Don’t Screw Us

The AMSP (The American Society of Media Photographers, Inc)  has started a campaign on copyright with a web site ‘Don’t Screw Us‘  which has what they call a ‘Manifesto‘ with ten points in plain American vernacular about intellectual property rights and why it pays to use and pay a professional rather than steal work from the Internet. All good stuff.

There is also a link ‘Propaganda‘ which goes to a video on YouTube  set on a New York street where a photographer sets up an easel puts some pictures on it and just leaves it on the street.  Several people then come up, look at the pictures and then pick them up and carry them away. At which point the photographer comes and starts arguing with them about stealing his work.

I think it’s cleverly made down to the standards of YouTube, and does more or less come over as a fairly amateur report on a real event rather than (as I’m sure it was) a carefully conceived piece of film. But I’m not too sure it really makes its point – and certainly if you just leave stuff around on the street in NY you would surely expect it to disappear.

And of course even on the Internet it isn’t sensible to leave  your work entirely unprotected. On Saturday I was talking to a curator from a major museum and was shocked to find that they put images on the web without metadata – and that until very recently it was something they hadn’t even thought about.

I wondered exactly where people like this had been; its something I’ve written about many times over the past ten years, and only a few of my older images on line are without metadata. When I press the shutter release, my copyright message gets written into the file; when I import it to my computer using Lightroom, it gets associated with more metadata, including my contact details and another copyright message, written into every file I output. Pictures I add to these pages usually have a copyright message in the alternative text, and work I upload to other sites keeps its metadata too, and most pages also have a copyright message.

It may actually be down to me that they are thinking now having to think about metadata.  One photographer whose work they want to use has insisted that they must include it in any files they put on the web.  I know I’ve talked to him a number of times about the importance of having copyright metadata present in files that you put on the web, and he will have read some of the things I’ve written here and elsewhere about it. But of course it is the same advice he would get from any sensible and informed photographer.

It doesn’t make sense to just leave your work lying around – whether on the street on on the web.

Camp Ashraf Update

I was sorry not to be at Grosvenor Square on Friday when the the news came through that the 36 men detained in Iraq had been released. The account on the Free Iran web site says:

Upon hearing the news of the hostages’ release, everyone was crying, dancing, singing in the street in Grosvenor square in front of the US Embassy.

and gives a link to a video on YouTube of the release in Iraq after 72 days of hunger strike.

I was also unable to attend the celebrations at Grosvenor Square on Saturday evening, however it is good to be able to report some success. But  the release of the prisoners was only one of the demands.

Many of the 36, who had also been refusing fluids for a week, as well as those who went on hunger strike around the world in sympathy – including the 12 in London – may have permanently damaged their health – and according the the report I heard early on Sunday morning on the ‘Sunday’ programme on Radio 4,  five of the London hunger strikers have been kept in hospital.

The Church of England often gets a pretty poor press, but the Archbishop of Canterbury took a prominent role in the campaign – and kept the issue in the religious media while the mainstream largely ignored it. Here’s another quote from ‘Free Iran’

Huge international pressure, prompted by hunger strikers, helped bring about their release.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, the vice president of the European Parliament, Dr Alejo Vidal-Quadras, and the former Prime Minister of Algeria, Sid Ahmed Ghozali, and thousands of parliamentarians, jurists, human rights icons, dignitaries and personalities across the world condemned the Iraqi regime for failing to release the refugees, despite three separate rulings by Iraqi judges.

Amnesty International joined the chorus of voices denouncing the actions of Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri Al-Maliki with another Urgent Action appeal which was its 12th statement since the ordeal started.

You can see my earlier pictures and comments on the Grosvenor Square hunger strike in Serbian Pride and Camp Ashraf, and more on My London Diary.

John Benton-Harris – Surprise Party

We should as a photographic nation be celebrating today, with features in the colour supplements and photographic magazines, the 70th birthday of one of the most important figures for British photography in the second half of the last century, who happily is still going strong now.  But you are unfortunately unlikely to read about it anywhere but here.

Yesterday I was privileged to attend the surprise birthday celebration for John Benton-Harris in the sports club opposite his home in Croydon, with his family and a decent smattering of photographers.

© 2009 Peter Marshall

Those of us who were around in the 1960 and 70s remember the great breath of fresh ideas that came across the Atlantic and re-vitalised the medium here. Two people in particular, both separately students of Alexey Brodovitch in New York and New Haven, played a greater role than any others by coming and working here. One was British, Tony Ray-Jones, who died tragically young – only 30 – in 1972, having produced  the work that was published posthumously as ‘A Day Off – An English Journal‘ in 1974. The other was an American from the South Bronx who took leave from his post as a photographer in the US Army in Italy to photograph Churchill’s funeral in 1965. While in London he met a young woman who changed his life, and as soon as he was able, moved to London and married her, continuing his photographic career here. You can see both of them in the picture above.

© 2009 Peter Marshall

Two years ago at the FotoArt Festival in Bielsko-Biala, Poland,  it was slightly daunting to take to the stage immediately after the notable historian and writer of ‘A World History of Photography‘, Naomi Rosenblum, particularly as the talk I was going to give had a considerable overlap with the lecture on the  history of street photography she had just given.

My  ‘On English Streets’ used illustrations from the work of John Thomson, Paul Martin, Sir Benjamin Stone, Margaret Monck, Bill Brandt, Martin Parr, Paul Trevor and of course John Benton-Harris, as well as some of my own pictures (I’d talked there about Tony Ray-Jones on a previous occasion or he too would have featured.) Here is my script for the part of the talk which was about John:

His vision of England – certainly in the early years here –  was very much based on the ideas about it he had picked up from films set in the country, particularly those made by British film studios. But his view as an outsider certainly made him more aware of the class differences here and the key ways in which they are signified – and in particular the importance and readings of hats, which appear in so many of his pictures.When John met another Brodovitch graduate, Tony Ray Jones  in London, and found they shared many ideas (Ray Jones had studied at Brodovitch’s class in New Haven, and they had not met in the USA.) Both had the experience of having worked in a supportive visual environment that they found almost completely lacking in word-centred Britain, where no one seemed to care about photography. It must have come as a shock to John to have moved from a New York where he knew everyone who was anyone to a London where there was no one to know, although Ray Jones would have known exactly what was in store when he returned here. Together they provided an energy, a dynamic, that catalysed others to shake up of the dusty world of British photography, particularly editors Bill Jay and Peter Turner, who took over from Jay at Creative Camera.  Benton-Harris curated several influential shows with Turner, particularly American Images: Photography (1945-80) at the Barbican in 1985.

The new breeze that ran though British photography affected all of us, perhaps reaching its apogee in volumes such as Creative Camera Collection 5, which featured, as the first of three major portfolios, 27 images by Benton-Harris (as well as a well hidden set of three pictures from me.)

© 2009 Peter Marshall

Those coming to the party had been sworn to secrecy, but were asked to nominate their favourite image by John, and these had been printed up to poster size and were stuck up around the sports hall for the party – you can see some in the background of these pictures. I’d printed out the presentation slides for his section of my talk as a small present and was pleased to see that my choice included several of other people’s favourites.

Also on display was a series of pictures of John as a young man with a camera on the streets of Rome, taken by his friend George Weitz, there at the party (I’m afraid the link to the piece I wrote on John for About.com no longer leads to it – like the several thousand other pieces I wrote for them it is no longer available on line.)

Part of the reason why John is not as highly known as he should be is that it is not easy to see his work, much only available in long out of print books and magazines. A reasonably diligent search on the web only reveals a couple of pictures of him and two poorly scanned images of St Patrick’s Day, neither his best work on the theme. We really need a well-produced book of his work from the first twenty or so years in England, as well as other publications covering his later work.

© 2009 Peter Marshall

Probably the best way publication is still the major portfolio in Creative Camera Collection 5 mentioned above, still available secondhand at a very reasonable price in the USA, though more expensive here – and prices of this and the other CC Year Books do now seem to be rising fast. (My favourite on-line bookseller lists a copy at a US bookseller for £6.47 below an ‘ex-library’ copy apparently in poorer condition from a UK store for £56, though most copies are in the £16-25 range.)

But it is also unfortunate that credit wasn’t always given to him for the things that he did do. The catalogue for the ground-breaking Barbican Show American Images 1945-80 does state in the acknowldegements “Peter Turner and John Benton-Harris have been the motivating force behind the show and without their unstinting efforts as organizers, American Images would never have happened” and it carries a short note by him and about him, but essentially it marginalises his contribution to a show which was almost entirely dependent on his contribution and insights, if slightly diluted by the efforts of others.

Unforgivably he was not even included in the index to the catalogue, and the front cover which should have stated ‘Organised by John Benton-Harris & Peter Turner‘ simply says ‘Edited by Peter Turner‘.

It is also hard to understand why use wasn’t made in the catalogue of his personal knowledge of many of the photogrphers included (which was essential in putting the show together) to provide greater insight into their lives and work. As his occasional contirbutions to this site show, John is capable of writing with considerable force and insight.

John has recently returned from another extended trip to the USA, doubtless with many interesting digital colour images as on his recent previous trips. I also hope he will write up his thoughts about some of the shows that he saw there for this site. It would be nice if here or elsewhere he would also share some of his images with us.

More pictures from the party on My London Diary.

City Panoramic II

OK, lets try again with that rather effectively hidden bad link to the pictures in City Panoramic (which I’ll correct in a second.)  This one to the actual City Panoramic website really does work

There really does seem to be some kind of hex on these pictures; first I simply forgot about the site, then I put it up with a bad link (or perhaps one that got corrupted when the site went down a few days back?)

When I showed the picture above, I gave it the title London Bridge but deliberately it wasn’t the most obvious of views, and perhaps the two pigeons are what stands out most. It was taken on a cold wintry day and I like the way it uses the curvature of the cylindrical perspective – it’s been called the ‘cigar effect’ – of the swing lens camera.

When I started using a panoramic camera – and this was taken with the Japanese Widelux – I found a recent book about panoramic photography in my local library which gave some useful advice. One of the things it said was essential was to avoid subject matter close to the camera. So of course I went out and did the opposite.

Opening night

Thanks to all who made it to the opening of ‘Taken in London‘ at Shoreditch Gallery at the Juggler in Hoxton Market last night. It was great to see so many photographers, including some of the best in London, so many old friends, and to meet some new people. It really was a very pleasant evening.

For once I went up to London and didn’t take pictures, though I did have my camera with me I just didn’t get the time to take it out of the bag and was busy talking to people for more than two hours.  Fortunately my fellow exhibitor Paul did occasionally top up my glass, or I might have forgotten to have a drink.

© 2009 Peter MarshallWhirling dervish at Eid Milad-Un-Nabi celebrations, Tooting, March 2009

The show continues until the end of the month, so there is still plenty of time for anyone who couldn’t make the opening to see the work.  The Juggler is a nice place to visit if you are around Shoreditch or Hoxton for a coffee and cake or roll (though I can seldom resist a bottle of Budvar there.)

Talking to the gallery owner he told me that there had been quite a few visitors already, many clutching their Photomonth booklets. There are around 20 galleries taking part in Photomonth within easy walking distance of the Juggler in the areas on either side of Shoreditch High St/Kingsland Rd, and although opening dates and times differ, it’s an area for a good afternoon out in the next few weeks. Full details and map on the Photomonth web site as well as in the booklet.

You can also see some of the work from the show on the Taken in London web site, although the final selection I made is rather different from there, with much more work from 2009. All of the pictures are of course somewhere on My London Diary – with around 50,000 others!

Irving Penn (1917-2009)

Irving Penn died yesterday, October 7, aged 92. One of the great American fashion photographers of the last century, he was a great influence on many other photographers, but although I wrote a little about him, I never warmed to his work. There is a fine long obituary feature on him in the New York Times, written by Andy Grundberg, and another with a slide show of nine of his pictures on their Lens blog.

You can see more pictures on Photography Now, though it’s a site which annoys me by resizing my browser window, but it does show his work well. There are many more pictures on the Art Pages site, hosted in the Ukraine, where copyright is perhaps rather different. The site isn’t in English, but if you click on any of the thumbs to view, then clicking on it again brings up an enlarged version, and clicking on the link to the top right of the picture goes on to the next. It includes some pictures I don’t think I’ve seen before.

Viva Cuba! Havana Cultura

I’ve never been to Cuba, although like many its story has fascinated me and I’ve written in the past about the country and its photographers, including the pictures of Batista’s Cuba by Constantino Arias (1926-92),  Raul Corrales (1925-2006) who in 1959 was official photographer to Fidel Castro and later worked for the government’s ‘Revolucion’ magazine and Alberto Korda (1928-2001) whose image of Che still graces t-shirts and more around the world, as wellas  and younger photographers such as José A. Figueroa (1946-) and a dozen or so others.

Visiting photographers have also created fine work there. Among the outstanding examples are three Magnum photographers, Burt Glinn, who photographed the   Revolution,  David Harvey, with some fine colour work – and he also used to run some gerat workshops there. Only the fees, air fare and carbon footprint prevented me from rushing to them. And another fine colour photographer, Alex Webb

Quite different was the work of Mexican Pablo Cabado, in his book on Cuba in 1990 – 12 pictures on Fifty Crows.

© 2009 Peter Marshall

Although I haven’t yet got to Cuba, last night I did have a very enjoyable evening in Bethnal Green, thanks to Havana Cultura, a global art initiative from Havana Club Rum to introduce the world to the fabulous culture of Havana.

© 2009 Peter Marshall
Along with around 50 other bloggers I was their guest at Chamucos Bar in the basement of Green and Red more or less opposite the top of Brick Lane. The Mojitos were flowing and the music from Gilles Peterson’s Havana Cultura album to be released on 26th October was playing – and I wrote this while listening to it again – watch out for it, some great stuff. Mojito Mayhem was one of the meetings of the London Bloggers Meetup, and we also got a couple of presentations from fellow bloggers.

© 2009 Peter Marshall

Havana Cultura has a great web site with lots of information about Havana, including photographer René Peña’s (b 1957) favourite views. But what was more interesting to me was to see a video of him talking about and showing his work, in particular a series called “White Things“, exploring the way that people consume things. The pictures show them with consumer objects, not necessarily white, but lit, exposed and printed to make them white against the darker skin of the people. As well as the video and text about him and his work there are also links to some of his pictures.

Doubtless somewhere on the Havana Cultura site you can also find details of the ‘Havana Twitter Treasure Hunt’ which uses clues on Twitter  – @_havanacultura_  and you will find the answers on the Havana Cultura’ web site. The first prize is two tickets to Gilles Peterson’s exclusive Havana Cultura album launch party in Paris on 26th October.

Tech Note:

All pictures 24-70mm Sigma on Nikon D700, with SB800 mainly bounced from a fairly white ceiling. It was rather dark in parts of the bar and I had to turn on the focus assist light. Shooting at a ISO 2000 and on program – which gave 1/60 f9 for most pictures – meant the ambient lighting helped fill in the distant areas. Lightroom helped a bit too!

My London Diary by the Sea

I didn’t go to Brighton clutching my bucket and spade, or even for the traditional dirty weekend – the hotels were in any case pretty much fully booked for the Labour Party conference, which explained my visit, though I had no intention of entering the boredom zone inside the conference centre itself. Coming from the western edge of London it didn’t make sense for me to travel on the specially chartered “Rage Train” from London Victoria, and I arrived an hour or two before this, avoiding the welcome by a large contingent of police at Brighton station when the demonstrators arrived, and strolled down to the conference centre and the pier with a Brighton-based photographer.

© 2009 Peter Marshall

There we found another train, driven by Gordon Brown, but with David Cameron waiting his turn on the back seat. The ‘Westminster Gravy Train’ was provided by the ‘Vote for a Change’ campaign, calling for a referendum on electoral reform and a break with the “voting system that has left parliament unaccountable and unrepresentative.” There were other protests too, including a reminder that there is still unfinished business at Guantanamo Bay, with Shaker Aamer, whose family live in Battersea still detained and former Bournemouth resident Ahmed Belbacha  who is free to leave but has nowhere safe to go, permission not having been granted for him to return to the UK.

Meanwhile, protesters were gathering on the promenade for the main demonstration for ‘Jobs, Education, Peace‘ organised by six trade unions and several campaigning groups.  Protesting against job losses and unemployment – and arguing that instead of allowing industries like Vestas who make wind turbine blades to move production out of the UK the government should be taking a positive lead in creating green jobs; against cuts in education provision, especially those in deprived areas such as Tower Hamlets, and against essentially imperialist wars such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

© 2009 Peter Marshall

‘Stuff the Market, Tax the Rich’ was the uncompromising message of the banner carried by a large group of students among the several thousand demonstrators, intermittently halting to chant slogans and work up some energy before charging forwards into the gap of 50 or more yards they had allowed to develop, scattering the media who had gathered in front of them.

That’s my arm at the left of the picture above, running at some speed to keep ahead as I pointed the camera held in my other hand back towards the banner. The 24mm end of the 24-70mm was around the right focal length for the job on the full-frame D700, and the fill flash adds the necessary sharpness to the central figures, while a slight degree of blurring helps with the feeling of movement. It is only slight blurring because the flash synchronizes at 1/320th, rather different from just a few years ago when sync speeds of 1/60 were normal and 1/100 fast.

It was a nice sunny day, and working at ISO400 was plenty fast enough, with f14 eliminating any depth of field problems – the hairs on my arm are out of focus but then they are closer than the near end of the focus range – and better soft in any case. The sea and promenade railings are blurred slightly from the camera movement – and this helps the picture. As I now do most of the time, I was using the camera in P (program) mode (though I often use the dial under my thumb to increase or decrease shutter speed while keeping exposure constant) and the exposure was made using the 3D Matrix metering with no compensation. The camera was also set to autofocus in auto-area mode – in which it is supposed to recognise and choose faces to focus on. In other words I left the technical stuff to the camera – and it seems to have worked

Back in the old days, when I was working with manual cameras such as the Leica I would have only managed a single exposure, at most two, during this few seconds of rush; with the Konica which added autowind, perhaps three. In both cases I would have have been lucky to get anything at all from the pictures – though I did occasionally manage in similar situations.

I can’t say it’s easy or comfortable shooting back over your shoulder while running fairly fast, but modern technology does make it a lot more reliable!

More pictures and text (both stories were on the front page at Demotix)  on My London Diary:

Gordon on the Gravy Train etc

Jobs, Education, Peace March & Rally

Taryn Simon TED Talk

Taryn Simon was for me the outstanding finalist among those shortlisted for the 2009 Deutsche Börse prize at the Photographers’ Gallery, for her work ‘An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar‘ which gained the 2008 Infinity Award for publishing from the ICP, and was one of the best shows to grace the Photographers Gallery in recent years. But of course the judges though otherwise.

However TED shares my opinion. On their web site they say “TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader.” And of course quite a lot more. Put simply, TED gets the best ideas over a very wide range of fields from around the world and presents them. It’s a great honour to be invited to take part.

The best of the 18 minute presentations by those invited to speak are made freely available on their web site –  under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.  Taryn Simon‘s is one of these, and you can watch her on the TED site as she talks about two of her projects. One is on the hidden sites, a number of which were in the Photographers’ Gallery show, and she adds some interesting comments on how she did the work and why. (You can see some with the accompanying texts from the link near the bottom of her web site page.)

Her earlier project, ‘The Innocents‘ (2003),  has a particular photographic interest as she has photographed men wrongly committed to long jail sentences for crimes they did not commit on the basis of photographic evidence.  She talks about how showing photographs to crime witnesses can produce unreliable results; often people remember photographs they have seen before and identify these rather than actually remembering the criminal and finding them in the pictures, and gives at least one case where police deliberately mislead a witness. The men were all cleared when further evidence – often DNA – became available and Simon has photographed them in locations with a particular significance to them – their alibi locations (some were convicted despite having many witnesses to testify they were elsewhere) , place of arrest or the scene of the alleged crime.

Simon’s portraits (and the hidden places) are interesting even if you do not know the story behind them, but the stories provide an added dimension which both anchors and intensifies their meaning. They give us some ideas about what we mean by truth in photographs, showing how misleading photographic evidence can be – and what a critical effect this can have on some lives. There are five images from this series on the Gagosian gallery site, and five with an essay and questions at MoCP.