>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Upping Again

One day a year I allow myself to photograph swans.

“Photography is not cute cats, nor nudes, motherhood or arrangements of manufactured products. Under no circumstances it is anything ever anywhere near a beach. Walker Evans“

Had Evans lived in the UK, I’m sure swans would have featured in his list of no-nos (even if, for the moment I can’t remember an Edward Weston picture featuring one.) Back in the years when I used sometimes to have to look at photography displays in schools my heart would sink when I saw a wall heavily laden with these birds. Another staple, cemeteries and gravestones, was somehow far less dispiriting.

But once a year I give myself special licence and go out and shoot the Queen’s birds (and those she graciously allows to the Dyers and Vintners.) Not literally shoot them of course, it’s probably still a hanging offence and even they don’t shoot them any more. They don’t even eat them or even make nicks in their beaks to mark them. Upping is now more a kind of roving clinic that gives the cygnets a quick MOT and snaps a ring around a leg so they can be identified in later years.

I’m not in favour of royal privilege, and find it ridiculous that the Queen or anyone else should claim rights on these wild birds, but there are some positive aspects to the upping as it is today, both for the health of the birds and also as a more general measure of the health of the environment. On our stretch of the river, despite apparent increases in water quality and banning anglers using lead weights (the latter prompted in part by evidence from the upping) swans are not doing well. They swarm on the river in great herds, but don’t breed, or certainly very much less than they used to only a few years ago.

I’ve photographed the uppers most years since I stopped teaching on Mondays – the day they come more or less past where I live – in 1999. It’s not as good as it used to be, partly because we have less breeding swans now, but also because they no longer have a man on a bike going ahead of the crews and attracting the swan families to handy spots by feeding them biscuits. I got to know Eric who did this, and for a few years rode along with him and could occasionally give him the benefit of a little local knowledge. He was a great help as he almost always managed to get the swans to a good place to photograph on the same side of the river as the towpath – and his and my bicycle. Now the Swan Warden’s outboard dinghy goes ahead, but not very far ahead, and the swans are upped wherever they happen to be.

I wasn’t going to bother with the swans this year, as I’ve got to the point where I have good pictures of almost everything, enough for a decent book, and really the only thing that would add to it would be some pictures from further up the river. One year when I’m less busy I’ll ask to go on the official press boat again and follow it further, as further upstream a bicycle becomes less useful. Though I may need to borrow a long lens to make it really worthwhile.

But it turned out to be a nice day, and I thought I could spare a couple of hours in the morning, so I decided to go after all. By the time I’d followed it for a couple of hours and the only cygnets that had been found were up a backwater and on the opposite bank where even after I’d waded through chest high stinging nettles I could only get the poorest of views, I was thinking I should have stayed at home.

Finally they came across a swan with six cygnets just a hundred yards or so short of their lunchtime stop at the Swan Inn in Staines, and there was a decent opportunity to see them at work. Unfortunately the bank where they boats surrounded the swans was a little overgrown, and there wasn’t time to do some gardening, so what would have been the best pictures are seen through rather too many weeds in the foreground, but I made a few that were not too bad. There are just a few parts of the event that are difficult – and usually impossible – to photograph well, for example when the birds are being returned to the water, as you would need to be in the river and in the way to be in the right place.

The upppers didn’t catch the male swan, who had been on the other side of the river, and he swum around a few yards away watching while his mate and offspring were being processed on the bank. There was a touching scene when the female swan was put back into the water and swam out to meet him, and despite my feelings about pictures of swans I had to take some pictures.

I grabbed the D300 which had the Sigma 28-300 attached and took a series of pictures without stopping to check exposure – having previously been using it I knew they wouldn’t be far out.

When I looked at the images after the swans had moved apart, I found that they were all very dark towards one edge. Eventually I worked out that the camera wasn’t working properly at speeds faster than around 1/1500 s. Testing showed the image darkened and blacked out from one edge progressively at speeds above this, unitl the entire image had gone at 1/4000 s, even wide open where it should have been fully exposed.

Fortunately Lightroom with its graduated filter came to my rescue (though I still find it very tricky to use) and the defect it fairly hard to spot in the final result.

It isn’t a fault that will worry me in normal use, where I seldom use fast shutter speeds, and the camera is long out of warranty, so I’ve decided to live with the problem until something really important goes wrong. Perhaps before that happens Nikon will announce a new model that I’ll want to get rather than repairing the D300.

See more pictures (and text) at Swan Upping on My London Diary

d’Agata Interview

Thanks to Jim Casper at Lens Culture for his tweet mentioning the interview with Antoine dAgata at Gomma magazine, which is worth a read. One of the people he mentions is Joan Liftin, who I met some years ago when I attended a Charles Harbutt workshop at the late and lamented Peter Goldfield‘s Duckspool. Joan sent me a copy of her book ‘Drive-Ins‘ which I reviewed on About.com when I was writing for that site, and is unfortunately no longer available. d’Agata goes on to mention Nan Goldin, who I wrote about at some length for About, and later produced a revised and updated version of my piece on her, Nan Goldins Mirror on Life for this site .

One of the last posts that I wrote for About, back in May 2007, was about Gomma Issue 3, when I noted:

there are some good interviews, with Daido Moriyama, Anders Petersen, Boris Mikhailov and Boogie. Along with Lise Sarfati, they also provide some great photographs, and there is plenty of other interesting work in the issue, for example the ambrotypes of Stephen Berkman (I mentioned his work with the Camera Obscura briefly eighteen months ago) and the highly personal black and whites of Danish photographer Jacob Aue Sobol.

Those names were all those of people I’d written about on About, and in the original there were of course links to those pieces, some short, but all linking to other information on the web. I’m still upset that the New York Times (the owners of About.com, at least when I dismissed) not only took all that resource off line, although without constant upkeep much of it would now be out of date, but more that there is still nothing on line which really replaces what I did. It was more or less a full time job, and I could not continue it without the financial support that About.com provided.

Gomma too has changed. Here is what it says on the web site:

Gomma Magazine, the printed six-monthly publication, was edited in London, printed in Italy and distributed worldwide through major distribution companies.

Unfortunately the publication of the magazine has been put on hold due to logistic issues, – however a relaunch plan for the magazine is currently being discussed. Also there are talks to create a small publishing house of high quality photography.

The Online platform Gommamag.com continue to be a valuable resource for photographers and visual artists. Its use and registration is free, although some new pay-per-entry structure has been installed so to avoid duplicate and flooding of the same info.

Having looked at the site, I’m not too sure what Gomma is, but there is certainly some interesting material there.

Pro-Choice Protest

The threat to change the law on abortion brought protesters to protest opposite parliament last month. There were quite a few men present, but it was mainly women, and of all ages and types. Naturally as a photographer I was particularly drawn to those of more dramatic appearance, and in particular one woman who held the main banner reading ‘My Body My Choice‘ but it was largely her bright blue spiky hair that drew my attention, although her tattoos and t-shirt helped.

So you will see rather too many pictures of her in my work from the day in Pro-Choice Rally at Parliament posted at last on My London Diary. Of course there were plenty of other people to photograph, and I did so, but it is rather hard to miss someone like this.

For this particular picture I had to get up on tip-toe to photograph over the banner she was holding, very carefully framing to show the face and fist on her t-shirt and also I wanted to get the text ‘Women must decide their fate‘ at the top right of the picture.

There were also plenty of placards of all sizes, and the mini-placard appears to have caught on, as this picture shows:

Something about the message on this one made me laugh, and I think my comment about it made the woman holding it laugh as well. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I think I was glad she had a sense of humour. Another of these minute placards had what was almost certainly the longest caption of any at the protest:

Just in case you’re finding it a little difficult to read, here it is in full:

What Do We Want?

Properly Resourced, Funded and High Quality Sex and Relationships Ed and Sexual and Reproductive Health Services For All People.

When Do We Want It? Now!

Unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to really make a good picture of it.

Perhaps the placard that amused me most was this:

It also has in the background what I felt was perhaps the most important issue in the whole controversy, a call for evidence-based health policies, a point mentioned by several of the speakers, including the only man brave enough to speak, at least while I was there. This was a doctor, the former MP and Liberal Democrat science spokesman Evan Harris. Facing him as he spoke was a woman in a green hat holding up a placard ‘Politicians Make crappy Doctors!’ You can see her in my picture but I couldn’t find a way to really make her stand out as I wanted. Although it had been a fine sunny afternoon, by then a heavy shower had begun and many people had their umbrellas up, and after taking this picture I decided it was time to leave.

On John Szarkowski

I’d not read the obituary of John Szarkowski, the man who defined our medium for several decades in his tenure at MoMA in New York from 1962-1991 and whose work remains a strong influence, written for Artforum in 2007 by Maria Morris Hambourg, so it was interesting to see it republished on American Suburb X.

Although I’ve sometimes poked a little fun at some of his writing, his view of the medium was largely one that I subscribed too, based as it was – and as Hambourg makes clear – on the work of Walker Evans, whose ‘American Photographs’ remains one of the truly great photographic works. Among the aspects of Szarkowski’s work that particularly interested me were his promotion of the work of Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, and also the re-evaluation that he made of the work of Eugene Atget, with his fine series of four books of his work, a project with which Hambourg was involved, and which came out around the time I was also investigating his work in my own ‘Paris Revisited‘, recently revised and republished as In Search of Atget.

Hambourg also mentions his ‘Looking at Photographs‘, still one of the better books which displays some of the joys to be appreciated in photography, although perhaps surprisingly she fails to mention his ‘The Photographer’s Eye‘, arguably the best introduction to how our medium works.

As she says, the “new directorial mode, constructed realities, appropriated pictorial worlds, and borrowed media identities interested him not at all”; like me he felt they had little to offer photography. Hambourg sees this as a weakness, but it came from the strength of his belief in the essential core of the medium and his appreciation of its subtleties and power.

Climate Rush Cycle Protest

Finally I’ve got around to putting some more pictures from this protest on July 13 on line on My London Diary.

My main dilemma in photographing this event was in deciding whether or not to take my bike. Handy though a bike is for following any bike-based protest such as this, it also tends to be something of a liability. Whenever anything is happening and the protest moves you have to decide whether or not to stop taking pictures and get your bike. When you arrive anywhere you need to find somewhere safe to lock it before you can start taking pictures.

Of course, if the cyclists are going to go large distances, a bike may become essential, especially when, as on this occasion the destination has not been disclosed. Often when covering protest marches I’ll take the tube (or even sometimes a bus if the protest isn’t so large as to block the streets) so as to get to the end before the marchers. With a bike it’s easy to keep up with other cyclists.

When I heard there was also going to be a bloc of the protest on foot as well as the cyclists, I decided not to take my bike but go with them, and I think it was the best way to cover it. We set off a few minutes before the cyclists and arrived at the destination before them, so I was able to take a few pictures of the large bloc of cyclists arriving.

The protesters had large placards which looked good in photos, but they had been made on the back of those used for a protest against university fees. Although this was fine when they were marching with them and holding them the right way, once they were on their backs on the roadway to stop the traffic they were holding them up in the air, and then around half were always showing the wrong message. I was slow to pick up on this at the spot and had to reject many pictures because they had the wrong placards, and it was very obvious when reviewing the work on the computer screen. I met some of the organisers at another event a few days later and pointed out this problem to them – so next time they will have double-sided placards, or at least blank out any confusing messages.

I’m not sure whether Jenny Jones, a Green Party GLA member, will like the picture I took of her, but I do,

and I was also quite happy with several other ‘portraits’, as well as pictures that showed the action that was taking place.

Perhaps my favourite image from the evening was this one of a protester who decided to lie down as soon as he was on the box junction, flat on his face next to his abandoned white bicycle. Apart from the design with just lines and circles it appeals to me because of the simplicity of it’s colour scheme, with just black and white (and grey) with three yellows and some purple details on the bike and shirt along with the blue jerking.

Arbus: 40 Years Gone

James Pomerantz, who blogs as ‘A Photo Student‘ marked the 40th anniversary of the suicide of Diane Arbus a couple of days ago by publishing the obituary from the Village Voice at the time, written by A D Coleman, along with a link to 1972 Masters of Photography video in four parts with contributions from her daughter Doon Arbus, Lisette Model, Marvin Israel and John Szarkowski.

A D Coleman is of course still writing about photography, and always worth reading (though perhaps it helps that I usually agree with him.) Our medium hasn’t been blessed with too many who have actually written intelligently about it and he is one of the few who doesn’t seem to be too scared by images to actually look at them rather than hide behind obscuring theory.

I’ve several times mentioned his detailed postings on the still unfinished saga of the attempts to pass off some rather second-rate images of Yosemite as previously unknown work by Ansel Adams. His latest series of articles, Ive Seen the Future, and Its In 3D, is about how the image world is rapidly and inevitably moving “toward a 3D digital environment.”

For some years people – including museum curators – have been telling me the future was moving images. It’s a trend that I’ve deliberately resisted, still personally finding much greater satisfaction and a greater plasticity in still photography. With still photography you can work much more on the individual image, and then go on to putting images together in different ways, and it’s always seemed to me to give more scope for the individual artist. Making film (and the first cameras I seriously used when I was a student were TV, video and 8mm film cameras) was always a team effort.

Of course video has its uses, and often gives a clearer view of the story of what is happening at some of the events I cover, but it lacks the focus on significant instants that the still image gives. The 3D digital environment clearly has its uses, but it takes imaging further away from the kind of personal response that for me is the power of the still image.

NHS At 63

I don’t know who the woman in the red dress in this picture is, but I’ve photographed her on at least one other of the protests over the Con-Dem coalition governments proposals to privatise our National Health Service, carrying as she is here the red flags of ‘Unite – the Union’ in protest. To me she seemed to look an archetype of the revolutionary woman and could well have been a model for some Soviet Socialist Realist poster or painting, striding out into the future, and I rather liked having placed her in front of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament (and the building at left of centre with the chimneys is Portcullis House, parliamentary offices. Behind her, carrying the University College Hospital Unison banner is one of the women who have led the protests in London, Janet Maiden.

The woman in the red dress is there again at the left of this picture made with a 16-35mm, but the reason I’ve put it here is really to point out why I sometimes really like the 10.5mm full-frame fisheye, which I used to take the picture below:

I think the fisheye with its closer viewpoint and steeper perspective turns what was otherwise a rather ordinary view into something rather more powerful. Of course it helps too that everyone at the front of the banner is looking in my direction, at least partly because I have rushed towards them with a camera. There is however sometimes a problem in that I do need to get very close, and tend to get in the way of other photographers who are taking a less wide view.

Here it wasn’t a great problem, as I was standing very much to one side of the banner, but I do try to avoid being a problem to colleagues when I use the 10.5mm for things like this by working fast and then moving back and using a more normal lens and viewpoint. More often I’ll use it inside crowds and other situations where I’m less likely to get in the way.

The protest was taking place on the 63rd anniversary of the founding of the National Health Service – and it seems likely to be in rather poor health by the time it reaches 64 as the parts which can easily provide a profit are handed out to private companies (parts of the bill were rushed through before the parliamentary recess under the cover of Murdochgate.) But there was not a great deal that could be photographed to show this birthday, until I saw that someone had brought with them two large silver inflated numerals.

More pictures in NHS 63rd Birthday on My London Diary.

Photography is Over?

You can watch J M Coelburg of Conscientious on a YouTube clip suggesting that we admit that we might as well admit that photography is over and we could then “end all those debates, panel discussions and blog articles about whether photography is over or dead”. It was, he says, “good while it lasted.”

I notice that YouTube lists the clip under the category ‘Entertainment’ and it has what I assume is a deliberately deadpan delivery. But looking at some current shows and some of the sites and books that Coelburg mentions on his blog I sometimes get the feeling that if not over, photography has certainly got itself pretty lost. But fortunately if you look in the right places there is still plenty of good stuff, and not just in the history books.

£7348 +VAT!

I first read a review of the Leica Noctilux-M 50mm f/0.95 ASPH in 2009, and I’m not sure why the BJP has chosen to publish a review by Edmond Terakopian now. Obviously he liked it very much, and a Leica lens at that kind of money is bound to be a fine performer. But it did come out in 2008, and is currently there is a waiting list for it even if you do have a spare small fortune.

I often idly wonder about going back to using rangefinders and am now looking hopefully at the latest breeed of mirrorless cameras, particularly the Panasonic G3. Certainly the strain on my shoulder and back would be considerably less with either a Leica based digital system or a micro 4/3 camera.

A lens like the Noctilux would help to compensate for the poorer performance of the Leicas at high ISO. But what a cost, and the Noctilux too is a relatively large and heavy lens by rangefinder standards – around 75 mm long, taking 60mm filters and weighing around 650g. Cosina’s 50mm f1.1 Nokton is a little slower, but quite a lot shorter and lighter, and over £6000 cheaper. Leica’s own Summilux 50 f1.4 isn’t a great deal slower and very much smaller and, at least in Leica terms, affordable at less than 1/3 the price of the Noctilux, while Zeiss have a 50mm f1.5 that costs around half of that.

Several of my friends are using Panasonic G series cameras, and although I’ve not been entirely impressed with the image quality of the earlier modes, but from the reviews the G3 seems to be a considerable improvement on the earlier models.

But for the moment, for the next few days I’m trying out a combination of cameras that I actually own, the Fuji X100 and the Leica M8. The 35mm f1.4 Summilux makes a good ‘standard’ lens on the M8, even though thevintage lens I own isn’t recommended for use with it. What I really use as a standard is the 35mm equivalent on the Fuji X100, while for something a little wider I have both 15mm and 21 mm Voigtlander lenses on the M8, giving roughly 21 and 18mm equivalent, while the Leica 90 f2.8 gives me a moderate telephoto.

I’m not sure that the combination will do all I want; in particular I’ve got quite addicted to using very wide lenses. It might be better to move to the Leica M9 and with the the wide angle Tri-Elmar giving me 16, 18 and 21mm, and add to that some new fast glass. But weight would be a disadvantage and cost makes it an unlikely option unless I win a lottery.

But a couple of G3 bodies, the kit lens, a wideangles zoom and a telephoto wouln’t eigh a great deal and would cost less than a typical Leica lens, let alone the Noctilux.

Pride Portrait

One of the advantages of being around in the couple of hours before the Pride parade actually starts is that you have time to talk to people and take their pictures. One of the drivers of the various buses that take part in the parade looked rather interesting sitting in the driving seat, and I took a picture of him looking at me out of the driver’s window.

It wasn’t bad, but I thought it was a shame that it didn’t really show his left arm which was rather more interesting than his right. Also, in front of him but out of view were some flowers decorating the front of the bus at the bottom of the windscreen.

So I asked him to lean forwards and tried to photograph through the windscreen. Unfortunately almost all I could see was reflections, with him almost invisible. If I were writing a how-to book, this would be the point where I showed the difference a polarising filter would make, but I haven’t carried one of these since lenses changed to plate-sized filters and prices became astronomical. The lens I now mainly use – the Nikon 16-35 f4 – takes 77mm filters and the largest polariser I own is a 49mm. Since I moved from Olympus M film cameras to Nikon digital I don’t think I’ve ever owned two lenses with the same filter size either; back then almost everything in the bag was 49mm.

Polarisers always worked better in the text books than in reality, where somehow it was always the wrong kind of reflections or the wrong kind of light you needed to control. But I didn’t have one anyway to try. Here’s the picture I managed, not perfect but much improved by a simple trick.

I must have looked a rather odd sight taking this image, camera to my eye in my right hand, and in my left holding my camera bag up above my head to get an area of shadow on the windscreen so that I could see the driver clearly. It did require quite a bit of work in Lightroom afterwards to get a picture more or less as I would have liked – perhaps stopping down or more careful focu would have made the foreground flowers just a little sharper.

I said thanks and was walking away when I had another idea of how to do it, and went back, got on the bus and told the driver what I wanted. I could get rid of reflections by working from inside the bus, using the 10.5mm semi-fisheye held close to the flowers to take the picture. The only small problem was that the camera had to be right up on the glass and I both had to guess what I was getting – and check after shooting – and keep myself out of the image, which covers 180 degrees corner to corner.

I rather like the result, though it really needed some extra lighting. I had to underexpose the driver quite a bit to keep detail I could burn in on Lightroom in the street outside. Like most of the pictures here, I worked on this fairly quickly and it could be improved with a little more work in Photoshop. One minor worry is the patch of green light close to his left wrist. It really was there, but it annoys me. Would it be ethical to remove it?

More pictures on My London Diary from this year’s Pride Parade.