>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

LIP at 21

I was sorry to miss the 21st birthday celebrations of London Independent Photography last night, but I didn’t feel up to it. As the first membership secretary of LIP I was also member No 1 and my membership card still has that number.

LIP was started by a small group of enthusiasts who had attended courses at Paul Hill‘s workshop’s in Bradbourne, Derbyshire and had wanted to form a group to continue their interests in photography. At the time I was involved in two groups in London, both loosely organised, one around the young photographers group that met monthly at the Photographers’ Gallery, and the other, Framework, organised by Terry King with help from myself and others that had been meeting at various places in west London for around ten years. There were also other groups around the capital, including the ‘Box Brownies‘ in East London.

I think the PG had for some time been looking for a way to get rid of its group, which was troublesome and showing rather too much independence, and jumped at the chance to encourage someone else to take over the work. The inaugural meeting and some early events of LIP were held on its premises, almost 22 years ago. But the first real event held by LIP was a ‘Blutak show’ to which 46 photographers (half the membership) arrived with pictures to stick on the wall of the Hammersmith and West London College on 26 Sept 1987. The first AGM was held at another ‘Blutak Show‘, this time at the Drill Hall in Chenies St, on 23 Jan 1988.

Framework had been very much a group about photographers sharing enthusiasms, discussing their work in progress and exhibiting together, but unlike LIP never felt the need for a constitution or formal membership. Over the years an impressive list of photographers showed with us, including Paul Baldesare, Sandra Balsells, Jim Barron, James Bartholomew, William Bishop, Edward Bowman, Robert Claxton, Charles Coultas, Townly Cooke, Steve Deakin, Richard Eldred, Lynn Fuss, Carol Hudson, Richard Ingle, Peter Jennings, T Herbert Jones, Lucie Jones, Terry King, Kirsty McLaren, Virginia Khuri, David Malarkey, Peter Marshall, Tony Mayne, Yoke Matze, Franta Provaznik, Derek Ridgers, Mike Seaborne, Len Salem, Jo Spence, Clive Tanner, John R J Taylor, Suzi Tooke, Laurence Ward, Randall Webb and Anton Williams, Robin Williams and Scott Younger (apologies to those I’ve missed out) and others brought their work to show and talk about with the group. Many of those involved were also LIP members, but it also contributed to LIP in other ways, both by providing the portfolio that got LIP it’s first show at the Mermaid Theatre and also as the model for the local groups (Satellite Meetings) which have for a long time been the most vital part of LIP. But with the formation of LIP it was more or less inevitable that Framework would come to an end, which it did a few years later.

LIP was also fortunate to have Roger Estop as the first editor for its newsletter, which soon developed into rather more of a magazine, with some serious (as well as some fairly humorous) writing about photography. His final issue, entitled ‘Show‘ was an all picture issue showcasing members work. After a short interregnum I became editor of ‘LipService’, producing 3 issues a year for 5 years.

Lipservice cover

I also wrote much, if not most of the content, and in 1997 decided to start putting LipService on line. It can probably claim to have been the first serious on line photography magazine, and you can still read some of the issues in their original format, for example the November 1998 issue, which I think was the first issue to use colour, as I’d just bought a colour scanner. The March 1998 issue has what I think is an important document for those concerned with the history of recent British photography, a review by Paul Trevor of a book about Camerawork.

By the time I gave up editing LipService – having been poached by an editor who had read the online issues to write the ‘About Photography‘ web site, I had decided that there was little point in continuing with a print issue, but I failed to persuade the other LIP members on that point. I still hope at some point it is a path LIP will decide to take!

Although I continued to show work in the annual exhibitions until around 2005, the last major LIP project I was involved in was the 1999 millenium year project, which came from an original idea by Quentin Ball. As web-master at the time I was highly involved and my son Samuel produced the elegant design (it should have won prizes for its simplicity) and wrote the scripts that put up a fresh picture to the site every day through the year 2000. You can still view the Countdown2000 project on line as a part of the LIP web site. I’m very pleased among other things that I manage to persuade Jim Barron to keep contributing work to the project throughout the year.

countdown web page

a photographic profile of the last year of the twentieth century

… a major collection of photographic images exploring London’s zeitgeist from a wide range of personal perspectives and it creates historical reference points for the future. The images reflect culturally significant dates, places and events in London and also the any-day, every-day way of life of the metropolis.

Its a project which I think LIP has yet to better.

Lens Culture

Despite apparently spending all his time making posts on Twitter, Jim Caspar has also managed to put some interesting material on Lensculture recently. Some examples:

For fans of Ansel Adams, there is a link on his blog to a mildly engaging video of the man saying nothing very much or very original.
Most of us will find the transcript of a lengthy interview with Malick Sidibé, born in Mali around 1935, fascinating, and it comes with an interesting gallery of his work.
And a really interesting set of pictures by Japanese photographer Shigeichi Nagano from his book Hong Kong Reminiscence 1958 with a review by Marc Feustel

All Fools Day Disappointments

April started badly for me. It was a day with demonstrations all over London and although I went to some and took some pictures, I find them a little disappointing.

Not that they are particularly bad pictures. Some I would normally have been happy with. But when I look at some of the pictures other people took on the day I can see that I missed most of the action, although by the time I left Bishopsgate it seemed pretty clear to me that the police were spoiling for action.

Police squad attack protester

Really I wasn’t equipped for it. Wednesday was a day when photographers needed hard hats and shin pads to stay with things, as well as a strong bladder and a masochistic streak. The people who got the pictures were with the demonstrators, held for hours by the police, then in the middle when the police horses charged or the riot police moved in, lashing out indiscriminately.

It was a day when I felt sickened when I watched the images and the videos – mainly not yet shown on the mainstream media. Watched the peaceful Climate Camp protesters holding up their hands and chanting “We are not a riot” as the riot police stormed in, batoning everyone on the street. There was a level of unprovoked violence by police unprecedented in this country both on Bishopsgate and around the Bank of England. One man who was there has died.

It should have been headline news on the BBC. There were cameras there and video available, but they had a different agenda, losing most of the respect I still retained for them. They reported the death as ‘unrelated’ to the events, which appears to be simply untrue. Some of the newspapers did a little better, but not much, even those who had reporters and photographers there. It isn’t a great deal of use having a free press if it doesn’t do its job.

I hope there will be a full and wide-ranging enquiry into the aggressive policing, although I don’t have a great deal of confidence – under our current government they seem to be able to act with complete disregard for the rule of law. If there is an enquiry it will almost certainly be a whitewash.

I wasn’t around when things went up. Partly because I went to cover another event – the official ‘Jobs not Bombs’ march through the centre of London organised by Stop the War, CND, BMI and Palestine Solidarity, which, as expected was a worthy if not particularly exciting occasion.

Then somewhere, somehow I lost my SB800 flash. It could have been stolen while I was travelling on the underground – I often forget to close my bag properly, or I may have dropped it climbing up for a better viewpoint, perhaps onto the plinth at Trafalgar Square. All I know is that I put my hand into my bag to put it back on the camera and it wasn’t there.

Otherwise I might have gone back to the City from Trafalgar Square and got a little more of the action, though more likely I would have travelled out to the Excel Centre where the Campaign against Climate Change were demonstrating with their iceberg. But without a flash, an evening demonstration didn’t seem worth going to, and I took an early night instead.

I’ve not been lucky with SB800s, which I think are a great flash unit. This was my third, and the second I’ve lost. One was stolen from my bag. Another failed after two weeks and it took me three months to get a replacement unit – which then failed within days of the end of its guarantee and is sitting on my desk waiting for me to take it to Nikon for expensive servicing.

The SB800 is the best flash unit I’ve used – when it is working, and when powered by five 2500 millamp hour NiMnH batteries has an extremely fast re-cycle time and keeps working through a day of heavy use – more than 500 flashes. Unfortunately it has now been replaced by the SB900 which seems rather less attractive as well as more expensive.

So I’ve ordered a cheap Nikon i-TTL compatible flash – at around a fifth of the price of the SB800 – and will see how that performs. I must also get round to taking the other SB800 in for service. In the meantime I’m having to work with a Nikon SB80DX which doesn’t combine well with the latest Nikons.

Although Nikon’s flash units are great when they are working, they just don’t seem to have the robust reliability of the old workhorse units like the Vivitars I used to rely on.

I’d gone out to photograph the demonstrations, not police violence. And so far as that went I suppose I didn’t do badly. You can see the G20 Meltdown with two of the four Horsefolk of the Apocalypse, the start of the Climate Camp on Bishopgate and the Jobs not Bombs march on My London Diary.

Jobs Justice Climate: Put People First

The G20 meeting in London’s docklands this Thursday brought protesters out in force on to the streets of London on Saturday, as well as prognostications of violence and doom for April 1 and 2 from the authorities and some of the gutter press. But the first major event, backed by over 150 groups and attended by around 50,000 people turned out to be entirely peaceful, if rather chaotic.

Police led the front of the march at a brisk walking pace, although I managed to sneak in and slow it down a little while I took pictures as it passed the Houses of Parliament, but the groups behind had problems in keeping up, with a number of large gaps developing – so the front of the march reached Hyde Park around two hours before the tail. The major hold-up was apparently caused by a police over-reaction when a few anarchists staged a sit-down.

The march was enlivened by a little theatre or various kinds, but almost everyone was on their best behaviour except for a curious incident at Speakers Corner where the alternative end of march rally was being held. People who were there report that a mysterious figure in black dumped some tightly wrapped packages and moved quickly away. When some of the demonstrators investigated these and found them to contain catapults, they kicked them into a fenced off area away from the protest. Before long, a police officer who seemed to know exactly what he was looking for came and found them.

You can see quite a few of my pictures of the event on My London Diary, though I’ve not yet had time to complete all the captions, though there is a little more about the event there.

Helen Levitt (1919-2009)

Helen Levitt, who died in her sleep at her Manhattan home on Sunday 29 March, age 95, was truly one of the finest photographers of the twentieth century. She photographed on the streets of New York where she was born for over 70 years, becoming very much a photographer’s photographer. Although she lacked the public profile of Henri Cartier-Bresson, she was a photographer very much in the same mould, but perhaps more lyrical, and the best of her work certainly ranked with his.

Inspired by the work of H C-B and Walker Evans, she bought a Leica in 1936 and began taking pictures, getting her first solo show at MoMA in 1943. You can read more about her in the piece I wrote in October 2007, Helen Levitt – Street Colour and another post the following month after visiting her show at the Fondation Cartier-Bresson in Paris.

Also on >Re:PHOTO is John Benton Harris‘s review of a show by her and Henri Cartier-Bresson last year in New York, Kings of the Street.

Fontcuberta interview on Lens Culture

Although I’ve known the work of conceptual artist Joan Fontcuberta for years, it was only in 2007 that I met him in person, when he was showing Landscapes without Memory at the FotoArtFestival in Bielsko-Biala where I was speaking.

Although I wasn’t impressed by the work that he was showing – computer generated landscapes that seemed to me of no photographic interest and not essentially different from the ray-traced images that I had seen many others – including my own sons – produce in the past, he gave a superb presentation particularly about two of his projects which it seems to me achieve an exceedingly rare successful combination of the photographic and conceptual.

Most impressive for me was his collaboration with Pere Formiguera – Dr Ameisenhaufen’s Fauna and I was also very impressed by the Sputnik Project.

On Lens Culture you can see a selection of his images, including some from these projects (and some of those I find of less interest) and also listen to a 20 minute audio interview made by Jim Casper with Fontcuberta in late 2005 in Paris. It repeats much of what I heard him say in Poland, but if you’ve not hear him talk about his work is well worth a listen. (You will need to make sure your browser allows the site to pop up a window to listen to it.)

Vintage?

I’ve written on various occasions over the years, here and elsewhere, about the cult of the vintage print. As a photographer I find it ridiculous that people might regard the prints that I made thirty years ago more valuable than the far superior prints that I might make from those same negatives now.

We all of course get older, and some may get wiser, and certainly for many of us our ideas change, hopefully gaining in depth and insight. While those old prints we made back then simply degrade, our ideas mature and we can add to the work when we make new prints. Valuing the older prints seldom makes sense.

Of course there may sometimes be aesthetic reasons for preferring the older work. In the immediate post-war period, Bill Brandt printed his work in an intense and moody fashion, at times because he was working for the block maker rather than the wall, knowing that a lower contrast and perhaps rather dull image was more suitable. He was working for the printed page rather than the print.

Later, as he aged, he turned to making much more contrasty prints, sometimes with very little in the mid-tone area. It was an age where the fashion was for high contrast high impact photography, particularly on the magazine page (though its arguable whether Brandt was a follower or helped to create this trend.)

Personally I loved the earlier dark and brooding versions of many of his pictures, far preferring those – for example in the first edition of his ‘Literary Britain’ to the later prints (yes, I do mean I prefer the book reproduction to the photographic prints.) The first edition is also in most respects preferable to the later publication – though each has its merits and I have both.

But my preference is nothing to do with one being older than the other – vintage as opposed to later. It’s all about the actual quality of the work, and it is a fairly rare occasion where the early work is better. I’ve often been shocked by the poor quality of some high-priced ‘vintage prints’ on dealers stands at shows like Paris Photo – often prints made as proofs or press prints or even apparently rescued from the photographer’s rubbish bin.

Usually later prints are better prints, not least because of the availability of more sophisticated printing methods. For many photographs – and a good example would be the work of Tony Ray Jones – the ability to produce high quality scans and to print from these rather than direct from the negatives has produced superior results, not least by allowing far more precision in the dodging and burning required to get the most out of the images.

And ten years ago we were bemoaning the demise of so many classic high-quality black and white photographic papers, not least the famed Cadmium-rich Agfa Record Rapid, which after its reformulation on health and safety grounds never had quite the same appeal. But now we have papers and inks that can match or outdo virtually everything that was available in the ‘golden age’ of silver printing.

I own several Tony Ray-Jones prints. One is something relatively rare, an exhibition print made by Ray-Jones himself (he hated printing and wasn’t good at it, though this is an acceptable attempt), the rest are modern inkjet prints. And they are better prints despite only costing a few pounds.

It was a piece I read a week or so ago by Mike Johnston on The Online Photographer that prompted me to write again about this subject. He finishes it with his thoughts on the subject that the should be only two things that matter about a photographic print; firstly whether it was made or approved by the photographer and secondly that it is a good print.I think I’d reduce that to one.

Our Green Government

I’m not sure that I’ll really be observing the World Wildlife Fund ‘Earth Hour‘ tomorrow evening, although the only light I’ll need will be that from my computer screen as I frantically process the hundreds if not thousands of image files I will have made earlier in the day. Although since their web page wants you to take pictures and videos or write blog posts and tweet during the hour I guess that’s OK with them.

However I don’t think I’ll bother with that 1 hour movie of me struggling with Lightroom, even though it would have far too much action in it for the late Andy Warhol.

But it was mildly amusing to learn from Iain Dales Diary that perhaps to celebrate the event with the Government’s typical concern for Green issues that while they have asked everyone in Parliament to switch off all non-essential internal lights when they leave for the weekend and that non-essential floodlighting will be extinguished for Earth Hour itself, they also sent round a e-mail to all staff telling them to ensure that every computer in the place is left switched on for the whole weekend.

It is rather like saying that Climate Change is the most important issue facing us, then announcing that they are going to build another runway at Heathrow.

AIG fails again

Stephen Mallon, a New York industrial photographer took some remarkable pictures of the recovery of the US Airways Flight 1549 from the Hudson River for the crane company that lifted it out of the water. It was a great opportunity and he got full co-operation from everyone involved and took 5000 images, which his client was happy to allow him to publish non-commercially on his blog or anywhere else.

On The Online Photographer you can read as I did a story with many long comments about the letter he received from one of the largest rercent business failures, AIG, who apparently have used some of the massive support they are getting from the US taxpayers to get their lawyers to write a letter forcing Mallon to take the pictures off-line.

You can see some posts about this by Mallon on his web site, and the hole were they were is currently filled by a short notice about their removal. Elsewhere on the web you can see many sites with comments about this fine set of pictures, and at the moment there are still some of them on line so you can see it was indeed a pretty remarkable set of work.

On Eric Lunsford‘s blog there are two large images, one of the actual plane body being lifted. This is also on Stellazine, Stella Kramer‘s blog. It’s worth reading what she says, both about this as an attack on free speech and on the pictures themselves: “Stephen Mallons photos are a thing of beauty, and show not only the fragility of such large machines, but the truly heroic work done by those who pulled it out of the icy Hudson.” She is after all a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo editor who has worked with publications including The New York Times, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and People magazine.

Doobybrain has another six images, and on PDN, who have also covered the story, you can still see the picture they published as their picture of the day in February. I suspect that the lawyers might well try to get some of these removed also, so don’t wait too long before looking at them. I think all of these sites are based in the USA, and it might be good to see as many of his pictures as possible posted on sites in other countries.

It isn’t at all clear what AIG are trying to do, and why they are using their immense legal clout to try and hide this fine work. But I think all of us involved in photography need to speak up and oppose them.

Bohemian Musings

One photo blog I don’t think I’ve come across before is ‘Thoughts of a Bohmenian‘ which describes itself as ‘Another Photo Industry blog‘. What led me there was a Twitter post by the writer of a blog I do occasionally read, ‘A Photo Editor‘.

In case you are wondering about the title, Paul Melcher‘s title for his blog came from hearing the comment about photography “This business has too many Surveyors and not enough Bohemians” and deciding to do his bit to redress the balance.He certainly has a nice turn of phrase (if his speed-spelling isn’t up to scratch) in his post ‘Please, save photography‘

Like me he saw the pictures on Magnum in Motion shot from TV by Alex Majoli and was apalled that Getty Images were rewarding him with a $20,000 grant, but I didn’t think to say “Henri Cartier Bresson must be having a tsunami in his grave as I can assure you, that was NOT the reason he created Magnum. Not for that kind of nombrilistic, uber self-absorded, hyper refflective intello photography.”

Photographing a TV isn’t of course a new thing. Last November I rested my feet during a tiring walk around Paris in front of a screen for another Magnum photographers work, Harry Gruyaerts TV Shots, on show in the Passage du Desir gallery space, and found myself thinking “that I would have found it much more interesting if Gruyeart had gone out and taken his camera with him” rather than sitting home and wasting colour film on a malfunctioning TV.

One photographer who did it back in the ’70s to some effect was Paul Trevor, who while working with ‘Exit‘ on their great documentary project, Survival Programmes, turned around and photographed the very different world that came to him through the TV as ‘A Love Story‘.

And of course, Gruyaert and Majoli do both go out and take pictures. Don’t waste time on Peace TV but do watch Requiem in Samba, also on the Magnum site.

Melcher’s comments came after reading about the ‘Save Photography‘ campaign organised by the French photographic organisations the Union des Photographes Créateurs, FreeLens and the SAIF ( Socièté des auteurs des arts visuels et de l’image fixe.) Their concerns are largely about the falling rates, microstock, orphaned images and so on, as well as some specifically French worries about the legal status of photographs, and as he comments, in typical French style they don’t suggest any solutions but just ask the government to do something about it.

So Melcher’s suggestion is that they should doing something about the quality of photography and get down to saving photography not just by asking the French government to do something but to stop people promoting what he calls “salon photography.”