Getting Bailey

The first post that I wrote for ‘About Photography’, where for around 8 years I wrote a regular weekly photography column as well as setting up a web site dedicated to photography, was about David Bailey.  Looking back, it wasn’t one of my better articles, but – perhaps because it had a touch of humour as well as a little insight – it got me the job.

Bailey has never really been one of my favourite photographers, but there are certainly things about him and his work that I admire. And clearly he is a guy with a dedication to photography, and a fashion photographer only because that was (according to him) an easy way to make a living so he could take pictures.

While some BBC Radio programmes never make it to iPlayer and others disappear after a week, you have, according to the web site, ‘over a year’ to listen to David Bailey talking to (and photographing) presenter Tim Marlow about how he got started and his attitude to portraiture and fashion. The first of two programmes in the series ‘Getting the Picture’, The Camera Has Attitudes, can be heard now, and the second part of the conversation with Bailey, He Seduces Everybody! will be on-line after it has been broadcast on Monday 20th January.

These programmes come in advance of a new show at London’s National Portrait Gallery, Bailey’s Stardust, which runs from 6th February to 1 June 2014. Meanwhile you can search the gallery’s collection both for pictures taken by him and pictures of him.

There are quite a few sites around the web with articles on Bailey, and more with some of his pictures. But perhaps the most interesting of them is by Francis Hodgson, David Bailey – Still Troubling After All These Years. Writing at the time of the show David Bailey’s East End at the Compressor House in  London’s former Royal Docks in 2012 (a show dedicated to , Hodgson comments:

David Bailey has had insufficient attention. That sounds absurd. One of the most famous photographers we have? Certainly, but he’s almost never had a public show – one big one at the Barbican (and the Barbican is oddly funded, it’s not really a national venue) otherwise scraps. It is impossible to imagine a German photographer of equivalent status, a French or a Dutch, to have received so little public confirmation. Our curators really haven’t been doing their work if Bailey can unearth treasures on this scale in a few months of trawling his own files.

And it is so obviously true, and something the show at the National Portrait Gallery will really do little to correct, because its focus is simply on one very limited aspect of Bailey’s work and perhaps this is not really his strongest suit.  Some of them are excellent for the genre, and certainly head and shoulders (excuse me!) above some of the mediocrity that seems to be the NPG’s forte, but there is much more to the man than these images which are largely about celebrity.

Of course, Hodgson’s complaint is one that could be echoed about many other British photographers and about the British establishment’s attitude to photography in general.  And if our own institutions don’t bat for them it’s hardly surprising that so many have not gained the international reputation they deserve.

Hodgson finishes with the final footnote :

I see that the show is dedicated to the late Claire de Rouen, bookseller of the Charing Cross Road, and a person whose enthusiasm for photography was the engine for an entire generation of UK practitioners.

Many of us were indeed encouraged and stimulated by her enthusiasm at the Photographers’ Gallery where I first got to know her (and in the Porcupine)  and then later at Zwemmers and then her own bookshop further up the Charing Cross Road.  If only there were more like her.

Around Erith, 1985


Erith Yacht Club, 1985

My photographic excursion on the lower Thames continued towards Erith, its slow pace suiting both my photographic needs and those of my six year old assistant, busily taking his own pictures, though I think he found the wide open spaces defeated him.


Manor Road, Erith. 1985

Getting towards Erith, past the Yacht club we had to divert from the river along a busy and dusty road, rather dreary walking, with just the occasional interesting but unphotographable distant glimpse of riverside industry. In 1985 there was no Thames Path (I think it was a few years later that I got an early draft and contributed some comments to the consultation), but now it still has to follow more or less the route we took.

I had the Ordnance Survey maps, which marked most of the paths; some were shown as public rights of way, while many other roads and tracks on the map were behind gates. Often more useful in finding my way were the large scale street-maps which had the advantage of showing road names, though not always paths.


Causeway- No Admittance. Erith, 1985

At that time you could only return to the riverside right in the centre of the town, with parts of the riverside still very much a closed off working river. Now you can walk back to the east a little, and some of what was industrial land is now a ‘superstore’.


Belvedere from riverside at Erith, 1985

From the riverside path there were views of the riverside industry on the same bank upstream at Belvedere. We walked a little way towards these before making our way back to the station for the train home.


Riverside path, Erith, 1985

That April walk was not the only photographic project I was working on at that time, and earlier in the month I had been busy taking pictures around the Old Kent Road in Peckham, Bermondsey and Camberwell, as well as of the flooding in Richmond (a frequent occurrence at high tides) and a few other things elsewhere. Later in the month I found time for another visit, making my way from Charlton to Greenwich, which I’ll post some pictures of another day.
Continue reading Around Erith, 1985

Ponytail Pontifications: The Sayle Twins

I’ve written previously about the blog by an old friend of mine – though our paths seem seldom to cross these days – Derek Ridgers, whose Ponytail Pontifications are always of interest. His latest post about meeting and photographing Alexei Sayle, and his invention of the Sayle Twins is a good example.

Back in the 1980s, Derek and I used to meet up regularly with some other photographers to criticise each other’s work, and Derek pulled no punches, as I mentioned in a post Photo Reviews. As I commented there, these critical gatherings “were about developing ourselves as photographers, photo reviews are all about developing your careers” and I know that they were important for me, and I like to think that some of my comments (though rather more polite and less controversial than his) may have at least encouraged him, and occasionally  I think we both gained from a little mutual advice.

Derek has worked for over 35 years for UK magazines and Newspapers like NME, The Face, The Independent, The Sunday Telegraph, Time Out and Loaded, and has a remarkable archive of work, including much on his web site.  Sabotage Times last month published an interview with him about a book of his pictures from the London Tattoo Convention with a gallery of 13  pictures.

Derek has a new book, Derek Ridgers: 78-87 London Youth, due to be published on March 31, 2014, and you can see and hear him talking about his photography in a promo video. His pictures are on show at Ketchum Pleon at 35-41 Folgate Street in Spitalfields, London E1 6BX in February 2014.

South of the Thames


Flood barrier at mouth of River Darent, 1985

I’ve published or exhibited very few of the images I took along the Thames Estuary in the outer boroughs of Greater London and North Kent in the 1980s. A handful appeared with a couple of articles I wrote in ‘Amateur Photographer’ at the time, and one or two were in various shows. A few are already on the web too, a couple on this site in a post Controversial Landscapes a little over a year ago.

There were various reasons for this, then and now. By the time I’d actually finished the project, working on odd days for a little over a year, I was beginning to work on another larger project on London which was to take up much of my next 15 years.

I was also having some technical problems. Wanting more detail and smoother tonality in particular in the wide-open landscapes I was working much of the time with Kodak’s Technical Pan, discontinued around ten years ago (they stopped making it some years earlier but had a large fridge.)


River Darent, 1985

It was a film developed for technical purposes as the name suggests, and was a panchromatic film with extended red sensitivity, rendering reds lighter and blues darker than normal pan films. Kodak described it as a versatile film and their “slowest and finest-grained black-and-white film for pictorial photography (when developed in KODAK TECHNIDOL Liquid Developer).” It had been produced at first for applications such as microfilm and astronomy and normal development gave a contrast that was way too contrasty for printing on any available photographic papers.


View across the Thames to Purfleet, 1985

For high contrast uses it could be exposed at reasonable ISO, typically ISO 125, but to get normal contrast involved using dilute or modified developers that required several stops more exposure – typically I was exposing it at perhaps ISO 12 or 25, and with some developers even at ISO 6.  Until Kodak’s own Technidol became my developer of choice, the results were often dismal, with contrast either too high or too low and a high risk of both uneven development and underexposure. But when you were fortunate the results were really only limited by your lenses. It was often said it produced ‘5×4’ quality from 35mm and that could be more or less true.


River Thames, 1985

The downside, apart from the many images spoilt by development faults was having to carry and a tripod to avoid any camera shake with these low ISOs. Many of the places I visited were some way from convenient public transport and typically I was walking perhaps ten or twelve miles a day carrying my gear, and the extra 5.5 lbs of the Manfrotto and head was often a literal pain. I tried lighter alternatives, but found nothing sufficiently tall and solid. It perhaps led to my aversion to tripods, which to this day I seldom use outside the house and garden.


River Wall, River Thames, 1985

My interest in this project came in particular from two sources, the first a geography text, South East England, Thameside and the Weald, by Roy Millward and Adrian Robinson (1971), which contained a section ‘The cement industry of Lower Thameside’, and the rather more fanciful and poetic ‘Pilgrimage of the Thames’ by writer and illustrator Donald Maxwell (1932) whose journey began at Gravesend and finished at Oxford. In the preface he writes that in existing books on the river “I realised that no attention whatever had been paid to many matters that I, for one, find thrillingly interesting.” and goes on to give several examples beginning with “Who has written on the cement country with any conviction or attention?” It seemed something of a photographic challenge too as I looked at his drawing of the ‘The Ravine of Greenhithe’.


River Thames, 1985

My first visit was for a simple walk from Slade Green station (the last in Zone 6 on a Travelcard) back along by the Rivers Darenth and Thames to Erith, and then to leave the riverside and make my way down to Belvedere station for the journey home, and the pictures here are from the first half of that day.

River Thames, 1985

I’ve revisited the area occasionally over the years, and some later panoramas are in my book Thamesgate Panoramas where the Blurb preview has a selection of 36 pages. Like most of my books it is available as a PDF, either from Blurb and also in a slightly better version at the same price direct from me.


River Wall, River Thames, 1985

I’ll write more about this work, and how some of the later images were made from the negatives using the D800E in some later posts. But all of this first set – which are displayed here as ‘unspotted’ work images are from high-res scans on the Minolta Dimage Scan Multi-Pro.

Continue reading South of the Thames

Time’s Flow – Adam Magyar

Over the years I’ve seen a number of photographs making use of scanners and photo-finish cameras and various multiple exposure techniques and never found them more than amusing novelties. But there is something rather more compelling about Adam Magyar’s stainless (video).  Perhaps because video is essentially a transient experience, while in still images I want something deeper, that says more than ‘how clever’ or even ‘I wonder how he did it?’

You can see more of his other work – and it is impressive if largely not to my taste on his web site linked above, and learn much about Magyar’s ingenuity and perseverance in a feature  ‘Einstein’s Camera’, which also includes the video along with other work.

I’m rather sceptical about any link with Einstein – and most other such claims made by artists – but that doesn’t detract from the work. Wikipedia has this quote from Arthur Eddington

Let us draw an arrow arbitrarily. If as we follow the arrow we find more and more of the random element in the state of the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future; if the random element decreases the arrow points towards the past. That is the only distinction known to physics. This follows at once if our fundamental contention is admitted that the introduction of randomness is the only thing which cannot be undone. I shall use the phrase ‘time’s arrow’ to express this one-way property of time which has no analogue in space.

which might be more appropriate, but ‘Eddington’s Camera’ wouldn’t have the same attraction.

The ‘Medium‘ site on which this piece appears has some other articles that may be of interest, though on a quick look through I found no other significant photography. One of the site’s features is to tell you how long each will take to read. For ‘Einstein’s Camera’ it tells you ’22 minutes’.

Thanks to Peggy Sue Amison of the Sirius Arts Centre in Cork, Ireland for bringing this work to my attention by a post on Facebook. Magyar is bow based in Berlin where she is a consultant and curator at Picture Berlin. The video was also shot in Berlin, and reminded me of my visit there a couple of years ago, when I also took the U-Bahn from Rosa Luxemburg Platz to Alexanderplatz, both close to where I stayed, though I took few pictures.

 

Epiphany

Bone, Ian Bone. I first met him around ten years ago, in Trafalgar Square on the edge of some demo or other. May Day I think. The radical fringe, autonomous bloc, black but very white. I crawled through a densely packed small crowd to where the anarchists were calling for revolt and attempting to clobber photographers who dared raise a lens. Elbows came in very useful, forearms parried fists and I pushed on and found myself photographing Mr Bone.

We met again over the years, and again, usually on the edges of protests, scarpering when the Bill arrived, leaving the youth death squad to be kettled, and I began to appreciate his tactical intelligence. Now it seems he’s a film star. And a director. Dark glasses. But is it the real Bone?

I’ve this memory or dream, standing in front of the lifts somewhere on the South Bank. RFH or perhaps Tate Modern, in a crowd. The lift doors open and Bone pushes in to a lift full of guys in dark glasses. No room for me. I run down the stairs to the lobby; no sign of Bone. No dark glasses. Check the bar. Not there. Sirens wail, blue lights flash along past St Thomas’s, over Lambeth Bridge.

Sitting in a chair in the cinema museum for the première on Sunday, talking to Bond, listening to him with his old mates from Swansea I sense a barrier. No trace of Swansea in him. Is this the real Bone I ask myself or have our spooks replaced him with a clone? Then on screen. Bone or an actor playing Bone? Film always lies, though some of the lies are beautiful, life seen through a glass of beer. Sparkling, not darkly.

Epiphany. London insurrection, 1661 and 2013 (minus the hanging, drawing and quartering.) Don’t miss it, Almost the latest edit on Vimeo, sans credits – watch it. Mad photographer appears at times, comes into frame around 29:50; I go left at 30:11 when everyone else goes right. Fifth Monarchists storm St Paul’s yet again, with the aid of a piked Muggletonian.

Nice film Suzy. Sorry for not writing about it. Perhaps I will one day. Looking forward to the next part on the Muggletonians. Perhaps Bone is a secret Muggletonian – or you or me. Who knows?
Continue reading Epiphany

More Raw Files

Pete Brook writing his Raw File blog for Wired magazine often comes up with some interesting work that’s new to me, and a couple of recent posts are worth a look.

I like the long exposure night images of Alnis Stakle in Ghostly Photos Reveal Subzero Shortcuts Through Post-Soviet Cities (that’s almost an essay rather than a title), made with exposures of several minutes on film in a Hassleblad. The lengthy exposures lose much of the feeling of night but produce some strange effects (with the peculiarities of Fuji Reala 100 and Kodak Ektar 100 doubtless adding their contribution.)

It’s also worth looking at Stakle’s own web site and the other projects there, a reminder of the great interest and depth of photography in central and eastern Europe, perhaps rather more vital now than the west.  I was reminded at times of the book ‘Lab East’ whose launch I photographed at Paris Photo in 2010.

Another recent post I enjoyed on Raw File was by German photographer Gesche Würfel, a set of images of the basements of apartment buildings in New York made while hunting for a flat there with her husband with another typically long title, Photographer Finds Cockatiels, Jesus in NYC Basements.  Among the other projects on her web site is a set of pictures by Würfel taken around the London Olympic site, Go for Gold!, covering areas I’ve myself documented over 35 years, some work from which is on my River Lea/Lea Valley site and in my book Before the Olympics.


One of my pictures from Before the Olympics – on Waterden Rd, Hackney Wick in 2005

December 2013 Posts


Tributes to Mandela in Parliament Square

December 2013

Walks around Staines


Reinstate Colombian Mayor Petro
Harrods & IRA Bomb Victims Memorial
Vigil for Chelsea (Bradley) Manning
Staines Moor


Against PayDay Loans and Austerity


‘Elf Not Wealth’ Anonymous Event
Hunger Strike for Sikh Freedom


Hizb ut-Tahrir Spokesman held in Pakistan
Cops Off Campus National Student Protest
Human Rights Day Candlelit Vigil for Syria


Against Sex Segregation in Universities
Human Rights Day Pilgrimages for Syria
Tibetans Walk Backwards for Human Rights


Photographers Support Photography
‘Cops Off Campus’ Protest Police Brutality
Bereaved protest at CPS Failures
Tributes to Mandela
EDL Protest Supports Marine A


PMOI continue Hunger Strike
Release Shaker Aamer
Continue reading December 2013 Posts

Peace as Police Stay Away


Feeling against the police was running high and was expressed in placards and banners including one referring to the well-known song

Perhaps the police actually read my stories on Demotix  (usually very similar to those I post later with more pictures on My London Diary.) Actually I know some of them sometimes do, because I’ve had officers making comments to me about things I’ve written in the past. And I’ve recently sent in a Freedom of Information request and am waiting to hear what – if anything – they have about me on their files, or rather those files they are prepared to admit exist (they’ve been caught out a few times lying over such matters.)

The previous week, after Friday’s protest I’d written

I found it hard to see any reason for the large police presence and stopping them walking into Montague Place as they wanted. It did seem an incredible and pointless waste of public money, and it resulted in more inconvenience to the public than if the event had not been policed at all.

But I think in this particular case I wasn’t the only journalist make the obvious clear, and perhaps even some of the police themselves may have realised that the heavy-handed policing of protests against a police presence on campus is counter-productive.


Other banners were less contentious – such as ‘Make Love not Student Debt’

So, unlike the previous week, where they came in force to London University, for the Cops Off Campus National Student Protest in exactly the same place they sensibly kept out of sight, and the protest passed off more or less peacefully, with far less mayhem than if they had turned up.


The Book Block with shields bearing the names of well-known titles for protection

There was a little damage to the gates of Senate House, and later, in an event I thought was probably staged for the press, to the doors into the entrance area of the building, when a few students attacked them using rubbish bins as battering rams. But there was no real violence and no attempt to occupy parts of the university, which would have broken the High Court injunction.


A clown mimes taking my photograph – and is caught by my flash

The protest was about a serious matter, and one which raises questions about the nature and purpose of universities that deserve proper debate, it was also an enjoyable and at times exhilarating event, with various groups enjoying themselves in their different ways, and ended with those taking part feeling a sense of achievement. It seems clear that the attempt by the London University management to stifle protest and freedom of speech and assembly has failed.

Two major issues remain to be settled; the future of the University of London Union and the proper treatment of low paid workers at the university who deserve decent conditions of work and pay. Until the management behave reasonably over these issues, protests will continue.


The book shields were useful in pushing against the gates

Photographically there were few problems, and it was largely a matter of being in the right place at the right time. When the students decided to go through the gates of the Senate House I had to move out of their way, and it was too crowded to get a really good view, though the fisheye did help a little.

There were some interesting faces in the crowd, and as well as taking pictures of the speakers I also took some of those listening to speeches.

After I left to go home there were further protests around central London by some of the students, where the police did show up (if sometimes rather late) including at the Royal Courts of Justice where the inquest into the shooting by police of Mark Duggan which sparked riots in Tottenham and elsewhere was taking place. It’s always difficult to know when to leave.

Cops Off Campus National Student Protest
Continue reading Peace as Police Stay Away

Human Rights & Syria

International Human Rights Day, 10th December, commemorates the day in 1948 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This has become politically controversial here in the UK, as our government, while claiming still to be in support of the declaration is rather noisily and busily trying to find ways to get around some of its consequences. There seem to be some groups – such as prisoners and suspected terrorists – that they don’t feel qualify for human rights.


The Syria Peace & Justice group were told they can’t protest directly outside the UNHCR offices.
But this is a pilgrimage not a protest they told the commissionaire.

As Herman and Chomsky pointed out 25 years ago in their classic book ‘Manufacturing Consent‘ there are ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims in the eyes of our politicians and dominant media, and many in power would like to restrict these universal rights only to those they consider ‘worthy’.

Given the political climate it perhaps is unsurprising that International Human Rights Day passes unobserved officially in the UK and those who rely on mainstream media would be totally unaware of it.

But the Syria Peace & Justice group chose the day to try to highlight the desperate situation in Syria and to call for an end to all human rights abuses there. They began the day by making a pilgrimage around as many as possible of the embassies of countries who are in some way or other involved in Syria, as well as the UN High Commission for Refugees offices and our own government offices and ended with a candlelit vigil on the pavement outside the Syrian Embassy. It wasn’t a huge protest – the group is a small London-based grass-roots one only formed a couple of months ago, which includes people of various nationalities and backgrounds united in their desire to see peace and justice. But many others would support their aims.

Because of the large number of embassies and other places involved the pilgrimage was split into two groups who met up in late afternoon outside the US embassy. This presented my first dilemma in covering the event, as I couldn’t split myself in two! I decided to start with the group at the UNHCR as it was the UN’s day, and to go with them at least as far as Downing St and the Foreign Office, before trying to join the second group who had started in Kensington.


The Syria Peace & Justice group were joined by several others as they posed in front of the Houses of Parliament.

At Downing St, one of the pilgrims had permission to take their letter in, but they arrived late, and had to wait for a suitable gap, and rather than waiting with her I went on with the rest of the group to take photographs outside the foreign office and in Parliament Square. From there I took the tube to Hyde Park Corner and rang the leader of the second group to find out where they were. They were heading for the Iraqi embassy, but by the time I got arrived there had already moved on. Two buses later I finally caught up with them outside the former Iranian Embassy which was closed by William Hague threw out the Iranian Embassy in 2011 after the UK’s embassy in Tehran was attacked and looted. It now appears to be a part of the Omani embassy.


At the Kuwaiti embassy they let someone in to deliver the letter calling for peace and human rights.

I walked down with the group to the Kuwaiti and French embassies and then left them to go to the US Embassy where I found the other group had arrived. Taking pictures there was a little tricky as it was now dark, and they were in a particularly badly lit area. I tried both using ISO 3200 and available light and adding flash, but neither worked too well with the pilgrims being rather spread out. You can see these and more pictures from earlier in the two pilgrimages at Human Rights Day Pilgrimages for Syria.

There was another event I wanted to cover a couple of miles away and I left them to take the tube there, returning for the candlelit vigil an hour and a half later outside the Syrian embassy.


Flash enabled me to bring out the Buddhist monk in a dark background area.

Candles provide enough light to illuminate a very small area, and the pavement outside the embassy had a little ambient light from the street lighting, but it wasn’t really enough to fill in the shadows. I got the best results by just adding a little flash fill, using ISO3200 with the candles as the main light source and a mix of flash and ambient in the shadow areas.


Peace pilgrim ‘Earthian’, a “citizen of the earth” made a peace pilgrimage to the Middle East on foot without a passport

I used the built-in wide-flash diffuser screen on the flash and also the small white bounce card, generally angling the flash head up at 45 degrees. Where there were subjects close to the camera on one side, I angled the flash away from them to reduce the coverage (even with the wide-flash adapter there is a lot of fall off at the edges with the 16mm.)

I worked with shutter priority, setting a speed of between 1/25 and 1/60s (with a certain random element from my habitual finger-fiddling) and adjusting both exposure bias and more often flash level to get the results I wanted, checking on the rear screen. The ambient levels varied considerably in different areas of the vigil, and the headlights of cars driving by also occasionally added a contribution.

More pictures from the candlelit vigil at Human Rights Day Candlelit Vigil for Syria.
Continue reading Human Rights & Syria