Capa and Leica

Thanks to dvaphoto for pointing out the great advert for the launch of the Leica Monochrom-M at the at the Sao Paulo Leica store, which is based on vignettes of the life of Robert Capa and some of his best-known images.

If you are not familiar with his work, it might be worth looking at a set of his pictures on Magnum before you view the video, and reading the profile on that page.

Capa really isn’t a great advert for Leica, although it’s true that his career started with a Leica II put in his hands by Simon Guttman who sent him to photograph Trotsky speaking in Denmark in 1932. But Capa fairly soon abandoned Leica for Contax (and sometimes Rolleiflex.)  I don’t think he used a Leica after he came back from Spain. All of his well-known World War II pictures were taken on a Contax II. When he died in Indochina he was using a Contax IIa and a Nikon S rangefinder.

Who knows what he would have thought of the M Monochrom, though it’s certainly a camera capable of fine black and white results. But were he still alive and working today – at the age of 100 – I rather doubt if he would be using Leica!

Lens Culture ‘New Blog’

I’m not quite sure how Jim Casper‘s “new LensCulture blog!” differs from the old one that has been so interesting and perceptive over the last ten years.  I rather hope the changes are not too great, since I’ve enjoyed and learnt from it greatly. Here’s what the opening post says:

“Now in our 10th year, we’re expanding our scope and vision at LensCulture!

We hope to delight you, often, with inspiring posts about how people are using contemporary photography around the world — in art, media, politics, commerce, propaganda and popular culture. Join us, and participate in our bold new vision to connect photographers and photography lovers via one great, dynamic platform.

Cheers, and please let us know what you think.”

Lens Culture has been a valuable resource for those interested in photography. Recent posts include Rene Burri talking about his career and talking about six of his best-known photographs and currently on the ‘newest’ page of the site you can see work by the “21 New & Emerging Photographers from Lens Culture“, most of whom are worth a look. Of course Lens Culture is not the only place where you can see such lists, but I think perhaps the most interesting, and with more truly ‘new’ photographers than some.

Of course I don’t find everything on the site of interest – it sets out to cover the whole of contemporary photography, even those parts I find rather trivial and boring!  But it’s great to have sites like this. When I started writing on the web around fifteen years ago, there was relatively little photography on the web, and what there was was largely amateur illustration or commercial advertising. Things have changed dramatically since then.

Fuji on the Italian Job

I think it was possibly in 1992 that I first photographed the procession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel which takes place every year in Clerkenwell. Since then I’ve been back most years, though sometimes more to drink the red wine and enjoy the atmosphere rather than to take pictures. Over the years the actual procession has got a little more organised and become harder to photograph, and certainly harder to find things that interest me.


Slow focus on the X-Pro1 made this moment hard to catch

It was a warm day, very hot in the sun and I decided not to take my usual heavy Nikon kit, but to try out the Fuji X system I’m beginning to build up. At the moment this is a little limited. I do have two bodies – an X-Pro1 and an X-E1, but the only actual Fuji lens is the XF 18-55mm f/2.8-4 zoom.


Focus isn’t a problem with the Voigtlander 15mm, but lighting was, with the faces needing rescue from deep shadow

Of course there are adapters to fit most other lens mounts to the Fujis, and probably the most useful of these is the Leica M adapter. For events like this I like a wide angle lens, and the 18mm of the zoom often isn’t wide enough, so I had the 15mm Voigtlander on the X-E1, where it does a very good job. Mine is an old Leica screw version, but with a cheap (from eBay) M adapter and is ridiculously  small and light. While it may not greatly impress the Leicaphile test chart fanatics, for all normal photographic purposes it is fine, with low distortion, little chromatic aberration and at least when stopped down a little (even from full aperture f4.5 to f5.6), good sharpness across the frame – it was after all designed for full frame 35mm.  Even after I’ve dropped it a few times and severely dented the built in ‘lens hood’.  The electronic viewfinder of the X-E1 is fine for the Voigtlander too.

Fuji do have an excellent 14mm f2.8, but it isn’t cheap, and is significantly larger than the Voigtlander. If I really get to love the Fuji system I’ll probably buy one, but at the moment I’m still slightly unconvinced. I think my main reason for getting the X lens would be for the EXIF data, though very occasionally autofocus might be useful. It will be interesting to see how it compares with the promised XF 10-24mm F4 R OIS for both size and quality too.

For most photography with ultra-wides it makes sense to turn off AF, set the distance to 2m and leave it there. Even at f5.6 things will be sharp from 1 meter more or less to infinity. It beats even the fastest of autofocus systems.

Autofocus on the X-Pro with the 17-55mm was occasionally slow enough to miss the moment, but generally did well. Still the most annoying feature of both cameras is their hibernation if you’ve not made an exposure for a few minutes.  Generally the fastest way to prompt them back into the land of the living seems to be the turn them off and then on again. It’s a real pain and such a difference from using a Nikon, where whatever state the camera is in, so long as it is turned on it reacts instantly to a finger pressing the release.


Probably the best of a series of rather confused images, with 5 doves in frame, 2 hard to see

The only time I really needed a wider range zoom at the telephoto end was during the release of doves at the start of the procession, when I would have liked to have been able to zoom in on one of the children holding the doves, since it wasn’t possible to move closer in front of the line of photographers waiting for the release. For the actual release I used the X-Pro set on continuous shooting mode – nominally 6 frames per second, and got a number of images.

None of them was particularly interesting, with some children releasing their dove rather slower than others, and the doves not getting into an interesting formation. There is an awful lot of luck involved in such situations and this year I wasn’t getting a great deal.

And yes, I should probably have crouched down to get them against a clearer background. You can see most of the others from the sequence, as well as more pictures from the Sagra and procession in Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Overall I think the Fujis came out quite well, particularly the X-E1 with the 15mm. But the Nikon D800E with the 18-105mm would have been rather better than the X-Pro1 and 15-55mm, though of course around twice as big and much heavier.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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HSBC Food Banks


UK Uncut cakes to hand out and eat – but the rest of the food went to local food banks after the demo

This morning my wife was volunteering at our local food bank, as she does a couple of mornings most weeks, sorting and packing up food and delivering it to those who need it. Despite living in a reasonably affluent area on the fringe of London, there are plenty of them. Many because they have had benefits stopped. Or because they have to wait until benefits are sorted out, or while they appeal decisions – and now are somehow expected to be able to manage to live without any income at all.

Hard to believe but true – over half a million people in the UK now rely on food banks to keep them from starving.


The 10.5mm let me get the food bank in from a short distance

UK Uncut makes the point that the UK banks received enormous financial support from the public finances – variously estimated at between £700 and £26,500 per taxpayer (the higher figure ignoring the eventual recouping of some of the support when the banks are sold back into the private sector and the lower taking a particularly rosy view of the return when this happens.) They call for an end to ‘bank welfare’, and point out that the avoidance of taxes by large companies and the wealthy costs the country more than will be saved by the government cuts that disproportionately impact on the poor and disabled. And the banking sector is the biggest user of overseas ‘tax havens’ to avoid paying UK taxes.

The ‘big four’ UK banks, Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and RBS, are reported to have over 1,600 tax haven subsidiaries between them, with HSBC being the largest offender, with over 550.  The amounts lost to the UK are several billions of pounds. Changes to the Controlled Foreign Company (CFC) rules by the government which came into effect this January were estimated to give another billion to the users of tax havens, a huge bonus while the rest of us were suffering from the cuts

UK Uncut’s protests at the premises of tax dodgers have certainly put the issue onto the political agenda, and made HMRC at least seem to take a little more action, as well as persuading some companies to contribute a few million more. Perhaps by setting up food banks at HSBC branches they will put the spotlight on the use of overseas tax havens by the banks to avoid taxes, and also on the Department for Work and Pensions, directly responsible for a large proportion of that half a million needing to use food banks, who appear to be conducting their own private war against welfare.


The food bank on the move to Oxford St HSBC

Photographically the event held few problems, although the pavements where the food banks were set up were at times rather crowded, not least with other photographers. The Oxford St pavement is rather narrow – the street should have been pedestrianised long ago – and police pushed the protesters back to allow pedestrians to walk past.

They stood along the edge a yard or two apart, but objected firmly when I stood between them to take photographs, arguing that I was “causing an obstruction.”  Clearly that wasn’t the case – and I was if anything less of an obstruction than they were, but logic isn’t a powerful argument against handcuffs and I had to move.


Photographing from inside the protest with the 10.5mm

So I went into the protest, using the 10.5mm to work at very close range. The alternative, to stand on the narrow strip in the middle of the road with a long lens, with a view obstructed by a line of police and the passing pedestrians, was taken by most of the press, but it wasn’t a good idea.


From the middle of Oxford St with the 70-300mm.

There are perhaps rather too many pictures from the event on My London Diary, but it was difficult to edit, as there were so many that I liked. Take a look at them at UK Uncut HSBC Food Banks.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

Nam June Paik


Video Chandelier No 1, 1989 and Global Groove video in the Talbot Rice Gallery

I’m generally not a great fan of video art, which seems to largely be a medium for inflicting terminal boredom on the viewer, usually saying very little at great length, sometimes taking 15 minutes to say what could have been summed up more elegantly in a single still image or perhaps a diptych or short series. But of course there are exceptions.

The Edinburgh Festival and its huge fringe isn’t a great place for the visual arts, and certainly not for photography shows. There is the Man Ray show already seen in London, and World Press Photo 2013, which doesn’t seem to be scheduled for London (though one year never seems greatly different from the last.) And the venerable International Exhibition of Photography organised by the Edinburgh Photographic Society, now in its 151st year – and I can’t help thinking the first 50 or so would still be of much greater interest.


Ginsberg (I think) in Global Groove, 1973 showing in the Talbot Rice Gallery

But one show that is certainly worth a at least a short detour and continues until Oct 19, 2013 is Transmitted Live: Nam June Paik Resounds, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of Paik’s first solo exhibition, Exposition of Music –Electronic Television  at Wuppertal in 1963.  He was really the guy who invented video and electronic art, and the 26 minutes of his Global Grove from 1973 demonstrates the effect his work has had since then (you can watch the first three minutes on YouTube) and still I think stretches it in ways that others have not – and he was thinking in terms of the ‘electronic super highway‘ back in the pre-internet days of the 1970s. Among his collaborators were Stockhausen, Cage and Ginsberg.


I take a close look at TV Buddha, 1974 in the Talbot Rice Gallery

The Edinburgh show doesn’t have some of the larger works you can see on a BBC web page about his Smthsonian show, but is a finely curated show which celebrated the 50th anniversary of his first solo show at Wuppertal in 1963.  His official web page, which seems to have been left unchanged after listing the tributes to his death in 2006, is also worth a visit.

The Edinburgh show will also have great appeal for connoisseurs of outdated TV and video equipment and included a largish studio area of such junk as well as that in the actual works. If we sometimes feel that the archival preservation of photographic works is a challenge, the problems surrounding his work are massive.

Street Isn’t Documentary

I’ve just read a rather nice essay by Evangelo Costadimas, Why Street Photography is not Documentary Photography on the Street View Photoography site, which examines the question of why street photography is so often confused with documentary photography.


Notting Hill, Peter Marshall

As he writes: “Street Photography does not concern itself with the Truth.” In fact it is largely concerned with making fictions, using a particular viewpoint or timing to create an image that misrepresents the subject.

But he goes on to write: “Street Photography concerns itself with Life” which I think is misleading. It doesn’t “concern itself” but uses life as subject matter. Usually if it concerns itself with anything it is with the reactions of the photographer and of a community of street photographers to the particular image that has been created.

Winogrand, used as an exemplar,  in some ways was not a street photographer, because his work was often if not always about wider issues of life in America, whereas much street photography is about ‘Oh what a clever and witty photographer I am.”


Peter Marshall

As I read that essay, I came along a piece of work by a photographer I know in London, Julio Etchart, a documentary photographer. In a way it isn’t special, just another typical example of his fine documentary work. But Muslims celebrate Eid Mubarak by the East London Mosque in Whitechapel is a good example of documentary photography on the street rather than street photography. Its’s important too that this is not a single image – documentary is always about project, about sets of images rather than a single picture – however fine some documentary images are, they always belong in a greater whole. The pictures made me wish I’d thought to get up early that morning and do something similar, but I live a little too far away and I’m not a morning person.


Whitechapel 1991, used on the poster for the London Street Photography show

The focus in documentary photography is always on the subject and on how you see it and what you can say about it. Street photography is about the photographer. I’ve photographed on the street for 40 years, was included in the book and  show London Street Photography, was inspired by the work of people like Winogrand, Tony Ray Jones, Lee Freidlander and others, but I hope I’ve never been just a street photographer.


Edgware Rd, Peter Marshall

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

OMG Life But Not a Camera as we know it.

The name of the ‘OMG Life Autographer‘ is probably a pretty good sign that I am not the target audience for this device, decribed as ‘The World’s First Intelligent, Wearable Camera”, but it does look in some ways an intriguing device, though the images taken by Rankin on its web site really do less than nothing to make it appeal to me.

It seems to be a device to produce a photographic record of your day without the actual thought or effort of making photographs. It isn’t the first device that can do this, and I seem to recall artists who experimented wearing cameras set to take pictures at regular intervals way back in the days of film. And helmet cameras have really made such things commonplace. But the ‘OLA’ is at least rather less painful than ‘The Third I’ which involved New York University photography professor Wafaa Bilal having a 10Mp camera screwed into a “transdermal implant” on the back of his head and wearing it for a year (you can see some of the results on the web, and they are frankly exactly as interesting as you would expect.)

But Autographer claims to be intelligent, though it isn’t clear exactly what this intelligence entails, it does incorporate six sensors, including a PIR sensor which I think detects movement in front of the camera, as well an accelerometer which determines the wearer’s movement, and temperature, colour and compass sensors. It also keeps track of where you with GPS. But there are no clues on the web site as to how it uses any of this information to decide when to take pictures.

The images Autographer produces are 5Mp semi-fisheye, with a 136 degree angle of view, and are about as good as you would expect – this isn’t a camera for those concerned with image quality. There is an excellent  Quick Review on Digital Photography Review which has some sample images from London and gives a fairly detailed look at the device.

The image distortion is interesting, and is different from that of the two semi-fisheye lenses I own, the Nikon 10.5mm and Samyang 8mm. I removed the curvature at the edges by using the Fisheye–Hemi plugin in Photoshop by increasing the canvas width from 2592 pixels to 3592 (giving a rectangle on each side 500px wide in the background colour), then applying the  ‘full-frame’ version of the plugin before cropping back to an image rectangle, now around 2472 x 1936 pixels. With some noise reduction, correction of contrast and brightness and light sharpening, the images when reduced to web size –  perhaps  around 600×450 px, are just about acceptable quality. But I guess for most potential users, bad will be better, and they won’t be satisfied with the output until it’s been further freaked with Instagram.

Although usually it takes pictures without human intervention, you can tell it that you want it to be ‘active’, though apparently it waits for 10 seconds before it starts to take pictures when you’ve pressed the button. And you can stop it taking pictures by covering the lens with the bright yellow rotating lens cap. It is small, weighs around 2 ounces and is said to be stylish, which I think means black with a leather strap. Certainly you would feel less of an oddity wearing it around your neck or clipped to a jacket than wearing a helmet camera in normal situations.

Perhaps the most interesting thing on the web site is a whole page of Autography Etiquette, including advice to get the agreement of friends and family, to follow laws on photography and to respect the privacy of others. Though I suspect the most interesting images will come from people who ignore this!

Given that its 8Gb of memory can store 28,000 pictures, users are likely to have an awful lot of editing to do, and I suspect we will be inundated by masses of largely random images on Facebook, Flickr and other social media and image-sharing sites. It rather reminds me o those millions of monkeys randomly typing to produce the works of Shakespeare. One could see it as those Lomography walls taken to a logical conclusion. Of course just a few of Autographer images will have some interest but I doubt we will ever see them found from the haystack.

Sick Pay, Holidays, Pensions, Now!


A cleaner speaks at the end of the ‘3 Cosas’ protest at the Senate House

London relies on its low paid workers to keep running. People like the cleaners are essential workers, but they get treated like dirt – one of their slogans is “We ain’t the dirt we clean for you” Politicians like David Cameron and Boris Johnson support the idea of the London Living Wage – the minimum hourly rate needed to live on in London – but do little if anything to persuade employers to pay it.  Those who are on low pay also usually get very poor conditions of service, with usually the legal minimum provisions for sick pay and holidays. Few if any are in pension schemes.

The cleaners, catering workers and  security staff at London University are not employed by the university. The university – and banks and other companies – have high ethical standards and give their employees decent levels of sickness pay,  holiday entitlement and pension schemes. But working in those same institutions are people who don’t get these – the university has delegated their employment to contractors, washing its hands of its responsibilities towards them.


Green Party leader Natalie Bennett came to speak in support of the ‘3 Cosas’ campaign

It enables the university to feel good about its employment practices, but get the dirty work done on the cheap.  The ‘3 Cosas’ campaign, in which the cleaners are supported by students and many staff employed by the university points out the hypocrisy involved. Either the university should directly employ everyone who works there, or if it uses contractors, should insist that they pay the living wage, give workers there comparable conditions to those it gives its own employees and manage them with respect.

So I like to photograph these protests, because these are people who are being mistreated and deserve support.  They also campaign in a way that is both effective and visually interesting, making it easy to photograph. The rise of grass-roots trade-unionism is also an interesting phenomenon, and I think points to problems within the trade union movement, which for various reasons has unfortunately largely failed these lower paid workers, a matter of some regret to me as a trade unionist (I belong to two unions and was for many years a union rep at my former workplace.)

The latest response by the University, which followed an incident in which a student  was arrested after chalking a slogan across the foundation stone (and charged with criminal damage as well as two charges of assaulting a police officer when she was being arrested – she has pleaded not guilty to all offences)  has been to ban student protests in the areas in which most of the pictures here were taken, the Senate House cloister entrance and the East and West car-parks, and to threaten to prosecute students (and presumably others) who protest there as trespassers.

I don’t know what effect this will have on future protests, but feel that instead of making such threats they should be addressing the issues that have led to the protests.

More about the protest and more pictures at London University Cleaners Protest.

Continue reading Sick Pay, Holidays, Pensions, Now!

To Up or Not to Up?

I was very much in two minds about going to see the swan upping this year. I’ve photographed in on quite a few occasions, starting on film in 2001, and I got my best pictures then or in the next few years I covered the event.


Swan Upping at Laleham in 2001.  Konica RF, Fuji film

Then it was easier, partly because there were fewer photographers and fewer spectators. Often I was the only photographer for much of the time, with perhaps two or three on the official press boat who usually arrived when the real business was over, having had to wait to be put on shore. The were often a handful of people who’d seen it happening and come to watch, some with a compact camera taking pictures, but seldom getting in my way.

In those early years I was even able to take some panoramic images with the Hassleblad X-Pan and the 30mm lens as well as images like the above, I think probably made with a 21mm on a Konica Hexar RF camera – a modernised version of a Leica M with power wind and decent auto-exposure, quite possibly the best film ‘Leica’ ever made, though not quite the build quality of the older Leicas.  The 2001 swan upping pictures start here.

Today taking the same picture I’d have at least one photographer poking his lens into the image on the left and quite possibly a guy holding his phone up next to the man in the hat – if not in front of my lens.  There just isn’t the room to work any more. I think it is all a small part of the attempt to make our royalty more popular, though perhaps a better gesture would be to give back the swans that Henry II stole from us in 1186 to the people. Though probably we wouldn’t want to eat them now.


Swan Upping 2004.  Nikon D100, Sigma 12-24mm

By the time I next went to the swan upping pictures in 2004, I was already noticing a difference, writing “i was the almost the only photographer who bothered to turn up three years ago, while today there was a press launch with a group of snappers and a film crew.” But I was still able to get some good pictures, like the one above, made with a Nikon D100 and the Sigma 12-24mm at 16mm (24mm equiv.) My bike had got there before the press launch and there was a line of photographers on either side of me, right along the edge of the bank so nobody could get in front of us. Despite being only 6Mp, this made a decent display print 2.3 metres wide.

Another thing that made it easier to work back then was that man in the hat at the left of the top picture. Those swans weren’t at that nice landing stage by accident, but because Eric – who I got to know a little as we cycled along the towpath together – had got there a quarter of an hour before the boats and lured them to a suitable position with some crushed digestive biscuits, first throwing larger lumps in their direction to gain their attention. He went ahead of the uppers on his bike, acting as their ‘spotter’ for the cygnets. This had the added advantage that most of them were attracted to the towpath side of the river for the uppers. Swans and cygnets do in any case have a certain tendency to swim on the towpath side, because that’s mainly where the public feed them.

Nowadays the spotting is done by the Queen’s Swan Warden Prof Chris Perrins  and his two assistants in a small boat with an outboard, who travel a little ahead of the rowers, and there is no luring to the towpath bank, so more are upped on the other side.

One advantage of being on the press boat is that you can get to either bank, and of course it involves rather less effort than riding a bike on the towpath. But almost always it’s better to be on a bike – you get there first. Of course you can also get a different view from the boat, but usually from too far away or from behind the uppers. The only part of the event I’d really prefer to cover from the river is the actual release of the swans after they have been checked, listed, weighed, ringed and measured and are carefully put back in the water.

One year I did apply to go on the press boat and got all the details fixed. Then a day or two before the event got an email saying sorry, there wasn’t room for me. As a freelancer working for a small agency I didn’t count when at the last minute more important people wanted to cover the event.  I’ve not bothered to apply since.

I’ve been most years since 2004, usually following the boats to Windsor, where there are still just a few things I’d like to do better than I have. Last year there was no swan upping because the river levels were too high,  and this year I wasn’t going to bother. But sitting at my computer on that hot summer morning I suddenly decided it would be a pity to miss the spectacle taking place less than half a mile away and jumped on my bike with my camera bag.


Swan uppers creep slowly in towards the birds on land. 2013

It’s always an interesting spectacle, though I didn’t really get any decent pictures in the hour or two I spent with them. The only cygnets on my side of the river were under the railway bridge, in deep shade with strong areas of sunlight, a contrast well beyond the ability of either digital or film (and I couldn’t use flash.)  The uppers did their business and rowed away across the river to the Swan Inn, and I got on my bike and rode home for my own lunch. I didn’t bother to go back and follow them that afternoon. Perhaps, if it isn’t so hot, next year.

Other pictures from this year- Swan Upping.  You can also see more from 2004, 2005,  2006, 2007, 2008, 2010 and 2011.
Continue reading To Up or Not to Up?

Dancing In Mourning Across America

I’ve been slow to mention Vanessa Winship‘s ‘She Dances on Jackson‘, which was on show in Paris at the Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson from May 15-July 28 this year. I’d half-hoped I would find time for a weekend in Paris, and would certainly have gone to see the show if I’d been there, but unfortunately it never happened.

As well as the show in Paris, there is of course a book of the work published by Mack, though it isn’t the same as the show. And so much has been written about the book that my thoughts are probably redundant now – though perhaps I’ll try to write something when I’ve more time – and perhaps we may some time see a show of this work in London. But for the moment I’ll suggest if you don’t already know all there is to know about it that you start by reading Liz Jobey in FT Magazine, which will tell you about the background to the project and explains a lot about why and when Winship visited many of the places in the book.  Then you may like to read Christer Ek’s blog post which expresses his slight disappointment with the organisation of the show, and the lack in the book of the personal material which was in the exhibition, and in particular:

“what appears to be Vanessa’s diary. It is a large A3 size book that has been made with emails that she exchanged with her sister and some hand written notes. The book is enriched by all the prints that are hanged on the wall in a very small format (around 8 x 10 cm). The small prints are some kind of reading prints on a beautiful warm tone argentic paper.“

Christer feels that once you have seen this:

“you can only consider that this is the real entire work and you start to imagine what could have been a book including all those pieces.“

I haven’t seen it, and so can hardly comment, but looking through the book and the pictures on line it seems to me that it is a fine body of work, and it is what the photographer has presented to us, and what we have to deal with. But it can’t be divorced from the personal life of the photographer, and the cruel blow of fate that as she was about to leave for America, having been awarded the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation prize of €30,000 to enable her to make it, she learnt that her father had been diagnosed with a terminal cancer from which he died three months later.

Finally, in the on-line gallery ‘The Great Leap Sideways‘ you can see 20 of the images from the book, as well as read an interesting essay: The Democracy of Universal Vulnerability: Vanessa Winship’s “she dances on Jackson”, though I’m not quite sure I follow all it has to say. There is at times a certain vagueness about it, where I would like the writer to get more involved with the specifics of the images.  Also on the page is a video ‘leaf-through’ of the book which enables you to glimpse all the images in sequence.