Gilles Perrin – on show in Paris

A few days ago I had an e-mail from  Gilles Perrin about his work in two shows in Paris,   Children of the world at the Commercial stock exchange, 2 rue Viarme 75001 Paris from October 29 to November 12, 2008, and Recent works: Africa, Asia…  at bâtiment des Douches, 5 rue Legouve, 75010 Paris October 17 to November 28, 2008.

I was very impressed by Perrin’s work from Tibet and Africa when I met Gilles and Nicole in Birmingham last year. You can see more of his work on at the art-Contemporain site, and in particular his work from Ireland, THE MEN OF THE SEA, which has text in English as well as French.

The web site is easier if you read a little French, but otherwise, chose A l’affiche then click the red triangle to the right of «Les hommes de la mer», Irlande, 2007/2008. On the page that appears are links (red triangles) to the portraits from Cork and also “diptyques et triptyques”  and on these pages you can click on the red rectangles to see the pictures larger.

You can also read (in French) a PDF file about his work from March to September this year in Conflans Sainte Honorine, a historic town in the northwest suburbs of Paris around 15 miles from the city centre, where the River Oise runs into the River Seine. I’m not sure what it says about the town that it is twinned with Ramsgate.

You can find pictures from other exhibitions by going through the expositions link.

On Criticism

Another recent post from Jörg Colberg on Conscientious that caught my eye was Being critical vs. being negative.

In it he mentions the “dearth of critical discussions of photography online” and that many people he is in touch with would like to see more, going on to make clear the distinction between being critical and being negative, and then suggesting that most people (and in particular I think he means most bloggers) are not critical because they fear it will be misunderstood as being negative, and that they feel this will be bad for their careers.

As someone who has been writing critically about photography on-line since 1999, my first thought was “what career?”  When I started writing for ‘About.com‘  I was expected to be critical. I was asked to write because I had ideas about photography and could express them, (although by the time we parted company in 2007 corporate policy had changed.) But now here on >Re:Photo and elsewhere I can do my own (but unpaid) thing.

Of course this isn’t the only blog which does feature critical writing about photography – and Colberg himself occasionally does his bit on Conscientious.

I don’t always write about every show I attend or web site I visit. Sometimes I don’t feel I have much to say, and if I feel the work is very bad it would be hard to write without seeming negative. Essentially I think the job of the critic is to provide some insight that will encourage or enrich photographers and the audience.  And, hopefully also to stimulate some kind of dialogue about the work. If I can’t think of anythi

And Colberg thinks critical discussion would be a positive thing. So I wanted to contribute to one by making a comment on his blog. I looked for the comment box on the page – and to my surprise there wasn’t one.

You can comment on >Re:PHOTO, although to prevent abuse you need to be a member (joining is free and instant) and logged in, and all comments are moderated before they appear on the site. There is a page – see list at top right – on how to make comments for anyone who can’t see how to do it.

I don’t get many comments here, but I do welcome them.

Editing Your Work

After a few days away and rather longer being tied up with putting a show on the wall I’ve today got back to catching up with some of my e-mail and reading some of the blogs I like to take a regular look at, including Jörg Colberg‘s Conscientious, which often comes up with some interesting leads. One of these that he mentioned a few days back was about Editing Pictures. Unlike me, Colberg often says little or nothing about the sites he links to, and his only comment on the article on Simon Robert‘s Blog was that it was a “must-read post.”

So I read it, and found it to be a very useful but hardly surprising account of how Roberts went about editing the pictures for his book ‘Motherland‘. Basically its probably not a lot different from the way many others work. He starts by having all of his films contact printed.

Nowadays I tend to do that instead on the Epson V750 Pro, which lets me scan my negatives in their filing sheets, carefully laid on top of the glass without a holder. It takes a complete 120 film in the filing sheet from the several different formats I use or either 5 strips of 6 35mm negs, 7 strips of 5 35mm negs or 7 strips of 3 XPan negs at a time.

Fine for the XPan, as its a whole film, but a problem for normal 36 exposure films which I have already filed, usually with 6 strips of 6 negs and a short end with 1 or 2 frames. However scan times are so short with the V750 that it is easy to make a second scan with the remaining strips – it only takes a few seconds to re-unite the two in Photoshop.

I find it better to make my first selection on screen – and its something I’ve become very used to with working from digital. 35mm printed contacts are a little on the small side, even though the high-quality loupe I use gives a superb view. If you work with film, it really is worth spending money on a really good loupe, though I made do for years with a cheaper Nikon one that isn’t bad…

Scanning at 360 dpi gives a jpeg file (at good quality) of around 2,000Kb for each contact sheet and is probably the minimum resolution worth considering. Each 35mm frame is then around 540×360 pixels and thus nominally around postcard size at 1:1 on the screen.

For Roberts, working away from base, the ability to see physical contact sheets while he was carrying out the work was of course pretty vital. He shot just over 5000 6×7 frames on the project in a year – a relatively small number of images compared to those of us who work with 35mm or digital, and both the small number and larger size certainly make editing easier.

From the contact sheets he made a selection of 500 images to scan and print, making up a book with 12 images per page. He doesn’t indicate the size of the book shown in the post, but if it was A3 landscape, then these images were around 4×3 inches. Roberts scanned all 500 for this on an Imacon, which seems to me overkill – the V750 could do the job perfectly adequately and a great deal faster.  If you are work on medium format and scan as contact sheets you can simply ‘cut’ the images out from these and paste them into a new document to print out.  For 35mm you would need to make your contacts at 600 dpi or higher, as then printing at 200 dpi would give images around 4.5 x 3 inches. (The optimum dpi for printing on most printers is probably 250-360dpi, but 200 dpi does a very decent job.)

500 pictures – 1 in 10 of his take – was still far too many for a book, and the challenge was to get them down, in his case to 153, for publication. (Looking at his book, which I think I wrote about briefly at the time it was published, I would actually have preferred a tighter edit, and considerably more text.)

There are two very important points that he makes on the real editing process that takes place at this point. Firstly that it is something that needs time; rather than making final choices immediately you need to go back time after time and let your thoughts about the images mature. Personally I prefer to leave work for years rather than months or weeks to give time for my initial enthusiasms, often more tied up with the event of making the image rather than the image itself, to evaporate and be replaced by a more clear-headed appreciation of the work.

It’s also true that many photographers are poor editors of their own work, too emotionally attached to it to think objectively. And some photographers are simply poor editors; the two occupations call for differering if overlapping skills. Roberts was fortunate to be able to call on the services of others, and in particular his publisher, Chris Boot.

The feature also contains some interesting quotes from a couple of books, one in which a number of well-known photographers give a sentence or two about their approach to editing and a slightly longer quote about editing and Gene Smith from ‘On being a photographer‘ – in which Magnum photographer David Hurn talked to Bill Jay.

I wrote about their views on Smith some years ago. They concentrate on his Pittsburgh work, produced in part during the short period he was a member of Magnum. It was in many ways a difficult project, not least for Smith when all his cameras and negatives were stolen. The burglars were caught after the cameras were sold as one contained a film on which they had photographed each other, but the negatives were never recovered and Smith had to re-shoot.  In some ways the project was doomed from the start, Smith had aimed to create an in-depth project, but Magnum and writer Stefan Lorant wanted a quick shoot with around a hundred pictures to decorate Lorant’s text. What they saw as a week or two of shooting eventually ended up as several years of Smith’s work, completed with the aid of a grant after he had left Magnum. But here’s the comment I wrote back in January 2000:

David Hurn and Bill Jay dismiss the idea that Smith was a good editor of his work, suggesting that all his best work was edited by Life staffers. It’s at best a curious argument, not least because Smith generally edited his work considerably before letting the staffers near, and the overwhelming evidence appears to be that they were limited to trimming and shoe-horning his ideas into the magazine format. At its best it was a painful and high-energy dialectic that did deliver. Hurn & Jay’s prime evidence is the stilted prose of the Pittsburgh article, which, according to other sources, was not by Smith, but written to a deadline by two Magnum staff at a time Smith was largely beyond lucid thought.

Which perhaps leads to a third point about editing.  It’s best done on a clear head and not under the influence of whiskey and Benzedrine or whatever your particular poison. A glass of wine may help me, but not a bottle.

But ‘Dream Street‘ was hardly as Hurn and Jay suggest “a failure“, except that is for the finances of Magnum, which Smith almost single-handedly brought to ruin (and he left owing money he was never able to repay.)  Some consider it Smith’s finest work, but perhaps Magnum was never able to forget that debt.

Orphans Act- your images up for Grabs?

Although the US Senate passed the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008 a few days ago, hotlined through a back door while most Senators eyes were fixed on the attempts to save the US economy,  there is still actually quite a road to travel before it becomes law, even in the USA, where it still has to pass the House.  And given that it basically alters the whole situation over copyright and intellectual property it isn’t beyond imagination that it could lead to considerable problems between America and the rest of the world, even though its perhaps more likely that many other countries will quickly slip through similar legislation.

Although most photographers are opposed to the ideas behind the US concepts of ‘orphan works’ in this and other bills, there are many others who would welcome the opportunity they offer for free-loading at our expense. These include the education industry, and Internet and media giants. At an earlier stage, Google were licking their lips over the prospect of using a million ‘orphan images‘, although probably even the weak safeguards of Shawn Bentley would queer their proposed piracy. It’s perhaps interesting to see the discussion of orphan works on non-photographic sites such as Public Knowledge.

As PDN comments,  Shawn Bentley does give some further ideas about what might be considered a ‘diligent search‘ and thus what steps we should do to protect our own work. Which of course include making sure our images contain the proper metadata – particularly IPTC copyright and creator data, and considering the use of registries such as PLUS – though it remains to be seen how usable and affordable such systems will be, particularly for low-earning freelances and semi-pro photographers.

Using Lightroom or similar software you can set up templates that add basic metadata to your images as you upload them from card to computer, including in the IPTC copyright section a copyright message, coypright status, rights usage terms and a web address for a page giving copyright information. In my case this part of the preset looks like this:

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although I’m not sure that these are exactly what are intended for these fields.

Part of any ‘diligent search‘ must surely be to look for image metadata, and I hope one  beneficial aspect of orphan works legislation (which I’m sure we will eventually get) will be to create a greater awareness of the existence of metadata and include the ability to read it into all viewing software.

Another positive result may well be an increased insistence on the proper attribution of published work, though I’m less sure that publishers will bother to do this. It really is something that photographers and their organisations should campaign more about.

I’ve always resisted putting visible watermarks on my images, but its perhaps time to rethink this, or at least to include them in an added image border. Again, software such as Lightroom enables you to automatically add a visible watermark.

Big agencies have for some years used image tracking services such as PicScout to locate unauthorised image use on the web, although these are perhaps too expensive for most freelances.  You can try out the Tin Eye beta from Idée – the easiest way to use it is to install the browser plug in and then right-click on your image on a web page and let it search. But so far its image data base seems too small to find any of mine – even where I know they are in use legitimately on other pages.

You will also need to be very careful about using image sharing services, both to look at what rights you are giving away, and also to see if your metadata is retained when the images are shown on the pages.

Black & White Printing Compared

Having spent rather too much time in the last couple of weeks printing from my black and white negs for the the English Carnival show I was interested to see a feature on Tyler Boley‘s ‘Custom Digital‘ blog, B&W print quality which compares some of the best currently available printing systems with conventional silver printing.

Boley’s  feature has its limitations; for one thing it looks at inkjet systems for printing on matte paper (Hahnemuhle Photorag 308g) , although it does include Epson’s ABW which will also work on gloss papers. I actually like matte prints, but their qualities are rather different from those of glossy prints (and matte inkjet prints are rather different and generally tonally superior to matte silver prints) although of course these differences are reduced by framing under glass.

Despite these, the results are really interesting, and clearly show the superiority both of prints produced using the latest rather pricey StudioPrint Rip with a dual quad ink setup and the more “off the shelf” and considerably cheaper QTR (Quad Tone Rip)  used with the Selenium K7 inkset from Jone Cone, which proves to be the ultimate currently available inkjet solution (and there is a special edition for the low-price Epson 1400.)

What is also clear is that a contact print from the silver negative still has a considerable edge over ink when examined at a micro level (on the linked page with larger examples, a 0.24 inch  wide section of the print displays at around 8.5 inches – around 35x magnification). Boley asks if these differences  matter, if we can actually see these differences viewing the actual print and his answer is: “I think you can, given certain images, and viewing conditions, and eyesight.”

Looking at my actual prints on the exhibition wall, where they are shown along with the work of two other photographers printing on silver, my own conclusions based on prints produced by the most primitive of the methods Boley compares, Epson ABW,  is that, for at least the kind of photography we do, the differences are not important. My prints stand comparison – at least in terms of print quality.  Everyone I’ve talked to has been surprised to be told they are inkjet.

Looking at Boley’s results, the most surprising difference to me is actually between the drum scan and the contact print.  As he notes, the scan has more detail but also considerably enhanced local edge-contrast, which he attributes to the highly collimated light source.

The silver print used in the comparison was a contact print, which might make sense for photographers working on 8×10 film, but perhaps not for the rest of us (I have shot only a handful of 8×10’s and none that produced a picture I would ever want to print.)  Typically I’m working with 10-15x linear enlargements from 35mm film (and scans at a slightly higher resolution than Boley used) and I suspect that this makes the difference between inkjet and silver print considerably less – even when looked at highly enlarged.

So, I’ve just taken two prints from the same negative, both 15×10″ prints (I made the inkjet to fit the same overmat) and scanned a small section of both at 4800dpi (the highest optical resolution of my flatbed.)  The prints were not made to be identical in contrast or density – but printed as I felt the negative should be printed roughly 10 years apart. The silver print was on Ilford Multigrade Fibre-Bass glossy and air-dried. The inkjet was printed using an Epson Photo R2400 using the K3 inks and Epson ABW printing on Permajet Fibre Base Gloss.

The differences between the two scans are noticeable when viewed at full size on my screen, equivalent to viewing the full print at billboard size from a couple of feet.  Viewed like this, the inkjet image is slightly dottier and less sharp, but  there is little difference in detail.

Reducing the image to a size so that the whole 32mm height of each scan will fit on the screen, here’s what I saw – remember the contrast and density differences were deliberate:


Detail: Epson ABW print (original 32mm high)


Detail: Silver print (original 32mm high)

There are small differences in detail in favour of silver, but they are relatively small (and on my screen I’m still looking at a 5x linear enlargement of the print) and not visible at actual print size.  Because I had deliberately chosen to reduce the contrast of this area of the print when making the inkjet it’s perhaps hard to decide whether there is any real difference in sharpness, but again I think there is very slight advantage to the silver print.  It’s also difficult to be sure that the slightly smoother appearance of the inkjet is also simply a matter of contrast.

It would have been better to choose an example where I had produced a print that more closely resembled the silver print, but those are mainly up on the gallery wall. But the real point of these two scans is not the minor differences but the close similarity. Without the contrast differences I would have been hard put to decide which was from the silver and which the inkjet print. Viewed at normal size, holding the prints in my hand there are no real quality differences, and I’m not sure which I prefer.

Boley’s is a considerably more careful study than my brief couple of scans, and clearly shows the superiority of the Cone K7 method over the Epson ABW (which seems to be gaining acceptance as some kind of fine-art inkjet standard.) If you want the highest possible quality matte black and white prints, K7 (K6 on six ink printers)  is the current ‘state of the art.’  Cone inks for use on glossy papers are promised but not yet available. Epson ABW may not reach quite the same standard in several respects but produces excellent results and can give great prints on glossy papers as well.

Gary’s Crime – Showing up the USA

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Gary McKinnon caused a lot of red faces among top brass in the USA when he penetrated and wandered around computer systems at the Pentagon and NASA in his obsessive trawl for documents revealing their cover-up of UFO sightings.  They didn’t like their incompetence being made obvious, and want him “to fry” for it. His case is also useful in their attempts to secure large amounts of extra funding for security.

David Blunkett brought in a one-sided extradition treaty with the US through the back-door when Parliament was on holiday which means that McKinnon can be sent for trial in the US without any evidence being presented in the courts here. The only thing that can stop this now is a decision on compassionate grounds by Jacqui Smith.  McKinnon has now been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome which is said to be the cause of his obssession. If tried here, the case would probably collapse (as an earlier hacker prosecution did) or result in a very short sentence, but in the US he might get 40 years or more in jail.

The demonstration outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square on Sunday was organised by the London Autistic Rights Movemeny. More pictures on My London Diary.

Al Quds Day and Iran

Controversy has grown in the last couple of years over the celebration of Al Quds (Jerusalem) Day in London.  Al Quds Day was started by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, and is promoted by some groups supported by the Islamic regime in Iran, which most of us have some good reason to protest against.

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Police hold back marchers at Piccadilly Circus

But it is also supported by a number of groups that clearly are not supporters of the Iranian regime (though like most people they would be opposed to a US attack on Iran)  who see the day and the march as supporting the Palestinians and the Lebanese in their fight against Israeli occupation and aggression.

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Not all of the groups against the march were Iranian
As a photographer and a journalist I try to approach things without closely identifying with either side, keeping a certain distance and although I always have a point of view, I went to photograph both sides of the argument.

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So you can see my pictures of the march, and also of the demonstration against the march as usual on My London Diary.  Perhaps this kind of unpleasantness could be avoided in future if groups that  support Palestine but have no connection to Iran were to organise an alternative Al Quds Day march.

National No More Fur March

Last December around 2-300 people marched from Belgrave Square in London to Harrods passing many designer shops that sell fur-trimmed garments on the way and voicing their opposition to this cruel, inhumane trade which involves the deliberate and callous ill-treatment of animals. Some of the same people were there for another march on Saturday, but in general it seemed a more middle class and polite affair, with rather more people present, nearer to 500.

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Anti-fur marchers outside Prada, Sept 2008

Looking at this crowd, the organiser’s plea for them to be sensible and not to try anything silly with half the Metropolitan Police watching them (and one of the many vehicles I noticed was from the City of London force) seemed superfluous, while in December there had appeared to be rather more chance of something happening.

Policing did seem to be excessive, with officers all along both sides of the procession and more in front of virtually every clothes shop the march passed – certainly all those that sell fur.  I got pushed in the back by police on several occasions as I stood on the curb to photograph the marchers and was pulled back rather firmly as I walked onto the pavement.  Showing my press card I was told “It makes no difference.” I argued but got nowhere, so simply walked a few yards further up the road (actually towards a fur shop) where the police seemed to have no problem about me going off the road.

For once the FIT team seemed busy photographing demonstrators and I didn’t once notice them photographing me or the other photographers present.  Of course I could just have missed it, but usually they like to make sure people notice they are being watched.

In December, outside Harrods, I’d shot from inside the march:

December 2007 Harrods
Anti-fur March outside Harrods, Dec 2007

So this time I’d decided to try from the other side of the fence there:

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Anti-fur March outside Harrods, Sept 2008

Harrods is a particular target as the only department store in the country to still be selling furs. As the placard points out we have a peculiar situation here that while fur-farming was banned here, the law failed to ban the import of fur farmed in other countries – under much more cruel conditions than those were allowed before the ban here.

Gorillas on the run

There were roughly as many people dressed in gorilla suits running a 7km route around the city of London on Saturday as there are mountain gorillas in the wild. It’s not a race, but a charity run to raise money to support the wild gorillas, and those suits make it a rather uncomfortable ordeal with those who actually run ending soaked with sweat. There were also others in various other costumes taking part, and Bill Oddie who started the runners and presented medals to all the finishers.

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You can I think be sure that all the fur involved was synthetic and that the bananas provided for the runners were fairly traded.

I’ve yet to work out a really good way to photograph the event and the runners, and to get pictures that really satisfy me.   Gorilla suits are tricky to photograph, being dark and detailed and need a fairly full exposure.  You need a slow enough shutter speed to get a little sense of motion, but need to keep things reasonably sharp – either by panning or with a secondary flash exposure.

The start and finish areas tend to be rather crowded and the lighting there gloomy in the courtyards of tall buildings, while on London Bridge the runners were coming towards me out of a bright sun. If I photograph the event another time I think I will try to handle it rather differently.

This year’s pictures on My London Diary.