>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

UBS Picks on Cleaners

There is something I find sickening about the way that bankers can pay themselves large bonuses but happily use contracting companies to clean their offices that cut the pay of some of the poorest in London. Not only have the cleaners at UBS suffered a loss in pay, they’ve also lost their rights, and Alberto Durango got the sack for protesting about it as their union rep.

The protests continue, and on Friday night I was there outside the UBS’s large and impressive offices in London’s Liverpool St – next to the station – to cover the event. As at the previous demonstration I photographer there in February, it was damp and there wasn’t a great deal of light. It’s also difficult to think of new ways to photograph an essentially similar event, and the pictures have a certain deja-vu.

But there are times when I think just being there and witnessing and making an attempt to bring what is happening to the attention of others is important, and this in its own small way is one such.

Earlier in the event the two children in this picture were holding a banner with their drawings on it and the message ‘Reinstate My Daddy Now!!!’ but I couldn’t find a way to get a good picture of it (you can see a couple of attempts, along with some of the other pictures I took on My London Diary, which also has more about the event.) Some things just don’t fit a frame well whatever you do.

News, Freedom etc

BBC news this morning reported that a committee of MPs and peers, the joint committee on human rights has asked that a review of all of our terrorism laws passed – often in great haste – since 9/11 should be “an urgent priority for the next Parliament.”

This jogged my memory about a video that EPUK pointed out in this weeks newsletter. Born Under Punches ( Big Brother mix) is a video around 10 minutes long that puts images and clips from various sources along with text – including quotations from George Orwell, Stella Rimington, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Capa and others to the sound track of “Born Under Punches” by Talking Heads.

It includes some familiar pictures of familiar events – including the killing by police of Ian Tomlinson, a year ago next Thursday and various other events in London where police have clashed with protesters and photographers trying to report the events.

Robert Capa is best known for his advice that if your pictures are not good enough it’s because you are not close enough, usually interpreted simply in a physical sense in terms of feet and inches, but also I think meaning that you are not sufficiently involved. One of the books that included his work, lurking somewhere on my shelves, was ‘The Concerned Photographer‘ published in 1968, fourteen years after his death, edited by his brother Cornell Capa which also included the work of Werner Bischof, Chim (David Seymour), Andre Kertesz, Leonard Freed and Dan Weiner.

It is this need to get close to the action that often results in friction between photographers and police, and also means that photographers often get a much clearer view of what is happening at events than some other journalists, even many camera crews. While some independents with movie cameras get in there with the photographers – notably Jason N Parkinson, who appears in ‘Born Under Punches’ on both sides of the camera, the news organisations with larger cameras and often two or three people tend to stick to the sidelines and only move in for the more organised ‘photo ops’, sometimes pushing rather rudely in front of us still photographers to do so.

So when – as in the reports of last Saturday’s protest involving the EDL and the UDF – photographers tell a very different story to that put out by the BBC and some other news organisations, you can believe the photographers. They were there, as were some journalists, while the BBC are generally only thereabouts. Photography isn’t just f8 and be there, but both a a sine qua non for photojournalists. Having heard BBC reports of events that I’ve covered in the past, I have no doubts that their reporting is often incomplete, sometimes incompetent and almost always biased.

The BBC does make some excellent programmes (and I often enjoy listening to them on the radio.) I’ve always supported the idea of the BBC and I think it vital to our democracy that we have public service broadcasting and a truly independent news service. But years of covering protest in London have led me to the conclusion that the BBC no longer – if they ever did – provides this. Frankly programmes such as the ‘News Quiz’ and the ‘Now Show’ are often closer to the truth than the news broadcasts or the ‘Today’ programme.

Capa’s quote used in the video was a good one: “The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.”

St Patrick’s Day

It’s taken me a week to get round to writing about St Patrick’s Day, mainly because I’ve been busy working taking other pictures and getting them on line since. If you want to keep up with what I’m doing then much of it appears on Demotix, and I post updates on my work on Twitter and Facebook. Here I try to reflect on things a bit more rather than simply cover events, and that takes time and sometimes there isn’t a great deal to reflect on.

St Patrick’s Day was a little different for me this year because I went to it with a photographer who has made covering these parades one of his specialities, although mostly in the USA where they take these things rather more seriously. And who comes from an American-Irish family and grew up in the the Bronx. I first saw John Benton-Harris’s pictures in ‘Creative Camera‘ many years ago and he had a fine portfolio in one of their year books, but little of his work is currently available, which is a great loss. I can only find 3 images on the web, none well reproduced, one from Derby Day and two (click on the thumbnails to see them) from St Patrick’s parades.

Before the parade John and I went to a couple of exhibitions, one the ‘History of Photography‘ on fairly permanent display at the V&A which seemed very much not to be a history of photography but some rather random items from their large collection (and perhaps mainly chosen for their size.) There are a few interesting images but it’s hard to see any particular justification for the particular selection. A couple seemed to be rather poor prints – the Robert Frank is damaged and the Don McCullin seemed rather too dark, and there were a few that the only justification for their presence was that they represented the fact that many photographs are bad. It did cheer me up a little to find that several of the better pictures were by photographers I know or have met. The one image that stood out for both John and I was probably the smallest in the show, Dorothea Lange’s ‘White Angel Bread Line.’

Also in the gallery is an exhibition about the first ever museum exhibition of photographs, held at the V&A in 1858. Consisting of work from the Photographic Society of London and the Société française de photographie there were the huge number of 1009 photographs on show, and you would have had to get down on your hands and knees to see some and stand on a chair to see others as they were hung 5 or 6 prints high from about six inches to what at a guess is around 7 foot. The photograph of some of them by the museum’s photographer is the earliest known photograph of a photographic exhibition.

We also dropped in to the Michael Hoppen gallery in Chelsea on our way to the V&A, but neither of us was impressed by the pictures of fashion photographer Fernand Fonssagrives (1910-2003), most of which were of his first wife, Lisa with her elegant torso covered with shadow patterns. It was something that Man Ray had played with earlier (and I suspect others too) but I couldn’t see any great interest in the work though some of the other pictures were of more interest. Lisa Fonssagrives became rather more famous as a model and after their marriage ended in 1950 she married Irving Penn, while Fernand went to Spain and became a sculptor.

And yes, I did take some pictures in Kilburn. Perhaps the one I like best is this:

though there are others, particularly some of the kids and the old ladies that have a charm (and sometimes an Irish charm.)

And I quite like this one of the English saint whose day it is. (The Irish of course came and kidnapped him from Somerset.) More pictures on My London Diary.

Friedlander’s Diet

I’m not sure that the video of Lee Friedlander compiled by Mark Schwarz has a great deal to recommend it, though it could perhaps be seen as an ironically satirical comment on a US American lifestyle, but I’m afraid it really is straight-forward piece of genial Californian whimsy for Mr Lee’s 75th birthday on 14 July 2009.

But the site, AMERICAN SUBURB X, does have a wealth of interesting material, including an illustrated article on Friedlander by Rod Slemmons, Director at The Museum of Contemporary Photography, and another by Carol Armstrong, professor of art and archaeology and Doris Stevens Professor of the Study of Women and Gender at Princeton University, written at the time of his 2005 MoMA show which may well enlarge your vocabulary, though I find her style akin to torture. But academics certainly get brownie points for that.

Of course lots more about lots of other photographers including Aaron Siskind and William Klein – and quite a few alphabetically in between on its ‘ASX Channels.’ As well as some whose names I won’t mention without mouthwash to hand.

Among the various articles, there is one by Paul Graham, from his presentation at the first MoMA Photography Forum on 16th February 2010, The Unreasonable Apple in which he likens the art world’s approach to straight photography to “the parable of an isolated community who grew up eating potatoes all their life, and when presented with an apple, thought it unreasonable and useless, because it didnt taste like a potato.”

Crossfire

Yesterday, as I read on PDN Pulse, an exhibition opened in Dhaka, Bangladesh with police barricading the doors of the Drik Agency where it was being shown.

The statement on Drik reads:

Drik Picture Library was forcibly closed down by the police today to prevent the launch of Pathshala, South Asian Media Academy, and the unveiling of a photography exhibition by photojournalist Dr Shahidul Alam, `Crossfire.’

From midday onwards, Drik was pressurised by RAB, police and Special Branch officials to close down the show on grounds that it does not have official permission, and later, on the grounds that it will create anarchy.

In its 20 years of existence, Drik has forged a unique position in the international cultural arena, which has earned Bangladesh a special place in the world of photography. The unfortunate event which was broadcast worldwide has tarnished the image of this democratically-elected government. We call upon the government to immediately remove the police encirclement, so that the exhibition can be opened for public viewing, and Bangladesh’s image as an independent democratic nation can be reinstated.

The show, with photographs by Drik’s founder Shahidul Alam and curated by Jorge Villacorte from Peru with research by Momena Jalil, Tanzim Wahab and Fariha Karim, was scheduled to be open to the public at the Drik Gallery until 31 March 2010 but currently can only be viewed on line due to the police action.

‘Crossfire’ gets its name from the statements issued by the RAB (Rapid Action Battalion) , a sinister black-clad group formed six years ago from members of Bangladesh Police, Bangladesh Army, Bangladesh Navy and Bangladesh Air Force which carries out extra-judicial killings and torture of people in custody. Set up in 2004 by Law Minister Moudud Ahmed, they have killed over 1000 people, whose bodies are then dumped in fairly random locations and a stock press release states that they were “killed in crossfire” between the police and criminals. A new word, “crossfired” has been added to the vocabulary.

As Alam say, the facts of these murders by the RAB are already largely well known, and a court which tried to investigate them was recently dissolved by the Chief Justice immediately before the Government was to give evidence. The installation at Drik in his words aims to “to reach out at an emotional level. I aim to get under the skin. To walk those cold streets. To hear the cries, see terror in the eyes. To sit quietly with the family besides a cold corpse. But every photograph is based on in-depth research. On actual case studies. On verifiable facts. A fragment of the story has been used to suggest the whole. A quiet metaphor for the screaming truth.”

The large format colour pictures show scenes where these killings occurred, and had to be taken in secret, often early in the morning – also a favourite time for the murders. The existence of the show also had to be kept secret, and it was only announced on the 16 March, when Where Death Squads Struck in Bangladesh was published in the Lens blog of the New York Times with a slide show of the pictures.

On ShahidulNews you can read more about Crossfire, with a Google Map giving details of many of the killings and their locations, and a dark video, ‘RAB Night Walk‘.

Shahidul Alam is Bangladesh’s best known photographer and his work has often before been controversial. Last November a show on Tibet at the gallery was closed down by the police following pressure from the Chinese government, and the web site was hacked and fake virus warnings put on it to deter people from viewing it. Thirteen years ago, as the Lens article relates, Alam was set on in the street by a group of men who pulled him out of a rickshaw, stole his camera and computer and stabbed him 8 times – in what he describes as “a particularly unsubtle warning” about his opposition political activities.

Jazz Loft

Great pictures, great atmosphere in an audio slide show on the NY Times site not to be missed W Eugene Smith and the Jazz Loft Project. There is also a short introduction to it by Jeffrey Scales elsewhere on the NYT site.

This was Smith’s largest project – a thousand or more rolls of film and countless hours of audio which took seven years for Sam Stephenson to research, producing a book, a radio series (I’m listening to the introduction as I write) and an exhibition, currently at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center until May 22, 2010 and later at the Chicago Cultural Center (July 17-September 25, 2010), the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (February 3-May 22, 2011), the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego (May 19-Oct. 7, 2012), and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona (late 2012, early 2013).

It’s a shame that at the moment there are no plans for this exhibition to come to Europe.

Smith was one of the first photographers I wrote about on line, and in many ways a legend in photography, not least for almost managing to bankrupt Magnum. He was also in some ways a very American photographer, not least because it was the attitudes in the US to press photography that his career was very much a battle against. In Europe at the time things were rather less ossified.

Deutsche Börse Shame

I can’t say I was surprised to hear that this year’s prize was awarded to Sophie Ristelhueber, who as I mentioned when I wrote rather briefly about this year’s four finalists said of herself “Nowadays I am not even a photographer because I am a conceptual artist.” And she is right, she isn’t a photographer and was in the wrong competition in the wrong gallery.

Frankly it wasn’t a good year for the gallery, with none of the four finalists standing out, and even by Photographers’ Gallery standards it was an extremely boring show. As usual the best work was on display in the print room, though even there it didn’t seem quite up to the usual standard.

It isn’t a situation I take any satisfaction in, rather one of considerable frustration because I know there is a lot of great photography out there. At least half a dozen photographers in the current show of Indian photography at the Whitechapel and another dozen whose work I’ve seen at other shows in London in the past year whose work I’ve found in some way exciting, and far more whose work I’ve come across on the web who have had shows in other cities across Europe.

What did interest me today was to read a Guardian feature, Has the Deutsche Börse turned into a conceptual art prize? by Sean O’Hagan which makes much the same kind of criticisms against the prize that I’ve made over the years, that the prize simply fails to reflect the “vitality, range or depth of contemporary photography from around the globe” and calling for “less theory and process and more exciting pictures.”

I wrote that the prize should have gone to the man who produced the scrapbooks that formed a part of Donovan Wylie‘s exhibition. Joanna Pitman in the Times suggested it should go to ‘Pete’ for his anti-cuisine meals photographed in loving close-up by Anna Fox.

This prize has simply become a piece of mutual curatorial back-scratching, with very little relevance to what is actually happening in photography – and rather a backwater so far as art more generally is concerned.

I’ve been a member of the Photographers’ Gallery for over 30 years, but now it has become something I’m almost ashamed to admit to other photographers and it isn’t just this prize that makes me feel that, but the whole programme there over recent years. As I’ve written before, it seems always to be apologising for photography rather than celebrating it. It really is time for the gallery either to start supporting photography or consider a change of name – and for the Art Council to rethink how it can support photography in Britain. There isn’t much point in funding a flagship if it is flying the wrong flag.

Bow Pans

Almost the only area where I still wish I was taking film is panoramic photography. Really because it is just so simple to taken with film and a panoramic camera – just compose and press the button. Digital is more flexible and powerful but considerably more fuss, even for the kind of simple panoramas I prefer.

The 35mm panoramic film cameras I used had lenses around 26-30mm focal length which gives a decent vertical angle of view without usually encompassing huge areas of sky. The horizontal angle of view depended on how the camera worked, but with the swing lens versions was dictated by the angle the lens swung through, typically around 120 degrees.

So to get similar results with digital I want to use a lens with a similar vertical field, so either the same range of focal length or a slightly longer length used with the camera in portrait format. At or around the 30mm end I find I need a set of 3 exposures to stitch (perhaps 4 if I’m shooting portrait format) while at the wider end, 2 frames will do.

One small complication is that I mainly shoot with zoom lenses, and if you are going to stitch images it is fairly important that the lens focal length remains constant. It really is only easy to be sure of this shooting at one or other end of the lens focal length range, although I suppose it would be possible to use masking tape to hold the lens at a fixed focal length.

Most zooms also alter focal length slightly as they focus, so at least in theory you need to hold the same focus throughout the series of exposures. This isn’t usually a problem as most panoramas can be taken with the lens focussed at infinity.

It’s also easier to get good stitching if all the pictures are taken at the same exposure – and under the same lighting conditions. The British climate is fickle and rather sneaky in this respect, rather too good at brightening up a little without telling you (or the reverse.) Of course there is often considerable variation in lighting as you swing through that 120 degrees or so, and it’s something that film, with its gradual response to excessive highlights copes with rather better than digital, which has a pretty sharp cut-off on over-exposure.

Film wasn’t of course without its problems. You could (and I did) expose it wrongly and development had its hazards too. I’ve had film returned from a pro lab absolutely blank that I know was properly exposed and made countless errors over the years when processing my own which have resulted in damaged, uneven, dense or very thin negatives. But at least out there in the field it was simple.

Anyway, here is a very small version of one of the results which I was reasonably pleased with. The file is actually twice the size it displays at on the blog, and you can see it and the others at 900pixels wide on My London Diary.

The actual image I produced from PTGui, stitched from two 12Mp images (4288×2848 pixels each) is 8028×2917 pixels, an aspect ratio of 2.75:1, and the horizontal angle of view is a little under 100 degrees. It would print nicely at perhaps 30 inches wide if I had a sheet of suitable paper that large!

It uses a equirectangular projection which works well if – as here – the vertical angle isn’t too large, and gives a very natural effect. The image is too wide to look good in normal rectilinear perspective. One advantage of the equirectangular is that it more of less keeps the full width of the image, allowing me to retain the yellow skips at the extreme right of the image, which were for me a vital part of the composition.

Mark Power on Tony Ray-Jones

Regular readers of my posts will know that Tony Ray-Jones is one of my personal photographic heroes, although I never knowingly met the man but we possibly attended some of the same openings and other events in London before his tragic early death in 1972. I also own several of his pictures, and one of the relatively few prints that he made himself hangs on my wall, from his ICA show. The others are cheap inkjet prints from the Science & Society Picture Library which I think are better quality than most if not all of the silver gelatin prints that have been made direct from his negatives. Although these now cost £15 for an A4 print (more than a 50% increase since I bought mine), the last time I saw a gallery show of his work the asking price for the inferior prints on display was more than 100 times this. Collecting good photography needn’t be expensive – just avoid the art dealers. Some photographers, including myself, sell their work at reasonable prices directly from the web too.

One of the essential aspects of photography has always been its reproducibility, the ability to make a theoretically infinite number of copies from a negative. (Of course this was not true of the daguerreotype – and this is just one reason why this is no longer a popular process!) The switch to digital, whether at the point of exposure or in scanning negatives, has made this process even easier. It has also revolutionised printing, enabling us to get more out of our negatives, particularly those where the exposure was not optimal – and apparently although Ray-Jones was a great photographer he was certainly not a great technician.

Although a few have sought to deny it, Tony Ray-Jones had an undeniably enormous influence on British photography in the 1970s, not just through his own work, but also because he and a few others were largely responsible for getting a huge swathe of mainly American photography, hitherto only known to a few cognoscenti (including of course some established British photographers who were well connected through international agencies) out to a new generation of photographers, through magazines and particularly ‘Creative Camera, where the then editor Bill Jay first published Ray-Jones’s personal work in the UK. You can read about these on Weeping Ash, a great web site by Roy Hammans which includes a great deal of writing on both Ray-Jones and Creative Camera, and of course quite a few photographs.

But what prompted this post was an article on the Little Brown Mushroom Blog, where Charlie B Ward has been asking photographers about the “first photo book that you can remember buying or seeing that really had a strong affect on you?” and Mark Power‘s answer was A Day Off Tony Ray-Jones (Thames and Hudson 1974). But of course he had something more to say about it in a story that includes wading into ice-cold water to photograph a whale and unrequited love, and makes interesting reading. Boringly I think I just bought the book from the Creative Camera Book Room.

You can still pick up copies at least of the US edition of this work at a not unreasonable price, but the recent volume Tony Ray-Jones (ISBN:095428139X) published by Chris Boot in 2008 is considerably better printed, far more informative and a better bargain.

Don McCullin

The show Shaped by War, the largest ever UK exhibition about the life and work of Don McCullin who is 75 in October, is on at the Imperial War Museum North until 13 June, though I’ll probably wait to see it until it comes down to London next year ( 7 October 2011 – 30 January 2012 – and it’s in Bath 11 September – 21 November 2010.)

But for the moment the exhibition has spawned a number of videos and features about McCullin on line, at the exhibition site, the Guardian, Channel 4 and doubtless elsewhere. Good to see him getting the coverage, although a pity there isn’t rather more difference between them. Perhaps the best of the current crop is on the BBC, where they have an audio slide show from the Today programme, which lets you see the pictures while the photographer talks (elsewhere you can see some very annoying camera work on his pictures.)

You can see rather more about him from last year’s show at the National Media Museum, and Frank Horvat had an interesting talk with him back in 1987.