Paul Graham wins

I wrote my thoughts about the four contestants for the Deutsche Börse photography prize at the London Photographers’ Gallery when the show opened.  You can read them here.

I’ve seen it again since then. But I wouldn’t want to change a word.

Here’s a recent interview with Paul Graham on PDN in  which he says some sensible things, particularly about digital and film still having all the important challenges in photography the same, as well as about documentary – with a nice little quote from Walker Evans.

As he said, it was about time the prize went to a UK photographer – even to one who has moved to New York.

More on Pirkle: Plagiarism & Truth

The question of what is and isn’t plagiarism has been aired considerably in recent months, particularly over the use made by Shepard Fairey in his posters of Obama.  There’s also a link to Pirkle Jones, whose recent death was the subject of my previous post.

As Mark Vallen  pointed out in his article Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey in December 2007, Fairey took an image of an anonymous Black Panther from Jones and Ruth–Marion Baruch‘s 1960 essay on the Black Panthers, degraded it both tonally and by the addition of a couple of inappropriate graphics and made it into ‘his’ street poster. As Vallen puts it:

“Pirkle Jones gave us a compassionate image that served the cause of African-American dignity and liberation, while Fairey gave us a stolen and regurgitated image stripped of all historical meaning and refashioned to serve only one purpose – the advancement of Fairey’s career.“

For Jones, taking a photograph was a political act (and we often forget that his mentor Ansel Adams was very much involved in a part of the environmental movement – as well as his more clearly political work on the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans at Manzanar.)

Funnily enough, the first time I recall meeting the unforgettable name of Pirkle Jones was in an essay by a student in which she pointed out a remarkable similarity between one of his images and an earlier picture by another photographer – I think Lewis Hine – showing a worker weilding a hammer. I think this was however not plagiarism but simply two photographers coming to a very similar solution when faced by the same subject matter. It’s something that happens fairly regularly in photography.

Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch’s work also became controversial in another way in 1964, when they exhibited a joint project on the sad decline of the northern Californian town of Walnut Grove. As you can read on Howie’s Home Page, things appear to have been not quite what they seemed.

In fact the truth about Walnut Grove is more complex than this article suggests. You can find out more about it on various web sites including Wikipedia,  a history page from the local Chamber of Commerce and various sites giving local statistics such as City-data. It is interesting to see that the population there now is more or less exactly the same as it was in 1961, though of course its composition may well be very different.  Another article on Jones and Baruch describes it as “a small, racially diverse community that was displaced by a freeway.”

The site about the film of his life, Seven Decades Photographed, as well as the pictures of Walnut Grove linked above, also has pictures on the other pages, for example the ‘Press’ page has pictures of the Black Panthers. There is also a trailer for the film, but since this is a 712Mb Quicktime file very few will have the bandwidth to download it!

Pirkle Jones (1914 – 2009)

The New York Times has a nice obituary of Pirkle Jones  who died on March 15, at the age of 95.  From 1947-53 he worked as assistant to Ansel Adams, printing his work.

His best known photographs were from a 1956 collaboration with Dorothea Lange The Death of a Valley, which filled a whole issue of Aperture in 1960, and in 1968 after his wife, the Berlin-born photographer Ruth-Marian Boruch (1922-97) became a friend of Eldridge Cleaver’s wife, the two of them photographed the Black Panthers in California. Their pictures of this controversial group drew crowds to the gallery when shown later that year at a San Francisco museum.

As well as the slide show on the NYT and the Black Panther pictures by Jones and Baruch, you can see 10 pictures including some Adamesque landscapes at Joseph Bellows Gallery, a small selection on Artnet and 22 pictures at SFMoMA.

Whirling Dervishes

There were three of them, performing in in a dimly lit hall in a leisure centre in Tooting, at the Eid Milad-Un-Nabi celebrations of the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad organised by the Sunni Muslim Association, and I really couldn’t quite work out how to photograph them.

Working with flash seemed a good idea, since even with the D700 giving pretty good results at ISO 3200,  it was hard to get both enough depth of field and a sensible shutter speed, but even more of a problem was that the lighting in which they were performing was extremely uneven.  Using the flash, I also wanted to get some ambient exposure to avoid very dark backgrounds and also give some feeling of movement to the figures.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

My decision in the heat of the moment was that 1/8 would probably give me enough blur and I set that as my slowest speed with flash. I set an ISO of 1250 as the18-200 zoom I was using only covered the smaller DX area and quality was more important, set the flash into TTL FP mode, the camera on P and then forgot about it, concentrating on getting pictures.

© 2009 Peter Marshall

I was also using the D300 with a 20mm wide open at f2.8 with no flash, which gave slightly underexposed results at around 1/60 ISO 1600. There were far fewer usable images from this, though I did get one with a fairly dramatic silhouette.

© 2009 Peter Marshall

You can see more pictures of the Whirling Dervishes as usual on My London Diary, where you can also read something about the deeply religious significance of their performance.  But they were only a small part of the event I photographed, and although they had particularly attracted me to the event, as usual it was the people rather than the performers that I think more interesting in the pictures that I took.

Ancient & Modern – Cleaners Call for Justice

Part of the fascination of the City of London is its curious mix of ancient and modern. You see it every direction you look. Even the Druids who I’d photographed earlier celebrating their ancient traditions, were wearing trainers on their feet and one had not switched off a mobile phone which rang halfway through the event.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

The cleaners who were out again in front of insurance brokers Willis seemed too to embody something both ancient and modern – up against modern capitalism, which seems to espouse a pretty Neanderthal attitude to labour relations, facing up to a modern hi-tech office building with only their voices and whistles.

This was the latest in a series of protests following the sacking of five cleaners – all trade unionists – by the contracting firm, Mitie, which have been going on since mid-February. These protests are unofficial, organised by the cleaners themselves, as their union doesn’t appear to be doing anything to fight their case.

The demonstration on Friday was very much a case of deja-vu, and little seems to have happened since I photographed an earlier protest in the same place two weeks ago.

Vernal Equinox at Tower Hill

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

The Druid Order held their usual ceremony at Tower Hill to mark the Spring Equinox last Friday, and this year it was a warm, sunny day.  The sun made photography a little more tricky – hard at times to avoid flare, and only too easy to get the photographer’s shadow on the white robes when I didn’t want it. Fortunately the ‘Active D-lighting’ on the camera really does seem to help a bit with the excessive contrast  – surprisingly like Nikon claim it does, and shooting RAW – pretty well essential for high-contrast light – lets you open up the shadows and bring down the highlights a bit.  The camera tests do show that cameras can handle a greater contrast range when making RAW rather than jpeg files, but I think this flexibility in processing is vital. Lightroom does let you  “stretch” jpeg files a little also, but you can do more starting from a RAW file.

Although the obvious approach is to use Lightroom’s ‘Recovery’ slider to bring the highlights under control, I like to keep it to low values or indeed at zero when I can. Using large values of ‘Recovery’ seems to rather dull the highlights and you lose the kind of glow that you can get. Sometimes you can get the effect needed by simply cutting down on the ‘Exposure’ and increasing the ‘Brightness’, but often the best way seems to be to use the ‘Burn’ tool to bring down the over-bright areas.

© 2009 Peter Marshall
The ‘glow’ here can get lost if you overdo the ‘Recovery’ slider in LR

And of course on sunny days the shadows become an important part of the subject matter – if one that it is easy to forget about, even when they dominate the image. Its one of the many things you have to train yourself to see as a photographer – and which it’s only too easy to forget in the heat of the moment.

© 2009 Peter Marshall

But in the end what is more important important for me than making single images is that the pictures tell the story. And you can read them and it on My London Diary.

Prague Poet Remembered

I’ve long been a fan of Josef Sudek – and my copy of the first edition of the monograph on him published in the West in 1978, two years after his death, edited by Sonja Bullaty shows considerable signs of use.  Bullaty, a photographer who shared some of his lyrical approach, had been held in Nazi concentration camps (including Auschwitz)  before managing to escape from a death march and return to Prague as the war was ending.  There she found none of her family had survived. She became Sudek’s apprentice until she was able to leave for New York in 1947.

Sudek’s images in the book were finely printed in gravure, and have a quality that often very much echoes the originals. His work very much showed a different sensibility and an alternative photographic printmaking syntax to the bravura zone-based silver prints of American photographers such as Ansel Adams or the glossy bromides of photojournalism. Complex, sometimes brooding, and always with feeling, whether on matte silver or pigment his prints had an interest in surface and depth. It was work in a different register to the prevailing US hegemony.

Later I bought a few more books of his work, and around 1980 organised a small gallery display of Czech photography that included at least one of his prints along with these. I’ve had another gravure of one of his images hanging on my front room wall for many years. And of course I wrote about the man and his work for About Photography.

So I was pleased to see a mention on The Online Photographer  (though I think to call him “one of the fathers of 20th-century photography in the Czech nation” belittles a man who was truly one of the greats of  20th century photography full stop) directing me to a note marking the anniversary of his birth on March 17, 1896 at the Disability Studies site of Temple University.

Sudek fought in Italy in the First World War, losing his right arm, and it was this very disability that brought him into photography, as he was given a camera while convalescing from the amputation, and his disability pension allowed him to study photography. The site also links to an extensive gallery of his work and you can also see some at Iphoto Central  and Luminous Lint.

One aspect of his work that I developed a particular interest in was his use of panoramic photography – something indeed that led me to buy and use a number of panoramic cameras. The internet doesn’t lend itself too well to the  format and not many of his (or mine) appear to be on line.

DLR at Bow Creek, © 1992 Peter Marshall
Definitely not Sudek, but one of my panoramas – some others are on the Urban Landscape web site.
Right Click in sensible browsers and select ‘View image’ to see the picture larger.

One site that has a few (it is poorly written – scroll far to the right to find images) compares some of Sudek’s Praha Panoramaticka images with 1992 images at the same locations by  Peter Sramek. Although it is sometimes interesting to see the differences time has made, Sudek’s work has a quality that sets it at a quite different level to the later work.

Invade Jersey Now!

Don’t Invade Jersey Iraq  read the placards that Mark Thomas had made for his one-hour demo (sorry, this was a ‘media event‘ and not a demonstration and thus needed no SOCPA authorisation) outside the MoD. Demonstrating (or media-eventing) along with him were representatives of Jersey’s teachers, who want a British take-over of this offshore tax haven so they can get the same working conditions as UK teachers including the right to a lunch hour. But the main point of the demonstration was that, thanks to PFI, the Private Finance Initiative that is Gordon Brown’s prime dogma, most of our government buildings (and policies?) are now in the hands of private companies based off-shore in tax havens to avoid UK tax.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.
Mark with demonstrators and police on the MOD steps

You can read more about the demonstration and the six reasons that Mark gave for we should invade now

© 2009 Peter Marshall

and see more pictures on My London Diary.

End Child Poverty – 10 Years

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

Ten years ago today the Labour Government made a promise to eradicate child poverty by 2020, and to half it by 2010. The Campaign to End Child Poverty turned up today with a birthday cake to mark the 10 years as well as a small demonstration on Parliament Square with men and women dressed in black with bill boards reminding him of the pledges and the organisations involved in the campaign, and a petition with 5000 signatures.

Urgent government action will be needed to meet the target, and it will need perhaps £3 billion pounds – which would also help to boost the economy by being spent on food, clothing and essential items to bring children out of poverty.

Taking the cake and the petition to Downing St were a small group of 10-year olds from Newham, accompanied by End Child Poverty Director Hilary Fisher, Colette Marshall (no relation) the UK Director of Save the Children and David Bull, the UK Executive Director of UNICEF. I left them in Parliament Square as I was on my way to another event.

A few more pictures on My London Diary