>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

More on the Students – Day 1

I’m at last beginning to catch up with putting my work on My London Diary, though I’ve still got a few things to do. I’ve already posted here about the pictures that I put on Demotix immediately after the days of protest, but you can now see a wider range of the work that I took on My London Diary.

On the first of the protests against the cuts on 24 Nov , rather to my surprise (and it was a longer day than I expected too) I took almost 1,500 images, although there are considerably fewer on My London Diary – about 100, or roughly one in 15 of those I took. I don’t normally shoot as many, but there were times when there was a lot of action and I was shooting short bursts of images.

Editing down such a large number of images is a problem, and I’ve been rethinking my workflow a little recently. Lightroom (I’m now using version 3.3) is a great piece of software and I’ve found out a little more about how to use it.

The way I used to work was to import all my images into Lightroom, before starting to select them in the Library Module, where you can rate them in various ways, giving them 1-5 stars or with one of five colours. So usually I went through all the pictures and give those I thought worth processing a 2 star rating. Ones that particularly stand out might get 3 stars. Then I reviewed all those with 2 or more stars to select a small sample to process immediately and send off to Demotix or elsewhere, giving them a colour rating. If I’d shot several events on the same day, I used a different colour for each.

I decided a while back, that it was no longer generally worth sending pictures directly to newspapers – the time I spent simply wasn’t justified by the results, and I wasn’t prepared to make the effort and compromises required to get my pictures there fast enough.

Partly it was a matter of equipment – I seldom take my notebook computer with me when I’m out taking pictures, but more important to me was that I like to select and process my pictures carefully before they are used. I also like to write stories to go with my pictures, and taken together these eliminate my chances of meeting the kind of deadlines papers expect – literally wanting pictures within minutes of being taken (or even seconds with some events.) My pictures do sometimes get into the papers, but not as urgent news.

So uploading the whole contents of the memory cards from a particular event into Lightroom isn’t usually a problem, though it can take quite a while. It gives me time to do other things – like research and write a story to go with them, or even have some dinner.

Often while I’m travelling home to do this, I have time to do a quick edit using the screen on the back of the camera, but I find this too small for most purposes. It does enable you to delete the really hopelessly exposed or framed images, and you can zoom in to check for sharpness, but not really a great deal more.

Recently I’ve started to do a more rigorous selection on the computer before importing the images, reading them while still on the card. The import dialogue in Lightroom enables you to view the images still on the card either as thumbnails in a grid or singly, and to decide whether or not to import each of them. Just as in the Library grid view you can also zoom into the images and check sharpness too. It isn’t perfect – and I’d like it to actually start the import as you are making the decisions rather than do it as a batch when you have completed your review.

There are also quite a few pictures that I’m unsure about because the default jpeg that Lightroom presumably reads from the RAW file isn’t good enough, and which need a certain amount of processing before you can decide if they are worth keeping. It’s actually easier to do the review of these once they have been imported into Lightroom, as the processing in my import preset usually helps, and in any case the Library module allows you to quickly apply some rough processing – such as increasing or decreasing exposure.

Lightroom is sometimes just a little slow at viewing them on my computer (which at more than 3 years old is beginning to show its age) but overall I find quite a saving in time if I can drastically cut the number than I import. It also of course saves storage space – those 1500 images are about 11 Mb each, and would occupy around 16 Gb on the hard disk – or 4 DVDs for a backup. So unlike working on film where everything got files, I’m moving to a more selective approach. Of course had I been using film I would have shot less, worried about running out of film – and I seldom used more than a dozen 36 exposure cassettes – about 450 frames.

Until now I’ve kept almost every file that I created with the digital camera, worried that I might miss something important. Now, having imported those files that I selected I go back and open the import dialogue again, making sure that I’ve ticked the checkbox not to import duplicates. I can then check through the pictures again, more rapidly as thumbnails in grid view (I use the slider to make the thumbnails as large as possible) and import any that I missed first time, before removing the card and putting it back in the camera. The pictures will stay there just in case I want to find something else from among them until I format the card, usually on my way to the next event.

The pictures here are just a few of mine from the day that I don’t think have been used anywhere other than in my own story, now on My London Diary, with a fairly large set of images including these.

PARIS SUPPLEMENT

My ‘Paris Supplement‘ with pictures from my six days in Paris last month is now finally on line on the November page of ‘My London Diary‘. Alternatively, here are the links that appear there to the individual items.

The posts above are more or less in chronological order, and I’ve already written something about most of these, although there is a little more about some on My London Diary, but in most cases there are significantly more pictures. The posts on My London Diary should have links to the corresponding posts here, and I’ll add the list of links to all my previous Paris Photo posts here. As well as my own pictures of Paris, these include some more installation views of the many shows I visited. I had intended to keep a count, but in the end there were just too many (if you include those that I looked at through the windows and decided not to go in, probably rather more than a hundred), and I’ve really only written about those that interested me more.

There really was so much to see and do, and six days really was not enough, especially as many things are closed on some days of the week (and almost everything closes on Mondays.) There were quite a few things I was sorry to miss, but it is a ‘month of photography’ and there is really a limit to how much of a month you can fit into under a week, though I tried hard!

What a shame London doesn’t have a similar festival (though the East London photomonth tries hard, it isn’t London-wide and lacks the breadth.) The month in Paris only happens in even-numbered years, and it would be good to have something here in the alternate ones, the odds. But I fear the odds are very much stacked against it happening.

Students Protest Fees Rise

I’ve been a little busy over the past few days, with little time to post here, though I have put some work on Demotix from my day out with the student protests on Thursday.

There, along with the pictures you can read my view of the protest, which was a huge and very spread out affair, both in terms of time and territory. Its obviously not possible for a single person to be everywhere and see everything and every photographer there has to make choices about where they go and what they photograph. So both my story and my pictures reflect this.

Some of those are made on the spur of the moment, dictated by events. When I saw the ‘Book Bloc’, protesters carrying large and thick placards with the names of well-known works such as ‘Brave New World’, ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, ‘One Dimensional Man’ and even Richmal Crompton’s ‘Just William’ trying to use these as shields and push their way through the barriers and riot police, naturally I tried (though with not a great deal of success) to photograph this, and again when I saw flames and a huge cloud of black smoke, along with everyone else I went to take pictures.

But there are other choices that are more basic. Some hinge on equipment. I seldom use long lenses – the longest in my current camera bag is an 18-125mm on my D300 (equivalent to around 175mm on the FX format.) I like to be in there, close to people when I photograph them, which isn’t always healthy when protests get a little heated. I used to have a 55-200mm, but lost it during a scrum in one of last month’s demos, and can’t quite decide whether to replace it – and if so with what.

Over the past few years, many of my colleagues who cover protests have begun to carry protective helmets, dangling from their backpacks – and on their heads when needed. It’s something no well-dressed photojournalist is without these days, but I decided against doing so. There are fortunately relatively few occasions here in the UK where they are really needed, and then mainly as protection against police batons. But there have been a couple of times in recent weeks when I’ve felt rather exposed without one, or have decided to keep a little out of the firing line.

It’s also a matter of philosophy. I go to events wanting to tell the story rather than aiming to capture spectacular or saleable images. It isn’t generally how the press works – as we’ve seen in the last few days with page after page devoted to a minor incident involving two royals in a car deliberately escorted into an area full of wandering protesters. Like most other photographers I was miles away at the time. Or a huge amount of coverage given to one probably rather drunk young man who decided to swing on a flag at the Cenotaph – rather than the many thousands throughout the day who had treated this monument with respect.

Of course there are themes that interest me. The large number of young protesters, many school sixth-formers, some of whom have occupied their schools. The changing nature of demonstrations in this country with a growing anarchist fringe. The growing disconnection between established political parties, trade unions etc and many people – especially students (this wasn’t one demonstration, it was two, with the NUS and others curiously sidelined by their own choice on the Embankment.) The problems of policing demonstrations and of policing the police and so on.

All of these things feed in to what images I choose to make (and not to make) when covering events. There are around 30 images on Demotix, and I’ll put more on My London Diary in a day or two.

Orphans Return

Earlier this year a number of photographers campaigned succesfully to stop Clause 43 of the Digital Economy Bill, which, as I wrote at the time “would have made many of our photographs orphan works and easy game for commercial publishers wanting a free ride on photographers backs.”

As I said at the time, it would be back, and it is – and there was a good post about it by Jeremy Nicholl on his Russian Photos blog last month. A few days later The Guardian (who should have known better) published an article by Stephen Edwards, suggesting that the actions of photographers had effectively sealed up the BBC archives “in which photographs either form no part (radio), or in which they are of relatively small importance (television)” and calling for what he describes as “a simple, fair and equitable solution” by the government re-instating this provision.

Unfortunately he is wrong. Clause 43 was neither fair nor equitable, as it failed to provide recompense for those who had produced the material while it would have enabled commercial organisations (and the BBC as a commercial organisation) to profit from their work.

Photographers aren’t opposed to all change, but they are in favour of changes that recognise and appropriately reward the creators of material. Legislation that did that would be welcome.

And as I recounted in New Thinking on Copyright, the photographers who mounted the campaign that played the largest part in stopping Clause 43 came up with some proposals that could for the basis for a new copyright law, and there have been other suggestions that would also solve the problem in a way that gave proper consideration to creator’s rights.

More recently, Jeremy Nicholl has published another article on his blog,
Exposed: The UK Orphan Works Covert Propagandist which lets us know what The Guardian should have made clear about its author when it published the piece.

Another project that might be worth looking at is MILE (Metadata Image Library Exploitation) which aims to promote European cultural heritage and make digital art more accessible by improving metadata. On the information page of its Orphan Works site it has a short explanation of orphan works, which makes clear the importance providing income to artists and artists’ estates.

Certainly the last thing that should happen is the kind of rush into inappropriate legislation such as Clause 43 (rumoured to have been dictated to Peter Mandelson by one of his billionaire friends in that villa in Corfu.)

Monday in Paris

Most things stay closed on Mondays in Paris, and that includes photographic exhibitions, so we were just going for a walk, as our train wasn’t until after 6pm. We booked out of the hotel, leaving our luggage to collect later (the hotel was close to the Gare du Nord) and set out.

I’d wondered if I could find some of the places that I’d photographed 22 years earlier and where in my Photo Paris book, as I knew I’d photographed some of them when wandering to the east and north of the park at Buttes Chaumont.

We spent the morning going down some likely streets, but didn’t recognise anything, apart from one very changed frontage which was still in the same hands.

We went and took a walk around Buttes Chaumont, an incredible park for an inner-city, and unsurprisingly a favourite of some of the Surrealists, as well as suicides.

As it got later, we were also looking for somewhere to eat, a good French cafe with a decent, reasonably priced menu, and we found a splendid example, Les Rigoles, on a corner of the Place des Grandes Rigoles. I started with a salad with lardons which was delicious, chunkier rather than elegant and followed that with the most delicious chicken I’ve had for some time. Definitely a place to go again next time I’m around there.

After a long lunch break we wandered down to the Parc de Belleville, and then slowly down to the Place de Menilmontant, before walking down towards the centre of Pais and then up along by the canal and down the rue des Recollets and making our way across the 10eme to pick up our luggage and go to the station. On the way we stopped to buy some food for the journey, although in the end we weren’t hungry until after we got home and only ate it then.
© 2010, Peter Marshall

Most of the posts from Paris, along with some more about about the few times we weren’t looking at photographs and more pictures from our stay are on My London Diary – see below.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

Getting Shirty

To me a shirt is a shirt, and there is something obscene about the images of boxes of what are presumably perfectly decent and serviceable garments being burnt, shown in the pictures that Florian Joye submitted in his entry for the Lacoste Elysée Prize.

His was the work which perhaps most explicitly linked to the product, with some of the other submissions for the prize frankly performing purely linguistic tricks to link their work to the polo shirt concerned, although a few crocodiles – apparently the nickname of the tennis player after whom the brand is named, and its symbol- do make an appearance, along with the odd tennis court.

But in all the competition still left me with what I consider important questions about the shirts unanswered. Perhaps if I searched on the web site I could find out where the shirts are produced, by who and under what conditions?

The 12 entrants for the prize – Ueli Alder (Switzerland), Kristoffer Axén (Sweden), Benjamin Beker (Serbia), Jen Davis (United States), Florian Joye (Switzerland), Kalle Kataila (Finland), Di Liu (China), Richard Mosse (Ireland), Camila Rodrigo Graña (Peru), Geoffrey H Short (New-Zealand), Tereza Vlcková (Czech Republic) and Liu XiaoFang (China) – were chosen from 80 young photographers taking part in the exhibition reGeneration2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today, curated by William A. Ewing and Nathalie Herschdorfer, which was at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne in June-Sept 2010.

Each of the 12 selected was given a scholarship of 3000 Swiss Francs (just under £2000) and 3 months to create 3 pictures with a link to the code name of the apparently famous shirt (which of course I’ve never heard of.) The winner, Di Liu, gets the prize of 20,000 CHF, around £12,900. This was the first of what will be an annual competition.

Although I think his work – like the rest – is somewhat trivial, I think Di Liu deserves the prize, for being the only one of the twelve with a sense of humour and for not including a crocodile in the three distorted animals – a rhino, rabbit and deer – that he plonked down in urban environments.

You can see the work of all 12 photographers on the official web site, one of those annoying web designs that insists on inappropriately enlarging my browser window to fill the whole screen.

Looking at the work, it seems to me that the concept of the prize has resulted in some rather mediocre work, which in a way I find encouraging. The idea of a huge pool of creative talent being harnessed essentially to market a rather ordinary shirt with a peculiar logo doesn’t fit with my ideas of what art or photography should be concerned with. Perhaps in future years Lacoste can be persuaded to a less stultifying approach, supporting creative photography rather than encouraging a kind of second-rate advertising. Some other commercial organisations that sponsor prizes have done it rather better.

France 14 at the BNF & 40 Years of Women’s Lib

Later on Sunday afternoon we went on to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), and spent some time wandering around on the top of this rather ridiculous building trying to find a way in. Even though we’ve been there quite a few times, it still isn’t obvious particularly when you arrive there from a new direction as we did.

The main show there was Raymond Depardon’s France, and there were longish queues waiting to see it. Fortunately I’d decided I’d seen enough of the Depardon work already, and was probably also familiar with much of the other material, so felt no need to pay and join them. What I was interested in was France 14, curated by Depardon and previously shown at the 2010 Rencontres Internationnal in Arles , with work by 14 youngish photographers (I think all in their 30s and 40s.)

Having gone through the scanner and having being allowed in to the entrance hall, we looked around for any signs of where this could be and could find none, so I got my ‘interpreter’ to enquire of one of the apparently unemployed uniformed men, but he had no idea either.

We wandered down the corridor past the queue for Depardon and found it was on the walls there, each photographer having a large area of wall to themselves with a numbered board with some information about them and their project. You can read more about the show (in French) and see some pictures in the BnF press release, and there is one picture by each photographer in a slide show on Liberation, but otherwise little on the web about the show, although there is also a book.

The 14 photographers, Jean Christophe Béchet, Philippe Chancel, Julien Chapsal, Cyrus Cornut, Gilles Coulon, Olivier Culmann, Raphaël Dallaporta, Franck Gérard, Laurent Gueneau, Olivier Jobard, Stéphane Lagoutte, Gilles Leimdorfer, Malik Nejmi and Marion Poussier, decided in 2006 to work as an informal group on the project, with each working in their own way on an aspect of the social and geographical representation of French cities and housing estates.

The resulting work was extremely varied, and some of the responses I found much more interesting than others. The Parisian facades by Gilles Leimdorfer, highly detailed and all taken from a direct frontal view, did, despite the text seem to concentrate on the decorative – for example the offices of La France with their sculptural decoraton of the fading advertisements above a Muslim butchers and other shops. While I found the images – like the actuality – fascinating, perhaps the approach was just a little too programmatic for my taste when viewing the whole set of work.

I was disappointed that there were only 3 pictures in Laurent Gueneau‘s ‘Dominante verte‘ but his web site is worth looking at, with a wealth of other images. Another photographer whose work interested me was Julien Chapsal, and the 15 pictures in his (Où) Suis-je? – (where) am I? – is very much an investigation of the idea of place (or non-place) in modern suburbia. You can see for yourself in the images and text on his web site.

Something very different but also enjoyable were the 18 images of Voyage en périphérie by Cyrus Cornut, images from the new suburbs of the banlieue around Paris. These pictures have an unreal drama, which perhaps matches their typically French architectural flamboyance, although the prints on show at the BnF were slightly less over the top in saturation than those on the web site. Most are seen across sports pictures or with a single sihouetted figure in the background, often at night or dusk.

Perhaps the most intriguing set of work was by Olivier Jobard, who had been sent to Chanteloup-les-Vignes as his first assignment as a young ‘intern’ with the French agency SIPA. A development programme had changed this over a few years from a village of 2,500 people on the Paris outskirts to a small industrial new town with a population of 10,000, including many new immigrants to France, and he was sent to make his report there after an eruption of urban revolt. He states that his work at the time was limited to the habitual clichés of the banlieue – a sick generation, drugs, ghettoism, violence…

Now well known as a photojournalist, particularly for his work in Sudan, he returned to Chanteloup, photographing there again and letting some of the residents tell some of their own stories with his images in ‘Chanteloup. Récits de banlieue‘.

What I did not realise from the BnP show was that he returned there to make a documentary film for the TV channel France 5, along with Fanny Tondre, who was responsible for the video sequences, interviews and text in the programme, which includes many more of Jobard’s still images as freeze frames. It has seven sections; a short introduction is followed be 5 sections, one for each of the people who tell their stories in the project, followed by a brief conclusion. It is worth watching on-line, even if you don’t understand French, with the video sections providing some useful context for a number of fine still images.

The film is a considerably more interesting presentation that looking at the images on the wall at the BnF, not least because it uses so much more of Jobard’s work and the words of the people in his piece – as well as some sensitive filming and commentary by Tondre. What we see on the exhibition wall is little more than a static trailer.

40 Years of Women’s Lib

Finally, before finding (rather by chance) a decent cheap restaurant where we had eaten at on a previous visit just off the rue Mouffetard, we took in another show a short Metro ride and walk away, at FIAP Jean Monnet in the 14e, celebrating 40 years of women’s liberation.

Many of the pictures were views of some of the more significant demonstrations in France by women or about women’s issues (there is a chronology of the movement in French here, and a few pictures here, and a more general survey, also in French, here. Google Translate may help.) Although many of the pictures were taken by women, the group that I found the most interesting were by Armand Borlant, who after working as an engineer in the aircraft industry became the photographer for the magazine Libération, and was later represented by Gamma and was one of the founders of Agence VU.

Also on show was some more outstanding work from Dominique Doan, photographer for the pioneering feminist publication Histoires d’Elles. I’m sorry I can’t find more of her work on the web.

After our meal, we took the Metro again to Montmartre before going back to the hotel for our last night in Paris. More pictures from our journeys around Paris and from there on My London Diary.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

A Few Shows in the 4e

From the Swedish Institute we made our way south into the 4eme, where there were a few shows from the Photo-OFF open on Sunday afternoons.

At L’Oeil ouvert in rue Francois Miron we saw the prints by Laurent Villeret from his ‘Carnet du Mexique, digital prints made from scanned Polaroid Transfers, a few of which had a pleasing charm.

A short walk away the Photo-OFF show at Galerie Hayasaki had ended (shows generally have to be for at least two weeks to be included, so some had ended by the time we were there), but its place had been taken by two other photographic shows, with Martine Peccoux’s angled views of some of the narrow buildings in Paris where streets converge at a small angle and a series of reflections in puddles by Shigeru Asano.

Walking away from here we came across another show, on its last day at the Galerie Binôme, their first show at 19 rue Charlemagne (it seems to be a peripatetic gallery), and a retrospective of the work of François Lartigue (b1949), with pictures from 1963-2010. The grandson of Jacques-Henri Lartigue and well known as a cinematographer and Director of Photography on many films, he took the earliest picture in the show in 1963 when he was 12.

All of the pictures in the show were black and white, taken with the same 35mm Canon given him by a friend of the family; most were taken between working on films when he wandered the streets of Paris on a Vespa with his camera, working always with available light. He grew up in Montmartre and virtually all of his images are taken in Paris – with just a few outside the walls of the city in Montreuil (as in my own Paris book.)

I particularly liked one of his images, showing a derelict shop on the rue de la Roquette in the 11e in 1955, the first of the six images on the link above. You can hear him speaking (in French) about his photography in an interview on a blog dedicated to Bob Giraud.

Our next stop was at the one of the few non-photographic shows we went to during our stay, a very detailed exhibition covering the life of novelist Irène Némirovsky, gassed at the age of 39 in Auschwitz showing and on-line at the Mémorial de la Shoah. Although the exhibition made little use of photography, there is a rather nice animation between various pictures of her on its front page.

My visit to Paris continues in further posts here and on My London Diary.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

Tio Fotgrafer

We met for lunch after our separate Sunday morning activities and lunched in the Place des Vosges before walking the short distance to the Institut suedois where there was a show of work by the Swedish collective Tio Fotgrafer (Ten Photographers), formed by a group of young photographers in 1958 after the model of Magnum as an independent alternative to the Swedish post-war photographic establishment. Later they enlarged the agency and became Nordic Photos.

At first we went in the small hall to the right in the courtyard of the Hotel de Marie. Here there were just a small number of very large prints on the wall along with another in a curious wooden trough on the floor, and the prints seemed rather crude, blown up far too much. If it hadn’t been rather cold and wet outside I might have seen this and given the rest of the show a miss.

Fortunately I didn’t do so, as on the other side of the courtyard there was a show with proper photographs from the photographers in the group,

Sten Didrik Bellander (1921-2001),
Harry Dittmer (1910-2000),
Sven Gillsäter (1921-2001),
Rune Hassner (1928-2003),
Tore Johnson (1928-80),
Hans Malmberg (1927-77),
Pål-Nils Nilsson (1929-2002),
George Oddner (1923-2007),
Hans Hammarskiöld (b1925) and
Lennart Olson (b1925).

The group were very much influenced by finding the work of photographers such as Kertész, Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Edouard Boubat (1923-99), and perhaps it shows too much, as although the work of these masters was unknown in Sweden in the 1950s,they are now very familiar to us.

Several of them became friends of Boubat and a panel of his pictures, from the collection of the MEP in Paris, was included in the show.

Several of these Swedish photographers were known to me – three were in the Family of Man and work from others appeared in international shows and publications. I was particularly interested to find a number of pictures of London by Hans Hammarskiöld in the show which has been seen at a number of places around the world, including Moscow.

It was a pleasant show, but one that showed that these were very much photographers of their times, working in a tradition that had already perhaps become rather comfortable over the previous 20 or so years before they founded their collective, and which younger photographers such as Robert Frank were already reacting to. As well as the links above you can find more of some of their work on either the Nordic Photos or Hasselblad sites.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

Sunday Worship at the MEP

Sunday morning when Linda went to the culte at the Temple de l’Oratoire du Louvre I took the Metro instead to St Paul to worship at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, although my service started half an hour after hers.

The MEP is a great place, and I’ve never visited it without finding at least something of great interest. But this time as I went in I noticed that it is about the only place I found in Paris where photography is forbidden, so there are none of my pictures in this post. Of course there are links to pictures elsewhere.

The MEP is also the driving force behind the Mois de la Photo and many other photographic events in Paris, and this year they were making good use of their fine collection of photographs. I think I heard that there were pictures from it currently on display in 50 (or was it only 15) other venues. Plenty still remained to fill most of its large exhibition space with its major show, ‘Autour de l’Extrême‘, perhaps indeed a few too many. Their collection includes over 15,000 photographs, including in depth sets of works by a number of great photographers and covering a wide range of photography. As well as many gifts from photographers, they also have benefited from several major sponsors, particularly in adding Japanese photography and the work of young photographers to the collection.

I think an important part of the success of the MEP is that it charges for admission, which encourages regular visitors to take out an annual subscription (at 28 Euros, the price of four visits.) Anyone unable to afford the entrance fee can come and see the shows free from 5pm Wednesday, and entry is free at all times to those with a press card etc.

Autour de l’Extrême proposed to show images that in various ways approached the extreme, the kind of limits on expression, pictures that perhaps altered the limits of what is acceptable to show. The curators “see one of the recurrent themes of contemporary art” as the constant endeavour “to roll back its own social, political, aesthetic and scientific limits.”

Although there were pictures that clearly illustrated this – what claims to be the first male nude used in advertising, an image by Jean-François Bauret used in 1964 – there were relatively few such clear examples, and the inclusion of some images – including many I was delighted to view – seemed inexplicable. Quite what is extreme for example about Tony Ray Jones’s image (and they had an excellent print of it) of picnickers at Glyndebourne? And of course, as they state, many things that were at the time controversial are now commonplace – such as male nudes in advertising.

But it was an exhibition I enjoyed, more as a kind of lucky dip into the MEP collection than anything else, with some find work on display, as well as a number of pictures I would be happy never to see again – including a whole incredibly tedious kind of landscape section which seemed a total waste of space.

Not all of the pictures were by well-known names, and there were a few interesting works I’d not seen before or at least did not remember as well as some old favourites. You can get some idea of the range from the list of photographers included:

25/34 Photographes, Ansel Adams, Claude Alexandre, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Claudia Andujar, Diane Arbus, Neil Amstrong, Richard Avedon, Roger Ballen, Martine Barrat, Gabriele Basilico, Jean-François Bauret, Valérie Belin, Rosella Bellusci, Philip Blenkinsop, Rodrigo Braga, Bill Brandt, George Robert Caron, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, Martial Cherrier, Larry Clark, Raphaël Dallaporta, Bruce Davidson, Jean Depara, Raymond Depardon, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Doctor T, George Dureau, Gilles Ehrmann, Fouad Elkoury, Touhami Ennadre, Elliott Erwitt, Bernard Faucon, Alberto Ferreira, Giorgia Fiorio, Robert Frank, Mario Giacomelli, Nan Goldin, Gotscho, Emmet Gowin, Seymour Jacobs, Claudia Jaguaribe, Michel Journiac, Jürgen Klauke, Les Krims, Oumar Ly, Robert Mapplethorpe, Don McCullin, Duane Michals, Pierre Molinier, Vik Muniz, Ikko Narahara, David Nebreda, Helmut Newton, Pierre Notte, ORLAN, Martin Parr, Irving Penn, Pierre & Gilles, Tony Ray-Jones, Rogerio Reis, Bettina Rheims, Marc Riboud, Miguel Rio Branco, Sebastiao Salgado, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, Jeanloup Sieff, Christine Spengler, Shomei Tomatsu, Pierre Verger, Alain Volut, Weegee, Edward Weston, Joel-Peter Witkin and Bernard-Pierre Wolff.

It’s a list of more than 70 names that includes around 20 phtoographers unfamiliar to me (as well as one spaceman and at least one other who isn’t really a photographer.)

Some of the work was perhaps too obvious and work I’ve seen too often before – such as Helmut Newton‘s giant images of fashion models clothed and unclothed which occupied a vast area of wall space. Frankly a magazine spread of the two would have done as well and made room for other work – it would have been nice to have more than the three pictures for Bruce Davidson‘s East 100th St or by Roger Ballen. I could also have done without an unfamiliar series of large portraits showing Michael Jackson.

I enjoyed seeing a couple of Les Krims‘s fantastic tableaux, packed with little things including bad taste jokes in both image and text – a bitter comment on the American Dream in his A Marxist View (1984) – and Mary’s Middle Class.

There were some rightly familiar icons – Elliot Erwitts’s washing facilities for Whites and Coloureds which speak strongly about apartheid, Marc Riboud’s Flower Child, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Denunciation of a Gestapo informer, Robert Frank’s New Orleans Trolley among them, but also images I’d not seen before such as a Seymour Jacobs portrait from Brighton Beach, one of a small selection of pictures on show in the various shows currently at the MEP you can see on Picasa.

Elsewhere around the show were many images or small groups of images predictable but still of interest, such as Larry Clark’s pictures of young addicts from Tulsa, Manuel Alvaro Bravo’s assasinated worker, the Hiroshima mushroom cloud taken from Enola Gay alongside the invevitable Shomei Tomatsu watch and Don McCullin’s shell-shocked marine.

One of the few small sections which for me showed some curatorial added value were a small series of images of a shattered Beirut, with three pictures each by Gabriele Basilico, Fouad Elkoury and, in rather muted colour, Raymond Depardon.

In the basement of the MEP was the rather curious ‘Trans-apparence‘ the work of Rodolpe von Gombergh, which aparently uses ultrasound, electomagnetic waves and X-rays to produce images displaying the interior as well as the exterior of artifacts. The display using “holograms, 3D screens and cold light diodes” I found odd but not particularly gripping. I was rather reminded of the kind of graphics sequences found at the start of some TV programmes, but here there was nothing to follow.

Miguel Angel Rios’s twin-screen film ‘Mécha‘ uses the bizarre Colombian sport of that name, in which metal disks are thrown at a mud-filled inclined surface containing triangular pink targets filled with gunpowder which explode when hit, as a metaphor about the urban guerilla warfare between drug traffickers in Mexico and Colombia. With lots of slow motion, rolling cable drums, close-ups of running feet and noises off he creates an atmosphere of tension, but left me feeling I would rather have seen a more straightforward documentary about either the sport or drug trafficking.

The MEP has a gallery ‘La Vitrine’ with windows that look out onto the neighbouring main street and in this the 16th Grand Prix Paris Match for photojournalism was on display. The winner was Olivier Laban-Mattei of AFP with a series of colour images from the earthquake in Haiti, which included a couple of great images, (one apparently but not credibly taken with a Leica M9 at f1.0) – it appears on his Photoshelter site in black and white.

All the work from the 20 or so photographers on display had a very similar look, with rather bright and slightly ugly colour reproduction, which for me made the show less interesting.

All too soon it was time to meet Linda and have a quick lunch before visiting a few more shows.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY