>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Kingsmead Eyes

One of the many sections of the Guardian that usually goes direct into the recycling is the Family section, but on Saturday it had a rather striking self-portrait of a startled looking young Sally Hammond on the phone in a white dressing gown with pink stars. Sally had just got out of the bath and answered the phone, as no one else was available, and had just been informed of the death of a relative.

Sally is just one of 28 pupils from Kingsmead School in the London Borough of Hackney, who took part in a remarkable collaboration over 6 months with photographer Gideon Mendel, photographing their lives – friends, family, the estate, shops, Sunday Schools – things that appealed to them and they felt strongly about. Food features quite a lot!

Crispin Hughes, whose work I’ve written about on a couple of occasions, taught the children how to use the digital cameras they used on the project in a series of workshops, and in the pictures selected for the video on the Kingsmead Eyes site you can see that most of those involved were eager learners. At least one now wants to be a photographer when they leave school.

I wrote a a piece on Demotix a couple of months ago criticising a politician who compared Hackney with Baltimore as seen in ‘The Wire‘. It isn’t, but it is one of our more deprived urban areas, and the particular estate on which the school is – the Kingsmead estate – has a poor reputation.

It is a typical LCC red-brick pre-war estate of large 5 storey deck access flats – 980 in all – in courtyard blocks close to the Lea Navigation, just to the south of Clapton Park, and across the canal from Hackney Marshes – whose many football fields feature in some of the images and part of which will be a car/coach park of the London 2012 Olympics. This “village” estate of “Kings Mead” was officially opened by the King – George VI along with Queen Mary – in 1939. The flats were built to a high standard with modern facilities for the time, and the tenants who were rehoused from the slums of Bethnal Green and Stepney enjoyed their new luxury – even if they were a bit out in the country.

It was only in the sixties that they began to turn into undesirable slums, partly through neglect with shared stairways and decks as on many similar estates becoming dirty and sometimes dangerous places, and by the seventies estates like this had became sink estates, with the GLC rehousing problem families from across all London in them. Transfer to LB Hackney after Thatcher’s ridiculous abolition of the GLC (a policy based purely on spite) didn’t help and the estate became notorious after the death of a teenager during a homosexual orgy in one of the flats in 1985. There were also very high levels of burglary on the estate and many robberies on the streets by gangs of youths. Things began to pick up in the 1990s, party because of coordinated action by police and council to use injunctions, repossession orders and other civil remedies against trouble-makers, resulting in a rapid drop in crime, but also because of one of the establishment of one of the most radical “bottom up” community projects there, the Kingsmead Kabin, still running.

Regeneration funding was granted in 1995, and since then with the estate in charge of registered social landlord, Kingsmead Homes (Hackney) Limited, now the Sanctuary Housing Association, over £40 million has been spent on building refurbishment. Sanctuary Housing Association along with the governors of Kingsmead School supported the project.

As well as working with the 28 pupils on the project, Mendel also photographed every one of the 249 pupils at the school, using an old Rolleiflex. These portraits are shown as an composite image at the Kingsmead Eyes exhibition – on show at V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green until 7 Feb 2009 – giving as it says “remarkable diversity and origins of these children in more than 46 countries this becomes a truly global portrait, taken in a small Hackney school.”

But as the old theatre saying goes, “never work with children or animals” and in the video installation, which is part of the exhibition and can also be viewed on line makes clear it is their work – photographs, descriptions and poems – initiated and inspired by Mendel that really makes this project. (The video also credits Louise Nichols along with Gideon Mendel for Creative Direction, Mo Stoebe as Video Editor and Crispin Hughes for the Photo Workshops.)

But at the same time, Mendel also made his own documentation of the area. Knowing the work of this South African born photographer who has been based in London since 1990 Im sure it will be of a very high standard. You can hear him talking about his work, mainly on HIV/Aids but with also some other interesting issues raised particularly in the questions and his answers, on a long video made at the Front Line Club last year (1 hr 27min.)

This is another fine show as a part of photomonth, the East London Photography Festival which continues through November, and which opened at the Bethnal Green museum a month or so ago .

A long Brew – but Brown finally gets the Message

It was over four years ago that along with a smallish group of demonstrators I walked onto Westminster Bridge to photograph an illegal demonstration calling for a ‘Tobin Tax’. I knew what it was, and that it had been proposed by Nobel prize-winning economist James Tobin (1918-2002) in 1972 as a microtax – perhaps 0.1% – on currency dealings that would be so small as to not affect actual currency deals but would be enough to put a real drag on speculation.

It was a proposal taken up by charities concerned with the effect of speculation on the poorer countries in the 1990s (and given some support by French President François Mitterrand) and early 2000s, when they also suggested that a very small levy – perhaps 005% – would enable the wealthy countries to actually meet the promises they had made on overseas aid. For several years I had a large poster about the proposal on my kitchen wall.

As I wrote in 2005: (when I still hadnt found the Caps key)

the aim was to deter speculation on currency movements, thus giving the elected governments greater control over their fiscal and monetary policies, and reducing the power of unelected speculators (who include some of the larger multinational companies) to affect the markets. Exporters, importers and long-term investors would all benefit from less volatile exchange rates, and the revenue raised by the tax could make a significant contribution both to the revenue of national economies and also for international development projects.

as a small gesture of support for the tobin tax, another illegal demonstration took place in westminster this afternoon, unnoticed by police. a small group of demonstrators, again following an example from boston – although this time from 1773 – chose tea as a way to symbolise their protest. each threw a teabag, produced by one of the giant corporations, from the middle of westminster bridge into the river thames below.

As you can see, I hadn’t at the time quite perfected my technique for mid-air hovering that such events really require – and it still needs a little more work.

I really was pleased that the police didn’t try to arrest the protesters. I’d watched (and photographed) earlier in the day as police arrested and led away five protesters simply for peacefully holding a banner in Parliament Square, ashamed at seeing my country become a police state.

When Lord Turner brought up the idea of a Tobin tax again at the end of August, it seemed very much an idea whose time had come, and another leading Nobel prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz backed the idea at the start of October, saying that the technical problems which would have proved impossible in the past were no longer an obstacle with modern technology.

It came as a surprise to hear Gordon Brown adding his support yesterday. Perhaps after five years those tea bags had really brewed. Less of a surprise that the US immediately turned the idea down, but at some time Obama will have to decide to stand up to the bankers, so it may yet happen.

Gazopa

We’ve already seen image search engines that claim to be able to find a particular image on the web, and services such as PicScout’s Image Tracker seem to have had considerable success in tracking usage for the big agencies who can afford to use it. Because it relies on a “fingerprint” created from the image rather than a watermark, it claims to be able to spot even images that have been cropped or manipulated.

TinEye is another “reverse image search engine” with the big advantage of currently being free to use (although they intend to add some extra paid-for services at some time. Tineye is very easy to use – just right click on any web image and select “Search Image on TinEye.” The only problem is that when I’ve tried it with my own and other peoples images that I know are on several places in the web it often hasn’t found them, though it is a lot better now than when I first tried it.

There are some examples of what it can do on the site. At the moment they claim to have scanned 1,143,177,077 images from the web; I don’t know how many there are in all, but the largest figure I’ve found on a single search on Google Images is 1,600,000,000.

Idée also have a PixID service which can identify usage of images in both print and on-line for “editorial, celebrity and entertainment firms, news wire services” and others, and is I imagine relatively expensive, as well as Pixmiliar which looks for similar images.

Similar to this is Gazopa from Hitachi America which is now in a public beta and you can use it on the web or download it for your iPhone should you have one. It lets you choose an image on your computer on on any web site, upload it and it will then find similar images. Possibly.

As I’m sitting here feeling sorry for myself just starting to recover (I hope) from swine flu – the letter offering me the vaccine came this morning, very much too late – I had time to try it.

The first few pictures – typical things I take like demonstrations – it could obviously not get it’s head round at all, so I thought hard and tried to give it something easy. How about one of London’s most recognisable buildings, Tower Bridge? And a picture that showed its very distinctive shape clearly:

and was rewarded with my first (and only) success. Of the 30 images on the first page of the thousand it selected there were actually 4 of Tower Bridge. I tried with some other well-known buildings from London, and other cities with no luck. A night image of the National Theatre did return night images, but not of anything remotely similar.

The bell-tower and cathedral in Brasilia doesn’t look to me much like the Japanese woman or the polar bear that GazoPa produced in response and although there was one other church it was in a very different style. The still ife image of two bottles was perhaps a little more understandable.

GazoPa also has a face recognition feature, so I thought I’d try that and fed it a picture of Tony Benn, complete with pipe, thinking there must be many thousands of similar images on the web (including hundreds of mine.) Searching normally perhaps the most interesting match – at third closest was of what looked like an amateur burlesque dancer, though further down the list were three men with pipes but otherwise no resemblance.

Switching to ‘Face’ mode gave a different set of matches, with several of the same kissing wedding couple, several women between five and ninety and a small child in a push-along cart. But perhaps those carved heads of four US Presidents on Mount Rushmore were a nod to his political nature. To be fair there was just one of the first 30 pictures that did bear a very slight resemblance to the man, and who was looking in a similar direction, but I think the matching algorithms still need a little improvement.

Just to give it a fair chance I thought I’d also try it on Tariq Ali who had been standing next to him on the plinth in Trafalgar Square, a couple of weeks ago. Perhaps I can see a very vague resemblance to a cat, but the pig just isn’t fair! And ‘Face’ mode doesn’t make anything better.

I’ve not posted any of the results here – as if PicScout picks up any from its clients it could bankrupt me. But you are welcome to try any of the images here – or on My London Diary – on Gazopa. If you find any really good examples perhaps you could post them as a comment – just the URL of my image and any comment you want to make would be fine.

2009 Aperture Portfolio Prize

Congratulations to Moscow-based Alexander Gronsky, born in Tallinn, Estonia in 1980, who began working as a professional photographer in 1998 and joined the agency Photographer.ru in 2003. He was awarded the prize for his series ‘The Edge‘ which makes superb graphic use of large areas of white snow on the outlying parts of habitations in Moscow and Pastoral, looking at wastelands within the city, areas that are not rural nor urban, areas that lack definition.” These show them in use for various purposes by people (and ducks), abandoned and wrecked buildings, dumped rubbish, fires…

Edgelands around our towns and cities have often held a fascination for photographers, including Ray Moore who taught me a great deal and myself, and some of these scenes (not the ones with snow) remind me of areas I’ve walked in around the suburbs of London and Paris, a kind of liminal zone where normal life perhaps breaks down slightly and almost anything would happen, and that heap of clothes under a bush in the distance could just be a body.

You can also see these two projects, along with his ‘Less than 1‘ (the average population of the outer Russian areas in which those pictures were taken and some of his editorial work on his web site.

Congratulations also to runners-up Keliy Anderson-Staley, Off the Grid; Alejandro Cartagena, who got a mention recently as a ‘discovery’ at Fotofest, Lost Rivers; Maureen Drennan, Meet Me in the Green Glen; Jason Hanasik, He Opened Up Somewhere Along the Eastern Shore; and Mark Lyon, Landscapes for the People, which looks at some rather remarkable interiors with wallpaper landscape.

For once it’s a competition where I would almost certainly have come to the same conclusion as the judges, although I found almost all of the work interesting.

Great Press Photographs?

I’d been looking forward to seeing the first of the Guardian/Observer series of nine booklets on “100 years of great press photographs” today, but have to admit I was just a little disappointed.

Not that most of the 35 or so pictures from the 1910s and twenties aren’t in the main interesting pictures, but that in rather too many cases they aren’t really “press photographs”. That is, they were not taken for use in the papers or published in newspapers or magazines in the era in which they were taken.

Or probably not, because with very rare exceptions, nothing is revealed about their publication history. But I suspect that those by some of the best-known names here – such as August Sander, Lartigue, Andre Kertesz as well as others didn’t appear in newsprint until considerably later.

Few of the captions do more that simply tell us a little more about the event or situation but there are some exceptions, particularly in the comments by Paul Lowe on a Lewis Hine picture and by cycling journalist William Fotheringham on what must surely be the best picture of all time of the Tour de France, with two of the “convicts of the road” (and in the picture it’s an extremely stony one) stopping to quench their thirst at a village bar. Like quite a few of the images, the name of the photographer is not known – and as with probably most real press photography of this era – the photographs would have appeared uncredited.

As of course far too many still do today. Even at times in the Guardian, though it does have a slightly better record in this respect than some UK publications. But it’s certainly long past time that we put an end to the myth that Alamy, Getty, Corbis, AP, Reuters etc make photographs.

One of the images was taken by the Guardian’s first staff photographer, Walter Doughty, who was appointed in 1908. In 1922 he was in a Dublin bank in O’Connell Street behind an Irish Free State Soldier kneeling in a suicidal position in front of a window shattered by bullets from the hotel across the street during the civil war between the newly founded Irish Free State and the republicans. His image was published in the Manchester Evening News. It perhaps says something about the industry attitude to photography that Doughty’s glass plates were then lost until 2000 when a later Guardian photographer, Don McPhee came across them in the abandoned darkrooms and realised their worth. You can see another image by Doughty and learn more about him in the page about the show, A Long Exposure, of 100 years of Photography at the Guardian which was held at The Lowry last year, and also watch a short slide show with a conversation about the images between photographer and curator Denis Thorpe and Guardian northern editor Martin Wainwright. Doughty, who stayed with the paper until 1949, apparently never got a byline.

Although I wish it had perhaps focussed more on the subject, this is an interesting read, and if – like me – you don’t buy the Observer on Sundays and the Guardian every day it’s probably worth asking your friends who do but have less interest in photography to pass their copies of the series on to you. You can also see a small selection of ten ‘Great Press Photographs‘ online.

Half Life

Here’s a set of 30 pictures on Burn that I really enjoyed looking at, not least because as it says “ESSAY CONTAINS EXPLICIT CONTENT”. As always I thought that non-explicit photography would have to be very out of focus, and in fact most of the more sexually explicit images in the sequence deliberately utilise depth of field to soften the relevant areas.

The 30 square black and white images of ‘Half Life‘ were shot on medium format film and individually each has a certain presence and moodiness, while together they build up a description of a life-style, of relationships, of memories from a recent two year period in the photographer’s life.

You can see more of the work of Edoardo Pasero (b 1978 Milan) on his web site. On permanence is a series of pictures of tattoos on various parts of the male and female anatomy and is perhaps rather more explicit, but Scripta Manent will offend no-one with its images of old books, documents and a library, which also in some images uses limited depth of field to great purpose. His colour portraits, some of which are also semi-nude, are for me less interesting, though there are a couple that I like particularly, a woman with beads that look a little like giant smarties and a man sitting on shopping trolleys, both clothed. You can also see more of his pictures on IrisF64.

Photomonth Looks for Young Photographers

If you are a photographer aged 11-19 resident in the UK you are invited to enter for the the first photomonth youth award. The theme is Children’s Rights and is related to the 20th anniversary of the UNICEF Convention of the Rights of the Child:

Every child has the right to

a childhood
be educated
be healthy
be treated fairly
be heard

Deadline is 14 December 2009 and each entrant may submit up to 3 images, stating which of the five rights above is the them of each photograph, as well as where and when it was taken.

If you have a son or daughter you might want to encourage them to enter, as the prize is flights and two nights in Cannes in April 2010 at the annual Sony Photography Awards and World Photography Organisation event for both the photographer AND their parent or guardian.

You can enter online at the photomonth site and for more details see the site or contact info@alternativearts.co.uk 020 7375 0441

Fotofest – Birmingham Mark II?

I was a little surprised to see a picture by Vee Speers at the top of the press release for the Fotofest International Discoveries II show which opens today in Houston and continues until December 19. Of course I really love her pictures, but I’d hardly call her a ‘discovery’ given the amount of previous exposure of her work, not just the The Birthday Party, first shown in Australia in 2006 which is now on show in Houston, but also previous work including ‘Bordello‘ which first shown in Italy in 2002.

I first met her at Birmingham at Rhubarb Rhubarb in 2007, though she first attended in 2005. In 2007 her pictures were on the wall of the room where I was looking at portfolios, one of several fine photographers selected for the show Otherlands, though I’d seen her work previously in magazines. Surprisingly Birmingham doesn’t get a mention in the Fotofest release, although it was most probably there she met the senior curator of Fotofest, Wendy Watriss, who was a fellow reviewer.

Chinese artist Wei Bis re-staging of his 80day experience in a Chinese prison a sentence received for making a photograph. His large black and white photographs are minimal, showing a surreal relationship between near expressionless guards and disoriented prisoners. One of his images appears at the top of an earlier press release.

Alejandro Cartagena, born in the Dominican Republic lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico and at Houston he is showing large-format brilliantly coloured images of the dramatic and ever-expanding suburban development of the area. He has shown work widely in Mexico for around 5 years as well as contributing to international group shows. I particularly like some of the ‘NewWork’ on his site.

Minstrel Kuik Ching Chieh was born and raised in a Malaysian fishing village but she studied photography in southern France. You can see her work, including RRose which is being shown at Houston on her blog.

Christine Laptuta produces work about the mystery of land, its ambiguity, disruption and rhythm. She chooses to represent ordinarily vast landscapes in multiple printed miniature platinum/palladium contact prints.

The constructed landscapes of cities are focus for Rizwan Mirzas photographs. His shadowy nocturnal images reflect the tension between the mysteries of darkness and the lighting. Born in Liverpool he studied with John Blakemore in the early 1990s and also came to Rhubarb Rhubarb in 2008, although the previous year he showed at various galleries and festivals including PhotoEspana, Madrid, Spain. His work was also on show – not in FotoFest – in Houston in 2008.

Born Tokyo 1948, Takeshi Shikama has been showing his black and white photographs of trees since 2004, and “The Silent Respiration of Forests” first appeared in a Tokyo gallery in 2006.

Working between Seoul, London and Paris, Korean-born MiMi Youn was one of the three winners of the Lens Culture – Rhubarb Photo Book Awards in 2008 along with Kurt Tong who divides his time between China and the U.K and has photographed a little-known and officially banned element of ancient Chinese funerary practice; Joss Paper or Spirit Money.”

Brian Haw Harrassed by Police

I suspect the small group of police who came to Parliament Square around 7pm on Friday thought that there would be few people around, and will have been a little surprised when they started arguing and arresting Brian Haw to find they were being photographed by two freelances and an AP staffer, as well as another freelance shooting video.

The event appears to be a part of a long-standing campaign of harassment against the peace protester who has been in the square since 2 June 2001 – eight years and almost five months. Over the years police have made various legal and illegal attempts to remove him, and the government passed a law to try and do so – but messed up the drafting. So Brian is still there, still making his appeal to the conscience of the nation to stop the killing – particularly the killing of children – in Iraq and elsewhere.

I couldn’t understand the argument the officer was having with Brian, but each seemed to be accusing the other of not having acting lawfully. Eventually Brian was pushed and pulled along on his crutches, still protesting and lifted into the back of a waiting police van.

I returned the following morning and he was still in police custody at Belgravia Police station, but about to be taken into court. Apparently his immediate release was then ordered. When I came back later in the afternoon he was back in his usual chair in the square.

Although I was working very close to Brian and the police, I was careful not to get in the way, and had no problems, although things got a little hectic as he was actually put into the van, and I had several unsharp frames as I was pushed by police and other photographers.

Almost all of the arrest images were shot at ISO 3200, f4.5, 1/60 and using flash. The flash can’t handle subjects very close to the camera and over-exposure of these was a problem in some frames. Although I moved around the action as much as possibly, there is just too much similarity between the various shots I took, as you can see on My London Diary.

Friday Zombies

Since it was Halloween weekend, it wasn’t that surprising to have two zombie-themed protests on the streets. The first, by the ‘Government of the Dead’ led by Christ Knight was meant to catch bankers and other city workers going home, but work now seems to stop pretty early on Fridays, and the part of Fleet Street where Goldman Sachs have their office was dark and deserted by the time the small group of protesters arrived around 5.10pm.

Considering that the Facebook page for the ‘Goldman Sachs Giant Vampire Squid Trick or Treat‘ had 97 confirmed guests and 389 ‘Maybe’s, the actual attendance of six was rather disappointing. The idea for the event came from Matt Taibbi who wrote in Rolling Stone and Goldman Sachs:
“The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money… ”

The group met in the Old Bell pub a few doors away, and lighting in there was low. Using the D700 I was able to shoot by available light at around 1/8 or 1/10s at f5 – stopping down from f2.8 for more depth of field. At 24mm a reasonable proportion of images were reasonably sharp if I chose moments when people weren’t moving. I was shooting at IS03200, but at -1.33 eV, which I think means ISO 8000.

Colour isn’t great, but that’s mainly down to the lighting, and viewed at 1:1 one of the guys has moved just a little too much, but otherwise sharpness is fine and my default (low) settings for noise reduction have done a pretty good job, though if I needed to I could improve on it.

Outside it was darker still, and flash was the only answer. I should have switched to aperture priority perhaps working at around f5.6, but I left the camera on program and it chose f10. Which was fine for the flash but meant I picked up less than I would have liked from the ambient light even though I was working at ISO 3200 and 1/60 s.

The second group of zombies were ‘The Parliament of the Dead’, protesting at the Houses of Parliament, calling for a referendum to create a fair voting system. There were certainly more of them.

By now I had switched to aperture priority and was working at f5 (still at ISO 3200, 1/60) and Big Ben in the background was reasonably sharp when I was working at the wide-angle end, but perhaps got a bit too out-of-focus at the long end of the 24-70 zoom.

The floodlighting on Big Ben is just a little too weak for it to really stand out against the night sky, though perhaps an extra stop – working at 1/30 rather than 1/60 would have helped.

Some of the pictures aren’t bad, but I didn’t feel anything I took quite gelled. Perhaps there were too many rather similar zombies, and too many mainly amateur photographers getting in the way.

You can see more pictures of both Goldman Sachs and The Parliament of the Dead as usual on My London Diary, along with more details about the two protests.