The Boston Global View – 2008 in Big Pictures

The Boston Globe publishes some big pictures of major events in its three-part round-up of 2008.  (Part 2 and Part 3.) Not all of the 120 pictures would have been in my choice of the images that define the year, but there are some powerful images among them. And some relatively trivial ones.

Use the ‘j’ key as it says to jump down an image at a time.

It’s been good to see photographs used large – here on screen and also in print in papers such as The Guardian. Its also good to see that desptie the size, the images aren’t marred by visible watermarking.

One small point that annoys me is that there are a number of pictures where the photographer isn’t named. Of course there are rare occasions where to do so might endanger their life, but with that single exception I’d like everyone in the industry to aim for 100% attribution. It’s a moral right, and one photographers should be making more fuss about.

Philip Jones Griffiths & Patrick Tourneboeuf

There were two exhibitions at the École nat. sup. d’architecture Paris Val-de-Seine, housed in the fine late nineteenth century factory (now listed and protected as a historic monument, and recently restored) built for the Société Urbaine d’Air Comprimé (SUDAC) and with the message in large text on its frontage: ‘Distribution d’air Comprime‘.


View from the Pont National, Peter Marshall

‘Recollections’ was a show of pictures by Philip Jones Griffiths taken in Britain from the 1950s – 1970s, with plenty of reminders of what a fine photographer he was. It appears to be showing also at the National Conservation Centre in Liverpool from 17 October 2008 to 15 March 2009, and their site has half a dozen images and some text. You can also read more and see some other pictures on the Trolley Books page about the accompanying book. The Paris show did not have the slide-show of his Vietnam images which is apparently at Liverpool, and there is also a slide-show linked at the top of the Trolley page.

This show – like the John Bulmer show I’d seen the previous day, was also a reminder of a vanished past – some gone for good, but in other ways very much for the worse. The Jones Griffiths show covers a much wider range of political and cultural events, and there is always an insistence on stating the photographer’s point of view in his work.

One image that particularly appealed to me (you can see it small and dark on the Trolley site) was taken in Downing St, outside the home of the Prime Minister. It showed four nannies with a couple of prams and a push chair who had stopped – as they did every day while taking their young charges for some air – to chat to the two policemen on duty outside the door of No 10. Now the west end of the street is walled off, and there are security gates on Whitehall, and they would need to apply several days in advance to go down the street – after passing through an airport-style security gate.

You can see many of Jones Griffith’s finest images on his Magnum pages, including in the slide show there a number that were in the show. Surprisingly, the book Recollections does not yet feature on the site.

Patrick Tourneboeuf’s giant colour pictures of spaces behind the scenes or being redeveloped in his ‘Monumental, etat des lieux’, (shown in Los Angeles as ‘The Museum Project‘) were also impressive. For once the scale of the images had a purpose, confronting us with these spaces almost on the same large scale as they actually existed, giving the feeling one could walk into these empty halls and spaces under repair. I was particularly impressed by an image of the Théâtre du Châtelet, its balconies and stalls wrapped in plastic and the workmen in hard hats at the bottom left.

It is also a project that reflects the much greater support that photography enjoys in France compared the UK.  The project began with a carte blanche commission from the French Minister of Culture in 1997 to photograph the renovation of the Pompidou Centre; other official commissions followed on from the success of his work there.

Hard Sixties

Another interesting show from Le Mois was at Galerie Galerie David Guirand  in the rue du Perche with John Bulmer‘s ‘Hard Sixties: L’Angleterre post-industrielle,’ which closes 20 Dec.   This small gallery had a series of black and white and colour images from the 1960s taken in the north of England, particularly around Manchester.

Bulmer studied engineering at Cambridge, going on to become a freelance photographer working for the Daily Express and Town Magazine before The Sunday Times, Life, Look and other magazines sent him around the world. In 1972 he worked as photographer (cinematographer) on a BBC film directed by Mai Zetterling about Vincent Van Gogh which won a BAFTA award for documentary, and after this he made his career mainly in film, although continuing to take still pictures as well.

He has directed over 30 films, photographing on many of them and also on other films. Now approaching 70, he lives in rural Herefordshire (not far from where another Bulmer, Percy, founded a cider empire in 1887) and is working with his archive of images, most of which have never been published. As yet he doesn’t appear to have put any on the web.

The show contains some dramatic images of the times, showing a clear liking for fairly extreme wide-angle views – several looked as if taken with a 21mm lens. The harsh printing of the black and white work also added to the gritty feel of the work, which did very much seem to mirror life in some of the poor and deprived working class areas which they depict.

This was a time when the colour supplements and magazines were increasingly publishing colour images, although many documentary photographers were reluctant to use colour, with its added technical problems. The magazines wanted colour transparency, and many of an older generation of photographers had never had to bother with exposure meters before. Bulmer’s colour work stands out from this era, although I felt his black and white images were more confident and perhaps more true to the subject.

For most of the sixties I was a student, and seven years of my life were spent in Manchester.  For much of that time I lived in working class areas not a great deal different from many of those where he took his pictures, but although I owned a camera (a Halina 35x), I didn’t have the money for film. Photography then was still largely a hobby for the middle class, and those of us with little money made do with a film a year  for our holidays.  At the time setting up a darkroom was beyond my dreams. Living in small flats there was no room – and we had no money.

My daily journey across Manchester in 1970 to my first job in a small town in its northern outskirts took me on the smoke-filled upper deck of a bus through miles of closely packed terrace houses,  across the dead and dreary wastes of council estates, past a working colliery and varied industries including a wire works, canals, mills and the inevitable gas works and gas holders.It was a vivid grandstand view of a slice of the industrial north for a few pence twice a day.

All of these industrial sites were on the edge of extinction and much of those older areas of housing have been bull-dozed. My journey today would be completely different  Bulmer’s work is a valuable record of and England that has changed, if not always for the better.

Le CentQuatre: Stephane Couturier & Alain Bernardini

From the avenue de Flandres we walked west across the 20e to Le 104 (Centquatre), once the home of the SMPF (le service municipal des pompes funèbres.) Built in 1873 by the chuch, the premises were taken over following the law of 1905 which gave the city a monopoly on providing funeral services; this ensured that everyone, regardless of sex, religion, marital status or cause of death could receive a dignified ceremony, whereas the church had previously discriminated against various groups.

At its height, 1400 people worked there for, including trades such as seamstresses and cabinet makers, working as a team to provide a complete service, transporting bodies from home to cemetery. It had its own footbal team, and even an orchestra. In May ’68 it kept going for 15 days working as a co-operative.

The city’s monopoly was abolished in January 1993, and the SMPF soon ran down its services, closing in 1997.

Considerable redevelopment work has taken place on this 39,000 square metre site, and although it opened in October 2008, much was still unfinished, and the vast building is still largely empty space. There will be a continuing programme where around 200 artists from around the world come to work on about 30 projects each year, and three festivals to show the finished work.

When I was there a few very large prints of pictures by  Stephane Couturier who was photographer in residence during the development work – you can see  3 of his pictures on the web site.

In the terrace of the cafe (opening 2009) was a set of pictures by
Alain Bernardini (b France, 1960) Stop / Tu m’auras pas, (literally ‘You won’t have me’ but perhaps here means ‘you won’t take my photo’)  pictures of workers on the site posing for their pictures, along with some where there are no workers, perhaps because they didn’t wish to be photographed.

Global Underground

At the Galerie Blue Square in rue Debelleyme (3e) I was able to see the remarkable images from the Global Underground project by Valera and Natasha Cherkashin who I’d met earlier in the week at the Lensculture party.

They have been working together since the 1990s and using digital photography and video since 1999.  The Global Underground project began in 2005, and is intended to cover some 35 cities around the world, including Moscow, New York, Stockholm, Beijing, London, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo. The project aims to merge underground systems from 33 cities around the world into one Global Underground.

Their images make use of multiple exposures creating an almost mosaic effect both in their still images and video projection. The densely filled surfaces of their prints come to look like canvases that have been painted over and over, sometimes producing an effect that is more like an icon than a photograph.

The images from different cities reflect the different visual nature of the different underground systems. So far I’ve seen work from New York, Moscow, Stockholm, Beijing, Paris and Washington, and each is very different. New York has dark vertical columns breaking up the images of people standind on the platforms, Moscow is light and golden with oval motifs, while Beijing has a frontal fringe of Chinese faces in front of what seems more like a department store than a platform,  Paris seems more linear, while  Washington is a place of shadows. I wait to see how London will appear.

Although this isn’t the kind of photography that normall attracts me greatly it was impossible not to like this work and repsond to its intensity. For once the techniques seem to be being used to say something rather than for their own sake.

Robert McCabe & Aurelia Alcais

There were two shows organised by Galerie sit down in the rue Ste Anatase, 3e. In the Galerie itself was a Photo Mois show ‘Grece: les annees d’innocence (Greece: the years of innocence) by Robert McCabe, while neighbouring shop windows were full of ‘Les Poupees Bidons‘ by Aurelia Alcais, a rather less serious part of the Photo-Off.

McCabe’s Greece, which ends 19 Dec, is a fine show of black and white work from the 1950s. Born in Chicago in 1934, he stated as so many at an early age with a Box Brownie, and later as a teenager photographed car
accidents on the streets of New York and became interested in press photography.

He made his first visit to France and Greece in 1954, returning to Greece the following year with a Rolleiflex. His pictures from these foreign trips were exhibited at the time at Princeton University.

In 1957 came to Greece again to work for National Geographic – in colour; other assignments included being sent to the South Pole to photograph for the New York Sunday Mirror Magazine.

His pictures reflect very strongly the age in which they were made, both in terms of the scenes that he photographed and his way of seeing. It was an age of innocence both for photography and for Greece.

Aurelia Alcais‘s work certainly added a little fun to things, taking pictures of the stomachs of pregnant women decorated to make faces. Some certainly gave me a belly laugh.

Lars Tunbjork: Vinter

Lars Tunbjork: Vinter
Galerie Vu, 2 rue Jules Cousin, 4e
12 Nov 2008 – 25 January 2009

also

Lars Tunbjork: I love Boras
Centre culturel suedois, 11 rue Payenne, 3e
9 Nov 2008 – 25 January 2009

The basement  exhibition space of Galerie Vu was filled with the large colour images of one of my favourite Swedish photographers, Lars Tunbjork. His show Vinter was drawing a good audience there, and deservedly so, although I felt it lacked the kind of unity found in his earlier books such as “Home” and “Office.”

I met Lars in Poland when his work was on show at the first FotoArtFestival at Bielsko-Biala, and was very there were photographers from 25 countries showing in Poland, and I was present as ‘Great Britain’ with  ‘London’s Industrial Heritage‘)

You can see a good selection of his work on the Agence Vu web site and also on the Cohen Amador Gallery site.

Here’s a little of what I wrote about him in 2005, but didn’t publish as I am still waiting for a reply from Lars for permission to use the images concerned!

Lars Tunbjörk

Lars Tunbjörk was born in Boras, a small city in southern Sweden in 1956, in an area that was an exemplar of the Swedish ‘Folkhemmet’ (the ‘people’s home’ or welfare state envisaged by the ruling Social Democratic Party). When he was at school in 1971 at the age of 15 he went on work experience to the ‘Boras Tidning‘ newspaper and was introduced to photography. He went on to become a freelance before getting a staff job with the ‘Stockholms-Tidningen‘, a leading daily in the Swedish capital. His work there from 1981-4, distinguished by its subtlety, established him as a leading Swedish photojournalist. He also worked for Metallarbetaren, the magazine
of the Swedish Metal Workers Union, Manadsjournalen, a Swedish monthly cultural review which ceased publication in 2002, and the Scandinavian Airlines magazine Upp&Ner (Up & Down.)

It was the work published in the book ‘Country Beside Itself’ in 1993 (Swedish title: Landet Utom Sig) with text by Thomas Tidholm and Göran Greider that brought Tunbjörk’s colour photography to the attention of the photographic audience world-wide. His pictures (and you can see a good selection of his work from 1989-99 including some from this book on Zone Zero) show a strong sense of colour and design as well as a taste for the amusing, ridiculous and occasionally surreal.

The images as well as showing his personal vision, also comment on the political and social malaise felt in the country, where much of the aims of the ‘Swedish Model’ welfare state had been acheived, and the consensus that this common aim had generated was being replaced by increasing feelings of alienation, emptiness and lack of purpose, and a movement away from social idealism towards a free-market individualism.

So in Olandi, 1991, a man and a woman recline in their swim suits on almost invisible supports, oddly suspended above a large area of grass, apparently floating as if on some invisible lake or by the yellow umbrellas that seem to emerge from their heads.

Far behind them along the edge of the grass across the centre of the whole frame is a series of buildings, black roofs above offwhite wood or plaster walls, a fairytale like faux-heritage development, stressed by the fake antique black metal lamp post which rises from beside the empty grey tarmac path at left of the picture into the white sky. Even the distant trees are drained of their colour. An image flickers into my mind of bathers floating in the high density of the Dead Sea, but this dead sea is marked as clearly Swedish by the colour – the yellow umbrellas and the complemenatry blue of the woman’s costume are those of the national flag, “a blue cloth with a yellow cross”.

An interior, Oland, 1991 is a simple scene. A room is seen in a wide-angle view square on to a wall, with white ceiling with glowing fluorescent fitting, a rather vivid green floor and pale orange-yellow walls, both facing the camera and to the right. The facing wall has a blue door at right, and in the corner of the room to the right of this a red plastic chair. High towards the left of the wall a TV is fixed, and below it stands a man, dressed only in trunks, socks and sandals, heavily sun-tanned, hands down at his sides. Seen from behind he betrays no thought or gesture through his pose, and appears to be staring at the wall in front of him (again the blue and yellow of Sweden) rather than looking up at the screen. Its a strangely empty room, nothing else except the white skirting board, a white light switch and socket by the door, a picture of loneliness emphasized by the colours. On the screen in cold blue light a couple embrace, the colour contradicting their contact.

In Flemingsberg 1989, a businessman or doctor or politician in an off-white raincoat, grey trousers, black shoes, walks along an empty tarmac road beside a fence past the grounds of some institutional building (presumably a hospital), striding out, head bowed, clutching his bulging briefcase. Perhaps representing the middle-class with all the plans of the ‘Swedish Model’, looking down and not thinking about the future, oblivious to the lamp post that has fallen down apparently towards him, about to pierce his heart with the sign attached. It reads ‘Diagnosv‘(Diagnosis) 13,15,17.

Later in the afternoon we also made it to Lars’s second show in the Mois de la Photo, a much smaller show, I Love Boras, in the Centre culturel suedois in the rue Payenne in the 3e. This too was busy, but for many the main attraction was the copies of his books available for browsing rather than the few prints on the wall.

Both shows continue until 25 Jan 2009, so if you are in Paris before then, they – and the Galerie Vu show in particular are worth a visit.

Gilles Raynaldy: Domiciles

Gilles Raynaldy: Domiciles
Ecole nat. sup. d’architecture de Paris la Villette, Paris
4-28 Nov, 2008

Domiciles by Gilles Raynaldy turned out to be one of the more pleasant and rewarding shows of the Mois. It was a simple enough idea and project, taking photographs of the interiors (mainly) of the homes of different people, mainly in France, but also some in Morocco. (The examples you can see on his web site are arranged in two projects, Parisian apartments and Moroccan interiors.)

Each residence was represented with a short text about the person or people who lived there, giving their occupation (or former occupation for the several who were retired.) There was then a short series of pictures of the interior of the house or flat, nicely taken and well-printed in colour.

The interiors reflected the personalities of the individuals concerned, but not just that, also of course their affluence and other aspects of their background, as well as the locations. These varied from tiny flats in Paris through mansions in the south and some rather more rudimentary housing abroad.

It was very nicely done and rather fascinating in a kind of voyeuristic way. It reminded me of the glimpses inside houses that one gets walking down the street in the early evening, when people have put on their lights but not yet closed their blinds or curtains, often fascinating but it would be rude to stop and stare. In these pictures Raynaldy has gained access and permission to do just that.

I did wonder about the choice of these particular examples, which was not dealt with in the notes on the show but were certainly in no way a random sample or cross-section of the population. There were, for example, several photographers, a rahter small element of society.

There were apparently a hundred 30x40cm colour images on show and I think it would have been at least as effective as a book or a high quality presentation on CD or DVD (my normal screen has an almost identical size.)

It made me think briefly of another series of domestic interiors, Bert Teunissen’s Domestic Landscapes  but these are very different, with Teunissen photographing the inhabitants in their own homes. Raynaldy’s people, who are perhaps his true subjects, remain invisible (or almost so), and the photographer roams their creation, recording their arrangement of territory and traces of their existence. It’s a project that perhaps has rather more in common with my views of shop interiors that made up a large part of the series ‘Cafe Ideal, Cool Blondes and Paradise.


Lewisham, London, ca. 1990 by Peter Marshall

Also on display in the show was a book of work by Raynaldy ‘Habitat social en Meuse‘ (also on his web site) which looked like a fine urban landscape project.

Showing in a projection area at the centre of the display were a couple of extensive slide shows by various photographers. One, on children seemed to me to have rather too many images that were largely of interest to the families concerned, mixed in with some more interesting work and some visual candyfloss. ‘Contempler et construire’ was made of sterner stuff, although not all the work appealed to me, but I was particularly interested to see the urban landscapes of Normandy as shown by Benoit Grimbert. The subject seemed rather more appropriate to his rectangular format and upright approach than the North Circular Road show I had viewed the previous day.

London & Greece

You can’t really compare the events in London with those in Greece, but if the Met haven’t yet started shooting harmless teenagers for being on the streets, they do seem to be stepping up the pressure against anarchists and other demonstrators, as well as journalists.

Over the last week or so we’ve also seen an inquest verdict on the shooting of an innocent man, in which the jury were clearly prevented from reaching the verdict of unlawful killing they felt deserved,  making clear that they didn’t believe the evidence given by several of the police concerned. (And it’s not clear if the shoot-to-kill policy they were following was legal – it was certainly introduced without proper debate.)  We’ve seen a photographer, Jess Hurd, covering a travellers’ wedding for The Guardian detained by police for forty-five minutes in London’s docklands by police misusing anti-terrorist legislation, (you can see the wedding pictures here), photographers  covering a demonstration outside the Greek Embassy assaulted, (it happened again later in the week) and many other smaller incidents in which the press is harassed and obstructed in covering protests.

So I expected there might be some problems with the police last Sunday when I went to photograph a march by Anarchists along with Greek students and workers in protest against the events in Greece. Rather than at the embassy, it was being held in North London in an area where there is a sizeable Greek population.


Police arrest and unmask a protester they alleged to have assaulted an officer

What I didn’t expect was that the police would decide to use the powers they have under the 1994 Public Order Act to force people to remove face coverings where the officer concerned is convinced they are worn wholly or mainly to conceal identity – and an Inspector or higher rank has issued an authorisation for such actions in that particular place (and time.)

It is of course arguable whether masks are worn at such events to conceal identities rather than as some kind of ‘uniform’ or even a fashion statement or just to keep warm. Few of those taking part in demonstrations have any real need to conceal their identity, and masks are seldom a truly efficient way of doing so – most of their wearers remain easily identifiable and many remove their masks at times during events.

What is clear than an attempt to get all those taking part to remove masks was doomed to failure and would considerably raise tempers at the event.  Those making the decision clearly did not want the march to go ahead but wanted to create a flash-point that would lead to a confrontation between police and anarchists.


Demonstrators in the kettle.
Police complained I was too close when I took this picture – though a gap between three separated lines of police.

It was a confrontation set up to show who was boss. And although the police were rather slow in bringing up reinforcements after they only managed to “kettle” a small fraction of the anarchists (along with rather more of the Greek students and workers)  they were clearly in command.


I’m starring in the film for the Police Xmas Party again

You can read a more detailed account of the events in Dalston on My London Diary, where the story is also told in pictures.  My job was occasionally made difficult by the police, particularly in their insistence on keeping a clear zone around the kettle and I did get pushed around a few times when the crowd spilled over into the street and colleagues took a few amusing pictures of me arguing with police about the rights of a free press, but I saw none of the assaults and attempts to grab cameras that had marred the events outside the Greek Embassy in the previous week.

Catherine Cameron

Another Paris  show I didn’t want to miss, also outside of the Mois and the Photo-Off, was by Catherine Cameron. Here Photographies was showing at Galerie Plume on the rue de Monmorency in the 3e, from 10 Oct to 29 Nov, and the gallery was open until 19h. Earlier in the year she also showed work in China, Poland, Argentina and the US.

You can see her work on her web site, but although this has an idea that lifts it above the ordinary, with a nicely designed slide-show in the pages of a book, it doesn’t actually do a very good job of showing her pictures.  The images are just too small, the shadows too blocked and the work has a coarseness out of keeping with the delicacy of her images.  You can see her work shown better at Lensculture but it is still no substitute for the real thing.

There are photographers whose work can look better on screen than as prints, but Cameron’s work is very much linked to the craft of photography. She shoots on medium format film and still makes her prints on photographic paper in the darkroom (though this is not to say that craft skills can not be equally applied when working with digital capture and inkjet printing – and increasingly it is clear that they can.)  Whatever the photographic means, the photographer needs to master them and produce work that leaves you not thinking about the means but entirely caught up in what has been created, and I stood entranced before several of these works.

Catherine comes from Norway, where together with her partner  Øyvind Hjelmen  she arranges photographic workshops on the island of Stord, on the west coast.  Among those who have taught there are Keith Carter (2005), Anders Petersen (2006) and Michael Ackerman (2007/2008). It was good to meet (and photograph) Catherine and Øyvind again at the Lensculture party in Paris earlier in the week.

This was our last visit of the day to a photography show – the end of what had been a very long day, and we needed to find something to eat before we collapsed. There were after all lots of shows to see tomorrow…