>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Vodaphone Uncut

Quite often there doesn’t seem to be a lot to photograph at demonstrations, and the UKUncut demonstration outside Vodaphone in Oxford St over their avoidance of UK Tax was one case. At the time it was due to start there were more photographers than protesters, with a few police standing around and a couple of security men in the shop doorway, with some slightly anxious-looking shop staff. It really was not promising.

Fortunately some more protesters arrived, and they sat down on the pavement in front of the shop, but it was still rather hard going to find anything other than the obvious.

I saw (and photographed) this woman writing on her hand and then moved closer and photographed her. I took two frames without flash, but although they were ok, felt I needed to make her stand out a little more – so this has just a little flash to help.

This was another picture that almost worked, but I find the hands at top left and the head at bottom right too distracting. But it was the best I could manage, although I took quite a few frames trying to get what I wanted.

Of course I always try to take some images that give a more overall view of the situation, even though these are often rather ordinary pictures.

At one point on the D300 I switched to manual to get more precise control over a particular image, and then forgot to switch back. It probably wouldn’t have mattered much, but I think sometimes cameras have minds of their own, and the D300 decided that since I’ve never taken a picture at its fastest shutter speed of 1/8000 it would take this as an opportunity to try.

I don’t like to ‘chimp’ while I’m working unless I have a very specific need to do so, as otherwise it interrupts my flow, so by the time I noticed what the wretched camera had been up to I had probably around 30 images taken at about 5 stops under. Or to put it another way, exposed for something like ISO12,800 or 25,600. Most had just a very dim image and I deleted them immediately, but there were one or two I decided might be worth keeping and trying to rescue in Lightroom. Here is one of them:

Even with fairly heavy noise reduction quite a lot of colour noise remains and it has a very washed out look – which might go down well in a fashion magazine but isn’t really my kind of thing. But the surprising thing is that it exists at all.

It wasn’t a great calamity, as I was mainly working on the D700, using the 16-35mm lens, and just taking a few images – such as this one – with the D300 and the 18-125mm. I found something was severely wrong when I tried to take a few pictures with an even longer lens and couldn’t get anything to work, though it took me a little while to work out why.

You can read more about the protest and see more pictures in UK Uncut Protest VAT Rise at Vodaphone on My London Diary.

A Trip to Kingston: Muybridge Misappropriated?

I think I first became aware of the work of Eadweard Muybridge while I was in short trousers, on one of the visits we were treated to by two of our maiden aunts to London’s Museums. The Science Museum was only a short trip on the District line away from where I grew up, but London was another world, and one to which my own parents seldom if ever ventured. Back in the 1950s I’m not sure what kind of display the Science Museum in South Kensington had, and my memory of seeing the images of a jerkily flapping bird in flight may well be a later back-projection.

But when I read what is apparently the first published book on him, Kevin MacDonnell‘s ‘Eadweard Muybridge – The Man Who Invented the Moving Picture’ (ISBN: 0 297 99538 3) in 1972, a book whose photographic enthusiasm made up for its many errors, much of what it contained on his pictures of movement was already known to me from the history books, but the book did fill in many details on his photography as well as more about his extraordinary life. But the real revelation was to see his photographs of Yosemite, Alaska and Central America and to realise what a fine photographer he was.

It was perhaps shortly after that I first visited the display of his work in his home town of Kingston, a few miles from where I live on the edge of London, and was rather disappointed. Some years later we took students to see it at the Kingston Museum and it had I think improved, and as a part of the current interest in his work aroused by the Corcoran Museum show which closed recently at Tate Britain and will be on show again in San Francisco from 26 February to 7 June 2011, Kingston Museum has benefited from a Heritage Lottery grant of almost £50,000 for its own Muybridge exhibition.

Web sites worth looking at on Muybridge include Stephen Herbert’s encyclopaedic The Compleat Muybridge and the Muybridge Collection on the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames web site. But unfortunately although this latter contains much important material, particularly related to his movement work, there is little about his other photography. Their current exhibition (until 19 March 2011) concentrates on his hand-painted glass Zoöpraxiscope discs used in his lecture presentations. Based on his photographs, these are certainly unique artefacts but seem very much a sideshow compared to the actual images published in Animal Locomotion and the Human Figure in Motion (and now animated on screen by almost everyone, including in the past a number of my students.)

You can however view some of the photographically more interesting aspects of his photography from the Kingston collection in the ‘Image and Context‘ section of the Eadweard Muybridge: Defining Modernities site.

Also taking part in the Kingston celebrations is the Stanley Picker Gallery at the University of Kingston. I have to say that the most interesting part of my visit there was the walk to and from the site, through the streets of Kingston and then back along by the Hogsmill River, one of London’s lesser known streams.

The gallery currently contains two works by an artist which are based loosely on Muybridge’s work. One references his 1877 panorama of San Francisco – which can be viewed online in some detail elsewhere (and on the same site there is also an 1851 daguerreotype panorama of the Bay.) Muybridge’s work is remarkable for it’s detail and clarity, thanks in part to the large (indeed ‘mammoth’) plates on which he photographed it, but also to his careful choice of the day when the air was particularly clear. Perhaps too he had learnt something from his previous attempts the preceding year on a smaller – which had been destroyed in a fire. The 13 plates together produce a 17 foot long image covering a full 360 degrees and showing a remarkable precision in alignment.

It did occur to me that a more fitting tribute to Muybridge would have been to host a show of rather more interesting panoramic photography than the two works on show in postcard racks here, which were I think taken in the garden of 2 Liverpool Road, the house where he spent his final years in Kingston, though I think it has changed rather since he was there.

The single thing I found most interesting about the work on show in the gallery was the letter reproduced on the final page of the leaflet from David Leigh in California to Borough Librarian Mr Cross on Jan 24th 1949, sending him some information about Muybridge and which in a postscript says “I have read, somewhere, that he was drawing to scale, a replica of our Great Lakes, at the time of his passing.” This was presumably the inspiration for the work based on the Great Lakes which apparently made use of linoleum, which I also found of little interest.

I can’t however let pass the following error in the introduction to this work:

LINOLEUM Linoleum was invented by Frederick Walton in Staines, England in 1855.

Much though as a resident of Staines I might want to claim any honour it deserves, unfortunately this is just factually incorrect. Staines did have a long connection with lino, and in my youth this was certainly clear to one’s nostrils as you drew near the town, perpetually reeking of linseed oil. But Walton himself wrote to the Technical Director of the first Austrian linoleum company Felix Fritz, the author of ‘Das Linoleum und Seine Fabrikation‘ that he invented linoleum in 1861 (and it is described but not given that name in a British patent of the same year.) At that time Walton was still working in Chiswick, and had no connection with Staines; it was only in 1864 that together with some new partners he purchased the land on the banks of the Colne there to set up a larger factory to manufacture lino.

Should you wish to read Fritz’s extremely turgid tome there is a copy in the library of the Royal Society of Chemistry at Burlington House, but one of the two existing copies of an edited English edition is on a shelf downstairs, severely abridged and translated pro bono for Staines Musuem by Linda Marshall with considerable (uncredited) technical assistance from myself.

The lino in Staines, long the town’s major employer, celebrated its centenary by closing down around 1964. When we moved to Staines ten years later you could still sometimes smell the linseed oil around the old buildings, then a thriving nest of small workshops and warehouses. Now virtually no trace remains and all we have is a large car park and a bleak boring shopping centre.

This error may not be of great importance, but for me it was symptomatic of a lack of rigour in the work – and was just one of a number of statments that made me think “that’s not quite so.” And a quick check in Google or reference to Wikipedia would have corrected this particular error.

Kington Museum curator Peta Cook told the BBC that she was keen to change the fact that Muybridge although well known in America is not more widely recognised in Britain. They quote her as saying:

“He is London born, and he came back and died here, and this is an amazing collection in Kingston. I would like London to have as much pride in Muybridge as the Americans seem to have.”

I can only agree.

The BBC article suggests the reason for our relative neglect of him is “perhaps because he did the bulk of his work in America.” I have a rather different view. He is neglected here because he was a photographer. And I left Kingston feeling that this very British cultural refusal to acknowledge photography in its own right is very much reflected in the way this current opportunity has been at least in part wasted. Muybridge was a photographer, and a part of a photographic tradition; it’s a pity we can’t celebrate him as such.

Penny Tweedie (1940-2011)

News of the death of Penny Tweedie came as a shock to me, when I read her Guardian obituary which reports that she died on January 14 at the age of 70. I didn’t know her well, but he seemed in rude good health when I last talked to her when she gave a presentation at the NUJ Photographers Conference in May 2009, and was still very much taking an interest in photography and still taking pictures. She didn’t at all seem an old woman, but a very lively person of my own generation, still young in spirit. We looked together at a few of the pictures in the NUJ exhibition, and she complimented me on my work in it.

Tweedie came into the profession from Guildford School of Art at a time when women were widely patronised and discriminated against. She had to fight against prejudice – even from the NUJ, and succeeded because of her determination and talent – she showed she could cover all aspects of the job at least as well as the men.

You can see much of her work on her web site, including some of her better known portraits and some fairly recent pictures, such as those she supplied for the ‘Hospice in the Weald: Celebrating 30 Years Cookbook’ published last November. But her best work was made in the era when magazines published real photography and she worked for some of the best – National Geographic, Sunday Times, Observer, Independent and Telegraph magazines, using the money she made from them to finance less lucrative work, particularly for aid agencies including Oxfam. As for the Hospice book, she often gave her work for good causes unpaid.

In 1975 the BBC sent her to Australia where she photographed a series they were making about Explorers, but it was the Australian Aborigines she met there that became her great preoccupation, and produced some of her best work and her books This, My Country and Spirit of Arnhem Land as well as earning her a Walkley Award, Australia’s leading photographic award.

The Guardian article gives more details of her life and career, and includes near the end the chilling statement: “it seems despair at the world’s lack of use for her craft finally induced her to take her own life.”

Inscape 81: The Urban Scene

I’ve written previously about Inscape, the ‘small magazine’ of ‘Personal Work in Photography‘ edited by William Bishop, which included a small portfolio of my work from Hull in Issue 80, ‘An Architectural Theme’.

The latest issue, No 81, includes work from a dozen or so photographers on ‘The Urban Scene‘ but more interesting to me was the written content, including two articles that make a call for further discussion.

Carol Hudson tells of her experience of using an iphone and asks “is photography, as we know it, now dead (or at the very least in retirement)?” and wants to hear what others “think about the rise and fall of the photographic document.”

A longer piece by Andy Biggs, headed by one of the more interesting images in the magazine, his photograph of the lower half of a rambler and a dog on a concrete pillar (a trig point?) at ‘The Wrekin’ that reminds me of an early Martin Parr, has the title ‘Is contemporary photography for constructed images only?’ and takes a look at some of the trends in photography over recent years away from the “desire by photographers to take their cameras out and record the world around” which he thinks photography should return to (and it’s a position I share) and ends with the short sentence: “Please discuss.” You can read a version of this article (without that final sentence) on his web site.

A quarterly magazine such as Inscape is not perhaps the most appropriate place for a discussion, which would inevitably proceed at a very slow pace. Perhaps the editor of Inscape should consider adding a blog to the Inscape web site, on which you can take out a subscription to this publication, which is also available at some select gallery shops.

When Inscape started, the Internet was in its infancy, and the only way to produce a magazine such as this was in print, but although the quality of that print has greatly improved, it could now be produced more easily and gain a greater readership and a wider group of contributors on the web. And if you have a copy of the magazine, and compare this image with the version of it on page 35, unless your monitor is badly in need of replacement, you will see that even though the reproduction in Inscape is pretty good for a magazine, the web can beat it hands down.

From ‘1989’ – you can see the web version & book online.

I’ve been a subscriber more or less since issue 1 and helped in the production of some of the early issues and also have a personal interest in this particular one, as one of the three book reviews in it is of my own book, 1989. The other two are ‘Intimations‘, Poems by Veronica More with photographs by Tom and Cordelia Weedon, and Gerry Badger‘s ‘The Pleasures of Good Photographs‘.

Also in Inscape 81 is a review of ‘Paris – New York – London‘ the show I organised in October including pictures by Paul Baldesare, John Benton-Harris and myself. (The link above is to what Bishop refers to as my “learned and informative introductory talk” in his piece at the “wine-sodden celebratory evening.”) It certainly was a good night.

It’s encouraging to read anything about events such as this, and apart from in blogs (or at least this blog) there is little if any coverage of photographic events outside the few major galleries. Even though, as for example I said in my reports from Paris Photo, these are where the most interesting work is usually to be found (and of course plenty of the dire.)

The two pictures reproduced with the review are both in black and white in Inscape, so here they are in colour:

You can see more of the work from the show on the Paris – New York – London website, including some pictures by John Benton-Harris.

Contributions to the next issue of Inscape, on the theme ‘Work‘ are invited on the back page of the magazine, with a copy date of 21 March 2011.

Leave Counting Teaspoons to the Academics

It’s a while since I mentioned the online magazine Visura, which is now at issue 11. The highlight for me is a portfolio of the work of Elinor Carucci, pictures of her and her family. At the age of 21 she decided to “shoot things as they were happening. I returned to color film which is, for me, warmer, more vivid.”

The result over the years is a very intimate body of work, with pictures of her mother, self-portraits related to her own marriage and its problems, her back pain and her work for 10 years as a “professional Middle Eastern dancer, or as it is called in the West, a belly dancer.”

The work is very much a collaboration between her and her family, but particularly with her husband Eran: “Some of the photographs in this collection are a collaboration between us, a few of them are Erans own take on the situation, his own work.”

Other portfolios in the issue also have a very personal, intimate theme, and although I find some of them of interest they move me less, and at times some I think go over a difficult to define line of using people and some simply fail to engage me.

Stephen Crowley‘s images of men and boys from Afghanistan were made using the cameras and equipment of street photographers still working in old-fashioned ways there. It isn’t of course the calotype process as he states, but uses commercially produced photographic paper. There are some interesting images by Yannis Kontos (Kabul Photographers, under Features) of these photographers at work and some are also in Issue #8 of Daylight Magazine (it costs $5 to download) with a rather longer text. As one of them, Mia Mohammed, bemoans in a short article on CBSNews, his business is about to come to an end because his supplier no longer stocks the kind of photographic paper he needs. Despite the competition from digital there is still demand for these services which can be carried on in the absence of any electrical supply.

Looking at the pictures and text by Stephen Crowley, I can’t help thinking that this is a piece of work more about the story than about the pictures and that I would very much have preferred him to have made his pictures on large format film – still essentially nineteenth century technology. Or even on digital.

The teaspoons come in Visura columnist Charles Harbutt‘s account of how he became a photographer (Harbutt is one of several distinguished columnists and his Reflections on Kertesz appear in the current issue.) When around 18 and taking pictures for a college newspaper Harbutt managed to attend a workshop run by two major figures in documentary photography, Roy Stryker and photographer Russell Lee. Stryker picked on one of Harbutt’s pictures, a back view of a girl working in her family kitchen, and told him he should have used flash “so that future researchers could count the silverware and identify the dress pattern and get other significant facts about the family“. Lee disagreed, as using flash would have lost the mood and made it impossible to take more than a single image of the situation. He said that “preserving the actual experience was what photography could do best. Leave counting teaspoons to the academics.”

Milton Rogovin Dies – His Work Endures

I was saddened to hear of the death of Milton Rogovin, although since he was 101 it was hardly a great surprise to hear the news that he died on Tuesday (18 Jan 2011.) The NY Times Lens blog has an illustrated feature with links to various aspects of his work (and to his obit in the paper), though perhaps his own web site is the best place to see his work. And he was perhaps the first centenarian photographer to start blogging. There are also some good links in the comments on the Lens blog.

I’ve written several times about Rogovin, and the most recent was on this site in August 2009. I think his work is important in particular for his recognition and celebration of the ‘ordinary’ working man, and occupies as important a place in the history of photography as other fine documentary photographers such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine.

One small but important technical point I picked up on from his work was about shutter speeds. When photographing people he liked to work on the edge where some slight movement might occur rather than us a fast speed that would be guaranteed to freeze any movement. For him and later for me it was something about showing living breathing people in his pictures, rather than butterfly specimens pinned to the board.

Pillow Fights

On Saturday I photographed my second pillow fight. The first was a couple of years ago, a flashmob in Leicester Square, and was really just for fun, although the pillows were flailed furiously and the air was soon full of feathers and a choking dust.

What interested me about that event was that it was part of a global world-wide Global Pillow Fight, and one of the earliest examples of such organisation over the Internet.

Saturday’s protest in Walthamstow was smaller and more sedate, though there did seem to be a few grudge matches taking place, particularly among some families.

But it was chaotic and fairly short – all over in a little under 4 minutes, and again I longed for a viewfinder that gave a view outside the frame – as in a rangefinder camera. Most of the time I was working close to the fighting (and I did get hit a few times, but fairly gently) with the 16-35mm at its widest end.

Possibly a higher ISO than the 800 I was using would have been better as it was rather dull, and a few pictures were too blurred to use. As often I would also probably have been better working on manual exposure, but I’m getting lazy, and usually prefer to make use of the ‘flexible program.’ The normal program gives speed/aperture combinations that are good for static subjects, but simply by using the thumb wheel you can set a bias either towards smaller apertures (for greater depth of field) or faster speeds to stop action. That bias then remains in force until you alter it with the thumbwheel or switch the camera off.

I also opted to use balanced fill flash with the flash unit as usual for me in the hot shoe. Fortunately flash synch is no longer a problem at faster shutter speeds, with auto FP high speed synch kicking in at 1/250 or 1/320 second and faster and normal synch at slower speeds. I think the difference is that with aFPhss the flash always uses a long enough output to cover the whole time the exposure slit is moving across the sensor, while in normal sync shorter flash durations are possible as the flash occurs when the sensor is completely uncovered, but in practical terms there isn’t any visible difference in the results. Presumably using aFPhss drains the battery more, so there is a longer time before the flash has fully recovered for the next exposure.

The SB800 has a reasonably fast recovery, particularly with the rechargeable NiMH cells most of us use, 4 seconds if the flash uses full output when using just the 4 batteries that fit inside the body. Usually using fill flash, it is ready much faster. You get a noticeably snappier response if you add the 5th battery in the ‘Quick Recycling Battery Pack’ but I find it harder to fit the flash into my bag with this attached, as well as more fuss changing batteries – and the spare battery packs hold 4, so carrying 5 means using two containers.

[Incidentally, next time I buy a flash for the Nikon, I wil look carefully at the Metz models which seem to offer similar features at a lower price, and also have upgradable firmware, which may offer some protection against obsolescence.]

This time the pillow fight was to gain publicity for a campaign against a high rise commercial development where it was taking place. So as well as trying to capture some of the action I also wanted to find images that had some connection with the campaign. There weren’t many people with placards taking part in the fight – it’s hard to swing a pillow and hold one, but I did take a few pictures including them and the banner, as well as trying to get the Victorian station buildings in the background of some of the pictures.

More pictures and more about the event and the campaign in Pillow Fight Against Solum at Walthamstow on My London Diary.

Dancing at the Bank

Last Friday I was at Bank at lunchtime, along with perhaps 80 demonstrators and what seemed like at least as many photographers and videographers. It perhaps attracted so many cameras because it was really the first well-publicised event against the cuts and the fees rise since students came back after the Christmas break, or perhaps it was because it was a demonstration particularly by those involved in the arts and so would have been well publicised in all the art colleges. Of course everyone has a right to come and take photos, but it does make working a little more difficult, both as they get in your way and I try to keep – as much as possible – out of theirs.

Despite the murky weather with the occasional drop of rain it was a lively event. I started off working at ISO 1000 without flash, and using the Nikon 16-35mm there didn’t seem much reason to stop down below its maximum aperture of f4 – it’s sharp enough wide open and at 16mm you have pretty decent depth of field, while at 35mm you can certainly make fairly close subjects stand out a little against a slightly blurred background.

Once the dancing started I began to add some flash, as although I was getting a shutter speed of around 1/200 there can still be a little blur with close subjects, and the flash also brings the main subject out just a little.

Once the break dancing started, I decided I needed a faster shutter speed and increased the ISO to 1600:

Without the flash, this ‘terrorist’s’ head would have been too blurred as he was dancing pretty energetically – you can see the slight double exposure effect there, while his torso was moving less rapidly and has remained sharp. I think the blur adds to the image, but it needs the sharpness of the flash exposure too.

The shutter speed changed a little frame to frame, as I was working using aperture priority auto-exposure. It might have been better to switch to manual exposure, as the lighting was pretty constant over the area, and the shutter speed changes probably just reflect the amount of sky in the image. But I prefer to work on auto when covering events, as I seldom have time to think about exposures, and if for some reason the light does change can get images that are too far over or under-exposed. All of the pictures I took were more or less correctly exposed – well within the limits of simple adjusted in processing the RAW files. If I was taking pictures of landscape or some other subjects where I would always have time to think I’d stick to manual and work to get the exposures spot on (probably using spot metering too) every time. For photographing events I normally stick to matrix metering.

When using flash, the camera metering system doesn’t seem to compensate for the extra light, so most of these pictures are taken with exposure compensation on both camera and flash at -1/3 or -2/3 stop to avoid burning out the highlights.

Almost all of the time I also use autofocus, and with rapidly moving events like this that usually means the continuous servo autofocus (C) mode that will attempt to track a moving object. The D700 (and other Nikons including the D300) has three autofocus area modes, and I often find myself switching between these while taking pictures. Probably the most useful is the Dynamic Area AF, where you select the focus point (I normally use 51 points) but when things get very hectic I sometimes switch to auto-area and let the camera decide. The danger in using it is that it may focus on close foreground which you would happily leave blurred. But if you use autofocus on a selected area, it is all too easy for that area to be the background when you are working rapidly.

Back in the old days of range-finder cameras with manual focus when I was working on film I would always rely on ‘zone focus’ – setting focus and aperture perhaps so that depth of field covered everything from 5-8 foot. Occasionally I still do so, though it’s less convenient with zoom lenses and no (or inadequate) depth of field scales, as once set, it is faster than the best autofocus!

You can see more pictures from this event – and read more about it – at Dance Against The Deficit Lies on My London Diary.

London Tunisian Protest

Yesterday I went to a meeting of photographers where a freelance who works for one of the tabloids was showing his work, and was profoundly depressed. Not by the quality of his photography but by the kind of assumptions that underlie photography for the press, and not just the red-tops.

It wasn’t just the attitudes of the speaker, but also some of the other photographers in the audience who at times seemed clearly to be justifying some of the work they did by simply denying responsibility for it – they were just following the orders of the editors.

Of course it is almost certainly right that if you want to make a good living from press photography you have to take on some fairly doubtful jobs from time to time, although there are some photographers who seem to have managed to avoid doing so.

Of course there was some questioning and discussion of the issues at the event, though I couldn’t bring myself to take part in it, partly because I’ve always chosen to remain on the periphery of the mass media. Teaching of course had its own moral problems, although I tried always to make it very clear to students that photography was only a directly vocational course for a tiny minority of those who studied it. There were quite a few students at the meeting, but most will find there is no – or not enough – work for them in photography after they graduate. I think we currently train more people every year than work in the whole “industry.”

On the way to the meeting I’d gone to photograph a demonstration opposite the Tunisian embassy against the killing of protesters on the streets. It wasn’t a huge event, but given the publicity that the events in Tunis and other cities in the country are currently getting I think it is genuinely news – rather more so than the minor misbehavour of minor “celebrities” that fills much of the press. But I think the only newspaper that had a photographer there was Al Jazera – and he, a friend of mine, had earlier in the day circulated the details to a number of photographers including myself. My report and pictures -including the one near the top of this post – appeared on Demotix around 11pm (and was selected for the front page), and on My London Diary the following day.

Demotix doesn’t make me a living, though recently it has been making me a little, selling my work on to papers etc, but I like it for the freedom it gives me to write my own articles and select my own pictures. Though in the rush to get work on line I don’t always make the correct choices. By today’s standards of course posting a story six hours after I took the pictures is incredibly slow, but it did at least give me a little time to review the images, both on the camera while travelling home and then larger on my computer screen. I also had time to process the raw files and make the necessary adjustments – exposure, contrast, a little burning and dodging and even a small amount of cropping to some. The result is all my own work and I take responsibility for it, mistakes (and I make quite a few) and all.

Looking at the work again this morning, I’ve found some decent images that I passed over last night – including those shown here, and decided to make a few more minor adjustments to some I did use, and selected roughly double the number of pictures to put onto My London Diary, and written most of this post before I had to rush out to photograph two more events.

Perhaps these pictures don’t add a great deal to the story, and several are very similar to pictures that I did use. But one of the things that the web allows us to do is to use images to tell stories in depth, and it’s a possibility I’ve been exploiting on My London Diary for some years, but which I think the conventional media outlets have been slow to grasp – outside some multimedia presentations.

Notting Hill, 1987

In a later post I’ll write about the problems I had in finding this image in my rather large collection. It’s a picture I took in the 1980s in Notting Hill, on a weekday in the market along the Portobello Road. There were two men – a trumpeter who you see – just about – in the middle of this picture, and hidden to his right, a saxophonist. Between them a music stand with some music neither was looking at, on the floor their instrument cases, one open for donations from the passing crowds, and a fairly small radio-cassette playing providing some backing.

They were playing outside a pub, and I stood for a while listening – they were good, but the first three frames I took of them were rather ordinary. They showed the scene, but it was somehow a little empty despite the people. I moved slightly closer and put the trumpet player in the centre of the frame, taking a slightly lower viewpoint. Fortunately he was getting more into his solo, pointing his horn down to the ground (I don’t think he had noticed me, but he could have been posing for the camera) and I took two more frames as people walked between us.

This is the one I like most, partly because while the child at left seems to be dancing to the music his mother (I presume) appears to be grimly ignoring it. It gets the feeling of the music playing and a crowd walking past. Lots of hands and arms and gesture. I like too the contrast between the suits of the two men in the right foreground, and the really tight framing of the trumpeter, almost hidden. The next frame showed him more clearly, and contrasted nicely the indifference a man and a woman walking past with his intensity, but lacked the complexity of this image.

I hadn’t gone to photograph the market, but had been working on a project photographing the buildings of London, and just happened to walk through the street. The pictures were taken on an Olympus SLR, probably with the 35mm f2.8 shift lens I used most of the time. I was also taking colour images on a second Olympus body, and here’s one from Talbot Rd, not far away, probably taken on the same day.