>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

East of the City – Invitation

You are welcome to the Private View 6-8pm Thursday 6 Oct 2011:

Oct 1-29 2011

The Shoreditch Gallery The Juggler 5 Hoxton Market
London N1 6HG

020 7729 7292 Gallery 01784 456474 Other information

Mon-Fri 8am-6pm, Sat: 10am-4pm. Closed Sun Free admission

(Hoxton Market is just east of Pitfield St, reached via Boot
St or Coronet St)

Documents from East London by three photographers

Paul Baldesare COLUMBIA MARKET

Mike Seaborne LONDON FACADES

Peter Marshall BEFORE THE OLYMPICS

Baldesare Seaborne Marshall

East of the City

East of the City is a part of Photomonth
2011, the 11th annual East London Photography festival.

Thursday’s formal opening of my show ‘Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood‘ went well, decently full without being too crowded, and I had the time to talk to most of the people who came, though as usual forgot to say some things I had meant to. And people seemed genuinely to like the work, with quite a few buying copies of the book – currently only available from the Queen’s Terrace Café where the show continues Mondays to Saturdays until the easily remembered date of 5th November.

Dr Cathy Ross from the Museum of London gave a short opening address, linking my work to a project the museum had carried out some 20 years ago, and stressing the importance of documentary work such as this which created a record of what otherwise would be a largely unknown aspect of social history.

It was good also to meet again (or in some cases for the first time) some of the garden owners and hear their views, mostly very complimentary, of my pictures.

One image that attracted quite a bit of attention was the only non-rectangular image in the show, and one that came about rather by chance. Before I took each image for the project I carefully chose a particular viewpoint and thought about how to make a picture in terms of the horizontal and vertical limits of a virtual rectangular ‘frame’ I was going to fill*, and this image was no different.

Almost the entire project involved a different way of working to my normal photography and there is not a single image in the show (though a few in the book) that I could actually see in a viewfinder when I took the image. Most are put together from between 3 and more than a dozen separate exposures to produce the picture I had in mind before taking them.

This shows the view, invisible from the street, that hits you immediately when you gain admission via the entry-phone to the high-walled garden, and was taken with my back literally against the door. It was a busy afternoon at the house, and I had to work quickly in case someone came to the entrance, when I would have had to interrupt taking the picture and move my tripod out of the way.

Like most of the pictures in the show, it was taken on the D700 using the 16-35mm lens in portrait format, usually at the 16 mm end, giving a vertical angle of view of 96 degrees. A series of exposures was then made, taking pictures at roughly 30-40 degree intervals to get a considerable overlap between each image (at 16mm the lens covers 73 degrees across the shorter dimension.)

I always started taking pictures where I intended one edge of the picture to be (normally the left), placing that in the centre of the first frame and tried to end it with where the far edge in the centre of the last frame.

To join the images, the software first alters their shape to suit the projection being used, changing the rectangular images into ones with curved edges. When the frames are combined to give the overall image, this results in an irregular shape with wavy edges, which are then normally trimmed off to give you a rectangle. One of the reasons for using a lot of overlap when shooting the series is that this makes the ‘waves’ shorter and thus less deep, and you have to trim less.

This strip of garden between the gate and front door was actually fairly narrow, and I decided that a single row of images would not give sufficient vertical coverage to include the chimney of the house. I need to use either two rows in portrait format or three rows in landscape format, and chose the second.

I had decided to start the image to include the small tree at left and to end it with the larger tree at right. What I had in mind was an image rather like this crop (though with sky where there is a black rectangle at the top and a little more of the path at the bottom.)

In the end it didn’t quite happen like this, and, thanks to the dog I ended up with a rather better picture, if one that some people are confused by. They interpret the picture with its dark grey background as being taken through some kind of gap in a fence, which although not literally the case, is certainly a good metaphor for what like the other images in the show is certainly a peep into the private domain.

As I was making the picture, one of the house residents, a large black dog, was running around the garden and watching me. I thought about cloning him in several images but decided more than one dog would be an unwanted distraction, and tried to avoid him. Finally, just as I was finishing the exposures I needed he came up and posed just in front of me and I took another exposure with him in the middle.

It was an image that didn’t fit the rectangle, which would have cut the dog in half, but rather than use a different exposure of the centre area of the path I could see two good reasons to include the image with the dog. The dog was beautifully positioned in a fine pose, tail leading up to the doorway of the house, and secondly the extra area of path in the centre of the image gave a much stronger impression of the path leading to the house. It would have been difficult to include it in a rectangular image as the tripod legs would have appeared.

I took out a few of the 18 or so images I’d taken from the image to produce a slightly more attractive overall shape which you see, placing the image on a dark grey background – the same tone as used for the introductory page for each garden featured in the book.

But this is a picture which, if not taken by a dog, was certainly made by one.

Technical notes

Few of these panoramas stitch perfectly automatically, and most need a little assistance with appropriate masking of some of the images. Plants are not entirely static, especially on windy days, and anything very close to the camera is likely to be a problem, as it is hard to get absolutely precise positioning. Joins between images often need to be moved to areas where any slight misalignment is not noticeable, for example empty areas of wall rather than window frames.

All of the images shot RAW and were pre-processed in Lightroom before being combined in PTGui. Basic exposure, fill light, black point, brightness and contrast were simply synchronised across a set of images, but considerable care was needed to apply the ‘adjustment brush’ in the same way to matching areas on different frames.

* The projection used in assembling the images alters there appearance in a way that is hard to predict when taking the series of frames. Mostly I made use of an equi-rectangular projection which I think is a more general version of the cylindrical projection of my earlier film-based panoramas, but for some I found the newly rediscovered vedutismo projection worked better.

Prison Photography

I’ve mentioned a few times the web site Prison Photography written by Peter Brook who also is the lead blogger for Wired.com’s Raw File photography blog.

Another blog I read regularly is the New York Time’s Lens, and a couple of days ago they ran a piece ‘Focusing on Prison Photography‘ in which James Estrin interviews Brook about his work and interest in prison photography, with examples and links to the work of a number of photographers. It’s an article that touches on important issues and links to some interesting photography, mainly by photographers whose work I didn’t previously know.

One UK photographer who has taken an interest in prisons is Ed Clark, and some time ago I reviewed his book Still Life: Killing Time on this site. I’ve also written about his more recent work Guantanamo: If the Light Goes Out on the camp and those who were locked up there, although I don’t think the longer piece I wrote about this ever got published. And I never got around to putting it on this site as I was waiting for a promised review copy of the book that never arrived.

Contemporary Russians

Posted on Lensculture a couple of weeks ago are a set of images by 43 contemporary Russian photographers, or rather photographers from Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus. The feature has one image each selected by Lensculture’s Jim Casper from what he thought were the 43 most interesting of those whose work he saw at a week-long conference about contemporary Russian photography.

The conference, at which Jim and the other international reviewers looked at the work of 185 photographers in what must have been a very busy schedule – he looked at the work of 62 photographers in 20 minute portfolio reviews seems to be only the tip of the iceberg so far as photography there is concerned, as there were over 2400 who applied to take part, roughly 13 for every place available.

Of course it isn’t possible to say anything much about the photographers involved on the basis of a single image, but there are certainly some that made me want to see more – and Lensculture promises to let me do so in the future for some of them.

Lenses For Courses?

One of my favourite lenses over the past 18 months or so has been the AF-S DX Nikkor 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR, rather a mouthful of a name, but a relatively compact lens for DX format cameras. If you like to see detailed test results, you should go to Photozone.de, and they do make interesting reading in some respects.

No lens is perfect, but the faults in optical performance of this one – mainly some distortion and chromatic aberration – are largely easily and automatically corrected in software such as Lightroom, leaving you with images with some impressively good resolution. It’s a very good lens even wide open, and down a stop or so, truly excellent. Subjectively certainly the results are better than the previous Nikkors and Sigma lenses I’ve used covering similar focal lengths, some costing more than three times as much. And perhaps even more importantly, autofocus is faster than the others.

But it is a ‘consumer’ lens and not a ‘professional’ one, and I’m someone who does tend to be rather hard on equipment. Ten days ago, rushing along in a crowded street I collided with a rubbish bin. The UV filter on my Nikon 16-35 mm took it head on, the glass shattering to pieces. I was obviously worried about the lens itself (it cost almost six times as much as the 18-105), but it seems to be working perfectly – and now has a new UV filter. I’m thinking of taking out a standing order for these. Fortunately from Hong Kong they only cost around £3 rather than the £37.95 at my local camera shop. And you can also buy lens hoods for most Nikon lenses that are better made than the genuine article for a fraction of the cost.

It also rains fairly frequently in London, and the difference between consumer and professional lenses also shows. Of course both get drops of rain on the UV filter, and I wipe it with a microfibre cloth before almost every exposure. Lens hoods help a little, but are pretty ineffectual with wide angles. But while the 16-35 is pretty watertight and keeps on working in the rain, the 18-105 is very definitely not, and soon becomes unusable until I can dry it out.

While the 16-35 survived a major impact, the 18-105 has now jammed and is unusable. It happened while I was sitting on a train and reading a book with the camera on a strap around my neck. Perhaps I might have turned over a page hurriedly, but there were no other incidents that I noticed. The lens that had been working perfectly when I got on the train was jammed solid when I walked out of my station.

I’m left wondering what to do with the 18-105. I do have other lenses that will do most of what it did, though not quite as well. Most lens repairs that I’ve had done have cost around two thirds of the cost of the 18-105, so is it worth repairing? Should I simply buy a new 18-105, or get a larger and heavier pro lens?

At the moment the lens is sitting on my desk and will probably stay there for some time. Like many other Nikon users I’m waiting for Nikon to bring out the next round of DSLR cameras, replacements for the D700 and D300s. My D300 is definitely showing signs of age, and the shutter in particular is probably well past its design life, and as I noted in an earlier post, not working at its higher speeds. Will its replacement be a FX or a DX camera – or perhaps some other manufacturer than Nikon will come up with a smaller and lighter system that really delivers similar quality?

Gardens Show – Installation Views

My current show at the Queen’s Terrace Café in St John’s Wood is a novel venture for me in several ways. It isn’t the first time I’ve shown in a café, but it is the first time that a café has been revamped as an environment to match my work, with the main exhibition walls made into a kind of garden setting, with arches of trellis work and the various gardens in my pictures separated by painted ‘branches’ with leaves.

I’ve always in the past rather decried such things, preferring a classic white wall approach, along with prints on large white (or rather archival not quite white) mounts. I still remember the shock and distaste I felt at a Martin Parr show at the old Photographers Gallery many years ago which was cluttered with aqualungs and other shells and stuff and where the photographer turned up in Bermuda shorts. Good photography I thought (and still rather feel) is belittled and marginalised by such gimmickry; it should be treated with a proper respect.

The colour of the screens on which most of the work is mounted is a green that is more or less café’s own colour, used on its leaflets and other promotions, and it seemed appropriate for a gardens project. I tried to get the book cover the same green, but using the RGB values I was given gives a purer and brighter colour, perhaps the result of printing (as Blurb do) in sRGB colour rather than from AdobeRGB or as a spot Pantone colour.

The redesign of the gallery was by Jiro Osuga, whose also has a garden screen showing at the entrance to the café, and despite my misgivings I think it works well. It is after all a café rather than a gallery. The large prints in the show work well, and I think I was right to insist that given the way they were to be incorporated they should be shown without borders or frames. I would have been happy mounting the prints directly onto the walls, but the cafe insisted on them being mounted onto card or, for the larger prints, foamboard. It’s actually good to see the prints without glass. As well as the spaces shown in these two views there is another small area of wall with five of my prints.

The prints are C-types, made on Fuji Crystal Archive paper at The Print Space, and I chose the Pearl finish (they call it matt) rather than gloss. I had intended to make the smaller prints (A3 and below) in the show myself as ink jet prints, but given the low cost of A3 prints there I decided it made sense for me to pay them to make these for me, and I was very happy with the results.

There was a curious slight difference in colour balance between my printer and computer screen and that of The Print Space, both colour managed systems. To get matching results I had to apply a small colour balance correction to the files in Photoshop, generally R+5 M+3 B-7 in Photoshop’s colour balance dialogue, and also very slightly lighten the files using a vale of around 1.03 for the mid-tone slider in the Levels dialogue.

If you go to to the Print Space, you can of course check your files on their colour calibrated systems – and if you do it quickly they don’t charge for this. The charge if you take a little longer isn’t steep either. You can also look at them in their non-calibrated systems you use to put them into their system, which seem to be reasonably close in colour. All their systems are Macs, which I find just slightly less easy to use as I’m used to working on a PC, but the colour should be the same.

Unless you need to check colour, it’s probably best not to go there, but to upload your files from home. You then get the prices immediately, and will know if you have made a mistake in your image sizing. You can still save postage by going to collect the prints from the lab – and sending the files in advance they are likely to be ready when you arrive to collect, which saves waiting. But the one print I did order on-line and have posted to me arrived the following morning.

I calibrate my Eizo ColorEdge monitor using a Pantone i1 and print using either an Ilford generic profile for Ilford Gold Fibre or a printer specific profile produced by Chaudigital for their Da Vinci fine art paper (which is very similar if not identical to that sold as Innova and Permajet), which both give very similar results. I use Photoshop’s soft preview feature with the profile supplied by The Print Centre to preview my prints but I still have to fudge things a little to get accurate results. Colour management seems to almost work but not quite exactly.

The Submerged

I was hoping to write a proper review of Michelle Sank’s book and show ‘The Submerged‘, at Hotshoe Gallery until 29 September, but I just haven’t had the time to give it the attention it deserves.

The work came out of a three month residency at Aberystwyth, and by coincidence around 18 months ago I wrote in this blog:

“Somehow Aberystwyth seems to me to be the last place a photographer would go for an interesting story…”

Then I was writing about a project by Chloe Dewe Mathews, Hasidic Jews on Holiday, which did provide a clue to a couple of Sank’s pictures in Submerged. In that post I also provided a link to photolibrarywales, and another search on there, this time for Aberystwyth provided more clues.

Both show and book present Sank’s pictures without captions or any relevant text, other than a few details which Liz Wells is unable to avoid in her essay. Many of the pictures do seem to me to be rather like visual cryptic crossword clues, and for me that often gets rather in the way of seeing them as pictures.

The work on photolibrary Wales is by Keith Morris, and there are perhaps half a dozen of his pictures from the first thousand or so that I paged through, 96 at a time, that had a certain resonance with some of Sank’s pictures (as well as a portrait of Sank herself.)

The show is well printed, the book a very handsome volume with a number of fine images, but I think the sequencing on Sank’s web site shows the project better; the book at times seems simplistic (the final image the end of the pier) and at others perverse. The brighter and purer colours on the web also suit some of the images better (and makes sense of Well’s reference to a row of bright red garages which they are definitely not in the book), although the work on the page and the wall perhaps better expresses the Welsh rain and gloom.

As I mentioned in my previous piece, my last visit to the town was as a young child, on a village coach outing:

It wasnt quite like the outing in one of Dylan Thomass short stories, but there were some similarities. We did eventually get there, after quite a few stops on the way, and about all I can remember about the place was that it seemed cold, windy, wet and grey.

Having seen Sank’s vision I’m not sure if I would want to spend a holiday there, even if I did live in Birmingham.

Versus – Peruvian Collective

Ten or so years ago I decided to write a series of articles on photography around the world, partly simply to get away from what I thought was an over-emphasis on photography in the USA in the histories and other accounts of photography, but also out of a genuine interest in work that was being produced in various countries, particularly those that appeared to have been little affected by what I saw as a kind of curatorial virus that seemed to my mind to have enfeebled photography over the past 20 or so years in much of Europe and the USA.

Rather than simply pick on countries randomly as I came on interesting work on the web, or rather as well as doing that, I decided to try and make a more systematic survey, and decided to start with photography in Central and South America. Since I was being systematic I decided to approach the countries of the region in alphabetical order, and thus started to find out all I could about photography in Argentina.

Although I was only writing relatively brief features, I also adopted a fairly systematic approach, or at least as far as possible. I began each country feature with what I could find about the early history of photography there, from its beginnings up to around the start of the twentieth century. Usually I wrote about interesting work by photographers from elsewhere who had visited the country, and I tried to find and write about the photographers who had become accepted as the country’s most interesting in the twentieth century but were no longer living or working. In a final section I looked at contemporary photographers, making my own judgements on work that I could find on the web or in my library.

Occasionally I came across so much material that I needed to write several features on a country, and progress through the continent was slow. Of course I wasn’t trying to write a definitive work about each country, these were just introductory pieces, but much of the material they contained was little known outside the countries themselves – and in some cases even within it.

Alphabetically I got as far as Mexico, where I wrote four articles, including two on Manuel Alvarez Bravo, so I still had a few countries to cover. One of them was Peru, although I had written a lengthy six part feature on Peru’s greatest photographer, Martin Chambi (1891) which had also brought in the work of some other Peruvian photographers. Some day when have more time I’ll perhaps go back and bring some of these old pieces up to date and re-publish them, but for the moment they are no longer available on line.

All of which is a very long preamble to a web site I came across the other day, of a collective of three photographers who call themselves Versus, and there is interesting work there and elsewhere from all of them.

The web site doesn’t seem to have any information about them, although there is a group statement about their approach. Gihan Tubbeh is a 26 year old Peruvian, and there is more about her on the 1000 words blog.

Musuk Nolte is roughly the same age and you can see some of his pictures on his VII Visonaires page, along with a picture of him and a link to his blog – im Spanish but there is very little text on it – mainly just titles and his pictures, and you can use Google translate.

Renzo Giraldo‘s web site has an English version with a picture of him and some information as well as his work as a photojournalist and personal projects. He was born in 1976 and so is the oldest of the three at around 35.

The Secret Is Out – Now On The Wall

Finally my pictures for the show ‘Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood‘ are up on the wall and you can see it at The Queen’s Terrace Café in St John’s Wood from today until 5 Nov 2011. The café, at 7 Queen’s Terrace, London NW8 6DX (020 7449 2998), is open from 9-6 Monday to Saturday, and I can recommend the salads, cakes, coffee, teas and fruit juices, having sampled many of them over the several months I’ve been working on this project.

I’ve written before about the café and the two previous shows, by painters Mark Cazalet and Jiro Osuga, who turned the space into Jiro’s Café.

Jiro has also had a hand in the current show, which is a project initiated and researched by café proprietor Mireille Galinou, following on from her book on St John’s Wood, Cottages and Villas: The Birth of the Garden Suburb, published by Yale University Press last year. All I had to do was to make appointments with the owners of the gardens she had selected and to take a panoramic photograph of them. Jiro has designed and decorated the café as a ‘garden’ in which to show the photographs – some quite large, and also in the show is a fine large screen ‘The Walled Garden’ that he painted in 2004.

Of course I ended up taking more than one panorama of each of the gardens that I photographed, and there are a few that have more than one picture in the show. But I also agreed to design and produce (through Blurb) a book of the same name as the show, and although this covers the same gardens as the exhibition it has around four times as many pictures, mainly panoramic.

Altogether I photographed around 20 private gardens for the project, as well as taking pictures in various public places and there were a few we decided for various reasons to leave out of the show and book, though there is a possibility, still under discussion, that this might be the start of a larger archive. I started work on the project in mid-May and took the last picture for the show on 2 August.

I spent between half an hour and an hour and a quarter in each garden. In some it was easy to find a viewpoint, but others were more difficult. A few had so many possibilities it was hard to know when to stop. But of course the time there was only the start of making the pictures. On average, processing the raw files and combining between 2 and 18 into a single image using PtGui software took another half day for each garden, and it was a lot of extra work to cram into the time. Travelling too ate up my time – around an hour and a half each way on every visit to the area.

The book is currently only available at the café – after all these gardens are secret – and it costs £20 for 80 pages with 76 of my pictures and some text and other illustrations. (We might be persuaded to post a copy for another £2.50.) Unlike my other books it is not available direct from Blurb, but it costs less than it would direct. So far I’ve had to order two batches and I expect to have to get more printed. I think for the first time I may be producing an actual limited edition, though I’ve not yet decided if it will be 200 or 500 copies.

You will have noticed too that there are none of my garden pictures here – you will have to come to the café to see them, though perhaps I will put some pictures from the opening next week in a later post. I’ll also perhaps write a little about how I produced the pictures and the various problems I had.

9/11 A Milestone in Citizen Journalism?

There are always said to be some events where everyone remembers where they were at the time: President Kennedy’s assassination, the Moon Landing and 9/11. I’ve got no idea about the first, but I spent the time of the moon landing walking through some of the more suburban streets of Hull, a blue glow from almost every front room window as we passed with a small group of people staring into a TV set, watching what we had gone out to avoid.

I also do have a very clear memory about 9/11. At the time I was teaching part-time and had just finished a long morning’s teaching with a lesson that ran over lunchtime and had gone down to get my bike to go home from the passage by the boiler room where the few staff who rode bikes parked them rather than have them stolen or vandalised in the bike sheds, and was putting my books into my panniers when one of my colleagues, a younger woman who had grown up in New York saw me and rushed out distraught from her office opposite to share the news with me.

As soon as I arrived home, my computer was on and I was following the events on-line, watching the videos and still images. Before long I had an e-mail from my editor in New York, firstly assuring me that everyone in the office was unhurt, but also suggesting I write an article about the photographic coverage of the event.

I scoured the web looking for pictures, wrote about them briefly and included links, and created a feature that in a very few days attracted several million hits, certainly by far the most popular piece I’ve ever put on line.

It did feel a little strange, sitting in London and writing about something that had happened thousands of miles away, but to an extent that was something I’d got used to, my study with the computer having been a virtual extension of New York for several years, where I’d written about all the big photography shows opening in that city, as well as many others across the USA. I can really say that I worked in America for around eight years without ever setting foot in that country (apart from the acre of it a couple of miles from here in Runnymede.)

I had to keep adding new sites with 9/11 photographs quite often for the next few days, and occasionally later still, but even when we got to see the later work as some of the world’s best-known photographers came to Ground Zero, the work that to me best represented the actual events remained the often anonymous images taken by those actually caught up in the event, often blurred or low quality, taken on cheap compact cameras. They had an immediacy unmatched in the more mediated images of the professionals, and the value of being caught up in the actual event. It was perhaps the first major event to be covered by citizen journalism.

Today’s 10th anniversary event in Grosvenor Square, London was the subject of protests and counter-protests, and I went there – along with around 50 other press photographers to record these. The policing in the area was understandably extensive and meant I was unable to work as I would normally do. I don’t think I was able to make any images that compared with those from last year’s protest by Muslims against Crusades (MAC) and the counter-protest by the English Defence Leagus (EDL.) The police were rather more succesful in keeping the two groups apart, and although I heard quite a lot of shouting by the EDL in the distance, in Grosvenor Square itself their protest was generally quiet and ordered, in keeping with the respect they had come to show.

Once the police had moved the EDL a few yards down the road leading off the other side of the square, the MAC arrived and had a noisy demonstration, but there was a double line of barriers forming the front of a pen between them and us, and within seconds the press were asked to move even further back away from them by police, and almost all the pictures I made were at the long end of my telephoto. Last year I was able to work right in the middle of them. They may have burnt a US flag as they intended, and I did at one point smell a little smoke, but I was too far away to see anything.

So although I will put up the pictures from this year in due course, last year’s work is rather more interesting:

EDL Protest Against MAC
Muslims Against Crusades Burn US Flag
EDL Remember 9/11

>Re-PHOTO