily Nathan
Carlos Rios
Matthew Pillsbury
William Mebane
Masood Kamandy
Kareem Black
William Lamson
Gina Levay
Karim Ben Khelifa

I’ve also tried to link them to their current web sites, though there may in some cases be confusion with other photographers of the same name. Two presented a problem – I couldn’t find a site for Hayley Harrison and although there are many links to work by Khalim Ben Khelifa I could not find an actual web site. And be warned that even on a high-speed broadband connection some of these sites are slow to load. Too many still have huge flash downloads.

This year’s crop give a little advice to others on the web site, and I’d like to add another small piece of possible wisdom. If you want to be remembered as a photographer, choose a good and memorable name. If like me you have a very common name it will not help in your career. And simply because you were blessed by your parents with something simple shared by thousands of others there is no reason to use that as your professional name.

I share my name with at least three other photographers (a confusion that has led to me being refused credit by one photography retailer and threats of bodily harm by an extremist right-wing organisation – I’m not sure what it has done for the other guys), a very well known preacher and his son, various sporting heroes (I don’t even swim or squash and gave up footy long since), the author of some great books, a journalist and  acouple of radio and TV personalities, a police chief, several professors, a breeder of ferrets and thousands more.

Somewhat surprisingly if I put my name into Google (I don’t make a habit of vanity searching, but have just done so as ‘research’ for this post) I find I come up in 14th, 17th and 24th position underneath two featured posts and some images, none of which are of me. On going to Google Images and searching well down the page I do find myself twice, as well as 38 taken by me, among the seven or eight hundred featured. They seem to include a couple of copyright violations, though I think neither worth chasing.

Je Suis Chaleroi?

A new controversy has emerged from the latest World Press Photo, with exception being taken to the winning entry, The Dark Heart of Europe, by Italian photographer Giovanni Troilo in Contemporary Issues Stories. There are 10 images from the story at the WPP and a dozen on the photographer’s own web site, under the title Charleroi, La Ville Noire – The Dark Heart of Europe, which omits several in the WPP selection.

In this case the complaint is not about the processing of the images, though some might feel this is at least a touch over-dramatised, but about staging and the false image they give of the city, whose mayor Paul Magnette, while professing not to be and expert in photography complains that the story is anything but photojournalism, hiding aspects and distorting reality through staged images.

In his letter the mayor goes on to repeat some of the criticisms of the work raised immediately after the award by Belgian photographer Thomas Vanden Driessche who is quoted on the web site OAI13 (Our Age is 13):

L’utilisation de la mise en scène, l’éclairage artificiel mais surtout le caractère falsifié et mensonger des légendes participe à la construction de cette fiction prenant les apparences d’un reportage. Cela ne me causerait aucun souci si cet ensemble était le résultat d’une œuvre artistique très personnelle. Mais le photographe ne présente pas son travail comme tel. Au contraire, il donne manifestement une réelle dimension journalistique/documentaire à son approche. Le simple fait que cette série a été soumise au World Press Photo et surtout le fait qu’elle ait été primée lui confère une crédibilité journalistique.

Driessche is saying that staging, the artificial lighting and above all the false and lying captions result in the making of a fictional story in what appears to be reportage. This would not worry him in a personal artistic work, but this is not how the photographer has presented it. On the contrary he clearly presents it as a journalistic/documentary story and submitted it as such to World Press Photo who have given it credibility as journalism by giving it the prize.

The mayor’s letter, reproduced in part on the same site gives some details about who and what appear in some of the images, arguing that the reality they show is very different to the story implied by the photographer through the highly stylised images and deceptive captioning, ending his letter by stating that the photographer has deformed reality for the sake of a story which discriminates against the city of Charleroi, its people and the profession of photojournalism. He says that you will not find a single person living in the city who would recognise it from the story, and that is seems to be more a settling of grudges than investigative reporting.

Time Lightbox’s report of the story includes some translations of the comments in the mayor’s letter and includes a statement from WPP:

“We are currently verifying the facts behind the photo story, as we do with all the prizewinning pictures, and we are in touch with the photographer Giovanni Troilo.”

Of course, if photographers and journalists are doing their job properly they will often offend some people. Few organisations welcome any critical investigation, as many people, particularly whistleblowers, have found to their cost. For those of us who have no knowledge of Charleroi (and I imagine few of us have heard of it before this, let alone been there) we have only the opposing views and the nature of the photographs to inform us.

Photography cannot exist without a point of view, though in much we see that may well be a rather confused one. The strength of Troilo’s work which led to its success is in the clarity of his view and the dramatic way he has presented it. We all have to dramatise the situations we photograph, to give them some form in order to communicate with an audience.

For many photographers, the guiding principle was stated clearly by one of the legends, W Eugene Smith in his credo “Let truth be the prejudice”. Perhaps in this case truth may have given way to prejudice. It will be interesting to see what WPP responds.