>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

(Un)Limited Edition – Happy Christmas

Not a Christmas image – but the one I chose for my Christmas card. Candlelit vigil for Michael Brown, US Embassy, London. Nov 26, 2014

Those who know me will know that I abhor the idea of limited editions of photographs. It’s something that to me goes against the whole grain of our democratic medium, one that has reproducibility at its very heart.

When I made a few screen-prints, these were truly limited editions, starting with a pile of perhaps fifty blank sheets of paper. Usually rather fewer as quality paper isn’t cheap and I was never rich. The first screen image went on every sheet, often just a background colour, but as the print was built up over a series of up to a dozen printings, registration errors and other printing faults reduced the number of usable sheets. At most I had two screens, although one was quite large and might have a couple of the images on it, but by the time I made the final printing, some of the earlier images had been scrubbed off, and there was no way I could print more without making a whole new set of screen images from the set of negatives. These truly were limited editions, and the finished prints more or less identical. Those that were not were scrap.

There are a handful of negatives from which in the darkroom days I made more than a dozen or so prints. But I never went into the darkroom and made more than a handful at a time, and even those were never quite the same, as each involved an individual performance of the dodging and burning and other tweaks that led to a fine print. The only real way to print a proper edition would have been to have made a corrected copy negative and print from that. Which of course a few people did with processes such as dye transfer. When we moved to digital printing, making editions became easy, but of course any limit was purely artificial. Digital files don’t wear out.

Limited editions are simply a marketing device and my opposition to them is one reason my work isn’t available from a gallery, though you can buy images direct. Some of those images I have sold as numbered but unlimited ‘editions’ which I think more accurately reflects photographic practice. The numbers involved have so far largely been single figures.

But I have produced a few ‘limited editions’, but only as Christmas cards, and this year’s has been printed and sent out in an ‘edition’ of 24 roughly postcard size pigment inkjet prints on Epson Watercoloour Radiant White to photographer friends, (other people get cards from one of our favoured charities) with another ‘edition’ of 50 as commercially printed glossy postcards. Some of those postcards remain, and if any UK readers would like a copy and e-mail me – my e-mail address is on this page – I will send my postal address for you to send a stamped addressed envelope to. Alternatively you can download the postcard file and print your own copy – for personal use only.

Continue reading (Un)Limited Edition – Happy Christmas

Fluorescent Orange

One of the many reasons I wish President Obama would live up to his promises and close Guantanamo Bay is that I hate trying to photograph those bright, often fluorescent, orange jump suits which have become such a part of the protest vocabularly. Of course its a very minor reason compared to the torture and human rights abuse, but one that gives me a certain amount of personal grief rather than engaging my conscience and my empathy for the suffering of others.

Bright reds and oranges have long been a particular problem for photographers, and it was certainly something I came across in the days of film – but then almost all colours were a problem with film, at least if you had any concern for accurate reproduction. Which is something many photographers don’t suffer from, and why so many long for the days of Kodachrome or wax long if not eloquent about the warmth of Agfa, or even pine for the garish purples of Orwo. And why so many Fuji X users are excited about the new firmware that adds ‘Classic Chrome’ to the various distortions you can – if so inclined – give your colour images.

Personally I moved from chromes to negative film in the mid 1980s in the search for more natural colour, switched to Fuji when I experienced the cleaner look its colour negative films and paper gave compared to the yellow box. And realised immediately the great leap forward with Nikon’s digital files when I started using the D100, something that I think led to me soon virtually abandoning black and white (though there were other reasons too.)

But though I generally love digital colour, or at least Nikon’s version of it (and Fuji X is usually great too) there are still a few problems. Artificial light, often far removed from a continuous spectrum has its own problems, and just occasionally in natural light there are conditions where I can’t really get entirely satisfactory colour results. And there are bright oranges.

So while I expect problems at protests for the release of Shaker Aamer, a Londoner still held in Guantanamo to the shame of both US and UK governments, I didn’t expect to have to deal with the same problem when I went along to y Frack Off London’d Global Frackdown event. But I arrived to find their fracking rig workers in bright orange suits.

The files on My London Diary were processed rapidly in Lightroom before uploading them for possible publication, and I didn’t have time to think about the orange suits. I’ve done another rather quick edit (with some slightly careless burning in) which gives a rather better result to the suit, though still not entirely to my satisfaction. Apart from darkening and lightening some areas, the main change is a switch from the Adobe Standard profile I normally use to ‘Camera Portrait’ for this image made on the D800E with the 18-105mm.

For images made using the D700, I have a wider choice of profiles available in Lightroom. Changing from ‘Adobe Standard’ to ‘Camera Neutral dcpTool untwist’ with just some minor adjustments to contrast and exposure – but no burning in – gives a better result, and corrects the slight hue shift in the original oranges.

I’m sure it would be possible to get a similar profile for the D800E, but I haven’t bothered to do so yet. For almost all pictures the ‘Adobe Standard’ is fine.

You can read about the protest and see more images from it at Global Frackdown at HSBC.

Since writing this I did a quick web search and found a link to some useful D800/D800E profiles.

Continue reading Fluorescent Orange

Epiphany

Re-enactment of the 1661 revolt goes up the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral – but didn’t enter and seize it

OK, I know I’m early (for once.) Advent doesn’t end for a couple of days and Epiphany comes after Christmas on January 6th. But Epiphany the 37 minute film is here now and for free! Unlike The Interview there have been no death threats and no mysterious hacking, as the ruler who its plot tried to get rid of has been dead rather a long time, though the people the film celebrates did come to a very nasty end, with a number of them being publicly hung, drawn and quartered after their 3-day uprising in London was brutally put down.

Director Suzy Gillett has decided to give us a Christmas present, and a year after it was completed,and after several screenings this 36 minute epic is now free to share.

The cast includes a number of people I know and have photographed at other events, in particular from Class War, and the subject comes from one of the more interesting periods of English history, perhaps the last era when we really had really interesting times.

Ian Bone holds a framed print of Thomas Venner leader of the Fifth Monarchists

The seventeenth century got off to a good start in 1605 with Guy Fawkes, by 1620 things were so bad that the Pilgrim Fathers sailed to America, then in 1642 a few years of Civil War, after which in 1649 we did the only sensible thing we’ve ever managed to do too our royal family, beheading the king. Unfortunately Parliament turned down the ‘Agreement of the People’ and we ended up with a dictator, Cromwell. After his death, people thought a king would be a better idea, and we had the Restoration in 1660. Actually it didn’t work out too well (except for Charles II, the ‘Merry Monarch’ who had innumerable mistresses and acknowledged 14 of his illegitimate children) and when his brother and successor tried to make us all Catholics it was time for change again – and our so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, truly a missed opportunity as it brought a replacement Protestant King from Holland.

Probably carrying axes and a pike was banned in the City of London after the 1661 Fifth Monarchist outrage

With that background, here is Suzy’s text about Epiphany from Vimeo:

Epiphany is about the rise and fall of the mystics and anarchists of the English Revolution. The Fifth Monarchists stood up to the restoration of the Monarchy in 1661 and were hung drawn and quartered for their efforts.
The Muggletonians lasted for 300 years, keeping a low profile they had their own religious beliefs that successfully continued until well after the restoration of the Monarchy.
Celebrating these little known political and religious sects of the English Civil War, a collective of people made a re-enactment of Venner’s uprising on the 6th January where he marched into the city to St Paul’s fighting off the army in a hopeless battle.
Incarnated by contemporary anarchists, Ian Bone and Martin Wright.

On the steps of St Paul’s Catherdral. The girl with the pike is a great-grandaughter of the last Muggletonian

I became involved with the film when I went to photograph the re-enactment, not at the time realising I was going to become a very small part of the film. Most of the time I managed to keep out of the way of the cameras, but there are three scenes in which I appear in fleeting glimpses. You can see my pictures from the making of the re-enactment at Epiphany Rising Against King.

Ian Bone holds up the picture of Venner on the steps of St Paul’s

Only one of the pictures in this post appears in the selection on My London Diary, and that is developed slightly differently.

Continue reading Epiphany

Beauty, Form, Redemption?

Photography is democratic: it puts into the hand of everyman the means to be his own recorder. To defend its artistic pretensions is to make everyman an artist.
Roger Scruton, ‘The Photographic Surrogate’, 1989 p.178

This morning, after breakfast but before I was truly awake I heard the third of Roger Scruton‘s ‘Points of View’, talks available ‘indefinitely’ as podcasts, but I was listening to the Sunday repeat on Radio 4. It seemed to me an error in programming, with Scruton’s contributions lacking the humour that usually makes these short talks entertaining as well as interesting – as too were the weekly ‘Letters from America‘ by the late Alistair Cooke that had formerly created and occupied this slot for as long as anyone living can remember.

In these three talks Scruton was giving us his views on what is and isn’t real art, and deservedly knocking much of what currently is lauded and sells for high prices. The first talk, Faking It, was a nice sally against “Artists like Damien Hirst” who “try so hard to be challenging, that causing shock or offence becomes their main motivation.” Then ‘Kitsch‘ looked more at the preoccupation among 20th century artists with “what they perceived as the need to avoid kitsch and sentimentality” which has led to “a different kind of fake: cliche” and the deliberate parody of “pre-emptive kitsch.”

In the final piece, ‘The Real Thing‘, Scruton identified and explained the three attributes of ‘real art’: Beauty, Form and Redemption. We may have slightly different ideas than him as to the first of these but can certainly understand his thoughts on form, even if we might not accept that real art always should aim to “take modern life in all its disconnectedness and bring it to fullness and resolution“.

There seems equally a desire for rose-tinted glasses in his final idea of ‘Redemption’, with talk of “proof that life is meaningful“… “triumph of dignity” … “restore moral equilibrium“….”the face of love shining in the midst of desolation...” and so on. Would I want to restrict art to what sometimes seems an overly positive view of the world and the human condition? He ends his piece with the comment: “Real art is a work of love; fake art is a work of deception.” I’m rather happier with the second phrase than the first.

But though much of this talk, what came to my mind was the work of Walker Evans, which seemed in many ways a perfect fit to his definition of ‘real art’, despite his views on photography. I thought perhaps I would write more about his views on photography, and began doing just a little research. But then I thought frankly I can’t be bothered. It’s sometimes strange that philosophers can be so blinkered in particular ways, and I have more important things to do. Perhaps even in my own minute and very limited way to change the world.

But if you feel up to it, you might like to read Stefan Best’s review of his ‘Photography and Representation’ or the 2009 paper by Dawn M Phillips, Photography and Causation: Responding to Scruton’s Scepticism, or Siran Changchang’s Representation of Painting and Representation of Photography for a view from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, the first of two articles on the work of Gerhard Richter. And I’m sure you will find much else, but I feel a pressing need to get some real work done and leave the angels on pins to others.

Photobooks of the Year

I’m a great lover of photographic books. I’ve often said that for most photographs they are the place they work best. Or can work best – there are plenty of bad books as well as good books. But there are several things about photobooks that attract me.

First its the intimacy of the experience which I think is somehow so appropriate to our medium. Photographs are generally something to hold in you hands and look at – and you can do that in a book or with a box of prints in front of you. Its a much closer and more personal experience than viewing them on a gallery wall, and one that you can have without interruptions.

Important too that a book puts a photograph into the context of others. One of the things I often have said which has confused students is that “photography isn’t about making pictures.” We make pictures of course, but we – or at least I – don’t make them to make pictures. Photography for me is about telling stories, and the best place for a story is a presentation or a book. A gallery wall can sometimes do a half decent job, but often they leave me feeling something is missing.

But I do have a problem with books. I own far too many of them (and get told that frequently in-house.) Most of our rooms have walls lined with them – at least they are good insulation. It’s got to the stage where I have to smuggle new volumes in and find some place to hide them away, and that’s getting difficult as the gaps fill up.

So I’ve adopted a policy. I now only buy books by photographers I know – actually know personally. Of course I don’t quite keep to it, there are some I just have to buy. But most of what I buy now are by people I’ve actually met. And one small tip to anyone in a similar position to myself – it’s easier to smuggle in books published years ago and bought secondhand; I don’t actually lie about it, but just let it be assumed that I’ve had them for years.

So you won’t find me writing a list of my top 10 photo books of the year as most people seem to be doing at the moment. Instead I’ll refer you to the top 36 picked by Jim Casper and the editors of LensCulture, an interesting selection, though I’ve only bought one of them myself. There is a preview for each on the books to give you a real idea of what you have missed.

The volume that I do have (and am still looking for a space large enough to keep it) is the big Winogrand book. I’m still not sure that I really like it, and certainly I prefer the books that Winogrand himself produced. I’m undecided too about the whole idea of posthumous editing and rather think that he might have been better served had all those undeveloped film and unprinted negatives had gone up in a fire.

And although I like the work of Robert Adams, I don’t feel I have to get yet another book of his work – and it seems from the Lensculture preview to be the same work that I already have in the dozen other of his books on my shelves. I think too that I already have the best of Ralph Gibson and of Gene Smith. And thinking of Smiths, another book I didn’t buy this year was Evocations of Place: The Photography of Edwin Smith, because I already own the splendid 1984 monograph on him. But I think it would go on my list were I to make one. As too would the very different Shoreditch Wild Life by Dougie Wallace, a small enough volume for me to make space for. And… No, I said I wasn’t going to write a list!

Better Portable Graphics

In what could be really good news for photographers, French programmer Fabrice Bellard has come up with a greatly improved new compression format for images which he has named BPG for (Better Portable Graphics.)

Making use of ‘a subset of the HEVC open video compression standard‘, it offers significant advantages over the JPEG format that has been the standard compressed graphics format for many years, in particular supporting up to 14 bits per channel and giving a greater dynamic range and better compression ratio. For equivalent quality it gives much lower file sizes, though for most of us it will be the ability to get much higher quality at around the same file sizes that will probably be of more interest.

Bellard has deliberately chose to support the same chroma formats as JPEG, to reduce losses in conversion from (and to) JPEG, and the format also supports an alpha channel and RGB, YCgCO and CMYK colour spaces. The format can also include EXIF, ICC profile and XMP.

Gizmag has a nice image gallery which compares the two formats, concluding “The BPG files seem to hold up vastly better, demonstrating a lot less color banding, blocking and step-ladder aliasing along edges, and producing pleasing images down to surprisingly small sizes.” You can also see some good examples at Imaging Resource.

The weakness of BPG which Gizmag points out is that it makes use of the HEVC open video compression standard, of which, as Bellard states, some “algorithms may be protected by patents in some countries“. The whole legal position over this and other MPEG-related technologies is unclear.

Also muddying the water is Google’s WebP format which they have made freely available under a BSD licence. Although clearly from the on line comparative examples inferior to BPG in image quality, it’s hard to compete with Google. But perhaps on seeing the advantages Google will want to run with BPG – so long as any patent problems can be surmounted.

At the moment BPG is not supported by browsers, but you can download source code, windows command line PNG or JPG to BPG encoder and BPG to PNG or PPM decoder, as well as javascript decoders for use on web sites which take pixel width and height from <img> tags to produce a canvas into which a BPG is decoded. So in theory you could start using BPG on your web site today.

Of course this is all rather experimental stuff, and few will wish to take it up. But as the number of photographers now working with RAW images shows, many photographers are aware of the deficiencies of the jpeg format, useful as it has been over the past more than 20 years. With the increasing importance of video in cameras, the use of the H.264 video codec for both video and still images might make BPG a sensible alternative for camera manufacturers. JPEG arrived just in time to make images viable on the web, but it now seems time to move on – and BPG seems the best direction to take.

Umbrella Revolution

No, I didn’t get to Hong Kong, but like so many protests around the world, it also came to London, with a little help from the National Campaign against Fees and Cuts, who organised the protest at the Chinese Embassy on 10th October.

It was the last of four stories I covered that day (and I found time to do a few urban panoramas too – which you can see with the other stories on My London Diary) and in some respects the most interesting. But it was probably well after midnight by the time I had finished uploading the earlier stories and was working on the post processing of the final event. Which is perhaps why one of the pictures I uploaded was just a little strange:

As is probably obvious, this suffers from a rather nasty case of extreme distortion, though perhaps that makes the yellow and black umbrella stand out even more.Here’s the image that I intended to post:

D700, 16mm fisheye, ISO 800, 1/80 f5.6

It still looks a little distorted, and the verticals are converging, though that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I’d made the original picture from which both these were derived using the Nikon 16mm fisheye, chosen mainly because I was in a very crowded situation on the pavement in front of the Chinese embassy and unable to move any further back from the subject. I’d wanted both the umbrella and the messages on the poster, with the ‘No Violence to Peaceful Protests in Hong Kong’ at the left- with another umbrella and, at the right the word ‘Solidarity‘. The text on placards is very important when photographing protests (something I learnt rapidly from the first editor I took my pictures to), and something you always need to be aware of in all images, as legible text always alters the way that we see images.

I usually process the images from the 16mm using either the Fisheye-Hemi plugin, PtGui or occasionally Photoshop’s ‘Adaptive Wide Angle’ filter. The first two are rather simpler to use and more or less automatically convert from fisheye to a cylindrical perspective, straightening the verticals and reducing the curvature of objects at the edges of the frame. Fisheye-Hemi has just 3 options, depending on the type of fisheye lens you have used (circular, full frame or partial), while PtGui gives greater flexibility. Photoshop’s own filter enables you to straighten any of the lines curved by the lens, but to do a great deal of work usually involves losing a lot of the image, and I usually end up getting some very funny curves indeed and deleting the results.

Somehow I have used Fisheye-Hemi twice on the top image, not a good idea. While the edges oft he placards and the crane at right are more or less straight in the lower picture, they have become curved in the opposite sense to the original in the upper image in a kind of extreme pin-cushion distortion.

Another pair of images perhaps gives a clearer view of what Fisheye-hemi does:

D700, 16mm fisheye, ISO800, 1/60 f5

The protesters were crowded around the doorway of the Chinese embassy – much to the annoyance of the police, who like to keep protests to the opposite side of the road. I am very close to the speaker and the man at right who I could reach out and touch. In the upper images there is very clear curvature close to the edges, particularly noticeable in the pillar of the doorway at the extreme right of the image, but also in the other building in the background and in the woman at the left of the frame.

Fisheye-Hemi has more or less straightened the verticals of the architecture and made that woman look fairly normal. You can also see that the centre points of all four sides show identical subject matter – at left the word ‘Solidarity’, at top centre the top of the pillar, at right a police officer’s ear and at bottom centre the lower edge of that red jumper (I’ve cropped the lower image very marginally to remove a little distraction, which is why there is very slight less of that officer’s face.)

There is also a little part of the image missing at the corners, something you need to be aware of when taking pictures, but it isn’t really a great deal. Because you keep those four edge centres the viewfinder image remains a pretty goo way to frame the image.

D700, 16mm fisheye, ISO 2500, 1/160 f5

Here’s another image taken a few minutes later when people were applauding. I’m pretty sure my shoulders were touching those of the guy whose hands appear at the left of the image.

D700, 16-35mm at 22mm ISO 2500 1/160 f5

Here’s another picture of a different speaker taken from more or less the same position but with a different lens. It’s an ultra-wide view, with the 16-35mm at 22mm, which gives a good idea of how close I really was to the speakers – and I couldn’t move back because of the crowd.

D800E, Nikon 18-105mm DX, 62mm (93mm equiv) ISO 1000, 1/60 f7.1

Later I moved a little to the side and was able to work with a longer lens. I could even work from a distance where I could use a more normal ‘portrait’ focal length, in this case 93mm equivalent using the 18 – 105mm. By this time the light was getting low and I was needing flash to brighten up the ambient.

More pictures from the event at Solidarity with the Umbrella Revolution.
Continue reading Umbrella Revolution

Darkness and Rain

October I seemed to spend a long time struggling to make pictures in darkness and rain, particularly at several of what turned out to be a weekly fixture covering the Poor Doors protests outside the hugely expensive One Commercial Street flats in Whitechapel High St at Aldgate, just on the edge of the City of London.

It wasn’t really quite dark when I took this- and other pictures in Poor Doors Musical Protest

One solution (of sorts) to darkness is to use flash, and I’ve kind of got used to that, even if things go infuriatingly wrong at times. But using flash in rain is a problem, as all the raindrops glow in the flash, particularly those closer to the camera (as the light falls off with the square of the distance.) My flash units aren’t waterproof either, and using them in wet conditions without some kind of protection can lead to expensive repairs – and even the possibility of getting 400 volts when you least expect it.

A week later it was darker and raining rather more – Class War Poor Doors Week 12

Flash is often infuriating in any case, and there are some very good web sites about using it which suggest various creative set-ups, none of which are particularly appropriate to the kind of work that I do. For that you need quick and dirty flash, but there are a few things to bear in mind which can improve matters. I suspect I’ve mentioned all this before, but here goes with my 10 flash tips.

Use high ISO to avoid blackness around the close bits your flash can light up. Mostly at night with flash I work at ISO1600 or ISO3200.
If your flash has a diffuser built in, use it for wide-angles unless you want ‘creative’ vignetting. For longer lenses you can use it for close subjects. The little built-in white plastic bounce reflector helps too – but only at fairly short range, when you can then angle the flash head up at 45 degrees.
Work with your camera in manual mode and your flash in auto TTL mode (assuming you can – it works with my SB800s)
Usually a shutter speed of 1/30 or 1/60 will do fine. Mostly I also work with my rather slow lenses more or less wide open too. Aim to get an exposure without flash that is perhaps 2-4 stops under.
Try to underexpose with the flash too, but only by around 1 stop. If you give correct exposure you will get pictures that don’t look as if they were taken at night. If I’m working without flash I generally need to underexpose by 1-2 stops
Most night scenes – at least in cities – will contain lots of light sources which seriously muck up your camera’s metering. Best work in manual and check the results, adjust as needed, then leave alone until you move into a differently lit area.
When possible make use of the uneven light spread your flash will give by angling the flash head away from the closer parts of the subject.
Sometimes it pays to use your left hand as a flag to shade parts of the subject.
Work in RAW, as you are going to need considerable post-processing for best results.
Never let people see your flash pictures until you’ve sorted them out in post-processing!

We did have one dry week, but then it rained again – another Wet night at Poor Doors

Nikon also have some kind of random fault generator, that will result in the occasional image being hopelessly over-exposed. It might help to make sure flash and hotshoe contacts are clean and that you have pushed the flash right on and locked it in position. But you will still get the odd random white-out (or at least I do) and the occasional random non-flash image with burnt out highlights. Its just to keep you on your toes.

Of course there are some faults for which only the photographer is to blame. Like taking a second picture before the flash has had time to recycle, which I manage frequently. Or forgetting that any exposure compensation for flash set on the camera adds on to that set on an external flash unit…

And while flash actually built into the camera may sometimes be a good idea, it’s largely a marketing point. Of the five lenses that I normally use on the Nikons it actually only works sensibly with one of them (and the one I uses least) the 20mm f2.8; with all the other lenses except the fisheye get a large shadow in the lower part of the frame from the lens. For the 16mm fisheye it’s also generally useless as it only illuminates a central oval in the frame.

I always thought that, as the SB800 manual says the flash diffuser is needed to provide proper illumination for 14mm and 17mm lenses, this meant that there was no way the flash would give a wide enough coverage with the 16mm fisheye. So I’d never tried it before these occasions. To my surprise it actually works quite well, and is slightly better still if you also use the bounce card. Used out of doors, recycling times will be around the maximum – and NiMH rechargeable batteries the only sensible choice. When I remember, adding the optional 5th battery really helps, bringing the recharge time down to under 3 seconds, almost as fast as the best external power supplies.

Having fitted an external flash into the hot-shoe, it becomes possible to only slightly raise the built-in flash. Just a little, so it is difficult to notice, but it is still enough to mess up flash exposures completely. So much so that I keep it permanently taped down, only for emergency use.

Uncorrected Fisheye and flash

But flash and rain is still a problem. As an alternative to flash I have a couple of cheap LED light sources, the more powerful with 9 rows of 16 LEDs, a total of 144 LEDs. It makes quite a good torch for looking underneath furniture, but as a light source for taking pictures it is far too weedy. There are more expensive units around, but I’ve yet to try them, though I have at times ‘borrowed’ the light from the larger units wielded by professional videographers.

But in the end I’ve often found myself trying to work just with available light, and wishing that I had lenses for the Nikons like some of those I used to use, particularly the 35mm f1.4 Summilux. Neither the 16-35mm f4 nor the 18-105mm f3.5-f5.6 is much of a lens in low light, and most of the time I find myself using the 16mm f2.8 fisheye, or, if I’ve remembered to put it in my camera bag, the 20mm f2.8. I’ve had most success with the 16mm (not least because I’ve almost always got it with me) but I’d still like a really fast wide lens for use on dirty nights. The only real choice I can see is the Nikon 20mm f1.8G AF-S but its a little on the expensive side.

Phantom

I’ll freely admit to never having heard before of Peter Lik, whose photograph “Phantom” has just sold for a world record $6.5 million. And when I went to his web site to (as it says) ‘DISCOVER THE BEAUTY OF “PHANTOM” FOR YOURSELF‘, I have to say I was not overly impressed.

In the press release about the sale it states:

“Phantom” sold to a private collector for an unprecedented $6.5 million. The purchase also included Lik’s masterworks “Illusion” for $2.4 million and “Eternal Moods” for $1.1 million.

“Phantom” and “Eternal Moods” are black and white representations of Lik’s iconic images “Ghost” and “Eternal Beauty.” Lik is known for his artistic approach to landscape photography and capturing Mother Nature’s vibrant colors. His use of black and white imagery is a rare and compelling departure from his normal style.

Looking at his site I was very much reminded of those many on-line shops I’ve browsed, perhaps in search of a new jacket or t-shirt, though there are t-shirt companies like Philosophy Football that I find rather more artistically interesting.

Of course Lik is a more than competent photographer (and has the certificates on-line to prove it), but frankly I think that anyone who pays more than two figures for one of his prints is lacking in judgement, and it is hard to disagree with anything that Jonathan Jones says in his Guardian article “The $6.5m canyon: it’s the most expensive photograph ever – but it’s like a hackneyed poster in a posh hotel“. Where the frames are worth more than the image.

It’s interesting that Lik’s on-line biography (which fails to mention a single other photographer whose work might have inspired or influenced him) includes the following:

Peter’s images can be viewed in luxurious hotels, prominent estates, leading corporate offices and in all of his galleries around the United States.

So perhaps those ‘hackneyed posters’ were really clichéd Lik originals. And if you can read that ‘biography’ without reaching for a sick bag you have a stronger stomach than me.

In black and white, “Phantom” is perhaps slightly less tacky than “Ghost” which is the colour version, but Jones is spot on the ball when he comments ‘Today, this deliberate use of an outmoded style can only be nostalgic and affected, an “arty” special effect. We’ve all got that option in our photography software.’ Though I suspect Lik’s conversion to black and white, presumably with ‘PhaseOne‘ was a little more sophisticated than Instagram, it does I think emphasize a failure in his vision.

As Jones says “Someone has been very foolish with their money, mistaking the picturesque for high art“. It harks back an argument that was current in photography around a hundred years ago, and for most of us looking back was fairly convincingly brought to an end by the final editions of Camera Work, begun at devoted to the work of Paul Strand. Edward Weston struggled with the issues in his own work in the 1920s, (and wrote about them) as did others in that period, but the debate was essentially over. And of course since then we have had further movements away from the pictorial and “arty”, for example in the later work of Strand, as well as with Walker Evans, Robert Frank and more. We’ve moved too from Ansel Adams (who perhaps seldom entirely escaped the picturesque ) to Robert.

Where Jones misses the point is to condemn ‘fine art photography’ because of the foolishness of some US billionaire and the avarice of the art market. Of course this is not ‘the most valuable “fine art photograph” in history’, and an idiot or a business paying huge money for it or other pictures (whether painted or photographed) doesn’t make it anything more than the most expensive.

In a house spat, yesterday The Guardian published a riposte by Sean O’Hagan ‘Photography is art and always will be’, which also says many things it is hard to disagree with, despite the silliness of its title. Most photography plainly isn’t art and never will be. And while not quite all the names given by O’Hagan to support his argument have a high rating in my personal Pantheon and we disagree about the dividing line between artists and photographers, he is clearly right about the irrelevance of the debate which Jones brings up and right too in his agreement over the worth of that Lik image: “It’s global capitalism – obscenely rich people with more money than sense.”

What matters in the end is not whether anything is art or photography – or in the end whether people chose to work within the photographic tradition or a wider artistic one, but vision and the ability to communicate that vision. As O’Hagan says, work that “makes you look at the world differently“.

October 2014

October 2014 I think probably set several records for ‘My London Diary. At a month and 11 days it’s probably the most I’ve been late in updating a month after it has ended, and the reason for that, at least in part is the record number of sets of photographs – almost reaching 50. Not all of protests, but it is the increasing storm of protest that is making me so busy, and seems unlikely to slacken for a while, as increasingly anger over the effects of government policies rises. Not that it is just the current government – the problems related to housing and the increasing gulf between rich and poor, the failure to subject the police to proper governance etc reflect the failures and priorities of previous governments – at least back to Thatcher – and an increasing dysfunction of democracy itself.

The protests also reflect increasing tensions around the world – Kobane, Hong Kong, Iran, Palestine – and major global issues including climate change. I’m pleased that I’ve also found a little time – often in the gaps between a couple of protests on the same day – to continue occasionally with some of my other photographic interests.