>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Student Protests & the Photograph as Evidence 2

The whole question about how we see and interpret events is an important one, and my own view of what I saw on Wednesday during the second day of student demonstrations against the proposed hike in tuition fees and education cuts differs considerably from that in several accounts that I’ve seen in left-wing media.

I’m sure that there will be some who were at the event who read this and disagree strongly with it. It represents my honest attempt to understand and report what was a rather confusing day, which I attended both as a journalist and as someone who strongly supports the opposition to education cuts and tuition fees. While I’m generally against violence I can only applaud the righteous anger that many show for the cause. Education in a civilised society should be freely available to those prepared to benefit from it and not dependent on how rich you are; educational resources should be directed at those who need them, and not available to enhance the privileged position of the children of the rich. I benefited from free education and student grants and taught in the state system for over 30 years and I’d happily vote for the abolition of private education.

I went to the event having read that the NUS and other leaders had agreed a timetable with the police as follows:

12pm Trafalgar Square
1pm March down Whitehall
2pm Parliament Square.

On the day, it didn’t happen like that, and the numbers present were considerably less than the organisers had predicted or the police had planned for – perhaps around 4-5000 in total over the day. When I arrived just before noon, there were only around a thousand in Trafalgar Square, though of course people were still coming in.

At around 12.05, a group of people who were on the plinth at Trafalgar Square started calling for everyone to go down to protest at Downing St and Parliament, and a a couple of minutes later a crowd of a few hundred was running down Whitehall.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
A handful of police had tried to stop them at the top of Whitehall, but soon agave up as there were too few of them to prevent it. As protesters ran down the road, police lower down Whitehall moved across it, and by the time the front runners reached there formed a line stretched right across the road.

What I’d photographed could hardly be described as a march, and it seems hardly surprising that the police decided to stop what looked more like a mob than anything else (and mobs have their place, but this seemed to me both premature and ineffectual.) Nothing in the police action suggested to me that they were attempting to kettle demonstrators, merely to stop them.

The vans parked in the side street and a clear Whitehall were what would have been expected if the police were getting ready to facilitate a large organised march down the street – as I had read that they had agreed.

I made my way with the protesters back up to the top of Whitehall, and there were no police attempts to stop us coming back out of Whitehall, or as we made our way through Admiralty Arch – a relatively easy place for police to have controlled movement – onto the Mall. Again, there were none of the signs that would indicate an attempted kettle. Almost all the police were still in Whitehall – or sitting in vans in the side streets, and it took some time for them to come through Horseguards and run rather comically across towards the marchers going down towards Birdcage Walk.

A few minutes later the marchers arrived at Parliament Square having gone via Storey’s Gate and Broad Sanctuary. There again it looked to me as if the police had made preparations for a march – with the roadway in front of Parliament surrounded by barriers. A march down Whitehall would have ended where the police were now standing. Of course marchers don’t like to be behind barriers, and don’t need to be, though police usually like to pen them in so that they can more easily be controlled.

I was surprised when the demonstrators turned round at this point, as they had reached Parliament Square, where they said they wanted to protest. Clearly many of them thought that the police intended to kettle them here. Of course any static demonstration in this area is sure to attract a large police presence, but surely it only becomes a kettle when the police prevent people from leaving the area in an orderly fashion. A pen is not necessarily a kettle.

When the demonstrators turned round and attempted to leave by Broad Sanctuary, police did form a line across the street and try to stop them. It could possibly have been an attempt to set up a kettle, but if so it lacked credibility, as it was obvious that the thin line of police would be ineffectual with a largish crowd on both sides of them, many of the protesters not yet having reached Parliament Square.

There simply were not enough police at that point to do the job. Some people walked through the gate into the Abbey grounds before this was blocked, others climbed over the fence and I heard later that at least one person had been assaulted by police at this point.

Most of those present – including myself, simply found a gap in the police line and walked through, and after a few seconds the police gave up trying to stop people. It was the start of a long and confusing walk around the capital.

Most of the time the police simply walked along by the side of the marchers – with the occasional incident – one of which is shown in the first of these two posts. At some junctions police blocked off one street and the marchers simply went down another. There were many places where it would have been relatively easy for the police to try to detain or kettle the march but I saw no real attempt to do so. In another minor incident in Holborn where police stopped some marchers who tried to go down a one-way street against the traffic.

By the time we had reached St Paul’s Cathedral well over half of the students had given up and left the march, many making their own way back to Trafalgar Square. As we passed the Stock Exchange it was hard to find a policeman in sight.

Certainly most of the police had also disappeared by the time the march turned up King Edward Street, perhaps because we were now outside the Met area. There certainly seemed no reason to go up Bartholomew Close and then to make a totally pointless detour to the right – many of us chose to take a short cut onto Long Lane and wait for them, and it seemed as if the march was trying hard to kettle itself. At that point there were I think less than a dozen of the Met still following the march, with the City of London police – whose area we were in- almost completely ignoring it, though shortly after I left it to catch a bus back towards Trafalgar Square I saw three of their vans moving in its direction lights flashing.

By the time I finally gave up on the march at Holborn Viaduct after around 8 miles of wandering (they did another 2 miles or so to arrive back at Trafalgar Square a little after me), it had shrunk considerably, with perhaps 500 people left from the original few thousand who had left Parliament Square.

Police were diverting all traffic away from Trafalgar Square, and I had to get off and walk the last half mile or so. At Trafalgar Square there were several hundred police forming lines across all of the roads, now forming a far more impressive barrier with their vans, but they were letting people move in and out freely when I came up Whitehall.

Around 3.15pm, one of the organisers of the event addressed the crowd now in Trafalgar Square, telling them that despite the heavy police presence we could see, the police had confirmed that people were free to leave in small groups along the road towards Charing Cross, the nearest tube station. He also said that although the organised demonstration had finished people were free to stay on and demonstrate if they wished. Clearly quite a few did, although others decided to leave.

Around 3.30pm a small group of policemen came onto the square, where they were surrounded by some of the demonstrators and road cones and other light objects were thrown at them. The police retreated toward their line across Cockspur St and were followed by a crowd of demonstrators, some of whom tried to push their way through the police, while others tried to prevent any disorder, some joining hands in a line in front of the police. People brought up banners and placards to stand a yard of two in front of the police in an often noisy stand-off.

Minor incidents continued sporadically here for around fifteen minutes and then things seemed to quieten down as the snow came down harder. Shortly before 4pm I decided it was time to go home, and together with a steady stream of protesters I walked through the police line and left the area and caught a train from Charing Cross (apparently the only train still running .) Police were making no attempt to check or stop anyone leaving at that point.

I drafted the outlines of my report on my way home and wrote it while while my images were transferring to my computer. You can read it on Demotix under the title Police Close Down London As Students March – and in a few days time I’ll also put it on My London Diary, with more pictures.

My account of the day differs considerably from some others that I have read on-line. There were things that happened after I had left – when police later did close in an make a great many arrest for public order offences, which should be given a mention in my final piece.

So what of the photograph as evidence? Essentially both what I write and what I photograph depend on what I see. The pictures that I took back up my account of the day as I saw it. I saw little if any real evidence that the police were making continuous attempts to kettle protesters – and certainly found nothing I could photograph to show this. But it was a perspective that seems to have driven the 10 mile march around London and some of the accounts I read elsewhere.

There seems to me to be something in the actual act of recording events (or at least doing so lucidly) with a camera that means I have to question all the time what is going on, why is this happening, and of course, how can I show this in an image. It’s a mental focus that drives out much sloppy or doctrinaire thinking.

Clearly there are some things photographs can show, and other things that need the support of a reliable eye-witness. Still photography is perhaps better at showing the detail (and sometimes at directing us towards it and towards a particular interpretation) while video can us a more or less seamless view of how something develops.

But both still and moving pictures can provide limits to the plausible interpretation of situations. Certainly I could not have written some of the things that I’ve read in some other accounts of the day.

Student Protests & the Photograph as Evidence 1

What exactly does the photograph above – which I took on Wednesday – show?

I think I know, because I was there and saw what happened before and what happened after the moment when I took this picture (its one of around a dozen frames, some blurred, of the incident.) But even as a sequence the pictures don’t tell the story. Yesterday I watched two rather poor quality videos of a similar incident in which a policeman punched a protester, and despite the lack of definition, they gave a much clearer idea of what was happening.

There were perhaps a couple of thousand protesters, mainly students, apparently marching without any particular direction through the major streets of central London. I think the police were equally unclear about their aims – but basically they were staying with the students in case there was any trouble, and groups of them were moving along the sides of the march towards the front. As they went along they were pushing people from the edges of the march back into the middle, out of their way and also away from oncoming but very slow-moving traffic on the adjoining roadway.

I got pushed aside rather roughly several times – and as usual there was the odd guy – perhaps one in twenty – in these police lines who was obviously enjoying throwing his weight around, using a totally unnecessary amount of force. Most officers manage to be firm and some even polite as they move people out of the way, but protesters of course sometimes complain or argue about their treatment.

I don’t know exactly how this particular incident started; I first saw the grey-hooded student being held by the officer – a police medic – who the pushed him back inside the march. Then the officer appeared to loose his temper and punched the guy several times before grabbing him around the head; other protesters tried to separate the two and pull the student away from the officer; one of the legal observers on the march who tried to get between them was grabbed by other officers, pushed away and held briefly against the bus behind.

The other police present – including an inspector, standing just behind the medic – make no attempt to stop the violent attack.

It was a short incident, over in a few seconds, and everyone involved disappeared. My last frame of it shows the medic being hurried away by the other officers. So far as I’m aware there were no arrests and no complaint made against the Police medic – whose number is clearly visible.

Although the demonstration was one against education cuts and the huge rise in tuition fees, the form that it took – on both the part of the students and police – was very much a reaction to the police’s “kettling” of the protest in Whitehall the previous week, part of a battle over the control of the streets, expressed in the loud chants by the students “Whose streets? OUR streets.” This incident was just one of many minor skirmishes in that turf war.

Had I been shooting video, the evidence would have been far clearer, but the still photograph I think provides a greater drama.

Photo-Off – A Guided Tour – 2

When I first walked down the rue Quincampoix some years ago it was lined with young (and some not so young) ladies who pouted invitingly at me as I went by, but now their place has been taken by art galleries, and the area has lost a little of it’s decadent charm.

In the basement of Galerie Impressions, below the bookshop, we were met by photographer Loïc Trujillo. The gallery is dedicated to work by Asian artists or those who have worked in Asia, and for the Photo-Off was showing his work ‘instants de vie‘, pictures from the holiest of Hindu cities, Vârânasi (Benares) on the Ganges.

Wealthy Hindus from all over the world bring there dead to be cremated on the slopes (ghats) by the river. Bodies are wrapped in cloth and bathed in the river before being burnt with wood on a funeral pyre. The morning after, the ashes are raked through to find any objects of value and then cerimonially scattered on the river with flower petas and other offerings. The sacred water of the Ganges is said to have the power to erase the sins of the deceased, liberating them from Samsara, the eternal cycle of reincarnation and allowing them to rest in peace for eternity.

Although I’ve seen other photographs and film of the events there, Trujillo’s work still impressed.

A little further down the street we came to ‘Someday we’ll all be free‘ at Gilles Peyroulet & Cie, a show of varied work around the theme of conflict and war, with images from more or less the whole of the twentieth century, where the curator took us through the whole show at some length. Although some of the work on display was of interest (and parts somewhat horrific, with one series of pictures showing a man undergoing barbaric torture, and also included were some official photographs of the Nazi concentration camps) I didn’t feel the show really produced anything coherent other than an easy condemnation of inhumanity.

Next we made our way to the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in the rue St Martin, opposite Beauborg itself, which was showing, Les (in)contrôlés, a group exhibition of work previously shown in the 2010 Liege Biennial on the theme (out of) control. This was the only one of the galleries that had made no arrangement for our visit, perhaps because it was a basically a show from elsewhere, but also possibly because none of the staff concerned with the exhibitions works on a Saturday. This is not a commercial gallery but some kind of official venue to promote the interests of French-speaking Belgium.

This wasn’t a show I particularly warmed to, and some of the work – such as the well over life-size female body-builders by Martin Schoeller (a German photographer who was an assistant to Annie Leibovitz in the 1990s before taking portraits for Rolling Stone, Vogue, the New Yorker and other magazines) I found repulsive, although in part that was because of the contrast – which fascinated the photographer – between their bodies and their faces.

Joyce Vlaming‘s series ‘Cellblock’ addressed the theme very directly, and her pictures, though in some senses very effective were just too cold and clinical to have much attraction for me. Perhaps too the chilling image by Nicolas Clément of a security guard and his guard do at night, ‘security Partagee‘ was just too direct an interpretation of the theme. I was certainly happier looking at the ‘autoportraits‘ by Melissa Desmet and the portraits of Patrick Van Roy.
‘Les Boules‘ by Nathalie Noël, pictures of glass domes encasing icons of traditional family values provided a little amusement, as too did the impossible situations of Tilman Peschel‘s ‘Revolution.’

Then it was back to the rue Quincampoix, or rather a courtyard off from it, for the Galerie Orel Art, a large space with a group show of Russian portrait photography from 1970-2010, with work by Nicolai Bakharev, Valery Schekoldin, Lialya Kuznetszova, Sergei Tchilikov, Oleg Kulik, Igor Mukhin, Sergey Leontiev, Igor Savchenko, Arsen Savadov, Sergey Maximishin, Olga Kisseleva, Evgeny Mokhorev, Vlad Mamyshev-Monroe, Valery Nistratov & Jason Eskenazi, Alla Esipovitch, Oleg Dou, Dasha Yastrebova, Irina Popova, Margo Ovcharenko and Tanya Leshkina. You can see the work of some of them on the Russian Tea Room site, as well as on the Orel Art site, which seems very slow to load. I was particularly impressed by the black and white work of Mukhin and Schekoldin from the 1970s and 80s, but much of the work was of interest.

Finally we made it to Le Nouveau Latina and an exhibition in the upstairs cafe lounge at this cinema in rue du Temple, where we were met by Dom Garcia who introduced us to ‘Black Lights’ his black and white portraits of his friends around the wall, accompanied by Olivier BKZ’s texts. You can get a good idea of Garcia’s work from a page on SDH. It was another show I enjoyed that unless I had gone on the guided walk I would probably have missed.

The Noveau Latina looked like a good place to have tea, but unfortunately we were short of time as we needed to go back to the hotel and change before going out to meet Linda’s brother and his wife for a meal. We had decided to pay another visit together to Chartier and had arranged to get there early to miss the large queues that build up later. Chartier has certainly gone down a bit since we first ate there years ago, but it’s still a part of Paris past not to be missed, even if our waiter did this year use a calculator. We walked straight in but by the time we had finished our meal and left to go elsewhere for a drink the queue stretched all the way down the street to the boulevard.

Photo-Off – A Guided Tour – 1

The Photo-OFF booklet, available at the roughly 100 spaces with shows in it, is a handy pocket size, but fairly thick, with well over 100 pages, and it divides the 100 shows into ten geographic areas. Unusually for Paris, these don’t correspond exactly with the arrondissements, but instead break up the shows into sensible groups mainly within walking distance – though in the outer areas you would probably want to jump on a bus or metro at times.

Except for the six shows in the ‘banlieue’ on the east and west fringe of the city, each area has a date specified as the ‘nuit parcours’, when most if not all are open specially from 6-9pm, often with the photographers present. Most of these were outside the time I was in Paris, and I had other things on for the two that were taking place while I was there to attend these.

This year for the first time there were also a guided walks for most of the areas (no booking required, just turn up), and two of these were taking place on the Saturday afternoon I was in Paris. These were not in the printed program but on the web site and the web version of the programme. Neil Atherton, an English phtoographer and curator who has lived in Paris for around ten years and founded Paris Photographique in 2004 was on the tour I took. He is the Commissaire General of the Mois de la Photo-OFF, and told me that this was an experiment, and the arrangements were made too late for the printed brochure.

About a dozen of us met at the ‘Coming Soon Gallery‘, a newly opened space in passage Lemoine between the rue St Denis and the Boulevard de Sebastapol at the top end of the 2e.

There we were able to look at the work of Swiss photographer Matthieu Gafsou, (b 1981), whose images of largely empty urban spaces appealed to me, and to hear him talk about his work – and although it was in French, I could make some sense of it, enough to ask a few questions in English, which he fortunately answered in the same language. You can watch a video interview in French with Frédéric de Gouville from the gallery and a with Matthieu Gafsou, which ends with the photograph which was my favourite from the show

Gafsou’s pictures combine reality – photographed on film – with elements constructed and added in Photoshop, and occasionally contain deliberate clues to remind the viewer of this intervention. His subject matter, largely architectural views of bland spaces around the industrial edges of towns, appealed to me, and some of the images were truly beautiful in a very cool and classical way, but I did find myself wishing that they had been straightforward photographs. It was a reflection of my conviction that photography is essentially a means of examining and exploring reality, while this was work at a more philosophical level, questioning the nature of reality. For me it came at the expense of jettisoning the essential power of the photographic medium, reducing it to simply a way of making pictures.

Our route took us to 8 of the 9 shows in the ‘Beaubourg‘ area (crossing the borders of the 2e, 3e and 4e) and in all but one we were met and introduced to the show by the gallery owner, photographer or, as in this first gallery both. It was truly an excellent way to see the work and to get rather more from the experience than would be likely on an individual visit, and it would certainly be good to include tours of this kind as a part of the East London photomonth.

Our next gallery was one I had particularly intended to visit, having been impressed two years ago by the work of Louise Narbo on show at Galerie Claire Corcia. She was again showing there, along with two other photographers, Sabria Biancuzzi and Vincent Descotils. Descotils was present to answer our questions, along with both Claire Corcia who spoke about the gallery and the work and Daniele Neumann Lumbroso who told me more about Descotils work in English.

Narbo’s work, pairs of colour images which resonated together, again impressed me, although I found it less interesting than her black and white work on my previous visit. You can see more about her on actuphoto.

Descotils was showing two sets of work, and ‘Migre‘, a very filmic series on migration – atmospheric black and white images, with a couple of people fleeing through a forest – had a tangible sense of urgency and fright and stood out for me. These photographs are also the inspiration for a performance at the gallery by ‘La Planquette des Animaux Humides‘ on 11 Dec which sounds exciting, though would certainly over-tax my French.

Our third visit was to the Galerie Riff in rue Chapon (a branch of the main gallery in Strasbourg), where the work of German photographer Andrej Pirrwitz (b 1963) was on display. These large colour prints were taken inside abandoned buildings, which also included a figure either in bright clothing or naked. Although I found a couple of these worked well, in others I simply found the person – sometimes blurred by movement – simply an annoying irrelevance. But then I’m always attracted to the kind of old abandoned interiors that were used in some of these pictures, perhaps former hospitals, factories or institutional buildings.

I spent some time while we were there – our schedule allowed 15-20 minutes for each gallery – looking through a book of Pirrwitz’s work, and as so often found it more suited to this format than the gallery wall.

(The guided walk is continued in the next post.)

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

Paris Street Photography Now

One of the more enterprising parts of the Mois del la Photo-OFF was the ‘Parcours Photographique‘ close to the Canal St Martin, with pictures from the recently published book ‘Street Photography Now‘ (see Photographers Social) displayed in shop windows in the streets around the Rue de Lancry. Many tourists will know the area for the lock and the Hotel du Nord just across the canal.

It’s an area I’ve photographed in on most of my visits to Paris, and for many years I’ve had a salted paper print of a street corner also just across the canal on my wall at home, and it has been published a few times too.

The 18 pictures in the show were displayed in the windows of 15 shops – fashion shops, cafes, a hairdresser, an art book shop, a gallery etc all within a few hundred yards of each other. The description on the Photo-Off brochure stating that this show was open “tous les jours 24h/24h” was unfortunately not correct, as we arrived before some of the shops were open and had to walk around a bit until some of the shutters were raised.

It was a nice idea, and certainly was good at raising interest, and there were several small groups of young photographers walking around searching for the pictures and taking photographs of them in the windows while we were there. This was much easier once we had collected the map for the shop from the Librarie Artazart on the Quai de Valmy.

The photographs for the show had in some cases been carefully chosen for the locations in which they were displayed, while others seemed rather arbitrary choices, presumably because there was no obviously suitable location. Some were displayed so that they could be easily seen, but others were made difficult to view because of the reflections in the windows, but of course the photographs I took exaggerate the problem.

I found it hard to concentrate on the photographs, because so often the streets themselves were rather more interesting. Many of the others going round were also carrying cameras and taking pictures, so the event was certainly promoting photography on the streets (though I’m unsure whether or not this is street photography.)

So as an event – and one that attracted some publicity in various magazines etc – it was certainly a success, but it would really have been nice to have a more conventional exhibition too. It’s perhaps a pity that they could not have used one of the galleries or empty shops in the area as well for this purpose. Of course that would have added costs – but also there is an inflexibility in the Photo-Off as exhibition ideas have to be submitted a long way in advance.

As we came to the end of the trail, there was even an event on the street for me to photograph. First I saw a group of men with drums and long trumpets emerging from the back of a van:

then, a few metres down the street, what looked like a party on its way to a wedding, but with only a bridegroom and no bride.

The two parties joined up and walked down the street to stand outside a doorway leading up to the housing above the shops, and started some music and dancing.

Three women’s heads came out of a third floor window to watch them, and after some more singing and dancing, a woman and child came down to the door to invite the party in. I decided it was time for me to leave them.

More pictures from our walk around the 10e and Street Photography Now as well as this event on My London Diary.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

Parcours Saint-Germain-des-Prés

I’ve rather gone off the Left Bank, which has changed almost beyond recognition since I first went there more than 40 years ago. Then it had the charm of seemingly hundreds of years of neglect. Now virtually every one of the old shops is a gallery or some other establishment catering largely for the tasteless over-moneyed. In between there are a few good galleries – including many of the more than 30 showing photographs that we looked into on our late afternoon walk around the area – most were staying open until 7pm. As well as the 31 in Photo Saint-Germain-Des-Prés there were also several with shows in the Mois de la Photo, though unfortunately several closed too early for us to do more than look through a window (and the hours given in the MdP booklet weren’t always accurate.)

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Depardon’s work on the Magnum stand at Paris Photo – the lower picture was my favourite from the show

We started at Magnum’s gallery just behind the former Abbey, which was showing pictures from two bodies of work by Raymond Depardon, a photographer whose work I’ve long admired. As well as the colour prints from La France de Raymond Depardon, there were also some black and white pictures from his ‘Errance‘. I was unimpressed by these – if anything they look slightly better in the book preview – and you can see 77 pictures in the album. I think the concept is too vague, and too few of the images really work for me (and those on show in Paris were not I think the best.) What they do of course show is Depardon’s interest in the urban environment, and that continues in the considerably more impressive colour work.

The Magnum page on the main exhibition of ‘La France’ which continues at the Bibliothèque nationale de France until 9 Jan 2011, has some curious difficulties, perhaps largely from translation. Here is a sample:

“The main features of Depardons full of empathy former works were the contrast effects of black and white photographs and the use of a dynamic depth of field. This time, he preferred frontality and the use of the photographic chamber, colour, and a soft, neutral and unique light. The photographer sometimes preferred landscapes to human beings; however, it is a way « to focus on human influence which modified landscapes throughout history. »”

The next paragraph starts by talking about the work on display as a “series of 36 very large silver prints.” Of course as anyone with any knowledge of photography can see from that link (which shows the 36 colour images) they are not silver prints at all. What I think they meant to say was that these are colour images taken on film using a large format camera.

I don’t know how they were printed, but I think it unlikely that Depardon actually polished the scans as they suggest, although he may well have worked on them considerably at the computer, and possibly not entirely to their benefit. The colour in all those I have seen is, to my eye, over-saturated, almost garishly so in a few of the prints at Magnum, although others were more realistic. I did find myself thinking while I looked at them that it might well have been a better show had he worked with digital!

His work is interesting, and very different to the view of France by Thibaut Cuisset I had seen a short while earlier, some of the pictures in which were also taken on the edges of urban areas. Depardon’s book too looked good, but far too heavy to carry, and the same was even more true of the volumes which Bruce Davidson was signing while we were there.

Our next stop was a cafe – I needed a beer and Linda would have liked a nice cup of tea, but this was France, so I think she settled for a coffee – like everything else round here rather on the expensive side. But then we pressed on.

Closer to the river on rue Bonaparte were two shows by photographers I’ve actually met, Eikoh Hosoe, seen above photographing in Poland (more pictures here) at Galerie Photo4, and Ralph Gibson at Galerie Lucie Weill & Seligmann next door, who made some generous comments when I showed him my work in London many years ago (including some of the pictures I later showed and put on the web as ‘Ideal Cafe, Cool Blondes and Paradise‘.) For me there was nothing new there, but it was good to see some of the work again. Gibson is a photographer who has rather gone out of fashion in the UK (and I think USA), probably now more regarded for his Lustrum Press rather than the actual pictures in books such as ‘Days At Sea‘ but he has remained rather bigger in France.

Another of the MdP shows was by Mac Adams, in Galerie Serge Aboukrat in place Furstemberg. Born in Wales but a US citizen, he is an artist whose photographic work I’ve never really appreciated, even when I can see his idea, visually it seldom seems to me to offer enough. This show didn’t help, though you can download a well-illustrated pdf from his site which is rather better.

Many of the other thirty or more galleries we visited – including some not listed on the ‘Parcours’ map – merited nothing more than a quick visit, but there were things of interest, including vintage work on Paris in the windows of Agence Roger-Viollet (I particularly liked an image of Delbord diving into the Seine with his bicycle as a part of the 1913 French diving championships on the Île des Cygnes – there is a larger version on Getty) and the surrealist images at Galerie les Yeux Fertiles. But there were also galleries full of rather stylized portraits and other work which while often technically excellent I failed to see much interest in, along with just a little of the kind of anaemic soft-porn that sometimes passes as art in France.

But at the end of our long and complicated walk we came to the Galerie Arcturus, showing Marc Riboud‘s ‘Icônes et Inconnues‘ and it was a joy to look at some of his great work. One image I don’t remember seeing before was of a street that could only have been in the north of England, taken in Leeds in 1954, a bowler hatted man in a raincoat with a stick struggling forward head down in the foreground while two women in coats and hats, one holding her shopping back chat in the road on the street corner, terraced houses leading down through the murk towards the gas holder.

By now – and perhaps more suitably for Leeds than Paris, it was cold and wet and we were in need of sustenance. Fortunately we’d come to the end of the parcours and we rushed to the Metro to get to a cheaper and more down to earth area.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

More Paris – French Landscapes

Finally I’d finished looking at Paris Photo, ending with another look at the BMW Prize pictures (and as usual I wouldn’t have chosen the same winner though I’ll save writing about it for another day) and then, right at the exit and rather more to my taste a show of work by Daido Moriyama along with a book including the same I was tempted by, but decided I didn’t want to have yet another thing to carry around with me. Leaving the show I emerged into the Jardin du Carrousel only to find myself surrounded by naked women.

Not of course in the flesh (apart from anything else it was a cold, dull day), but in bronze, a whole flock of sculptures by Aristide Maillol many surrounded by the small hedges of the formal garden. Apparently 18 of these large figures were placed there in the 1960s, thanks to André Malraux and the model for some of them, Maillol’s last model Dina Vierny. I had a few minutes to spare and wandered around photographing some of them as I made a wandering path out of the gardens of the Louvre towards the river.

I could have walked across the Pont Royal or the Pont du Carrousel, but decided to make my way alongside the river to the Pont des Arts, leading directly opposite to the Instutut De France, stopping on my way to take a few pictures. There were two police on horseback at the lower level on the Quai opposite, stationary and facing towards me across the river. They had bright blue jackets and were underneath a long line of trees with yellow leaves.

Not really my kind of picture, but I thought I’d give it a try anyway, wondering if I could make it work. The Seine is pretty wide here and the longest lens I had for the D700 was a Sigma 24-70mm f2.8, so those blue jackets would be fairly small on the image. I took a frame, then realised it would be better to use a slower ISO to get more detail.

It was fairly dull and I hadn’t bothered to alter the ISO from the 1600 I had been using inside Paris Photo, but I now set it to ISO 320 (though as I had an exposure bias of -2/3 stop I suppose it was truly ISO 500.) Everything in the picture that needed to be sharp was on the other side of the river, so I hardly needed much depth of field, but I wanted to use the lens around its optimum aperture for sharpness. The lens isn’t pin sharp wide open, but its pretty good at f4, and although I’ve not tested it, will start to lose sharpness through diffraction probably at anything smaller than f8. I settled for f5, which gave me a shutter speed of 1/100. At 70mm I would expect to hold the lens steady at that, especially as I was leaning on a small wall to take the picture.

It doesn’t work at the size it is on this blog, though if you open it in its own window in your browser (in Firefox, right click and select ‘view image’) you can just about make out that there is some blue there, but on a large print it does, or at least in the one frame where the two men are both looking directly at me. Some pictures do need to be fairly large, though I’d spent quite a lot of time in the exhibition hall earlier thinking many of the large large colour images there would look better very much smaller.

But I think some of the other pictures I took as I wandered along are better, despite needed rather less thinking about from a technical point of view, although they are unlikely ever to end up as being more than a picture on a birthday card from us.

Campagne française – Fragments

My destination in the Institut opposite was a landscape show, Thibaut Cuisset‘s Campagne française – Fragments, which according to the Mois de la Photo programme ended on 17 Nov, but was actually continuing until 21 Nov. The show included 40 of his pictures and most of them are on the web site.

They are quiet and precise views, avoiding the kind of drama or anecdote that characterises much landscape work. They are in a way typical views, images that attempt to show the essence of the place. As the notes on the pictures state, “il ne cherche pas le scoop optique” and there is nothing false or forced. The colours are natural and accurate (or at least appear so), the lighting flat. The subject, the French countryside is clearly shown as it is, it’s nature shaped by the work and actions of its inhabitants.

Cuisset has photographed in countries around the world over more than 20 years – and on the Filles du Calvaire site you can see work from Japan, Turkey, Corsica, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Australia and Syria as well as France.

Perhaps what I found most surprising is that work that is as quiet and considered as this was the product of the winner of a major prize, the Prix Photo 2009 de lAcadémie des Beaux-Arts, produced with the aid of its 15,000 Euros. It seems to me that his work is very much the kind of work that could and probably would be overlooked or dismissed were it being produced by someone outside the charmed circle of the art establishment.

I’m not generally a great fan of landscape photography – too often it seems to attract photographers whose idea of creativity is to use a graduated tobacco filter and turn up the saturation beyond belief, or large-format clones of St Ansel without his originality or talent. But Cuisset shows that it can be done sensitively and well – and still be recognised, at least by the French establishment.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

Paris Photo – Lab East

It was thanks to Teresa from Blurb that I was invited to the book launch of ‘Lab East‘ at the Lumen Gallery stand in Paris Photo. Lab East, a roughly seven inch square slab of 260 or so pages, “printed with the friendly support of blurb, the creative publishing platform” is I think an important work in several respects. Edited by Horst Kloever of photeur.net, it presents “30 photographic positions fron Central and Eastern Europe“, work by young photographers – all born in the 1970s and 80s – few of whom will be known outside their own countries, although there were one or two photographs I recognised, and a number of those included have worked or studied in the west.

One of those included is Bevis Fusha from Albania, who I got to know when we both showed work at the first FotoArt Festival in Bielsko-Biala, Poland in 2005, and whose work I’ve written briefly about on several occasions, and it was good to see his black and white images exploring the antagonistic aspects of the ‘Supermodel of the World’ annual competition in Tirana. Although there were half a dozen of the photographers there for the book signing, unfortunately he wasn’t among them.

I don’t entirely agree with the forward by Walter Keller, the organiser of the Labor Ost show in Zurich in May 2010 and was an important advisor for this book (the show included many of the same images.) Perhaps there are countries where “a dense net of art schools, supporting foundations, photo museums, commercial galleries and curators all merge into a promotional engine of high energy, making it almost impossible for a young photographer not to be discovered“, but I certainly don’t live in one. It seems to me that most photography of interest in the UK arises outside of any such system and probably only a small proportion is actually devoured by it. But the UK has a particular inbred cultural aversion to photography, or rather photography as art, and things are perhaps different in Switzerland.

But what is obvious is that although most of these photographers were still in school or kindergarten when the Berlin Wall fell 31 years ago, photography still has to seriously address its own Iron Curtain. This book, like this year’s Paris Photo, is one small step in that direction.

However the very richness of the work on display in this book – and to be found elsewhere across the former Soviet empire – surely owes something to the importance placed on culture and cultural organisations during those years – and which in turn stimulated vital dissident work. These artists grew up in more fertile soil than that provided by McDonalds and MTV.

Reading through the short biographies traces of this still exist – for example I learn that Pawel Bownik “received a scholarship from the polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in 2008.” Here our governments give money to people who can run, jump, swim, throw, row or sail instead.

Latvian photographer Arnis Balcus, who took his MA in photography in London after after studying communications in Riga, addresses the Soviet past, or rather the ‘Collective Amnesia’ around it in his pictures which, by fortuitous alphabetism, start the book. His image of a young man in military uniform sitting on a rough bench outside a dreary and run-down block of flats, another identical in the distance, grass overlong and pushing up through the cracks in the pavement seems to me truly an archetypal post-Soviet image.

To go through all 30 of the photographers in this book would take me until Christmas, and I’ve other things to do. You can order it from Blurb and it will cost you £31.47 plus postage; not cheap, but perhaps someone will give it you for a Chrismas present? You can see 69 pages on the preview there, including some of the work I found most interesting, for example by Krisztina Erdei from Hungary, whose work was on display at the Lumen stand (she is a founder and curator of that gallery and foundation.)

This is a book I intend to return to from time to time, and perhaps write a little about some of the others included in it. I can’t say that I like every work in it, but certainly a much higher proportion than on the walls of Paris Photo hold some interest for me.

But this book is also important in that it is a part of the new photographic publishing, through Blurb (and perhaps also other print on demand services, though at the moment Blurb seems clearly to be in the lead.) Although print on demand will still remain as a cheap way for anyone to produce personal books for themselves, friends and family, increasingly it is becoming the way that serious photographic books – such as this – will reach their audience. The Blurb London Pop-Up – in which I took part in, and it also had a ‘Magnum‘ day – and their ‘Photography Book Now‘ contest and even my own Blurb books are all a part of this (and might solve those Xmas present problems too:-))

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

Paris: Wandering in the 20e

Paris has a number of ‘garden villages’ and one that I’ve visited several times is close to the eastern edge of the 20e, close to the Porte de Bagnolet on a small hill, reached on foot from the south by a long flight of steps made of rather rustic concrete. It’s really just a couple of tightly packed streets tightly packed with small villa type houses, which undoubtedly have a certain charm and period detail.

This small area was developed by a cooperative called La Campagne à Paris (the countryside in Paris) from 1907-1926 with around 90 closely packed houses with differing designs, from different architects, except for the more vernacular that just had builders, with small and often flower-filled front gardens (though some are now converted to give access to garages in what were presumably built as their wine cellars.) It comes as a surprise to find such an essentially car-free cobbled rural street in Paris.

Beyond it is an area more typical of the outer areas of Paris, mainly distinguished by a whole rash of streets named after people killed in aeronautical accidents.

We continued our stroll westwards walking through some familiar alleys and streets, including some we had visited following Willy Ronis’s favourite trail a couple of years ago. There was an alternative big photographic event taking place at ‘La Bellevilloise’ all weekend, but I just didn’t have the time to visit it.

On the Rue des Pyrenees the Bistrot / Brasserie where we had a fine lunch two years earlier had changed considerably – so much that it took us a few minutes to be sure it was really the same place. It was still a café and we were hungry, so we went in and had a meal, but it was rather a disappointment.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

Paris Party

Lensculture is one of the best photographic web sites around, and Jim Casper publishes some great interviews and sets of work, and gets to know some of the most interesting people in photography from around the world. Quite a few of them were in Paris last week for Paris Photo, and quite a few were at a great party given by Jim and Millie in their flat on the rue Saint Antoine, where the champagne was flowing freely and, once I started taking pictures my shutter too.

So thanks to everyone – and Jim and Millie in particular for the invitation as well as all the others I talked to, including Joanne, Damian, Xavier, Vee, Ute, Mike, Ed, and all the others. If you are in the pictures I hope you like them, and if I missed you I apologise, but you may be pleased. Here are just a few, and I’ll put up rather more in a few days on My London Diary.
© 2010, Peter Marshall
You can see the rue St Antoine through the window

Technically all these were straightforward. All with the D700 and 20mm f2.8 Nikon, everything auto using program setting at ISO 3200, which gave exposures from mostly from 1/15 f2.8 – 1/60 f4 depenidng on the room lighting and exactly where people were standing. One or two were a stop or two underexposed. I doubt if you will notice from these small images, but I used rather stronger luminance noise reduction than I normally do when processing these images in Lightroom (I’m using Release Candidate 3.3 which seems fine apart from a few quirks in File Import, which also likes to crash occasionally) and although it significantly lowers the noise, it ends up with sometimes giving skin a slightly plastic look.

It’s something that I’ve seen too on some high-end digital images – including some of the large Brian Griffin pictures I was looking at earlier before coming to the party, which were taken on a Leica S2, £25,000 worth of kit loaned him by Leica. I wonder if it really is how skin looks, at least under certain lighting conditions, but that we are so used to seeing it with film grain that our mind demands something with a little more visual tooth?

As often when photographing by available light, rooms often contain light sources with differing colour temperature, and many low energy lights in particular are pretty discontinuous sources, with big spikes in their spectral distribution as well as some fairly empty areas. The Nikon auto white balance setting usually takes a decent stab, but there is no perfect solution. Almost always if you use a neutral gray to balance the image it ends up looking too cold, and you need to add a little warmth by increasing the colour temperature – perhaps from 2400K to 2650K. It’s then generally necessary to remove a little magenta. But always the important thing is to try and getting the skin tones look healthy, if not necessarily accurate.

In situations like this, working with colour film would have been pretty much impossible, and I would have shot on black and white, probably either pushing Tri-X to its limits or perhaps these days Ilford Delta 3200. But digital makes colour at least reasonably usable.

I was sorry that I had to leave the party early – at around 11.30 when things were just beginning to really get going. But our hotel was rather a long way to walk if we missed the last metro.

More pictures on My London Diary.