>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Sudan Drums

Sudan was an area where British colonialism messed up in the nineteenth century with General Gordon being failed by the government and much more. From 1899 to 1956 it was essentially a British colony, and for the last 30 or so years run as more or less as two different countries, a largely Muslim north and a largely Christian south.

Although the south and the north reached some kind of agreement in a peace settlement five years ago following two lengthy civil wars, fighting and civil rights abuses continue, particularly in Darfur in the west of the country. The peace settlement called for a referendum in the south to decide whether to remain in Sudan in January 2011, and the international Sudan365 campaign which was being launched on January 9, 2010 brings together groups working for peace and human rights in Sudan and a free and fair referendum in a year (actually now just under 365 days).

Photographically it was a fairly simple event to cover , with demonstrators in a pen on the pavement in Whitehall, although the police were occasionally being a little unhelpful and quite unnecessarily attempting to keep the pavement in front of the demonstration clear rather than routing passers-by through the wide empty gap behind it, and I was occasionally asked to move. They also refused to allow the organisers of the demonstration to have speakers there – and to my surprise they failed to insist on doing so, unlike several previous demonstrations I’ve photographed there.

The event had attracted some media attention, though mainly from broadcast media rather than print, and BBC radio 4 had interviewed the major speaker, the Sudanese Archbishop Daniel Deng earlier in the day (and did so again on Sunday morning.) Of course we all want peace, but his interviews- and the well-received address he gave at the protest – seemed to me politically lacking (as perhaps too is Sudan365.) Perhaps not surprisingly he was feeling the cold in London, even with a red jumper under the purple.

Since the protest was called ‘Drums for Peace‘ it would have been nice if he would have actually beat one at least for a few minutes with everyone else, but he could not be persuaded to do so, presumably feeling it wasn’t the kind of thing an archbishop should do. Apparently he is meeting Gordon Brown on Monday- and I hope the other party leaders too.

I did photograph him speaking, but he held the microphone close to his face all the time and spoke without any gestures or expression and so the pictures weren’t great. A few of those when he was posing the the middle of the demonstration are a little better, but lack the kind of interest and dynamism shown by the demonstrators. And dark glasses are seldom a plus point when you are trying to make a portrait.

The second speaker was much more interesting to photograph, though again not easy, as there were only a few moments when she lifted her eyes from her typed pages. But there were some great faces in the crowd of demonstrators as you can see in the rest of my pictures from the event on My London Diary.

But by the time she had finished, I’d decided it was time for me to go also. Elsewhere on My London Diary you can see several other protests about Sudan I’ve photographed previously – all concerned with the continuing genocide in Darfur, in April 2007, Sept 2007 , April 2008 and May 2008.

Aberystwyth – Chloe Dewe Mathews

Somehow Aberystwyth seems to me to be the last place a photographer would go for an interesting story, but London-based freelance Chloe Dewe Mathews has proved me wrong with her Hasidic Holiday: The Annual trip to Aberystwyth which appeared on Burn Magazine today. Apparently around a thousand orthodox Jews have taken an annual holiday together there each August, staying in the student village for the last 20 years or more.

Obviously Mathews has succeeded in gaining the confidence of the families she has photographed and given us an insider view of a community which likes to keep itself. On her web site you you can also see another rather different story about an annual visit to the sea, when tens of thousands of European Roma make a pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in late May for the festival of their patron saint, Black Sara. Her pictures from this are rather more emotional than those from Aberystwyth, but perhaps that is not surprising given the nature of the event. But the Welsh work has a clarity of colour and a precision that appeals to me.

There are a few pictures of the Jewish holidays by a Welsh photographer (who has also produced a book on Aberystwyth), Keith Morris, on the Welsh Photolibrary site (perhaps surprisingly, apparently the only 8 images on the site featuring Jewish people.) Like the Guardian link in the above paragraph I think these are interesting simply as an illustration of the difference between competent library images and some excellent photojournalistic projects.

I think it must be around 50 years since I last visited Aberystwyth, as a small boy with my family on a coach outing from an isolated village in mid-Wales where some of us were staying one summer. It wasn’t quite like the outing in one of Dylan Thomas’s short stories, but there were some similarities. We did eventually get there, after quite a few stops on the way, and about all I can remember about the place was that it seemed cold, windy, wet and grey. But it doesn’t quite look that way in Mathews’s pictures.

Doctorow on Copyright

I first read the speech by Cory Doctorow ‘How to Destroy the Book‘ before Christmas, but didn’t immediately mention it because although there was much in it that appealed to me I wanted to think about it a bit more.

Doctorow made the speech to a Canadian ‘National Reading Summit‘ in Toronto in the middle of November and the speech was printed by ‘The Varsity‘, a Toronto-based on-line student newspaper, a month later. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you should.

To put things simply, Doctorow stresses the centrality to our culture of being able to own and copy books and points out the threat posed both by mechanisms such as DRM licensing and the current attempts by the copyright industries (and in particular those from the US) through the the World Intellectual Property Organization and proposals to ‘update’ copyright laws in countries around the world. (Our very own Peter Mandelson gets a special mention for his weekend in Corfu with David Geffen which persuaded him to to come back and rewrite our own copyright laws.)

Doctorow as a creator has certainly put his works where his mouth is, insisting on his work being published DRM free and making his books available as free downloads (and they really look good on screen.) For him, scattering his work, to use his image, as freely as the dandelion scatters its seeds, gives “a fecundity to your work that allows it to find its way into places that you never thought it would be found before.”

As he says, most people first come across the work of authors without buying it. They borrow books from libraries, from friends – or download material from the Internet. Far from threatening the sales of books, these same people go on to buy those that they really like – because they want to own them.

It works because the product for sale, the printed work, has a physical form that people want to own. An electronic book just isn’t the same (and I think most of us are by now simply annoyed by those clever book-look interfaces on web pages with pages that ‘turn’ rather than simply doing what a screen display can do better.)

But does it work for other media? Perhaps less so for some, although I’d still prefer to have those few movies I own on DVD in nice packages with a title on the spine and some interesting material in the box – something the industry has rather too often failed to provide. Music too has failed to come up with anything to rival the LP cover in the post-vinyl age, though I still like to be able to run my eye along a row of CDs and choose the one I want, but perhaps I’m a dinosaur in this MP3 age.

And photography? I’ve certainly made much of my own work available in low resolution on the web – well over 50,000 images now on My London Diary and other web sites. Although almost all of it carries a copyright message, I’ve never intended that this should prevent people copying it for their own personal use and for research/study. Occasionally people do ask for permission to print pictures or use them in their academic work or even to print them on a t-shirt, and I would never normally refuse such individual requests.

I also make it clear that my pictures are available for use without payment by “suitable non-profit organisations” but that payment is expected for any commercial use. It isn’t a hard and fast division, though usually a reasonable test for me is whether the person asking to use pictures is actually getting paid for what they are doing. If the organisation can afford to pay them, it can afford to pay me for my work too.

By keeping my work copyright I can also try to prevent images being used by people in ways that I don’t want, for example by right-wing hate sites. Letters from a solicitor to the ISP concerned about copyright abuse have led to their removal, but unfortunately it is all too easy for these sites to move around to different hosts. Unfortunately Creative Commons licences – of any type – just don’t seem work in this way at all.

But as a photographer I also have something else to sell. Original prints and high res files for reproduction. And the Internet is a shop window for me, although the takings from it are not particularly high. I’m not sure I’m ever going to put high-res files onto the web without protection of some sort, though should I ever get round to publishing (almost certainly self-publishing) one of the books I’ve often started to produce I think it quite likely that I would make that available as a free PDF.

What I think is vital – and what Doctorow says – is that copyright, and in particular the international agreements on it, needs to take into account the interests of creators and users and not to be simply based on securing the profits of large corporate interests who are currently running the show in secret sessions of the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement or at villas in Corfu. People like Geffen would really like to keep copyright as their private beach!

A New Year for Visura

Visura Magazine has come out every two months for a year and issue 7 now out is another great one, although I did spend a couple of days wondering why I couldn’t manage to see any pictures. I’m afraid at first I just thought that although they’d sent me an e-mail they hadn’t quite got the magazine on line!

It’s a flash-based site, and if like me you like to have several browser windows open on your screen you are likely to find the same problem that I had. Their web designer has placed the ‘Enter‘ link off to the right of the screen but decided not to provide a scroll-bar. I can scroll up and down without one, but not to the right. This link will take you inside, and once you do get in, you will see it tells you to use screen resolution of at least 1440 x900 for best viewing, but unless you are you probably won’t have made it to see this advice.

Visura is “an online, invitation only publication that features personal projects chosen by artists themselves“. It doesn’t have any advertising but does have a number of media partners, including the Lucie Foundation, the NYT Lens blog and Miguel Garcia-Guzman’s Exposure Compensation blog and the Summer Show and Aftermath projects.

Issue 7 includes intriguing multiple images from Tokyo by Miguel Rio Branco, a lengthy set of pictures of the second beat generation of Larry Fink‘s youth (the sixties), when he was a pot-smoking Marxist with a Rolleiflex his daddy had given him, pictures from a strife-torn Ingushetia by Andrea Bruce, more fine black and white in Joan Liftin‘s ‘Runaway’, a superb view of the magical island of Chiloe by Brigitte Grignet, Donna Ferrato with her M6 on the streets of Tribeca. There is also a large selection of Simon Robert‘s pictures from ‘We English’. I think these images, shot on 4×5″, work better when seen as large gallery prints, but on screen many seem rather dull. Other photographers featured include Visura’s Head Copy Editor John Sevigny, Ken Van Sickle and Evan Abramson.

Darbis Murmury

Ten years ago I wrote a short piece on my experience of attending a series of workshops with Raymond Moore and Paul Hill at Hill’s ‘Photographers Place‘ in Bradbourne, Derbyshire for William Bishop’s ‘Inscape‘ magazine, accompanying a few of my pictures of the people concerned – including some of Ray.

The title ‘Darbis Murmury‘ came in part from my two-year-old son’s description of where I had gone for these weekends, but was also refers to Ray’s book, Murmurs at Every Turn as well as of course my own memories.

Ray’s comments on my own pictures were both critical and inspirational, and did much to set me off on my own route in photography. Seeing his work and his attitudes towards it and towards photography were also vital.

Today I looked for the article I wrote for Inscape and some of the pictures I had taken of people during the workshops, and found a half-finished web site I had written. Just a single page with the text more or less as it appeared in the magazine surrounded by almost 30 thumbnails linked to the pictures.

It took me a couple of hours to sort out the site and make a few corrections, but you can now see all the pictures and the text of Darbis Murmury, more or less as I wrote it and the web site ten years ago.

Chiswick House Gardens

For some years Raymond Moore lived in a room in a house on the riverside at Chiswick overlooking the Thames and just a short walk from Chiswick House Gardens, where Bill Brandt created some memorable images in the 1940s (but I can’t find them anywhere on the web) – though there are some by (Edwin Smith.) It’s only a fairly short train or bike ride from where I live, and was a place I occasionally took students to photograph in the past. My last visit there – on my own- was in 2004 and here are a couple of my images from then.

You can see more of my pictures from a walk in March 2004 from Brentford to Chiswick House. So far as I know, Raymond Moore didn’t make any pictures there.

Remember Ray Moore

For several reasons I’ve been thinking about Raymond Moore recently. Just before the New Year I was up in Derbyshire for a few days, and went through some of the places I visited with him in the 1970s while I was at one of several workshops with him, and this brought back a few memories of Ray and the other photographers I met there.

It’s only too likely that many reading this will be scratching their heads and wondering who Raymond Moore was. If there was an award for great photographers who have disappeared most completely off the critical radar he would certainly be in the running for it. Yet Ray was certainly one of the great British photographers of the twentieth century, up there with guys like Bill Brandt, and his work stands comparison with rather better remembered American photographers such as Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan.

Moore (1920-87) was the first living photographer to have a truly British show at the Art Council’s flagship Hayward Gallery in London; Brandt had beaten him to it by eleven years, but Brandt’s show was from John Szarkowski at MoMA rather than a home-grown enterprise. Earlier, Ray’s work had been shown by the Welsh Arts Council, the first living photographer to be given a show by by any of the UK Arts Councils.

But there are reasons why Ray’s work has drifted out of our sight. He was a painstaking printer, one of the best (like me largely self-taught from the Ansel Adams ‘Basic Photo‘ books) but made relatively few prints, and sold few during his lifetime, so virtually none appear in the art market, probably now the major driver of photographic visibility.

The largest collection of his work has for years been the subject of legal dispute and thus unavailable for museum shows. And the genre in which he worked was outside the traditional British obsession with social documentation (nothing wrong with that, but it isn’t all of photography) and in an area largely abandoned by academia in the UK in the 1970s in its Gadarene rush to theory.

British institutions have never had any real faith in photography and the kind of enthusiasm and support systems that exist in some other countries have never really developed here. Ray did have a few shows, but they were relatively few and far between, and few buyers, institutional or collectors, were buying work by contemporary British photographers in the 1970s and 80s.

Ray wasn’t well served by publication either, although his pictures appeared in various magazines, including Creative Camera, who also published a major portfolio of his work as the lead portfolio in their 1977 year book. Murmurs at Every Turn came at the time of his Hayward show in 1981. But these publications – and the slim Welsh Arts Council catalogue – were printed in the style of their time, with heavy blacks that lose the shadow detail on which Ray was always so insistent. His final publication, Every So Often, represents his work rather better, but all these are now relatively rare and expensive second-hand. However you can see them even if they are not on your shelves, as Weeping Ash has a tribute to Ray that includes virtually every magazine article and photograph published by Ray – and you can page through his books. The site also includes an essay which was the basis of a talk I gave about Ray in 2005.

By the time I met him around 1976, Ray had simplified and perfected his technical approach. Although in earlier years he had worked with medium format (and occasionally with larger cameras) he now worked with a Nikon camera and a single standard lens (I’m not sure whether it was a 50 or 55mm.) He chose to use a Nikon macro lens not because he wanted to photograph close-up but because he felt it was sharper and had a flatter field of view at normal distances. He mainly worked with Ilford FP4 film, relatively slow and fine-grained and a favourite with many photographers, espeically those doing portraits for its smooth tonality, exposing it around 2/3 stop more than its normal rating and I think preferring to develop to a slightly lower contrast than normal.

He had decided he didn’t need a larger negative to get the print quality he wanted, always printing essentially from the whole negative on an old Leitz enlarger (simple but one of the best ever produced for 35mm), making final prints around 14 inches wide. Ray liked to print with open shadows, and although he was a master of the craft always aimed to make prints that made people look at the images rather than trying to dazzle them with the print quality.

Although he admired the work of Brandt, he was not an admirer of the prints that he made when he moved to a more graphic approach, using higher contrast and often blank shadows.

Also on-line is a 2002 dissertation on Moore by photographer Neil Shirreff which looks at “his positioning in Britains photographic history, the perspective of Moore himself, and the perspective of a viewer engaging with one of his photographs.”

A new book on Moore is long overdue, although unlikely to emerge before the legal problems surrounding his work are resolved. It would also be good to see his work in exhibitions. The V&A does have a number of his pictures which can be viewed on request by visitors to the print room.

Ten years ago I wrote a short piece on my experience of attending the workshops with Ray and Paul Hill at Hill’s ‘Photographers Place‘ in the Derbyshire village of Bradbourne for William Bishop’s ‘Inscape‘ magazine, accompanying a few of my pictures of the people concerned – including some of Ray. I began to put this on-line at the time, but somehow the pages never got finished – until I found them and did the job this afternoon! Now on-line as Darbis Murmury.

New Year’s Day

I’ve been doing a lot of walking in the last week, which isn’t unusual. A few years ago I was being interviewed for a photographic magazine and was asked to name my most useful photographic accessory and my answer was “a good pair of shoes.” It wasn’t the kind of answer he wanted (though I think they did print it) and he continued, “No, not clothing, what’s your favourite accessory“, so I told him it was my Brompton folding bicycle, which as well as getting me to places (and folding so I can put it on trains and the Underground for longer distances) also enabled me to see and photograph over walls and fences by standing on it.

But mostly the walking I’ve done recently has been in cities, often with a few hundred or thousand other people on demonstrations (and quite a bit of it I’ll be walking backwards, which gets a little tiring.) There are some streets in London where it now feels a little odd if I have to walk along the pavement rather than marching down the centre of the road, although when I’m on my own the traffic would make that suicidal.

But New Year’s Day I took a walk in the country with some of my family along a part of the Thames Path. There was a cold wind and the temperature was around freezing and I froze at times, despite a warm jacket, woolly hat, scarf and gloves. I find it hard to imagine how (and even harder to imagine why) people live in really cold climates.

Our walk from Reading to Pangbourne was a relatively short one, though we made a few detours, mainly at both ends of the walk, giving us a total of around 7 miles. Mostly – as you might expect from the name – the path was alongside the river, although we did at one point have to make a rather lengthy detour through a rather boring housing estate at Purley. And we were lucky it was so cold, as much of the mud that would otherwise have made walking difficult was frozen solid. Otherwise much of the Thames Path is best walked in reasonably dry weather rather than after some of the wettest months on record.

Thames Path at Pangbourne

I can never get too worked up about photographing landscape, and this certainly lacked the spectacular, though I’m not a great fan of that either. But I did rather like the sign on the bridge which states:

JUMPING FROM THIS

BRIDGE IS

HIGHLY DANGEROUS

AND

IS NOT PERMITTED”

Thames Path at Pangbourne

Although given the weather I didn’t feel at all tempted to do so.

A New Year

I decided to start the new year differently in 2010. Almost every year this millennium I’ve made a start with the London Parade, a rather curious annual event that started almost 25 years ago, and at least in the early years that I photographed it was made up almost entirely of US teenagers either marching in uniformed bands or jumping up and down to music waving pom-poms. Here’s one I took in the previous century:

When I first photographed it, quite a while ago, it was called the Westminster Parade, involving only one of London’s three cities but it has since broadened to include not only the other two cities (the City of London and Southwark, south of the river) but also the Greater London boroughs, a number of which now have floats or groups in the parade, along with various other organisations from around the country. But although 9/11, the London bombings have resulted in rather fewer US kids flying in, others have taken their place to give a more varied event.

It’s also become increasingly controlled, and arranged more for the benefit of a worldwide TV audience than for those watching on the streets, and I’ve found it less interesting to photograph. One of the things that helped to retain some interest was that the parade assembled around Westminster, giving some nice backgrounds for pictures – such as these Morris Men from the London Borough of Harrow:

But this year the procession was to go around the route in the opposite direction – apparently the TV companies had pressed for the change as they had decided it allowed them to show some of London’s landmarks better in their coverage. So rather than starting at Westminster it would be starting on Piccadilly.

Perhaps I’ll photograph it again another year, but once TV gets to call the tune I’m not sure it is worth bothering. I’ve felt that the last few years, though I’ve taken a few pictures I like, the only thing that has kept me going back is that it has become a little bit of a social occasion for some of my photographer friends, where we meet up and go to the pub as the last of the parade moves to the start line. And I was sorry to miss that, though I imagine there will be a few opportunities later in 2010.

My best wishes to all for 2010. No long list of resolutions for me, but I’m going to try and do things a bit differently to 2009. Time for a change.

Season’s Greetings

It’s often hard for photographers to choose an image for their Christmas card, and this is my choice for 2009, which some of you on my various card lists will already have seen. It’s a picture I like and it has a bit of a festive spirit about it, and it’s also from suburbia, if a rather more lush and leafy part than where I live. It’s not very Christmassy, but after several years in which I’ve sent out cards with Santa pictures I felt I needed a change.

I did think briefly about writing a post on the cards that other photographers send, but decided I’d rather like all my friends to keep talking to me! Seriously I do like to get cards – and increasingly e-cards to remind me of old friends, and it’s so much better to have something with someone’s work on it than a more standard Christmas card.

Seriously too, for many of us 2009 has not been entirely smooth and prosperous, so let’s all hope for the best for 2010. I shall be busy with various things other than photography over the next few days, so there may be rather less posts on the blog than usual (our first Christmas guests arrive in a few minutes) and it could even be 2010 before I post again.

So, my best wishes for a merry Christmas and a happy New Year, however and wherever you celebrate the season.