Capa Again

Do we care if that picture of a falling soldier really does or doesn’t show the actual moment when a Republican fighter died for his cause?  Whether it was taken during actual fighting, or during a training exercise, or when a soldier acting out an attack for the camera got into the sight of a distant sniper? What does seem clear if you look at the surviving images by Capa is that neither Phillip Knightly or Richard Whelan (link above)  provided a believable solution to the enigma (see in particular comments #7 and #10 on the piece.)

The story seems to be one that will never come to an end – and you can read about the latest instalment in a feature, Wrong place, wrong man? Fresh doubts on Capa’s famed war photo, published in the Observer last Sunday. There is an audio slide show which takes a look at some of the evidence. Although I’d need to see rather  more before making any judgement; in particular it’s a shame that the José Manuel Susperregui, whose book Sombras de la Fotografía gives the evidence, apparently didn’t take a rather better photograph, preferably in black and white and with suitable lighting, than the one shown.

Capa’s picture was I think captioned and published in his absence by Vu magazine in September 1936, and it may well have come as rather a shock to him when he first saw it on the magazine page, although the caption there was almost certainly deliberately vague, and it was Life the following year who made it into the legend of the Falling Soldier. He was – as his writings show  – a great story-teller, and whatever the real story behind this image it would have been very hard to resist that provided in first publication.

Photojournalism is very much about telling stories, about giving our view of events, of finding ways to express what we feel about what we see; CCTV seldom provides great news images.  The power and fascination of our medium is very much tied up in the relationship between reality and the image and also between our experience and how we relate it in images. Susan Sontag, quoted at the end of the audio clip, really oversimplifies to the point of irrelevance. (But that’s ‘On Photography‘ for you.)

But images, particularly ones as iconic as ‘Falling Soldier’ have their own lives.  Although when made it was news, it soon became something else, a symbol, detached from the actual events (whatever they were) of its creation.

So while it was of vital import at the time the picture was made – and the public was almost certainly mislead at least to some extent – it is now frankly of academic interest.  And of course this is a book by an academic, if one that seems rather more  interesting than most such productions.

Olympus Pen?

I don’t often write about cameras and stuff, but the Olympus EP1 finally anounced at a press launch in Berlin does on the face of it look as if it may be something special. Not least because with the 17mm lens (34mm equiv)  and external viewfinder it can double as a reasonably portable and very capable compact camera for those times when you want to travel light. The body is about 120.5 x 70 x 35 mm (plus some protrusions) and weighs only 335g and the pancake 17mm f2.8 only 22mm long and 71g, with the VF-1 viewfinder adding 20g. A total weight of less than half the body only for my D700. If you want a flash the FL-14 is 84g with the 2AAAs adding a little more.

Unlike the other current Micro Four Thirds offering, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH1, the E-P1 doesn’t have a viewfinder, enabling it to be considerably more compact. This still rules it out for some kinds of photography, and I certainly won’t be abandoning my Nikons for a while.

The first thing I did on reading more about the EP-1 on Digital Photography Review was to go to their hands on preview but I found a more useful set of sample images on the Photography Blog which were taken with an actual production camera and I could  to download a full-size sample file taken at ISO 1600. The 12.3 MP jpeg made with the 14-42mm lens on a production camera was a 5.8Mb file. It’s not perfect but very adequate, and doubtless the results from a RAW image would be better.

A perhaps small added advantage for me is that almost any lens can be fitted to the micro four Thirds system camera using suitable adaptors. Olympus supply one to fit all my old OM series lenses, one or two of which might be useful with the body, and perhaps more usefully, any Leica M fitting lens can also be used. Apparently the results with some modern Leica lenses on the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH1 are exceptional.

Frankly I don’t much like the EP-1’s “stylish design” with a deliberately retro glance to the old Olympus Pen. At the bottom of the first page of the DPR feature is a pair of pictures comparing it with the Panasonic Lumix L3, which to my eyes looks so much better. Perhaps in time an all-black version will evolve (as well as the black and silver version there is an even more hideous light taupe and white body.) And as on almost every other camera there are now the built in “art filters” to really f**k up your pictures and gain Flickr kudos.

I’m probably not going to rush out and buy one as soon as they come into the shops in July, but suspect I may not long be able to resist. It isn’t a cheap camera and the 17mm with VF-1 costs rather more than the zoom. It will also be interesting to hear how well the body works with other lenses, and perhaps in particular with a wider zoom than the 14-42mm.

Your Best Shot

Thanks to Jim Casper of Lensculture for pointing me (via Twitter)  towards the Guardian Series My Best Shot, which I hadn’t looked at since November.  It’s a series that is interesting for both the selection of image and also what the photographers have to say about them – and sometimes that’s very little.  And among some splendid work there are also some that make me think “well if that’s your best I’d hate to see the worst” and others where I think “you CANNOT be serious!” and think of many many more they have taken that are so much better.

But then if anyone asked me what my best picture was, I’d probably be stuck for an answer.  And whatever I said this week, probably by next week I would have changed my mind.  And I rather hope I still have my best picture to look forward to.

Of course some of those selections are little more than a marketing exercise for the photographer’s next book or show and I very seriously doubt if the photographer felt they were their “best shot.” And perhaps such a thing doesn’t really exist in any case, though their have been a few photographers perhaps unfortunate enough to be known only for one single image – though sometimes so iconic that it must be in its way satisfying.

But mostly the pictures chosen – even if sometimes rather randomly are interesting, and so are some of the stories and the details the photographers give about themselves. So if like me, you’d forgotten about it, why not take a look. And if you come across something there you think is ridiculous – or particularly interesting –  do share it with others in a comment.

Street Photography, Iran Style

Although I’m rather a fan of Paolo Pellegrin and have previously written about his work several times, perhaps the most interesting thing about his latest set of street portraits ‘The Changing Face of Iran‘ is that it exists at all.

The pictures and accompanying text perhaps say more about the problems of working in the country as a foreigner than anything else: “Accompanied by an official ‘minder’ from the ministry of information and armed with a government permit to take street photos, Pellegrin approached mullahs, shopkeepers, beggars and young hip-hop kids, and most readily agreed to be photographed.”

I don’t find the resulting pictures of much interest, and I hope that Pellegrin found other things to photograph in Iran as well.  But it must be difficult to take pictures there. His Magnum colleague Thomas Dworzak, another photographer whose work I admire, visited in November and with a few exceptions his work on this occasion also fails to inspire me.

Today’s election there reminds us that these are interesting times in Iran, but I have a suspicion that the more interesting pictures may not emerge for some years – and will have been taken by Iranian photographers we have never before heard of, rather than visiting firemen.

Whither or Wither Street Photography?

The recent case of Wood v Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis is discussed in an article by solicitor Nigel Hanson of Foot Anstey solicitors that I think makes interesting reading for photographers.

Essentially the court decided that the use of photography by the police to harass people involved in demonstrations – something I’ve written about on many occasions in the past few years- was a contravention of the right to privacy under Art. 8(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

But perhaps importantly for street photographers,

Lord Justice Laws said it was clear individuals still have no right to prevent another person politely merely taking their photograph in public.

He said: “It is no surprise that the mere taking of someone’s photograph in a public street has been consistently held to be no interference with privacy. The snapping of the shutter of itself breaches no rights, unless something more is added. Accordingly I conclude that the bare act of taking the pictures, by whoever done, is not of itself capable of engaging Article 8(1) unless there are aggravating circumstances.”

So it would appear that we can go on taking pictures – so long as we do so in a discrete manner, although this does not necessarily mean that we are free to either retain them or publish them.

The police lost the case in part becuase the way that they took pictures was intrusive – I’ve long argued it more to be more a deliberate harrassment than any attempt at providing evidence – but also because they were unable to convince the court of any real public interest to justify their action.

But the judgement seems to imply that if you work – like Cartier-Bresson – in a candid fashion, the ECHR would not affect you, but possibly walking right up to your subjects and blasting them with flash would clearly be an intrusion, as would a persistent following of people or workiing with a pack of photographers.

This all seems pretty sensible to me. Long ago I decided that most people would rather be photographed without their knowledge than have strangers approach them and ask if they can take photographs. There are times when I do both of these things, but  generally working without permission is more likely to produce interesting pictures. I always agree if strangers ask if they may photograph me (it seems only fair as I’m a photographer), but frankly I’m happier if they just get on and do it without asking me – so long as they don’t disturb me too much. Probably I’m rather more likely to notice if they do so, but like most of the public I prefer to ignore it.

But what the judgement also made clear (if I interpret Mr Hanson correctly) was that to retain and publish pictures taken without permission there has to be a valid argument that it is in the public interest.

I’m not quite sure what this might mean legally, but I have my own views on what the moral position is, at least so far as my own work is concerned.

The first question I always ask is to try and put myself in the position of the persons in my picture – would I find the way that I have portrayed them objectionable? It’s too easy to catch moments when people look ridiculous or show something they would not want to show.

Secondly, and more difficult,  does the picture have something worth saying about who we are and how we live – the human condition. This perhaps sounds more pretentious than I mean it to be, but what I’m not interested in are pictures that simply show how clever the photographer is (something I find only too common in much street photography),  and what I hope to produce are pictures that have something to say about life. I think that this is something that we can clearly see, for example, in at least most of the pictures of Cartier-Bresson, and something that a court might also be persuaded was in the public interest.

I hope I’m not being too optimistic, but despite the fact that the judgement found that the particular photography being carried out was outside the law, it seems to me that as photographers we can take something positive from it.

Agustí Centelles (1909-85)

This morning I listened to the Today programme as I washed up the breakfast things and heard an interview with Sam Lesser, one of the seven remaining Britons who went to Spain with the International Brigade, all of whom have now been made Spanish citizens and given Spanish passports.

Sam Lesser © 2006, Peter Marshall
Sam Lesser in 2006

But of course as well as those thousands of brave individual who went to Spain to fight for freedom, there were many Spaniards also fighting.

And when we think of the photographs of the Spanish Civil War, probably we immediately think of Robert Capa – and in particular his ‘Falling Soldier‘ picture.

But of course there were also Spanish photographers. Or in the case of   Agustí Centelles (1909-85), Catalan photographers.  A photojournalist in Barcelona, he became an official photographer for the Republican government, and even managed to continue using his Leica when interned in the Bram refugee camp in France in 1939.

When he fled to France in February 1939 he took several thousand negatives with him. Later, when France was occupied by the Germans, he decided to return in secret to Spain, but left his negatives hidden in a house in France, as his pictures could have incriminated many Spaniards and led to their persecution by Franco. It was only 40 years later, after the fall of Franco that he could return and reclaim his work.

An exhibition of his work from 1936-9, “Agustí Centelles: journal d’une guerre et d’un exil, Espagne–France 1936-1939” opened at the Jeu de Paume (Hotel de Sully site) in Paris yesterday and continues until 13 Sept 2009. You can read more about it in French on their site, and also in English on Art Knowledge News. There is also an extensive collection of his work on line at VEGAP – I’ve not yet looked at all 336, but what I have seen is enough to convince me that  we should be thinking of him as the major photographer of the Spanish Civil War.

Too often we think of events that happen abroad – particularly in the majority world – only in terms of the photographs made by photographers from the  Western agencies who travel there – almost as if photographs that don’t come from Magnum or VII  or Getty or Reuters somehow aren’t real.  Agencies such as Drik should have changed the way we see the South by now.

New Topographics Revived – No UK Show

In 1975, I was one of many youngish photographers to be excited and to an extent influenced by the work shown in an exhibition at George Eastman House curated by William Jenkins called “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” Not that I went to Rochester, but I read the reports in the US magazines, looked at books and catalogues, and at pictures which did come over to exhibitions here, and even went and did a workshop with one of the photographers included, Lewis Balz. (The full listing of those included: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel Jr.)

I think you can see a certain influence in some of the work I’ve done since then, particularly on the urban landscape, a genre central to the show.  Without it I don’t think I would have set up the Urban Landscape web site, or produced many of the images on it – such as this of the DLR at Blackwall:

Blackwall © 1984 Peter Marshall
DLR Blackwall, 1994, Peter Marshall

The NPR article on the show, with a slide show of a dozen images that is worth viewing at full screen – for once you really do get larger images, not just fuzzier ones, is surely quite wrong to state that the paradigm shift this show produced “was imperceptible at the time.”  To photographers such as myself it was as imperceptible as a thunderbolt.

The reason for the feature is that a new version of this show, new version of this seminal exhibition, organized by  George Eastman House with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona opens at GEH on Saturday, June 13 and runs until Sunday, September 27, 2009. As well as 100 works from the 1975 show, it also has “some 30 prints and books by other relevant artists to provide additional historical and contemporary context.”

After Rochester the show will travel to eight international venues.

  • Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Oct. 25, 2009–Jan. 3, 2010);
  • Center for Creative Photography (Feb. 19–May 16, 2010);
  • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (July 17–Oct. 3, 2010);
  • Landesgalerie Linz, Austria (Nov. 10, 2010–Jan. 9, 2011),
  • Photographische Sammlung Stiftung Kultur, Cologne (Jan. 27–April 3, 2011);
  • Jeu de Paume, Paris (April 11–June 12, 2011);
  • Nederlands Fotomuseum Rotterdam, the Netherlands (July 2–Sept. 11, 2011);
  • Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, Bilbao (November 2011–January 2012).

Like me you may well be devastated but hardly surprised that no venue in the UK is on this list. After all it is a major photography show, so you can’t expect the Photographers’ Gallery or the Hayward or the Barbican to take much interest.

Top Taos?

I’ve never been to Taos, New Mexico but the The Church of St. Francis of Assisi is very familiar, having been photographed and painted by many. James Dansiger posted three photographs, by Ansel Adams, Laura Gilpin and Paul Strand – all intrigued by the forms of the rear of the building – the other day in Spirit West and asked readers to pick their favourite – and also to send in their own pictures.

Danziger says you can no longer take a view like Adams et al, as the adobe church is now surrounded by power lines and buildings.  In Reader Comments,  he includes a number of more recent photographs, which perhaps suggest the situation  isn’t as bad as he suggests. His readers don’t manage to come up with any very great pictures – and display their lack of taste by preferring Adams to Strand. But more interesting is the image at the top of that second post, another image of the back of the church, inviting us to guess who took it.

Looking at it, and particularly the tonality and and hooded figure in the foreground my mind immediately jumped to the great Spanish pictorialist and master of the direct carbon process, Jose Ortiz Echague, but a closer look – by clicking on the image – told me I was wrong – perhaps misled by a poor reproduction of an indifferent print. I won’t give the game away, but look carefully at the top edge of that picture and you too may immediately come to the same – correct – conclusion as me.

You need a clue? Page down

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Those Leicas were very fiddly to load! But even when he got it wrong he almost never cropped.

Pure Genius – Only 13 Years One Month late

I’m not sure now why the virtually only pictures I took at the ‘Pure Genius’ land occupation in 1996 were made on a swing lens panoramic camera. Perhaps there was something about the open spaces of that site – now occupied by tall luxury riverside flats – that made me want to think panoramic.  But I exposed two complete rolls of film in the Horizon – 42 exposures, and just 5 black and white images, I think on a Leica.

© 1996 Peter Marshall
‘Pure Genius’ site, May 1996

The site was a large one, 13 acres, and by the time I took these pictures on May 6 the activists from ‘The Land is Ours‘ had already begun to transform the site, erecting buildings and preparing the land to grow crops.

I was reminded of this 13 years on by the news that a group inspired by this earlier ‘The Land is Ours’ action had occupied a long empty and overgrown site next to Kew Bridge as the Kew Eco-Village.  I took a little detour to walk past there and take a look on my way home on Sunday but as nothing much seemed to be happening and I didn’t want to miss my train home (only hourly on Sundays) I didn’t try to make contact. Perhaps I’ll return another time when more is happening.

You can watch a video of the occupation, look at a local blog, Here Be Dragons (I met The Dragon – and Green Dragon Lane is just a few yards away)  and follow KewEcoVillage on Twitter and there is a Facebook group too.

I made some quick scans from the 1996 pictures and have put nine of them on My London Diary . They aren’t great scans, as I made them like contact sheets, with the negs still in their filing sheets, so they are a bit dusty and a few of the negs were not quite flat…  And using the Epson V750, some of these colour negs are a little too dense to give good scans,  correct colour balance is murder, and you get some light leakage around the edges… Considering everything they are not bad at all on screen.

The Wandsworth/Battersea Guinness site remained empty for years after the TLIO occupation was ended forcibly after five and a half months. Eight years later, in June 2004, I returned and took this picture of the new flats that were going up, and work was still going on on the last block on the site last year.

© 2004 Peter Marshall
Former ‘Pure Genius’ site, June 2004

The 1.8 acre site next to Kew Bridge has been empty and awaiting development since it was cleared in 1992. It should be a local scandal given the housing shortages (and high prices) in the area that the local council hasn’t stepped in at some point and taken over the land for social housing. Given the current economic climate, it seems unlikely that the current owners, St George West London Ltd, who bought the site in 2003, will be able to start  building in the near future.

Their first planning application was turned down, and their second made last year for a 2 acre site including the next door pub includes a new pub, shops, offices and 170 residential units has not yet been approved. You can read more about the proposed development and its problems on the Strand on the Green site.

The Horizon that I bought cheaply around 1996 produces negatives around 56x24mm and they have a horizontal angle of view of approximately 120 degrees. The rotating lens produces what I think is called a cylindrical perspective. It has a nice clear viewfinder that is not 100% accurate but pretty good for it’s type and very bright. The built-in spirit level appears in the viewfinder making it easy to use this camera hand-held – for many pictures getting the camera level is essential, as otherwise the horizon will be nicely curved. When the camera is used upright, all vertical lines remain straight, but any non-verticals that do not pass through the centre of the image will be curved.

Incidentally you can still buy a very slightly updated version of the Horizon, the Horizon 202 (there are other models too) either under its own name or marketed as a Lomo. The difference is in the price – and possibly the guarantee – and of course you don’t get to call your pictures Lomographs, which may be an advantage.

I bought a replacement Horizon on eBay a couple of years ago for about half the cost of the equivalent Lomo in the bookshop of a well-known London gallery. The first lasted me around ten years of fairly regular use – several hundred films at least, though it had needed some minor repairs that I’d been able to make myself. Not bad value for a panoramic camera costing well under under £200 (now just slight over since the pound has gone down.)