>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Don’t Photograph Me!

Two pictures from five individual frames over two seconds with the lens at 16mm as a security guard tells me not to take his picture and threatens to assault me and smash my camera. That finger in the lower image is around six inches from the front of the 16-35mm f4, and too close for the lens to focus on. The guard is slightly less sharp than in the previous images because he is moving towards me, and after making this exposure I moved back.

I’d been photographing him telling a group of protesters against workfare – a government scheme that forces unemployed people to work for nothing or lose their benefit payments – that they could not protest in the street outside the shop where he was working, Superdrug, which they say is using the unemployed as free labour rather than taking on extra staff for the Christmas rush.

Fortunately too, he stopped, probably not because I told him he was breaking the law by threatening me, but because everyone around – including the man who has put a hand on his shoulder was telling him too, and he turned around to argue with them – and I continued to photograph him, but from slightly further away.

After a few minutes with the protesters talking to him he calmed down. He listened and understood why the protesters were there, and went back inside to continue to do his job rather than try to intimidate a legitimate protest. I hope he learnt something from the experience, which obviously he hadn’t been trained to cope with.

He wasn’t employed by Superdrug, but by a security company who are “an NSI Gold accredited organisation and has an ACS score that positions it within the top 5% of all manned guarding companies.” They claim that their security officers are highly trained, but obviously they had not given this particular man the basic training in law (and common sense) needed to deal with such situations. His actions were of course counter-productive for both Superdrug and his employers and gained publicity for the event both on the street where it was happening and on the web. Though I wasn’t happy when Demotix made the threat to me the main point of the published story rather than the issue of workfare that the protest was about.

The protesters knew they had the right to protest on the street (and had been told so by two PCSOs elsewhere earlier in the day) and told him, but he continued to argue with them and attempt to get them to stop. And of course I knew I had the right to photograph, but he seemed unaware of this too. They don’t appear to have trained him that it is an offence to threaten assault (and even more of an offence had he carried out his threat.)

I’d photographed the same protesters earlier in the afternoon when they protested against workfare at a shop run by the charity the British Heart Foundation. Here they actually went inside the shop to make a protest, and I followed them inside and took some pictures. As soon as I was told I couldn’t photograph inside the shop and was asked to go I left, but continued to photograph as best I could from the street outside through the door and windows.

One of the staff, possibly a volunteer (and of course there is nothing wrong with charities using volunteers – but many charities are now using people who haven’t chosen but are forced to work for them without pay or lose benefits) was obviously concerned by my taking pictures and came to try and stop me. She told me I needed a licence to photograph, and I told here that she was wrong, and that everyone was free to photograph on the street, and that I had the right to photograph what I liked. She ran away into the shop when I offered to take her picture and raised a camera to my eye.

Shops could of course choose not have large windows so that we can see inside, but most deliberately invite the public to gaze inside, so they can have no expectation of privacy. And for me there was a clear public interest in what was happening both with the charity and with companies such as Superdrug – as well as security companies that fail to give their employees proper training.

But what the incident outside Superdrug clearly shows (and such incidents are not unusual, with security guards who know and understand the law being in my experience unusual) that security companies need to properly train their staff both in dealing with protests and with dealing with photographers. That NSI (National Security Inspectorate) Gold accreditation looks rather tarnished.

Some things may have improved in the City of London since the film ‘Stand Your Ground‘ was made, with police (who came out of the video pretty well) and photographers giving some training to security guards but in general there still seems to be a lack of proper training for security staff.

Flinging Cameras

Above is the latest modification I’ve made to my D800E, with a short length of nylon pictures frame cord between the strap slot on the sling strap and the strap ring on the camera body.

It’s very much a stable-door modification after my run for the train on the way home on Saturday resulted in the camera detaching from the strap and bouncing along the platform. Fortunately the camera itself doesn’t appear damaged, as it landed on the flash unit. This broke quite neatly leaving the shoe in the camera and the body of the unit – which appears more or less undamaged skidding along the platform, from where another would-be passenger kindly returned it to me. It looks a fairly simple repair – and putting the two pieces together it still seems to work. The miniature flat cable from the shoe to the body actually looks like it was designed to unplug during this kind of event!

A colleague suggests that a little Loctite on the screw thread would be a good idea, and I don’t often want to remove the sling strap fitting (it takes a tripod screw on the rare occasions I need to use a tripod or monopod.)

I’d realised when I started using the sling strap that there was nothing to stop it coming loose, and added another to my repertoire of many nervous twitches, attempting to tighten it, but had never actually found it needed tightening. Saturday had been a fairly active day, moving around a lot when taking pictures and it had obviously worked loose, with running for the train the last straw.

The nylon picture frame cord is tough stuff – unlikely to break under the weight of camera and flash, leaving it hanging just a few inches lower if the strap becomes unscrewed again. I deliberately have left it loose both to allow the movement the sling strap needs and to avoid chafing.

I like to work with two cameras, and at the moment I have the D700 still on a normal neck strap and the D800E on a sling strap. I quite like this, as it helps me to tell which camera is which (sometimes a problem for me, particularly as the telephoto lens I use is shorter than the wide-angle) and also helps prevent the banging of the cameras into each other which can result in minor damage.

I didn’t notice any problems working with the cord in place at a protest on Wednesday, so I think its a permanent feature on the camera for me, though I’ll need to watch out for wear. So as I sat down on the bus to go home, I thought I’d mention it here and put the camera on my knees and took a picture of the modification – heavily cropped above. It was getting dark and it isn’t a high quality image, but it shows the idea clearly enough.

It also told me I had been working with the VR on the 28-105mm lens switched off. I can’t think why this should have been, probably just that I pushed the switch by accident when changing lenses. I don’t think I ever need to switch it off, and it has quite a heavy detent. I hadn’t noticed the images were any less sharp than usual.

Film’s Final Fling?

Film has been pretty well dead for some years now, or at least reserved for a few very special niches. There is a movement to keep it alive, I think largely the reserve of those opposed to change on emotional grounds. Real ale I can understand, but real film? We really are better off without all its problems and defects, and with the many advantages of good digital cameras.

I last took pictures on film around 5 years ago now, but I actually gave up developing film slightly earlier, and was left with around a 100 cassettes (and a couple of rolls) that I exposed in around 2007, left on a shelf in my darkroom. I kept meaning to get out my film processor and develop them – they are all C41 though some are chromogenic black and white, but somehow it hasn’t happened. I did a couple of batches of the b/w around 18 months ago – 7 films at a time, but that still leaves quite a few.

Finally I’ve got around sending some of the colour neg to a pro lab for processing. The local lab I used to use occasionally went out of business some years ago with the switch to digital, so I decided to post these off to a company that offered a reasonably priced service at £2.99 per film, process only. I knew that they were probably all exposed in panoramic cameras – one of the few niches referred to above, so couldn’t just send them to a budget processor.

Getting the films back in the post was a little like reliving the thrill (and often disappointment) of taking the films out of the final rinse and hanging them to dry, though this time I had little idea what I was going to see. Here’s one of the images that I found.

Some of you will recognise this view, and I also photographed digitally from the same viewpoint in 2007 and on other occasions. I was actually more or less in the same place last week, though a very tall fence prevents me getting to the exact same spot. But here’s a picture from just a few yards away of how the scene looks now.

Probably the only thing that is still more or less the same is the bit of the bridge at the left of the top image – and you can just see it under the fence at centre left of the lower image.

The digital image is a detail from a wider view – the film image covers roughly 120 degrees and I’ve cropped the digital to a similar angle – I made it as roughly twice the horizontal angle and vertical angle of the film camera. They use a similar perspective but the wider vertical view of the digital makes the curvature more obvious.

What you can’t perhaps see clearly is the difference in colour quality and detail, where digital scores heavily. And at the left of the film image I’ve left on one of the little accidents we often got with film, a lighter area where I think there was a little overlap with the next frame. It was taken with one of my favourite cameras, a Horizon, which I think cost well under £200 in a brown paper package from the Ukraine.

Keeping the film for 5 years between exposure and development doesn’t seem to have greatly altered the image, taken on an ISO400 Fuji film, though of course this is not a scientific test, but it seems fairly similar in most respects to films I did develop at the time.

I’ve just sent off another batch to finish the undeveloped colour film, but am still thinking I might process the 50 or so cassettes of T400CN myself, perhaps giving them a little extra development to compensate for any loss in contrast that may have occurred.

I’m also wondering whether to take out the Horizon or my X-Pan again. They are fun to use and better for panoramas with moving things in them as the exposure is made more or less at a point. And I do have a little supply of film still in the cupboard with expiry dates around 2002 or 2004 it would be a shame to waste.

Paris 2012 Complete

Paris last month was something of a marathon for me, not helped by a little sickness in the last couple of days, but putting my thoughts together on this site and also on My London Diary has probably taken rather more hours of work. At last it is more or less complete:

PARIS PHOTOMONTH DIARY
Monday Blues
Sunday Afternoon
Sunday morning at the MEP
A Photo-Off Guided Tour
Saturday Morning
Paris at Night
Menilmontant
Friday Morning
More Photo-Off Openings
Thursday Afternoon
Thursday Morning
Paris Photo Wednesday pm
Wednesday Morning
Openings – Tuesday
Paris Photo – Photograph as Commodity

You can actually read all of these here on >Re:PHOTO, where there are a few pictures included in the text. On My London Diary – links above – there is a single picture at the top of the text, and then a link to one or more pages of pictures. You can also go through all the pictures I’ve put on line from Paris by starting here and following the ‘more pictures’ or ‘More pictures from Paris’ link at the bottom of each page.

So far I’ve been asked two questions about the pictures from Paris. One was about the legal position of taking pictures of people on the street in France and whether I had any problems. On this visit I had no problems, though I have very occasionally been challenged on previous visits. I work quickly and many people were not aware they were being photographed, but when they were nobody actually voiced any objection. In some cases there were enough people to make it an image of a crowd (I was told four is a crowd in France, but wouldn’t rely on it.) In some other pictures – like that on the Metro – I chose an angle and lighting so that the people were not really recognisable.

I’m not sure what my favourite picture among those that I took is, but possibly one of the dogs in the Placement libre-atelier galerie. There I was with other photographers on the tour, others were also taking photographs and no one was objecting. I did ask the before taking this picture in the same gallery, because it seemed polite to do so.

Earlier that same afternoon while walking along the street with the others on the tour Linda did say that some people seemed shocked when I rushed up to a man wheeling some paintings on a trolley and took several pictures. He didn’t look particularly pleased but he didn’t object.

Continue reading Paris 2012 Complete

Final Hours

Although Sunday had felt rather like the end, and my gut had put an end to all my plans, we still had most of Monday to fill before it was time to go the the Gare du Nord for the late afternoon train home.

My plans had been to go out for a good meal at one of our favourite cheapish restuarants in the 5e on Sunday night, with a few glasses of wine, then on Monday to book out of our hotel, leaving our cases to collect later, have a leisurely meander around a few of our favourite places, perhaps morning coffee in a cafe, then a little more wandering before a long and satisfying lunch, getting up from the table in time to collect our bags and walk to the station. But in my state I spent our last 24 hours in Paris eating nothing and drinking the odd sip of water – I just couldn’t stomach the thought of anything more.

But we needed to do something to keep myself and Linda occupied, and we started with a trip to the cemetery. Montmartre cemetery isn’t really a gloomy place, though it’s pretty huge, and gives considerable employment to the gardeners who were busily blowing the leaves from one place to another. We’d actually hoped to be able to walk through it and out a gate at the north-east, but on reading the notices found that this is only open on one day a year – All Saints.

So we just walked around a fairly small part of it, finding some of the graves of the famous who are buried there (even some I’d heard of) and generally enjoying the atmosphere. It must be about the best time of the year to visit, with falling leaves and colour on the trees.

We then had to walk around the outside of the cemetery to revisit the Espace Central Dupon, which now held a different show, Mectoub by Scarlett Coten, portraits of young Maroccan men in their own surroundings. On her web site, she perhaps unhelpfully writes:

“« Mektoub », littéralement : c’est écrit”

– literally ‘it is written’, but it more means that whatever is referred to is predestined, already written in the book of life. And perhaps in photographing these men in their work place or home we see them in acceptance of their fate, their destiny and their offering it to the photographer for her images.

But perhaps what is more obvious is her sense of colour, and their ease at posing for the camera. You can see the series on her web site, and what is striking both on the wall and there is the huge amount of pinks and red, dominating almost all the images. It was certainly an interesting set of portraits.

From there we hurried across Paris to the 3e, where one of the few shows open on a Monday was the work of Mariana Yampolsky (1925-2002) at the Instituto Cultural de Mexico. Tepalcates continues there until the 29 March 2013.

Yampolsky was born in Chicago but grew up on her grandfather’s farm in rural Illinois. Her father was a sculptor and painter of Russian Jewish extraction, and her mother came from a wealthy German Jewish family. A year after she graduated from the University of Chicago in social sciences she went to Mexico City to study painting and sculpture and fell in love with the country, making it her home and becoming a Mexican citizen in 1958. In 1948 she studied photography with Lola Alvarez Bravo and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and the more interesting work in this show clearly showed his influence on her work.

The name of the show, Tepalcates, is apparently the Spanish version of a Nahuatl word meaning a fragment or scrap of rough clay, and is used to refer to anything made from clay, particularly dishes and bowls. Perhaps the clay here is the ancient culture of Mexico which Yampolsky recorded and also the clay that was important in the vernacular architecture prominent in the work.

For me there was far too much work in the show – and too little time to look at it all before the show closed for the lunch hour. There were some images that caught my attention, and rather too many that seemed to be little more than a record, perhaps something unusual or even typical and doubtless of interest to some but perhaps not to a general audience. But perhaps I’m not the right audience, not in love with Mexican culture. I think of the little curiosities that so attracted Edward Weston when he spent time in that country – and which for me seemed simply wasted film and wasted time when he could have been producing more of the great images he made there.

Yampolsky’s work I already knew – for example on Zone Zero and here and here – had perhaps led me to expect something more interesting. The gallery was closing for lunch, and it was time to leave before I had a really good look. But perhaps if I get back to Paris before March 29 I might go back and have another look.

Not that I wanted lunch. I went with Linda to a brasserie, but couldn’t face the smell or sight of food, and went to sit and read in the winter sunshine in the Square du Temple while she ate.

We did some more wandering in the afternoon, mainly by accident, and came upon the show Barcelone Annees 60, photographs by Narcis Darder Bosch (1923-2006) and Ricard Duran Bargallo (1916-1986) The PDF catalogue here has more pictures. Bosch was a succesful industrialist and a keen amatuer photographer, while Bargallo who started with an interest in cinema and painting and worked in the textile industry made photography his means of expression. While much of the work on show was very much in the amateur photography tradition, some of Bargallo’s work seemed more interesting.

Finally back at the Square du Temple we went inside the Mairie of the 3e, where another exhibition had opened that morning, Paris Couleurs 1960 by Jean Jéhan. A young man from the country, when he had to do his national military service he was stationed in Paris, and decided that after that he wanted to be a photographer. So he bought a camera and spent most of his off-duty time travelling around Paris and taking photographs on 120 film of the people he met on the street and anything that interested him. 200 of these colour images have now been published in a book, Paris-Bohème 1960, with a preface by Charles Aznavour.

From the large selection on show at the Mairie gave an interesting view of the city, which has changed considerably since then. He was photographing more or less at the time when I first came to the city, although I didn’t photograph it at all seriously until 1973. You can get a flavour of the work from the poster and a brief article on the show.

It was time to make our way to collect our suitcases and go to the station. On the way we bought some quiches, in case either of us felt hungry on the way home. I hadn’t eaten for over 24 hours, and it wasn’t until I got back home around 8pm that I felt at all like food – and the quiche was delicious.

The End of Paris

By Sunday lunchtime I was definitely beginning to feel ill, but there were still things that I wanted to see, and after a brief lunch – a mistake – we went on to the Hôtel de Sauroy in rue Charlot in the 3e,where the first thing we saw was a rather curious box in the courtyard. It seemed an odd way to treat the work of Liz Hingley, as the winner of the Prix Virginia for her work on The Jones Family, and certainly did not show it at its best.

The first show we went inside the rather grand house to see was Thanks to Luigi Ghirri & Italian Emerging Photography. I’ve never really seen what people see in Ghirri’s work, although it’s not entirely without interest, it has never really gripped me. What people see as poetic often seems to me just sloppy thinking and technique, but the work of the six younger Italian photographers held a little more interest.

For me the most striking work were the dark images of Alessandro Imbriacos Static Drama, but there was also interest in Marco Barbons Asmara Dream, Susanna Pozzolis On the Block. Harlem Private View, Ottavia Castellina‘s Here I am Again, but I was less than enchanted by Claudia Pozzolis lonely mountains of metaphors and perhaps felt I had seen work similar to Margherita Cesarettis magic herbarium rather better done by others.

Through a neighbouring door leading to its own staircase we went up into the group show Le temps des lucioles (The time of fireflies) with work by Robert Cahen, Bogdan Konopka, Gladys, Laurent Millet, Sarah Moon, Caroline Hayeur, Machiel Botman, Didier Massard, Patrick Taberna and Salvatore Puglia.

The retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Brave Tin Soldier is one of Sarah Moon’s most charming series, and it was good to see it on the wall. But for me the real star of the show – perhaps because I was not really familiar with his work before – was Bogdan Konopka.

Born in Poland where he was a part of a movement known as ‘elementary photography’ which led him to use a large format camera (mainly I think 4×5″) and work with low contrast heavily printed contact prints as a reaction to the then prevalent style of working, which favoured gritty high contrast and greatly enlarged photojournalistic images. He move to France in 1989.

The images on show demonstrated his approach, small and darkly printed with very little in the highlight area, they had an unusual depth and shadow separation that prevented them from being dull or gloomy. There were also copies of several of his books, and a comfortable sofa on which to sit and browse through them, so much that I perhaps neglected some of the other work on show which, at a fairly brief encounter failed to arouse my interest.

There is a good selection of work by Konopka on his Candace Dwan gallery page, although unfortunately the reproduction there seems a little unsharp and fails to do the work justice.

We walked rather briskly down to the Institut Suédois for a quick look at the show Different Distances, showing the work of a new generation of Swedish fashion photographers whose work has a free interpretation of fashion and is also fine art photography. Or so I think the exhibition description said, though to me it all looked rather ordinary. But by now I was really feeling quite ill, and although there were more shows I had meant to visit I had to give up and return to the hotel.
Continue reading The End of Paris

Paris – Sunday

Sunday I woke up not feeling at my best after a big meal the previous evening, but after a bit of breakfast felt a little better. Sunday mornings in Paris both Linda and I go separately to worship, she at the Protestant temple near the Louvre for the 10.30am service while I make my way to the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in the rue de Fourcy in time for its 11am opening. Normally we then meet up for lunch.

Linda had already been to see the main exhibition at the MEP on the free opening they have on Wednesday evenings – when I was at Photo Paris. Photography in France, 1950-2000 was a large show which reflected both the changes in the medium and in society over the period and also the views of its two creators, Gilles Mora and Alain Sayag, who feel that photography is now past its peak, with the disappearance of much print journalism and the switch online to video.

The show certainly seemed to me to catalogue a downhill journey, with the show being dominated by the work from the early years, with some memorable images. Perhaps Iziz was the star of the show, but he had firm support from Willy Ronis, Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Brassai and more, with some fine fashion work by Frank Horvat and William Klein, as well as a rather irrelevant image by Robert Frank, a Swiss-born photographer who became American – although of course the publication of his book Les Amercains in Paris was a major event in photographic history in France as elsewhere across the world.

There were a number of books including this on show in glass cases – and this reflected the intentions of the curators to show photography in a wider context than simply images, and the show included examples of photography used in magazine spreads and adverts, as well as a grid of images of the best pictures by an amateur photographer packed with the usual cliches – sunsets, snow, sun on the mountains and sunsets – and one that almost manages to make a decent image of two hens. Perhaps the weakest aspect as an exhibition was in the display of books – looking at their covers isn’t a great experience, and perhaps some short video displays would have been useful.

But even in these heady early days there are signs of the fatal viruses that worked themselves out in the lower floors of the show dealing with the later decades. This was a history of a medium subverted first by the easy nudes and chemical abstractions and later by the philosophical and the chic, meaningless art and the market for such decorations. The show demonstrates both the strengths of French photography and its weaknesses.

What seems most dated from this early period was the work of the ‘radical artists’ who now don’t appear at all radical, while the ‘reclamé’ or publicity images have aged much better and made a real contribution to the show. It would perhaps have been better to have had a show of this nature curated by outsiders to French culture who might have spared us some of the more banal images of the famous French – and personally I could have done without pictures of our royal occasion.

As the years progressed there was still some fine photography, though it sometimes became hard to find for the dross (my notes have a rather stronger term.) Most of the better work came from the photojournalists, and the rest of photography – with some notable exceptions such as DATAR seemed to have lost the plot. Even those whose work I admire were often represented here by rather poor examples of their work.

This was a show intended to provoke discussion, and it will probably be very successful at doing so; it continues until 13 Jan 2013.

As usual there were several other shows at the MEP, the most interesting of which for me was Susan Paulsen‘s intimate view made over 10 years of Wilmot, Arkansas, a small southern town which is a part of her family history and where some of her relatives still live.

I very much enjoyed looking at her pictures – finely made Epson Ultrachrome inkjet prints. They are very much seen from the perspective of her family, living in this town of 700 inhabitants, a town (at least for its white inhabitants) that used to be a place of “fine things, fine manners, fine ways.. a place where everybody spoke perfect English.” Changes came “in the 1960s; due to mechanisation many blacks were moving from the farms into town” and Paulsen records “I am proud of Uncle William and Big John for fighting … zoning restrictions” against setting up trailers (mobile homes) on the grounds that “trailers represent fairness to the very poor.”

The images chosen for the MEP web site show two portraits of black people in the nine images, giving a rather different view to the show as a whole. Although I went around enjoying the pictures, by the end I was also thinking it was a bit like comfort food and nostalgia and I longed for something with a little more edge.

You can see some of Paulsen’s older black and white work older b/w work here.

There were a couple of other shows down in the basement, neither of which interested me greatly. One featured the self-portraiture of teenager Sarah N. who, according the curator writing on the MEP web site “has produced a staggering body of photographic work” and the other by Jean-Luc Tartarin, undoubtedly a talented photographer – he was only 20 when he won the Prix Niepce in 1971, the youngest photographer to do so, and who now teaches photography at l’École Supérieure d’Art de Metz Métropole. You can see some of his work on line at Galerie Jean Greset and see him talking at one of his shows on YouTube. But the work for all its technical proficiency didn’t have anything to say to me.

You can take a very quick walk around all these shows in a 1 minute 26 second video by Molly Benn on Le Journal de la Photographie. She also covered other events in the Paris Month of Photography, notably on the evening of November 8th, which was the peak evening for openings in Paris this month – the Photo-Off brochure lists 25 of them, but there were also 5 others. She got on her bike and tried to take in all 30, but was defeated by the long climb up the rue de Belleville and abandoned her ride after only 19, but still an acheivement that makes my own attempts seem rather tame.

Of course I like to spend enough time at each venue to see the work properly, and also like to have a glass (or sometimes two) or wine, so even had I brought my bicycle (certainly the fastest way to get around the city) I could not have managed to come close to her record.

Continue reading Paris – Sunday

Jon Levy & Poppy

Foto8 is no longer at Honduras St, but Jon Levy continues to pose interesting questions about photography on the web, and his blog post The World in 2012-According to Me he makes some interesting and challenging comments about photography, most of which I happen to agree with (though I have a few caveats, particularly on self-publishing, where I think he fails to consider the potential of publishing on demand, which has removed some of the pitfalls.)

His 2012 list of 10 19 things they didn’t want you to know about photography but are actually true will he says “empower you and blow the boring, self indulged, narcissistic fauxtojournalist documentary squatters off the face of this earth for good.” I do hope so; go and read them now!

Some have already caused a little controversy, and doubtless that was their intent. Writing “You cannot learn photography at university...” is bound to upset those who make a living out of teaching it, though I think it is at least largely true. Universities may help a few photographers to bloom, but mostly they seem to have the opposite effect, and constrain their students to a particular narrow view. Of course there are good photographers who come out of universities, but then there are probably rather more good photographers who go into them – like the students who used to come back to visit the college where I taught and tell the staff “thank God you taught us photography, because nobody does where we are now.”

Of course there are exaggerations and part-truths, but much that really makes sense. There are photographers who make a living selling prints in galleries (though your best career move for selling work is certainly death) but they are few, and most photographers with work in galleries make relatively low sales – galleries may survive on it because they sell the work of many photographers. And frankly, some of those who do make a living don’t make really good pictures and some have made a career out of taking the same pictures over and over again, stuck in a profitable rut they found many years ago.

Of course as he says, “EARNING A LIVING is not a god-given right in photography“, and he writes “You are however entitled in this day and age to get a job doing something else and STILL take pictures about what matters to you. You can still publish and tell your stories, maybe even more effectively.” I’m often heartened by remembering that many of the photographers whose work I admire most never really made a living from photography. And on the theme of money, was his “visa versa” in point 16 some kind of Freudian slip by him or the spell-checker or a deliberate pun?

You can also hear Levy talking about photography and in particular about the book Poppy – Trails of Afghan Heroin which he reviewed on Foto8 a couple of weeks ago and picked as his book of the year. This conversation between Jon Levy and Jonathan Worth was the final lecture of the year for the #Phonar course at Coventry University (does Levy think the students on this course learn photography I wonder?) It starts very badly, but improves as Jon gets into his spiel. Halfway through it loses video and is much improved for it – sometimes a picture is not worth even a single word, and this would have been better simply as audio. Of course you can just not watch the picture; it’s long – 37 minutes – but worth listening to.

You can also read Joerg Colberg’s review of Poppy on Conscientious in which ends “this book is setting a new benchmark for the photojournalistic photobook. Highly recommended.” It links to a video presentation as well as showing some page spreads and gives a good idea of the book.

Continue reading Jon Levy & Poppy

Why Bangladeshi Workers Die in Fires

I’m not a fan of Bloomberg, but Shahidul News has reposted an article which was published on Bloomberg yesterday, Wal-Mart Nixed Paying Bangladesh Suppliers to Fight Fire by reporters Renee Dudley & Arun Devnath which makes clear the role of companies including Wal-Mart and Gap.

They report some of the statements made during a meeting to try to increase safety in Bangladesh’s garment factories, and in particular to increase standards of electrical and fire safety (and their enforcement.) They quote a Wal-Mart director of ethical sourcing Sridevi Kalavakolanu as having said that that “very extensive and costly modifications” would need to be made to some factories, and that “It is not financially feasible for the brands to make such investments.”

Some of the name brands have signed up to an agreement, and pressure from some brands has led to improvements in working conditions in some factories due to their pressure on them, but half of the garment workplaces in Bangladesh still don’t meet the country’s legal standards.

This is a report that should be read in full and it makes clear that action is needed in countries where the clothes are sold to force the companies to face up to their responsibilities towards the workers who make their clothes. It may mean an end to the dirt-cheap bargains on our high streets, but many of the clothes manufactured for next to nothing actually end up as relatively high priced designer label goods, and the name brands with high mark-ups can certainly afford to pay. The Bloomberg article does say that a couple of the dozen retailers who attended the meeting have signed up to the memorandum, but the rest need to follow their example.

Oscar Niemeyer 1907-2012

Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida de Niemeyer Soares, architect of Brasilia and much more, died on Wednesday in a hospital in Rio de Janeiro, the city in which he was born in 1907, shortly before his 105 birthday, and his obituaries appear in today’s papers. Some of them are being published for a second time, as a disturbing Internet hoax published news of his death a month or so ago, a rumour that spread rapidly around the world before being scotched.

I never met Niemeyer, but did have the experience of spending a couple of days in Brasilia days after his 100th birthday. Brasilia was his major monument, and I was shown around the city – the only entirely modern city to become a Unesco World Heritage site and a collaboration between him as architect and urban planner Lúcio Costa (1902-98.)

I wasn’t in Brasilia to take photographs, but to show my own work in the Foto Arte 2007 festival there, and I deliberately hadn’t taken my full photographic kit, just a small compact camera, something I rather regretted later, although it was still probably the best thing to do given the packed schedule of my stay.

Of course I wrote a series of posts about my visit and the festival, and you can see them here on >Re:PHOTO, starting perhaps with Foto Arte 2007 Brasilia. As well as writing about some of my experiences and the shows I saw in the festival there is also a series of posts which reproduce much of the lecture I gave at the festival which starts with Architecture and Urban Landscape photography, and continues in Garden Suburbs and Garden Cities and Under the Car.

I visited all the major buildings by Niemeyer in the city, although it wasn’t possible to get very close to the presidential palace and I viewed it only across it’s moat and vast stretch of very green grass, watched by the soldiers on guard, and also went around several of the Super Quadras – the autonomous neighbourhood units which were the building blocks of Costa’s plan and some of the commercial areas. But perhaps the building by Niemeyer that made the strongest impression on me for it’s simplicity and functionality was his small church, the Igrejinha Nossa Senhora de Fátima.

Niemeyer was the last remaining great architect of the modernist era, giving his own particular flavour to it with his love of curves, curves derived from his love of women and of nature, of rivers and mountains. It is perhaps surprising that some of his best-known and best loved buildings were churches and cathedrals, as he, like the other main figures in the development of Brasilia, was a communist since the 1940s – and had to flee Brazil after a right-wing coup in the 1960s, living for a while in Paris where he designed the headquarters building of the French Communist Party.

One of perhaps the stranger sites on the tourist map in Brasilia is at the highest point looking down on the rest of the city, where the first Mass in Brasilia was held, attended by Costa and Niemeyer who were both atheists. You can see a not very good picture of the site, along with more of my images from Brasilia starting here on My London Diary.

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