>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Millbank & Misrepresentation

I’ve just posted my pictures from last Wednesday’s higher education march on My London Diary. The pictures I took tell a very different story from that which filled the news broadcasts and papers on Wednesday evening and throughout the next day or two. But of course most of those who pontificate about it weren’t there, and even those of us who were could only get a partial view. But I’ve talked to a number of others, read eyewitness accounts, watched the videos and seen the photographs taken by others as well.

The account I just uploaded to my web site – and this story here – both differ in some respects from what I wrote for Demotix on Wednesday night, because of what I’ve heard since from others who were there, but it was clear on the day that many published accounts were frankly sensationalism rather than based on fact. Even today the BBC continues to talk about the ‘storming’ of the building which just isn’t what happened. They are simply telling a lie on behalf of the political establishment and the government.

It wasn’t just the Met who got it wrong for the student protest on Wednesday; the journalists and photographers in particular did as well, which is why the editors and politicians got quite such an easy ride in making up their lies about what happened.

As the march came down Whitehall and we stopped to photograph it going through Parliament Square we’d talked about the possibility of trouble. And although one of the best-known anarchists had earlier told me “There’ll be plenty for you to photograph” I didn’t take the hint, or at least failed to understand it, though I doubt if he knew the details of what would happen.

I’d thought that the glass-fronted Millbank offices outside which I photographed in May had only been taken over by the Conservatives as their temporary election HQ, and didn’t realise they were still there six months later. Had I known that – and if I was the officer in charge of the policing I would have known it – I might have followed the front of the march down just in case rather than keep on taking pictures in Parliament Square. But probably not, as there had been little indication that there was likely to be anything special to photograph. Certainly there had been no organised bloc that looked like causing trouble – though many obviously angry students – and I’d seen few of those that I’ve photographed at previous events who might be expected to cause trouble. Several photographers commented to me that it didn’t look likely that things would take off.

So I was a little surprised when I heard (thanks to a tweet read by one of the students I was photographing) what was going on. I’d stayed on in Parliament Square as I thought there would be a few things of interest there (and there were) while quite a few of the other photographers had continued down towards Tate Britain, outside which the rally was being held.

But few if any of them were actually there when the first group of students walked into the offices and occupied them – more or less non-violently. There are some people taking pictures on the short and fairly amateur video I’ve seen, but I didn’t recognise any of them as professionals. Rather more of the press were there when the police made their second big mistake, which was to try and forcibly remove the protesters when they had too few officers to do the job sensibly.

The photographers who were there at that point tell me that there was a great deal of indiscriminate violence by the police, much of it against protesters offering no resistance – and some photographers also have the bruises from the batons and riot shields to prove it. The said the effect of this attack was to enrage many of those who until then had been onlookers and produce an angry mob, which was the start the real battle that took place, with the breaking of windows and a fair amount of indiscriminate violence, in a second wave of occupation. Had the police reacted more calmly and sensibly, waiting until they had the resources to properly protect the building there might have been only minimal damage.

By the time I heard about what was going on it hardly seemed worth rushing to get there – I thought I would have missed everything. So I continued taking pictures for quite a while around Parliament, and then decided to make my way home by a route that took me along Millbank.

I ignored the NUS/UCU stewards who where by this time turning away protesters coming down Millbank at the Lambeth Bridge roundabout, telling people that the protest was all over and walked down towards the Millbank Tower. As I arrived a group of riot police got out of several vans and ran past me and into the crowded area; I tried to follow them but soon found my way blocked by a crowd of onlookers, so I went back and round into the courtyard which was slightly less packed with people, some standing around a couple of small fires.

Over their heads I could see a line of riot police facing the crowd with a small gap between. I pushed through the crowd and eventually got to the front and found myself with a number of other photographers, most of whom I knew, taking pictures.

By that time there wasn’t a great deal happening, and the police were adopting a low-key policy, at least outside the building, forming a line to prevent any further ingress. A few people in the crowd were still throwing the occasional piece of card or stick towards the police, and a number fell short on the photographers and crowd, and a number of those at the front occasionally shouted at the police. Generally it was almost good-natured – more a game than any serious attack by this time. The police certainly weren’t in any great danger and though a few looked a little stressed, many seemed to be quite enjoying it.

A couple of fire-extinguishers were let off from the crowd, as well as from the roof and I got rather wet, and then covered with powder. Neither healthy for cameras. I wasn’t there when an empty extinguisher was thrown down from the roof, but on the video it’s clear that it caused an immediate angry chant from the crowd below as a stupidly irresponsible act. Someone – and and given the way it was lobbed it could have have been a protester rather than police – could easily have been killed, was just luck that it missed everyone.

There didn’t seem to be a great deal of point in staying – there were hordes of photographers and videographers there and any pictures I got would be unlikely to add much to the coverage or even get used. Unlike some of the other photographers there I refuse to carry a helmet or hard hat, and this was a situation where I would have been happier with one on. So having taken a few pictures I left and walked across Vauxhall Bridge for a train home.

More detail about the event and more pictures on My London Diary.

Pictet ‘Growth’ Shortlist

You can see the shortlist for the valuable Prix Pictet which was announced today in Paris, where a preview of the work will open at the Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire on Sunday – and I hope to drop in and see it when I’m in Paris next week. The prizewinner won’t be announced until March, so there is plenty of time to place your bets.

In alphabetical order,a the runners are Christian Als, Edward Burtynsky, Stéphane Couturier, Mitch Epstein, Chris Jordan, Yeondoo Jung, Vera Lutter, Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo, Taryn Simon, Thomas Struth, Guy Tillim and Michael Wolf, and you can see their work that is in for the prize on the Pictet web site.

What is unusual for a photographic prize these days is that there are some pretty decent pictures among the lot, and seven or eight photographers whose work I might well have chosen myself. There are a couple I find ‘arty’ in a sense that would have been fresh in the 1930s, but now I just find pretentious garbage, and a couple that do things that I’ve seen rather better done by others (and in one case seems hardly worth doing), but it is good to see so much good photography up for a prize like this – though it remains to be seen what will win.

I probably shouldn’t condemn any of them to oblivion by naming them as my favourite for the prize, and in any case I think it should receive rather though more than my quick first impression. Particularly because it isn’t just a matter of a single image, but really of a set of pictures, and that does need more consideration. But Mitch Epstein has long been one of my favourite contemporary photographers, Guy Tillim’s work I always find of interest and the show by Taryn Simon was one of the best in recent years at the Photographers’ Gallery. The only work that really appeals that was new to me was by Nyaba Ouedraogo. So probably those four are now the outsiders in the race!

I hope I’ve more or less got everything sorted for my Paris trip now, and certainly I’ll be writing about it here. Unfortunately I’ve been having some problems with getting my notebook to connect to the Internet, so I may not be able to post until I return home and there may be a few days without posts on the blog. In any case I tend to be too busy and get too tired (and sometimes emotional) to comment while I’m there.

Blurb & 893 etc

The first presentation on Sunday morning on the London Blurb Self-Publishing day was given by Anton Kusters, a photographer who specialises in long term projects and is based in Brussels, where he runs his own web and interactive design agency and is also creative director of Burn Magazine, the online publication for emerging photographers curated by Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey, which I’ve mentioned a few times here.

Kusters won the 2010 Blurb Photography Book Now Editorial Prize for 893 magazine on the 893 project which he has been working on with the help of his brother in Tokyo for a couple of years, making numerous visits there. It took lengthy and complicated negotiations, sealed with an impressive looking document to get the permission to document the Yakuza, a Japanese crime family that runs the streets of Kabukicho, the red-light district in the heart of Tokyo. The contract runs for two years and Kusters has committed himself to publishing 893 magazine twice a year to show his progress. You can also read more about it on his 893 blog where he posts work and discusses the project and his feelings about it.

This is fascinating and at times exciting work, with a real air of menace in some of the pictures, but Kusters is very much concerned with getting under the skin of his subjects rather than taking some moralistic stance. It is a study of a subculture made with their cooperation and collaboration, and every image used has to be approved both by the photographer and his subjects.

During his talk, Kusters talked a lot about the process and the various stages, particularly using printed ‘books’ that he has used to refine his work, and also showed a short film clip. His is work that crosses a number of media boundaries, with some exciting and fresh design.

I’ve never been to Kabukicho, but have seen many pictures from the area, which is part of Shinjuku, the stamping ground of several leading Japanese photographers, including Daido Moriyama (his own web site is slow to load and rather unpredictable) and Nobuyoshi Araki – in 2005 they did a joint show Moriyama-Shinjuku-Araki.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
‘WassinkLundgren’
It was a hard act to follow, and so too was the presentation by the PBN Portfolio prize winners WassinkLundgren after which it was my turn with a rather less dynamic presentation of ‘Before the Olympics‘.

Among those at the event was Pierfrancesco Celada, who had made a Blurb book using his pictures from The Bigg Market in Newcastle. You can see some of these in the two sections insideout and insideout on his web site – and I also particularly liked some of the images from the St James’s pilgrimage.

Unfortunately Bruno Ceschel was unwell and so the self-publishing debate was a little different from anticipated with Robin Goldberg of Blurb in the chair and myself, Anton Kusters and artist Jonathan Lewis of ABC Cooperative on the panel. More about my ideas on the future in a later post.

Not Cricket

Last night I visited the holy of holy for many, the inner sanctum of the world of cricket, the Long Room at Lords. Even for someone with so little interest in the game as me it was an interesting experience, and there in a glass case was a small terracotta urn along with some larger and shinier trophies.

As the name suggests it is a fairly long room, and did look quite large when we were some of the first to arrive – our rush hour bus had taken rather less time than the Transport for London web site’s rather pessimistic forecast. But it felt fairly crowded when the other 290 or so had arrived. It’s a pleasant enough space, and but for the fact it was dark would have given us a good view of the pitch with its unlikely looking stretched out lollipop media centre by Future Systems at the opposite end. But for lovers of cricket, this is the spiritual home of the game and the MCC, the Marylebone Cricket Club, “the guardian of both the Laws and the Spirit of Cricket.”

It’s also more surprisingly a part of the London 2012 Olympics, despite cricket not being an Olympic sport (presumably because countries such as America and France have never managed to understand the rules.) Instead they are shooting out the archery here.

We were there not for cricket but for the launch of a book written by a friend about “the first garden suburb“, the villas, many still standing, built a hundred years before the Garden Suburb movement on the extensive Eyre brothers estate of St John’s Wood – where the world’s most famous cricket ground was built on the site of a pond. Mireille Galinou‘s ‘Cottages and Villas – The Birth of the Garden Suburb‘, published by Yale University Press (ISBN: 0300167261) and based on several years of her work on the Eyre archive looks a fascinating and superbly illustrated study of the building of the area and the people who came to live there.

The MCC moved to St John’s Wood – their third ground – in 1814, and the new pavilion we were in was built in 1826 after the previous one burnt down Many of those who attending the launch were local residents, members of the St John’s Wood Society, founded to promote and conserve their unique area (I don’t think they included any of the pop stars and Russian oligarchs who now live there but keep themselves to themselves in their deeply dug basements behind high gates and security cameras) and the books were selling like hot cakes – I saw one man leave carrying four of them.

Fortunately I hadn’t gone there to take photographs (I commiserated with the man who had), as when I took my camera out of my bag, I found it was completely dead. I’d brought it mainly to take a few pictures at a party we were going to later, and unusually hadn’t bothered to take a spare battery. I always keep one in my proper camera bag, but I’d only taken the D700 with the 24-70mm and 20mm along with a few books and other things I needed in a small shoulder bag.

I’d charged the battery when I came in on Saturday, as I always do, and had only used it since for a handful of test shots, so it should have been good for the usual thousand or more pictures the D700 can normally clock up on a fully charged battery.

It remains a mystery to me how it came to be fully run down. Sometimes I’ve found that I’ve left a camera switched on when I’ve put it in my bag and it has produced a series of rather noisy but otherwise blank files, but when I checked the card after I got home there were no blank files.

So now I’m left wondering whether there has been some kind of electrical fault in the camera, though it seems to be working fine, or perhaps the battery is faulty. I’ve recharged it and put it back in the camera, and the battery check reports it as good.

But the moral of all this is clear, a message I’ve told others many times, and a practice I always used to follow until the incredible capacity of recent cameras had made me rather slack. ALWAYS CARRY A SPARE BATTERY.

So no pictures of mine showing the Long Room, which is perhaps just as well, because I think almost any mental image you may have of it is probably more impressive than the reality – a nice enough room of its age (and recently splendidly refurbished along with the rest of the pavillion at a cost of £8 million), but with a rather dull collection of portraits of cricketers (some of whom were surely more impressive on their cigarette cards) and early but largely unexciting paintings of people with oddly shaped cricket bats.

But of course I have photographed cricket. Not just a couple of games by the Space Hijackers – as here when they challenged our members of parliament (who if they noticed had the sense not to turn up) to a game on Parliament Square, but the real thing a few years earlier when I got a commission from my local council and the Arts Council to photograph one of the leading ladies teams in the country and in particular their younger members.

The most interesting action was almost always off the pitch, and during matches of course I had to keep outside the boundary line, but photographing during practice sessions I was at times in some very silly fielding positions with a camera.

It was a nice project and I enjoyed being with the people there. It is one of very few projects where I’ve worked with medium format, though I also used 36mm, particularly at some of the matches where at times a 200mm with a 2x converter was still a little on the short side for capturing action.

Halloween

I’m not a fan of Halloween, which seems just another sad synthetic commercial opportunity. There is something very unpleasant about the whole ‘trick or treat’ idea, a kind of demand with menaces (and one which sometimes gets out of hand.)

Not that I’m against people having fun, and I do rather like the sight of zombies invading our streets, generally simply out to have a good time and a bit of a party. These and more formal Day of the Dead celebrations perhaps owe more to All Saints Day and All Souls Day than to Halloween which comes before them, although now they have been drawn into a single commercial exploitation.

In 2006, (somewhere well down this page) I met up with some very fine zombies, including the two ladies below for a tour around Oxford St.

Starting from the very spooky Ben Crouch Tavern (now sadly converted to a pub I find rather plastic and unpleasant) we toured a shopping centre on Oxford Street and walked past the hard-core shoppers before slithering down the steps to Ramillies St (which later became the home of the Photographers’ Gallery),

and on to another pub at the top of Carnaby St.

On that occasion the pub ‘Crawl of the Dead‘ had started in late afternoon, and although the light was failing there was still enough to work with even by the time I left them.

The following year, in the City of London, the Crawl of the Dead started later, which was probably better for zombies but not for photographers, though I was able to take some pictures before the start in ‘Ye Olde London’, a rather dimly lit pub with some appropriate decoration.

but by the time we got to staggering on the streets things were a little trickier.

It certainly didn’t help that my SB800 flash decided to pack up – in need of a rather expensive flash tube replacement – and I was left only with the built in flash on the camera, really only suitable as a fill, and not usable with big lenses which cast a shadow in the image area.

This year it was fully dark when the ‘Dance of the Dead’ street parade from Hoxton Square to Dalston was gathering, and the rather dim street lighting had the very orange colour of sodium lamps.

So although there was just enough light in some of the brighter areas to take pictures at ISO3200 and get some reasonably sharp, it isn’t possible to get good colour, even when shooting RAW, as the light is essentially monochromatic orange and sadly lacking in other colours. The image above, taken at 1/20 f4 was about the best I could get.

Using the SB800 mounted on the D700 camera did produce some better results, but the orange light was still a problem. You can’t light up the whole world with a single flash, so I normally use flash at high ISO when I can to pick up enough ambient exposure to add some background detail. Because of the poor colour of that ambient and to get better quality in the flash lit areas, I compromised on using ISO1000. With the flash I was working at 1/60 f7.1 to get a bit more depth of field and avoid movement blur where the ambient was stronger. I think that was equivalent to around 4 stops underexposure for the ambient, but I didn’t make a precise calculation. Looking at the results on the computer now, I can see that the flash, despite being set at -2/3 stop was actually overexposing slightly, though seldom enough to burn out the highlights completely.

My favourite image from the event was also the simplest, a young girl waiting for the event to start. I photographed her first with her mother standing watching the preparations, then got down on my knees to make this image, in which her witches hat becomes a kind of purple halo.

There are some other pictures that I quite like – and you can see a largish set on My London Diary – but none that really lived up to my expectations, as it was a very tricky, fussy and at times fast-moving event. Perhaps if I’d followed the parade further I would have found some better lighting, and the dance at the end might well have been fun, but I’d been on my feet and taking pictures for over 7 hours and was feeling rather tired, and when I saw a bus approaching I rushed across the road to jump on it and start my journey home. Perhaps next year I’ll do better.

EDL & Israel

I have my disagreements with the English Defence League, but have tried despite these to cover their London events as objectively as I can. Some of them at least realise this and so I was able to cover the event with relatively little harassment compared to some of the other photographers present. Several of the EDL stewards were supportive, and I only had a couple of minor problems, which were soon resolved. At one point a woman did start shouting at me, telling me to get on the other side of the road, but I simply walked away into the crowd of EDL and I think one of the stewards had a brief word with her.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Handing out placards to the marchers
The meeting place for the march had to be changed at the last minute as the pub they had planned to use had decided to remain closed when it learnt they were coming there. Perhaps this was why I arrived at the event rather earlier than the other photographers and for around twenty minutes or so was the only photographer on the pavement with the protesters drinking outside the pub. Of course we all like to get pictures that other people don’t but there are also times when you welcome the support of colleagues.

Much of that time I was talking to the EDL members, and although most were happy to be photographed (and quite a few insisted on posing for me) I spent much of the time being questioned about the way that the press in general treats the EDL, concentrating on acts of violence and pictures showing some of their more extreme members. I tried to suggest to them that rather than blaming or attacking the photographers they should make sure there was no violence or other extremism to be photographed.

The EDL are also pained at being labelled racists and were keen to point out that they will not allow racism and that they support gay rights, and there were several placards making this clear.

Later some of the same people I’d been talking fairly sensibly with were among those baiting several of my colleagues and were making threats at another photographer until a police officer came and stood between them.

It was the speeches which upset me most on this occasion. I find the stand they have taken over Israel and their opposition to the Palestinian people hard to understand, and they seem to me to go deeply against our British traditions of fair play and support for the underdog. There really does seem to be a failure to distinguish between opposition to extremist Muslims – which I share – and opposition to all Muslims, particularly those who live in this country and most of whom are now our citizens. One of the guys I talked to outside the pub told me that Muslims may live here but they are not and never can be English. I had to disagree.

You can read my account of the march and rally opposite the Israeli embassy in London on 14 October – with many more pictures – on My London Diary.

Blurb’s London Celebratory Kickoff

Last night I was at Eastcastle House for the start of Blurb’s London events, celebrating the new pop-up store and the 2010 Photography Book Now winning books. Several of the winners were present including the Portfolio category winners, Dutch photographers Thijs groot Wassink and Ruben Lundgren, though we had to be content with Judith Stenneken, whose Last Call won the $25,000 Grand Prize, on video.

Some of the judges were there too, and I talked briefly to Martin Parr and a number of old friends at the event, as well as drinking too much fizzy stuff (I’m sure it was the bubbles that made me just a little unsteady as I walked towards the bus stop after the event.)

After this morning’s session, the events continuing at the London Pop-Up store until Nov 14 are free, and I’ll be there again talking on Sunday about ‘Before the Olympics‘ and my other two Blurb books. Also in Sunday’s programme are some of the Blurb winners, Anton Kusters and ‘WassinkLundgren‘ as well as Jonathan Lewis, and the day ends with a self-publishing debate with guest panellist Bruno Ceschel of Self Publish, Be Happy.

More pictures from last night on My London Diary.

Yangtze and More From Photomonth 2010

Nadav Kander’s Yangtze – The Long River is the outstanding show of Photomonth 2010 both in its scale and its concept. The exhibition continues until 13 Nov 2010 at Flowers East and comes from several voyages that Kander made cover the river from its estuary to the source during a three year period. His journey along the river, shrouded always in the light orange brown haze of pollution gives us an insight into the rapid growth of China, with image after image showing people dwarfed but remaining significant by the giant structures erupting around them.
He says in the gallery notes, “The photographs are an emotional response to what I saw. I gave them simple titles so that viewers are encouraged to respond subjectively before seeking the facts.”

I’m not sure how well that latter idea works in the gallery, and I’d recommend that anyone visiting the show go first to watch the video being presented where he talks about the pictures and his ideas, which to me was vital in really appreciating his work. In it he also says that one single picture – a line of washing hanging sturng between rough wooden posts leaning against a wall under the huge girders of some giant bridge in Shanghai- for him sums up the whole process he was observing, and it was certainly one of my favourite images.

I took only a very quick look at the book published to accompany the show which includes “ca. 77 color ills” (couldn’t they count?) and although the work on display covered the two main areas of the ground floor gallery with three or so more tucked away (one of my favourites hidden in an office) there were rather fewer pictures on show than that. But even so there was a certain repetitive aspect which after a while I found slightly disturbing. The prints were very big and I often found myself moving in close to look at the people in them, and felt that perhaps occasionally the photographer might have done the same rather than always keeping a distance. The closest he comes is to a group of five, picnicing under a multicoloured umbrella on the riverside with a large bridge behind them, and I think it no co-incidence that this picture is featured as the largest of four images on the gallery handout.

The weakness – and I think it is one – is not in the photographer’s project, but in the selection of images for the gallery show. On Kander’s own web site (its the first item under ‘Work‘ on the menu) there is a more varied selection of 49 images. Also on the web you can watch the video being shown in the gallery on YouTube.

Upstairs Flowers was showing another very fine show, which again I mentioned briefly in an earlier post on its opening night, Edmund Clark‘s work ‘Guantanamo: If the Light Goes Out’ which combines some startling images from Guantanamo (though many of the images I found most telling were absent from this particular showing) with images in the homes of former detainees now trying to rebuild their lives. All of the pictures are without people, but Clark builds up a very strong atmosphere in these very carefully framed images. Also on show are some of the letters and cards sent to Omar Deghayes, a Brighton resident who was held for 5 years in Guantanmo.

You can see a few of Clark’s photographs on his web site, but rather more on Lensculture. I wasn’t convinced that the ‘Letters to Omar’ actually added anything to the show and would have preferred to see more photographs. As well as this show at Flowers until 14 Nov, there is another show of this work across London at Photofusion in Brixton until 26 Nov 2010.

A couple of doors down the Kingsland Road is the printspace, where there were a series of large portraits of dogs looking out of closed car windows, ‘Mute‘ or ‘Dogs in Cars’ by Martin Usborne. Superb control of lighting and every hair apparently manicured into place, these seemed to me to be great examples of advertising photography – and taken on a Canon DSLR seemed to blow away the arguments for ‘medium format’ digital. But somehow the very gloss of the finish seemed to take something away from the impact of the work, and looking at them I couldn’t feel they had been deserted but felt they were being watched over not just by the photographer, but a whole team of assistants, stylists, art director and proud owners.

Another short walk takes you to the Red Lion in Hoxton St, where an exhibition by the Shoreditch Group of London Independent Photography (LIP) continues until 20 Nov 2010 – go up the stairs to the right of the bar. The show, which includes personal work by members and a group project ‘Parallels’, is as you would expect from such a group uneven, is worth a look. But having tried the beer, I’d advise going the short distance to one of my favourite London pubs, the tiny Prince Arthur in Brunswick Place with a well-deserved reputation for serving a good pint – and sandwiches (nothing fancy) at sensible prices – though unfortunately rather uncertain opening hours.

Talking of pubs and shows, another LIP member Anne Clements, has a show ‘Don’t Pass Me By‘ in Photomonth 2010 at the Jerusalem Tavern in Britton St, Clerkenwell which opened a few days ago and continues to 26 Nov 2010.

One venue that I was surprised not to see taking any part in Photomonth was the basement at Shoreditch Town Hall. It’s a large and curious labyrinth, great for a group show as it needs to be manned while open, and really worth a visit just to see the place. I couldn’t resist going in to see the show ‘to be or not to be: a false dichotomy‘ by a group of thirteen artists based around Forest Hill in South London, curated by Dunio Mauro and advertised by a rather large pig. Unfortunately the show was only on for five days – I imagine the space is fairly expensive to hire despite the dilapidated condition – and ended on October 27. Although I didn’t find anything of photographic interest, I did enjoy much of the show, and thankfully they had provided a numbered map to find my way around the more than 20 spaces (not all in use.)

Geoffrey Crawley RIP

I read yesterday of the death, age 83, of Geoffrey Crawley, and wasn’t intending to write about it as I didn’t feel I had anything to add to what had already been published, particularly by the BJP and Amateur Photographer – he worked for both. The twenty years he spent as editor of the BJP, from around 1967 to 1987 were perhaps its best years within living memory, although not commercially.

I can’t remember ever having met him, but as a very occasional contributor and letter writer to the BJP, I did talk with him a few times on the phone and received several letters from him, including a very nice personal reply following a complaint I made about a rather insane review the magazine had printed by Ainslie Ellis (1920-1997.)

Like many photographers I made use of the developer formulae which he contributed to the British Journal of Photography Annual, the whole ‘FX’ series of fine grain and acutance developers, some of which, such as Acutol and Acutol-S were commercially marketed.

As well as the magazine, he also edited the annual from 1967. In 1988, which I think was the last issue, it made the proud claim to being the oldest photographic annual in the world, first appearing as a wall calender in 1860, and then as a pocket book supplement to the magazine in 1861. You can read or download the 1898 issue (long out of copyright) made available by the University of Toronto.

It’s interesting to re-read the two page editorial in the 1988 issue by Crawley on advances in technology and how these will effect the future of photography – he notes that the “keynote of the next few years… could well turn out to be the increasing use of photography as a notebook in everyday life and particularly in leisure activities.” But writing in 1987, the article nowhere mentions the idea of digital imaging – how quickly things were to change in that respect.

The 1988 annual had another great figure from the last century of British photography as picture editor, Colin Osman, noted as a photo historian but also as the financial supporter for the crucial years of the magazine ‘Creative Camera.’ I was very pleased to have four of my pictures included in the picture section, along with work by many other photographers, including David Hoffman, Anna Fox, Tom Wood, Crispin Hughes, Mike Seabourne, Barry Frydlender, John Blakemore and many others.

One of the strangest stories which Crawley was involved in was the 1917 Cottingley Faires hoax, and it was an article on PetaPixel about this that made me change my mind and write this post. As Michael Zhang notes, it’s interesting that so many people were taken in by these pictures (though they were not as he suggests “in the early days of photography” but when it was 78 years old.)

The hoax, carried out by two girls aged 10 and 16, was a very amateur affair. That people believed them was simply because they wanted to believe them, not that they were in any way believable – to any unprejudiced eye they were obviously fake. What Crawley did was to show in detail exactly how they had been made, and to gain the confidence of Elsie Wright and enable her to at last confess to the truth of the matter.

Stuart Freedman

Stuart Freedman, a Londoner born in 1967, has been a photographer since 1991 with stories “from Albania to Afghanistan and from former Yugoslavia to Haiti” published in leading magazines around the world, including Life, Geo, Time, National Geographic, Der Spiegel, Newsweek and Paris Match. He is represented in London by Panos Pictures.

In 1998 he was selected for the World Press Masterclass and the following year for the Agfa Young Photojournalist of the Year, and has gained awards from Amnesty International (twice), Pictures of the Year, The World Sports Photo Award, The Royal Photographic Society and UNICEF, and his work has been shown widely.

Looking at his new web site, it is easy to see why, with fine photojournalism is stories both in black and white, for example The Mutilated, with images from Sierra Leone, and some stunning colour work in all the essays on the site, although perhaps sometimes I find the colour a little over-saturated.

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Stuart talk about his work, and there are some excellent pieces of writing on the site, as well as on his blog, Umbra Sumus (We are but shadows.) One recent piece, “I am not a witch” Well, actually I am had some sensible things to say about the Halloween scam as well as his portraits of some British pagans.

I did have a few minor problems with his new site, which certainly looks very stylish. As well as my often-mentioned aversion to sites that need you to scroll sideways (I’m still waiting for a mouse with a scroll wheel that works that way) there were some links that only wanted to work if I opened them in a new tab.