>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Hull Published

Yesterday I finished the proof-reading of my latest book, ‘Still Occupied – A View of Hull’ and made it available on line, as well as buying a few copies myself. As before, it’s a Blurb book, and you can view it all in a preview on Blurb, along with my three previous books.

When I began the work on Hull, my main preoccupation was with the large swathes of the city that were being razed to the ground and re-built in huge clearance areas. It reminded me very much of Hulme and Moss Side in Manchester, through which I had walked ten or more years earlier, and where I had taken part in getting the people who were going to be rehoused to take a more active role in the planning process. Although we had lost the fight there – and the council went ahead with their instant slums, now mainly demolished – the kind of ideas and methods of involvement we were a part of did largely win the battle in the longer term. But Hull it seemed had yet to get the message.

The title for the exhibition – in the excellent Ferens Art Gallery in the centre of Hull in 1983 – came from a shop front with the two words ‘Still Occupied’ painted across its two front windows and again on its door. No longer in use as a shop, on the name board above the shop was its name – in inverted commas it read “Vogue” with a very large V. I liked the sense of humour and showed it on the corner of a grey street, short rows of terrace housing with gaps for terraces behind at right angles to the street typical of Hull, empty except for an elderly woman pulling her shopping trolley and a dog watching her, though these figures are probably too small to make out here.

I photographed the same shop in the Argyle St clearance area two years later, and if anything it had looked up slightly. There was a new lampost, a metal security gate across the doorway and a car parked in the street, and I’d stepped back slightly to show the whole of the front of the shop and its upstairs windows, but also to show the house to its right, empty and its windows covered with corrugated iron. You can also see this image, if rather small in the book and in the book preview, in which I’ve now decided to make the whole book viewable.

I think I’ve learnt a little from my earlier books in terms of design, although I’ve also run up against some of the limitations of the BookSmart software provided by Blurb. Having taken the decision to keep the pages looking cleaner by putting the list of locations at the back of the book, I found setting out the table of text for this was a lottery. Simply closing and opening the file could move text from one line to the next or from the bottom of one column to the top of the next. I came up against a few other minor limitations too, although its a simple program to use and works just fine for simpler books.

And although I can understand why Blurb decided not to let people produce PDF output from this software (though I imagine this is what it sends to Blurb) I find it frustrating to put the amount of effort that goes into making a book and not to have it available as a PDF. It also seems an unnecessary limitation to allow you to print out the book on your own printer but to then put a watermark stating ‘FOR PROOFING ONLY. PRINTED VIA BLURB.CO’ across each page.

To produce a printout of this book on my own printer in similar quality to Blurb would cost me between just over 40p and £1.50 per page for paper and inks, depending on my choice of paper. This is a 120 page book, so that adds up to somewhere between £50 and £180, surely enough to make the watermark unnecessary.

Still Occupied has around 275 pictures and I’ve tried to design the layouts so that almost all of the better pictures are printed to a decent size – between 6-8 inches longer dimension. The book itself is nominally 10×8″ landscape, which in practice works out at around 9.5 x 8″, and I like to keep the full image for all my pictures so the largest possible landscape image on a single page is around 9″ and for a portrait format around 7.5″, but I like a little more white space. I actually saw these images – most of which are uncropped – very much as small prints, and in the original show they were mainly much the same size as in the book, although framed in larger frames in groups of two or four.

Still Occupied is on sale from Blurb at £24.99, though carriage adds to that. Blurb is unfortunately too expensive for me to hope for good sales of this book, or to make it available through bookshops or galleries. They do offer some discounts for quantities, but still not enough to sell the book at any reasonable price. If I wanted to do so I would need to be thinking in terms of printing several thousand copies at a time, and spending thousands of pounds, and probably ending up with boxes of unsold books in my loft, which is already too full of junk.

Some people have called this book or the earlier show ‘gloomy’ but I don’t really think that is fair. Some of the pictures are gloomy, and back in the late 70s and early 80s many of us printed rather dark, making use of the lustrous blacks that were achievable with the old Record Rapid, and although Blurb can’t match that, some of the printed images still reflect that kind of mood.

As well as Hull itself there are a few pictures taken around, with a chapter on the Humber, including images on and from the old Humber Ferry and a few from the ‘other side’, New Holland. I’ve also included a final chapter on pictures taken on my first visit to Goole, a short train ride away from Hull.

I haven’t yet taken the plunge and bought an ISBN batch to put on the books, but I still intend to at some time. And I’m still hoping that Blurb will start to support the open source Scribus DTP package as well as the expensive Adobe InDesign. People have managed to use Scribus with Blurb, but it does appear at the moment to be a slightly tricky business.

The advantage of using a DTP package compared to BookSmart, apart from proper control over text, is that it generates a PDF file, and apart from being able to use this in presentation, it would be possible to make the work available to people in this format (and possibly even to charge for it.) Some online print services do actually sell PDFs by download but unfortunately Blurb doesn’t offer this option. But with the book market increasingly moving over to reading on electronic devices perhaps this will change.

Deaths in Libya

The news that photojournalist Tim Hetherington has been killed and three other photographers injured in Misrata after being hit by a RPG is shocking but hardly suprising. In the confused situation there, any photographer is clearly risking his or her life.

Although I heard it first elsewhere, probably the most reliable source for up to date information is the British Journal of Photography, which as I write has been unable to confirm the stories that Chris Hondros has also died from his injuries, but many other sources seem to be reporting his death too. Guy Martin and Michael Christopher Brown were also injured, but they are said to be ‘wounded but fine.’

Hetherington worked for Vanity Fair and you can read more about him there. I wrote about him briefly when he won one of his three World Press Photo awards, and mentioned his own web site, though it may currently be hard to access.

You can read more about Hondros on the New York Times Lens blog, as well as on his own web site. There are more links for both photographers and more information on the BJP site.

Yesterday I reported for Demotix on the protests in London for and against the UN intervention in Libya, and I think today’s news makes me a little more convinced that action was necessary, although for various reasons it has not gone far enough.

Thursday Niggles

There are some days now when there seem to be protests at various places all over London. Last Saturday I would have liked to have been photographing in Vauxhall, and meeting different groups of protesters at London Bridge Station and in the City of London all at noon – and there were several other things all happening at exactly the same time. Of course I can only be at one place at a time, so I had to choose.

But for once, last Thursday, things seemed to be arranged so that I could cover four separate events one after another, and go on to a choice of two meetings in the evening, without too much standing around waiting for things. But things didn’t quite work out as I had hoped.

The first event, a protest at the Libyan embassy – or rather on the other side of a very wide road with an underpass running through its centre opposite the embassy close to Hyde Park corner – was billed to be from 12-2pm. Experience suggested to me that this would probably mean that people were still arriving up until 12.30 and would be drifting away by 1 o’clock, which was fine. I could even get the earliest train that I can use a cheap day return on, the 11.29, and be at Victoria by around noon to get a bus for the short ride to the event. Despite the trains running a little late, it worked fine, and I was there and taking pictures by 12.20. It wasn’t the most exciting of events, but it was organised by my union, and both the current and next general secretary were there holding placards, along with a few other members I knew.

One of the three journalists still held by Libyans had been released the previous day, and the placards show two ticks for those who were released. Another was freed the following day, though I suspect it had little to do with our protest. But as you can see from the pictures in NUJ/Al Jazeera – Release the Journalists on My London Diary it was hard work to produce a great deal, and by around 12.45 I had lost any desire to keep taking pictures.

Of course I could have held up a placard myself, but I was feeling rather hungry, and decided for some reason a kebab or something similar would be great. Unfortunately, neither Knightsbridge where I was, or my next stop in Kensington are the right places to find this, and I arrived at Young Street where the next protest was supposed to be happening still hungry.

Not only no kebab, but there was no demonstration. But I wandered around the area for a bit and was then greeted by another photographer on the corner of Derry St, and looking down there could see some police and barriers and a small group of people, among whom I recognised a few who would be in the protest.

By 2.10pm the protesters had put up a few banners and I started taking pictures again, and visually – as you can see at Claimants to Daily Mail: “Stop the lies!” things were rather more interesting. The people were more varied and there were banners and a number of placards to make use of. Behind the protesters was a fashion shop, GAP, with giant-size photographs of fashion models which rather contrasted with the protesters. I did vaguely wonder about possible copyright problems with both these pictures and the GAP logo, but decided that since ‘incidental inclusion’ was inevitable in the situation I might as well make the most of it!

By around 2.50pm the protest seemed to have peaked and begun to loose its momentum; many of those present had already spoken , some a couple of times, and I decided it was time to leave in search of food in more promising areas. (Unlike many other photographers I generally boycott places like MacDonalds or Starbucks, which they often find the only places around from which they can file their work – but I always wait until I get home and spend hours sorting the pictures out and writing stories.)

The bus from Kensington to Victoria must be one of the slowest journeys on earth; certainly if I wasn’t still suffering slightly from a bad foot it would have been much quicker to walk. The main hold-up is at the junction with Brompton Road, where traffic coming along Knightsbridge from the west gets a ridiculously short and badly sequenced chance to proceed, with preference being given to traffic from the Brompton Road. I think the bus waited for almost ten full sequences of the lights before it was able to get across.

I wasn’t worried, as I had been told that the next protest, opposite Downing St, would be from 4-5 pm, and so I had plenty of time. So I arrived, having picked up a snack at Victoria while walking from one bus stop to the next and eating it on the bus, at around 3.50pm to find everyone getting ready to leave at 4 pm, having started their protest at 3 pm. I did have a few minutes to take pictures, but not enough to do justice to the event, which would otherwise have been interesting – and in the end decided I didn’t have enough to file a story later on Demotix. You can however see it on My London Diary at Libyans Keep Up Their Protests.

They were walking to join other protesters at the Libyan embassy, so along with another photographer I decided to go there. Rather than walk with the women and children from the protest (that foot again!) we went by bus, and got there rather faster, only to find just a handful of people opposite the embassy – and really nothing to photograph. I stood and talked with some of the people there for around 15 minutes, then decided I would need to leave if I wanted to get to the next event on time. As my bus went around the large roundabout of Hyde Park Corner, I saw the women and children finally arriving. It would have been something that I could have photographed, but not from the bus.

It was just a little galling that when I reached Westminster City Hall at the advertised time for the protest there, there were quite a few photographers standing round and talking but nothing much else going on. It was really only around 25 minutes later that there was anything at all to take pictures of, so I could have waited at the embassy and got more pictures. And although the protest there was supposed to end by 7 pm, later we were told that one of the larger groups who would be coming to hand out hot food, didn’t expect to arrive until 8 pm.

By the time I had taken some pictures, it was too late to get to the photographers meeting I would have liked to attend, which started at 6 pm. Apart from seeing some good pictures and meeting old and new friends, there are usually brownies to die for and a free drink for those who arrive early, and afterwards free food at a nearby pub funded by a raffle – and the raffle prizes are generally prints provided by the photographers showing work – often very desirable, and I’ve won a couple in the past. So I was unhappy to have missed this.

Instead I went to a meeting of another group that I’ve usually enjoyed, which takes place in different venues around town. Thursday it was in the downstairs area of a slightly trendy bar, with a poor choice of overpriced beer, and it was very noisy and crowded. Few of the people I know from the group were there, but I was happy to find a place to sit and relax after a busy day. There were two speakers promised for later in the evening, but I found the first so bad that I left after he had spent what seemed like an hour saying what he could have said in two minutes. It hadn’t been a bad day, but a busy and at times frustrating one, and I still had work to do, sorting out pictures and sending off one of the stories before I went to bed (and a second the following morning.)

Painted Photographer

Milena Nova is someone I often meet while photographing protests, and when I saw her outside Westminster Council Offices on Thursday I remembered to ask her if I might use her picture of me on my blog. I have a simple policy about using other people’s pictures, partly a matter of the cautious legalism of my former employers at About.com but more a matter of my respect for copyright law – which protects my own work – and I only use other people’s images with their permission. Earlier I’d posted a link to it – and again in my opinion you never need permission to publish a proper link – but it was a link to her Facebook page and might not have worked for some. So here it is.

Taken just a minute or two after I was hit by a paintball at Oxford Circus. I’m clutching a handkerchief in my hand that I’ve used to wipe a little paint off, but to little effect.

My wife likes this picture, though I’m not quite sure how to take this. Would she like to throw paint at me? I think it is the best that I’ve seen of me in this state, but I’d rather it hadn’t happened. I’m smiling at Milena because she is a friend taking my picture, but I was really pretty fed up. But I wasn’t prepared to give up.

Today I didn’t get anything thrown at me, which was perhaps a bit boring, given that successive Saturdays it has been paint, feathers and flower petals I was wondering what the next member of that series would be. Along with others I did get assaulted by one young man who thought that being one of the stewards on a march gave him the right to push photographers around, but otherwise most people were very friendly. But perhaps more about that later.

Taking Tablets

I spent most of yesterday at a friend’s house, working on the scans of his images for a show later in the year using his computer system, and it was an experience that made me realise just how useful a graphics tablet is for photographers – because yesterday I had to make do with just a normal mouse with Photoshop.

I first used a graphics tablet while I was teaching, and it was a large and very expensive A4 model, and the experience convinced me enough to get the whole room in which I taught fitted out with smaller and cheaper models. Getting the students to use them turned out to be a problem – it does take some time to get used to the different ways of working. Mice are relative devices which move the cursor from its current position depending on the way that you move the mouse – and you can lift the mouse and put it down somewhere different without moving the cursor. The pen on a graphics tablet is an absolute device, working on a defined rectangle on the pad which is precisely mapped to your screen. Put the stylus at top right of this area and the cursor moves there, pick up the stylus and put it down on the bottom right and the cursor goes there. It takes a little time and effort to get used to this very different way of working – and few students wanted to invest this. Provided with both mouse and stylus they would continue to work with the mouse.

But if you put in that initial training then soon most people get to appreciate the tablet, particularly when working with programmes like Photoshop or Lightroom. It gets much easier to make your way around an image and retouching becomes much easier when you have the software set to make use of the pressure sensitivity – so using a light pressure retouches or paints just a small spot while heavier pressure gives you a larger area.

Before I bought a tablet for myself, I read many of the reviews, most of which suggested that you needed a large tablet for precision. It might be true if you are working with technical drawings, but working with photographs I found that a large tablet was a disadvantage, and was soon making use of the ability to map a much smaller area of our A4 tablet to the screen. The next tablets we bought at work were A5 and much better, but even that area was larger than necessary, and the one that has sat on my own desk for many years now is around A6 – and described as small.

Technology has moved on a little, with many tablets being wide-screen ratio and wireless, but my old Wacom Intuos is still working fine. It seemed expensive when I first bought it – I think for around £75 – and the current equivalent but doubtless improved version now costs more than twice as much. These aren’t the cheapest tablets around but I would certainly buy one again.

As well as getting the work done faster it is also less stressful, and using the stylus has a health benefit; switching from a mouse apparently cuts down the risks of both RSS and Carpal Tunnel syndrome.

Woolwich Vaisakhi

I think I would have been fairly pleased with the pictures I took on Saturday of the Vaisakhi celebrations in Woolwich if I hadn’t photographed similar events at half a dozen other Gurdwaras in previous years. Certainly I enjoyed my visit – and I wonder why so few people seem to venture inside their local Gurdwara when these events are taking place. Of course you can see the processions on the street, and certainly quite a few people other than those taking part do stop to watch the spectacle, but it is even more interesting to make your way inside. I’ve always been made to feel welcome.

There were times during the prayers in particular where I felt the noise of my D700 in particular was too obtrusive (it has a sharper sound than the D300) and I stopped taking pictures, but otherwise I could photograph fairly freely. Of course in photographing any religious event you need to have a certain respect and to observe some of the practices – and it can be very difficult to know exactly what limits there are. Inside the Gurdwara you need to cover your hair in an appropriate way – and there will be scarves provided if you don’t have one, and there will be at least some areas where you need to remove your shoes – and generally there will be notices to tell you and somewhere to leave them, although if possible I put mine inside my camera bag as I don’t then need to stop to pick them up on my way out and perhaps miss a chance to take pictures by doing so. This time my boots wouldn’t fit in my bag so I left them in the racks and it wasn’t a problem as things moved relatively slowly, partly because the Khalsa also stopped to change into trainers before going out of the Gurdwara rather than walking barefoot through the streets.

It helps to understand the reverence that the Sikhs have for their ‘eternal guru’, their holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, which of course plays a vital part in these processions, where it is brought out and carried around the neighbourhood on a float.

The Gurdwara I was visiting had a number of generally helpful points in its ‘Visitor’s Guide’ on the web, one aimed at photographers: “Care must be exercised by photographers during service so that the Guru Granth Sahib is faced at all times.”

It’s something that needs a little interpretation in practice, but certainly you need to show a proper respect. It helped me that there were Sikhs videoing and photographing the event and I could at times work beside them when otherwise I might have been unsure about what was acceptable.

Fortunately the GUrdwara was fairly well lit, with large windows on both sides, although these did make for a few minor problems with exposure. Although I needed flash for a few pictures, to keep on using it throughout the proceedings would have seemed to me too obtrusive. I would have been better setting a higher ISO on the D300 which I was using with the 28-105, as quite a few pictures were lost through camera shake. For some reason I’m not sure of, I also seemed to be having some focussing problems with this camera – something I need to look into carefully later.

To get really good pictures you need a little luck and the right geometry in terms of where you can stand in relation to things that are happening. I’ve often stressed the importance of standing in the right place to take pictures, but sometimes either there just isn’t a right place or if there is I can’t find it. Nothing quite came together for me on Saturday, either inside or outside the Gurdwara, although there are a few pictures I quite like – largely because of the people – nothing that really grabs my attention, and I think I’ve done better in earlier years.

See more from this year’s Vaisakhi Celebrations in Woolwich. In 2009 I photographed Vaisakhi both in Hounslow and Slough, and you can find work from earlier years either on the site search or index pages of My London Diary.

Paint & Photography

Today I read a short article in a magazine that mentioned two former photographers who have turned their back on the medium and now work in paint. Not that there is anything wrong with that, although so many photographers – Henri Cartier Bresson certainly the most notable among them – who have done so have ended up being rather indifferent painters. And I can think of others who have shown paintings based on their reputation as photographers who have been considerably worse than Henri.

Equally we see shows of photographic work by painters or writers that are frankly embarrassing. Even giants like Picasso never quite became a master of the camera, and people who have produced work of interest in both painting and photography are pretty rare – Charles Sheeler and Paul Nash come to mind – or find ways to use the photographic medium that in a way that is not really photographic in the normal sense – like Hockney‘s joiners. Of course some photographers had worked rather like him previously – its something most of us have done from time to time on a rather smaller scale, and some had done it rather more cleverly, but no one before him had done it as a famous artist!

May photographers have of course benefited from a training as artists that may well have involved them in painting and drawing, and it may even help them in their photographic work, but photography is really a very different medium and requires us to work in different ways.

I’ve not I think made a serious attempt to paint anything since my art classes in secondary school, though I have from time to time produced some seriously bad drawings which I have the sense not to show people. I did spend several years making screen prints based on some of my photographs – and even sold a few of them – and while doing this I would often make quick sketches using paint, mainly to work out the colours I was going to use, and some of the people who saw these did suggest I should take up painting, but it never interested me.

© 2011, Peter Marshall
This is where I was hit by paint

Most of which was aimed at the doors (here lit by a red flare)

or the police

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself rather more intimately connected with paint than was either healthy or convenient, hit by a paintball, possibly aimed at the police while I was photographing them making an arrest outside Topshop on Oxford St. Fortunately most of it soaked and washed off my shoes, jacket and trousers, and even almost all from the jumper that took the direct hit, but the shirt underneath had to go in the bin. The D700 got rather a lot of paint on it, the D300 a little less, but both kept on working – and so did I for a couple more hours, though I took 20 minutes out to scrape and wipe off the worst.

Finally last Friday I managed to get the pictures that I took while covered with paint on to the web, along with the rest of the work from the long day of the march:

I’ve now scraped most of the paint off the cameras themselves, though some of the rubber surfaces won’t clean off entirely. There is still paint I can’t easily get off the camera straps and camera bag.

Since then all I’ve had thrown over me while taking pictures has been feathers and flower petals, neither of which leave a permanent stain.

Royal Wedding

I’ve been busy for some weeks finishing off my book on Hull, or perhaps I should say my first book on Hull, as ‘Still Occupied: A view of Hull’ only covers my black and white work in that city from 1977-1985, and I continued to take pictures there at least occasionally until a few years ago. Like the other books I’ve produced in the last year this is a Blurb publication, and I’m now waiting for the first copy to come back to me for the inevitable tweaks and corrections – so I’ll write more about it when it becomes available. You can already see a few of the pictures that will be in it on the web on the Urban Landscapes site.

The book has taken much longer than I expected, originally planned to come out in time for a group exhibition last autumn, which perhaps fortunately got cancelled. It took so long largely because it was on film that now needs extensive retouching before it can be used to make prints. One of the two images on this page needed a couple of hours work and is still not perfect. But now it is on digital (and I’ve made a backup) I feel much happier about its future. Digital isn’t without its problems but film is truly an unstable medium. Good inkjet prints on fine paper will probably outlast both.

But I’ve recently been working with another photographer on his book of pictures of our last royal wedding, again an event that seemed to more or less paralyse the country into sycophantic fawning, that of Charles and Di. Down in central London where he was, people were sleeping on the streets and celebrating.

Up in Hull I came across a small shop in Church Street, in what was a fairly deserted area of town following the closure of the Victoria Dock, which was perhaps celebrating the event with something of the spirit one might expect from the city that kicked off the English Civil War in 1642 when Sir John Hotham refused entry to King CharlesI.

Royal Wedding Window Display

Later I recorded the normal window display of the same shop on several occasions – and here is one of them:

Normal Window Display

As you may guess, I didn’t get an invitation to this year’s wedding, although I have had several to demonstrations against it. Not that I have any real antipathy to the two people concerned – may their marriage have a rather better future than that previous one – but frankly the whole thing is of no interest to me.

I’m not entirely against royalty, though I do think we should have nationalised their assets – and the others stolen from the people by the rest of the aristocracy long ago. Do it now and we could pay off those debts and avoid the cuts. Let’s have a monarch that rides bikes and lives in a council house. I might even photograph them then.

So I’m not sure what I’ll be doing on the big wedding day, but it certainly won’t be watching the wedding – after all none of their family came to mine. Perhaps like most of today I’ll be struggling with my next book.

Different Views

Bromley isn’t a town I visit often, out on the south east fringes of London, although I have been there a number of times to take photographs, both when I was carrying out my extended project ‘The Buildings of London‘ – when few areas within the M25 escaped my attention completely – and, more recently working on the project on May Queens.

Bromley is in the centre of the London May Queen realms, and I had hoped to get a set of my pictures of May Queen events ready for the group show that I helped hang in Bromley Central Library this lunchtime, but the first three months of 2011 have been too crowded with protests for me to get seriously to work on that, and instead I’m showing half a dozen of my Paris 1988 pictures, half the set I showed last year at the Juggler as my contribution to ‘Paris – New York – London’ and less than a tenth of the pictures in my Blurb book Paris 1988.

It’s a pity, since quite a few pictures for the May Queens were actually taken in the park just a few yards from the library entrance, where, after a parade through the town by five May Queen realms from the surrounding area – West Wickham, Hayes, Hayes Common a, Shortlands and Bromley Common, together with the London May Queen and her retinue, several of the local May Queens are crowned by the London May Queen in ceremonies that had their genesis around a hundred years ago.

I’m still hoping to produce a book on this, having narrowly failed to get a major museum to put on a show a few years ago. It would be nice to get it out for this May, but I think we are perhaps in for a spring of discontent that will keep me too busy, and I have a very important engagement out of London that will keep me from this year’s major event at Hayes.

The show continues at Bromley Central Library until Tuesday 19 April and is open during normal library hours. We are having a fairly informal opening next Wednesday – 13 April – from 6.30-8.30pm and everyone is invited to came and have a drink, see the work and meet most of the 8 photographers.

Although I’m not showing work on protests, there are some black and pictures from recent London events taken by Sam Tanner. Around the corner from them are some very different, almost abstract, images from a derelict fort by David Malarkey.

The group is formed of members of London Independent Photography who attend regular monthly group meetings to show and discuss their latest work. One of a number of LIP groups, this one used to meet in Twickenham, fairly close to my home, but has since moved away, first to Thornton Heath and is now in West Wickham, and I’m now rather an irregular visitor.

Bankers Prize

I arrived at Baker St a little early for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (DBPP) exhibition opening last night – held for this year only at at Ambika P3, in an area that looks like a disused engineering lab in the basement of the University of Westminster – while the Photographers Gallery is rebuilt. It remains on show until 1 May 2011 and the award will be announced on Tuesday 26 April 2011. After the London showing it will go to Berlin and Frankfurt.

So rather than hang around outside, I took a little walk around the area. Paddington St was where I first took a portfolio of prints to show a gallery owner many years ago. He spent perhaps half an hour looking through the small pile of work I had taken, enthusing about some of the pictures, looking through it again and again, before finally saying to me that he would love to show it, but it wouldn’t sell and he simply could not afford it. And in Chiltern Street I could look in the windows of the various closed galleries and shops, including the Atlas Gallery, showing the work of Herbert Ponting (although its web site doesn’t appear to mention this at the moment.)

But in general it’s a street full of what I regard as totally inessential shops, but also one which curiously seemed almost identical to most of the work on display for the DBPP when I finally arrived there. In what I think was an upmarket florists there was an impressive paper sculpture which came back to my mind when looking at the single over-large photograph of his work by paper sculptor Thomas Demand in the show, while many of the windows included advertising imagery that reminded me of the work of Roe Ethridge and Elad Lassry, although it was perhaps on average somewhat slicker.

Despite most of the rather empty wall space (and some empty of ideas even if there were pictures on it), the opening was an enjoyable evening, meeting a number of old friends and talking about many things, while drinking a few glasses of white wine. But there was really very little of photographic interest. If I felt for a moment that this represented the work that had “made the most significant contribution to photography in Europe, between 1 October 2009 and 30 September 2010” I would sell the cameras and take up fretwork.

It was very noticeable on the night that the only work that attracted any real interest on the wall from the large crowd was that by Jim Goldberg. His is the only photography of any significance in the show, although I think his approach in ‘Open See’ often defeats the object of his enterprise, making him more a scrapbook compiler than a photographer. As I’ve written before it is work that is very much better in the book Open See than on the exhibition wall. I was disappointed that some of what I feel are the best images from the 147 on the Magnum site from this long-term project which

“follows refugee and immigrant populations traveling from war-torn, economically devastated and often AIDS-ravaged countries to make new homes in Europe. Goldberg spent four years documenting the stories of Greek refugees from Iraq, Somalia, Congo, Ukraine, Albania, Russia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China, Sudan, Kenya, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Bulgaria, Palestine and Moldavia.”

His is the only photography of any significance in the show, and certainly the only project which would be worth supporting with the £30,000 prize money. But prizes such as this are always awarded more on grounds of fashion and art politics rather than merit. They create public interest in the medium while at the same time degrading it, and do nothing to stimulate really new creative work – for which the money would be much better spent on perhaps 5 or 10 smaller bursaries for emerging photographers or new projects.

Demand, as I’ve said and he has said, isn’t a photographer, but a sculptor who makes sculptural constructions to be preserved as photographs, with the sculpture then being destroyed.

As I also noted in Deutsche Börse Ditto when the short list was announced,

It would indeed be good to have a major prize for photography in the UK, and to have a major gallery that supports photography as well as eating a large portion of the public photography budget.

This comment that came even more firmly to my mind as I stood looking at this show and thinking of the tragically misguided decision of Arts Council England to cut funding to Side. If you’ve not signed the petition yet, please do.