>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

August Comes Late

August has at last arrived on My London Diary, although I’m still considering adding some of my pictures from Berlin in July. But there are now two new events on the site.

Every August 6 I like to reflect on an event that took place a few weeks after I was born, the first atomic bomb exploding over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. To many at the time it seemed pointless, as Japan had already lost the war and the only option remaining was some kind of surrender. Many thought it went ahead only because of the kind of inertia of the project (rather as the invasion of Iraq had an inevitability about it months before Parliament here took the vote which, largely thanks to the deliberate misleading by Tony Blair and his fellows in crime, sanctioned it.) But I think we now realise that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the opening salvo of the cold war, bombs on Japan that were actually directed towards the USSR.

As an event, the annual commemoration close to the Hiroshima cherry tree in Tavistock Square isn’t the most exciting, and while I go to many events to photograph them, this is one that I photograph because I am there. This year however it had a star, the 105 year-old Hetty Bower, who arrived with a camera crew in tow, and captured the hearts of the audience as she told us how as a young girl of nine in 1914 the sight of men returning from France minus an arm or a leg had convinced her of the futility of war and made her a life-long pacifist.

Photographically the only problem was avoiding that camera crew, making a video of her life story while getting to the kind of distance I like to work at. Perhaps rather more pictures than usual were taken towards the longer end of the 28-105mm. There was a clear cue for a picture when Hetty held up a picture of her grandson, one the following Tuesday, but it was wrapped in highly reflective cellophane and the reflections killed some of the best pictures. Later, when the formal part of the event had ended I tried to photograph her sitting and talking with another veteran (if young by her standards) Tony Benn, but I couldn’t find an appropriate angle, they were too far from each other and facing more or less in the wrong direction. Perhaps I could have posed them, but that isn’t the way I work.

I think my best picture came when she showed me a large Peace card given to her when she visited a primary school. At first I was too close, looking at the signatures she showed me inside it, with greetings from the children and staff, but as I moved back a little she closed it up and held it up for me.

The other part of the event I’ve always wanted to get a good picture of but never quite managed is the laying of flowers around the cherry tree planted years ago in memory of the victims of Hiroshima. It’s hard because people come spontaneously and from all directions, and of course turn to face they tree when they place their flowers. Its also a moment when I feel a photographer is rather in the way.

This was perhaps my best attempt, and the video cameraman at left perhaps doesn’t really add to it. I thought I might have another good picture a few seconds later, when another woman came to add her flowers, but as she lent down to do so my picture became rather dominated by her low-cut dress billowing out to display considerably more than was appropriate for the occasion.

Perpignan

The professional week at Visa Pour l’Image in Perpignan has just drawn to its close and for yet another year I’ve not made it there, or to any of the other major festivals. I’m not quite sure why I’ve never really got into the habit, perhaps because I don’t much like the kind of networking that these things are very much about, but probably more that I just don’t like travelling. Lack of money also comes into it. If there was a similar event in London, I’d probably make it, and I have managed to drag myself across to Paris a few times, largely I think because its another city I love.

But al least if I don’t get to the meetings or to see the exhibitions I can look at the web site, and I’ve spent some time doing so for Visa Pour l’Image. It’s very much a festival of serious photojournalism and after a while the images can get rather depressing, no matter how good the photography, so it was a pleasure to come across the work of Peter Dench, with his often light-heated look at the English. You can see more of this on his own web site.

Congratulations also to the winner of this year’s Canon Female Photojournalist Award, Ilvy Njiokiktjien (The Netherlands), which will enable her to continue work on her project on Afrikaner teenagers in post-Apartheid South Africa for a showing at Visa Pour L’Image 2012. You can read about her project on the Canon site and there is a link to an interview. I did wonder slightly if text on the site saying she had already photographed a “nine-day period of training sessions led by a racist leader” was likely to make relations between her and the people she is intending to photograph more difficult. But perhaps they only read Afrikaans.

Perpignan has one big advantage over most photo festivals in that it is an open competition and any professional photographer one can send in an entry – the simple rules are given on the web site. Unlike some other events, there is no entry fee. Of course you do need to have the right kind of work, and at least 50 images on a single story. The web page states: “Please note that we are an international festival of photojournalism focusing on news and current affairs. Please, NO art photography or series of portraits.” Entries for 2012 open in January and the deadline is 30 March 2012.

Gomorrah Girl

This year’s winner of Blurb’s ‘Photography Book Now, an annual prize for self-published books is Italian photographer Valerio Spada for his Gomorrah Girl, a photographic exploration of the murder of 14 year-old Annalisa Durante in 2004, a young adolescent girl involved in “the land of Camorrah”, (the Naples Mafia.) You can of course read more about it on Blurb’s site, and there is a feature about the prize on Time, and the ‘lightbox’ there shows more of what looks like a truly amazing book, along with some images of this years other PBN prizewinning books.

Perhaps the first thing that struck me – apart from the quality of the work – was that this book was not and could not have been produced on Blurb. This is an open competition – for which Blurb deserves praise – and any self-published book by professionals or amateurs can be entered. But Spada’s book has a complexity which adds interest that goes beyond what is possible with Blurb. The book combines and binds together Spada’s own documentary pictures interleaved with a smaller book of pictures he was allowed to take of police photographs from their investigations of the case. I’ve not been particularly impressed by all of the earlier winning books in the various categories of this prize, now in its fourth year, but this looks a very worthy winner. Perhaps it means that word has now really got round that the $25,000 prize (courtesy of HP Indigo Digital Press) is really worth winning.

Although I’ve now completed six books on Blurb (and helped friends in the production of a number of others) I’ve not entered any of them for PBN, largely because I’ve not thought any of them was the right type of book to have a chance in the competition, either for the overall prize or any of the categories. Many books that are worth publishing are never going to win prizes.

My latest book, now eagerly awaited from the printers, has seen me struggling with several of the limitations of Blurb’s free publishing software, BookSmart. In particular, printing double page spreads is very much a gamble, and the only solution I can find is to take an educated guess on the amount of overlap of the two halves needed and send it for printing, then wait the week or two until your book comes back, make adjustments and repeat until you are happy and the book can then be released. Blurb’s help suggests you avoid important detail in the region of the gutter, but I think all of the detail in my pictures is important! The forums have some more common-sense approaches (although as always there are people, always American, who see no problem and I suspect have no important detail anywhere in their pictures) but no real solution. Depending on exactly where the image is in the book and the type of binding you seem to need to allow around 1/8″ to 1/4″ of overlap.

I’ve never much liked having images that run across the gutter, but my latest book – for a show opening shortly – the pictures are panoramic images of gardens, and some have a aspect ratios that really need to use the 20×8″ of a double-page 10×8″ spread. Others are close to square, where I’ve used a fairly extreme vertical angle of view as well as horizontal, and fit a single page without problems. But more about this in a week or two when the show should open.

Last Days of ‘London Street Photography’

This is the first of several posts I hope to write following the panel discussion I took part in on August 31 at the Museum of London, a few days before the end of the Museum’s ‘London Street Photography‘ show, which has been the most successful show in terms of audience figures ever held there. The book of the show has also sold well, and had to be reprinted to meet demand.

It’s also possible that this show will now be shown in several overseas venues, perhaps including a showing in Rio, the next city after London to host the Olympics.

I very much welcome the success of the Museum of London’s show London Street Photography 1860-2010, which along with other ‘street photography’ related events has I think helped to shift the whole perception of photography by museums and galleries in the UK. Not only the Museum of London but other institutions are thinking much more seriously about showing photography, and of showing photography outside practices in the more general art world and portraiture. We could even in the future see shows of British documentary photography or landscape at major institutions in this country, and it could, just could mark the beginning of the end to the critical coldshouldering of photography – and particularly British photography – that has prevailed here.

Although I have my doubts, not least as there are now so few curators with any real knowledge of the media in position in UK institutions – on a generous estimate a couple at most.

Mike Seaborne, who along with Anna Sparham, curated this show for the Museum (and is one of that very few) is shortly leaving the museum after a long tenure there. He was also responsible for what was arguably the last great survey related to British photography (there have been a few more partial and half-hearted attempts since,) again at the Museum of London, with the show ‘Photographers London 1839-1994’, and unsurprisingly quite a few photographers are common to both volumes. The book of that earlier show was rather larger and better produced but long out of print, although you can get a secondhand copy in fair condition for less than it cost at the time or pay another £550 or so for a “collectable” copy.

It is perhaps important to state that the current show is not a show of ‘street photography’, but “a compelling view of London street life over 150 years” and designed to give a “fascinating insight” into the museums photographic collection, with few images drawn from other sources. Its title is perhaps a little of an opportunistic grab at the zeitgeist, but ‘Photographs taken on London Streets from the Museum of London collection‘ would have been rather less compelling.

In fact the show was even more restricted than this, as the curators took the decision at the start of their work to exclude all pictures taken at organised events. Possibly this was on pragmatic grounds, simply a way to reduce the workload of looking through the huge collection, but for whatever reason it had the effect of excluding what must surely be the largest source of street photography (or photography on the streets) and certainly where most of the more interesting street photography of the last thirty or more years has taken place. It has the effect also of producing an anodyne view of the capital, removing most if not all of the evidence of dissent and social action; one of my friends described the result as “perfectly pure pabulum puree”. I certainly felt that in the work from the past fifty years the show reflected surprisingly little the great changes in population that have produced today’s vibrant multicultural city.

Contrary to the rumours put about by some (including the curators of some other exhibitions) street photography is alive and well in London and has been so for many years. The real problem has been photography and art institutions that have turned their backs on documentary photography (and particularly British documentary photography) for so many years.

It was a policy that perhaps reached its asinine depths earlier this year with the Arts Council decision to remove its support from Side Gallery, one of the very few institutions that kept the flame of documentary burning strongly in this country – and gained international recognition for its work.

The show certainly had its strengths and its weaknesses, and some of both come from the museum’s collection, which includes some real gems but also has significant weaknesses, in part because for much of the period covered by the show it lacked a curator for the medium or anyone with the knowledge of the medium to form a rounded collection. But I also felt the show was weakened by the desire of the curators to avoid showing some of the well-known works of some photographers and instead including unknown images. Certainly in some cases there was evident good reason why these works have been less often seen.

Perhaps the weakest aspect of the exhibition is a slide show of recent street photography, which I think adds little to the overall show. When I viewed it last week I was also shocked by the presentation, showing a complete lack of concern for the medium. The images were all being projected at the wrong aspect ratio, stretching out the vertical dimension and making the images look like something from a ‘Hall of Mirrors’, presumably because the screen of the computer sending the signal to the projector had been incorrectly set. They were also being projected at too low a resolution for the screen size and were ridiculously blurred to a degree that made them uncomfortable to watch. This isn’t the first time I’ve been appalled by the apparent disdain shown by the museum towards the display of photographs on-screen which is truly unprofessional.

This was also a show that very much side-steps the question of what street photography is, something I’ll return to in a later post.

According the to museum web site, the show ends on 4 Sept, and it says:

Please note that due to the popularity of this exhibition, a timed ticketing system will be in operation during weekends and school holidays.

Tickets can be collected from the Museum front desk on arrival, tickets cannot be prebooked.

A Rare Opportunity

You can read my opinions on photography with some regularity on this site, although I’ve been rather busy in the last few days with a couple of shows coming up, and producing a catalogue for one, and, when I get around to it a web site for the second. A more normal service will I hope be re-introduced here and on My London Diary (where August has yet to begin) shortly.

But tomorrow there is a fairly rare opportunity to actually hear me talking, in an event at the Museum of London, where with a few others I’m on a panel discussing the future of street photography and related issues. On the panel with me are the curator of the museum’s attendance-breaking London Street Photography show, an old friend of mine, Mike Seaborne, and one of the other photographers with work in the show, Polly Braden, while photographer Stephen McClaren will try to keep some order. The discussion starts at 7pm and you can still book on-line.

Unless pressed I don’t intend to talk about my own picture in the show, not least because I don’t think it really is an example of street photography, although it was indeed taken on a London street, and was one of the images used on the poster for the show. But I have taken plenty of other pictures that are street photography but were not chosen. Of course the fact that it – and many other images in the show are not really street doesn’t mean they are not good pictures, but rather questions the criteria used in curating the show.

© 1991, Peter Marshall
Whitechapel 1991- a documentary image but is it ‘street photography’?
© 1987, Peter Marshall
But Portobello Road, Notting Hill, April 1987 certainly is

I wrote earlier this year about the opening of the show in London Street Photography, a piece that included one of my images that was a small attempt at a comment on the future of street photography.

The discussion lasts – including the time for questions – an hour, after which there is a further opportunity to see the show, which closes this Sunday, September 4. I’m not at all sure what the talking will be like, but I have been asked to supply five of my own pictures for a presentation as well as nominating two pictures from the book that I would like to say something about.

Although in some ways I found the show disappointing, as an event in promoting photography I think it has been a great success – and of course I was very pleased to be chosen to be in it and the book London Street Photography published by Dewi Lewis Publishing, ISBN 978-1-907893-09-4, together with it. But when asked to talk about two pictures from it, I found it hard to find pictures that I really wanted to talk about, as although there were some great photographers included, the pictures were seldom particularly good examples of their work. There were also some aspects of it I found hard to swallow, including the disregard for the moral rights shown in projecting some images taken on medium format cropped to 35mm format in the slide show. A museum should really not treat photography like this.

Despite such reservations (and I have others), this was a show that came at exactly the right moment, when street photography was high on the popular agenda, with shows in Derby and of course the first London Street Photography Festival which has just concluded, although there is still a chance to see a show of the much-hyped work of Vivian Meir at Photofusion in Brixton, where it continues until 16 September 2011.

Although the publicity for the show talks about “her unique style of candid street photography” unfortunately the images on show – including some that I liked very much – confirmed her as a fine but derivative photographer. I walked around the show last week with a photographer friend and we were saying things like “not a bad Lisette Model” or “sub-sub Arbus” in front of almost every image. Most things she did do well, but I found it impossible to see any unique personal vision in the work. We all produce works that are based on those of others, but the aim needs to be to try and stand on their shoulders rather than march behind them. Of course there are many good photographers, people whose work adorns the history of photography, but very, very few who really advance it.

No Copyright on Ideas?

Many years ago when I first started writing and taking pictures I remember being firmly told “there is no copyright in ideas“. The FAQ on the US Copyright Office site states it clearly: “Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed.”

Of course it isn’t always clear quite where the boundary between idea and expression lies, particularly in photography, and some court decisions in the past have perhaps clouded the water. So it was good to see the judge dismiss the case that photographer Janine Gordon had brought against Ryan McGinley so clearly; the New York Times quotes from his written judgement that her idea of copyright would result in claiming copyright in “virtually any figure with outstretched arms, any interracial kiss, or any nude female torso” and that it had “no basis in statute, case law or common sense.”

You can read a slightly longer report on ARTINFO, which also links to an earlier feature there which includes a slide show comparing several images by the two photographers which I think clearly demonstrates the ridiculous nature of the claim.

Ryan McGinley is a photographer I’ve written about on several occasions, here and elsewhere. In Ryan McGinleys Lost Summer I suggested that he “seems to have got lost, perhaps seduced by becoming too well-known.” But his project that I was writing about was based on the the kinds of amateur photography that appeared in nudist magazines during the 60s and early 70s and that seems to me the true source of exactly the kind of things that Gordon was complaining about. Surely something has to be original for you to claim copyright on it. But that might rule out the entire oeuvre of many photographers!

Facing Bruce Gilden

I’m not a great fan of Bruce Gilden, although I do still have a review copy of his ‘Facing New York‘ which Cornerhouse brought out here in 1992. But then I’ve never sold my review copies (plenty of reviewers made more money from doing so than writing reviews) though I have put some in the bin.

I think I did review it at the time, and it was a work I disliked but I recognised the power of his pictures, although in some respects the book seemed and still seems over-repetitive. They work made me uncomfortable, it seemed too much like being rude to people. Though if you are a New Yorker you are surely used to people being rude to you.

I mention the interview* with him in Vice by Jonnie Craig published a week or two back mainly because I rather like the paragraph at the start about street photography which ends with a definition of what it used to be:

“picture-taking informed by unchecked insanity, spontaneous joy, downtrodden souls, criminal behavior, spewing fire hydrants, and all the other varieties of filth and glory that can be documented by simply walking down an unfamiliar sidewalk. “

I think it’s the “unchecked insanity” and “spontaneous joy” that mostly appeal to me, and as Craig states, it is a far cry from the kind of thing that many people who like to call themselves street photographers are now producing.

It’s a fairly short read and I think gives a very clear impression of Gilden and comes with a few of his previously unpublished pictures. You can of course see more of his work on his Magnum pages, and I think he is generally a rather better photographer than ‘Facing New York’ made me think. Or at least there are many pictures that I like in his other work.

Vice seems to attract a particularly poor line in comments, but one of them says “Go look at Kurata Seijis book, Flash Up.” I googled a little, but only came up with the cover, which I looked and and thought of Daido Moriyama. And then Wikipedia tells me that he “practised under Daidō Moriyama in an independent photography workshop in 1976“, as well as that he was born in 1945, perhaps a vintage year for photographers. But the only other pictures I could find were some colour pictures that, at least out of context, could be seen as fairly generic travel work. So although it also apparently gets a recommendation from Messrs Parr and Badger, I can’t really tell you if ‘Flash Up‘ is worth a look.

*Thanks to American Suburb X to posting a link to this on Facebook.

Street View Photography

Last November in Paris I saw Michael Wolf’s ‘We Are Watching You’ and was underwhelmed. Large blow-ups of images from Google’s Street View (GSV) neither seemed particularly interesting or much to do with photography. As I’ve said in various other articles on work taken from TV screens I think photographers should be out in the real world and not looking at a box on which other people have put images for them to look at.

Apparently neither Wolf or other artists using GSV even actually find these images themselves, but get links to them from Internet forums which post up these kind of things. Pete Brook who has a fine blog ‘Prison Photography‘ has been looking at these projects and writing about them both on his own blog and on Wired’s Raw File. There in Navigating the Puzzle of Google Street View Authorship he tries hard to find some merit in such projects but I find the artists’ justification of their practice less than convincing, and Google’s claim to copyright difficult to argue against.

It seems hardly a big deal that each of the two artists he considers crops the GSV image differently (although often not very differently) and Michael Wolf’s attempt to equate this with framing by a photographer seems merely an attempt to mislead. Framing is very much about your point of view as well as about where you then put the edges, and in GSV the point of view is supplied by Google.

It’s also hard to take the analogy with Duchamp’s Readymades too seriously. He took objects – urinals, bicycle parts etc – and completely re-purposed them. GSV users simply take images and make smaller images from them, before blowing them up into senselessly big images for the gallery walls.

I find the whole thing a waste of space and resources, galleries, articles, discussion etc that could be used by real photographers making real images. For me it is the kind of thing that gives art and art photography a bad name.

Back on his own Prison Photography blog, in Photographing the Prostitutes of Italys Backroads: Google Street View vs. Boots on the Ground Brook looks at two contrasting approaches to the same subject matter, one by photographer Paolo Patrizi who actually went out on those back roads with a camera and researched the subject as well as taking pictures and the other a virtual tour using GSV by Mishka Henner. It is a comparision which makes the difference very clear. As he concludes:

‘Patrizis photographs return us to the shocking fact that that these women are human and not just bit-parts in the difficult social narratives of contemporary society. Works full of threat, fear, flesh and blood.

By comparison, Henners screen-grabs are anaemic.’

To me one is real photography, the other voyeuristic image collection. I find myself totally in agreement with Alan Chin who Brook quotes as saying:

‘This is about as interesting as cutting out adverts from magazines that have some connection and then presenting your edit as a work of art. ‘

Also by Brook on Wired’s Raw File is another piece, Googles Mapping Tools Spawn New Breed of Art Projects which looks mainly at Wolf’s work and in particular quotes from a BJP article that I linked to in a piece about what I considered the nonsensical award made to Wolf in World Press Photo.

It’s perhaps interesting that although in his earlier work Wolf relied on Internet forums to find the incidents he used, he now says that in more recent work he finds the scenes himself on GSV. I’m not sure why he finds this necessary or necessary to mention.

Also interesting – and perhaps it may one day be tested in court is his claim quoted here that because he actually photographs the screen, chosing which part of it to include in the image, he somehow creates something that belongs to him.

There are I think two good reasons why he is wrong. Firstly that copyright law would seem quite clear that if the work on screen is copyright of Google any reproduction of it will also be covered by their copyright. Secondly that Wolf’s work is essentially a mechanical reproduction of an existing work and lacks the artistic intent that is necessary for any new copyright to be created. Or interesting pictures.

Brassai & Tony Ray Jones

Thanks to American Suburb X for posting an interview with Brassai by Tony Ray-Jones that I first read around 40 years ago in Creative Camera magazine where it was published in the April 1970 issue.

Although I’d long had an interest in photography, at least since the start of my teens, money in those days was more than tight and in my family every halfpenny had to be accounted for. A twelve exposure black and white film developed and contact printed cost around half a day of my family income and was made to stretch over two years of our annual weeks at a seaside boarding house or with relatives in the country.

Then came the sixties and I was busy with other things – being a revolting student, getting degrees, getting married – and there was still no money and even less time for photography. It was only in my final year as a student, taking a training course for teaching that I could begin to indulge my interests, managing to spend most of that year playing in the university’s TV studio, taking courses in media studies (from the guy who had more or less just invented it), photography and film alongside my required teaching studies. AlsoI met a couple of real photographers, and, in the library, came across a rather strange magazine, Creative Camera.

The next year I was out in the world and earning money (if not huge amounts) as a teacher rather than scraping along on a student grant, and I bought a cheap USSR made camera and enlarger, and set up a temporary darkroom in the kitchen of our flat. And took out a subscription to Creative Camera, ordering too all the back issues that were available. Although the Zenith B and suitcase enlarger are long gone, I still have those magazines on the shelves behind me, along with most of the other issues until its sad end around the end of the century.

In the main the interview concentrates on the history of Brassai’s career and his view of the history of photography, interesting because of his part in it. I’m not sure how much of it was new information, but certainly most of it has been repeated by many others, including myself, in writing about Brassai.

Perhaps my favourite sections are those in which he talks about his attitudes to photography and to art, and in particular one section in which this remark appears:

I think that there are photographers who compose very well but who have no understanding of life or human things. There are others who have much human understanding but no feeling for form. I feel that it is important to have both because one must convey a living thing with strong composition.

Happy World Photography Day

I started off World Photography Day early for me, not only taking a picture but printing it out as a card a delivering it to the client (my wife) before 9am. Not a great picture of a rose but one that had more or less immediate use.

I only remembered it was World Photography Day a few minutes later when I read my e-mail from Shahidul News. Daguerre process had been announced by the French Academy of Sciences on 9 Jan 1839, but it was on 19 Aug 1839 that the French government made a gift of the process to the world.

Or at least to parts of it. Perhaps the reason we don’t make much of this celebration in the UK is that ‘the world’ for the French did not include us, and Daguerre patented the process here so those wishing to make Daguerreotypes in England had to pay for a licence.

This, along with our imperial need for Britain to have invented everything, doubtless contributed to this country always regarding W H F Talbot as the true inventor of our medium. Hearing about Daguerre’s announcement he rushed out some details of his ‘photogenic drawing’ and presented them within days, although it was not until a couple of years later that the calotype, almost certainly the first workable negative/positive process was introduced.

Now of course we have largely abandoned the whole family of processes that descended from that branch and perhaps even in the UK can acknowledge the priority of the French pioneers – Nièpce as well as Daguerre.

Shahidul News comes from photographer Shahidul Alam, the founder of Drik, and also on the blog is an interview between him and Shehab Uddin, which you can also read along with Uddin’s photographs of Dhaka’s pavement dwellers on the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund site.

In it Alam desribes “Driks photography-philosophyin telling rich and diverse stories without compromising the subjects humanitywe just had to create a whole space for ourselves. And now we are telling our own stories.” Drik really is an incredible and inspirational story and has led to a tremendous volume of great photography dealing with important issues across the majority world. You can follow some of the links in Alam’s blog to see some of it.

Photography may have started in France (and England) and perhaps came of age in the twentieth century in Europe and the USA. But now much of the more interesting work is happening elsewhere.

Anyway, I’m going out to celebrate the day by telling some more stories.