>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Peter Sekaer Overhyped

Peter Sekaer (1901-50) was a Dane who went to New York in 1918, setting up a business producing posters for shop window displays. In 1929 he joined the National Art Students League to study painting meeting Ben Shahn, who probably got him interested in photography and also introduced him to Walker Evans. In 1933 he studied photography with Berenice Abbott at the New School for Social Reasearch and assisted for Walker Evans who was photographing artworks at the Museum of Modern Art.

Sekaer also went with Evans on his Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration (FSA) trip to the South, taking some pictures of similar subjects as they travelled around together. From 1936 to 1942 he worked for various US government agencies including the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), the United States Housing Authority (USHA) and the Office of Indian Affairs, working briefly for the Office of War Information (OWI) in 1941.

In 1945 he gave up working for the government agencies (and the American Red Cross) to freelance, moving to New York in 1947 where he did magazine and commercial work. A heart attack killed him in 1950, aged only 49.

Solo shows of his work took place at the Witkin Gallery, New York in 1980, in Copenhagen in 1990 and at Howard Greenberg Gallery in 1999. Books were published alongside the latter two shows. Currently the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, USA, which recently acquired 70 vintage prints of his work has a show ‘Signs of Life‘, Photographs by Peter Seaker, which continues until Jan 9, 2011 and there is also an accompanying book.

Searching for pictures under Sekaer’s name at the Library of Congress produces surprising few results; a set of images of an FSA trailer camp at the Vultee Aircraft Plant in Nashville Tenesse, taken in May 1941 for the OWI, and two earlier images, only one of which is on line. The trailer camp pictures are undistinguished, a fairly dreary record of the site. The other picture shown, of mothers and children at the doorway of a brick home in a former slum area for the USHA, is a little more interesting but also rather routine.

The Library of Congress does include many fine photographs from the less well-known government agencies for which Sekaer mainly worked, taken by other better-known photographers – for example Arthur Rothstein. There are also some very run of the mill unattributed images. But unless I’ve missed something Sekaer appears to have produced little or nothing of worth for these agencies.

You get a rather more positive impression of him as a photographer by searching at the Addison Gallery of American Art which produces 17 results, one of which shows a page from a scrapbook containing 725 small prints by him (27 or 28 on the page shown appear to be contact prints including several frames of some subjects.) Not all of the other 16 pictures are on-line.

There are some nice touches visible in some of those which are. A young woman is posed behind a restaurant window in Charleston which has a cup of tea and a fish painted on it; the collar of her dress appears as a heart. But looking at most of them I can’t help thinking of rather stronger images of similar scenes by Walker Evans, Helen Levitt and others.

Sekaer’s ‘artist’ pages at the Howard Greenberg Gallery which include 25 images concentrates even more on those that make him seem heavily under the spell of Walker Evans. But frankly they just are nothing like as good. He isn’t a bad photographer, but just rather ordinary when compared with Evans – as most of us would be. But there are two or three images that perhaps show something rather more personal, all including people. Images 19 – Lousiville, 1938, with two women and a child with an upturned tricycle and 21 – Untitled, 1938, with and old woman wrapped in a shawl on her front step, for me stand out above the rest.

Sekaer was obviously a proficient photographer, and doubtless his work adds something to our knowledge of the era he photographed, and the book may well be of interest. It’s good to see publications and shows of some of the minor figures of photography – and there were very many of them – whose contribution to photography is more in their collective input than in individual work. There are hundreds if not thousands more like him, and it would be good to see more of them recognised for what they are. But don’t let’s make them out to be overlooked geniuses.

You can read more about Sekaer and the High Museum show in a feature in the New York Times. Apparerently 53 or the works in the museum were acquired from the Howard Greenberg Gallery, and the piece quotes Greenburg as saying that had he lived to promote his work “he would have had a great reputation.” Earlier the writer seems to suggest that Walker Evans is better known because he “lived into his 70s and promoted himself as an artist as well as a documentarian.”

I have news for Eve M. Kahn – and also Mr Greenburg (though I think he already knows it but also knows his business.) Walker Evans is better known because he was an incomparably better photographer.

PG Closure Enigma

The British Journal of Photography somewhat surprisingly announces as a scoop the news that London’s Photographer’s Gallery will be closing for a month from September 19.

I thought the closure had been long planned and remember going to a presentation by the architects who were overseeing the redevelopment last year. And when I got home after the opening of the current Sally Mann show on June 18th I wrote:

I was disappointed in various ways at the Photographers Gallery opening of a show of Sally Manns work yesterday evening, the last to take place in their current premises before they close for extensive rebuilding. But the show, The Family and the Land, which continues until 19 September 2010, is certainly worth at least a brief visit.

So I’m hardly surprised at the news!

But the feature on the Photographers Gallery is perhaps one of the few interesting items in the otherwise rather tedious September issue of BJP, and you can read it online.

It’s also hard to understand the headline that says ‘Photographers’ Gallery to close down for a year, answers criticisms‘ as it seems to me that it rather signally fails to do so in the article. I’ve been a member of the gallery since soon after it was founded in the 1970s (except for a short period where they lost my membership details) but find it hard to disagree with the criticisms that so many photographers have of it and its programmes.

Quoted by the BJP are Magnum’s Chris Steele Perkins (the BJP gets him to expand on his June statement I dont hate The Photographers Gallery, I just think theyre shit) and Brian Griffin, along with other figures in photography.

The Photographers’ Gallery is funded as if it was a major institution covering the whole of photography in the UK, its £852,693 grant being almost as much as the other photographic recipients – Photoworks, Impressions Gallery, Open Eye Gallery, Photofusion, Redeye Photography Network, Hereford Photography Festival, Four Corners Film and Pavilion put together. What we really need is something rather more like New York’s ICP or Paris’s MEP, rather than an organisation that seems to be pursuing just a particular niche which many of us feel is peripheral to photography.

You can read my thoughts about the differences between the PG and the MEP in a post from two years ago, Paris and London: MEP & PG, and more of my thoughts about the gallery in a post from the opening of the gallery at its new site, Zombies in Ramillies Street.

I’ve always supported public funding for the arts in principle and still do, but I often find it hard to do so when in so many areas so little of the funding flows directly into supporting arts practice and so much into questionable institutions.

Perpignan Winners

Lens has a nice feature on the top award winners at this year’s Perpignan Festival, with some interesting photography from Frédéric Sautereau winner of The Visa d’or – Daily Press for his work for French newspaper La Croix, VII photographer Stephanie Sinclair, winner of the Visa d’or Feature award for work for National Geographic & The New York Times Magazine and Damon Winter of the New York Times, winner of the Visa d’or News award.

It was indeed a very good year for photographers associated with the New York Times, although Lens would probably have run a similar feature even if their paper had not been involved.

So far as I can see in the awards page, none of the three winners or the other six nominated photographers is British or has any connection with any UK newspaper or magazine.

There are some fine British photojournalists, but we perhaps lack the kind of photographic culture that incubates great photography; few newspapers or magazines that publish more than individual images or encourage thoughtful photographic endeavour. So perhaps the lack of British names on the list isn’t too surprising.

Heathrow Celebrates

© 2010, Peter Marshall
John McDonnell MP, John Stewart and others with Stewart’s latest work ‘Victory Against All The Odds’
My father used to cycle past the orchards of Heath Row, then one of the most fertile market gardening and orchard areas supplying food for London. My mother grew up on a market garden a couple of miles south of where the airport now is; around ten years ago the last remnants of the orchard her father planted were dug up for social housing.

Then came the airport, and they changed its name to Heathrow. We got used to planes passing a hundred or so feet above our heads on their way to touch down. But the planes got larger and larger, and noisier and noisier. Then came the jets with a quantum leap in noise (and years later another leap with Concord, but fortunately there were few of them) and things became near impossible. Double glazing helped but meant you had to live with windows closed, and even then listening to the radio or holding a conversation was often difficult.

I moved a little away from the flight path, and when they built Terminal 4, the runway that took the planes closest to my house could no longer be safely used (bringing Heathrow down from its orginal five or six to a two runway airport.) But Heathrow seemed insatiable and unstoppable. T4 was going to be the last they would ever need, but then came Terminal 5. Again they would never need another runway or terminal, but within a couple of years they were saying it was absolutely necessary to have a third runway – and it wasn’t long before they were also planning T6.

Local residents in Sipson, Harmondsworth and Harlington whose homes would have been demolished or impossibly blighted if the third runway went ahead decided to make a stand, and founded the ‘No Third Runway Action Group‘, NoTRAG. I photographed its first major demonstration in June 2003.

They kept up their fight, and built up a coalition with other groups including most of the local councils in the surrounding area and with environmental groups such as HACAN, led by John Stewart. MPs too gave their support, including local MP John McDonnell (though my silly local MP preferred to support BAA – though it was his expenses rather than this that finally forced him to resign.) They fought the proposal at every level, with Greenpeace coming up with the idea of the ‘Airplot‘, a small piece of land in the middle of the runway site that ended up with over 80,000 beneficial owners – and I was one of them.The ‘Climate Camp‘ at Heathrow also did a great deal to raise interest and debate over the issues.

Over the years I photographed many more events related to the campaign. More marches, Whitehall demonstrations, the Terminal 5 Flashmob, and of course the Climate Rush on tour.

Airport noise caused by Heathrow effects much of West and Central London – several million people – and what had started as a local campaign soon became something much larger. And of course there were larger issues involved around the environment and a growing realisation of the accelerating damage that aviation was causing to it.

One important point came when the Conservative opposition came out against the proposal. Of course it was partly party politics, partly a matter of seeing the growing political importance of Green issues generally. And once they were in power they stuck to their decision, and the third runway is, at least for the moment, history.

But although the photographs aren’t so interesting the event that pleased me most was the celebration at the end of August – pictures on My London Diary. It was as John Stewart said, a ‘Victory Against All The Odds‘. Everyone said at the start it couldn’t be done, but it was. And I’m pleased to have played a part – if very small – in it too.

Ian Tomlinson Eyewitness

On Foto8 you can read the story by Vu photographer Michael Greive of how on 1 April last year he photographed Ian Tomlinson in his dying minutes. His first picture of the incident shows Tomlinson sitting on the ground shortly after the fatal blow by PC Horwood in the pedestrian street behind the Royal Exchange; Tomlinson, seen from behind, looks up towards police who appear to be ignoring his pleas. After taking this frame, Grieve turned towards a group of police standing to the right to take another picture as a record of the whole scene, and at the back of this picture is the officer later identified as Horwood, two hands holding a club with his face partly covered.

A few minutes later, Greive saw the same victim, clearly in need of urgent medical attention. Police had prevented protesters – including a third year medical student – and a news photographer from coming to his assistance; one of the protesters had called the ambulance service, but they asked to speak to the police and the request was ignored.

Grieve took further pictures as Tomlinson, finally attended by police medics, was dying. It was only several days later, when a friend told him that he could be seen taking a picture of Tomlinson on the film of the unprovoked assault by Horwood which a US investment manager had taken and later sent to The Guardian that the photographer realised exactly what he had witnessed.

Grieve was advised to contact the Tomlinson family’s solicitor with his evidence and was later interviewed by the IPCC who were investigating the case. He decided to cooperate fully with them, supplying high-res scans of his images, in the hope that these would help in ensuring a conviction. Among other things his pictures showed conclusively that PC Horwood was not wearing his serial number.

In his feature, illustrated by a number of the pictures he took, Grieve records his disgust at the failure to prosecute Horwood. It’s hard indeed to disagree with his final paragraph:

“But photography did not fail that day. It recorded evidence as best it could from professionals, amateurs, to the unauthored CCTV. All photographers acted with total professionalism, doing their job, and not, as the police may these days accuse us, acting like potential terrorists or paedophiles, or whatever they decide to pull out of the hat. It goes with out saying that the only individual who unleashed terror this particular day at G20 was wearing a police uniform with his face partially obscured and failing to wear his serial number. And though he may be reprimanded internally by the police force he has, in effect, got away with it. And we citizens have to fight our corner and watch our backs.”

As the farce of an investigation into this case and others has shown, the police are effectively above the law – particularly in dealing with protesters and with the working class and ethnic minorities. The law at every level is still very much a law for the rich and privileged.

My Own Day

I wasn’t around when Ian Tomlinson was killed, although I had been with the protesters as they made their way to Bank in the morning. By the time I’d followed a second group there the area was packed with people and it was impossible to move down past the Bank of England. As well as the protesters there were literally hundreds (if not thousands) of photographers and I decided my time might be better spent covering the other protests going on around London.

So I left the the demonstration at Bank a little after noon, going to photograph the Climate Camp as they arrived to set up camp in the middle of the street a quarter of a mile away in Bishopsgate. As I left, police had started to “kettle” the protesters, refusing to let them leave but were still allowing press to go out through their lines. Later I went to photograph the ‘Jobs Not Bombs‘ demonstration at the US Embassy and march to a rally Trafalgar Square – and police were by then refusing to let journalists back into the area around Bank. And by the time of the police violence against the Climate Campers I was back at home and in bed.

Earlier I’d seen a few minor incidents as police snatched some masked demonstrators apparently at random out of the crowds and stood among the TSG as some of them paced from foot to foot obviously itching for some action. They seemed to me more than eager for confrontation, and it was obvious that they were out to cause trouble and to have no interest in keeping the peace.

The murder of Ian Tomlinson (and despite the CPS decision it is difficult to describe it as anything but murder) didn’t surprise me, although I was shocked by it, as well as by a number of other non-fatal incidents recorded on other videos, including attacks on several journalists as well as protesters.

© 2009 Peter Marshall
Prof Chris Knight, one of the G20 Meltdown Organisers, and the officer responsible for the policing at Bank meet at the start of the Ian Tomlinson Memorial March

Later I attended a number of protests against the killing, including a march in memory of Ian Tomlinson organised by the people who had organised the event at Bank, now working with the Tomlinson family. Later came a candlelit vigil with the family and, after the announcement of the failure to prosecute, a further demonstration outside the offices of the DPP.

I think we haven’t heard the last of this case, either in the courts or on the streets. Perhaps it will even lead to action to curb police excesses by our parliament. But given the record that doesn’t seem too likely.

Metadata Mysteries

Photo-Attorney Carolyn E Wright has stirred up a metadata controversy again with Is Google Stripping Your Metadata? posted a couple of days ago. In it she links to a couple of posts from the Gunar blog, Google in the hot seat for stripping metadata in image search results (May 27, 2010) and What should Google do about media metadata? (June 3, 2010)

As I’m sure we are all aware, the vital part of metadata for photographers is the copyright information which shows our ownership of an image, as well as our contact information. Google for its image search feature produces thumbnails of images from web sites, and in making those fails to include such ownership information. As Gunar points out, industry guidance – such as the Metadata Manifesto from the Stock Artists Alliance – is that ownership metadata should never be removed, and the technical means to transfer it when creating derivative files are well-documented and relatively simple.

Katherine Grainger at the NPG. Thumbnail saved from Google search – no metadata.
© 2010, Peter Marshall

Full size image found in Google seach – is saved from original location and so has full metadata.
© 2010, Peter Marshall

Gunar suggests that not only should Google always respect and transfer such information when it is present, but that it should also add the URL of the web page on which the picture is displayed. It’s data that Google obviously has and is currently in the link text on each image, along with the image URL. This would as stated be a very useful service, particularly for those older images put on line before we realised the importance of metadata and the threat of orphan works legislation.

As the post suggests, removal of metadata is illegal in the USA under the “copyright management information” (CMI) provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and according to leading copyright lawyers also in the UK. Perhaps it is about time that one of the leading photographers’ organisations in the US gave notice of an action against Google, who do rather seem to be dragging their feet over incorporating a few straightforward lines of code into their thumbnail production.

The same DMCA provision has also been dragged – perhaps rather less convincingly – into the dispute between Shepard Fairey and Associated Press over his use of an image of Barack Obama (news in the BJP a week ago was the photographer Mannie Garcia has dropped his claim against AP) which is due to come to court in March 2011.

According to a post by Julian Sanchez on ars technica in March, AP are alleging that Fairey violated the DMCA copyright removal provision in making a copy of the work from which to produce his artwork. It isn’t clear what they mean by this, but Sanchez points out that “CMI embedded in a digital image as metadata, after all, will necessarily be omitted from a printed copy of the work.”

Google are perhaps not the worst offenders of major online services. In April 2010, Jonathan Bailey reported on Plagiarism Today Flickr and Facebook STILL Strip EXIF Data. Flickr apparently now keeps it on the original uploaded files, but there is none on the other sizes that it generates. Of course most EXIF data isn’t a great loss, and what is important is particularly CMI data, most of which is IPTC data, but that probably goes the same way as EXIF.

Plagiarism Today also has some stock letters for making use of the DMCA to get content you own removed from web sites. It’s easy to do and there is useful guidance in DMCA Takedown 101, although I followed the perhaps more straightforward advice from Photo-Attorney Carolyn E Wright on NatureScapes. Unless you have some acceptable form of authenticated digital signature you will need to airmail or fax your signed take-down notice to the offending service provider’s DMCA agent.

It’s perhaps a symptom of the need to get more people to understand the need for metadata that almost all the web links I found when researching this article were about how to remove it rather than preservation. Usually this was simply to reduce image size, although it was good to find the following in Yahoo! web developer’s Stoyan Stefanov’s Image Optimization, Part 3: Four Steps to File Size Reduction

“Important note on stripping meta information: do it only for images that you own, because when jpegtan strips all the meta, it also strips any copyright information contained in the image file.”

Also on my long trawl I came across a reminder that there can be privacy issues when EXIF data is included. If you are an illegal marijuana grower it probably isn’t a great idea to take pictures of your crop and upload them – even through an anonymous proxy – complete with EXIF geotags!

Jpegs From Lightroom

Two weeks ago, in the post Lightroom 3.2 RC I wrote “they havent tackled any of those things I find most annoying – like Export giving lousy soft and over-large file size small jpegs.”

I met bahi a couple of months back at one of the monthly London meetings of Photo-Forum – well worth attending if you are in London on the 2nd Thursday of the month – it takes place in Jacobs Pro Lounge in the basement of their New Oxford St shop, from 6-8pm and afterwards we enjoy free food at a nearby pub paid for by a raffle during the meeting – the prizes are usually prints donated by the photographers who present work that evening.

Bahi is from Shoot Raw, an organisation that delivers support and training for photographers in digital photography, including Lightroom training and in a comment to that earlier piece gives a useful link to Jeffrey Friedls analysis of file size vs quality for Lightroom JPEG export, and also asks me to go into more detail about the problem I mention.

When I read his comment I’d just been going through some of the pictures I took at Notting Hill yesterday and so decided to use the picture I’d just developed in Lightroom 3.2RC(on PC) as a fairly random example.

This is the full image – scaled down from the original D700 raw file taken at ISO 800 from 42656×2832 px to 600×399 px (and displayed here at 450x299px.)

Not one of my greatest images!

First I tried using File Export to produce this file – here are the settings I used :

At 70% quality the file size for the 600-399px was 312kB.
At 30% quality the file size for the 600-399px was 254kB.

I tried to get File Export to produce a file using a file size limit of 150 and200Kb, but both times it reported it was unable to do so.

I selected the file and went to the web module in Lightroom, outputting a web site containing this file. I used the same 70% quality setting as before. The file produced was 118kB.

Here are some 300% details from the three Lightroom jpegs – as you can see, despite the huge file size differences the two 70% files are very similar.

[These files were created by viewing the files at 300% in ACDSee Pro, capturing with PrintScreen and pasting into Photoshop and cropping.]

70% is the setting I currently use for My London Diary, generally giving file sizes that are reasonable for broadband users – even on a page with a dozen pictures. Back in the old days of slow dial-up I used greater compression (and some special software that could actually use different compression levels on different areas of the same image) to trim file sizes to the bone, but this is no longer needed. Before switching to Lightroom I had moved on to batch processing from full-size images with ACDSee Pro, which typically seemed to produce comparable quality with file sizes a little smaller than Lightroom. It isn’t possible to simply select an equivalent quality setting, but files slightly under 100kB from ACDSee seemed comparable to the Lightroom 70% file.

I’ve not investigated this Lightroom problem in great detail, butI get the impression it gives the largest files from those images I’ve worked on most with the tools such as the adjustment brush.

Friedl in his piece at the link given above points out that despite having quality settings labelled 0-100 actually only implements 13 quality levels – just like Photoshop. I think you also get those same 13 quality levels if you use the checkbox to limit file size, but the file sizes can be different. Using quality 92 (or rather 85-92) on the above image gave a file size of 3748 kB, while limiting the file size to 5000 kB produced a visually identical file of 3550 kB.

Long, long ago when I produced jpegs using a DOS command line program I there were at least two parameters which had to be specified. One was a 1-100 setting for the quality of the match required between cells which would be replaced by the same cell, and the second was some kind of smoothing function. I don’t know that we need that kind of control, but perhaps we could be offered a little more than we have at present.

In Ray’s Footsteps

I’ve been away for a few days having a short holiday with family and friends and away too from computers, staying at a house in the middle of Cumbria away from wireless hotspots. Of course I could have connected from many of the places we visited, but I rather enjoy having a few days away from the Internet now and then.

My first photographic mentor was Raymond Moore (19201987) who I came to know through a series of photographic workshops with him and Paul Hill at Paul’s ‘Photographers Place’ in Derbyshire. Shortly after I met him, he retired from formal teaching in the Midlands in 1978 to live and photograph on the Solway Firth, where he produced some of his finest work, some of which can be seen in his ‘Every So Often’ published in 1983.

It’s hard for me not to think of the Cumbrian coast as ‘Ray Moore Country’ and although I wasn’t expecting to see large ‘Welcome’ signs proclaming this as I was driven to the coast, it was perhaps strange not to see any mention of him and his work in the many tourist leaflets and several information centres we visited during the week. Perhaps his work is very much at odds with how the Cumbrian Tourist Board want to promote the area, but in a hundred years or so they may erect a blue plaque on those houses in Silloth or next to that washing line in Allonby to match that on the nearby inn commemorating the stay there of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Dickens did praise the local shrimps (doubtless then less radio-active) though he found some of the other local towns which also celebrate his visits less pleasing, but so far as I’m aware the area failed to inspire him creatively.

I don’t know what Ray thought of the shrimps or the kippers, but he created a considerable body of work in the area on both sides of the Solway Firth, finding inspiration in the light and openness of these liminal areas, and in particular of their changing weather. In that respect the bright and sunny days we enjoyed for most of our week there while the rest of the country was experiencing heavy rainstorms was perhaps disappointing, though in other ways I was very glad of it.

It was the first time I’d actually visited the area and I hadn’t gone there to “do a Ray Moore” but to have a holiday, but there were times, as in some of these images, where I nodded a little to the memory of that great man, certainly one of the finest British photographers of the last century.

Obama Poster Controvery Continues

In Fairey or Not? I took a look at the controversy over the use by artist Shepard Fairey’s who clearly based a poster of Obama on a photograph by AP photographer, Manny Garcia, using the work without permission or payment.

I’ve quite a few times been paid by artists who wished to base their works on my pictures, so I have some personal interest in the practice continuing. Recently Dan Heller has posted a lengthy reply on his Photography Business blog to law professor Peter Friedman’s article Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity which asserts that Fairey had copied nothing that could be copyrightable. Both pieces are worth reading.

There are many aspects where copyright law – in the UK as well as the US – lacks clarity both as to its intention as well as its application.

Meatyard

If you’ve not yet come across the rather curious world of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, (1925-72), also known as ‘Eyeglasses of Kentucky’ you could do worse than start with the selection of his pictures on the ASX Facebook page.

Meatyard became a licenced optician after Navy service, and bought a camera to photograph his newly-born son in 1950. In 1954 he studied with Van Deren Coke, and later with Minor White and Henry Holmes Smith.

Although included in several prestigious shows, he remained an amateur photographer, opening his own business as an optician in Lexington, Kentucky in 1967. A monograph of his work was published in 1970, the same year he discovered he had terminal cancer.

Meatyard never just took a photograph. His work was always carefully planned and executed, with his children and friends acting some surreal charade for the camera. The pictures are full of menace and foreboding. People wear masks or blur their faces by moving their heads during exposure, emerge out of bushes or other unexpected places. Even the bushes sometimes seem to move. Meatyard creates a world in his pictures, that sometimes touches on our everyday, but always has some surprise up its sleeve.

More of his pictures at George Eastman House and on Google images, and a more detailed biography on Wikipedia.