Drop the Debt in London

Thursday I spent a day out in London, but my idea of a day out is perhaps different to most people. It started badly, when I forgot where I was supposed to be going and went to Trafalgar Square rather than Parliament Square!

I’ve changed from using my ancient and rather inconvenient diary software that produced nice neat printouts of my schedule to a rather more up-to-date piece of software, but haven’t so far managed to get it to give me such nice lists. Thursday I was in a rush and just glanced at the screen, scribbled a few notes and ran for the train. And got it wrong.

So I was late, and missed the start of the event I’d gone to photograph. Really organisation is vital, and I wasn’t the only one who had messed up, as the organisers hadn’t realised they needed permission from Westminster City Council for what they wanted to do.

The two mistakes didn’t quite cancel each other out, but it did mean I’d missed rather less than I would otherwise have done. I was able to catch up and photograph the rest of the event.

Birmingham May 2008
Paper chains in Birmingham

Which had started several weeks ago in Birmingham, where at the ‘Journey for Justice’ we had celebrated the 10th anniversary of the human chain which had been perhaps the most effective demonstration ever at a G8 Heads of Government meeting. Without any violence by demonstrators or police it put the cancellation of the overseas debts of the world’s poorest countries firmly on the political agenda.

There is still a very long way to go for the ‘Drop the Debt’ campaign – with only 20% of such debt yet dealt with. But that 20%, as the director of Christian Aid noted, has meant as much as the contributions collected in a thousand years of the annual fund-raising in Christian Aid week, one of this country’s major charity collections.

The paper links in the chains made this year in Birmingham were to take the ‘Drop the Debt’ message to the G8 meeting in Japan in July, and last week a small group of London activists carried them to the the Department for International Development in Palace St where they were met by Development Minister Gareth Thomas.

Drop the Debt, London

Photographically things were a little tricky. As you can see, the meeting took place outside on the pavement, at the entrance of the building. There was a fairly huge difference in light levels in the bright sun on the pavement and the deep shade of the entrance.

Photographers sometimes tell me that digital doesn’t have the dynamic range of film, but generally that simply means they haven’t learnt to use digital. It can really deal with much the same range as colour neg, though to do so in this kind of situation does require that you shoot RAW rather than jpeg, and also make use of some flash fill where you can.

The big plus is that with digital you can see immediately whether you have things right, not mainly from the picture display, but from the histogram, and if necessary adjust exposure and flash intensity. Here I was also moving the flash (with the plastic diffuser head that came with it) to point in the direction that needed flash and as far as possible away from the parts of the subject in bright sun.

Apart from a few pictures with my new ultra wide-angle – which I discovered was stuck wide-open and had to give up with, most of the pictures came out fine, at least so far as exposure was concerned.

On the tube to my next location I played with the stop-down lever on the back of the ultra-wide, and fortunately was able to sort out the problem. Obviously I’d changed lenses in a hurry and banged the small lever against the mount, bending it enough to prevent it moving smoothly. After straightening it out carefully the lens worked perfectly.

Having spent around thirty years working with what seem to be the best camera mounts ever designed – from Leica and Olympus – the Nikon mount does seem a little crude.

New Members for Magnum

You can’t back much closer to the centre of photography (or at least of photojournalism) than Magnum, the co-operative agency founded by some of the legends of the mid-twentieth century – Robert Capa, Cartier-Bresson and the others – to stand up for the rights of photographers and still going strong – certainly the best known agency across the world.

Magnum has an annual business meeting, held in either Paris, London or New York. Last week’s was in Paris and three photographers Jonas Bendiksen, Antoine D’Agata and Alec Soth, who all came to Magnum in 2004, were made full members.

There were two new nominees:

Olivia Arthur , who took an Oxford maths degree and was Guardian Student Photographer of the Year in 2001 before going on to take the Diploma in photojournalism at the London College of Printing (and has since gone on to gain several awards including Magnum’s own Inga Morath Award in 2007 .)

Peter Van Agtmael who graduated from Yale with a History degree in 2003 and immediately started a very succesful career as a photographer by going to work in China for a year.

I’ve often been asked whether you need to go to college and take a course in photography to become a photographer. My answer has always been that many of the best photographers have always studied other subjects at college – although some may also study photography. Of course there are also good photographers with first (and higher) degrees in the subject.

Magnum has full members, associates and nominees. A year ago, Alec Soth some informative pieces about Magnum and the process of becoming a member from an insider view hat are still available on line, though as often is the case you need to read the comments to some of the pieces.

In time we will probably find something about the new nominees on the Magnum blog in due course. In 2007 Martin Fuchs posted a short conversation with that year’s new nominees, Alessandra Sanguinetti from Argentina, Jacob Aue Sobol from Denmark and Mikhael Subotzky from South Africa, and there is also a short Magnum essay where Mark Power and Peter Marlow give an insight into the process by which they were chosen.

A genuine Richard Prince photograph?

I’ll let you into a secret. Richard Prince does actually take photographs, or at least I think he may. Not many – most of the time he’s happier ripping off other people’s work, to the extent of $3.4 million for his photograph of a Marlboro cowboy ad.

I don’t really understand why anyone would want to pay that sort of money. It’s not a picture I would want on my wall, but if I did why not just go out and make my own copy for considerably less. It does seem to be an awful lot to pay for what is essentially a can of the artist’s excrement (Piero Manzoni  got to that first.)

There is a nice story in an Independent feature by Charles Darwent published just before the opening of Prince’s show ‘Continuation‘ (at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, London until 7 Sept, 2008) in which he finds a rip-off of one of his ‘Girlfriend‘ series on the cover of French Vogue and reacts indignantly to them stealing ‘his’ work. (These were readers’ girlfriend photos ripped from the personal pages of biker mags and re-photographed by Prince.)

You can also read a review of the show in the same newspaper by Sue Hubbard, which I think gives an clear view of the man and his work.

I do actually think his art is of some interest, but also that photography is something rather different (and rather more important), and we shouldn’t really waste much if any of its limited cultural space on work that basically just isn’t photography.

Richard Prince isn’t a photographer. Or not much of one. Take a look at his web site, and under ‘photographs’ I think there are possibly a few that were really seen and taken by him. Perhaps the series ‘Upstate Photographs‘ is his own work (though equally it could be an album he picked up in a yard sale.)

Finally, thanks to Jörg Colberg’s Conscientious for pointing me to two rather wacky reviews, one in the Observer ‘Shame he’s a one-trick pony‘ and a second, which may, as Colberg suggests, lack logic, but I think tells the reader rather more about the work, Bidisha‘s Guardian blog, ‘Girls, cars and body parts: Richard Prince’s shallow American dream‘ – and don’t fail to read the comments. In particular arthouart writes “What really is at issue is the bankruptcy of irony in Art, like most of Prince’s work its an insider one liner, if you don’t get it you don’t belong.” Which perhaps gets to the root of why I think I’ve wasted far too much time on this already and should apologise to readers and return to the real world and photography.

A Looking Glass Eye – Exit Gallery

‘A LOOKING GLASS EYE’, 21st Century London‘ (which continues until 12 Sept, 2008) is the first show I’ve been to at the ‘Exit Gallery‘, the stairs up out of London’s best photographic bookshop, Claire de Rouen Books, on the first floor at 121-5 Charing Cross Road, just north of Foyles.

Exit opening
At the opening at Exit

There, around 140 unframed works of various sizes from enprint to poster (including one multiprint work) were each pinned by four bright shiny nails to around a dozen different areas on the stairs and landing in irregular grids, bereft of names or captions. At the opening party it was difficult to see the work for the press of bodies. As Brian David Stevens says on his ‘Drifting Camera‘ blog, “it was a fun party” and he has a few pictures from it there. You can see a couple which show the actual installation with some of the guests on Edmond Terakopian‘s blog – and that’s my shoulder visible in a check shirt at the bottom left of the top image, with I think Daniele Tagmani and Thabo Jaiyesimi in the centre.

There were a few copies of plans of the wall layout available, with squares and numbers on them, but even with the help of these it was confusing to march pictures to photographers, although there were a few that were instantly recognisable. It would have been rather easier to have the individual plans and lists pasted on each section of wall – our better still some rather easier and more informative system there, but things will of course be rather easier without the crush of bodies on the opening night. I’m not sure quite how many photographers have work in the show – perhaps 50 – and most of them seemed to be there and with a few friends.

Unlike the curate’s egg, this really is a show that is good in parts, and if the intention was to provide a full cross-section of work from the last 8 years on London ranging from the superb to the rather ordinary, it was successful. Print quality also seemed to cover a similar range, with work representing the best work from some of London’s leading labs on the wall together with looked like inkjet prints on cheap paper from the kind of printers that cost less than a set of inks. Some photographers seem to have decided that it wasn’t worth taking a great deal of trouble for work that was going to be nailed onto a wall – and the fact that the gallery showed several pictures partly obscured by electrical conduit or similar wall-clutter suggests a certain contempt on their side.

Of course there are different approaches to the medium. Not every black and white needs the Ansel Adams treatment, and I’ve been to shows I’ve loved where the prints were made on a photocopier. But there needs to be some kind of match between the intentions of the work and the syntax of the printing process. Otherwise even good prints can be bad prints and bad prints are best reserved for the rubbish bin, not the gallery wall.

But there is plenty of work here to interest most viewers (although the photographer I arrived with left very quickly) and not just from the biggest names, although several of the half-dozen pictures by Simon Wheatley were among those that appealed to me most (though work by some other photographers I admire was disappointing.) Among the highlights for me were Brian David Stevens, who I mentioned before, and wrote about for his work that stood out in Press Photography 2008 with several fine black and white prints, and David Boulogne had some of the more interesting details from suburbia (some of which at least are from his Henorama project) which I perhaps like because they remind me very much of some of my own work with similar subject matter in the 1970s and 80s.

Simon Rowe picture & model at Photofusion opening
At Simon Rowe’s Photofusion opening – the picture at left was in the Exit show

Another photographer I’ve mentioned before is Simon Rowe, and the work here included some of that shown at Photofusion earlier this year.

But this is a show with a wide range of work, and others will doubtless find other work that attracts their interest. If you are in London it’s worth a visit, but give yourself plenty of time, as you will want to spend quite a while browsing and buying from the incredible stock of Claire de Rouen Books.

The gallery is close to Tottenham Court Road Station, and I took a couple of surprisingly upright pictures there on my way home.

Dominion TCR
Dominion, Tottenham Court Road

Tottenham Court Road

Another Clapham Celebration

The SS Empire Windrush, which brought the first major group of Caribbean settlers from Jamaica to England in 1948 sank in the Med near Algiers around six years later, but a major monument of those times that have changed our country so greatly over the last 60 years remains.

Many of the 492 who arrived on the Windrush came with a suitcase and their hopes but little more. Many had served Britain in the armed forces, sometimes based in this country, and some few had places they could go to, but most were urgently in need of somewhere to stay while they sorted out jobs and a place to live.

One of the deep shelters, built for government use in the early 1940s and later opened for use as a public air-raid shelter in 1944 was pressed into service, quickly being adapted to provide basic living accomodation. This shelter still survives (along with the other London deep shelters) and the surface buildings are on the edge of Clapham Common near to Clapham South station.

The nearest labour exchange to the shelter was in Brixton, about a mile walk, and led to the area becoming the home of the Caribbean community in England. So it seemed an appropriate place to be celebrating the arrival of the Windrush, 60 years ago on Sunday.

Windrush celebration
Children listen to Four Kornerz and the Churchboyz at Clapham Windrush celebration

Although a small group walked from the deep shelter, the actual celebration took place a quarter of a mile away at the bandstand in the middle of Clapham Common, and was organised by Christian Aid, together with the Windrush Foundation and local churches. With speeches and gospel music it was more an aural than a visual event, although the children taking part in their own way made it rather more interesting.

One local church, Holy Trinity Clapham, played a major part in the event, as it had done in the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the Act abolishing the slave trade.

A commemoration walk last March started there, where worshippers in the ‘Clapham Sect‘ at the centre of the movement had included William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, John and Henry Thornton, John Venn, Zachary Macaulay and others, and went around the area stopping at notable sites associated with them, including the probable site of the ‘African Academy‘ in the picture above.

Arles Rencontres

I don’t know why I’ve never been to Arles.

But as I type that sentence I realise it’s false. First because I have been there, back in the spring of 1973, visiting the city because of its associations with Van Gogh and to visit the Roman remains – and not when the Rencontres were taking place. They had started just a few years earlier and I don’t know if I had heard of them at the time. I suspect had I started going to them at that point I would still be going now.

Then, for many years there was a small matter of work. At the start of July – this year the first and important week of the Rencontres is July 8-13 – these came at an impossible time for someone working in secondary education, as I did for many years, in the last week or two of term. (Some exhibitions continue in Arles until September, so if you happen to be in the area any time in Summer it’s worth checking the program.)

Then there are other reasons. I dislike travelling and staying in new places, I’ve forgotten most of the French I once learnt and really the only important reason, I’ve always found such social events very hard to cope with at a personal level, and unless I can persuade a few friends to come with me I doubt that I would survive. Perhaps I’ll start working on some seriously with next year in mind. This year’s programme on clothes and fashion didn’t greatly attract me in any case.

You can read about the program in English at the festival web site if you want to see what you are missing, although if it is like previous years it may be better to try the French version.

But for a rather better idea of the photographic content, I suggest you take a look at Lens Culture where Jim Casper describes the festival as “a vast summer camp for adults, where you can eat and drink well, enjoy boundless art, and catch up with your like-minded friends from all over the world” and has an excellent fairly high resolution gallery of images.

Looking through these, although there is plenty of good work as you would expect, there seems little really novel and worth seeing this year. For me the outstanding pictures were by Vanessa Winship, whose work has deservedly done well in several competitions in recent years (and her ‘Albanian Landscapes‘ was screened at Arles in 2003) , and by Debbie Fleming Caffery, whose work I’ve long admired and wrote about when she had a one-person show in London in 2004. I think she first showed work at Arles in 1989.

So it probably won’t be the photography I’ll be missing in a couple of weeks time, but the “drinking cold beer in the shade with some pals“.

Rathayatra London Juggernauts

Rath Yatra

Jagannatha, whose name means ‘Master of the Universe‘ is a form of the Hindu deity Krishna was one of three deities who were carried on large chariots through central London by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (better known as the Hare Krishna) last Sunday.

Subhadra

His half-sister Subhadra , again seen in the back of a car, was on the second of the large chariots in the Rathayatra procession, while the picture below shows brother Balabhadra beig caerfully lifted up to be installed onto the third of the chariots.

Balabhadra

The festival follows the pattern followed for perhaps more than a thousand years at Puri in Orissa on the Indian east coast, and the giant wooden chariots used there to carry Jagannatha gave us the word juggernaut.

Unlike the huge diesels that power juggernauts along our motorways, these chariots are pulled by hundreds of people on two ropes in front of them. It takes a little more ‘horse-power‘ than the couple on this cake are showing:

ISKCON organised their first Rathayatra in the western world in San Francisco in 1967, and two years later held the first Hare Krishna procession London, making this year’s the 40th. You can see more pictures of the 40th London Rathayatra Chariot Festival

on My London Diary, as well as pictures from the Rathyatra festivals in 2001, 2004, and 2005.

Another Hare Krishna procession in London I’ve photographed is the Gaura Purnima Procession, which I went to again in 2008.

Gaura Purnima
Gaura Purnima Procession, 2008 close to Leicester Square

Love Music, Hate Racism, fed up with stewards

Last Saturday I went to photograph a march against the BNP, who gained a seat on the London Assembly in the elections last month. I’d photographed the man who was elected, Richard Barnbrook, speaking at an outdoor BNP meeting in Dagenham a year or so ago, and detest his politics.

Barnbrook (C) Peter Marshall
Barnbrook speaks to media at BNP rally in Dagenham, Dec 2006

It struck me when I was taking pictures on Saturday that although the people in the demonstration were considerably more open and friendly than the small worried looking crowd in Dagenham, I was getting a lot more hassled by the stewards at Love Music Hate Racism‘s Stop the BNP march. Officiousness and threatening behaviour is no way to get good treatment from the media.

Although billed as a carnival parade, Stop the BNP was more a boring political march. If there was a samba band it was in hiding. For me the tone was set when a steward came up to the band who were just about to start playing and rather grudgingly allowed  them to do just one number before the march had to move off.

LMHR march

It wasn’t a huge march, and quite a few of those on it apparently left before the rally in Trafalgar Square (including me.) Although I’m dead against the BNP, I’m not really sure that this march was worthwhile. The Love Music Hate Racism campaign needs to convert hearts and minds not bore them. It should have been a carnival parade but was just another rather dull march.

More pictures on My London Diary as usual.

Carolyn Drake wins Lange-Taylor prize

This is rather old news, not least because my server ate it when I posted it a day or two ago. I’ve been meaning for some time to write again about the work of Carolyn Drake, who, together with writer Ilan Greenberg is the winner of the 2008 (and eighteenth) Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize, one of the major awards for documentary photography.

The $20,000 prize from The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, USA, is given to encourage collaboration between photographers and writers in documentary work. Dorothea Lange is best known for her picture Migrant Mother and other images taken for the Resettlement Administration (FSA).

Library of Congress
from: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington

Lange’s second husband was an agricultural economist and writer Paul Taylor, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley (they married in 1935) and together they made many field trips documenting rural America, and in particular poor sharecroppers and migrant workers. Lange got a Guggenheim in 1941, the same year that they published the seminal ‘American Exodus:A Record of Human Erosion‘ Later, in 1952, she was one of the founders of Aperture Magazine.

Carolyn Drake

lan Greenberg and Carolyn Drake’s project, ‘Becoming Chinese: Uighurs in Cultural Transition,’ looks at a rural Muslim community in a Chinese region, whose culture and language has been and is under severe pressure from the Chinese government.

Drake’s colour images (there are six on the Duke site and others in the links below) have an incredible freshness of vision, with sometimes a quite striking framing or angle of view. Sometimes it can be a challenge to decide exactly what we are seeing – as in a view ‘Oasis town, Turkmenistan‘ on the set of images on F-Stop #27 (Feb March 2008).

On Blueeyes you can see images from the Ukraine in Borderland, many of which too have a certain mystery as a face glooms out of the darkness at the edge of an image or a man is suspended in the branches of trees. Drake likes dramatic foregrounds, but there are also images that are largely about superb colour. She is also given to some powerful and dynamic composition, often getting away from a slavish adherence to the horizontal and using the cuttng edge of the frame to great effect.

Her other Blueeyes essay on the Lubavitch in Brooklyn is perhaps more carefully controlled but has some stunning images (they got her noticed by PDN for their Top 30 emerging photographers to watch in 2006)

You can also see a great deal of work on Carolyn Drakes own web site – perhaps the most intriguing for me was a set on a subject I’ve tried to look at myself, suburbia. I’m not sure where her ‘New Suburbia‘ series was shot, but I think it’s a place I’d avoid living.

Drake, who is based in Istanbul, is a member of Panos Pictures and you can see a perhaps wider range of her work on that site by clicking on her name on the photographers page.

One of the first articles I wrote when I worked for ‘About Photography‘ was about photographic competitions – and its major point was the obvious one that you won’t win if you don’t enter. I’m sure there were many more excellent entries for the Lange-Taylor prize, and it takes a lot of time to put together entries for this and other competitions. This wasn’t Drake’s first year of entry for the prize. It’s always a disappointment if you enter and don’t win the best thing to do is to pick yourself up and try to do better another time. Entries for the 2009 award are due in Jan 2009 and all the details are on the web site.

World Naked Bike Ride

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to photograph Saturday’s World Naked Bike Ride in London again. I wrote at some length last year about its ‘photography’ policy and my objections to it – it seems to be a blatant attack on the freedom of the press in particular and on individual freedoms at a time when both are under considerable fire from the law and order fascists. I won’t repeat myself – it’s still on line. But if you take part in a public event and want to hide your identity or blushes, as  I’ve said before, the answer is simple:

don’t shoot the photographer; wear a mask.

I also wrote a shorter piece about news values and nakedness after last year’s ride. There is a paragraph I rather like in it, so here it is – though you can of course use the link to read the rest.

10,000 marching for Palestine. Perhaps 3,000 Orangemen and women. A thousand or so naked or near naked cyclists. No contest, not even for the BBC. When I switched on Radio 4 for the 10 o’clock news there was only one London event. And there was no one there wearing a burkha.

Definitely not a burkha, but she made me think of both of my comments from last year.

But the World Naked Bike Ride is in several ways an interesting event, although as in previous years while bodies are very much on display environmental messages seemed at times to be rather well-hidden, leaving many of the public along the route bemused.

The two young women standing next to me at the start weren’t commenting on the state of the planet or the strangulating grip of car culture but that they had never seen so many penises before, and they were certainly glorious in their diversity. We speculated together briefly on whether the ride showed a greater proportion of circumcision than among the general public and if so why that should be and other major penis-related issues.

Later I was in the middle of a group of young men who loudly expressed the view that the whole event was “f**king out of order, innit” and that it should not be allowed, but most of the people standing around me as I photographed seemed startled but generally amused by the ride, even if few realised what it was about.

According to the web site, it is a “peaceful, imaginative and fun protest against oil dependency and car culture. A celebration of the bicycle and also a celebration of the power and individuality of the human body. A symbol of the vulnerability of the cyclist in traffic.”

I don’t know how many cyclists took part – it seemed roughly the same size as in previous years, and my guess would be a thousand or two. Of course it wasn’t just cyclists, there were some skateboards and roller blades, and some odd sort of curved metal thing. Surprisingly only two unicyclists – you have to be an exhibitionist to ride a unicycle, so I’d expect rather more. (Perhaps they are all away in Nova Scotia keeping most of their clothes on and ‘Riding the Lobster‘ along with one of my sons?) One of them was riding with the slogan “One Love, One Wheel” on his chest.

Cyclists take up quite a bit of road space compared to marchers, so it is certainly more impressive than a march with the same number of people, and of course the bared flesh greatly adds to the impact.

More pictures on My London Diary, though as always only a fairly small fraction of those I took. If you were on the ride and would like your picture (if I took one) email me and I’ll send one if I can.