>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Workers Memorial Day – Stratford

This was the first year that the UK government had recognised International Workers Memorial Day, which has been marked here for a number of years, largely due to the efforts of the Construction Safety Campaign. I’ve photographed it because it highlights a very important issue, workplace safety. Despite a much greater emphasis on Health and Safety (and it’s too often used as an excuse for organisations not doing things they don’t really want to do, which brings it into disrepute) we still have far too many workplace injuries and deaths. We shouldn’t really call them accidents, since most are not really that, but the predictable consequences of management not taking proper precautions or insisting that workers do tasks without proper training or equipment or supervision. Accidents at work generally don’t happen, most are caused, and the people causing them almost always escape prosecution.

There are over a thousand building sites in London and only 28 HSE inspectors to cover them. 90% of reported accidents are not even investigated because there just isn’t the staff to do so. And when people are actually taken to court and convicted for offences that have led to the death and injury of workers, sentences are often derisory.

Management know that they can get away with it, and when they face fines over completion dates or costs are running high, safety is something that can be compromised.

I found this event with its large crowd of workers standing unusually quiet in memory of their two dead colleagues a moving one, and at times it was hard to photograph. Fortunately technically it was mainly straightforward, but there were pictures that I didn’t quite see as clearly as I might have.

One that I tried for but didn’t quite make was on the march earlier, which started close to the London 2012 Olympic stadium. I wanted to show the march and this together, but there was no really suitable viewpoint. Perhaps this was my best attempt:

which does have the advantage of having the stadium twice, once on the banner of the London Construction Branch of Unite. It’s a pity this was some way back in the march, and I would have liked to have got a rather more clever image of it with the stadium.

So far, this is the only picture that has got used, other than in my postings to Demotix and elsewhere, but you can see the set of them on My London Diary.

Clear Blue Skies

Volcanic ash might have caused havoc to the world’s airlines and inconvenience to a many passengers – including several friends of mine and my son, who got an extra week’s stay in America with some more wild swimming.

But for those of us who live near Heathrow it was sheer bliss! We hadn’t realised here how much incessant background noise – day and night – the airport was responsible for, and it was almost like moving out to the country. Nor how much our skies are normally populated by vapour trails. This morning as I performed my daily workout (not the most strenuous of activities, but good for the heart) I looked up at the sky and realised that every bit of cloud cover was man made, with con trails in virtually every direction speading out to give light and fairly diffuse clouds over perhaps a fifth of the sky.

Of course these trails eventually vaporize in the sun and later in the day we still sometimes get clear blue skies, but those few days when ash grounded the planes were something rather special. Despite being busy with other things I did find time to take advantage of them with a few pictures, in Finsbury Park and Wandsworth.

The skies seemed a little deeper blue than normal, perhaps because of the ash. We had expected some rather special sunsets too, but I didn’t see any, though I’m not sure I would have photographed them in any case. File with cute cats so far as I’m concerned.

Actually I don’t much like clear blue skies either, better to have some clouds, but the do need to be real clouds. Con trails can be a nuisance, and its often hard to convince viewers that those marks in the sky are not scratches on the print and I have been known to retouch them out of pictures, especially when sending files to Alamy, otherwise their quality control may reject the images.

Alamy are also responsible for the elimination of countless birds from the sky too. Once you’ve had an image rejected for ‘dust’ that you know was seagulls, it’s easier to play safe and simply clone out those little dots.

You can see more blue skies on my pictures from Wandsworth and Finsbury Park on My London Diary, but I’ve taken better pictures of both places previously – with clouds. Some of my acquaintances threw up their hands in horror when I told them I’d been photographing in Finsbury Park in 2003, expressing surprise that I had survived and not been mugged for the Hassleblad Xpan and other expensive gear I was carrying.

Not a great deal of cloud there, but here are two images taken a few hundred yards and 8 years apart on the New River that really show the difference.

Yes, I prefer clouds!

City of London Needs A Flash Flashmob

Security guards and police in the City of London have been at it again. Blatantly disregarding the official advice to police from the Home Office, they are continuing to misuse the powers under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act to harass photographers.

The NUJ Photographers Branch has Grant Smith’s account of what happened to him yesterday, 10th May, and clearly the police acted wrongly. They should have protected his right to photograph on the street but instead acted in an aggressive manner and forcibly searched him despite his cooperation with them. They also took away his mobile phone, although a later comment states it was later returned to him.

I think photographers need to educate both the City of London Police and security guards around the city, and a good way to do that would be a flash mob. My suggestion would be for it to start outside the police HQ in Wood St, and from their to go on a tour around every site in the city where we know of incidents of photographers being stopped. I’d like it to be a Flash flashmob, because firing a few hundred flashes would be a way of making sure we were noticed.

For maximum impact I think we should do it at lunchtime on a weekday when there are plenty of people in the City to see it – and perhaps some city workers who are also amateur photographers might be encouraged to join in.

Of course others may come up with better ideas – and I’ll be happy to join in with whatever is suggested.

Sapology

Chelsea isn’t my favourite part of London, always a slow bus ride for me, either from Victoria or Clapham Junction, although yesterday I enjoyed the journey back as the evening lighting was beginning to work its magic as the bus made its way over Battersea Bridge, and I was feeling rather pleased after a pleasant hour or so at Michael Hoppen Contemporary with the aid of some interesting company, a couple of beers and some good photography.

The current show, until 5 June is one of the most interesting I’ve seen in that space which so often seems to be given over to mildly pornographic visions that doubtless sell well. But this show was different. Daniele Tamagni‘s “Gentlemen of Bacongo” is a fascinating study of a genuinely interesting phenomenon.

Les Sapeurs get their name from ‘Societe des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elegantes‘ – or alternatively from the English version, ‘Society for the Advancement of People of Elegance‘, and sapology is more than a look, it is (as one might expect in a Francophone society) a philosophy espoused by its exponents. Despite the poverty in the society in Brazzaville, Congo (or perhaps as a reaction to it) they aim for an elegance and style that is based on an idealised tradition of the English dandy, although sometimes allied with a flamboyant use of colour that would seldom be imaginable in our duller clime.

Many of the finely tailored suits are – at great expense, sometimes involving years of saving – from Saville Row and leading French and Italian designers – and are complemented by hats, shoes, ties, carefully folded and displayed handkerchiefs and gloves, along with cigars (seldom actually smoked) and pipes.

Le Sape has its own highly formalised aesthetic, at its base a ‘trilogy of colour‘, aiming for a perfection of effect within a particular choice of three colours. It even has a written set of ‘10 commandments‘ (actually only eight as numbers 9 and 10 are “Still to be written”) of which number 2 is “You will not sit down“. Clothes are for posing in, for appearing in on the street or at the bars at which the Sapeurs meet, for putting on a show.

Most of what I know about them comes not from the images on the wall but on the book of Tamagni’s work (Gentlemen of Bacongo, Trolley Books, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-904563-83-9 – and the site has a good slide show of ten images) which is more impressive that the show, enabling Tamagni to portray a much wider and more rounded view of his subjects. On the gallery wall they perhaps become a little too much like exotic specimens. It is hard to photograph people like this who are so conscious of their own appearance and image and are almost always posing, but he manages both to project them as they would like to be seen and also at times to get beyond that.

I first met Tamagni in Peckham in 2007, and I wrote about his contribution to a show there and, something I found rather more interesting, his work on black churches there, from which perhaps the most striking image in that show came. In the same year he won the best portfolio in the Canon Young Photographer award for Italy for his pictures of dandies from the Congo, and in 2010 he gained the ICP award for Applied Fashion photography.

Sapology has spread from the Congo as Sapeurs have gone abroad to live and work, and the opening night was made more memorable by the attendance of one of them from London, who had also brought along a collection of his shoes. As usual I couldn’t resist taking a few pictures, two of which you see above.

Also showing in the gallery are a series of portraits by Araminta De Clermont of young South African girls from the Cape Flats dressed up for their end of school ‘Matric Dances‘. For many of these young women it is the night of their lives and their families have planned and saved over the year to create a night of fantasy. She has photographed them very much as fashion models in the style of fashion magazines. Born in the Isle of Man she graduated in architecture before going on to study photography in London and South Africa. She now lives and works in Cape Town, where these pictures were shown in 2009.

Her first solo exhibition “Life After” at Joao Ferreira Gallery in 2006 looked at South African ex-prisoners and their tattoos. You can see six pictures with her comments in a Guardian slide show, Prison Ink.

Crow Country

The British Journal of Photography has a rather low opinion of it’s readers when it states “Few readers will have heard of let along seen Masahisha Fukases 1986 book, Karasu (Ravens), first printed by Sokyu-sha, a Japanese publisher based in Tokyo.”

Do I feel insulted or give myself a pat on the back as one of the chosen few? No, but I do feel it rather more reflects the ignorance of the writers of the BJP about the wider aspects of photography which are too often demonstrated on its pages than anything about its readership, and for a publication hoping to establish itself as a monthly devoted to the medium is disappointing. Guys you need to up your game. In many respects the latest May issue is an improvement (and I’m pleased to see that it has lost the typographic fancies that made it literally hard for me to read.)

Although I don’t own ‘Karasu‘ I was among the thousands of us in London who flocked to the Serpentine Gallery in 1985-6 (and it was also shown in Oxford) for the show ‘Black Sun‘ which featured Fukase’s work along with that of three other great Japanese masters, Eokoh Hosoe, Shomei Tomatsu and Daido Moriyama and have the Aperture issue of the same name by Mark Holborn which served as a fine catalogue. It has 16 pages devoted to Fukase’s work, and in particular to the crows. Much more recently I remember seeing a whole wall of this work, I think at the V&A, and the former director there, Mark Haworth-Booth is among those listed in the acknoledgements to ‘Black Sun’.

More recently in 2008, Paris Photo had its thematic show on Japanese photography from 1848 to the present day and on this site I wrote “Of course there will be plenty of familiar work, including people such as Shoji Ueda, Ihei Kimura, Masahisa Fukase, Eikoh Hosoe, Shomei Tomastu, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama” and there was.

Japanese photography, despite my particular interest in the work of people such as Eikoh Hosoe (who I was really delighted to meet in Poland in 2005) and Issei Suda, one of whose books I bought many years ago was an area I had only really just started to work seriously on in the ‘World Photography’ section of my ‘About Photography’ site when my contract was terminated. A couple of years earlier I had published a piece ‘Early Photography in Japan’ which had dealt largely with the nineteenth century and was hoping to write more on the twentieth century, although I had written short notes about Fukase and the others.

The BJP calls Karasu “an obscure masterpiece” and expresses surprise it was chosen as the best photobook of the past 25 years in their critic’s poll and you may like see the list of the other works that these “five experts” (themselves somewhat randomly chosen) have selected. Perhaps surprisingly, the one Japanese among them, Yoko Sawada, who was responsible for many of the issues of the influential Japanese photographic magazine déjà-vu in the first half of the 1990s, does not mention the book, picking works by five other Japanese photographers starting with Nobuyoshi Araki to whom 4 of the magazine’s 20 issues (including its last produced by Akihito Yasumi) were entirely devoted.

There are rather few books on the list I would have chosen, although I’m familiar with many of them. Those I own are Nan Goldin’s ‘Ballad of Sexual Dependency‘, Chris Killip’s In Flagrante and What We Bought: The New World by Robert Adams, although I do have other works by several of the photographers named.

I don’t really subscribe to the idea of “the best photobook“. Books to me are working tools, things I use, and if you have a job that needs a screwdriver even the best spanner is likely to be pretty useless. I’ve never felt a need – nor do I expect to – for quite a few of the volumes listed by this very small selection of critics.

What I have read recently is ‘Crow Country‘ by Mark Crocker, described in the Independent as “A thoughtful and brilliantly executed celebration of countryside and the importance of nature in human affairs.” It contains no photographs, but is superb evocation of one man’s obsession with the the corvid family of birds – crows, rooks, jackdaws, ravens and more – and his attempts to find what lies behind their migrations, roosting and massing. It’s a work that perhaps might well be read alongside Fukase’s work.

November in Paris & Lensculture fotofest

I’m already looking forward to November in Paris, which really is the month of the photo, as well as a great time to enjoy walking around one of my favourite cities.

In 2008 I spent the best part of a week there and apart from Paris Photo, visited more than 40 other photo shows, writing about quite a few of them for >Re:PHOTO, as well as my reflections on the Maison Europeene de la Photographie (MEP) compared to our Photographers’ Gallery and attending the Cérémonies du 11 novembre. I think there are about 32 posts from that visit on the site in November 2008 and December 2008 (it took me a month to finish writing about the best of the exhibitions I saw) and also on My London Diary, a special Paris Supplement with my own pictures from the visit.

Two things reminded me about Paris in the last week. One was a request to supply a picture I took in 1984 which is on the front page of a part of my Paris site.

And the second was the latest news from Lensculture, based in Paris, which as well as announcing the latest issue of this great online magazine, also gives details of the Lensculture fotofest Paris 2010, with international portfolio reviews and a meeting place for photographers to be held at Spéos Paris Photographic Institute in the 11th arrondissement from November 15-17 2010. This is the first large-scale event of the type – pioneered by FotoFest in Houston 20 years ago – to take place in Paris. Birmingham of course got there some time ago with Rhubarb Rhubarb.

Lensculture has also joined up with VII Photo and now has features and recorded interviews with their photographers in an ‘Inside Photojournalism‘ series.

Something completely new to me in this issue of Lensculture is the work of Lithuanian photographer Mindaugas Kavaliauskas whose book on life in Kraziai, an historic village in north-western Lithuania, is reviewed by Zoë Fargher and you can see a set of of his 16 images from it on the site.

Visura 9

Issue 9 of Visura magazine is, as its predecessors, full of delights, and doubtless you will find your own and different highlights from mine. Cheryl Karaliks‘s five deaf boys raising their hands in the air in Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso in 1991 certainly lifted my heart and there are many other fine images in her ‘Notes from Africa.’ Alex and Rebecca Webb’s ‘Violet Isle‘ includes many amazing colour images by both, and it was a joy to view the work again.

The work in this issue is extremely varied, and living up to the magazine’s policy which is to feature “personal projects chosen by the contributing artists themselves” with “texts that accompany projects … edited through a collaborative process with the artists” with the goal “to be true to their voice“. Although it is an ‘invitation only’ publication, photographers are invited to include a link to a series of their personal work on the ‘Your View’ page.

I still have some problems with the web design – or perhaps with my connection to the site. I don’t know if I saw all the pictures in some of the essays, as on the final image I reached there was still a button for the next image – but clicking it failed to load more. The initial image for each feature also came equipped with a ‘previous’ button that did nothing on my browser. For some features – including my two favourites mentioned above – I could find no accompanying text other than the image captions, and where the text was on the other features there was a large area of empty space. I was left wondering whether the photographers had wanted their images shown without text, or whether the text had for some reason failed to load. It remains the kind of site where I sometimes am left wondering whether I’d using the right browser or have the right plugins loaded.

For some time I’ve been convinced that the future of photography magazines is on the web, and Visura I think is in most ways a good example of how that future will be. Visura has great content and it looks good on my screen (and after all photographers need to have good screens, accurately calibrated to process their own work – so what could be better to view the work of others?)

Previous issues are still available in the archive section of the site and there are many fine features there to discover if you haven’t been a regular reader.

Photojournalist Arrested At Protest

On dvaphoto you can read the full story of the arrest of photographer Ethan Welty in Colorado following his coverage of an environmental protest at the Valmont Power Plant near Boulder on Tuesday April 27th. He was photographing from outside the plant where 4 environmental activists were arrested for 2nd Degree Criminal trespass.

Police named him as one of the arrested activists, and the press, including AP ran the story without checking the facts, and much of the media are still ignoring Welty’s attempt to point out to them that he was acting as a journalist and did not take part in the protest, staying outside the plant.

You can see Welty’s pictures from the event on Photoshelter, and his web site is also worth a look for his other work. As Matt Lutton says in his post, “This is an issue not just of press freedom for an independent photographer covering an event but of Ethan Weltys ability to fight false accusations and bad reporting which have brought his name into media reports of the event.“

And Who Are You Working For?

Sometimes when police or security people talk to you its just a matter of being friendly, but too often it isn’t. Sometimes it’s easy to think that they are fishing for information, and I’ve often been surprised by questions from police that reveal they know more about me than I might expect – and that some have been reading this blog or my web site or know about my movements.

Although I’ve never seen a police “spotter card” for journalists like the ones that have been found and published for demonstrators, I’m fairly sure that they exist somewhere, perhaps on police station walls and that at least at one time if not now I was featured.

I don’t believe in being rude or uncooperative, but I do think there are some questions we should not answer and some distinctions the police try to make that we should as a profession refuse to admit. So many statements I’ve heard have clearly been the police trying to distinguish between “good” and “bad” journalists – the good being those who work directly for the large circulation and mainly right wing press and the bad being those who contribute to the kind of ‘leftie rags’ in which my work has been known to surface.

So for some time, my response when the police ask “Who are you working for?” has simply been to say “These days we’re pretty well all freelances” even on those too rare occasions when I am actually on commission. It’s slightly more polite than what I’m thinking, which is that it is none of your business and letting the police decide who is a ‘goodie’ or a ‘baddie’ is going far too far towards a police state. If we have the credentials to show we are a journalist – such as an NUJ card – we should be treated as such – end of story.

So I was interested to hear the story of a well-respected and widely published photojournalist where the police seem to have acted as they should when he was harassed by security while attempting to work:

About 9.30 earlier today (29.01.10), I passed through the police line, showing my NUJ press card, without hindrance. A few minutes later, in front of the main entrance to the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, a man came over to me and asked who I was and who I worked for. He was wearing a plain white identity tag around his neck with ‘press officer’ printed on it. He aggressively and repeatably asked me who I worked for. I replied that I had identified myself as a working journalist to the police and I told him to stop harassing me and who was he ‘press officer’ for. I also asked for his name.He told me that I was on private property and that it was ok for me to be a freelance but that I had to be working for someone even as a freelance, and he demanded that I leave. He took me by the arm and I told him to let go or I would ask for his arrest for assault with intent. He let go of me and demanded again that I leave. I again asked him who he worked for and his name. He told me that he was the Conference Centre press officer and that his name was Bob Honey. He again told me to leave and I told him that I was working and to stop hindering me and that who I work for is my business.He then called over a private security guard who told me to follow him. I refused and replied that he, too, should leave me alone and stop harassing me and that I identified myself to the police. The security guard then walked away.

A couple of minutes later five uniformed police came over to me, one of them a high ranking officer with braid on his hat, asked me who I was and I identified myself again by showing my NUJ press card. The only question he asked me was to verify my name. I did and this satisfied him and I continued working.

It’s good to be able to report that the police behaved correctly both when allowing the photographer to access the press area and when brought in by security to deal with the incident. If they had any doubts about the photographer they could have checked up on the security hot line, but the card does carry a photograph.

The letter, sent to the union, continues with a request that the NUJ make a formal complaint to the management at the QEII centre pointing out that freelancers have equal rights as staff journalists and asking them to ensure that they are treated equally. I understand this is in hand.

This is perhaps another story which makes clear why photographers need to join the union. If you are a professional working in London, then the London Photographers Branch will welcome you.

We Stole Your Pics & We Are Suing You For It

When I saw this on PDN Pulse I just could not believe it. You need to read the comments to get the full story and there is a rather better piece on it by Olivier Laurent on the BJP blog in which he makes clear just what a slap in the face this is to all photographers – as he writes “in my opinion, this case highlights one major problem affecting the journalism world in particular: a blatant lack of respect for a photographers work and copyright.”

Frankly it is unbelievable that what we thought was a respectable and trustworthy organisation should behave in this way. I hope it gets to court and AFP really get taken to the cleaners, since the legal issues appear to be clear cut. But I guess AFP will be paying lawyers huge sums to muddy the waters while apparently happily stealing work from photographers

But it isn’t the only current news about photographers getting a raw deal. Guardian News & Media wrote to freelance photographer contributors on Monday telling them it was reducing rates by 10%, unilaterally breaking a long-standing agreement with the NUJ. You can read more about the cuts in the BJP. On Tuesday the NUJ London Photographers Branch unanimously passed a motion to adopt a model letter for photographers to send to GNM. More on the story on the Journalism web site.

So far the Guardian‘s response to this letter have been to say that they are sorry that the photographers concerned are unwilling to accept the new rates, and agreeing to delete any of their images that may be held in the paper’s archives.

I’ve never contributed work directly to GNM, although in the past I probably occasionally sent work there, I can’t remember it being used. I very seldom send work to newspapers now, except by request. Most get thousands of unsolicited submissions every day. Most of these never even get glanced at, with most organisations using text search robots to try to identify images that might be of interest. Many stories in all our press now get illustrated with largely generic stock imagery supplied under bulk contracts from the large agencies. You can send a better picture but the chances of it getting seen by a human are very low and of being used almost zero.

Another current story is over Bauer Media, publishers of some of the leading musical magazines among a wide range of titles, which is trying to grab “all rights” from its freelance contributors for Kerrang!, Mojo and Q. Once they’ve paid to publish a picture or article in a single issue they want to be able to do anything they like with it for free, and those who have failed to sign up to this agreement have been told they will no longer be commissioned. If they succeed in imposing the agreement on these publications, Bauer plan to extend it to their other titles.

What can photographers do? Join the union and try to fight the cuts – and stand up generally for the rights of photographers and other journalists. Certainly refuse to supply work to GNM at their new rates. But also to try and support new media and alternative media, even if at the moment they don’t generate income directly. As well as trying to sell images as stock through libraries and occasionally to papers and magazines I also publish regularly on Demotix, and Indymedia as well as here and on my own web sites such as My London Diary. There I can tell the stories the way I want to and get work to an audience and just occasionally it does pay off with work.