>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Alec Soth

I’ve written a few times recently about Alec Soth, and he now has a new web site and its front page says:

“My name is Alec Soth. I live in Minnesota. I like to take pictures and make books. I have a Labradoodle. I also have a business called Little Brown Mushroom. “

Go there and click on the link and you’ll find the Labradoodle is well-named. Fortunately the site also has pictures from half a dozen of his projects:

all of which need you to scroll across the page* to see more pictures. The site also has quite a lot of information about him, definitely a good idea as he must get thousands of students writing to him with similar questions and he can just tell them to look on the web site.

If you have a large screen, it’s better to click on the picture and watch them larger as a slide show, but you need to have a screen around 1500 pixels wide to see the landscape format images properly, as on smaller screens the left side menu gets in the way.

The images in the slide show good quality jpegs, maximum dimension 1024 pixels but may not look their best in your browser as they are AdobeRGB images. These will only display correctly if your web browser is color managed. You can find out more and check that on the image at top right of this Web Browser Colour Management Tutorial, which should not alter when you move your mouse over it or click on it. If you find it changes it is worth considering updating your browser. Recent versions of Firefox are colour managed (though it can be switched off) and I think Safari always has been. The only version of Internet Explorer I have is IE7, and it isn’t.

Without colour management browsers will normally display all files as sRGB (or at least roughly so) as 95% of monitors use the same 2.2 gamma as sRGB. This is why it almost always makes sense to convert your files to SRGB before putting them on the web. Very few monitors can actually display many colours outside the gamut of sRGB in any case, so if you display an AdobeRGB file on them with colour management it won’t look any better than if it was converted to sRGB, and without colour management will look considerably worse.

Of course if you are at all interested in looking at photographs on the web you will have already have a properly profiled and calibrated monitor – to to 2.2 gamma and D65- 6500 Kelvin – and you can read more about that on the tutorial linked above. As G Ballard explains, the Mac default of 1.8 can cause problems.

While many lesser photographers (and sites such as Magnum) are pretty paranoid about putting images on the web, limiting the size and decorating them with watermarks, Soth does neither. It’s good for all of us who like looking at his work and particularly for those students I mentioned earlier who can print them off in their reports, and for other ‘fair use‘ of the images. If your work is as well known as his, you don’t need to worry too much about the images becoming ‘orphans‘, the main reason I now include both metadata and a visible watermark on all new web images.

*I’ll possibly think that is sensible design when I get a mouse that comes with a ball on top rather than a wheel, but not before.

Shore: Photography and the Limits of Representation

I didn’t get to Stephen Shore’s talk in London on Tuesday, but I’ve just been listening to it and watching it on video on the AA School of Architecture web site. Shore has been the director of the Photography Program at Bard College in upstate New York since 1982, but most of us probably know him for his 1982 Aperture book Uncommon Places, which gave many of us a new impetus to explore colour photography.

He talks about the nature of photography and the four tools that a photographer has at his disposal, “focus, moment & duration, choice of frame and choice of vantage point.” He says “Photography is essentially an analytic medium … a photographer starts with the whole world and every decision brings order to it … a photograph is solved more than it is composed.”

It’s a long video – 90 minutes – but it held my interest for most of that time, and is a very clear exposition of his views on photography and of course of his own work. As well as the actual talk the video also includes the whole of the question session with Shore after the talk.

Photolounge/Photo-Open/Flowers East

If you are in London this weekend, it worth a trip along to the Old Truman Brewery in Hanbury St, just off Brick Lane, where in spaces T3 and T4 of F Block you can see both the Photolounge and the Photo-Open, both parts of Photomonth 10, this year’s East London Photography Festival. Both are open from 11am to 6pm Fri, Sat and Sun.

Photolounge is a three day event which gives a large number of photographers the chance to put up their own small show. The overall standard of work seemed very high, although some of the better photographers had relatively little on show. Far too many for me to comment in detail, but among the work that particularly interested me was Graeme Vaughan‘s ‘Prague: a notebook‘ and work by Jon Cardwell, Andrew Meredith and Steve Schofield. But there was really a pretty overwhelming array of talent on show, with very little that held no interest for me, a considerably higher standard than some other open events, and it reflects the enormous amount of talent in and around the capital.

Given that there are another 92 galleries and exhibition spaces on the Photomonth 10 map, this with over 200 exhibitions and events is by some way the largest annual photographic event in the UK, and has a very good claim to be the most important of them all.

The Photo-Open attracts a high standard of entries and they remain on display every day until 25 October. Also in the same building is one of those 92 galleries mentioned, the Cynthia Corbett Gallery as well as a display by Photobox of the Worlds Biggest Photobook (yes it was big, but…) to mark ten profitable years of their on-line digital printing service.

Many other shows in Photomonth 10 are an easy walk from the Old Truman Brewery, including my own ‘Paris-New York- London‘ around 15 minutes walk away (though quicker if you hop on a bus – and don’t forget you’re invited to our mid-show party on the 20th Oct.) There are over 50 venues within a similar distance, and the map, although not perfect (and our show has been put on Hoxton Square rather than Hoxton Market) is generally rather better than the Brighton one I criticised a few days ago.

But yesterday night, though I could have walked the whole way, I went instead to the bus stop at Primrose St (get off here rather than Liverpool St for the Old Truman Brewery) and took another bus the three stops to Flowers East on the Kingsland Road for one of the truly outstanding shows of the festival (incidentally they recently opened a new London Overground station, Hoxton, very handy for it.)

Upstairs was ‘Guantanamo: If the Light Goes Out’, a part of Edmund Clark‘s very impressive project on the lives of the men who were held in Guantanamo Bay (and that shameful camp is still going, despite Obama’s pledge.) The show at Flowers ends on 14 Nov, but you can also see more of this work at Photofusion in Brixton until November 26 2010. Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, who almost certainly knows more about Guantanamo than any other single person, has written about this work, and hist site includes an interview from ‘Spoonfed‘ between Clark and Loredano, as well as a selection of pictures. At present the best way to see this work online is at Lensculture, where there are 30 pictures along with text by Clark – and I think gives a better impression of the project than the limited space at Flowers allows; I understand a new web site featuring the project and book is under preparation for next month.

Nadav Kander‘s Yangtze, The Long River fills the ground floor at Flowers (until Nov 13), its large prints impressive on the walls, although the opening was a little too crowded for me fully to appreciate this internationally acclaimed work. I hope to go back and take a longer and calmer look. Instead I went outside for some fresh air and to chat with some of the photographers who had come to the opening. It’s a particularly handy place as there is a bus stop right outside the gallery and so I could make my goodbyes as the 243 came along to take me back to Waterloo.

Travelling by bus in London at night is usually a visually interesting experience, although one that is difficult to capture. But I sometimes try.

Degeneration

Although I wasn’t able to see the show ‘Degeneration‘ by the collective Human Endeavour which is upstairs at the Bellis Gallery, 8-9 Kings Road, South Lanes, Brighton until Friday 14th Nov (Wed-Sat 10-30-18.30, Sun 11.30-16.30) I did meet briefly with one of the photographers, Alex Currie, who has kindly sent me four of his images:

These are pictures taken with great deal of respect for the subject and with care using the movements of a 4×5″ camera. Together with the other work I’ve seen on this project they well reflect the objective of the project, stated to be

to take a critical look at the state of housing and regeneration in the 21st century, and the implications and complex nuances this may have on some of the poorest in society,reliant upon social housing.

As they make clear, much of what they are recording has not occurred by chance and cannot be blamed on the architects and builders, but is the result of deliberate policies.

After several decades of neglect, consecutive governments have overseen the gradual disappearance of social housing, due to Right To Buy and a lack of new housing stock built, arguably fuelling the necessity to own rather than let that has instigated the artificial inflation of the housing market. This opens up many questions as to why this was allowed to happen, has fuelled the rise in homelessness and poverty and left the majority of people living in social housing trapped in so called ‘sink estates’.

There are indeed examples where blocks similar to many of those shown in this project have been sold to private companies and refurbished to become luxury flats. But for councils and social housing associations the alternative of demolition (sometimes also creating a little local spectacle through the use of explosives) attracts, perhaps because of the financial incentives available, or simply because over the past 40 or 50 years we have become increasingly a throwaway society. Or perhaps sometimes because of the profits that others can make.

The house I live in was built around 1880, condemned in the 1950s and still (with minor alterations and occasional maintenance) performing its original function reasonably adequately. It wasn’t well built, didn’t use the best of materials, but the design was basically sound. The prefabs I photographed a few days ago, made in 1945 were only meant to last 5-10 years, but some are still in reasonable condition, and their owners and tenants happy to remain living in them. So it is a very good question why so much of the building around the 1960s are now considered only fit for demolition (although some of those I knew erected in Hulme in the mid 60s were in a terrible state within months of completion.)

The answers lie not among the planners and the architects but in the politics of the era (and perhaps things have not changed much.) I’m currently reading a book by a friend of mine, Franklin Medhurst, ‘A Quiet Catastrophe: The Teeside Job‘ (ISBN: 978-0-9566550-0-40 in which he tells the story behind his dismisal as Director of the Teeside Survey and Plan in 1967, largely because of his insistence that pollution be taken into account in the location of housing in the plan. The two men who fired him were Hugh Wilson, responsible for Cumbernauld, recently voted by its residents the “second crappiest town in Britain” and Lewis Womersley, responsible for the Park Hill terraces in Sheffield that feature on Currie’s site as the first picture in his project, Redundant Ideals. Its also worth looking at the other two projects on his site, which include one ‘Nonscape‘ which turns out to be black and white images of central Croydon.

This is a very different view of the place than on my own website where I have a set taken a few years earlier in 1991 along the then recently opened tram line. Looking at the two I think his work looks to be older, and not just because it was taken in black and white rather than in colour. Unusually my Croydon Tramlink was taken on medium format (and I also took some panoramas that have have yet, 9 years later, to be added to the site) but after that I reverted to using 35mm with a shift lens.

Finally, one thought that I left Brighton with, from the theatre opposite the station:

New on Niépce

For many years since its re-discovery by Helmut Gernsheim, a view taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce from his upper-story workroom at his Saint-Loup-de-Varennes country house, Le Gras, has been regarded as the world’s first photograph, but the process, heliography, has been dismissed as incapable of producing anything but the crudest results.

Niépce brought it, along with several other examples of his heliography to England to show the Royal Society in 1827, but circumstances prevented this, and he left the metal plates with his host in Kew. On his death they were sold, later sold again and in 1884 when they came up for auction again they were split into two lots. Three ‘heliographic reproductions’ of engravings and what was though to be an etching made using a heliograph on the plate as a guide were bought by the notable photographer H P Robinson, and on his death went to the collection of the Royal Photographic Society (and were lent to the Science Museum in London for display.) The second lot, of one ‘heliograph’ and Niépce’s words on the process was bought by the Editor of the PHotographic News, H Baden Pritchard, and later disappeared from view.

Helmut Gernsheim attempted to enlist the help of the Times newspaper in 1948 to find the Pritchard family, but they refused to print his letter about the missing image – and did so for a second time in 1950. But a few months later, when he was contacted by the Observer newspaper about the photography of Lewis Carroll he had rediscovered, he got that paper to print his appeal for news.

Pritchard’s son immediately got in contact but only with the bad news that the family had no idea what had happened to it. But a year and a half later after the son’s death he got more news from the widow. The metal plate had been found in an old trunk – but unfortunately it had faded and there was no picture on it.

Gernheim knew this could not be true, as the process was extremely permanent, and was able to show her the faint image that could be seen if the plate was looked at carefully from the correct angle. He persuaded Mrs Pritchard that rather than put the plate up for sale – when it would probably be sold at a very high price to a private collector and disappear again – she should make a gift of it to the Gernsheim collection – and later, when that collection was sold to the University of Texas, it was also as a gift.

You can read more about that familiar picture at the Harry Ransom Center site, and also on National Public Radio.

But now a new example has emerged among early photographs, and certainly it is a better image than the Le Gras window view. New tests on the image that was previously thought to be a hand-worked etching on a heliotype plate have shown it is actually a camera-produced image without any extra work, leading to a re-assessment of the process.

Since ‘Interior of an Abbey in Ruins’ is dated c. 1827, it seems likely that the Gernsheim image remains the first, but it does show how Niépce was able to develop his process further.

I read about the discovery in the BJP, which has a reproduction of the image, but more details should be given today and tomorrow at the conference Niépce in England being held at the UK National Media Museum in Bradford. On the conference web page you can hear Dr Dusan Stulik of the Getty Conservation Institute waxing a little too lyrical about the import of the new discoveries from his investigation of this image.

But I don’t think many of us will be abandoning digital to become heliographers.

Brighton Photo Fringe

There are an impressive number of shows in the Brighton Photo Fringe Open this year, and some are of a very high standard, others of course rather less so. Organising events such as this must be extremely tricky and I suspect those responsible will be a little frustrated at some of my nit-picking after all their hard work. But I hope they will be taken (and are meant) as constructive suggestions to improve the festival in future years, especially for visitors coming from outside Brighton.

As with the Biennal, several of the venues – including the major ‘Fringe Focus‘ – were closed on a Tuesday. Some other shows listed either did not exist or I was unable to find them. It would be considerably more helpful to divide the shows in Brighton into areas each with its own local map and fuller key rather than the large area map provided. This would enable precise locations to be shown – numbers which are seldom actually present on the streets are of little use. Finding the work – for a visitor to Brighton – was something of a logistical nightmare and there were a number of shows that I looked for but could not find at all, and some I did eventually find were invisible from the street – not even a small ‘Brighton Photo Fringe notice in the window – and so could easily be overlooked. Then there was the gallery I walked past three times, and twice the door was locked with a notice saying ‘Back Soon.’ Nothing the organisers can do about that of course.

Although the map gave opening and closing dates for shows, to find which days and at what times they were actually open meant consulting a separate booklet, arranged in a different order to the map list and not making use of the numbers on the map. Again with so many shows – and doubtless more in 2012 – it would also help if this were broken down into geographical areas. It was actually hard to find a copy of the booklet, so many who visit this year will only have the map, so it is unfortunate that these details were not on it.

The show I was most sorry to miss was ‘degeneration‘, a project by the collective ‘Human Endeavour‘ which “is a study of key areas across Britain” – Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, Salford, Sheffield, Birmingham, Cardiff, London and Portsmouth – “of 20th century housing that has slowly fallen into decline and is now due for regeneration.” It’s a project that fits very well with my own interest in urban landscape – for example in my work on Hull – that arose out of an active grass-roots involvement in the redevelopment of Hulme and Moss Side, Manchester when I lived there in the 1960s.

So far all I’ve seen is a nicely printed folding card with one image by each of the photographers, Alex Currie, Richard Chivers, Simon Carruthers and Oliver Perrott and a well-illustrated web site. This is the third show by this collective and the second to receive Arts Council support. Looking at the work on the web, I was particularly impressed by the pictures from Glasgow by Alex Currie and Richard Chilvers.

It was interesting to be reminded again of the work of Michael Ormerod, (1947-91) a British photographer who took to America very much in the footsteps of Robert Frank and Stephen Shore. Ormerod died in a motorbike accident at the age of 44 in Arizona in 1991, and shortly afterwards there was a show of his work at the Zelda Cheatle Gallery as well as a book to accompany this, ‘States of America‘.

While I quite like some of his large colour images, I can’t help looking at them and thinking that other photographers – such as Shore – have done it rather better. I get a similar feeling too about his black and white, which perhaps also leans too heavily on American precedent without really establishing a voice of his own. Ormerod was a pretty good photographer and I quite like his work, but… You can see for yourself at the Crane Kalman Gallery.

Was he one of the UK’s leading photographic talents at the time of his death in 1991 as the exhibition text suggests? It’s something you could say (if you were an art dealer) about any of several hundred photographers of the time – many of whom might well have taken rather similar pictures on a trip across the USA, and some did.

The USA was also the source of another show on the fringe, shown in JB’s American Diner on Kings Road. I found this a more interesting view of America than Ormerod’s, partly because it played a little further from some of the stereotypes but I think largely because it’s subject was so much more clearly defined, with Kit Fordham focussing his attention on ‘Bascom Avenue: The Unloved Hear of San Jose, California.’ The show starts here on Fordham’s web site, although I think the colour was better on some of the prints than in some of these on the web.

There was a synergy between the show and the surroundings that worked well and it was the only venue where I really felt I had to take some pictures myself. It can be hard showing work in cafés and shops and this was a great example of how it can really work well.

But the outstanding show of those I saw was ‘Closer‘ by Stuart Griffiths, even though looking at his web site I see very clearly how much stronger a show this could have been. I find it hard not to see the presentation at the Phoenix as an example of a kind of curatorial vandalism, pushing his work into a rather different aesthetic. Of course I’m not a great fan of the cult of the curator, which I think has been a curse on photography, particularly in the UK, for the last forty or so years. The show still worth seeing for the rawness of some of the images, but afterwards look at the web site and see how much more it could have been. It’s a pity that they didn’t get around to adding labels to the works (obviously actually a deliberate decision but equally obviously an poor one) but you may be lucky and be given a list of them if you view the show.

I’m not sure how much the smaller room given over to small pictures and letters from Griffiths’s time in the Parachute Regiment from 1988-93 where he became a unit photographer with the Intelligence Section in Northern Ireland actually adds to this as a show. What is perhaps much more relevant is the film about his life, Isolation, was shown as part of the Photo Fringe at the Electric Palace, Hastings on 10 October, and will also be projected at the venue for this show, the Phoenix, Brighton, on 30 October. You can read about it in The Guardian which also has a gallery of his pictures. Isolation had its World Premiere at the 2009 Edinburgh Film Festival and from there you can watch a short trailer which includes some of his still images.

I could see no point for the use of three very similar portraits shown in the installation picture above – and it suggests a kind of indecision that although doubtless a decision by the curator seemed to suggest that the photographer was unable to arrive at the image he wanted. Griffiths actually chose a different image from the session for his web site in the series ‘Back From the War’, where you can also see some of the other powerful images that were not selected for the Brighton show.

It was, despite the weather forecast, a pleasantly sunny day for a walk around Brighton, although at times a little frustrating. As well as those I’ve written about I saw quite a few other shows which for various reasons – largely that they didn’t particularly excite or interest me – I’ve not mentioned. I’m very aware of having missed much of both the Biennial and the Photo Fringe, partly because some things were not open, but also because this is a very widespread festival – as well as the more outlying areas of Brighton & Hove there are also Fringe shows in Chichester, Lewes, Peacehaven and Portslade and the Biennial also has related photography shows in Portsmouth, Bexhill, Chichester and Eastbourne. There are of course all kinds of events too taking place in Brighton and elsewhere, making this a considerably more exciting event for photographers based in the area.

For some years Brighton has been establishing itself as a major photographic centre in the UK, and in many ways I think more important and certainly more vital than London, which has largely failed to develop a photographic culture, largely due to the stultifying effects of some of our major institutions, but also because of its sheer size. This year’s festival marks another step along that road.

Brighton Photo Biennial

Unfortunately I was only able to visit the Brighton Photo Biennial (which continues until the 14th November 2010) on a Tuesday, when some of the possibly more interesting venues were closed. Perhaps I’ll manage to get back to see them but it isn’t easy for me to find another day to visit Brighton and see more work in both in the Biennial and the Photo Fringe. But if you are thinking of going, this is a festival that – if you want to be able to see almost everything – is only fully open on Fridays and Saturdays.

The Brighton Museum where the headline show ‘Strange & Familiar‘ was taking place is well worth a visit, although perhaps more for the building and the permanent collection than the photography on show. Commissioning new work is always a gamble, and here I think the dice have rolled to give Brighton an near minimum score. Of course, having given commissions, the commissioning body is more or less obliged not only to show the work but to praise it inordinately whatever. But I found it hard to believe in emperor Parr’s new clothes.

I’ve already written about Alec Soth‘s problem on entering the country (in UK Customs) and my thoughts on that; the images on show have some interest as the work of a seven year old with a certain fairly large amount of parental direction, but frankly not very a great deal. I think her drawings are better than her photography. For those of us who on first hearing about the commission had been looking forward to seeing Soth’s take on the city I think this is – to view it generously – a rather poor third-best.

If you like rather wacky ideas you may like Stephen Gill’s ‘Outside In‘ but I found seeing more than one or two images made with rubbish picked from the streets of Brighton in the camera (including cut up bits of transparencies he took for the purpose) tedious. Actually I do tend to appreciate the weirdly unusual, but my first impression that it was an amusing idea was soon undermined by asking the question “But does it work?” and finding myself giving a fairly negative answer at various levels, and found myself wondering if that old computing acronym, GIGO, might have been a better title.

I think it is partly a matter of scale and it does for me work considerably better in some of the smaller prints on display than on any of the rather large ones, perhaps because the collected detritus in the camera (and in a large display case) is closer to actual size. And in the Blurb book which I’ve just seen rather small on line, I really begin to warm to them considerably more. His video chat with Martin Parr did have me laughing at times, though for all the wrong reasons. In the interview Gill talks about feeling restricted by straight photography; perhaps why I don’t appreciate his work here is that I’ve always and still feel empowered by it.

But there was I think a second problem that lay behind this and to some extent all three of these shows; the pursuit of novelty for its own sake and a determination to avoid the stereotypes of Brighton at any and all costs. Gill’s work seemed curiously dislocated from the city despite being based around objects from it, and I think would have been considerably stronger had this not been so.

Of these three major commissions I felt only half of one of them, the ‘Murmuration‘ of starlings around Brighton Pier in the winter dusk by Rinko Kawauchi was really at all successful. It’s perhaps a pity that she returned in Spring to do more work, which I think largely fails. Her pictures (like the others) were shown as large unframed inkjet prints pinned to the walls, and they had become somewhat buckled. This was a shame as I found it detracted particularly from those large images of the flocks of birds in flight.

I think I would probably have found both New Ways of Looking and Queer Brighton considerably more to my taste but unfortunately both galleries were closed. Should you want to see all four shows in a single day you need to go either on a Friday or a Saturday between 11 am and 5pm.

The only other major show in the Biennial I could see was ‘A Night in Argentina‘ with work by Alejandro Chaskielberg and Esteban Pastorino Diaz, in the University of Brighton Building on Grand Parade.

Both sets of pictures were impressive, though in quite different ways. With Diaz, my main interest was in the incredible architecture of Francisco Salamone, which was however splendidly brought out by the photographer. I couldn’t understand why the programme leaflet labelled this an experimental strategy – how does it differ from the many other photographs of buildings using long exposures at night, certainly since the early years of the dry plate process, if not before? Or was there something I missed? But they were fine images. Perhaps the ‘experimental’ label referred to the fact that he usually prints by the gum bichromate process (which dates from the same era around 1900) but of course there are many other photographers using that – including my old friend Terry King who started using the process around 1980 (with a tiny bit of help from me) and has since taught it to hundreds if not thousands of mainly British photographers – part of a worldwide awakening of interest in ‘alternative processes’ over the past 30 years. But the large prints on show were fairly ordinary inkjet prints, perhaps just a little lacking in the delicacy that the best of these can now achieve.

Chaskielberg‘s work (see the BJP video) is without doubt experimental although others have previously worked with lengthy exposures and the full moon to give results with a distorted colour palette. I find his pictures ugly and brash but also fascinating. He adds light while taking them by using a flash, and using a 4×5 camera appears in some cases to being doing some interesting things with lens tilt, though honestly I could be sure about little. But whether it “open up new ways of representing the world” or “effectively refreshes our photographic vocabulary” I have grave doubts. For me this work was not representing the world, but about creating fictions about it.

More about Brighton in Brighton Photo Fringe

Lost Steps

Lost Steps is a radio series presented by Malcolm Hopkins and produced by Nick Hamilton for Resonance FM, a unique radio station broadcasting in south London on 104.4 FM as well as live on the web. You can also download the programmes a few days later as podcasts.

On its web site, Resonance FM says:

Imagine a radio station like no other. A radio station that makes public those artworks that have no place in traditional broadcasting. A radio station that is an archive of the new, the undiscovered, the forgotten, the impossible. That is an invisible gallery, a virtual arts centre whose location is at once local, global and timeless. And that is itself a work of art. Imagine a radio station that responds rapidly to new initiatives, has time to draw breath and reflect. A laboratory for experimentation, that by virtue of its uniqueness brings into being a new audience of listeners and creators. All this and more, Resonance104.4fm aims to make Londons airwaves available to the widest possible range of practitioners of contemporary art.

and it describes itself as the world’s first radio art station. It came out of the London Musicians’ Collective and has been broadcasting since May 1st 2002.

Lost Steps is a weekly radio show which explores aspects of London’s artistic and cultural landscape with guests including artists, writers, film makers, bloggers, academics and publishers. Among the people who have appeared on it are a number whose work I admire, including writer Stewart Home and, in the last programme of the previous series, the creator of the amazing cult fanzine, Savage Messiah, Laura Oldfield Ford.

I met producer Nick Hamilton at the London International Documentary Festival in April this year where I was showing the work which is now in my first two Blurb books, 89, a fictional walk through North London, and ‘Before the Olympics‘ and we talked briefly about the possibility of my appearing on the programme later in the year.

Then he met me again as he chanced to be passing when I was photographing the ‘Life 4 A Life‘ march last month and I agreed to go on the show as the first in a new series of Lost Steps. When he emailed me about the details I sent him a link to the photographs I had taken, one of which gave him something of a shock. One of the pictures included members of a family he had known a some years ago in Hackney and he discovered that their nineteen-year-old son, who had been friends with his children, had been murdered last year. The family had moved away to Eastbourne to get away from the violence and gang culture in London.

I spent an enjoyable afternoon talking with Malcolm and Nick last Friday about my photography of London – including the kind of work which is on my Buildings of London, River Lea, London’s Industrial Heritage and My London Diary web sites, and the first half hour while we were in the recording studio can be heard this Thursday, 14 Oct 2010, at 10.30 pm and is repeated on Saturday 16th October at 6.30pm. It should also be on the website from Sunday 17th October.

Perhaps fortunately the next couple of hours of our conversation around the corner at the Kings Arms in Newcomen St, interesting though it was, will not be broadcast!

Sam Lesser 1915-2010

In the print edition of The Guardian on Saturday I read with sadness of the death of Sam Lesser, one of the few remaining veterans of the International Brigade that fought against fascism in Spain. It was a very short note and I hope they will publish a proper obituary at some point. Spain was important, not just for the left but for all of us, and the Sam Lesser was one of the more than 30,000 volunteers who went to fight for freedom – and around a third of them gave their lives there. He survived and continued through his life to follow his beliefs and work towards a better world.

I’d photographed him a number of times, and was impressed by his speeches, although I wasn’t present at the Spanish Embassy last year where along with the other seven then surviving British and Irish volunteers he was at last honoured by the Spanish Government by being made a Spanish citizen. According to the Morning Star obituary, his “emotional anti-fascist speech” in “fluent Spanish” on that occasion reduced some of the embassy staff to tears. Characteristically it linked the struggles of his youth to the current day fight against fascism here and the rise of the BNP.

Lesser took part in the fierce fighting at the University of Madrid shortly after arriving in Spain in 1936 which killed 24 of the first 30 British volunteers, but was wounded in a battle in January 1937. Hit by bullets from both sides, he was left overnight dying on the battlefield but saved by a comrade who insisted on going back to look for him the following day). After a period in a Spanish hospital he was sent back to England for treatment. He returned to Spain hoping to fight again but failed his medical and instead made radio broadcasts for the Republicans and worked as a journalist for the Daily Worker, escaping to France as the Republicans were finally defeated. You can read more in an interview with Angeles Rodenas which the Socialist Worker published four years ago, and you can hear him speaking in English as a part of the programme ‘Witness‘ broadcast on the World Service of the BBC.

During the Second World War he was again turned down for military service because of his wounds and he worked as an inspector in an aircraft factory. After the war he returned to journalism with the Daily Worker, the communist party newspaper, which sent him to many scenes of post-war conflicts. His experiences working in the Soviet Union and reporting on the Soviet invasions to crush the popular movements in Hungary and Czechoslovakia destroyed his faith in communism and he moved increasingly towards social democracy, even becoming a strong supporter of New Labour.

Lesser, who worked as a journalist under the name of Sam Russell, was in Cuba for the missile crisis, and spent a night with Che Guevara at the height of it (his interview was heavily censored by the Daily Worker, removing all Che’s more controversial war-like rhetoric) and he also reported for them on the Vietnam war. As a student I read many of his reports in the Morning Star (the Daily Worker was relaunched under this title in 1966), which often presented a rather more accurate overview of events at a time when much of the media was over-saturated by cold war rhetoric and US propaganda.

The Morning Star obituary also tells the story of his visit to Chile in 1973, where he arrived for a fraternal visit the day before the CIA-backed coup and was woken up early the following morning by the gunfire. His fluent Spanish (he learnt it while in a Spanish hospital bed) enabled him to pose as a Spanish engineer and move into the Santiago Hilton, later relaying his report to the Morning Star, where it made the front page with the headline “I Saw Democracy Murdered.”

Sam Lesser was a founder of the International Brigade Memorial Trust which holds an annual commemoration every July at the memorial in Jubilee Gardens on the South Bank, at which the pictures here were taken. In 2009 he gave a spirited address there in front of the Spanish Ambassador, a month after he and the other veterans had been given their Spanish passports.

Excalibur!

On Thursday I got on my bike and cycled from Waterloo Station to the Excalibur Estate at Downham in Catford, whose streets are named after knights of the Arthurian Round Table. This is the only large example remaining of a number of prefab estates constructed as the Second World War ended for returning soldiers and their family. Although intended as temporary dwellings, they were basically well-made and equipped with all mod cons including fitted kitchens, refrigerators, built-in cupboards and heated towel rails.

For many years now, Lewisham Council has left the maintenance of these bungalows to the residents, and a few of them, along with rather more who have bought their homes, have made a real effort to keep them in good order.

Where tenants or owners – past or present – haven’t taken over the council’s responsibilities, these homes are in often in very poor condition. So bad that when residents move or die, they are no longer re-let, but allowed to become derelict.

As you can hear on a slide show at The Guardian, for the first residents who moved to these properties were impressed by the standard of the accommodation they offered, and the standards set by the Ministry of Works were high- more modern properties are built to rather meaner specifications. The minimum floor area was 635 square feet, though I think these are a little larger, and some have now been extended. Although they were meant to cost £500 each, the actual cost of these was, made by the Selection Engineering Company Ltd was well over a thousand pounds – some things don’t change.

One of the designers of the kitchens in the ‘service units’ – kitchen and bathroom – was the Czech industrial designer George Fejer who worked on them from 1943, and later was one of the team that worked at Hygena creating the British style of fitted kitchen.

The UniSeco design – and around 29,000 were built – was perhaps the most innovative of all the various prefab designs built, with a distinctive modernist look, for example in the joined corner windows and the almost flat roofs.

The Excalibur estate, with 187 UniSeco Mark II or Mark III units and a prefabricated church – St Marks Downham – and church hall was assembled by German and Italian prisoners of war in 1945-6 on an area of public open space for the neighbouring Downham estate – with the promise that after the 10 or so years these temporary buildings were to last it would be returned as open space. For some years Lewisham council have wanted to demolish the lot and build new social housing on the entire site.

It is the only large prefab estate remaining, and residents and others pressed for its preservation and listing. English Heritage had advised the listing of 21 of the units, which would have enabled something of the character of the estate to be retained if on a much smaller scale. The Department for Culture Media and Sport reduced this to six; four Mark IIs and two Mark IIIs, which although retaining these individual buildings will loose any real sense of the estate, although those chosen are a compact group and were selected because they were relatively unaltered – while some others have undergone considerable ‘modernisation.’ It still is not clear whether or not the church will be retained, though in any case it is of rather less interest.

One of the problems of renovating prefabs of this type is the large amount of asbestos sheeting and cement used in their construction, covering the timber and plywood frame.

I first came across and photographed the estate while walking the Greenwich meridian around 15 years ago – it runs through the middle of the estate – and was impressed by the feeling of openness and space. As some of the residents say, living there is the nearest thing to living in a village you can have in London, and some have made their homes look rather like country cottages, surrounded by flowers. Many have lived there for a very long time.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
One of the residents who doesn’t want to move – the sign says he’ll take the council to court
Others on the estate want to get out and live in something more modern and better maintained, and there appear to be two fairly well defined camps. Lewisham, having promised for several years to consult residents finally organised a vote this year, and the results, announced in August were 114 votes for demolition and regeneration with 89 against, with 21 of those entitled to vote not doing so.

Although the time-scale isn’t clear, the council are going ahead with the scheme which involves transfer to a housing association who will carry out the redevelopment. Current tenants who want to move back to the new estate when it is completed will be allowed to do so.

But I wouldn’t leave it too long if you want to visit the last example of one of our more interesting attempts at providing low-cost housing.