The Year in Pictures

James Danziger is a well known name in photographic circles, having opened a New York gallery in 1989 and now running Danziger Projects in New York’s Chelsea. So the start of a new blog, The Year In Pictures, in which he promises to write about pictures that have captured his imagination is welcome news. One to bookmark or add to your blog feeds.

My favourite among his postings so far is a piece on Milton Rogovin, entitled ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ where he publishes a great image from 1973 of Lower West Siders Johnny Lee Wines and Zeke Johnson, along with 4 unpublished and previously unseen shots of Johnny from the same day, and another of his “favorite pictures that blends happiness, romance, and a certain bashfulness” by Malick Sidibe.

Great, I thought, and wouldn’t it be nice to link to my feature on Milton Rogovin. Then I remembered that was no longer on line (or at least only in the Internet Archive), so I wrote a new and revised version, correcting a number of mistakes and adding some new material. Rogovin is a really fine documentary photographer, and incredibly only really started serious photography when he was in his late 40s. He finally retired in 2003, the year when his wife, comrade and muse Anna Rogovin died, and the family are now preparing to celebrate his 98th birthday next month.

This year marks a significant anniversary for Rogovin. It was 50 years ago, in 1957, at the height of the great American Cold War paranoia, that he refused to answer the questions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and was pilloried by the Buffalo Evening News as “Buffalo’s Top Red”, and harassed by the FBI. 50 years in which he continued to live his courageous belief in the dignity of humanity and the inherent worth of people, channelling his efforts into photography. 50 years over which America changed from regarding him as a national enemy to accepting him as a national treasure, when in 1999 his negatives, contact sheets and around 1300 prints were archived by the Library of Congress, the first living photographer to be honoured in this way since the 1970s.

Milton Rogovin

For images by Rogovin, open a new window on the Rogovin website while reading this essay.

New York Origins

Milton Rogovin‘s parents, Jacob and Dora, were Lithuanian Jewish immigrants; Jacob had arrived in New York in 1904 and Dora came the following year with their year old baby Sam, and they set up a shop selling household goods on Park Avenue in New York’s Harlem. Their second son was born in 1907, followed in 1909 by Milton. His first language and that of his family was Yiddish.

Business started to get tough after the First World War ended in 1918, and in 1920 the family and shop moved to Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, but Milton travelled in to Manhattan to attend Stuyvesant High School. From there he went on to Columbia University where he qualified as an optometrist in 1931.

By then the depression had hit, the family store had gone bust, and his father died of a heart attack four months before he graduated. Work as an optometrist in New York was hard to find and sporadic. In 1938 he moved to Buffalo to take a job there where there was more opportunity.

Politicisation

The depression and his own experiences, particularly the failure of the shop and his father’s death made him become politically active, and he helped to set up the Optical Workers Union in New York City. He continued his union activities after moving to Buffalo, losing his job there in 1939 when he picketed two of his boss’s offices.

He had met Anne Snetsky (later Setters) at a wedding in Buffalo in 1938, where they argued about the Spanish Civil War – he was highly concerned while she was then indifferent to the cause – and fell in love. They were to remain life-long lovers and comrades until her death in 2003.

With Anne’s encouragement and the support of the union, he decided to set up in practice as an optometrist on his own, on the edge of Buffalo’s deprived working-class Italian Lower West Side.

War Years

Anne and he got married in 1942, which was also the year Rogovin bought his first camera. Later in the year he volunteered to serve in the US armed forces, training as an X-ray technician before being assigned to serve as an optometrist. During his training he entered and won a photo contest at the training school with a picture of a waterfall taken on his new camera.

In 1944 he was posted to a hospital in Cirencester in the west of England, until the end of the war in Europe.

Back In Buffalo

After war service, he returned to Buffalo, where his brother (also an optometrist) had been keeping the practice running, and they worked as partners. He continued his political activities, becoming the librarian for the local communist party, as well as being active in the union, taking part in encouraging black voters to register and other political campaigns.

Mexico
Rogovin and Anne made their first visit to Mexico in 1953, where they met a number of left-wing Mexican artists and then and in subsequent visits over the next four years he made a number of photographs there.

He was by this time developing a greater interest in photography, showing pictures in the annual Western New York Exhibition at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo in 1954 and 1958.

Red Scare: “The Top Red in Buffalo”

Cold-war hysteria in America was growing, and in 1957 Rogovin was summoned to appear before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Rogovin invoked his constitutional right to refuse to testify rather than cooperate in any way, but became the subject of various newspaper headlines which labelled him as ‘Buffalo’s Top Red.’

In the following months his business fell off dramatically; some who thought of themselves as loyal Americans wanted nothing to do with ‘Commies’, while others felt that they too might suffer from similar smears if they continued to associate with him.

Many photographers and other artists also suffered from McCarthyism. The New York Photo League, the most important and vital photographic organisation of the era – one that changed the history of photography and had many leading photographers as members (and to their credit others joined to try and protect it after it had been named) – was forced to close. Paul Strand chose to leave America and live in France to avoid the persecution. Any American who dreamed there could be a better and more equal future was open to attack.

Store Front Churches

Rogovin was left with time on his hands as the business collapsed. William Tallmadge, a friend and professor of music at Buffalo State University, was recording music at one of Buffalo’s Afro-American Holiness Churches and invited him to come along and photograph.

The experience decided him to dedicate his life to photography. Progressive political activities had become virtually impossible in Buffalo and he felt his “voice was essentially silenced, so I decided to speak out through photographs.”

After working with Tallmadge for three months, he continued to photograph in Afro-American churches in Buffalo for the next three years, learning the skills that he needed. He went on a two week workshop with Minor White, who showed him how to use the bare-bulb flash technique that he continued to work with for the rest of his career, and worked out how to photograph black faces in a way that achieved proper gradation with their darker skin tones.

White also gave him advice on shutter speeds, suggesting that rather than use 1/125th which had the effect of freezing the movement of his subjects, he should use a slower speed, perhaps 1/25th, which would give a slightly more dynamic quality where there was some movement.

His approach when photographing people was simple and straightforward. He would ask permission to take their picture, set up his camera on its tripod and let them decide how to pose. The only thing he would ask them was to look at the camera – he liked to see their eyes – as was perhaps natural for an optometrist. The camera meets the gaze of the subjects, giving his work a powerful directness.

Minor White was a great supporter of his work, and published pictures from the project in his magazine, Aperture, getting W E B Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP (National Association of the Advancement of Colored People) to write an introduction.

Family of Miners

Rogovin was not making money from his pictures at this time. Fortunately Anne was still able to carry on with her teaching in special education and support the family and his work, as well as helping him in developing his projects.

In 1962, they read about the problems in the coal industry and in particular for Appalachian miners, with declining production as the car industry leading to lower demand for coal. As well as increasing unemployment there were also the health problems faced from working under appalling, dusty conditions underground, with most or all eventually succumbing to silicosis.

A letter to the mineworkers union president got them an introduction to the union office in West Virginia, and during Anne’s summer break they travelled there to see and photograph the workers. They were to return for the next eight summers to continue the work.

In 1981 he began a larger project which he called ‘Family of Miners’, starting again in the Appalachians. The following year there was a show of his work on the store front churches and working people in Paris, and he came and photographed miners in the north of France, then in 1983, support from the Scottish miners union enabled him to photograph miners in Scotland.

In 1983, he received the W Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography and was able to extend his work on miners to other countries, eventually including China, Cuba, Germany, Mexico, Spain and Zimbabwe

Neruda and Chile

On 1967, Rogovin sent a letter to the great Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, requesting his help in producing a series of photographs of the people and the country with Neruda’s writing. Some of the pictures were published in the Czech Revue Fotografie in 1976 later the project was published as ‘Windows that Open Inward‘ including poems by Neruda.

Lower West Side

By 1970, Rogovin was deliberately cutting down his remaining work as an optimetrist to spend more time on photography. However it was not until many years later, around 1978, that he was able – with family support and his wife’s income – to give this up to be full time as a photographer.

His next major project began in 1972, when he decided to document the Lower West Side. The Italian population there when he moved to Buffalo had moved out to wealthier areas, and had been replaced by Puerto Rican and African-Americans. It was now an area with high levels of crime, drugs, alcoholism, prostitution and high unemployment.

At first people there were very suspicious of a white guy with a camera, regarding him as a spy sent by the police or other authorities. With the help of Anne, he slowly get to know people and gain their trust, enabling him to photograph them in their homes as well as in public.

When he took his Hasselblad and set it up on a tripod, he noticed that people came up to him and asked him how much it had cost. He took the hint and decided it would be more sensible to use his old Rolleiflex instead – and it was his preferred camera from then on, used for most of his best pictures.

The Rolleiflex – like the Hasselblad – has a focussing screen on the top of the camera, requiring the photographer to bow his head to look down at it. This reverent attitude towards the sitter contrasts with the more aggresive direct view, aiming at the person with an eye-level viewfinder. It reflected his attitude to those he photographed.

Three years of work in the Lower West side led to his first major exhibition, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. He organised a smaller show in the Lower West Side itself with buses to the gallery so that those he had photographed and their friends would see the work.

He returned to photograph there in 1984-6, at Anne’s suggestion producing ‘Lower West Side Revisted‘ which pairs these pictures with the work a dozen or so years earlier in diptychs. He managed to locate over a hundred people he had photographed previously – and found many had the pictures he had made hanging proudly on their walls.

Following his recovery from surgery for a heart problem and prostate cancer, again prompted by his wife he returned again in 1992-4, again photographing the same people thus producing some outstanding triptychs taken over a 20 year period, showing them at radically different stages in their lives. These produced the book ‘Triptychs: Buffalo’s Lower West Side Revisited‘ (1994.)

By 1997, cataracts in both eyes and fading sight forced Rogovin to sell his camera and shut up his darkroom. But being unable to photograph was too frustrating and he had surgery in 1999, which restored his vision, and he bought back his camera.

In 2000, with Anne and broadcaster Dave Isay, he returned to photograph in the Lower West Side for a fourth time. They managed to find 18 of his original subjects and photograph them to produce a series of ‘Quartets’. Isay had worked with photographer Harvey Wang, who produced the award-winning documentary short film ‘Milton Rogovin, The Forgotten Ones‘ (2003.)

Workers

In 1976, inspired by a Bertolt Brecht poem, ‘A Worker Reads History‘ he began to photograph workers at the steel mills and car factories around Buffalo.

A picture of a steel worker and child feeding ducks outside their home published in the Illinois Historical Society journal led him to extend his work. When he had photographed someone at work, he would go back with a print and a request to photograph them at home with their families. His workers are not just workers, not just a small cog in the machine of production, but people, individuals with their own lives outside of work.

In 1987, he returned to photograph these people again, now out of work, as steel production had ended in the area.

In 1993, his book ‘Portraits in Steel‘ was published, with interviews of the subjects by Michael Frisch.

Working Methods

Working with 120 roll film, Rogovin could make 12 images on a roll, and to keep costs down he usually fitted three or four people or groups onto each roll, taking only 3 or 4 frames for each of them.

He did all his own darkroom work, developing the film and them contact printing it to choose which of the frames to enlarge. The Rolleiflex (and Hasselblad) produce 6×6 cm negatives (actually around 56mmx56mm) making the contacts easy to assess. Normally he would chose at least one image of each person and print it carefully, dodging and burning as required to bring out the most from the negative, to make sure that he had a good picture to give to the subject.

The bare bulb technique is a good method of getting fairly even light in small rooms. As its name suggests, it uses a bulb holder with a bulb but no reflector, so that light is given out in all directions more or less evenly. Shooting as he usually did in small rooms, this produced in a lot of light bouncing from walls and ceilings as well as some direct illumination.

Special flash guns or slaves can be bought for bare bulb use, or you can get bare bulb effects from an ordinary flashgun by using an attachment – a large translucent bulb on the front of the flash. You do however need a fairly powerful flash as the light, being spread out is considerably less intense than with a normal directional flash.

Rogovin worked almost entirely in black and white. He decided that colour was a distraction that took people’s attention away from the subject and into thinking about the colour of the clothes or surrounding objects.

Colour would of course have added considerably to his costs and to the complexity of the processing and printing. Black and white is very much more straightforward to process and print yourself, while colour is generally best handled by machine rather than hand processing.

Influences on his Work

Although Rogovin was aware of documentary photography and was a friend of Paul Strand, as well as having respect for the work of photographers such as Lewis Hine, Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White, he has said that his major influences came not from photography but painting, and in particular the work of Goya and Kâthe Kollwitz.

It is perhaps hard to understand this, looking at the very photographic quality of his work. Of course the paintings may interest him more and inspire him to get out an make images, but the forms that these take are rather more clearly based on the photographic sources.

One particular film by Luis Bunuel, ‘Los Olvidados‘ (1950) did have an important impact, and is reflected not just in the title of his book ‘The Forgotten Ones’ (he liked it so much that he actually used the title for two books, the first in 1985, and then in 2003), but in a devotion throughout his working life as a photographer to photograph ordinary people rather than the rich and famous. In its concern for ordinary people and their often forgotten lives his work obviously resembles Bunuel’s film, but it lacks the surreal symbolism which is central to Bunuel’s vision.

Peter Marshall, 2007

Other web links on Milton Rogovin, some of which provided information for this feature:

Milton Rogovin web site
Library of Congress: Milton Rogovin
Luminous Lint – Milton Rogovin
N Y Times A Sympathetic Lens on Ordinary People
NPR: Milton Rogovin
Afterimage: Robert Hirsch Interview with Milton Rogovin
The Forgotten Ones (book – with pictures on line

David Plowden – Vanishing Point?

I’ve written before – elsewhere – about David Plowden. His ‘Small Town America‘, published in 1994 by Harry Abrams in NY (ISBN 0810938421) remains one of my favourite records of America – just one among around 20 of his books, and he was among the list of around 250 ‘Notable Photographers‘ I first put on-line around 2000.

He is also one of the photographers whose work is included on David Sapir’s Fixing Shadows, one of the earliest web sites to feature fine collections of ‘straight photography‘ (and on which I was proud to be included as the first UK photographer on the site.)

So it was a little surprising to read on The Online Photographer a review of his retrospective publication ‘Vanishing Point‘ starting “David Plowden may be the best photographer you never heard of.” Surely there can be few with a serious interest in photography who didn’t visit the old ‘About Photography‘ or ‘Fixing Shadows‘ – I ask tongue in cheek, although back in 2000, there really were not too many other serious games on the block.

But of course there are people with a serious interest in photography – even some photographers – who were hardly out of nappies in those primitive days of the web, and now we are overwhelmed with material. Then I had problems finding sites worth writing about because there was so little available; now I have problems finding sites worth writing about because there is so much.

Back to David Plowden, a fine and unassuming gentleman who I met a few years back, and a great photographer. Reviewer Geoffrey Wittig puts it well: “Walker Evans without the condescension.” His work is clear, precise statements, beautifully seen and presented. As the review also says, it is perhaps low on irony, but it is full of a kind of love and reverence for the subject.

Plowden’s lack of visibility in some circles largely resulted from a difference of opinion between him and curator John Szarkowski, and he never made it to the Czar’s pantheon. There seems to me to be a certain irony here, in that some of Szarkowski’s own photography has a very similar character; perhaps their failure to connect was some kind of turf war on the curator’s part.

Plowden of course kept on at the photography for some 50 years, and at 75 has a show – as Arthur Gross points out in a comment to the review (do read it) – at the Catherine Edelmann Gallery in Chicago (until Dec 29, 2007.) You can also find his work at the Lawrence Miller Gallery, but the definitive site is his own David Plowden website.

Vanishing Point (ISBN-10: 0393062546) is an expensively produced book and one that needs a strong table to rest it on, with some 350 pages. Fortunately it is heavily discounted from suppliers such as Amazon and would be a very acceptable Christmas present for many photographers, including myself!

Paris Photo – The Empty Centre

The ‘Central Exhibition‘ of this year’s Paris Photo was ‘Landscape Photography in the UniCredit Collection’, and was a part of this year’s focus on photography in Italy. The show included around 30 works by 10 photographers, some extremely large images.


Upper Level: BMW – Paris Photo Prize; Lower Level: Central Exhibition

Unfortunately, on the basis of the work presented here, the collection has not bought particularly wisely. There was plenty of evidence elsewhere on various exhibition stands that Mario Giacomelli (1925-2000) was a fine photographer, but the few prints displayed were at best unconvincing. Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992) was an interesting colour photographer at a time before colour became respectable, but the vintage prints were disappointing, perhaps due to the ravages of time. There were a couple of nice prints by Mimmo Jodice (b1934) – but again better and more appropriate work elsewhere. Most photographers will be familiar with the work of Franco Fontana (b1933), and there was a good exhibition of his work in the FotoArtFestival at Bielsko-Biala last month, but again the work here was somewhat disappointing. Perhaps the only photographer whose work in this section impressed was Gabriele Basilico (b1944), though again there was better work by him elsewhere in PP.

UniCredit, one of the major European banks, was founded in Italy and started to collect contemporary Italian art, particularly photography, in 2004. Presumably they are not short of money, and apparently the collection includes 500 photographs, but on the basis of this show, they would not appear to have spent wisely.

An Italian photographer I met at PP told me that, like many other Italian photographers she had talked to, she felt that this show – along with the two other sections of the invited Italian presence, Statement: Italy and the General Section, “an overview of Italian photography from the 1950s to today” – actually failed to provide an adequate representation of photography in Italy today, but rather reflected the artists represented by the relatively small number of Italian galleries who were taking part in PP.

I rather hope she was right, otherwise the future of photography in Italy appears depressing. The 5 photographers I’ve mentioned above were all born before 1945, and there seemed little evidence here of exciting new work.

Prix BMW – Paris Photo

At the centre of Paris Photo, (PP), is a stand displaying a car. Given that BMW are an official Paris Photo partner and provide the BMW-Paris Photo prize, I imagine it was probably a BMW, but it looked pretty boring to me.

Personally I’d like to see ban on cars in cities. For London we could use the M25 as a giant car park (it sometimes gets like that) and set up decent public transport within it. Perhaps this might even include some electric taxis and electric self-drive vehicles – perhaps at ranks like those bikes in Paris for London Oyster card users, though I think I’d favour extensive light rail links to some more central locations.

I sold the first and only car I owned in 1966, though I have occasionally hired one in the years since then. Despite what manufacturers like BMW would like us to think, there is no such thing as a ‘green’ car – running on hydrogen or not. Green ‘vehicles’ are pedal powered.

I still ride the bike given me by my eldest brother (long dead) for my 13th birthday, though almost everything except the frame and handlebars have been replaced over the years. And one of my most useful photo accessories is a Brompton, a folding bike I can carry on trains and tubes. It gets you to locations without fuss or parking problems, and also is handy to lean against walls and stand on to look over them.

I’m definitely not a car person. Though I hardly think that’s why I found the entries to the 2007 BMW – Paris Photo Prize so disappointing. The competition is limited to works by living art photographers entered by the galleries taking part in PP, and apparently 60 works were submitted from the over 80 galleries.

The 16 short-listed works were on show in a spacious gallery area on a large doughnut-shaped dais at the centre of PP, and I found the selection as a whole depressingly poor. The 2007 theme was “Water, the Origin of Life” and even works by photographers I usually admire seemed to lack inspiration. Indeed, for several of them, “pedestrian” was the word that came into my mind for their interpretation of the theme.

The jury included Jacqueline d’Amecourt, curator of the Lhoist Collection based in Brussels, Vince Aletti, photography critic of the New Yorker magazine, Charlotte Cotton, now in charge of photography at LACMA in Los Angeles, Roberta Valtorta, director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Cinisello Balsamo, Milan, photographer Massimo Vitali and two guys from BMW. They didn’t come to the same conclusion as me, but at least they avoided choosing of the more boring works.


Jitka Hanzlová, Untitled (Hungry fishes) from the series the cotton rose , 2004, Kicken (Berlin)

Czech photographer Jitka Hanzlová (b 1958) who lives in Germany was the winner of the 12,000 Euro prize. Her image wasn’t my first choice, but it was certainly one of the better entries.

Paris Photo

Paris Photo was one of the highlights of the year for me, although there is much about the actual event and its venue I dislike. For those who’ve not been, PP is mainly a trading show for dealers, with over 80 from around the world having stands and selling product. Its an expensive business, so many are looking for big money, largely selling corporate artworks to decorate extravagantly large office walls in major cities across the world. What matters most is scale and colour and the result is big prints that often achieve the difficult task of being both boring and garish.

If you went to PhotoLondon you will know exactly what I mean. Half of Paris Photo was like this, but there was also a truly incredible amount of really excellent photography on display, including on the stands of some of the better-known US dealers. My vote for the favourite of these has to go to Bruce Silverstein, where several photographers were treated to well-displayed mini-exhibitions of their work – with a pink-curtained area with images by Joel-Peter Witkin, and another black-painted wall with images by Aaron Siskind, as well as a nice range of works from Paris by one of my favourite photographers Andre Kertesz, along with one of the first images I wrote (and lectured) about, his Martinique, made when he was in his seventies in 1972. You can read someone else’s thoughts about it here.

Other galleries with plenty to see included Laurence Miller, Robert Klein and Howard Greenburg. Vu La Galerie had a fine range of images, mainly documentary and photojournalistic, but also including a couple of John Davies landscapes from the show currently at their Paris gallery.

Far too many stands to mention were – at least in part – showing interesting work, and from all periods of photography. Many years ago I picked up a number of copies of ‘Photograms of the Year‘ from the 1920s and 30s, and some of the more interesting images were nudes by the Czech photographer Frantisek Drtikol, and I came across work by him on half a dozen different stands including Kicken from Berlin and Michael Hoppen. Kicken also had some of the Austrian Heinrich Kuhn‘s large gum prints from around 1900, impressive for their size. Most of his work I had only previously seen as small reproductions.

There was also some fine work from the nineteenth century, with some of the finest images being on the stalls of English dealers, including for the first time Lindsey Stuart from Bernard Quaritch Ltd, who was showing on Baudoin Lebon stand, and Robert Hershkowitz.

One thing that was noticeable was that some galleries were showing exactly the same highly priced images as last year, perhaps an indication that these pictures were actually overpriced?

The market in photography has many pitfalls for the ignorant or inexperienced, and it always dismays me to find work that must make the photographers turn in their graves for sale. One stand had a couple of cyanotypes that I would have told my rawest student to put in the bin and have another try, and there were many ‘vintage prints’ that must surely have been taken out of the bins of the photographers concerned. It made me feel I should rush home and start looking through all those old boxes of my own ‘vintage’ prints in the loft and burn any which I don’t think reflect my best standards – probably most of the prints from my first 20 years in photography. In most cases they only got into those boxes because they weren’t quite good enough to show.

Of course the whole thing about ‘vintage’ prints is largely a nonsense. There were several opportunities in PP to compare prints of the same image on different stands made at different times. In virtually every case, the prints made later are better. And of course cheaper.

Larry Clark at the MEP

The Maison Europeenne de la Photographie (MEP) is perhaps my favourite space to go to look at photography, and I only wish we had something like it in London, though of course a part of its charm is that it is just a few yards from the busy pavements of the Rue St Antoine where you can eat and buy real French food along with the ordinary Parisians. I’ve spent many happy hours and days wandering the Marais, and if it has lost a little of its charm over the years under the relentless spread of boutiques it remains one of the great urban experiences.

Marais, 1973
The Marais in 1973, from Paris, 1973 (C) Peter Marshall

Larry Clark‘s “Tulsa, 1963-1971” is one of three major shows currently there (until 6 Jan, 2008) and is an extensive showing of his work, most of which appeared in the books ‘Tulsa‘ and ‘Teenage Lust‘.

An important part of the show was an edited version of a film in which Clark talks about his life and work. This was in English, but with French subtitles. These provided an interesting comment on the differences between English and French ways of thinking, as in many places they diverged. While Clark’s responses were American laconic, the translation was French philosophical.

Clark’s story is probably too well known to need a detailed exposition, and as I managed to lose my notes (it was a very good party on Thursday night) there may be a few misplaced details in this outline, but I don’t think it really matters.

Clark was born in 1943 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which, from memory, Oscar Gaylord Herron – also from Tulsa – described in his ‘Vagabond‘ (1975) as the jewel in the bellybutton of America, bang in the middle and as number 10 on the list of Soviet missile targets. His father was a door-to-door book salesman, but when business got really bad, left the job and worked with the family business that Clark’s mother had established. This was in baby photography, going to homes and photographing newly-born infants.

When Clark was 14, his father came home one day, took a look at him sitting around downstairs and told him he looked like a piece of shit before going upstairs and hardly ever coming down again or talking to Clark. Family life took on a very curious quality, with his father staying upstairs, eating food which his wife took up to him, although Clark also writes that his father gave him three dollars every Friday to go out.

At his school in one of the poorest areas of the city, Clark mixed and befriended many other kids who also had trouble at home. Kids who arrived at school beaten and bruised; girls who were screwed by their brothers and probably their fathers and more. Hanging out with these kids he learnt how to extract amphetamines from inhalers – his three dollars bought three of them – and get high.

Also at 14, he began to help his mother taking baby pictures, and in a year or two he was a photographer, taking these on his own. Clark realised that he needed to get away from his family, and at 18 left home to go to study photography at Layton School of Art in Milwaukee (Wisconsin). It was there he saw the work of W Eugene (Gene) Smith in Life magazine, and realised that there was rather more to photography than taking baby pictures.

When he returned home, he began to take photographs of his friends and their wayward lifestyle, very much as one of them. Then the army claimed him for a couple of years and after that he moved to New York, trying unsuccessfully to make a living as a photographer. There he met and photographed Gene Smith and also the friends he made – again on the fringes of society.

He left New York and went back to Tulsa with the idea of making a film, telling the truth about the things that were happening in America, with the kind of people that he knew. He bought a camera and sound equipment, but then found it impossible to work on his own. Looking at his photographs he decided instead that they could be a book, although there were gaps in his record that he need to fill, and he went back to photographing his friends to do this.

There is a very strong sense is which the books are like films, showing a story in a very similar way. Clark felt that photographers before him had stopped short, there were things about America that they were not prepared to show. Drugs weren’t supposed to exist in America, nor for that matter was sex (and certainly not incest) and he was determined to show the truth about the kind of life he had been a part of.

Although he exaggerates – there were photographers who had photographed virtually all aspects of the American underbelly as well as those who concentrated on Mom and apple pie – he did so in a much more personal and considerably more intense manner, pulling few if any punches. When Ralph Gibson‘s Lustrum Press brought out Tulsa in 1971, it certainly created a stir.

But in reality, little it showed was news. It may not have featured widely in pictures, but Kerouac’s ‘On The Road‘ was published in 1957 (I picked up my paperback copy on a second-hand bookstall in Hounslow in 1963) and there were plenty of other books. Kerouac’s cast of friends were of course rather more literary, but there was still plenty of sex, drugs and aimlessness, if rather less anger than in Clark’s work.

Clark was able to work the way that he did because he was living – certainly at times – the life that his friends he photographed were living. As he says in Tulsa, “once the needle goes in it never comes out.” He worked with a Leica to avoid the clunk of the mirror with an SLR, the quieter, lower tone of the slow cloth shutter getting in time, as he says, almost musical.

As well as anger, there is also a lyricism about some of his work. In one of my favourite images, a woman sits back in a chair, seen from the side, injecting herself in the right arm. Above the waist she wears only a white bra, and she is lit strongly from the window at top left of the image. The bright light on the white fabric, and also to a lesser extent on her skin are diffused, perhaps by a little greasy fingermark on the lens or filter, creating an incredible glow.

Clark’s work influenced many young photographers, but was also important as a source of inspiration for films such as Taxi Driver and Drugstore Cowboy, and both Martin Scorsese and Gus Van Sant are great fans. When Clark saw Drugstore Cowboy he thought that this guy was treading on his turf, and when they met at an opening, he told Van Sant that he wanted to make a film. This led to ‘Kids‘ (1995) and other films followed.

Large Image Collections on line

MOCA search gives 182 results
Addison Gallery search finds 134 images from Teenage Lust and Tulsa
LACMA search shows 132 images

Other sites

Larry Clark on Myspace
Official Website – under construction in Nov 2007 – but try later.
Luhring Augustine
Artnet
Pavement
Salon
Larry Clark

Helen Levitt on Show – Paris

One of several highlights of my trip to Paris was a visit to the Helen Levitt show – I mentioned it and wrote a little about her last month. Paris transport is currently on strike, with restricted and unreliable services, and to reach the Fondation Cartier-Bresson a little south of Montparnasse from the city centre location of Paris Photo, was a lengthy and rather tiring experience – part of a day in which I covered over 10 miles and was largely on my feet from 9am to 3am the following morning. Fortunately this was in Paris, where almost every street has some interest (and my walks are always longer grow in the taking, as I can’t resist a detour down any street that looks particularly enticing.)

Which brings me to one small complaint about the gallery space. The exhibition was shown in two large white-walled galleries, images in a single line around the wall, the centre of the room a largely empty space (with a rather lost looking display cabinet.) Nowhere at all to sit and rest and reflect on the work. Even when I haven’t had to walk, visiting such shows is a tiring exercise. The look of the rooms would also be improved by some simple elegant benches or other seating in their centre, and it would be so much more pleasant a place for the serious contemplation of photography.

There are chairs on the top floor, up a couple more flights of stairs, in a room devoted to the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Here were a dozen or so of his best-known works, including 3 or 4 of his best images. The interior of the building is modernist and compliments the work of the master well, but perhaps felt just a little austere for Helen Levitt.

In the lower gallery (on the first floor) was a fine showing of her work on the streets of New York from the late 30s and early 1940s. As you can see from the feature I mentioned previously  (and also the other links in that feature) Levitt achieves a wonderful sense of capturing natural activities on the street, helped of course by the use of the relatively small and inconspicuous Leica camera (one of HC-B’s from that period is on display in a cabinet on the top floor, reminding us how much smaller they were than the current M series – I had my M8 in hand to compare.) She also made use of a device that enabled her to be looking away at 90 degrees from her subjects when taking pictures, so that although many of her subjects appear to be clear she is they, they think she is photographing something else.

It was interesting to see the several variants that she had made of some images, shown as her small reference prints she made, roughly 6×9 cm in size – a method that enabled her to see the work better. I do think it was a mistake to mount these in window matts which did not allow the viewer to see to the edge of the print and beyond, especially since the top lighting in the gallery cast a deep shadow across a significant strip across the top of each of these small images. But I also think it is an inappropriate treatment for work prints.

In the main these showed that Levitt moved relatively little when making her images, with at times a slight investigation of different framings. Often it was more a matter of taking a series of images as the children got on with their play. It was particularly intriguing to see the other versions of her image of black boys climbing and playing on the imposing porch of a otherwise rather bare brick building. In the selected image, one clings to the top of the porch, either about to climb up or let himself down , with another boy crouching down on the top looking at him, while another pair stage a boxing match to his right. The figure next to the crouching child has his fists up in a fighting stance, while the boy dead in the centre of the lintel, turned away from the photographer, apparently lands a powerful straight left to his left eye. A fifth figure hides behind the right-hand column, arms and legs on each side and peeping out at the woman with the camera. The image is a glimpse of the kind of dangerous activities that boys will get up to, emphasized by the height of the doorway and the risk of falling, both from that precarious grip of the clinging boy and the play-fighting on the top.

Another striking image of boys playing on the street shows two of them holding up the empty wooden frame for a mirror, with the broken shards in the gutter in front strong evidence as to what has rather recently happened. A couple of boys are examining them carefully as the others look on, none more intensely than the boy on a bicycle we see framed in place of the mirror. So intense that one can imagine that it was his stare (or perhaps something rather more physical, as if he had tried to ride through that mirror) had shattered it to fragments.

The show also had a few examples of Levitt’s work from Mexico, shown along with the similar images by Cartier-Bresson; it was his work – including these images – that inspired her to photograph people – after seeing it she lost interest in pictures of buildings or landscapes.

The upper floor concentrated mainly on her colour images some from the 1960s but also later work. These pictures were published as the book ‘Slide Show‘, which was also on display in the gallery. The book is actually considerably more impressive than the show, partly becuase I think the selection of images is a little different, but perhaps more importantly because of the sequencing and also the quality of the images.

It was interesting to be able to compare the actual prints on the wall with the versions on the printed page, and I spent some time doing so. In almost every case there were significant differences, and in most cases the book version was preferable. That the exceptions were mainly some of the dye transfer prints is perhaps unsurprising.

Probably some of the other colour prints may have changed significantly since they were produced. They were not so obviously poor as some of the high-priced vintage prints on offer in Paris Photo, but certainly the book prints had a ‘cleaner’ look and often had better shadow and highlight detail. I think the few prints on display in Paris Photo may have been better examples than some here.

I find her colour work uneven, with some finely captured little happenings, while a few left me rather cold and sometimes puzzled. Perhaps the images I like best are the more dynamic, where Levitt has captured the moment, such as the woman reading her newspaper on a windy street corner, rather than those that simply seem to me to be about colourful scenes.

Despite my quibbles it was really splendid to see such a collection of Levitt’s best images on display, and when I left well after an hour after I had arrived (together with the walking it meant I was rather later than I had intended at the MEP, and at the party after that) but feeling uplifted by the experience. Coming out from the Impasse in which the gallery is located and turning across the main road to the rue de la Gaite in the fading light I did feel somewhat gay, my tired steps a little lighter as I danced past the sex shops and theatres.

Peckham or Paris?

If I wasn’t going to be in Paris on Wednesday, I would be heading instead for Peckham, where the Peckham Literary Festival 2007 kicks off with two events I’m sorry to miss (though I could hardly have attended both.) The festival programme continues until Sunday and so far as I can tell contains no photography, although earlier in the year I wrote about the show ‘Peckham Rising’ at one of the festival venues, which included photographs by Thabo Jaiyesimi and Daniele Tamagni.

Things have been happening in Peckham this year – and I was also there for the Human Rights Juke Box and the I Love Peckham festival. If you can’t get to any of the events you can listen to a little of the music which will be performed at the festival from the new album “Psychogeography” described as “ a collection of dark but warm songs about losing vital limbs, nursing small birds, conversations with insects etc.”

It’s hard for me to see Paris clearly – it has so many memories. Some of them are in the pictures I took there in 1973, on my second visit to the city (now all this site should be working – apologies to anyone who found some missing images earlier.) These are are couple of salted paper prints I made in the 1980s.

And no, I never made the edition which is referred to on the print above, which was a kind of joke. I think I probably made 3 or 4 prints – and they were all different.

Last year, going to Paris and trying to fit in Paris Photo, the Mois de la Photo and the incredible fringe festival, the Off, in five days there I had little time to take pictures during the day (not much at night either) but I did manage to put together a set of work, Paris November, which does include a few pictures inside the photo fair. I won’t need to tell you guys that you can go on to the next image by clicking on the main picture – or choose any other image by clicking on its thumbnail.

Local Events, Local Papers?

I’m not sure if any of my local papers (5 titles, four of them free come through my door each week, several on a fairly direct route to the recycling bin) bothered to send a photographer to our local Remembrance Day parade and service. I did see one other photographer there, although I think he only took a couple of pictures – but that could have been what the paper wanted.


Remembrance Day in Staines

Or perhaps the local paper photographers were among the many people using phones and compact digitals to take pictures – particularly of the brownies and scouts in the parade? Doubtless I’ll find out on Thursday when the several hundred pages of advertising accompanied by a few snippets of news comes through the letterbox (or the following week – as two of them simply recycle stuff from the one we still pay for, in the hope it will one day have some news.)

Twenty years ago,  we used to tell our keener photography students it was worth getting in touch with the local papers, taking a few pictures along and asking if they could cover an occasional story. It got them a little pocket money, and one or two eventually ended up with full time jobs, or even in Fleet Street. (Now of course a memory, though the few times I’ve dropped into the old pubs there in recent years I’ve ended up talking to guys from the print, revisiting their pasts.)

Now, forget it.

PR shots, handouts and free snaps from people and organisations who want publicity provide 90% of the photos, with the rest coming from a few remaining poorly paid and overworked staff.

So if anyone in Staines wants to see pictures from the Remembrance Day parade and service – and it was a well attended event – they can look on My London Diary.  I went there to photograph it because I wanted to take some pictures to mark the occasion, but didn’t want to cover the national event in Whitehall – too much security, too little access. I could have gone to any of the hundreds of other such events around the country rather than Staines, but that’s where I live.

Peter Marshall