>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Guardian Pics 2008

If you’ve not yet taken a look at the pick of pictures from 2008 by Guardian photographers David Levine, Dan Chung, Linda Nylind, Martin Argles and Sean Smith, then sit down for a while and treat yourself. It isn’t a bad interface either, and if you get fed up with listening to the commentary you can go through the pictures at your own rate.

Last month I went to see Smith, whose work I particularly enjoyed in the Guardian slide shows, showing his work to fellow photographers at the Photoforum meeting in London, and I hope to get to this month’s meeting this Thursday. If you are a photographer and you’re in London why not come along. On the web site it describes itself:

“Running monthly on the second Thursday of the month, Photo-Forum, kindly hosted by Jacobs, is a place for working photographers to bring images, ideas, photo stories, approaches and work in progress for supportive debate and criticism.”

Jacobs is a photo store, often with some interesting second hand equipment and some fairly competitive prices on New Oxford Street close to Tottenham Court Road Station – opposite another large photo store that once used to get a lot of my custom, Jessops, but which seldom seems to stock anything I want nowadays. Certainly Jacobs does seem to have a much greater interest in professional photographers, and Photoforum is a good place to meet other photographers, particularly photojournalists, who are based in London.

Back on the Guardian pages mentioned above, you can also see the picture editors’ choice of images which appeared in their daily gallery during 2008. In some ways I found this a disappointing selection, although there are some excellent and dramatic images. What seems to be lacking in what they find of interest is subtlety and magic, two very important qualities in images that delight me. I can’t help thinking they don’t really deserve the photographers they have.

Lost Masterpieces?

Almost certainly not. But lost pictures, the ones that got away, are always so much bigger than those you bring to land.

Around 700 pictures lost in a moment not of carelessness but by accident. Yesterday I was covering the protests in London against the Israeli attacks that are killing so many in Gaza. At first things were fairly sedate, with a march to Trafalgar Square and a rally addressed mainly by the usual suspects. Afterwards opposite the Israeli Embassy in Kensington things began to hot up, and noticing I was close to filling an 8Gb CF card I took it out of the camera and put an empty card in, slipping the full card as usual into my ‘secure’ trouser pocket – one with a zip where I also keep wallet and credit cards.

Things did get a bit heated and at one point I heard my trousers rip, and glanced down to see a tear a couple of inches long. What I didn’t realise was that it had also torn some of the stitching of that secure pocket, leaving a gap more than large enough for a CF card to fall through.

It was noisy outside the embassy, with a police helicopter overhead and a near-riot on the street, so I didn’t hear the card fall through and on to the ground, probably when I rushed out to follow the police who were beginning to get seriously to grips with the protesters.

It was only on my way home waiting for a bus three-quarters of a mile away from the disruption that I put my hand into my pocket to look for my travel pass and found a large hole – and no CF card. I suppose it was fortunate that I hadn’t lost credit cards, wallet or ticket home, but I was really despondent to find my pictures had gone.

Even more annoying as I hadn’t really needed to take the card out of the camera when I did, because although I was right to think that things were going to happen, the police – perhaps understandably in the circumstances – stopped me from going to where I could take decent pictures. Shortly after they cleared and sealed off the area where I probably lost the card, and there seemed no point in going back to look.

I didn’t even have my name and details on the card, which I do on some along with the message ‘Reward for return’ so I think short of some miracle I’m unlikely to see the pictures again.

Until now, I’ve relied on putting full cards in a safe place. Actually in what I thought was the safest place, that zipped pocket where I keep my cash and cards. It’s a system that’s worked without fail for seven years. But yesterday it let me down.

I’d put a lot of effort into those pictures. Heavy stewarding made parts of the march hard to photograph, and I think I’d done a good job. At several times I’d been in interesting positions and photographed some great people and until I discovered my loss was feeling pretty good about the event. Losing perhaps four or five hours of my work isn’t really the end of the world but it felt close. And it leaves me with at least one rather tricky e-mail apology to write to one of the people I photographed and can’t send a picture.

To avoid any chance of this again I think I’ll buy a large enough card to hold a full day’s work – perhaps 16 Gb so I never need to change a card when I’m working. It’s something I couldn’t do a few years ago. And I’ll be sure to put my name and address on it so there will be some small chance of getting it back should I somehow lose it.

Actually I was lucky that I’d put two full cards into that pocket with a hole, and surprisingly the 4Gb one had stayed inside, with pictures from the start of the march. So at least I have something to use for the event.

And there are just a few more I’ll put on My London Diary shortly. 2009 is starting rather late there.

A New Year

2008 wasn’t a good year for many of us, and certainly not for me. Personally there were several disasters, including the deaths of two family members, an older brother and a younger cousin. Photographically I had some minor disappointments, including the cancellation of a major show of my work which finally fell through after I thought all been agreed, and another invitation to show work at a major photo festival that came to nothing. And don’t let’s even think about money – financially I think most of the world had a bad year.

At the start of 2008 I made a list of things to do in the coming year and posted it, hoping it might encourage others to get themselves sorted out too. There were a total of ten points, and you can read more detail on them in the feature 2008 To Do List. Here are the bare headings:

1. Make better pictures
2. Get out more and take more pictures.
3. Check my camera settings more often when taking pictures
4. Always check for dirt on the lens
5. Edit my work more stringently
6. Sort out a proper back-up system
7. Make proper to-do lists
8. Really sort out my old street photography
9. Publish, at least on the Internet, my Docklands work from the 1980s
10.Get back to scanning my old work which is on deteriorating film negatives.
11. Rewrite as many as possible of my features and put them back on line.
12. make more money by selling photographs

My end of year report on these is a poor one. Even with some very liberal marking I can only claim around 3/10, and I don’t think I’ve quite completed even a single one, although I’ve made some progress on several.

Of course some – like ‘Make better pictures‘ – are things I hope I’ll never be satisfied with, and it would always be nice to make more money selling photographs, if only because it suggests a greater interest in the pictures. But there are a few I’d really like to be able to cross of the list. Still, I suppose there is an advantage in that I don’t need to bother with a new list for 2009.

I’m hoping for a better year than the past one, and send everyone my wishes for a happy and successful 2009.

Amen Sister!

2008 has been a year that has seen a few interesting developments in photography in the UK, although also a year that has left many of us considerably poorer. Many photographers have seen their incomes fall sharply with clients going out of business, staff jobs being axed and an increasing use of images from free or cheap sources. Many publications seem to think that anything that will fill a suitable size rectangle on the page will do and are not willing to pay the rate needed to sustain professional work.

I heard a week or so back of one local newspaper offering a ‘day rate’ of £25 – and still finding people who would take it, while others are now relying on amateurs to send them pictures for nothing but having their name in small print next to them.

Not of course that their is anything necessarily wrong with amateurs – much of the most interesting photography over the whole history of the medium has come from people who supported themselves by other means (or relied on partners, friends or families to support them,) or was the personal work of photographers whose professional work was generally tedious and mundane.

And many photographers who became famous through their actual professional work of course still often produced a great mass of uninspired bread and butter images. One of the problems we now have is that curators have a great delight in bringing this out and presenting it on walls as great previously unknown art. The truth generally remains that there are very good reasons why these images were obscure, but there is no career-enhancing kudos for curators in repeating – for example – to show the pictures that Henri Cartier-Bresson chose to include in his ‘The Decisive Moment.’ (You can now usefully see the entire book online, although of course the quality of reproductions is so much better in the real thing.) And yes, even H C-B had his off-days, and it is hardly surprising that the title “the Pope of Photography” has most often been applied to a curator – John Szarkowski – rather than a photographer.)

There have been some encouraging developments this year. Photographers often like to bitch about the British Journal of Photography (not least when it asks to use their work without payment) and there are sometimes very good reasons for this, particularly in some of their coverage of equipment which at its worst can be little more than a round-up of press releases or a display of personal prejudices, but in my eyes their coverage of photography has certainly improved. This was brought home to me when I cleared out the shelves containing several years of back-issues before Christmas.

One innovation for the BJP this year was its rather curiously named blog, 1854, a reminder that the print magazine is extremely long in the tooth. One of the great things about blogging is that it forces you to read other blogs, and although 1854 hasn’t yet become a useful source of information for me (usually I’ve read it first on the same blogs as them!) it does mean that its writers, “the editors of the British Journal of Photography, the world’s oldest photography magazine” at least keep up to date with “photographic news, from the latest gear to the best exhibitions to the best insights on ongoing and upcoming trends in the industry” which I’m fairly sure accounts for the improvement I’ve noticed in the print issues. Though there are perhaps one or two of their contributors who still need to start blogging!

At least for those of us who live in London, one of the big developments of the year – and one the BJP largely neglected – was the tremendous growth of the East London Photomonth. Of course there are some other photo festivals in the UK, but this is the only one of any moment in the capital and with around a hundred events this year beginning to make an impact.

The Mermaids and the Poodle, Hayling Island Carnival, 2005. Paul Baldesare from the show “English Carnival“, part of the Photomonth I was also in.

Of course it still has a very long way to go to rival Paris – which is why I spent eight days in that capital this November (which you can read about in great detail both in many posts about the shows here on >Re:PHOTO and also in my Paris Supplement to My London Diary.

One of my first posts on arriving back from Paris was Paris and London: MEP & PG which compared our London Photographers’ Gallery with the Maison Europeene de la Photographie (MEP).

The main thrust of my piece was in the third paragraph:

but the biggest difference so far as photography is concerned is one of attitude. The MEP clearly believes in photography, celebrates it and promotes it, while for many years the PG has seemed rather ashamed of it, with a programme that has seemed to be clearly aimed at attempting to legitimise it as a genuine – if rather minor – aspect of art.

So I was interested to see that when the BJP’s report (BJP 17/12/2008 p6) of the PG’s opening on its new London site (my account, Zombies in Ramillies Street, on >Re:PHOTO was rather different) commented that gallery director Brett Rogers “hopes that the gallery will reach an equal footing with organisations such as the Maison Europeene de la Photographie in Paris“.

Amen sister! So do I, but I’ve yet to be convinced that we are singing from the same hymn sheet!

Keep Your Rights

The law, particularly it seems in the USA, works in mysterious ways, as Jerry Greenburg and other photographers who worked for the National Geographic Magazine have found to their disappointment and cost.

National Geographic re-issued the print magazines containing their work on CD, adding a searchable database, and claimed that this was just a ‘revision’ of the previously published printed work and so photographers were not entitled to any further payment. And they got a court to agree with them.

The legal arguments have continued but seem to now have reached a conclusion with the US Supreme Court deciding that the case isn’t worth them bothering about.

You can read more about the case on the Photo Attorney site, where Carolyn E Wright makes the comment that “photographers now must be clear in their licenses whether a publisher may make electronic uses of their photographs.”

Of course, many of us supply images through agencies or libraries that supply the licences rather than doing so ourselves, or submit work to organisations that impose their own licence terms. But with these, some photographers have found that the small print in them hasn’t actually reflected what they have agreed with an editor to supply and often have been able to delete or alter them and still have their work used.

It’s important to protect your work when submitting it ‘on spec’ to editors by including with any images your own general licence terms and fees. You can make up a general ‘PDF’ file containing these to attach along with the images to any e-mail, and add a sentence such as: ‘Usage of the image(s) is subject to the attached terms unless other agreement is reached prior to publication.’

One simple way to do it is to use the forms written by the Creators’ Copyright Coalition for ‘Confirmation of Sale, Commission or Submission‘ which are written for use in the UK – and you can download a copy from the NUJ London Freelance site, which also has some very good advice on negotiations as well as an invaluable Freelance Fees Guide.

Of course if you are UK based and 50% of your income or more comes from journalism (including photography) you should join the NUJ if you are not already a member. Given the increasing problems and threats involved in photographing in public it really does make sense to be in an appropriate professional body, and for UK photographers that means the NUJ

Thinking about copyright, if you put your work on the web yourself, then it is a good idea to put your copyright message on every web page. You can find out all about copyright on the UK Copyright pages, which include a useful page on using copyright notices. (But you can neglect their advice about registering copyright – it is hard to imagine any situation where this would be necessary for photographers – assuming you keep your negatives or shoot on digital andkeep theRAW files. And if you don’t, you should.)

Although when the typewriter was king we got away with using (C) for copyright you should make sure you use the proper copyright symbol ©, followed by the year of publication and your name. It is also useful (and necessary in some countries) to actually use the word ‘Copyright’ along with the symbol.) If you wish you can also add a statement about rights, such as ‘All rights reserved.’

Some programs used to edit web sites have problems with entering the copyright symbol ©. The ancient version of Dreamweaver I still use messes it up if you try to add it to the ‘alt text’ of pictures in Design view. But if all else fails you can edit your source code with a text editor – even Notepad – and put in either the html code ‘©’ (without the quotes of course) or the unicode ‘!’ both of which should display correctly in your browser.

It goes without saying that your image files should indicated your copyright in the appropriate metadata fields. You can read more about this in the features Orphans Act – Your images up for Grabs and More on Metadata. Many cameras also allow you to set a message to be added to all the pictures you take – which appears in an EXIF field – and mine currently reads ‘(C) 2008 Peter Marshall’ as the character set available doesn’t include the copyright symbol. But the D300 does also allow me to put my name into a copyright field.

A Christmas Message and a small Milestone

Forget Ahmadinejad and the Queen. My Christmas message came in the early hours of Christmas morning. Santa and his elves were busy working overtime with the fairy dust and a small present came floating into my mind as I woke to roll drowsy out of bed to empty my bladder at 3am, and after completing the necessary I sat down with paper and pencil to record it. Unusually for such night-time notes it remained legible and made some sense when I found it again in the morning.

A few months back I got myself involved in one of those long and essentially pointless discussions on internet forums that I usually stay clear of, which I think had started with the question “what is a photograph“, although as such things do soon strayed off into other areas (at least one per participant.) I’d contributed Walker Evans’s quote from the text for a show at MoMA in the early 1950s about valid photography “Under no circumstances is it anything ever anywhere near a beach” (which I had put on >Re:PHOTO a few months earlier

However it’s perhaps more relevant that on Christmas Eve I had been thinking about Minor White, both in writing my Seasonal Greetings and also leafing through the latest Winter 2008 issue of Aperture, which on its final inside page has a feature by Anne Wilkes Tucker on what she truly describes as a “seminal gathering” at the Aspen Institute in 1951, which is accompanied by a group photograph of just over 20 or those taking part. This high-powered crew included Wayne Miller, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott, Frederick Sommer, Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, Herbert Bayer, Eliot Porter, Minor White, Ferenc Berko and Laura Gilpin. The event led to both the founding of Aperture, with Minor White as editor and moving spirit and also the genesis of the Society for Photographic Education.

Aperture has now reached issue 193 (as a subscriber for many years I now have well over a hundred issues on my bookshelves) and published many fine books and editions. I wrote a double feature on its history at the time of its 50th anniversary (another piece no longer on line – but perhaps to be rewritten to come out at the same time as issue 200?)

So here (at last) is my little present, a kind of definition of worthwhile photography:

The simultaneous exposure of two sensitive surfaces – one in the camera and the other in the photographer’s mind.

Im always wary about milestones. Its a word too close to millstones, which though perhaps notable for grit also hang round necks. But I do note that a few days ago I wrote my 500th post to this blog.

Also, looking at the statistics from my web host (which I seldom do,) I find that with a few days left, >Re:PHOTO is getting very close to 500,000 page views for 2008, though unless there is a sudden surge it wont quite reach the half a million this year.

Seasonal Greetings: Bells not Bombs

Apologies to those readers who have already received a Christmas Card from me, either physically or by e-mails, but finding one picture that was recent, appropriate and visually literate was the best I could do, so you will already have seen this.

Festive demonstration outside London offices of one of the three companies that make the UK’s nuclear warheads at Aldermaston, Dec 2008

Glory to God in the highest, and

on earth peace, good will toward men

Someone did ask me whether I had arranged this group for the photograph, (or rather they accused me of doing so) but as usual I was able to reply that all I had done was to be in the right position at the right time and keep thinking and shooting as things developed. It’s a picture in which body language was very important, and the only one in a short sequence where the guy in the ‘radiation suit’ at left has a strange lean away from centre. I also shot a similar image without flash:

Two frames and 10 seconds earlier without flash

but I think this doesn’t for me work quite as well, partly because my eye goes to the two very bored looking security men on the door. I also like the picture with flash partly for the way it picks out the foreground slightly, and especially the figure lying on the ground (a deliberate reference by the demonstrators to the outlines of bodies etched on pavements by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan) but also to the ‘fault’ of the reflection on the shiny black door of the bomb-makers offices – which the remaining security guy seems to be regarding with concern. It appears to me like there is an explosion taking place inside and this flash is escaping through the door.

People often ask photographers if they ‘saw’ certain things in their pictures when they were making them. Well, I certainly don’t stop and write things down – and the pictures are the best record of how I was thinking. In some ways it helps not to have too set ideas of what I’m trying to do which would stop me trying to push things further and make things less open to chance.

Minor White had a lot to say about photography.

every photograph a celebration

every moment of understanding a birthday

So enjoy and celebrate.

Background Information

Picture shows the North-London based group of Trident Ploughshares, the ‘Muriel Lesters’, in festive protest on 12 Dec 2008 outside the London offices of the leading company behind nuclear bomb production at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston.

US company Lockheed Martin leads the group making warheads for the Trident replacement and is the makers of ‘bunker buster’ and ‘cluster’ bombs, the worlds largest exporter of weapons.

The UKs Trident replacement program is an illegal breach of the UK’s obligations under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Around a week after I took this picture it was announced that the one-third stake in the UK bomb-making programme previously owned by British Nuclear Group (BNG) has been sold off to another US firm Jacobs Eng, outside whose offices the Muriel Lesters also demonstrated.

The group of protesters takes its name from Muriel Lester, (18831968), born in Leytonstone, was a leading Christian peace campaigner and writer. Among many other things she founded Kingsley Hall in Bow, was a friend of Ghandi, Travelling Secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and was detained for ten weeks in Trinidad and then several days in Holloway Prison for her activities during the Second World War.

Paris Supplement

Finished at last, November’s Paris Supplement to My London Diary.

The trouble with being a one-man band is that when its all hands on deck there are still only two of them, but at least you can get away with murderously mixed metaphors without the restraining good sense of an editor. Though too many of those have the good sense of the average donkey coupled with a total lack of vision and an over-pernickety attitude to spelling and punctuation (and in the unlikely event she’s ever reads this, there is one lady who will immediately know I’m thinking of her – and for the record, you have absolutely no idea about punctuation despite your “corrections” to my pieces.)

Paris Photo, the world’s largest annual dealer photography fair, Le Mois de la Photo, a two-yearly festival of around a hundred shows and events, and it’s fringe, the Photo-Off with another hundred or so (and probably another hundred shows unlisted on the fringe of that fringe.)

Paris, the city and perhaps 50 km of walking around its streets searching for those shows and taking pictures. It’s all too much for one guy, even with the help of his wife (whose punctuation is always reliable and French impeccable.)

I admire those who are able to pull out their laptops or notebooks and blog or twitter away at events – at least until I read what they have written. Twitter is really such an apt name. Dawdlr is perhaps more my style, though I’ve yet to feel moved to contribute.

Anyway, my Paris Supplement 2008 is now on-line, with a dozen articles

PARIS SUPPLEMENT

Tourist Montmartre at Night
Le Paris Nord
Ceremonies du 11 novembre
Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise
Night in the City Centre
More Shows, more walking
The Canal, Les Halles and more
Friday – More Shows
Saturday- Art & Tourism
Sunday: Marais, MEP, Seine
Buttes Chaumont / Belleville Traversée
Paris Photo Party

and over 300 photographs. In the features there are many links to the roughly 30 articles and reviews from Paris I’ve posted here on >Re:PHOTO and of course both sites have many links to external sites where you can see some of the pictures and find out more.

If you went to Paris you might find I saw some things differently, and almost certainly you will have missed some of those things I saw. Comments as always are welcome on this site, though you need to join (it’s fast, free and simple) to post.

For those who missed Paris this November (and if you are interested in photography and weren’t there, you did miss a lot) reading my thoughts and seeing my pictures (or at least the 10% or so I’ve put on line) is probably the next best thing. So if you can tear yourself away from the mince pies and steal away to your screen it might provide a little Christmas cheer.

You’ll need to provide your own champagne for that party though.

The Worst Photograph Ever Made?

If you’ve not read Friday’s post to The Online Photographer, don’t miss it. The Annie Leibovitz picture printed there is certainly a contender, though as it says it isn’t really a photograph, but a bad Photoshop job combining several photographs to make up something that is bad on almost every conceivable level.

The actual photography is trite. The Photoshop is terrible (so in Paris it might win a prize.) The parts don’t really fit together. The concept is lousy. It’s sexist. Kitsch. But Mike really puts it much better than me, and why waste my time. Elsewhere on PDN Online you can see some of the incredible bills that Leibovitz gets for the work of stylists for her pictures, and this picture undoubtedly involved a lot of similarly expensive work by a team of the highest paid pros in the business.

Also on PDN is a series of links to Ad-Week’s 2008 freakiest ads contest, and although you’ve missed the chance to vote in the preliminary rounds (but can still see the contestants) the final round voting starts on Monday. Your choice for Ad-Freak 2008 is between “A headless person, a disembodied tongue, a guy who likes kissing glass, and a nude 86-year-old woman.” The old lady is I think quite sweet, though I’d have preferred her to keep her clothes on (but it’s harmless enough), but the whole tongue thing really sucks.

Annie’s isn’t the worst photograph ever made. There are guys (mainly guys) who churn out worse examples day by day that are hideously bad on a level she doesn’t compete on – though I admit here she is trying quite hard. I won’t post a link, but you could try typing ‘glamour photography’ into Google and take a look at some of the 1,470,000 hits.

Naked Rambler Jailed

One of the sadder pieces of news in the past couple of days has been the jailing of the ‘naked rambler’ Stephen Gough, given a 12 month sentence by a Glasgow Court for breach of the peace.

I don’t have any particular wish to walk our streets naked myself, our weather seldom tempts me to bare anything, but I find it hard not to agree with Gough’s comment reported by the BBC, that if members of the public were offended by his nakedness then the problem was with them and not with him.

In 2000 I photographed a protest for the right to be naked in public outside the Met police HQ at New Scotland Yard. I don’t think any of the public showed any signs of concern, and most of the police seemed pretty amused by it, although doing what they considered their duty by telling people to cover up – the man below was threatened he would be arrested until he held his hat strategtically over his penis.

More recently I photographed several of the annual naked bike rides through the centre of London – last years had almost a thousand riders, mostly wearing nothing more than a little decorative body paint. It was again an event that caused considerable amusement among spectators. Here are a couple from the 2006 event:

and one from 2007:

and again from this year:

We all have bodies, and most of us have nothing very special about ours. Mine I think generally looks better the more it’s covered and I certainly feel more comfortable wearing clothes. But I can’t really think it should be an offence not to do so.

Mooning

Even where the attempt was to give offence – as in this group of anti-monarchists ‘mooning’ outside Buckingham Palace in 2000. Here the police did wade in and make an arrest – of a Swedish journalist watching the event who had kept his clothes on, but just happened to wear rather similar ‘Lennon’ style glasses to one of those taking part in the protest.

This event came into my mind last week when the police were insisting that anarchist demonstrators should remove items of clothing – face scarves – in the demonstration I photographed at Dalston last week, but here and at Scotland Yard they were attempting to arrest them for not keeping bits on.