>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Ricky Bishop Remembered in Call for Justice

Ricky Bishop was a passenger in a friend’s car, driving through the back streets of Brixton, London on a Thursday afternoon, 22 November, 2001. For reasons that have never become clear, police decided he was suspicious (being a young black male seems often to be a good enough reason, and the fact he was in a car with a white man may have added to their concerns) and decided to stop the car and take the two along to Brixton Police Station for questioning.

Four hours later, a healthy young 25 year old black man was dead. Bishop’s family and friends allege he was assaulted by police, and that they held him down and failed to giv e medical assistance when he had a heart attack. The inquest seems largely to have served to lay bare inconsistencies in the police account, and the jury were denied the opportunity of bringing in a verdict that would have blamed the police for his death – as is also happening in the current case of Jean Charles de Menezes.

His family and many members of the community want to see justice done, not just in this case but in many others. At the anniversary march in Brixton this year, two other men were also remembered, Derek Bennett, shot in the back by police as he held a novelty gun-shaped cigarette lighter in Brixton in 2001, and Sean Rigg, who died after being taken ill in police custody in Brixton Police Station on Thursday 21 August 2008.

You can see more about the march and rally outside Brixton Police Station on My London Diary. Elsewhere on Current TV there is also a short video by Jason Parkinson which includes much of Ruth Kimathi’s statement about the Bishop case.

English Carnivals Deja Vu

All over again at the Barbican Library in London, UK, starting from Wednesday 2 Dec and continuing until 29 Dec, with a day or two off for Santa’s Shopathon in between. I think it will be more or less identical to the previous showing in October in the East London Photomonth at the Shoreditch Gallery (the Juggler.)

If you are around Wednesday evening, you are welcome to the private view, 6-15-8.30pm and if you haven’t got the slightest what I’m talking about, here’s most of the stuff from the press release:

Barbican Library
Level2
Barbican Centre
Silk Street
London EC2Y 8DS

3 Dec – 29 Dec, 2008

Monday, Wednesday: 9.30am – 5.30pm
Tuesday, Thursday: 9.30am – 7.30pm
Friday: 9.30am – 2.00pm
Saturday: 9.30am – 4.00pm

Contact: Peter Marshall: petermarshall@cix.co.uk
Website: http://englishcarnival.org.uk/

English Carnival shows the work of four documentary photographers who have each been inspired by the carnival tradition and carried out long-term projects on Carnival in this country. Although they have at often worked together, each has a distinctly different approach to the subject in their photography. All four photographers have shown work extensively and their pictures have been published widely in books and magazines.

Paul Baldesare and Bob Watkins have photographed traditional English carnivals since the early 1990s, and they received an Arts Council National Lottery Grant in 1997-8 to continue their project. A show of their work organised by Kent Arts toured a number of venues in the South East. Baldesare in colour and Watkins in black and white both show the highly idiosyncratic and sometimes esoteric side of the traditional carnivals that result in their peculiar fascination.

Peter Marshall’s black and white prints from the 1990s are from ‘Notting Hill in Carnival’ , published in ‘Visual Anthropology Review’ in 1999 with an essay and comments on the pictures by George Mentore who took part in Notting Hill in the 1970s.

David Trainer’s striking black and white portraits come from traditional English carnivals and fairs. His work has been included in shows in leading galleries, including the Tate Gallery’s ‘How We Are: Photographing Britain.’

Paul Baldesare “Many years ago I came across a book called ‘A Day Off‘ by photographer Tony Ray Jones. One section, ‘Summer Carnivals’, shot in the 1960s, was a particular favourite.” “For me, these events were full of cultural imagination and ritual contradictions.”

Peter Marshall “Notting Hill has brought new traditions of carnival to this country, enlivening our tradition. I deliberately chose to photograph it in black and white to concentrate on the people and the spirit of the event. I wanted myself and my camera to be a part of the dance.”

Dave Trainer “Just for a day you can be someone else, live out those hidden fantasies, look and act like your heroes. Dress up like a lady with balloons for boobs and walk around half naked without being arrested it’s all about dressing up, showing off and having fun. Well, it’s only once a year.”

Bob Watkins “carnivals are unique in the way they mirror variety and depth of our social history through popular cultural images these pictures are social documents of particular times and places, [but] some have a meaning beyond the thing itself and it is this possibility of the photo as metaphor that keeps me enthusiastic about image making.

And of course if you can’t make it, there are more pictures on the English Carnival web site – rather more than the 40 that are in the Barbican show.

Boston Globe – Big Picture Mumbai

Thanks to EPUK for sending me a link to a dramatic set of large images of recent events in Mumbai on the Boston Globe site.

Last week I went to see the World Press Photo exhibition, on show at the Festival Hall on London’s South Bank until Dec 7. Worth a visit if you are passing, though you can also see the work online. Some of it possibly looks better on the screen than on the wall, although other images are more impressive on a large scale.

WPP does sometimes seem to be more about the dramatic nature of the incident than the quality of the photography – though often the two coincide. But there are a few images on the Boston Globe roundup that I would not be surprised to see featuring in the 2009 prizewinners. It is incidentally, one of the easiest contests to submit an entry to, and it is free to enter – if one of the hardest to win. You have until 15 Jan to send in your work,whether over the internet or by courier.

Paris Photo and Japan

There is much more I could say about Paris Photo, but much was the same as ever, or perhaps more so. At many gallery spaces it was very much a case of deja vu, and there were some images I welcomed as old friends, in particular a very nice Steichen gum platinum print and some fine dye transfers of artists studios by Evelyn Hofer. If one can’t own such beautiful objects it is at least nice to see them on a regular basis.

However there were other works I would be happy never to see again, and indeed some I would happily add to a bonfire or put back in the photographers rubbish bin from which some ‘vintage works’ do appear to have been ‘rescued.’ I think the gallery scene lacks any mechanism for dealers to admit to making mistakes – they just have to keep on putting out the work and hope that suckers will take the bait.

It was good to see some of the Japanese work, in particular some fine large prints by Daido Moriyama which made a nice comparision with work by William Klein it was shown alongside. It was disappointing not to see more work from Eikoh Hosoe, but there was a magnificient very large screen made from his picture of a Kamaitachi running across a rice paddy, a wide open and highly luminous patchwork landscape. This very large inkjet print made on silk paper was truly one of the most desirable objects in the show.

There is a lengthy illustrated essay by Mariko Takeuchi, guest curator of the “Spotlight on Japan” at the show on lensculture which attempts the kind of overview of Japanese photography that would be beyond me. However, there are a few things it fails to mention, for example what was possibly a vital influence on photography in Japan in the 20th century (it was listed on the very detailed history board in the exhibition) in 1931 when ‘Film und Foto‘ brought the modern photography world to tour Japan.

Also without a mention is one of my favourite Japanese photographers, Issei Suda (b1940), (you can see around 30 of his pictures – though not my favourite works at the site of the Portland USA Charles A Hartman gallery.) I was pleased to see pictuers by Suda both at both Galerie Priska Pasquer from Cologne and a particularly fine image with a tatooed torso, from Zeit-Foto Salon from Tokyo. Its a picture that’s hard to describeand I can’t find on the web, so here I’ll do something I don’t like to do and put my very bad snap, taken as an ‘aide-memoire’ and full of reflections, on line. (Incidentally everyone seems happy with people taking pictures of the pictures at the show – which comes as a little shock after some museum policies. )

Another fine image on the same stand was a large print by Ihei Kimura (1901-74) one of a generation across the world whose creativity emerged with the Leica, and whose work desrves to be more widely known here.

Takeuchi does mention Kimura, and also another phtogorapher whose prints I liked, Tomoko Yoneda, whose black and white pictures seen through the spectacle lenses of the famous have for me a very Bauhaus feel. Another photographer who doesn’t get a look in is the only one of the more recent photographers from Japan who held any great interest for me, Nobuhiro Fukui, who I mentioned in an earlier post.

The Dear Leader and others

Christopher Morris‘s video sequence The Dear Leader seems largely to show what a good still photographer he is. The video itself is far too long and its soundtrack filled with rather too much portentous music (Emily by Philip Glass from the score for the film The Thin Blue Line and Evil Grade by John Kusiak, used in the film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons of Robert S. McNamara, which also had a soundtrack largely by Glass.)

Essentially the movie seems a series of stills, to some of which the movement of the characters involved occasionally adds something, particularly in a lengthy shot of Bush speaking where what I assume are security men twitching in the right foreground supply the main interest. At other times it merely distracts, and there are also some downright boring long and fairly empty scenes where I longed for a single frame or even a more active pair of scissors.

I couldn’t help thinking what a shame he didn’t have his eye to the viewfinder of a still camera during some of these sequences, still frames as yet can’t have the same quality (but of course it may not be long, esepcially with RED), but there are images that flicker through here that are stronger than some of those in his George Bush retrospective on VII, which does also contain a number of superb pictures.

You can see more of his feature stories ther by clicking on his name at the left of the features page – unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a direct link.

Among many other articles worth reading in dispatches is a letter from John Morris written on the occasion of Cornell Capa‘s death in May 2008, but also recounting something of the tragic loss of both Werner Bischof and Robert Capa in May 1954.

I found the video on ‘dispatches‘ from a link at FOTO8 and again on VII you can also see the pictures from Morris’s show My America which was at the Host Gallery recently. Currently they are showing the work of British post-war industrial photographer Maurice Broomfield, a reminder of those times when Britain still had industry.

Nikon D3x

Given the leaks and teasers that have appeared previously there were few surprises in the description of the Nikon D3x in the Nikon Pro magazine that came through many of our doors this morning.

What is clear is that is probably isn’t a camera I will particularly want. Nikon describe this 24.5Mp ‘FX’ model as “designed with medium format photographic applications in mind” and it has the fairly conservative ISO range of 100-1600, though with boost to ISO 6400.

Its 75Mb files would for most of us most of the time be an embarrassment of riches, although its ability to shoot these at 5 fps seems pretty astounding. It does have what seems to be a very useful DX mode, which gives 10Mp files.

Otherwise it seems very similar to the D3. Another big heavy camera that’s already overkill in various respects. The price is yet to be announced – rumoured at around $5,500, enough to put it out of my league, but still likely to make some other manufacturers wince. And even if you’d like one for Christmas you will be out of luck. More chance if your birthday is in February at a guess.

Nikon’s recommendation for your Christmas list is the D90, a camera that in some respects, certainly according to the DxOMarks, outguns cameras including the Canon EOS 5D and Nikon D300, despite selling (body only) for under £600. And there is a rather nice sounding new DX 18-105 f3.5-5.6 VR lens to go with it. Compared to the D3x it seems pretty compact which for me is a big point in its favour, although it still isn’t a small camera.

Along with many photographers (though perhaps not a huge section of the market) what I am still waiting for is a true digital successor to the Leica M series. Leica’s own contender, the M8, has proved to be a whole series of disappointments – not just for me but for many other users – hardly addressed by their second edition and in several ways Epson’s rather curious earlier attempt (I always feel the need to don racing goggles and jump into a sports car when I look at its top plate) is still the best in this area, one that Leica seems to have relinquished for their S series. But both – for better or worse – were ‘retro’ cameras, firmly founded in the 1950s, and what I would love to see is their 21st century equivalent – including the kind of low-light capabilities we now see in the D700/D3.

Cafe Ideal, Cool Blondes and Paradise revisited

I worked on the project that became Cafe Ideal, Cool Blondes and Paradise for around ten years, and the final on-line version I mentioned in a previous post is only one of several ways that I showed the work – there were also several different physical shows. But all of these only really scratched the surface of the project, for which – at a guess – I took around 20,000 images.

Recently a group of 25 of them have been selected for a museum collection and I’ve been getting down to scanning the negatives – mainly from around 1990 – for the first time.

Technically it wa a project that was made possible by my switch to colour negative in the mid 1980s. Until then colour neg had largely be seen as an amateur medium, while pros shot mainly on transparency, which was always demanded for repro work.

Many of the images I too for this series would simply have been impossible on transparency material, as the lighting contrast was simply too high, and shadows would have blocked to an impossible extent on the higher contrast material. The presence of lighting of differing colour temperature would also have been a challenge on some images, but was easier to handle on neg – though sometimes it meant waving CC filters under the lens over parts of the printing the darkroom.

Like many other things in photography, this would have been so much easier with digital – and the prints from scans are very much easier to correct.

Almost all these pictures were also taken with a shift lens, which again was essential to the project, enabling me work from the viewpoints that were possible and also to exercise some control over perspective. The framing in these images would not have been possible without the vertical and horizontal displacements that this lens allowed. I still often find myself trying to push the lens to one side when working with other lenses on a digital SLR.

Many of the images chosen are ones I’ve not used before, and previously I’ve mainly scanned enprints rather than negatives, so it’s been interesting for me to see this work again in a new light. I think I will end up scanning many more images from the project and re-evaluating it.

Paris Photo: Alec Soth

Undoubtedly one of the greatest hits of this year’s Paris Photo was Alec Soth‘s “The Last Days of W“, shown on the Weinstein Gallery, Minneapolis stand. You can see the work, which was originally published in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters, on Soth’s own site, and read an introduction by Soth on their Artinfo site.

In the introduction, he quotes several Bushisms, and ends by saying that in this collection ‘I suppose Im not really trying to accomplish much at all. Rather, as President Bush himself once said, One of the great things about books is, sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.’

And there are a few such here, although on the printed page or screen some lack the impact of the works in the flesh. About half the prints in the work were on show in Paris and several in particular on show caught my attention.

One of the finest landscape images on show in Paris is his view of Salt Lake, Utah, the rectangle split into two, salt below, pale blue sky above, by the thin line of a road coming from the right two thirds of the way across the frame, on it a lorry and a few smaller dots – but you need to see the actual print to appreciate it. Following it is another splendid image of a group of cadets at West Point, then a great image of a table tennis table and a mural at First Baptist Church, Bemidji, Minnesota.

Another favourite image on show in Paris that also includes a mural was of Michael and Dominique from Dearborn, Michigan, a black couple in their wedding whites (including a white top hat for Michael) seated behind a long table with a lilac fabric front on a rather battered stage; behind them a backdrop of the Nile, pyramids and moon.

“The Last Days of W”, a 48 page self-published artist book printed on newsprint, is still available from Little Brown Mushroom Books or Magnum at $17.00 (plus shipping), though I expect it will soon sell out.

Serial Numbers

Ed Ruscha with his “Twentysix Gasoline Stations” and “Every Building on Sunset Strip” has a lot to answer for, although he could perhaps shift some of the blame onto Bernd and Hilla Becher in Dusseldorf.

Since they made their work, splendid though it often was, the rather straightforward and simple concept of “typologies” has provided rather easy ways to think of and carry out photographic projects, though it’s been instructive over the years to see what a pig’s ear some students have made of them. Perhaps fortunately in that it has usually been the “mistakes” that have given any interest to their work.

What soon becomes obvious is that, even given the straight-jacket of the concept, the interest in the result is still so very dependent on the photographic seeing of the photographer, a thought that came very obviously to me on seeing the black and white set of images by Jeff Brouws, which you can see on artkrush , Twenty-six Abandoned Gasoline Stations (very consciously a direct homage to Ruscha’s work) on a stand at Paris Photo. (There is also a good interview with Brouws on the site with a link to more pictures.)

Typologies such as this are succesful as photographic series because Brouws is a photographer who very much follows the advice of the sage to “let the subject determine its own composition.” You can see more of his more recent work on his own website, where it also becomes clear that typologies greatly benefit from interesting and important subject matter.

This is perhaps even more clear in the work of the Bechers, where the intrinsic complexity of the industrial structures elevates their work above the tedium of the framework house series.

Paris Photo: BMW Prize

A major area at the very centre of Paris Photo is devoted not to photography but a car showroom. As someone who was a friend of the earth before the Earth officially had Friends (and who got rid of his first and last car in 1966) I find it inappropriate and distasteful, even more so this year since it it’s a make very much associated with bankers, whose bad book-keeping has certainly not put them into my good books of late. If I wanted to worship the motor car I’d go to a car show.

The centrepiece of the show – not photography

BMW are the sponsors of the BMW-Paris Photo Prize, a contest that has always turned up some rather odd entrants and chosen peculiar winners. The entrants are nominated by the galleries taking part in the show, which accounts for some fairly unlikely submissions.

Shortlisted work for the prize displayed on the upper level

Perhaps the most unlikely this year was the winner, Yao Lus New landscape part I Ancient Spring Time Fey, 2006. Yao Lu was nominated by the 798 Photo Gallery, Beijing. He photographs mounds of garbage covered by green nets and digitally manipulates them to resemble traditional Chinese paintings. It’s more bad Photoshop than photography as I know it, though, as the pdf file says “speaks of the radical mutations affecting nature in China as
is it subjected to rampant urbanization and the ecological threats that endanger the
environment.” But I still think its a shame that a jury that included one photographer and one curator I admire couldn’t pick something more photographic.

Looking at the winning entry

I took some time going round the works shortlisted for the prize that were on show in Paris, and picked my own top five (not in order): Janne Lehtinen from Finland, Yuki Tawada, Ken Kitano (click on the pictures to see them larger) and Nobuhiro Fukui from Japan and Atta Kim from South Korea.

But this, as I’ve mentioned previously, is the year of China, thanks to the Beijing Olympics, so perhaps Yao Lu’s victory should not have come as a surprise.