>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Spelthorne? Where? Wilshire? Who?

While these were the questions asked over the toast and marmalade in many homes this morning, for once I knew all the answers. Because I was at the centre of David Wilshire MP’s constituency, Staines. Spelthorne is at the centre of all those reservoirs visible on the left immediately after take-off from Heathrow as you wantonly increase your carbon footprint.

All that water is not enough for our local council, which also goes under the rather silly name of Spelthorne, and despite the fact that the River Thames was only a few yards behind me they had to install the rather fatuous ‘water feature’ (a concrete ditch) that you can see behind the Spelthorne MP and his very personal assistant taking part in a very worthwhile charity event Stepping Out for Water that I photographed last year.

Mr Wilshire has earned some local respect for getting involved in events such as this, where he came to speak at the meeting in the Staines Riverside Gardens/Car Park at the end of a walk raising concern and cash about the one fifth of the world who lack clean water and the 40% who lack basic sanitation – and our failure to do our part to meet the Millennium Development Goals, one of which included the aim to halve those without clean water and sanitation by 2015. He’s also supported other events, such as a Trade Justice demonstration in Staines. So he isn’t all bad.

He also regularly replies to letters from me and Linda, telling us of his support for various things we oppose – such as the wasting of vast amounts of money on Trident and the expansion of Heathrow – an issue where he is one of few local MPs to defy official Conservative policy. But he does keep in contact with constituents and argue the case even if he almost invariably ends up coming to the wrong conclusion.

He must have been doing something right, as there is a group of local Tories reported to be trying to get rid of him since August – though their main beef is over his expenses claims, others criticise him for not living in the borough (reportedly he has homes in Somerset, Hanworth and London.) The current allegations are about payments to Moorlands Research Services, an unregistered company owned by himself and his partner, Ann Palmer.

Spelthorne exists because of opposition by Conservative backwoodsmen and women back in the 1960s, who fought tooth and nail to keep this true blue area out of Greater London and in particular the London Borough of Hounslow (thus ensuring it remained under Labour control. Oh dear!) It then jumped over the Thames to become part of Surrey, although that country has never quite accepted it, and even now some local activities get missed out from Surrey listings because they are in Middlesex. But Staines really isn’t Surrey. We have the crime rates, unemployment and social problems you’d expect for outer London, with an extra dose of pollution from Heathrow and three motorways around our edges – the M25, M3 and M4.

Wilshire, a former Conservative whip, probably last made the national headlines for the controversial Section 28 which he introduced into the Local Government Act, 1988 aimed at preventing “local authorities from promoting homosexuality“. A half-baked and largely ineffectual attempt at discrimination, it had the effect of uniting and galvanising LGBT groups in protest and thus advancing the cause of equality in the period until it was repealed (in Scotland in 2000 and the rest of the UK in 2003 – hard to comprehend why it took New Labour so long.)

It seems inevitable in the current climate that Wilshire will have to go – whatever the justice of his case. But I don’t hold out any great hope that the conservative candidate that replaces him as MP (a monkey with a blue rosette would get elected here) will be any better.

Mitch Epstein’s Power

In last Saturday’s post on the Lens blog at the New York Times you can see 15 pictures by Mitch Epstein from his new book American Power and on the NYT itself you can read an article by Randy Kennedy about the six-year project that led to the book.

The pictures are well worth a look – faintly reminiscent of at least one recent project on the UK, but to my eye rather more interesting – and the story is also worth reading. Photographing power stations – even with an 8×10 – attracted the attention of law enforcement, and at one site he was told by an FBI man If you were Muslim, youd be cuffed and taken in for questioning. On another occasion his camera was mistaken for a missile launcher!

On Epstein’s web site you can also see work from some of his earlier projects, Family Business (2000-2003), The City (1995-1999), Vietnam (1992-1995), Common Practice (1973-1992) and Recreation (1973-1988.) Artnet also has an online catalogue.

Born in 1952, Epstein studied at Rhode Island School of Design before going on to study with Gary Winogrand at Cooper Union in 1972-4.

He was one of the long list of photographers featured in the book by Sally Eauclaire that defined ‘The New Color Photography‘ in 1981 (it included among others Harry Callahan, William Christenberry, Mark Cohen, John Divola, William Eggleston, Emmet Gowin, Jan Groover, Len Jenshel, David Hockney, Les Krims – who refused to let her use a picture, Helen Levitt, Joel Meyerowitz, John Pfahl, Stephen Shore, Sandy Skoglund, Eve Sonneman and Joel Sternfeld) and also in the more focused vision of her later volumes ‘New Color, New Work‘ and ‘American Independents.’

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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 Petersons 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.

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 Petersons 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!

Normal Service

Apologies to anyone who tried to access this blog yesterday, when it was down for around 15 hours when a record table was somehow corrupted. And thanks to the support guys at 1&1 who sorted it out once I had convinced them it wasn’t working!