>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Brian Griffin – The Black Country

One of the more exciting events of the month – but outside Paris Photo, the Mois de la Photo and the Photo-Off as it was apparently planned too late to be included – was the latest show of work by Brian Griffin, The Black Country, in the superb setting of the recently renovated 13th century College des Bernadins on the Left Bank of Paris in the 5e. The building is a splendid old religious building and Brian’s show was in its former sacristy, the place where the vestments, sacred vessels, and other treasures were kept. It was a building of impressive size and height and a fine setting for his work.

The Black Country is a work that goes back to Brian’s roots, and to the town were he grew up, Lye, in the Black Country around the north and west of Birmingham. The area got its name from the coal seams close to the surface, and together with iron ore, limestone and clay this made it one of the powerhouses of our first Industrial Revolution. The particular specialities of the region were the making of nails and chains, and Lye itself was “the bucket capital of the world” and there were also brickworks and galvanising plants. The work was heavy and dirty. Many like his father worked in filthy jobs, inhaling dust and other pollutants, absorbing toxic materials through their lungs and their skins. Brian’s father retired in 1983 and died within 18 months, worn out and poisoned by a lifetime of poorly paid factory labour.

Brian’s mother Edith too had a hard life. Her mother had died giving birth when she was only seven and she had been left to care for her younger sister. She worked at a factory a short walk from where they lived, packing nails in boxes and making tea. They lived in a two-up two-down terraced house in a short cul-de-sac, in an area surrounded by factories. Although they had no running hot water, their house was unusual in having an inside toilet, rather than having to go out into the yard at the back. But bath night meant boiling kettle after kettle to fill a small galvanised iron bath with perhaps three inches of water, before each member of the family got in and washed themselves in turn. Brian was lucky as he got first turn. The landlord of their rented home refused to make any improvements or even do repairs to the property.

Brian was the only kid in the area who passed his eleven plus; while everyone else went to the local Secondary Mod he went to Halesowen Technical School. But he had to leave and go out to work as soon as he was old enough. He was working in a factory in Lye when the foreman suggested he join the local camera club, and although he didn’t have any real interest in photography he did so. Three years later, after a girlfriend had left him, he wanted to escape from everything he knew and applied to photographic colleges as a full time student just to get away from Lye and everything he had known. Despite the fact that his pictures then were – as he says – “dreadful and displayed little talent” he was accepted.

The Black Country is an intensely personal project, inspired by the people that he knew in those early years and the experiences of life in Lye. Among those present at the opening was one of his oldest friends, a man from there, and during Brian’s speech they had a short exchange in the Black County dialect that would have defied most of the English speakers present, let alone the French.

Some of the people in the images, most of which were made on location, are from the Black Country, while a few others were carefully cast for studio portraits based on people he knew who are now dead. Brian works as a part of a team, and liberally acknowledged the contributions made to the project by his assistant, his stylist, printers and others.

For me the strongest image was based on the Gunpowder Plot which fascinated the young Brian as the conspirators met just a few miles away and it’s mastermind, Robert Catesby was arrested not far away. The image was made in the Boro foundry where his father had his final job before retirement and the man on the left is Dennis Norton, the son of the man who employed him and who has now taken over as chairman and managing director of the firm. It’s a powerful and classic group image, based on a painting ‘Cardsharps’ by Caravaggio, with Catesby played by Steve Goldby, who has blogged about it, and the figure at the right is actor Callum Coates as the Earl Of Dudley, the landowner of much of the Black Country.

Another striking image shows a young woman as a foundry worker, holding a red hot chain link in tongs. The glowing link on her chain is echoed by a similar shape in her red hair, a small touch which really makes the image far more striking, and suggested by the stylist. The young woman was actually a worker in the factory, although not I think normally doing this particular job, and apparently before the shoot had always kept her hair combed straight down, but was rather taken by the effect.

Another strong group image from the foundry shows a group of men making the chain. For me this show had a personal involvement by Brian that made it stronger than some of his other projects, but it also illuminated some of his earlier work. Included in the show were some of the portraits he made of workers at Broadgate shortly after the death of his father – and as he writes, “I photographed the men like knights lying in a cathedral with their swords.” His background (which in some respects is similar to my own) goes a long way to explain the empathy that he showed to the workers in his work on projects such as the Channel Tunnel rail link, and perhaps also a certain ruthlessness in some of his images of management.

You can see more pictures of the show and the opening on Facebook, and I’ll put more up on My London Diary shortly. In the meantime here are a couple more of my favourites from the opening. There were a couple of speeches in French, but as I expected Brian gave his usual fine performance, though parts of it proved tricky for his interpreter, and it was a more distinguished audience than most UK openings. I think this is his first major show in France (and he is one of those photographers who I think was entirely missing from Paris Photo) and it should do much to increase his reputation here.

I did find it slightly difficult to take photos holding a glass of champagne, though after several it seemed to get easier. The light level wasn’t too high in the sacristy, and I was glad I was using f2.8 lenses – the 20mm and Sigma 24-70 on the D700. Faster lenses wouldn’t have helped a great deal as most of the time I needed the depth of field, but it was good being able to work at ISO 3200 and know the results after processing would be fine. I did take a couple with flash as insurance, but the available light was so much better and of course less intrusive.

It was a very nice event, and a great show, and I was sorry to rather rush off when the official business was over (particularly as I could have had dinner) but Paris in November is a busy place and I had a party to attend!

More pictures on My London Diary.

Thursday Afternoon in Paris 3e

I’d chosen to meet Linda for lunch at the metro Filles du Calvaire so we could start our walk at the gallery of the same name, and for once our trains arrived from different directions at the same time and I shouted her name across the tracks. A short walk away we found a decent but not exciting café for the plat du jour and a beer.

One of the pictures I took in Paris 3e between visiting shows – more below

The Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire was showing the work shortlisted for the 2010 Prix Pictet on the theme of ‘Growth’ which I mentioned in a previous post. Actually seeing the work for real rather than on the web did little to change my prejudices expressed then, except that I was rather more impressed by one of Edward Burtynsky‘s images. He is one of relatively few photographers where the large scale of the print is often vital to the appreciation of his work, although his largish images were relatively small compared to some of the other works on display as you can see from the gallery view. But whereas some of those larger works actually look better on the web – and you can see them on the Prix Pictet site – than they do on the wall, with his Highway #5, a mere 121.92 x 152.4cm is really necessary to do justice to the detailed nature of his work. Had I been asked to vote on the day from solely the evidence on the wall, this picture would have been my choice.

The rue des Filles du Calvaire leads on directly to the rue Veille du Temple which was studded with photography shows, including a number outside the MdP and the PhotoOFF. Most of them didn’t detain us long, a short walk around or in some cases even a look through the window was enough to convince us that they were not our kind of thing. But you can look at the work of Bertrand Flachot, Frédéric Chaubin and (in nearby rue Charlot) Arno Lam from the Photo-OFF and make your own judgement. If you think photographs are improved by scribbling on them, or that naked woman in landscape = art you may like the first two, while Lam’s work rather reminds me or some scientific photography of specimens undergoing stress tests. Some of Chaubin’s other work does seem to be a great deal more interesting that this and these three shows were of rather more interest than several that we walked past.

By the time we got to the Instituto cultural de México I was beginning to lose the will to live but Ombre Et Lumière there revived me. Subtitled PHOTOGRAPHIE MODERNE MEXICAINE this show featured work mainly from the 1930s by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Agustín Jiménez et Luis Márquez. Bravo has long been one of my favourite photographers and it was good to see a fine selection of his work. Jiménez and Márquez were very much photographers of the period but beside him seem rather shallow, making pictures that are often somewhat clever but, with one or two exceptions, not profound.

The next good show we found was around the corner in rue Perche, New York Promenade – USA Underground at Galerie David Guirand. It was an enjoyable show, and you can read a good write-up in English on Actuphoto; this enjoyable show was one of a number in Paris (I was told around 50) which included work on loan from the extensive collection of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie.

A few yards down the road was La Galerie Particuliere with ‘We Are Watching You’ including work from two projects by Michael Wolf, large blowups of found images from Google in Paris Street View and also Tokyo Compression. You can see a more extensive selection of work from his two Street View projects and the Tokyo piece, which shows people suffering from poor air quality in cars on his web site, and again I think this is work that hardly benefits – if at all – from the large prints on show. I would certainly have preferred perhaps two or three times as many smaller images.

The next show of interest we came to was a short walk away in Galerie Sinitude, where Andoche Praudel was showing his series Les champs de batailles – panoramic views of battlefields around Europe, including Glencoe, Waterloo, Agincourt in the Photo-OFF. Also in the gallery were ceramic objects by Praudel, some of which bore some resemblance to cannonballs but with intriguing texture and decoration. However it was the photographs that interested me more, quiet scenes, sometimes with a certain air of malice, nicely printed on large sheets of cotton rag paper. It was an intriguing show, and the images had an unforced quality quite at odds with much I had seen earlier in the day at PP.

Praudel works with an Art Panorama 240, a similar camera to the Art Panorama 170, made in Japan and giving three 6x24cm negatives on 120 format film. The 240 is normally used with a 105mm lens giving a rectilinear image with a horizontal angle of view of just under 100 degrees, around the practical maximum for rectilinear perspective.

The prints were around 50 by 200cm and appeared to be inkjet prints made on to uncoated traditionally made Japanese Washi paper made from Kozo, the most commonly used wood for the process. They have a slightly less bright and less saturated appearance than prints on the coated matte rag or baryta papers used for most gallery prints.

By now it was getting a little late and the light was beginning to fade as we came to the final show of the afternoon, which was also a highlight. This was in the fine mansion of l’Hotel de Sauroy on the rue Charlot, and was a travel show with a difference, part of the MdP. Nous avons fait un tres beau voyage which included prints by Jacques Borgetto, Françoise Nuñez (from the Galerie Camera Obscura), Bernard Plossu (from the Maison Européenne de la Photographie) and Sophie Zénon. All of these are interesting photographers, but it was particularly the work of Plossu that caught my attention.

More pictures on My London Diary.

Thoughts on Paris Photo

There is no doubt that for a month every two years Paris is the centre of the world of photography, and at its centre is Paris Photo (PP), the largest annual trade fair for dealers and collectors, with this year over 38,000 visitors and some outstanding sales, particularly for work by photographers who were also showing in major galleries as a part of the Mois de la Photo (MdP). As well as the two Sudeks mentioned in my previous report, the PP press release also records a number of other large sales, with Edwynn Houk from NY selling a Moholy-Nagy print for 265,000 US dollars. Other work with a central European connection also sold well, with Budapest’s Vintage Gallery making sales of 22 prints with a total value of 58,000 Euros (). Other high prices for older works included the entire (and rather boring) collection of images from a 1931 colonial exhibition held in Paris, bought by a Paris museum for more than 100,000 and a self-portrait by Man Ray which sold for 75,000. Hamiltons Gallery from London sold what I’ve always regarded as a spectacularly ugly image by Horst P Horst, his ‘Mainbocher Corset’ for 150,000 USD.

More recent work too seems to have sold well, although I think that some of the buyers may be regretting the high prices they paid for some of the pieces in a few years time. But there is certainly a lot of money around for a few people in photography, and New York’s Yossi Milo (one of the more interesting contemporary galleries) reported sales of 40 prints at 6-10,000 each. The gallery representing Hungarian Gábor Ösz who was the winner of the 2010 BMW-Paris Photo Prize, Loevenbruck from Paris, sold four of his pictures at 20,000 a time.

There were also good sales of some high priced collectors books, both rare vintage items and at least one of the kind of high price limited editions which I think are one aspect of the future of photographic publishing (when most more normally priced books switch to e-books and print on demand), ‘What Man is really like’ by Rachel Whiteread, (with story by Ingo Schulze and layout and case by Naoto Fukasawa) with 20 copies (half the edition) selling for 7,000 each though that does include 11 rather ordinary signed colour prints. It was a book that had it been remaindered at a tenner I would probably have looked at and put back on the pile. One gallery with some rather more desirable vintage books on its stand was rather less fortunate in that an expensive volume was stolen on the opening night.

Although PP is important, and it is an incredible treasure house for those of us with an interest in the history of photography as well as showing a considerable range of contemporary work, it is important to keep in mind that everything there represents a particular viewpoint on the medium. PP holds up a very distorted mirror to photography, and many great photographers of the past are missing simply because they made few prints, and most of those are already in museum collections. There are many from the more recent past, and many living photographers who have either chosen to work outside the galleries or, for various reasons, have not been taken up by them. And when it comes to contemporary work, the selection on view is very much a matter of current fashion.

This year it was particularly useful in the emphasis that it put on photography from Central Europe, but even this was a rather dim searchlight that only penetrated into a few shadows. Three years ago I was presented a book published by the Association of Polish Art Photographers, ZPAF, ‘Polish Photography in the 20th Century‘ and including the work of around a hundred photographers, beginning with Edmund Osterloff, born in 1863 and ending with Pawel Zak, born in 1965. All seem from the one or two images in the book to have been as interesting as some more familiar names whose work was in PP, but I think only Stanislaw Ignacy Wietkiewicz, Jerzy Lewczynski, Zofia Rydet, Zofia Kulik and Bogdan Konopka were shown at PP, along with some younger Polish photographers, including those on the ZPAF i S-ka Gallery stand. There really is a great deal more to be found – and I think this is likely to be true of all Central European countries.

And of course not just those. Even for England – one of the two countries which saw the birth of the medium – the coverage is very patchy. I could have done a similar exercise with, for example, Photographers’ London, 1839-1945.

Any view of the history of photography will always be the product of a particular bias, and at the moment the two major aspects from which photography is viewed are those of academia and the art dealers. Both are very much centred in the USA, and both have over-emphasised the very considerable role of US photographers in twentieth century photography. We are still at the early stages so far as expanding both views, both with photography entering the art market world wide – and there were galleries from 26 countries at PP, 7 for the first time: Canada, Iceland, Luxembourg, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia, and only 16 of the 91 were actually from the USA (21 were from the host country, France) and photography gaining greater acceptance in the academic world of art around the globe.

Even in Paris, the real heart of photography isn’t in PP but in the many other shows scattered around the capital. Its at these, shows in the MdP, the Photo-OFF and many others that the real interest lies.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO SUPPLEMENT is now on MY LONDON DIARY

Paris Photos Day 2

Paris rises every morning a divided city, with workers rushing around in the early hours emptying rubbish bins and other useful work but many shops and other businesses not opening until 11am, Paris Photo (PP) among them.

Fortunately my hotel room was pretty quiet and I slept every morning until 8am or later, but that still meant that after showering and having breakfast I had some free time before I could resume work at the Carrousel du Louvre, and I had time to wander a little and take some pictures.

So on Thursday morning I took a leisurely walk that took me across the 9e and 10e and through some of my favourite Paris arcades, leading me to the Jardin du Palais Royal and then on to PP, arriving just in time to walk past the long queue building up for tickets and into the exhibition halls just as it opened. There are definite advantages to press accreditation, and not just the cost, though a VIP pass would be even better!

It was also a useful walk for Linda, who called in at a hardware store on the rue Cadet and found exactly the rotary grater she had been searching for months without success in England. In France they still cook rather than stick prepared meals in the microwave.

In PP, my immediate destination was the toilets, where I found a man taking a picture of himself in the mirrors, and having photographed him I took a picture of myself too – on My London Diary later.

Then it was down to the real business, and I started on the central block of stands in the Salle le Notre. All of the galleries had some work of interest, but one that stood out for me was Bruce Silverstein, with a fine set of pictures by Robert Doisneau. I was specially pleased to see a set of four images from a taken from inside the gallery with a painting of a nude woman displaying her ample derrière, the best-known of which, usually called ‘Sidelong glance‘ shows a man and wife, she talking animatedly about the picture in front of her which we can’t see while his attention is clearly drawn to the nude. My favourite of the others was of a gendarme pretending not to be looking at those curves; it’s an image I have seen before, but it was good to see them again together, along with a good number – perhaps 20 prints in all of other images by the photographer, a mixture of familiar favourites and some I don’t think I had seen before.

With so much big bad colour on show at some of the stands (there does seem to be something of a rule that the bigger pictures are the more likely they are to be hideous) it was a delight to come across the little precise observations of Jessica Backhaus at the Robert Morat gallery from Hamburg. Backhaus grew up in Berlin, studied photography in Paris where she made friends with Gisèle Freund, and now lives in New York. Her series “What still remains” which she started in 2006 “explores the question why forgotten or abandoned things turn up in certain places and how they seem to develop a life of their own.” These prints, roughly 11×14″ are obviously both taken and printed with a great deal of care and feeling and have an intimacy with the things and places they depict. The colour is natural, with normal saturation (a fairly rare thing in PP) and the printing just sings a true and beautiful tone.

Magnum‘s display I found disappointing. Not that there were not some fine images – for example by Bruce Davidson – but that it was just too bitty, and some pictures, both old and new work, were I felt not well printed.

Perhaps the most interesting pictures for me were two of the three prints by Raymond Depardon, from his La France (you can see 5 minute film in which he talks in French about the project as the images slide slowly by on the BnF web site.)

I stopped off at the Purdy Hicks stand to take another look at the two large images by Tom Hunter from his Unheralded Stories. One that I was familiar with was Anchor and Hope (2009) taken on Walthamstow marshes looking across the Lea Navigation towards that Fullers house in Upper Clapton, and based on one of my least favourite paintings, the 1948 Christina’s World by US painter Andrew Wyeth, while The Death of Coltelli (2009,) also on show, is based on a detail from a painting by Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus, hanging in the Louvre just a few yards away. Hunter has chosen just one figure from the chaos in the painting, the king’s mistress, arms stretched out apparently unconscious at the feet of the king who sits up on his bed apparently unmoved by murders and other violent activity around him as the massacre he ordered of his women, slaves and horses takes place before he by his own choice is to be burnt to death on a sacrificial pyre.

Hunter’s picture, charming though it is, takes the pose of the woman and little else, setting her in a quiet domestic bedroom, looked down on by a photographic portrait of an elderly woman, a plaster religious statue, two framed religious images and a few other knick-nacks. Her eyes are open and she looks fairly unconcerned in what is a mildly erotic image with some rich colour.

Minutes later in the Salle Delorme, I found myself standing in front of another photographic reprise of Christina’s World, this time on the Beaumontpublic stand and by Dutch photographer Ellen Kooi. Although I like much of Kooi’s work – and she is a photographer who like me has a great interest in panoramas – I found her take on Wyeth less interesting (and I think there is another version on her own site.) Of course that could be because of my particular interest in the Lea, having just produced a book about it. And although I like Hunter’s image, I couldn’t for long live with grass that was such an intense blue-green – really on Walthamstow Marsh it never looks like that.

I haven’t mentioned so far the particular focus of this year’s PP on photography from Central Europe. Some of it I’ll write about in a later post on a book launch I attended the following day, and other aspects were already so familiar to me – the work of people like Sudek, Funke, Rossler and the great Hungarian exodus which took Kertesz, Brassai, Moholy-Nagy and others west and others are already so familiar that the show told me nothing new. Others I felt were very poorly represented here, including a number I’ve met and written about such as Antanas Sutkus from Lithuania.

There were three of the galleries exhibiting as a part of ‘Statement’ on Central Europe that particularly interest me. One was Galeria ZPAF from Krakow (The Association of Polish Art Photographers, web site in Polish), the which I’ll write about when I’ve had time to have a good look at the CD they gave me. A second was Lumen Gallery from Budapest, and you can read about their show at Paris Photo on their site, but I’ll mention them again in a post about the book launch there on Friday, and the third was another Hungarian gallery, Zsofia Faur. The work that most impressed me on their stand was by Anna Fabricius, on her web site as ‘Tigress of Housekeeping.’ There was only room on the stand for 8 of the nine pictures from this series which were displayed as large colour prints. Although these were fine, I still felt it looked better and was better suited to the presentation in the book of her work.

Finally for this post, I’d like to mention my favourite print of all those I saw at Paris Photo, on the Johannes Faber stand. It was a pigment print made by Josef Sudek, Three glasses (1951) unfortunately not shown on their web site. One tall glass in the centre of the image is half full of a dark beer and there are empty foam-stained smaller glasses in front and behind. It is a dark image, one that I don’t think I’ve seen before and that doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the web. If I had a spare 48,000 Euros I might have considered buying it. There were other Sudek images in the show – including two more on this stand, but compared to this they were ordinary (and some rather poor, probably proof prints.) While PP was taking place, Sotheby’s were running a photography auction in Paris, where one Sudek print sold for 300,750 Euros (the estimate was 18-23,000) and another for 228,750 (estimate 14-18,000) and this was in my opinion a rather better image. So it could have been a bargain.

But by this time my feet were getting tired and it was time to meet Linda for a rather late lunch in a cafe near Filles de Calvaire, from where I’ll take up my Paris wanderings in another post.

More pictures now on My London Diary.

Paris Day One

Our Eurostar train got through London from St Pancras at an impressive lick and soon we were at Thurrock before diving down under the Thames to stop at Ebbsfleet. Where almost every passenger probably looked out of the window and said “Where the hell is this?” as we stopped in a deserted station. But soon it was on its way, sweeping across the Medway and on, and we were in the tunnel and arriving in France before I’d had time to finish my sandwiches and the small bottle of red wine I’d taken for the journey.

Getting to Paris took a little longer, but we were pulling into the Gare du Nord just around 138 minutes after leaving St Pancras, a couple of minutes early, and hurrying along to the RATP ticket office to get ourselves a Navigo Découverte card which would carry us around Paris on buses and Metro for what seemed a rather small sum for those accustomed to London fares. So my next significant photograph was a rather small – 25x30mm one of myself, which I slid across the counter and was then attached to a card in a thin plastic sleeve.

Once you’ve paid 5 euros for the card, you can charge it with a week’s travel across the city of around 18 euros. Unlike London’s Oyster card there are no arcane regulations, although it is less flexible in that the weekly season can only run from Monday to Sunday, and you can only buy it up to Wednesday in any week. But all in all it’s a much better system.

We didn’t need the Navigo to get to our hotel – it was just a short walk – but I wanted to rush off for Paris Photo as soon as we had booked in. This took a little longer than expected as when we arrived we were taken a quarter of a mile to another hotel for our first night as maintenance work meant our room would not be ready until the following day. Fortunately the new hotel was equally close to the metro and soon we were able to rush out to take the train to Paris Photo (PP).

PP takes place in a subterranean shopping and conference centre, Le Carrousel du Louvre, underneath the Louvre and the Jardin du Carrousel. Two short escalators take you down from street level on the rue du Rivoli or you can exit directly from the line 1 Metro station and walk a couple of hundred yards to the show. From the ticket hall you enter into a central area which includes a number of smaller stalls for publishers, a cloakroom, a bar area, offices and a small exhibition area as well as a stand featuring a BMW or two – BMW are the major sponsors of the show. They provide the money for the BMW-Paris Photo Prize, the short-listed entries for which are up some wide steps on a mezzanine floor above the rear of the central area.

Off three sides of the central area are three exhibition halls with the stand of the various galleries and larger publishers taking part. The stands vary in size, and even more in the number of photographs on show, with some having only a few mural size images and others being crammed with much smaller work – even done to some showing small contact prints.

The only way I can cope with such a huge show – 106 exhibitors from 25 countries – is to approach it in a systematic way, working around the 3 major exhibition halls. I started during the press launch and opening on Wednesday by working around the outer stands of the Salle Le Notre, then moving on to the outside of the Salle Soufflot and finishing with a part of the outside of the Salle Delorme, and coming back in later days to finish the circuit and do the inner blocks of each room. It was the only way I could be sure of seeing everything.

Of course some stands did not detain me long. Many had work that either did not interest me, or that I was already very familiar with. It is sometimes nice to see work you really like “in the flesh” like the Kertesz image Martinique (on the Stephen Daiter Gallery stand and later I found it elsewhere) I’ve written about at some length from its reproduction, though just occasionally the experience can be disappointing, but I’m really more interested in discovering new work that excites me.

Another of the good things about PP is that virtually everyone seems quite happy with people taking pictures of the pictures, unlike many museum and gallery shows – though the only place I went to during the six days I was in Paris where photography was explicitly banned was the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), though with almost everyone now carrying a camera-phone such bans are virtually impossible to enforce.

One thing that struck me on that first night – and a partial look at PP, was there number of pictures by Bernard Plossu, with a particularly nice set on the stand of Galerie Le Réverbère, Lyon. Plossu is a French photographer whose work has long interested me, and I have a couple of his books including perhaps his best work, ‘New Mexico’. There is a large amount of his work on the ‘documentsdartistes’ web site – click on the images on the thumbnails page to see more.

The work shown by dealers at PP relates to that on show elsewhere in Paris, so Plossu is the major artist in a splendid free show, part of the Mois de la Photo (MdP), ‘Nous avons fait un tres beau voyage‘ at the Hotel de Sauroy (58 rue Charlot, Paris, 3e) until 15 December 2010. It’s a show I very much enjoyed when I saw it later in the week.

There was a lot of Kertesz’s work throughout PP too, to link with his major show at the Jeu de Paume (1 place de la Concorde, Paris 8e) until 6 Feb 2010. Although I’m a great fan of Kertesz, I have seen his pictures so many times. I also have several books of his work and although I enjoyed seeing the many prints of his on display at PP didn’t feel any need to spend time going to see another show of his work as well.

I was particularly struck by a small set of 5 pictures by Lise Sarfati on the Brancolini Grimaldi stand, from her series ‘She‘; the two images of ‘Christine‘ one in a wedding dress and the other apparently in the middle of a desert in California stood out for me.

It’s always good too, to see work by photographers I’ve written about before – and especially if I’ve actually met them. There were some of Vanessa Winship‘s pictures on the ‘Vu Galerie‘ stand (and more of her work from Turkey on ‘The Empty Quarter‘. Vu also had some pictures by John Davies, particularly one from Widnes and another from Blaenau Ffestiniog that I admire. They were also showing the work of Denis Darzacq, although I found these images from his ‘Hyper‘ somewhat less striking than his earlier work in ‘La Chute‘.

But the most striking of all the new work that I saw on that first evening were a large set – around 16 – prints by Lee Friedlander from his ‘America By Car’ series of 192 prints showing at the Whitney Museum in New York until 28 Nov 2010 and at PP on the Janet Borden stand. You can watch the pages of the book of the work being turned on YouTube.

This is inventive and well-printed work that really fits well into the square format and came as something of a shock in the middle of a show rather dominated by very large (and often poorly printed colour images. Much of the black and white work around the show – with notable exceptions – isn’t well printed either, so it was a delight to come upon this set.

Just how many ways can you make use of the structure of a car – its door posts, mirrors, fascia , window – in a photograph. Certainly on the evidence here, rather more than sixteen. Of course the content framed by the car is also both vital and in Friedlander’s case superbly matched, the two integrated into a vibrant whole by the work of the printer.

Having seen this, it seemed a good time to leave PP for the day on a high note, and in any case I needed some dinner, and it was time to meet Linda again. On the way out from PP we were greeted by several women in long coats who were rushing up to people and ‘flashing’ open their coats to reveal an illuminated photograph. This was a ‘CONTRE évènement’ against Paris Photo, inspired by its Central European theme and the clandestine circulation of ideas necessitated by state censorship. You can read more about that – in French – and watch videos of the QQQOC artists confronting those leaving and entering PP.

We took a short stroll through the centre of the city to enjoy a leisurely and pleasant cafe meal. Afterwards we strolled again through the Isle St Louis and then looked in vain for a bus back towards our hotel. Fortunately we were still in plenty of time for the Metro.

A few more pictures are now on My London Diary.

Not Quite News From Paris

First an apology for not posting here for almost a week. I’d hoped to make at least some brief initial reports while I was actually in Paris at Paris Photo (PP) but several things defeated me.

One was the Internet provider. I use a BT-provided service which claims to give me access at thousands if not millions of locations around the world. It links to a map of them, and zooming into the part of Paris around where I was staying shows them crowded around it, but it proved to be more of a virtual network than I expected, as on the several occasions I tried none appeared to be in range.

The hotel I was staying at didn’t offer Internet access, except through a special and rather expensive terminal for checking e-mail. It’s cheap hotel I’ve stayed in previously and is basic, but reasonably comfortable, close to a useful Metro station and an easy stroll with luggage from the Gare du Nord where my Eurostar arrives. The kind of place where half the rooms don’t have a plug for the sink (and this year we forgot to take ours) and small children would quickly electrocute themselves from the socket hanging off the wall or the open tops of bedside light fittings. But the rooms we’ve stayed in there have been warm enough, unusually quiet for central Paris, had plumbing that works, plentiful hot water and comfortable beds, and it provides a basic breakfast all in at a price less than the admittedly rather more sumptuous breakfasts at some luxury hotels.

But the real reason I didn’t post was simply a lack of time. There was just too much to do and to see, and most of it connected with photography. PP itself, with stands from over 90 of the best-known galleries from around the world – some with large collections of work on show, as well as all the best-known publishers and magazines was just a start.

It was also the Mois de la Photo (MdP) in Paris, with its long list of shows in galleries around Paris – almost 60 of them, and the Mois de la Photo-OFF which sensibly limits itself to a hundred shows. But these things are just the tip of the iceberg, and on almost every occasion I was making my way to one of these listed shows I came across two or three others.

Last Friday afternoon, after a rushed lunch, I hurried to a book launch at a stand in PP itself for a glass of champagne and a copy of the book (more on this and most of the other things I mention here later) before spending a few minutes looking around the dozen or so stands of the show I’d not managed to see in my previous two visits. The I let myself wander a few minutes around the Jardin du Carrousel before strolling along by the Seine and across the Pont des Arts to the Institut de France fore the superb landscape show there – part of the MdP.

Leaving this I looked briefly at several other shows as I strolled down to St Germain des Pres, where I’d arranged to meet my wife who had been watching a film somewhere in the 5th arrondissement. Together we went to the Magnum gallery to see the MdP show there, mainly pictures from his new book ‘La France’ (Bruce Davidson had just arrived there to start a book signing) before going to a cafe for a beer – or a cofee for Linda. Magnum had been our first stop on ‘Le Parcours Photo Saint-Germain-Des-Pres’ and in the next couple of hours we looked in at the other 30 shows on a trail around the area, as well as two more in the MdP – Eikoh Hosoe and Ralph Gibson – in the area but not part of the walk. We didn’t go in everyone of those 30 on the trail – most specially open that evening until 7pm – there were a few where a quick look through the window confirmed it wasn’t worth stopping, but most of them, and there were a number of highlights, including a small show of the work of Marc Riboud which had a very nice picture of a street in Leeds.

By then it was time for a little more refreshment, after which we took a late evening trip to Montmartre – just a short walk and a funicular ride from our hotel. Then a bus ride down to Place Pigalle and a walk back – by the time we arrived in our room I was too tired and it was too late to do anything but sleep.

Next time I go to Paris, perhaps I’ll be better equipped – one day I’ll surely buy a new phone that does more than make telephone calls – and less ambitious and simply try to make the occasional tweet about what’s going on.

Over the next few weeks I’ll gradually work through the copious notes I made during my trip and get working on the many pictures I took. There are certainly many stories to be told and quite a few will appear here before too long.

UPDATE:

PARIS PHOTO is now on MY LONDON DIARY

OFF to Paris

I’ll shortly be on my way to Paris, travelling of course by Eurostar – the only sensible way to go from London, so it seemed appropriate to write a little about what I’m going for – and the Mois de la Photo-OFF in particular.

Every two years, November is the Mois De la Photo in Paris, and the Photo-OFF is a parallel fringe festival, which aims – according to the one page in English on their web site “to offer a dynamic selection of emerging photographers exhibited in young galleries and unexpected spaces, like a train station.”

Basically anyone apply to have a show in the OFF, so long as they can find a space in Paris to show their work. It differs in one important way to the East London Photomonth – which this year particularly promoted such places – in that bars, restaurants and cafés are excluded. But any other indoor or outdoor space can be used. In previous years I’ve seen shows hung on railings along a street, in the windows of a community centre on a street (and of course inside such places), in a disused hospital, in a butcher’s shop, on the doors on the landings of a staircase on a high rise block, on station platforms and in various small galleries and other spaces. All the shows have to be free and accesible to the public and in places that can show work in a proper fashion.

I’m not entirely sure what I think about the ban on bars, restuarants and cafés, although some of the least satisfactory venues in shows like Photomonth and the Brighton fringe were in such places, and even when these places were fairly empty they were often very limited and difficult to view. But there are exceptions, such as the superbly appropriate show of pictures from the US by Kit Fordham in JBs American Diner on Kings Road in Brighton, or my own shows in the Shoreditch Gallery, which is a gallery space in what is really an overspill area for the Juggler café – such as this year’s Paris – New York – London. Would even London’s V&A Museum, which at one time advertised itself as an ace caff with a gallery attached, be allowed?

Once you’ve found a site and arranged your show you can apply to take part in the festival at a nominal cost, and then have to send in a portfolio to the selection committee. If your show – which has to be open for at least 15 days in November – is one of the total of 101 that can be accepted to take part you then have to pay a further fee of 85 euros. One further rule is that although you can take part if you were included in the previous festivals, you are not allowed to show at the same venue as in 2008, although this does not appear to be strictly applied as I’m intending to visit one listed show by an artist in the same gallery as then.

The festival produces a well-printed program which arranges the shows into different areas, and one aspect I’m sorry to have missed is that each of the 8 or 9 areas of the city has a Saturday afternoon guided walk around all the spaces where you can meet the photographers and gallerists. Each area also has a special night when the galleries are open so you can walk round on your own.

The web site is pretty clear if you have a slight knowledge of French, and you can download the complete programme or if in Paris pick up one of the 10,000 pocket sized printed copies. Or you can make use of the Twitter feed, the Facebook page, your iPhone and Google maps, and there are Flikr pages and videos on Vimeo….

My only problem is knowing which of the 101 shows to see, and how to fit them in with Paris Photo and also the Mois de la Photo, which started in thirty years ago in 1980, though as it only happens every other year I’m not sure if this deserves to be called its 30th anniversary.

And of course I’ll take a camera and perhaps find times to take a few pictures. It might be nice to revisit some of the places I photographed back in 1988 which appear in my Photo Paris, though the weather forecast isn’t too promising.

If I get a moment there may even be the occasional short post from me in Paris here, but I suspect I may find I’m just too busy until I get back home and sleep it all off for a day or two. So if you don’t see any new posts for a few days you will know why.

National Anti-Fur March

After the egg on their face at Millbank last Wednesday, I went to Saturday’s National Anti-Fur march wondering if their was going to be some reaction. Animal Rights protesters in groups allied to the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) – have carried out non-violent illegal direct actions and in some previous years this march has attracted some very heavy-handed policing. In 2008 I wrote:

“I was several times impeded in my work by being pushed by police as I took photographs and being refused permission to walk onto the pavement, despite shoing a press card. Demonstrators were also prevented from going to hand out leaflets to people on the streets. It doesn’t seem to me to be a democratic way to police a protest.”

Last year, post Tomlinson, things had improved greatly, and I was pleased to find that again there were no problems this year.

This was I think the best picture that I took on Saturday, although I didn’t spot it in my first quick look through the pictures when I selected twenty or so to upload to Demotix on Saturday night. But it’s certainly a picture that has grown on me since, starting with the word ‘CRUELTY ‘ in the top left and the distorted face below it (that distorted ‘R’ in the word helps too) then moving across to a second piece of text ‘Everyone Wants to Live‘ which perhaps asks rather more questions than it answers, then a group of three heads – a rabbit, a bear and a young woman whose megaphone both sweeps us on across the picture and for me links back to the open mouth at left.

There is also something about the placement of the other figures that I think could hardly be bettered, both the two men standing at the right and the two women in the background at left, and the banners behind. I’m not sure that the hands of the man who is looking a his pictures on the back of his compact camera are really what I would have wished for (it looks to me as if he is rolling a cigarette), but for it’s perhaps something that illustrates the real power of photography, coming up with things I would never have dreamed of, and part of the kind of ordered chaos that makes taking pictures exciting. They are also a part of a kind of swirl of hands around this picture – I start from the upraised paws of that bear and my eye works round through the hands of the two women, the rabbit, a hand holding a cardboard placard, the hands on the megaphone and then on to those holding the camera.

It also pleases me that this is exactly as I framed it in the camera – as indeed are most of my pictures, though I’m not a religious fanatic about it. Sometimes in the heat of the moment you don’t get it quite right, and I’ll happily shave off a few pixels if necessary. But this is exactly as I saw it.

Perhaps too, had I been arranging a shot like this in a studio or on location (it could never had been the same – why does Jeff Wall bother – it just shows up his limitations) I would have arranged for the text on the front of the rabbit to be more easily legible (it says ‘THIS IS MY COAT NOT YOURS’.)

This was taken on the D700 with the 16-35mm zoom at its widest, and it isn’t often that I get an image that works as well across the whole frame with that extreme a wide-angle. The inherent distortion from such a wide view in a rectilinear lens helps her, exaggerating the pain and anger in the face at left and making what was a very large megaphone seem to loom even larger.

Of course I didn’t stand there thinking about all these things when I took the picture – but I did recognise something that made me press the shutter. Of course I always (well, almost always) have a reason to press the shutter, but things seldom work out exactly how I want. But its all part of training the mind (the ‘eye’) along with looking at the results afterwards. And just sometimes the arrow hits the target.

I can’t remember why I had the camera set to ISO360 at this point. There wasn’t a great deal of light and more typically I would have been giving myself at least a stop if not two more. I think I’d probably forgetten to reset it after taking a portrait earlier. But this was shot at 1/100 at f8, and everything is pretty sharp – 16mm gives fairly extreme depth of field. But the two closer figures, where fill-flash was more noticeable have just a slight, very slight suggestion of blur along with the sharp flash image. It isn’t visible at this scale, but I think helps prevent the scene looking static when viewed at a larger size.

Using flash of course meant that the closer elements of the image were too bright as taken, and a little bit of burning down was needed. The flash is no longer obvious but it does really add to the picture.

Most of the other images I liked from the day were really of single figures or concentrating on a single figure in a crowd. This image below was one, like the top picture taken outside Harrods, currently the only department store in the UK still selling fur, although the march organisers, the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade, have hopes that the new Qatari owners will end this when they fully take over in January.

More about fur, the march and more pictures in National Anti-Fur March on My London Diary.

Against Racism, Homophobia & Islamophobia

The NO to Racism, Fascism and Islamophobia march on Nov 6 was a decent size and had rather more of a carnival air than most since it was organised by Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) as well as being organised by Unite Against Fascism (UAF). That did mean we got a DJ playing some very loud music, and when I found at one point I wanted to be right in front of the rather large speakers next to the lorry they were using I wished I had brought some ear plugs. It isn’t that I don’t like music, but when it reaches the kind of decibel level where all your internal organs vibrate it’s a bit too much. It used to amuse me when I saw the guys at Notting Hill Carnival photographing with ear-muffs on, but it makes more sense to me now.

Both the UAF and LMHR are widely regarded as being closely linked to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) although both draw support from a wider range of people – and get funding from bodies such as the TUC which the SWP itself would not. Many left-wing activists are SWP members and without the effort they put into organising things we would have far fewer demonstrations and they would be considerably smaller. Many of the more active members of Stop The War are also from the SWP. I don’t suggest anything sinister here, it is simply a matter of fact and generally strongly evidenced by the number of people offering SWP petition forms and publications at demonstrations.

But it is bad news for photographers, as these organisations all share a style of stewarding that makes our job difficult. There is an obsession with control which seems to be central to the SWP mentality (and one reason why I’ll never join them.) Usually it is just a matter of keeping photographers away from the front of marches by surrounding the march with stewards who link arms to create an empty area in front of the banner, making it impossible to get within a reasonable working distance to the front of the march, or indeed to get good pictures of the front of a march from a longer view.

At one Stop The War march the photographers got so annoyed that we staged a sit-down in front of the march on Park Lane until we were allowed a few minutes access. But it goes further and I’ve several times been assaulted by stewards at such events – although others have been more cooperative and have apologised for the behaviour of others. During one march from the US embassy I was fortunate to escape serious injury when pushed violently backwards. It’s not surprising that we sometimes amuse ourselves by making up other meanings for the initials SWP – such as ‘Sod Working Photographers‘.

There was some of that aggressive and obstructive behaviour at this event. One of my colleagues was assaulted and most of us were at times rather frustrated trying to get the pictures we needed. It just isn’t necessary and it certainly is counter-productive. Much larger demonstrations manage without stewards who think they are storm-troopers, and it is obviously in both the protesters and photographers interest to get the best pictures possible.

A little chaos really does work fine and it seldom gets out of hand, as photographers tend to regulate themselves though there are a few who don’t play the game – mainly those with big video cameras, like the guy who several times swung his round rapidly and hit me the other day. And there are those sad individuals who like to try and organise everything and everybody who deserve to be dealt with drastically by the stewards. But most of the time we get along OK, and if they stewards would just stand back and let us get on with it unless a real problem arose we’d get better pictures without compromising the march in any way.

Fortunately I don’t often spend a lot of time at the front of marches where these things happen. Certainly on this one there didn’t seem to be any ‘celebrities’ who might occasionally need a little protection from a crush of photographers, and almost all the people I found interesting were further back in the march where I could wander around as I liked. There the atmosphere was much friendlier.

There had been some anticipation that there might be some trouble from members of the English Defence League during the march, but they had the sense to stay away. When we saw this dog, sitting with its owner watching the march go by, most of us probably drew the conclusion both from the St George flag and the appearance of the dog owner that this could have been one of them, but when one of my colleagues asked him he told us he had no sympathy for people who behaved like they do although he was proud to be English. It was a lesson about being careful not to jump to conclusions based on people’s appearance.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
For once the weather was good and I remembered to make reasonably sensible settings on my two cameras, and everything worked as it should. It does happen sometimes.

But by the time we got to Millbank, the light was beginning to fade and it was getting harder to work, and even at ISO 3200 people dancing just moved too much to be always sharp, so after another round of speeches I decided it was time to go home. There was actually another problem, which you can see in a few of the pictures on My London Diary with light from a large TV screen, mainly filled with purple creating a rather unhealthy effect.

But by then I was ready to go home anyway.

Jimmy Mubenga

The UK Borders Agency (UKBA) generally doesn’t like to do its own dirty work. It is after all a part of the civil service and accountable at least in theory to government. Its own staff would have to go through proper training programs and be subject to various codes of conduct and so on. Not that all that means a great deal or offers us a great degree of protection. But much of the really dirty work is contracted out to private enterprise companies whose main aim is profit, and are often prepared to cut corners, use poorly trained staff and turn a very blind eye towards their actions so long as the job gets done.

One area of activity where this appears to be happening is forcible deportations. Private security guards are used to take people – usually from privately run detention centres – to airports and put them onto flights back to countries to which they do not want to return. Often they have very good reasons not to want to go and a genuine fear of imprisonment, torture and even death awaiting them at the end of the flight.

We have an immigration policy which is driven by right-wing racism, in particular in parts of the press which has resulted in Labour and Tory parties engaging in a bidding war to show themselves to be tougher on immigration than each other. The rules have been revised time after time to make it harder for asylum seekers to pursue their claims, with fast-track procedures being used to prevent proper consideration of cases. Those working in the UKBA are under great pressure to play the numbers game, removing as many people as possible.

Deporting people like Jimmy Mubenga makes no sense. He’d been living in this country for 16 years, doing a useful job and contributing to our economy, paying our taxes and bringing up a family, who only know England, having grown up and been educated here. Stupidly he got into a fight in a club – the first time in years here that he had been in trouble – and was sent to prison. Because of that, after serving his sentence, a short time later he found himself being forced onto a plane bound for Angola, the country from where he fled for his life. Had he arrived back there he was convinced he would be killed or imprisoned, and very probably he was right, but we will now never know.

It took three men to get him on that BA Flight at Heathrow, and the witnesses say that they held him down as he screamed “They will kill me” again and again, and they held him down more and he screamed that he couldn’t breathe and they held him down more and everything went quiet and still they held him. Finally they called an ambulance, but the paramedics were unable to revive him.

Few forcible deportations make the news, but this one did. Unusual because a man was killed in front of witnesses rather than simply disappearing in another country. This was news, at least for a few hours – and should become news again when – assuming the Crown Prosecution Service can’t find a way to brush it under their extensive carpet – the three men responsible come to court.

A month after the killing, Jimmy Mubenga’s family and various campaigners for justice for immigrants marched from the Angolan embassy to the Home Office to hand in a letter asking for a full inquiry not into this particular case – which is still the subject of a police inquiry – but the procedures used in such deportations, as well as asking that the Mubenga family’s immigration status be urgently resolved and that they be given indefinite leave to remain.

I was surprised to find that there was almost no interest in the event shown by the press. Apart from myself there was one other photographer and one videographer present; the only other journalist I saw was from a small left-wing daily. My story with some pictures went up on Demotix within 24 hours. A quick Google search finds no other report of the event (though the Guardian has covered aspects of the case well), other than a short note on BBC news obviously written by someone who wasn’t there that simply noted the march was taking place, and misleadingly refers to Mubenga as an “Angolan man who fell ill as he was being deported.” Asphyxiation as a result of having three men on top of you is not an illness.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
A Home Office official takes the letter. The family were upset that no-one could be let in to deliver it.

You can read more about the event and see more of my pictures in RIP Jimmy Mubenga – Killed at Heathrow on My London Diary. It’s the kind of story that makes me feel that what I’m doing is really worth doing even when I know I’m unlikely to sell any of my work from it. I didn’t find it easy to take some of these pictures, and there were times I didn’t take pictures, but I think it was something that needed to be recorded.