Photo Arles on Foto 8

So far it would seem there hasn’t been a great deal to report from Arles if the first batch of images in George Georgiou’s photo-diary Photo Arles is to be believed, but it’s a nice idea and there are certainly a few images that made me wish I was there among others that made me glad I wasn’t. So far the toilets don’t appeal and only Vanessa Winship’s exhibition seems worth more than a cursory glance, but some of Georgiou’s pictures certainly look better than those on some other walls. Doubtless more will appear as the week progresses, and I’m sure there will be some interesting text on the festival too.

Also on Foto 8 is news of their latest monthly competition, which has noticed that next month we will have a Friday 08/08/08, and invites anyone to submit low-res files pictures taken on that day- either by e-mail or by posting on Flickr.

Editors Don’t Look at Pictures?

When a picture of Iran’s recent missile tests hit the front pages of major US newspapers and made news services including the BBC, one thing was obvious at a glance. It was a fake, as a blog on the NY Times clearly shows (thanks to State of the Art where I first saw the story, although there is rather more about it and how it broke on PDN Newswire, as well as a later update on the story on PDN Pulse.)

An Irani Photoshop user had cloned in an extra missile, and it wasn’t a convincing job. One missile doesn’t look a lot different to another, but when several clouds of dust from the right hand missile appear identically and rather distinctively underneath the missile to its left it is a bit of an instant give-away.

(When I looked there were over 600 comments on the post, although I’ve not read them all. Some suggest there may have been further doctoring of the image.)

Yet though it was an obvious fake, not only did the picture fool Agence France Press, who picked it up from an Iranian Revolutionary Guard web site who picked it up and distributed it (and I rather doubt will be sending the licensing fees back to Iran), but editors at leading newspapers and web news sites.

If anyone in the media was seriously looking at photographs, the cloning would have been spotted immediately – it really is rather an amateur job as surely there must have been other images with the dust clouds at a different state from which they could have been borrowed – or a little intelligent reworking could have made them a less than perfect match. Of course it isn’t the only case of bad photo-manipulation – and State of the Art have also reported Fox News being caught badly uglifying a NY Times reporter recently, I think using one of the tools available for making a mess of your mates to post on your social networking site.

But the news is dominated by people whose business is words.

Panoramas and Balazs Gardi

I’ve long been a fan of panoramic images, though since moving to digital for most of my work I’ve taken far fewer (and there are still a few rolls of film containing them waiting for me to develop them.) Having tried a few panoramas on film by combining several exposures (so much easier with digital!) I saved long and hard for a rather expensive Japanese Widelux swing lens model in around 1990 and worked fairly hard with it and a cheap Ukranian Horizon 202 I acquired a few years later.


(See it larger on my Lea Valley web site)

With digital you can fairly easily stitch images to make panoramas – especially with static subjects, but it is hard to work with people, and cameras such as the Horizon or the no longer made Hasselblad XPan – a superb rectilinear panoramic camera, especially when fitted with the wide-angle 30mm lens, which became another favourite of mine, still have a role.

What brought panoramic photography to my mind was a fine set of black and white images, The Valley, taken in Afghanistan in late 2007 by Hungarian freelance Balazs Gardi of VII Network which includes some panoramics. Gardi first came to my attention when he won a Getty Grant in 2005 for his work on Roma. I’ve also mentioned ‘The Valley’ before but it was brought back to mind by a recent mention on PDN Pulse, where I also read news of another panorama currently arriving from Mars, which will take several Martian days to complete!

Friedlander in Minneapolis

It is worth reading John Camp‘s post ‘Lee Fridelander in Minneapolis‘ on The Online Photographer
not for what it tells you about the photographer and his work (rather little – as he says “Friedlander is a photographer who I never quite got hold of“) but for the questions it raises about showing photographs in galleries and in particular about print size and the current fashion for large prints. The post is also developing a lively series of comments, many of interest.

I’ve always thought that photography is at its best as an intimate medium, one best suited to presentation in a book or magazine, or by leafing through piles of prints (and – for those of us with high-quality screens – by viewing high resolution images on line, though for very obvious reasons few photographers make their pictures generally available in this way.) Most of the memorable shows I’ve seen have also been in relatively small galleries rather than the giant halls of some major museums, although these can be made to work by breaking them up in a suitable fashion.

Walking round events such as ‘Paris Photo’ where dealers from around the world display their more saleable works some stands are filled by huge images, but those more crowded with viewers are those with smaller works on display. Of course that means there is more to look at, which takes longer, but I think it is more than this. There does seem – with a few notable exceptions – to generally be an inverse relationship between size and interest in photographs.

Or perhaps it is just that there are just the same proportion of ordinary or not very interesting images irrespective of size, but that size makes the boring seem even more so?

The post also refers to the large images of Richard Prince, stolen from photographers such as Sam Abell and gives a link to a video where he talks in a very measured way about his feelings on seeing his work used in this way. When Abell says that what Prince does is legal, I wonder if that is the case in other countries where – unlike the USA – moral rights are taken more seriously. There might be some interesting and possibly rewarding work for lawyers there.

You can see an interesting selection of Friedlander‘s photographs through an image search on Google, but the best collection of his work is probably on Artnet though you can see some more organised slide shows at the Fraenkel Gallery which misrepresents the photographer and provided the work for Artnet. Unfortunately the several pieces I’ve written about his work are no longer available on line, but one day I’ll perhaps get round to a new essay.

London Pride


Stonewall’s slogan – ‘Some people are gay – Get over it!’

From My London Diary – where you can see more pictures:

It’s nearly 20 years since I first photographed Pride (you can really go back in time and view the actual web site I wrote in 1997 for my pictures that year – but I would no longer recommend Netscape Navigator 4!) and some earlier work is still on Fixing Shadows. You can also see the 40 or so pictures (as rather better scans) from my ‘Ten Years of Pride‘, part of the ‘Queer is Here‘ exhibition at the Museum of London in 2006.)

Now I wonder each year if I will bother to photograph it next year. It’s still I think an important event, but really now an entertainment rather than the kind of statement it used to be.

This year there seemed to be rather less of the parade than in previous years, though much of it seemed just the same as last year, and the whole thing seems to have rather got in a rut. Still, at least this year it was dry.

Paper Planes for Ruth Kelly

Flash mobs can be rather tricky things to photograph, particularly for those of us who find it difficult to be at the right place at the right time. According to the FAQ on the UK Flash Mob web site, a flash mob is “a sudden gathering of people into a crowd that do something unusual for a few minutes in unison and then disperse.” I photographed one of their events – the London start of a Flash Mob Global Pillow Fight in Leicester Square – earlier this year.

‘Stop Airport Expansion‘ was both the name of the group who had organised the event (and an earlier one to celebrate the opening of Hedatrow T5 that I missed) and the message they wanted to send to the elusive Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly, who has refused to visit local authorities or meet with local people who will be affected by airport expansion, particularly by a third runway at Heathrow. The ‘Stop Heathrow Airport Expansion Flashmob‘ took place outside the offices of the Department for Transport in Marsham St, though where she was at the time nobody seemed to know.

I’ve been opposed to the expansion of Heathrow as a local resident since I used to watch the aircraft low over the garden from my pram. The airport began with deception before my birth, pushed through in wartime (and diverting resources from the war effort) and has continued to grow and grow, repeatedly breaking promises that each new development will be the last. I photographed marches against the building of the third runway at Heathrow in 2003 as well as earlier this year.

People did appear fairly dramatically just before 11 am, although there were perhaps not quite enough of them to make a real mob.

The whistle came early
And when someone (at right above) blew a whistle just before 11.02 (their clock was wrong) everyone took it as a signal to throw their planes, though they did pick them up and throw them again at around the correct moment. They had to pick up the planes in any case, as police had warned them they might otherwise be charged with littering.

Planes in flight

Catching good pictures of paper planes in flight turned out to be surprisingly tricky. I’d fortunately realised there might be a problem in advance, and turned the D300 on to the high speed mode. Usually I leave the camera on the low speed continuous setting, which I’ve set using the custom setting d4 to be 3 frames per second. I find this is the fastest speed I can leave it on and reliably take a single exposure by a short shutter press that doesn’t jab and cause camera shake, while allowing me to take a sequence of images by holding my finger down.

Up till now I’ve also been using the 14 bit RAW setting, which restricts the maximum frame rate to slightly slower than this, at 2.5 fps. I’ve seen reports that there is very little advantage in using this compared to the 12 bit setting, but hadn’t found the time to test it out for myself. (I’ve continued to use RAW compression which I tested on the D200 and found made no discernible difference in my kind of pictures.) But waiting for the mob to flash, I’d remembered to set the bit depth down to 12 bit so I could shoot 12 bit RAW bursts at 8 frames per second.

You can see more of my efforts at photographing the Stop Heathrow Airport Expansion Flashmob on My London Diary as usual.

I didn’t notice any drop in quality in these files compared to the 14 bit ones, but the extra number of pictures on a card was significant (the manual suggests around 1.3 times as many.) I found I got almost exactly 100 files per gigabyte compared to around 79 using 14 bit, a very slightly smaller difference. I’ll perhaps get round to making some more careful comparisons of image quality for myslef shortly – and when I do will write more.

Even in 1/8th of a second, a paper plane moves a considerable distance, and catching them flying low with the added milliseconds of reaction time and shutter lag was a lottery in which I had no outstanding success. Of course I could have set something up, but I’m not that sort of photographer.

Time Running Out

Time seems to be passing very quickly for me at the moment, and I could hardly believe it when I had to start a new month on My London Diary. So it was perhaps fitting that several of the events I’ve photographed recently have been about time running out for our planet.

June 30 was the last day of a government consultation about what started off as a potentially good idea – eco-towns – but has ended up as an unpopular mistake. Eco-towns were promised to be zero-carbon new developments using brown-field sites and acting as exemplars of ecological development in various ways. But the thinking behind them was never properly explored, and murky compromises with the building industry muddied the original concept, and we ended up with proposals that really looked very little different from other new town developments, largely to be sited on prime agricultural land. Brown-field sites are harder to find and generally give developers more problems.

It was hardly surprising that local protest groups emerged to oppose most of the proposals, nor that most of their opposition was on environmental grounds although probably very few of us welcome development in our own backyards. (I certainly hated it when the council built rather plain flats on the unregistered common land at the end of my garden.)

BARD against Middle Quinton

Certainly I think the strength of the opposition which was demonstrated outside the Houses of Parliament on June 30 will at least worry the government – as should the comments of prominent architects and environmentalists.

More on the story – and of course many more pictures –
in Eco-Towns Scam – Parliament Lobby on My London Diary.

Are You being Served?

‘Are You being Served’ is not, as its name suggests, about a department store, but about the small shops that are common in the inner city area around the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green and Hackney in the East End of London. (If you look on Tom Hunter‘s web site, you will find this work under the more prosaic and I think rather better title, ‘East End Business.’)

I first met Hunter when his work ‘The Ghetto‘, a photographic sculpture of a street in London Fields, just up the road from the Bethnal Green museum, was one of the star exhibits in a show at the Museum of London in 1995, in which I also had a couple of pictures, and I’ve written about his work on several occasions, most recently when he became the first photographer to have an exhibition in London’s National Gallery.

When I visited the show (it continues at the Museum of Childhood until Nov 9, 2008), there were 16 moderately large colour prints on the wall of the Museum, tucked away to the left as you enter. Although the museum was busy with school groups coming in an out during the 20 minutes or so while I was there, I was the only person to come and look at them at that time. Curiously, an Evening Standard review had talked of their being 30 prints, so there appear to be 14 that have gone missing (or a curious lack of numeracy by that reviewer) or perhaps hidden elsewhere in the museum. On the web there are roughly 40 images, including most if not all of those I saw in the show.

What I think the show needs for its current location- and the pictures would serve well – is a well-written worksheet getting visitors to the museum – who mainly are school-children – to look at the images and question the content and their responses to it. What it gets is an essay of typical academic mystification. But it isn’t fair to blame Tom Hunter for the text which accompanies his pictures.

The pictures seem to me to be a workmanlike response to a relatively simple brief. The essay says they “were inspired by a nineteenth-century model of a local a butcher’s shop in the Museum of Childhood” (sic) What it fails to note is that pictures such as this were a staple of Victorian photography, and a genre that has continued to attract photographers to the present day. Its the kind of thing that many students have a go at in their courses (one of many project ideas that we used to suggest to students on the courses I taught on) and that has filled rather too many books of photographs and exhibitions – including at least one other in a major London gallery in the past year.

Many of us have been drawn to photograph such small businesses, largely because of the way they reflect the personalities and culture of their owners. You can see a few of my own attempts in this area among the pictures in my own ‘Cafe Ideal, Cool Blondes, and Paradise‘, (1986-96) in which I deliberately avoided photographing the shop owners, who are at the centre (often literally) of Hunter’s pictures.

It goes without saying that Hunter does it pretty well, although perhaps this isn’t the work he will particularly want to be remembered by. It is certainly all good, workmanlike stuff, but nothing that has the appeal of – for example, Walker Evans’s 1936 Roadside Stand near Birmingham.

Library of Congress image
(You can download a high res version of this from the US Library of Congress to print.)

Compositionally, Hunter I think largely follows the lead of Evans, liking when possible to adopt a square-on viewpoint. This may have limited his choice of subject matter, as many of the local shops will have been just too small or have been laid out in the wrong way to allow him to work in this manner.

The pictures do – of course – as the essay I think takes rather a lot of words to say, reflect the multicultural nature of the area. It would have been hard for them not to. But while it suggest that there “is always a sense of the anticipated customer” I think this is clearly not the case. They are very clearly about being photographed and it is the interaction between photographer and photographed that enlivens these images.

It is a relationship that tends to be unsure, and Hunter does seem to very much put his subjects at ease. They may be thinking he is a slightly crazy (as people often do think photographers are – though the police posters try to convince them we are all dangerous terrorists), but they perhaps think he is a harmless and rather pleasant lunatic and are happy to humour him.

There are some curious excitements in these images that certainly made my visit worthwhile. One is I think a rather small shop, forcing Hunter for once to work from an oblique viewpoint, actually looking in through the doorway. Most of the image is taken up by a glass-fronted display case of pastries (rather like a museum show case), and the shopkeeper and his shorter female assistant are in a small area above some kind of electrical unit at the right of the image. There is something about the image – perhaps their sharpness while this unit, a little closer to the camera is slightly out of focus, that makes them look not like actual people but like some kind of cardboard figures in an advertising display (traditionally large format camera movements might have been used to produce an oblique plane of focus for an image like this.) The oddity is enhanced by the side of the display unit, which has a patterned effect and, at first glance a metallic look to it. My mind interprets the side as a surface that should reflect rather than transmit, and we can see the left side of the man’s shirt and shoulder through it, but visually the strong check pattern seems to be in front. It is a curious and rather compelling effect.

Another image shows a huge patterned suitcase like some leopard in its den between two African men surrounded by suitcases and cardboard boxes; they are relaxed, leaning back, but there is a menace as that leopard may at any minute pounce. But perhaps my favourite image is a Chinese fish and chip shop, again seen through a doorway to get the necessary distance, the L plate on a box on the back of a scooter tilted crazily at the right of the image; but what really makes it for me is the contrast with the elegance of the peacock screen poking up behind the counter.

This was also a show that made me think about technical questions, particularly about the differences there might have been in this work had Hunter used digital instead of film.  Looking at it on his web site also made me think about the differences between viewing a set of images on screen and on the gallery wall. But these are questions I had better return to in later post.

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.