>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Magnum Failure

I’ve written several times over the years admiring the powerful black and white images of Magnum’s Paolo Pellegrin, and wasn’t surprised to find one of his stories, on an area called ‘The Crescent‘ in Rochester, USA awarded second prize in the recently announced 2013 World Press Photo. So it came as a shock to read in EPUK News that one of the images included in this was not quite what the photographer had alleged it to be, and that a large section of the text of the story had been taken almost without alteration from a New York Times story published ten years earlier.

EPUK News linked to a feature When Reality Isnt Dramatic Enough: Misrepresentation in a World Press and Picture of the Year Winning Photo by Michael Shaw, the publisher of the BagNews Notes web site, which gives full details of how and where the picture was made and the various errors in the caption and use of the image – including some comments by the subject of the photograph, Shane Keller.

Briefly, the picture was taken after Pellegrin had asked a student who was assisting him during the Magnum project in Rochester if he could find someone to be photographed holding a gun. It wasn’t taken in the Crescent area, and the man holding the gun was a student with no connection with violence or drug-dealing in the area. Nor, as the caption asserted, had Keller been a Marine Corps sniper – and the gun in the picture is not – as stated – a rifle!

And although the man in the picture offered the photographer his details for captioning, the photographer wasn’t interested – which would appear to imply that he had already decided that the picture was going to be used in a way that did not reflect what it actually showed. The title of the BagNews Notes article suggests that it was the pressure to make stories more dramatic – particularly for the prize contests – which led him to decide he needed a picture that went beyond what reality provided and to set this up.

The article publishes the material from the New York Times together with that submitted by Pellegrin, and the two are essentially identical. It seems a clear case of copyright infringement let alone plagiarism, and taken with the misuse of the image, it makes clear that what otherwise might have been arguably (if hard to believe) simply a matter of a careless approach to facts and journalistic ethics was a matter of deliberate pre-meditated deception. Not only is it a serious offence by the photographer concerned but it casts doubt on the whole integrity of the Magnum Agency.

Most surprisingly, the same story also won a second place in the Pictures of the Year International Awards, with the particular picture concerned winning first place in the Freelance/Agency category, but the controversy over it did not come into the open following this.

The case seems clear, and certainly demands investigation by Magnum, World Press Photo and POYi. Unless they take appropriate action they too will be sullied by the photographer’s failure, and public confidence in photojournalism and documentary photography will be further eroded.

I’ve never been a great believer in ‘awards’ whether in photography or other areas. It’s always seemed to me that the real award for making a fine image or a great film is intrinsic in the thing itself, and certainly the kind of awards ceremonies for the Oscars and similar events are both embarrassing in the extreme and actually demean all those involved – whether they win or not. Few of the greatest films have done well at the Oscars, and if the satisfaction of making great works isn’t in itself enough, you probably are not making great works.

Lewisham

The government has decided to sacrifice Lewisham Hospital as a token gesture over NHS costs, although it seems likely that the costs of closing it will in the longer term be greater than the short-term profit. Lewisham is a successful hospital clinically and financially, and serves a large population in south-east London and it is hardly surprising that the closure plan – removing its essential A&E and Maternity services along with some other children’s services – has caused local outrage, with many thousands on the streets for two major demonstrations – see Save A&E at Lewisham Hospital and Save Lewisham Hospital – as well as many smaller events.

The losses of the local heath area are nothing to do with Lewisham, but arise from the decision to use private finance to build hospitals in neighbouring areas. The contracts negotiated under PFI reflected the lack of commercial nous in the public sectore, exacerbating what was in any case a disastrous policy, and now the pigeons hatched in Woolwich are coming to roost in Lewisham, at a time when government policy is rapidly privatising our National Health Service.

Around 150 people came to a lunchtime rally at the War Memorial opposite the hospital, where there were short speeches by a large number of people. I scrabbled around in my pocket for my notebook to record their names, only the remember that I had taken it out to write up a protest a couple of days earlier and had left it next to my computer at home. The only paper I had to hand was the small A6 rectangle of scrap paper I’d used to write down my directions for the day – times and places of events, bus numbers etc. I’d written these on the back of a piece of an old letter, and had covered most of the blank side with my pencilled directions. I had to write the names of the roughly 20 speakers over these in biro.

Even when I remember my notebook, writing while taking pictures isn’t too easy. It would be rather easier and a better solution to be able to attach short audio notes to pictures – as you can on some phones. I do carry a small audio recorder, but it’s too fiddly just to record the odd note, and slow to have to look at the frame numbers on the camera back to use them in the recordings. Sometimes I do record longer audio tracks , but then having to search through and hour of audio to find the names takes too long.

You can add audio notes to images on some cameras – and with software on camera phones – but not on the Nikons. Theoretically I can use the buttons on the back to add a message, but it takes ages – and I type in one a year as a copyright message.

Taking the pictures of the crowd gave me the opportunity to include the older hospital building in the background, but for some of the best opportunities this also meant pointing my camera directly towards the sun. Being Winter, the sun even in the middle of the day was low, so hard to avoid even using a moderately wide angle.

I think even the manuals that come with Nikon’s professional cameras tell you to take pictures with the sun behind you, but of course this is neither always possible or desirable, and I like working towards the sun. It used to be considered a specialised aspect of photography, contre-jour, but hardly now qualifies as anything out of the ordinary.

In several of the pictures I was able to make use of the placards that the protesters were holding up as lighting ‘flags’, thus avoiding excessive flare and ghosts, and for some pictures other protesters served the same function. Digital makes this kind of thing easier, first because you can see immediately if you have got the results but also because it makes the post processing simple – just a quick dash with the adjustment brush in Lightroom to add a little brightness and contrast to the faces and other significant areas in shadow.

The problem with using people as ‘flags’ is that they will move unpredictably while you are taking pictures. Just as I don’t normally direct the people I’m photographing, I don’t direct those I’m using to control the lighting.

More pictures on Fight to Save Lewisham Hospital Continues.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : Londons 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

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Repent!

Police question and take down details of two protesters who have marked the
Old War Office with charcoal crosses and supporters stand in solidarity.

I’d arrived just minutes late to get a picture on Ash Wednesday when two Christian peace activists were being questioned by police after having scrawled charcoal crosses on the pillars of the Old War Office in Whitehall. More pictures of the whole event at Ash Wednesday – Ministry of Defence.

I’d come down by bus from North London, where I’d been photographing a protest Victimisation at London Met on a cold pavement outside London Metropolitan University where two employees have been suspended on very dubious grounds. After an hour standing on a cold pavement and another half hour on a bus travelling to Trafalgar Square I needed to pay a brief visit to the toilets there before rushing down Whitehall.

Had I not paused I might have got pictures of those writing on the wall actually being stopped by police. But more likely I would have hurried past just before it happened, on my way to the main body of worshippers at this regular Ash Wednesday event around the Ministry of Defence.

I could instead have travelled by Underground – the earlier protest was very close to Holloway Road station – and would probably have shaved ten minutes off my journey time – and certainly missed this particular part the Ash Wednesday protest. But so long as I’ve time I prefer to travel by bus. The upper deck of a double-decker gives you a great view of London, and on many occasions I’ve seen things happening and got off to take pictures. It’s sometimes frustrating that it’s difficult to get drivers to let you off the bus except at stops (the old Routemasters, now only on a couple of ‘heritage’ routes had a great advantage in this respect.)

It’s even possible to take pictures from the bus, though reflections in the windows are often annoying. But on many journeys buses are about as quick, and they reach places untouched by the tube, often taking you more or less to the door. And a particular advantage for me is that I have a pass that gives me free travel on the buses but not on the Underground or Overground rail. Public transport in London is relatively expensive compared to most cities around the world.

But back to Ash Wednesday, the ritual marking of the buildings is an annual ‘cat and mouse’ game between police and protesters. You know it will happen, but not exactly where and when, with around a third of a mile of wall on three streets and an hour and a half or so. There are police spaced out at intervals, spread thinly all along the walls, but large gaps allow the protesters to at least start the marking, though I don’t think this year any of them managed to complete the word ‘Repent!’ after making their crosses.

Ash and water on the pavement – impossible to claim it causes any damage

Charcoal – like chalk also often favoured by demonstrators – is easily removed, and this makes charges of ‘criminal damage’ hard to sustain and the costs of the removal miniscule, but is of course chosen because of its connection to Ash Wednesday. Most of the protesters are there to make a completely legal protest, with a service of worship at various ‘stations’ around the Orwellian-named Ministry of Defence, which includes the marking with water and ash in large letters of the word REPENT! on the pavement in front of the main entrance (in some previous years they put their own sackcloth on the pavement to do so.)

Previously one protester had managed to leave his charcoal mark next to the name plate for the ministry, but it was now surrounded by barriers and police. I didn’t have a long enough lens to get a good picture, and had thought about going back on my way home as the protesters were dispersing and asking to go inside the barriers to take a picture. But I stopped to talk with a police officer a little down the road and then forgot all about it.

Placards also spelt out the message ‘No Trident – Repent’

At the very end of the protest, I missed another protester who had vaulted over the low fence and rushed across the short stretch of grass to write on the wall. She did it while my back was turned as I was photographing the final service a few yards away, and again all I could photograph was the police talking with her. They released her after a few minutes and she vaulted back over the fence to rejoin her friends.

In some previous years I’d experienced just a little hostility photographing this event, being angrily reminded by one person at one point that this was an act of worship. Of course I was trying hard to cover it in a suitably reverent fashion, but my actions had still upset her. A few years on, with now so many of those taking part also taking out their digital cameras and phones and taking pictures, often in a rather more intrusive way than I would have chosen, I had no such problems. Just occasionally there are advantages for photographers in everyone having a camera.

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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

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Shaker – 11 Years

On a bitterly cold morning for London – around zero with a noticeable wind, I put on an extra layer and went to photograph in Parliament Square, where around 20 people were holding up banners facing the House of Commons, reminding MPs that London resident Shaker Aamer had been held without trial at Guantanamo for 11 years. You can read more about the protest and see more pictures in Shaker Aamer – 11 Years in Guantanamo on My London Dairy.

The same day we’d had an e-mail from one of my wife’s old school friends in which she’d mentioned the weather where she was living in Canada – where they were having something of a cold spell, with the temperature at 50 degrees below zero. I’m thankful not to be working there, as I was having problems keeping warm in London. Fortunately it doesn’t get cold enough here to have to worry too much about equipment, which all seems to work OK around zero. I get cold standing around, not so bad if I can keep walking, but I felt for these guys standing holding banners and placards in orange jump-suits, not as warm as the fleece and jacket I was wearing – and black hoods are not as warm or wind-proof as my Polartec hat. Some weren’t even wearing gloves, and I can’t work in cold weather without them, though I can’t find anything really very warm that still lets me work a camera without problems. My current solution is a pair of thin silk gloves with a second pair of close-knit wool gloves on top, reasonably warm and I can do almost everything with both pairs on; for anything really fiddly I can take off the wool, and the silk still keeps my fingers a bit warmer. Silk gloves on their own are good for when it isn’t too cold, but it doesn’t take long for the shutter release and other controls to make a holes in the tip of the finger. The wool is a bit tougher, though I’ve already got through one pair this winter.

Apart from keeping warm – and at least unlike the protesters I could walk around a bit – I had two main problems. The first is that I’ve photographed so many protests with people in orange suits that it’s hard to find anything new to say, and the second is with the way that the camera reacts to saturated orange and red.

Even in this small reproduction I think it is clear that there is something wrong with the orange, while the rest of the image looks about correct. Cutting down the saturation would help a little, but the better solution I’ve found in the past is to use an ‘untwisted’ camera profile in Lightroom (or Adobe Raw.) And I do that with images from the D700, such as the picture below.

I think the difference is clear, though you can’t assume that the two orange suits were equally intense, there really was quite a range. The lower image was taken on the D700 for which I have ‘untwisted’ profiles which I downloaded several years ago, but I can’t find any for the D800E (there are some on line for the D800, but I can’t get Lightroom to use these.) I’ve tried downloading software that untwists the standard profiles (created because the free Adobe profile editor doesn’t), and it runs to create new profiles, but again I can’t get these to show up in Lightroom. Having wasted and hour or two I gave up trying to make my own profiles – but if anyone has succeeded for the Nikon D800E I’d like to have copies.

But there is still something that Lightroom can do. In the Camera Calibration panel of the Develop module there are hue and saturation sliders for the Shadows and Red, Green and Blue Primaries. Here is the result of setting the Red saturation to -20 on the top image.

On my screen the improvement is very marked. I think there are other small improvements from choosing the Camera Portrait rather than the normal Adobe Standard profile, and also perhaps a very slight tweak of the Red Primary hue.

For this image, the shadows, such as they are, are generally fine, but having discovered the Shadow slider which shifts along a green – magenta scale, I think I may have a solution to a problem I found working in mixed lighting a couple of days later.

Future versions of Lightroom may well omit these controls as Adobe people have stated that the job can be done better by using specific profiles. But for the moment they are still there even if we seldom need them. I’d rather be out making pictures than having to fiddle so much with them.

Nour Kelze

We Brits (though I don’t think we ever think of ourselves as Brits) often like to pride ourselves on our BBC, in some ways the best broadcasting company in the world, and sometimes I think there is some truth in this, also increasingly I find myself turning to other news services to find what is really happening in – for example – the Middle East, and deploring the BBC for its inaccuracy in reporting some UK events which I’ve attended, and its tendency to pitch for the status quo. Often accused of political bias by Tories, its real and utterly consistent bias is to the established order, even if a few of its journalists sometimes try hard to overcome this.

But one thing it’s never done well is photography. It’s too soaked in a logocentric culture to have any real idea about an essentially visual medium, but really it doesn’t try too hard since it just isn’t regarded as of any importance.

Much more often I find myself looking at and listening to features about photography at another public service broadcaster, the USA’s NPR. The latest is a report about Syrian teacher Noor Kelz, an English teacher from Aleppo who has become a war photographer. She started taking pictures on her mobile, but her career was transformed last Autumn by a meeting with Reuter’s photographer Goran Tomasovic.

He “spotted Noor shooting pictures with her cellphone. He trained her for a week on how to use a professional camera, then gave her a few of his cameras to keep. She’s been sending pictures to the agency ever since.”

Noor (or Nour) Kelze was wounded in Aleppo a couple of weeks ago, suffering a broken leg and shrapnel wounds when a tank shell exploded near her and is being treated in hospital in Turkey, but she hopes to be back at the front lines shortly. There are two pictures of her, one with her leg in plaster, on the PetaPixel post about the NPR show.

She appears in a film ‘Not Anymore, A Story Of Revolution – Nour Kilze – Noor Kelze‘ made by Matthew VanDyke who she worked with to raise funds for the Free Syrian Army which is due for release shortly – all I can find at the moment is a short CNN feature on it.

You can see Goran’s work on a blog on the Reuter’s site, where there is also a fine slideshow of his work from Syria.

WPP Time

It’s the time of year for the usual criticisms of the winning images in World Press Photo. if you’ve not already done so, rather than wade through the whole lot on the official site you might like to look at a slide show of the 18 top winners on Lensculture. And of course you can learn something more about some of them on PDN and the British Journal of Photography site with a stories about Paul Hansen‘s winning image from Gaza City and Spanish photographer Bernat Armangué‘s series of images also from Gaza as well as several other stories.

Paul Hansen was also the winner of the 2012 Newspaper Photographer of the year in the 70th Pictures of the Year International (POYi), with a portfolio that as well as Gaza covered the mass murders on the Norwegian island of Utoya in July 2011.

I usually go to the the WPP show when it comes to London, but always with a heavy dose of deja-vu, though usually there are pictures that stand out for some reason or other, though often not the major winners. But most of the main themes that produce the most shocking or startling images repeat themselves event if the massacres, famines, floods and earthquakes happen in different parts of the globe, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the images are often similar.

Duckrabbit quotes a Gary Knight ( Chair of 2013 World Press Photo Contest – before he stepped down) quote from ‘A Photo Editor’ and a comment from that site by Mike Moss in a post entitled Cliché on cliché? But what I found more interesting is the comment made on duckrabbit by Tobias Key on the lighting in the winning image.

As he suggests there is something that seems over-produced about it, as if it was lit by a large soft-box fired by a radio-trigger on the camera. It would have been a powerful picture without the added drama of the lighting, because of the subject matter and viewpoint, but to me the lighting makes it into a film set, or a hyper realistic painting, and for me it weakens the raw impact of the image. I have a suspicion that the effect is partly or mainly from post-processing rather than lighting. Perhaps there is a clever Lightroom pre-set you can buy to do this to your images?

Don’t get me wrong. I admire the photograph and the undoubted courage and skill of Hansen and others who make such images. It’s something I could never do. But perhaps this – and others – work would be better if they turned down the techniques a little and let the subject speak for itself. Of course that way they would almost certainly not win prizes.

Sports Illustrated etc

Sports Illustrated isn’t a magazine I ever read, nor for that matter is Jezebel, so thanks to
(Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography for drawing my attention to the feature in it,
Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue Goes to 7 Continents, Finds Exotic People to Use as Props, which made me both laugh and despair about the abuse it documents. Hard to believe that such pernicious and stereotypical nonsense gets published but it does reinforce the view of those interested in sports as retarded. If it wouldn’t be unfair to Neanderthals I might even employ that term. Seriously I thought stuff like this went out of use years ago, but perhaps I live in a sheltered environment.

It’s also evidence of some pretty poor Photoshop, and reminded me of another page of ‘
17 Mesmerizing Before & After Photoshop GIFs (and again I apologise in advance for exposing you to some poor taste puerile images of women) almost all of which I think qualify as Photoshop disasters. I don’t think there are any that actually improve the images, but most are beyond saving except by throwing a blanket over the model in the studio.

I’m not a prude, and would readily admit to enjoying looking at images of the nude human body and have written about them, but there is something unnatural about the whole of what is misleadingly given the name ‘glamour’. Come to that, much ‘erotic’ photography leaves me uninterested and certainly un-aroused, except occasionally to laughter at the more preposterous examples. It’s certainly hard to take the work of some of those well-known French photographers taking ‘photo de charme’ seriously event when their work sells for high prices in the art market.

Last week too I followed a link to some newly produced commercially available Lightroom pre-sets. More curious than anything about why anyone would want to buy pre-sets when you can set up your own for free – it’s one of the essential features of Lightroom and easy to do. It led me to a video part of which took a wholly healthy looking woman’s face and turned it into a decidedly unnatural glowing porcelain. I’ll spare you the link.

Gabriele Basilico (1944-2013)

Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico who died on Wednesday in Milan where he was born was not as well-known in the UK as he should have been, perhaps because the area in which he worked, the urban landscape is not generally highly regarded in this country. Although I went to several exhibitions of his work in Paris (for example Vertical Moscow), I can’t recall having seen one in the UK.

There is a good introduction to his work at Studio La Città, which also has a list of his solo and group shows around the world since 2000 – and none have been in the UK. His pictures from Palermo were shown in Cardiff in 1998 and work from a war-torn Beirut at a private gallery in London the previous year, but seem not to have featured in any of our major London galleries. It’s a shame that we’ve never really had a major space in London devoted to photography – and in particular that the Photographers’ Gallery which gets so much of the photography funding that crumbs down from the opera-dominated Arts Coucil has failed to step up to the mark in this and many other areas of photography.

You can see more of his work online at the Amador Gallery (New York). Although best known for his black and white work, there is an interesting colour series, Roma, on the Galerie VU website, which presents a rather different view of the city. There is a fine collection of his work at the Galerie Anne Barrault, which includes one of my favourite of his images in the 1984 series bord de la mer.

Basilico trained as an architect and had his first important photographic show in and on Milan in 1983. The following year he was the only Italian of the 36 photographers commissioned by the French government for their major DATAR project to ph0tograph the natural and built environment of France. Among the other photographers involved were Lewis Baltz, Raymond Depardon and Robert Doisneau. (A full list is in the French Wikipedia article, and there is a history of the project, La France vue du sol, by Vincent Guigueno published in 2006 in études photographiques and available online – if your French is up to it.)

Several if not most of those photographers whose work is featured on the urban landscapes web site I run with Mike Seaborne were impressed and to some extent inspired by the work of Basilico, and by his success. We would have loved to have featured his work on that site, but never quite got around to contacting him, overawed by his reputation.

Pancake Day

Shrove Tuesday in England means one thing – pancake races. Starting (as I was reminded in the Lady Mayoress’s speech at the Guildhall today) in Olney in 1445 when a housewife late for the Shriving service ran down the High St clutching her frying pan and wearing her apron, in recent years the observance has grown exponentially, and is now observed in shopping centres and other venues across the land.

I could indeed have stayed home and photographed such an event in one of the local shopping centres ten minutes walk from my house, but there were other races around central London that I was sure would be of great interest.

There are five that get into our main listings online and in print, starting at around 10.15 next to the Houses of Parliament. Here teams from the House of Lords, House of Commons and the Parliamentary Press battle it out on a course in Victoria Gardens. I photographed this in 2008 and haven’t felt moved to return since. It involves just a little of a rush for me, as the first train I can get to London without paying excessively high fares gets in at 10.04. If it gets in on time (and often it is just a few minutes late) this gives me 11 minutes to cover the almost a mile to the venue in Victoria Tower Gardens. Easy if I take my bicycle, but a little of a rush on foot.

Today it wasn’t great cycling weather, with a temperature in the early morning at home around zero, and I wasn’t feeling like rushing, so I opted to start at the Guildhall in the City of London, where people were gathering at 11.30 for a start to the event at 12 noon. A train and a bus got me there nicely in time.

It was hard to choose what equipment to take. The more interesting pictures are the kind of thing that a Leica would be great at, drifting easily around more or less unnoticed, and a 24mm or 28mm would have been fine. But the M8 unfortnately just isn’t up to the job (or at least not in my hands), and though the Fuji X100 would have been good in some ways, its fixed 35mm lens is just not wide enough. And I did also want to be able to photograph the actual races, where a longer lens and an SLR would do much better, and there are also situations where something wider than 24mm helps. So in the end I went with my standard camera bag, the two Nikons and a few lenses. Actually the cameras – and particularly the 16-35mm lens – did do a pretty good job but having the largish bag on my shoulder did restrict movement through the loosely packed crowd.

Looking at my three favourite images there, they were taken at focal lengths (35mm equiv for the DX lens) of 22mm, 42mm and 25mm and I could have worked quite happily with – for example – a 24mm and a 50mm lens.

I’d decided to leave the Guildhall event early to cover a very different pancake race in Spitalfields. 1.14 miles is not a great distance to cover in 15 mins, though doing so in part through pedestrian clotted streets, with a number of major roads to cross and carrying a heavy camera bag makes it just a little more of a challenge, and I was just a little out of breath when I got there, just as the races were about to start. Ideally I like to be at events early, as often the best opportunities for photography come before the actual start – and that was certainly true with the Guildhall event, where the actual races were hardly enthralling.

But at Spitalfields, with its lighter touch organisation (which threatens at times to become chaos) and people very much more prepared to let their hair down, there isn’t really the same problem, and there were plenty of opportunities between the races and probably the most interesting part of the event is the prize-giving ceremony.

I didn’t do very well at photographing the actual races. Dray Walk is a fairly narrow street between some tall buildings, and on a truly gloomy day like this was, is pretty Stygian in terms of lighting. Being close to the action as I was requires a pretty high shutter speed or flash to avoid blur, and I just hadn’t thought enough about it. Or at least had just somehow thought that ISO1600 should have been good enough in the middle of the day. But with the 18-105mm even with the the ISO at 3200 I managed to get some things unsharp. It’s a while since I’ve really done much real action photography and I wasn’t in any case interested enough to really think about it.

More on the two events at Great Spitalfields Pancake Race and Poulters Pancake Race.

Continue reading Pancake Day

London Photographs

Some years ago I registered the domain name londonphotographs.co.uk with the aim of setting up a web site called ‘London Photographs’ that would display my archive of images of Greater London taken since the 1970s, and it still provides a ‘front end’ to much of my work on the city, although I think all of it can also be reached through other domains that I also have.

Looking at the weather this last weekend I decided to use the time to work on another project for ‘London Photographs’, related to the book London Dérives that I completed a week or so ago.

The web site London Dérives isn’t the same as the book, although I think it includes all of the 73 images from the book (or near duplicates) but has almost 200 images. It includes the key text from the book related to the project.

What took most time was going through the images again and adding captions. I’ve never been too good at keeping records of what I’ve photographed or where, but from around 1986 on I began to carefully annotate my contact sheets with things like Grid References, street names and other information while it was still fresh in my mind. But prior too that, it often involves a little detective work, looking at the series of frames for a particular walk, hunting for clues in the images, resorting to maps (on and off-line), Google searches, and sometimes even satellite images, StreetView or Bing’s rather nice Bird’s Eye views. But finding places can be pretty tricky as many buildings have been demolished and others built.

Looking at some pictures, even from 35 years ago, I get a very clear impression of where I was and exactly what I was thinking when I took them, though these are not always entirely accurate. One image I was convinced was made close to the British Museum turned out – when I examined the evidence closely – to have been made around 6 miles to the north.

The site is now on the web, but I’m sure I’ll make some changes to it. But I’d be pleased to get any comments and suggestions on it and to get more accurate captions for some images. I haven’t put a comments form on the individual pages of the site, but I’d be happy to add suitable comments at the bottom of the pages.

Here’s a final small mystery – a disused pub, possibly in Hoxton or Haggerston (an image taken a frame or two further on is from Haggerston and on later frames I was in Hackney.)

On its top is a rather fine (if damaged) coat of arms with the motto ‘Sapere Aude’ – dare to be wise – which is apparently that of both the Wise and the Whittington families. Whittington seems more likely to be the connection. Obviously the building is in a poor state, but has a certain distinction, and might well have been renovated – or it might have been replaced by offices or flats. Looking at the image full-size doesn’t really yield any more clues other than making the motto just legible. Anyone?

Most of these pictures were taken either on a Leica M2 with a 35mm lens, and Olympus OM1 or one one of a series of Minox 35 cameras I owned. For some of them I was trying to get a feeling of glimpsing the sites on a walk and deliberately framing slightly oddly and sometimes with the camera not level. Some of these I’ve tidied up a little with cropping or rotation, and with a very few some correction of the verticals, but most I’ve left as I took them.

Continue reading London Photographs