>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Pancakes

Tuesday was Shrove Tuesday, and over the past few years this has become celebrated across London by a number of pancake races. Elsewhere in the country there a a few places with a long tradition, but the London events all have a relatively short tradition.

I’ve photographed most of them in past years, and I probably would not have bothered to go again this year had I not also been in Central London for another event. Had the women’s march by the Thames on the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day held my attention more I would not have walked up from the north end of the Millennium Bridge to London’s ancient (though much restored) Guildhall for the pancake races there.

These have a certain interest because of the curious mix of ancient and modern, something not unusual in the City. The teams taking part are from the City’s Livery Companies, some of them founded as medieval guilds, but others recent formations in areas such as information technology.

Behind its gloss of tradition and formality the City is of course highly competitive, and the races sometimes demonstrate this. There are too the kind of rules of etiquette one might expect, with points penalaties for failing to wear an apron or gloves, losing ones hat and more. It has a strict dress code for the ladies races, where skirts must be worn and must come below the knee.

But perhaps what stands out most is the fancy dress section, and the obvious glee that some of those present take in being ‘out of school’.

Photographically my equipment – the usual pair of Nikons, a D300 and a D700, the latter with the extremely bulky 16-35mm Nikon lens – was not perhaps the perfect choice for what is rather a choice location for some candid ‘street photography’. Creeping around the event were a number of other photographers equipped to a man (they all were) with Leica M9s (perhaps one or two with more primitive film models.)

But actually in this situation I think the D700 with its 16-35 was as good as anything. It was noisy enough for the shutter sound not to matter and the kind of situation where if anything you are less conspicuous standing there openly with a brace of Nikons than skulking and trying to hide the fact you have a Leica, and it is really just as fast to raise either camera to your eye and press the release. You are I think slightly more likely to get a correctly focussed and exposed result with the Nikon.

Here is one that I took that perhaps works, although it is perhaps a cliché of street photography, the kind of thing I usually find more annoying than interesting. What lifts this one for me is the woman at the back of the line, stretching up on tiptoes. I did take half a dozen other frames but none of the rest quite make it, though here is another that almost does.

With a man in a giraffe costume, various crazy hats (including some traditional ones) and more there was plenty for the connoisseurs of the bizarre and surreal, but perhaps that was just too easy.

More pictures on My London Diary shortly.

The Cruel Radiance

I haven’t yet read Susie Linfield’s The Cruel Radiance, Photography and Political Violence but I must, and the short excerpt available on American Suburb X makes me think I must find the time to do so.

I’ve long said that the problem with most of the criticism of photography is that the people who write it don’t really look at the pictures and don’t have a real understanding of the medium – perhaps because relatively few of them have ever really become or tried to be photographers. In the excerpt, Linfield starts by reminding us that the great critics of other artistic media were truly in love with it and then writes “The great exception to this approach is photography criticism.” The paragraph ends ” Its hard to resist the thought that a very large number of photography criticsincluding the most influential onesdont really like photographs, or the act of looking at them, at all.”

She then goes on to suggest why this is and how it exhibits itself in the work of Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, John Berger (who she describes as “the most morally cogent and emotionally perceptive critic that photography has produced“), and several others who feature highly on photography course reading lists.

The excerpt ends with her comparing the work of movie critic Pauline Kael, truly smitten with her medium and producing great insights with “the postmoderns obsession with victimization, their refusal of freedom, their congenital crabbiness” and asks why photography critics have rejected the “quest for the synthesis of thought and feelingand the essentially comradely, or at least open, approach to art that it suggests” which “was the central project for generations of critics, especially American critics in the twentieth century.”

It is a good question and exceptionally well put, and I look forward to reading her answer to it and her thoughts about photojournalism and particularly the photography of violent events that this work addresses. The publisher’s text on their web site end:

A bracing and unsettling book, The Cruel Radiance convincingly demonstrates that if we hope to alleviate political violence, we must first truly understand itand to do that, we must begin to look.

Looking, and looking critically, at the images should surely be the start of all photographic criticism and should be at the basis of all photographic courses. And perhaps we should all ritually burn those scrawled-over copies of ‘On Photography.’

Claremont Revisited

Times have changed. From when I was around 9 or 10, I was out on my bike most free days in the Summer, sometimes with my friends, but more often on my own (they weren’t as keen on going any distance) exploring the area around where I lived in the west of London. Mostly I would ride out into the countryside around, in Middlesex, Surrey and Berkshire. Often I’d ride around 30 or 40 miles, but occasionally I’d make sandwiches for a longer ride, perhaps up to 80 or 90.

These were the days before motorways (later we had just one, the M1, which came nowhere into my territory), but I often rode on the main routes, the A4 and A30 which ran through the area I lived, and the A3 a little to the south. They may have been full of traffic, but often they were the shortest route.

One of the places that I discovered on the A3, just past Esher, was an overgrown park called Claremont, with a large lake and hillsides covered with rhododendrons. It wasn’t too far away and I persuaded my friends to ride there with me, and we hid our bikes under some bushes just inside the entrance and spent hours chasing each other around through the dense undergrowth, playing Cowboys and Indians or whatever took our fancy.

Apparently the National Trust had owned the park since 1949, but didn’t have any money to tidy it up and left it to the local council to administer as public open space. It had once been famed for its gardens, said to be one of William Kent’s major works, but years later when the NT finally found some money and started work they found the picture was more complex, with several of the great gardeners, including Capability Brown having left their mark. So their restoration tried to keep something of all their work. You can see some of my pictures from a walk around the renovated park, my first visit for around 50 years, in A Day Out at Claremont on My London Diary.

One remote link to my own family came through the man who was in charge during some years of the nineteenth century, a now largely forgotten Scottish born gardener called Charles McIntosh (or M’Intosh), one of the leading gardeners and garden writers of the age, who from 1829 to 1838 was the head gardener to the owner of Claremont, Prince Leopold, another of the Saxe-Coburgs who was married to the heir to the British throne, Princess Charlotte. In 1830 or so he was elected to be King of Belgium, and McIntosh looked after his garden in Belgium too. One of the visitors to Claremont who often talked to the head gardener was a Princess Victoria who later became Queen, Charlotte having died young. McIntosh’s obituaries write of him having made a number of improvements to the gardens at Claremont, and doubtless one aspect of the renovations has been the removal of these! Certainly there is no mention now of his work at Claremont.

The A3 is now a much quieter road to travel on, thanks to the M3 taking most of its traffic, but in the unlikely event of any ten year old being allowed to cycle far from home, they would find Claremont closed unless they coughed up the NT entrance fee, and far less fun with most of the overgrown areas cleared, and certainly running around through the remaining parts frowned upon – there is a special play area with wooden forts and slides rather than the acre upon acre of undergrowth which we made our own country. Though he could of course go across the road a few yards to a common, but this does lack the feeling of a secret garden and the surprise of coming across the lake that I found at Claremont well over 50 years ago.

Empty Cup at Photographers Gallery

Thanks to Jeremy Nicholl who writes the Russian Photos Blog which I’ve often linked to here for a Tweet mentioning
Empty Cup: A Case of Copyright Infringement, posted by Vancouver based John Goldsmith on his blog. Goldsmith is a freelance photographer and currently has work in the Format festival in Derby. (This year seems very much the year of street photography with another festival in London and the show at the Museum of London; but too much is happening on the streets for me to photograph for me to find the time to get to Derby.)

I won’t go into detail about the Goldsmith article, as you should go and read it, but it involves the unauthorised use of his picture showing a woman in the window of a coffee shop reading a book by the Photographers’ Gallery and the architects O’Donnell + Tuomey responsible for the rebuilding of their premises (see my Zombies in Ramilees St.) Goldsmith registered his copyright at the US Copyright Office and posted the picture on Flickr where it quickly became one of Goldsmiths most popular images with “14,737 views to date.”

So far all he has received have been very unsatisfactory responses from both parties, with the PG director expressing some concern but passing the buck to the architects – despite the picture concerned having been displayed very large in the gallery window (where someone saw it and told Goldsmith) – and the architects refusing to accept any responsibility despite having made the image available to various magazines and web sites which published it.

I don’t know if Goldsmith belongs to a union or professional association, but had a similar situation occurred with one of my own pictures I would be pleased that I was a member of the union, who would support me in a legal case and I would expect to get a very welcome financial settlement. No reason why he should not do so without such support, but professional advice and support does make such things easier – and would almost certainly result in a faster and more beneficial result.

It’s an image that reminds me of pictures by Walker Evans, a man with a great love of windows, and indeed of others by various photographers over the years (even I think some of mine) but is a fine image, and I remember seeing it on the ‘Londonist‘ web site and thinking how inappropriate it was to be used in a feature about a gallery that over the past years has avoided photography of this genre like the plague. Of course, I suspect with it’s new-found high profile (and impressive audience figures at the Museum of London show) that if the PG were up and running it too would be jumping on the street bandwagon.

Back on the Russian Photos Blog, Dear Photographers, Lady Gaga Wants The Copyright On Your Work. Oh, And By The Way, So Do We makes interesting reading on a related topic, although I think the answer is simply to stop photographing ‘celebrities’ of all kinds. But I suppose some photographers need the money, and it is about all some publications use these days. Frankly I’d rather do weddings, which I think generally offer rather more scope for creative photography. Though I’ve only done three and none as a paying job.

6 Billion Ways – The Full Show

So long as you have Flash, have your browser set to allow scripting and a broadband connection, you can now see the full presentation as it should have been shown during 6 Billion Ways at Rich Mix.

These days most people will be able to see the show, as so many sites need all these things, though you may need to click in a bar at the top of your browser to enable scripts for this site.

The flash presentation will adjust according to your browser window size, so if the pictures look rather small, try making the window bigger.

Alternatively, you can see the full set of 41 images on a normal (still fairly large) html page here.

Setting up this slide show reminded me why I don’t normally use Flash! Though I think it works quite well for this purpose.

6 Billion Ways at Rich Mix

6 Billion Ways at Rich Mix yesterday seemed to be a very vibrant event, although I only popped in for a few minutes, largely to see the photography there, including my own. Saturdays are working days for me and I covered two other events in London for ‘My London Diary.’

The bar area at Rich Mix with one of my pictures on screen

But I wanted to see how they were using the 40 pictures I had sent them from My London Diary, and I was pleased to walk in to the busy ground floor bar area at the centre of the event as one of my images appeared on a giant screen. But I was disappointed to realise that they were only showing half of the pictures I had sent – the full set is on the web for those of you who were unable to attend or missed half of them because you were there. I didn’t have time to stop and try and find out they were only using half of them, but it was particularly galling not only because I had spent most of a day getting the missing work ready for the project but because the half that they had lost had many of my favourite pictures in it, including this image I really like of Climate Rush and NoTRAG at Heathrow.

I’d met the Climate Rushers, including Tamsin Omond at the centre of the picture above – at Marble Arch earlier in the day when I was photographing the ‘Million Women Rise‘ march, and told her about the showing, including the picture above.

The projection included work by two other photographers, one with pictures taken at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia, which I would have loved to have photographed – and there were a couple of pictures I really liked. I’m sorry I can’t remember the name of the photographer and when I checked this set isn’t even mentioned in the programme. The other images were by Gareth Kingdon, ‘On the Sidelines‘, showing “South Africans left behind by the free market” in the Blikkiesdorp relocation camp, and included some 360 degree panoramas, which although interesting didn’t really project too well on a normal aspect ratio screen. I’d seen some before in print and on the web where they work rather better.

I felt all of three bodies of work on show would have benefited from some related text putting it in context. It did look as if those putting the show together had some difficulty with text – perhaps because of the software they were using. I’d offered to supply my work as a normal presentation, but they apparently couldn’t cope with this, so I had attached a brief captions along the bottom of each image which were visible, but I had also supplied a very short explanation about my work that was not used. Of course there were a few of my posters around the venues.

The sequence of three sets of photographs was also very short for the event – and most of the people sitting in the area had probably seen it go round dozens of times. It would haven been better perhaps four or five times the length, with work from more photographers.

Other exhibitions included Celebrate Peoples History, a collection of posters by artists in the US-based collective Just Seeds, which “remember and celebrate the struggles of ordinary people against injustice and for dignity, decent livelihoods and liberation from oppression” and Liberate Tate, which documented their interventions in major cultural institutions such as Tate Modern and Tate Britain against their acceptance of sponsorship from BP and Shell.

Also showing on some smaller screens around Rich Mix were a loop of photographs presumably taken for some of the organisations supporting the event (such as Friends of the Earth and WDM.) With a few exceptions, most were rather disappointing, with too many pictures simply concentrating on showing the t-shirts from the organisation concerned in various events and locations – often rather more PR than photography. Several of the organisations behind the event do employ excellent photographers to show their work around the globe and far better could have been made of these displays.

I wish I had more time to stay and take part in the full programme of this large event (it ran from 10am, including events at three other local venues and ending with a final plenary at Town Hall from 7 -8pm then a party after at Rich Mix until 1 am), but I had work to do elsewhere.

World Press Photo?

In Whats wrong with global photojournalism? Russian photographer Vladimir Vyatkin “ruminates on results from the worlds top press photography contest“, the 2011 World Press Photo, and I have a great deal of sympathy with his diagnosis:

International photojournalism is seriously ill, suffering from an acute cerebrovascular disease complicated by cardiac failure a common diagnosis for the many mortals who suffered significant physical and psychological stress as a result of the past years natural disasters, revolutions, ethnic conflicts, terrorist acts, government provocations and social and domestic tensions.

Of course you can avoid all that nastiness by sitting at home in front of your computer and walking around the world on Google Street View – and still win an honourable mention at WPP. It’s a prize that I think went to the wrong person – it was after all produced by those guys at Google – and for the wrong work, which clearly has nothing to do with photojournalism. You can read what Michael Wolf (who I think is otherwise an interesting photographer) thinks in an interview with the British Journal of Photography.

I saw his show show of work from Street View in Paris, and didn’t feel it was worth writing about, and still feel much the same about it. You can see more on Wolf’s own web site, along with some other work which I find of much more interest.

So my advice to all who want to succeed next year is to throw your cameras away, invest in some good ray-tracing or virtual reality software and start working on some pictures for WPP 2012. Or may be they will go retro and you should be in your darkrooms making photograms about the Arab revolution.

Rich Mix Protest Show

Yesterday afternoon I produced a poster for the showing of some of my pictures at Rich Mix during 6 Billion Ways on Saturday. It should have been a very simple job. I still use the old software I used to teach Desk Top Publishing with around 15 years ago, well before Adobe moved over to InDesign to try and fully compete with Quark.

It was Aldus who made the Mac successful and gave it the dominance that to some extent it still enjoys in the creative industries. Pagemaker 1.0 was introduced in 1985, the year after the Apple Macintosh, and together with Apple’s LaserWriter created Desk Top Publishing, spawning a new industry – and to service this we got other software that could produce the illustrations and images that this required – including Photoshop.

Before this, even simple publishing jobs had required hugely expensive imagesetting hardware and skilled techicians along with tedious and precise paste-ups, but they could now be done quickly and accurately with a few mouse clicks by technically unskilled designers on desktop equipment costing only a small arm and a leg – and of course just a year or two later on considerably cheaper PCs.

Adobe (they bought the succesful product from Aldus) Pagemaker 6.5 came free with one of my scanners and doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of its succesor InDesign but is easy to use, fast and handles text and layout superbly, and works fine with Windows XP.

It was ease of use (and the fact that it could still then be supported as an industry standard) that made me choose PageMaker to teach our students. It was far simpler, less clunky, more competent and more reliable than amateur software such as Microsoft’s Publisher (which I hated having to touch, software that should have been strangled at birth), and the output was so much better. I’m only sorry that Adobe discontinued it in 2004. A simple, effective, classic which really just needed an occasional update to keep it up to speed as operating systems etc change. But apparently what sells is feature bloat. Perhaps the future for those of us who want simple, effective software is in open-source such as Scribus, which also has the advantage of being free.

But yesterday I had great problems, as every time I imported two of my images into PageMaker it gave an error message and crashed. I tried copying them from Photoshop and pasting them in, which worked fine on screen, but they then printed black and white rather than colour. Eventually an error message gave me a clue. Some jpegs produced by Photoshop 7 (also of course from Adobe) started with a section of bytes (I think it was 637 bytes) that Adobe Pagemaker decided were illegal. Loading the jpegs into some non-Adobe software and saving them (at a similar high quality) solved the Adobe-Adobe clash. It was a poster about protest, but I hadn’t expected a walk-out by the software.

From PageMaker I exported the file as a PDF (of course another Adobe format) and checked this by printing on my own Epson printer before e-mailing the 20Mb file (its an A3 poster) for 20 or so copies to be printed. Here’s a rather smaller version (with a black border I’ve added with Photoshop to make it stand out on the page.)

The bad news is that the projection, which we had wanted to have around 50-60 pictures has now had to be cut to 20 – and none of those in my previous post about the showing will be included. There is still time to register and attend, and there is a great free programme for Saturday at Rich Mix in 6 Billion Ways of which my pictures are just one very small part.

And of course if you can’t get there you can see those 20 pictures on line – along with around 59,980 others – at My London Diary.

Ten Years of London Protest at 6 Billion Ways

6 Billion Ways is an free event next Saturday in Bethnal Green that explores through “discussion, ideas, action and the arts” the resistance around the world to climate change, financial crisis, and other problems that have as their basis the greed of the rich.

As their web site says:

“people are fighting back. From the grassroots to the global, communities and movements are imagining and creating a world where people and planet come before profit, and democracy trumps corporate power.”

I was delighted to be invited to show my work documenting some of that fight-back over the years through events in London, many of which reach out across the world, through my pictures on My London Diary.

At the moment it’s a rush to try and select the pictures, with so much to choose from – more than 50,000 pictures from something around a thousand events over the years that My London Diary covers.

The pictures on it start in 1999, and among the events I photographed that year were several, mainly organised by Jubilee 2000, calling for debt relief, as well as Kurds calling for the release of their national leader, Abdullah Öcalan, a solidarity protest with the people of East Timor and a protest calling for NATO to get out of the Balkans.

Over the years I’ve photographed the big national protests in London, but also many smaller events, some about local issues – for example against the closure of Queens Market in Upton Park, local protests about what are really national issues, including recent anti-cuts protests and many also protests about events in other countries.

Walking around London the various blue and other plaques on many of our buildings reveal the long tradition of this country upholding political freedom and giving refuge to those who would lead the liberation of their own countries across the world. It is a record somewhat tarnished in recent years, but it still seems true that protests take place in London about events around the world, and that many people from around the world who have had to flee their own countries protest here.

In a post that should appear shortly on the 6 Billion Ways blog I wrote:

So far in 2011 as well as local marches against the cuts in Islington and Hackney, UK Uncut actions, students protesting the loss of EMA, protests against unfair testing for disabled benefits, against privatisation of Royal Mail, calling for the release of Shaker Aamer from Guantanamo, I’ve also covered protests calling for freedom for Kashmir and Khalistan, opposing cuts in the BBC World Service, solidarity with the Libyan, Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and more – including a pillow fight against unsuitable high-rise development in Walthamstow.

Of course only a relatively small number – perhaps around 50 – of my pictures will be shown on the projection loop at Rich Mix during 6 Billion Ways and you can see so much more on the web.

Southbank Panoramas

I’d met a friend at the Festival Hall (RFH) to talk about an art project we have been planning together, and as we left I walked up to Waterloo Bridge with her I saw the wide expanse of sky and clouds with the sun just sinking, and knew it was just about time to take some of the panoramas that I had been talking with her about making around the cultural buildings in this area. I had an hour or more to kill before a lecture I wanted to hear a mile or two away, which was just about the right amount of time.

So I made my goodbyes and started by taking a view from the top of the bridge, though this wasn’t really what I had in mind. But it did look as if it would make a good picture and was hard to resist. Then I wandered back towards the RFH as I’d had an idea as we walked past earlier, but things had changed a little and the picture I’d thought about wasn’t quite there. But there was another obvious subject, with the sculpture, the yellow stairway, the RFH amd in the distance the London Eye.

But the scenes I was rather more interested in were those that included both interior and exterior views, such as this:

Like the others it was taken using manual exposure and focus using a Nikon 20mm f2.8 on the D700. Some of the images were taken with the camera in portrait mode, others landscape, and between 2 and 5 exposures were combined to give the final panorama using PTGui. I like to keep things simple, and worked without a tripod, pivoting the camera on a finger placed roughly where I think the rear nodal point should be. It usually works quite well.

You can see a larger version of this image and a few others on My London Diary, ending with a wide-angle view of the Barbican Arts Centre a mile or so away at night, taken a little later in the evening when I had a few minutes to spare before that lecture.