film | >Re-PHOTO

Hull’s River Bridges

Hull’s River Bridges: Rich & Lou Duffy Howard began their ‘A River Full of Stories‘ project when they produced ‘Open Bridges’ as one of the most interesting events of Hull’s 2017 year as UK City of Culture.

Scott St, Bridge, River Hull, Hull, 1992, 92c8-01-31

Unlike most of the events in that year, this was one that was truly based on Hull and produced by people from Hull rather than put on by a team who largely came up from London to organise the year. Although that team received around 200 proposals from local artists for the year, virtually all these were turned down in favour of imported ‘culture’.

Scott St, Bridge, River Hull, Hull, 1992, 92c8-01-43

We are familiar with ‘taking coals to Newcastle’ but after what happened in 2017, we could replace this idiom by ‘taking culture to Hull’.

Scott St, Bridge, River Hull, Hull, 1992, 92c8-01-42

As I learnt when I met Rich and Lou for the first time in August this year, the support for including ‘Open Bridges’ was more than somewhat grudging and it required a considerable effort to get it included in the official programme, with some ingenious overcoming of problems raised.

Chambers & Fargus, River Hull, Scott St Bridge, Hull, 1986, 86c82-24

I wrote about Open Bridges here in 2019 when as a follow up to it Rich & Lou – with the help of the Heritage Lottery Fund – produced “a film, exhibition, website and a book which will be given to each library and museum in Hull and the East Riding.” And those outside the area can see the book using our inter-library loan system. It would be good to see it published more widely – and perhaps one day there might be a paperback edition on sale, though its sheer size makes this difficult.

Downstream view, Scott St, River Hull, Hull 85-10c3-22_2400

On their Open Bridges 2017 web site they write “Open Bridges made history when for the first, and only time, all the bridges over the River Hull were raised, swung or closed simultaneously splitting the city in two at 20:17 hours on the autumn equinox, 22nd September 2017.”

The River Hull splits the city of Kingston upon Hull in two, with 13 bridges inside the city limits, all of which can be lifted or swung to allow navigation.

Shamefully despite its Grade II listing the City gave itself permission to demolish one of the, the Scott Street bridge (most of the pictures in this post are of it or from it.). It had been permanently raised since 1994, allowed to rot by the city authorities – which was brought to national attention by Banksy in early 2018 with his “Draw The Raised Bridge!” which may have been inspired by Open Bridges.

As well as drawing attention to the scandal of the bridge and continuing a debate about freedom of movement which ‘Open Bridges’ had also drawn attention to, Banksy’s intervention also sparked an incredible display of activity by Hull’s own fine muralists in what became the Bankside Gallery.

Anyway, at last I’ll get to the point. Here is a Facebook post by Lou Duffy-Howard on Friday 12th September:

” Today, Rich and I have launched a new Open Bridges project as part of Hull Heritage Open Days 2025 festival. Here is the link: https://openbridgeshull.com/hulls-river-bridges-25/

“‘Hull’s River Bridges’ is an online tour of all the bridges over the River Hull, past & present, inside & out. It explores the history of the bridges with previously unpublished original architectural plans and photographs, contemporary art and personal memories & stories.”
“There are contributions from many people. If you have a browse, we hope you enjoy it. And if you’d like to share it or pass on the link to anyone who might be interested we’d be grateful.”
——————

I’m proud to have some of my pictures again used in this project, particularly one of that scandalously lost Scott Street bridge. As well as photographs the site also has, maps and engineering drawings and a great deal more information about the bridges across the river and some of the people involved – including a portofolio of some of my work including my writing about the pictures featured.

In this post I’ve deliberately pictures which are not on the new web site – so do click on the links above to see more there – and of course not just my work.

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All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
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Vietnam – Who Took The Picture?

Vietnam – Who Took The Picture? Whenever you think or talk with anyone about the US war against the people of Vietnam back in the sixties and seventies the one image that is in everyone’s mind is of a nine-year-old girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, running naked down a road screaming after a napalm attack on her village by the South Vietnam Air Force following misleading US intelligence. She saved her life by stripping off her burning clothing and running but was badly burnt. And the photographer who made this iconic image also saved her life.

Although this image is in the public domain in the USA because of it’s date of publication, I think it is still in copyright in the UK, so I won’t post it here. If you need to look at it again it is widely on the web, including on Wikipedia. It’s title is ‘The Terror of War‘, though it is better known simply as ‘Napalm Girl’.

The picture was taken by and credited to a young Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut (Huynh Công Út) working for Associated Press, the US not-for-profit news agency based in New York, and Ut took the 8 films he had shot that day into AP’s Saigon agency – after he had rushed her to hospital – where the film was processed. This image stood out immediately but the AP staff were reluctant to send it to New York because of its full-frontal nudity. They called agency director Horst Fass back into the office and he saw the power and news value of the image and transmitted it to New York demanding they publish it despite the nudity. They did and it won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and the 1973 World Press Photo of the Year.

As so often in covering events, Ut was not the only photographer at the scene, but his image was the most visceral and Fass who was a noted photographer and fighter for the right of photographers to be credited saw that Ut’s name was attached to the picture – and AP had very careful procedures to ensure that pictures were accurately credited. So we can be sure that this picture was the picture taken by Ut.

And we all were convinced until a rival agency, VII led by its co-founder Gary Knight, working largely on the stories of a disgruntled former AP employee challenged this a few years ago and set up a two-year investigation which culminated in the film “The Stringer” released this year. This argues that the picture was actually taken by another, much less well known, Vietnamese photographer, Nguyen Thanh Nghe, who also took his film from that day into AP.

The film puts forward some evidence – enough to convince some reviewers – but I think few actual photographers who have read the truly comprehensive report of the investigation by AP into circumstances will be left with any real doubt that the published picture was by Ut.

Of course many of those who could have given relevant evidence are now dead, and film negatives contain little of the evidence that would be available from digital metadata, though AP did conduct extensive testing of the two negatives that remain from the film. The only people who denied them access to evidence were the film makers, who demanded AP sign a non-disclosure agreement which would have prevented AP from disclosing anything it found – which would have defeated the purpose of the investigation. And both “Nguyen Thanh Nghe, who says he took the photo, and former AP photo editor Carl Robinson, who claims he was ordered to change the credit” declined to be interviewed, instead providing written statements.

The AP investigation which took more than a year points out a number of lies, deliberate misrepresentations, omissions and errors in the film and points to the failures of a report commissioned for “The Stringer” on material still available from the day’s events from the commercial company INDEX which has also so far failed to work with AP. AP carried out a similar but more comprehensive study with significantly different conclusions and shows that the film makes use of “a flawed graphic 3D render of the scene.“

As so much of the relevant evidence has disapppeared, AP are very circumspect in their conclusions. They conclude that Nick Ut could have taken the picture but there are some questions which it is impossible to be sure about largely because of the passage of time.

They say that they cannot now prove conclusively that Nick Ut took the photo, but the “no proof has been found that Nguyen took the picture” and also that there were other photographers who were in a position to have taken it.

And they conclude:

We applied AP’s photo standards to guide us to an outcome. AP’s standards say “a challenged credit would be removed only if definitive evidence … showed that the person who claimed to have taken the photo did not.”

All available evidence analyzed by AP does not clear that bar. Thus, the photo will remain attributed to Ut.

Some photographers have been very much clearer – including some of those who were invloved and gave evidence to AP and it seems almost certain that the accusations made in the film are both untrue and slanderous and that Ut took the picture used by AP which won him the Pulitzer.

I wasn’t in Vietnam and have no connection with either AP or VII or any of the photographers involved. But often I see published pictures of events or places I have photographed and cannot always decide if they are my work or that of another photographer. Particularly on Facebook, where most weeks I come across several of my pictures appearing without any attribution. I have to go back to my files to make sure if a picture is really mine or if someone else has taken a very similar picture. But usually when I have a suspicion a picture could be mine it is.

It seems to me quite likely that Nguyen took a similar but less powerful image on the roll that he claims went in to the AP office. He says AP paid him for bringing the picture in – something they often did even for pictures they could not use, though the records from the office show no record of any payment – and gave him back a print of his picture – but that later his wife threw that away. As the negatives no longer exist we cannot compare his picture with that by Ut. If his wife had kept that print I feel sure we would not now be having this controversy.

Ut deserves a grovelling apology and compensation from the film makers for questioning his integrity – as do many of the others involved. Of course they won’t get it.

*This is not a photo by Fay Godwin! Sleepy Lion, Chatsworth © Peter Marshall, 1980*

Hanging on my living room wall (and there are copies on walls and at least one mug elsewhere) is a picture I made of a sculpture of a lion at Chatsworth. Years after taking it I opened a book by Fay Godwin – a photographer whose work I admired and who I knew personally – and found that very same lion staring out at me.

It’s part of the nature of photography that photographers can make very similar images to each other – and sometimes very minor differences or even chance can make one a masterpiece and another an also-ran – though in this case I think we both did pretty well. Her picture was taken from a position that must have been within an inch of where I had held the camera eight years earlier. Even though we were not there at the same time we saw the scene in the same way. More about this in my post Fay Godwin – Land Revisited.

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Epiphany Rising Against King

Epiphany Rising Against King: On Monday 7 January 1660 (1661 by our modern calendar – New Year back then was the 25th March) Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary “This morning, news was brought to me to my bedside, that there had been a great stir in the City this night by the Fanatiques, who had been up and killed six or seven men, but all are fled. My Lord Mayor and the whole City had been in arms, above 40,000.”

The Fanatiques – a term used to describe the Fifth Monarches (and other nonconformists) believed that the killing of King Charles in 1649 had brought to an end of the last of the four kingdoms mentions in the biblical Book of Daniel – considered as the end of the Empire of Rome (before that had come Babylon, Persia and the Greeks – though there were many other interpretations) and that the time was near for the second coming and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. Their uprising was against the re-establishment of monarchy in 1660.

Led by preacher and cooper Thomas Venner they marched from a religious meeting in Swan Alley to take forcibly the keys to St Pauls Cathedral which they then occupied for some hours. Here the band of around 50 men defeated a much larger body of troops sent to capture them, but then failed to decide what to do next, and went out into the woods at Kenwood north of London. Three days later on 9th January they came back to the City and first forced the soldiers sent to stop them to retreat but were finally defeated by a much larger body of soldiers. Twenty-six of them were killed and twenty soldiers also died.

Venner and around 50 others were arrested and tried. Venner was hanged, drawn and quartered on 19 January 1661. His head and those of 12 others were then displayed on London Bridge.

Pepys has a longer entry in his diary for the 9th January about the insurrection – and on seeing everyone else carrying arms he went back home “and got my sword and pistol, which, however, I had no powder to charge” but after taking a walk into the city he “went home and sat, it being office day, till noon.” Later he was persuaded to go out, but then went home and played his lute then went to bed “there being strict guards all night in the City, though most of the enemies, they say, are killed or taken.”

In January 2013, Ian Bone and Class War collaborated with film-maker Suzy Gillett to film a re-enactment of the events of 1661, including a number of speeches and performances about the original events before setting off behind a banner made for the occasion led by a young woman playing the role of Baptist visionary prophet Anna Trapnel, a Fifth Monarchist best known for her 1653 tract ‘The cry of a stone” which recorded her speaking in a trance in Whitehall at great length, in particular berating Oliver Cromwell who many felt was by then setting up a new monarchy. In it she said “the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus is at hand, all the Monarchies of this world are going down the hill: Now is a time that thine should look off from the fethings, and lift up their head, for their Redemption draws near.”

You can read an account of what happened in 2013 on My London Diary at Epiphany Rising Against King or another account by another of those taking part, Paul Brad, also illustrated by my photographs.

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Paris August 1973

Paris August 1973: We all start in photography some time, and although I’d owned a camera of sorts for some years my real start in photography came in August 1973 in Paris.

My interest in photography had begun when I was very young, looking at the pages of Picture Post from my toddler years. We were too poor to actually buy the magazine but got old copies given to us by friends and neighbours and even before I could read – self-taught when I was 4 – we played with these, looking at the pictures, drawing over them and doubtless tearing them up. Later we were give a large stack of old National Geographic Magazines on the death of a wealthier distant relative, and on wet days when we couldn’t go out and play on the streets we would leaf through these laying on the floor.

When around 8 or 9 I had got my first camera given to me by my brother Jim, the eldest of us four children and then over twice my age. He had worked briefly for Ranks who then handled Pentax cameras and had taken up photography slightly as a hobby though on a very amateur level. The only pictures I remember him taking were some posed portraits of members of the family and family groups. His interests were largely technical and they included some pictures taken with flashbulbs including one of the family (except him) seated around the breakfast table.

The camera he gave me was not of course a Pentax but a plastic Kodak Brownie 127 and it was loaded with film. I carefully made my 8 exposures and then opened the camera back and was disappointed to find there were no pictures on the film. I never used the camera again!

Later at the age of around eleven I graduated from the Junior to the Adult public library and on my regular weekly visits there would spend some time leafing through the pages of Amateur Photographer, with a growing interest in the pictures of often scantily clad women – and even the occasional very cautiously posed nude.

When I was around 14 I would walk several times a week past a pawnbrokers and jewellers near my home. In Tracz’s window was a shiny 35mm camera which looked just like those in AP, a Halina 35X made in Hong Kong. I lusted after that camera, but the price tag on it was over 150 times my then weekly pocket money income.

For over a year I saved very penny, including the odd half-crown gifts at Christmas and my birthday, wearing the shop window thin as I rubbed my nose on it every time I went past, hoping it had not been sold. Finally I had a heavy cardboard box full of small change to take to the shop. But when I counted it out on the counter I found it was 5d short and broke down in tears. For probably the only time in his life as a shop-keeper, Mr Tracz relented and made a sale for less than the advertised price.

I had a camera, but it was only a couple of years later that I could afford to buy and film and pay for it to be processed. I think it will have been Ilford FP3 and I posted it to the cheapest service in the AP small ads – I think developing and en-prints cost me just under a pound. As well as a couple of family portraits made in my back garden I got on my bike and photographed some of the ancient oak trees in Richmond Park and another landscape there. The results were not too encouraging, partly because of the poor quality of the printing.

In the next ten years I probably took another ten films, I think only one black and white, the rest holiday pictures and a girlfriend sitting in a cherry tree (we’d broken up before I got the slides back.) A pound or so sounds cheap, but back then I was living on around £300 a year and after rent, food and bus fares there was nothing to spare on taking photographs.

I’d also managed to drop the Halina in a lake on my first visit to Paris, taking the woman later my wife rowing at Versailles. The boatman had later managed to find it and fish it out with his boathook and I think was rather disappointed when all he received for his efforts was profuse thanks rather than a large tip. The slides from the film in it had a strange colouration and the camera was never quite the same again, giving random shutter speeds at all settings but seldom fast enough to prevent camera shake. Later I gave it to my brother-in-law who continued to use it for some years despite this.

In 1971 I took short courses on photography, film and media studies as a part of a graduate teaching course and also met the first real photographer I had known who was taking the same course. So when I started earning money from teaching I was able to buy a new camera and also the gear – developing tank, trays, enlarger – to enable me to develop and print my own films, taping black plastic sheeting over the kitchen window to do so.

I was lucky in that my local library had several books from the original Ansel Adams Basic Photo Series, particularly volume 3 ‘The Print‘ first published in 1968. Although my earlier course had taught me the very basics, I really learnt how to print from Ansel. And although I’m not the greatest fan of his images, he was certainly a very fine printmaker.

Of course I still couldn’t afford a Leica – or even a Pentax. But there were cheap Russian cameras available, both rangefinders and SLRs. I tried several but settled on a Zenit B, a heavily built SLR, buying it with the more expensive Helios 44-2 58mm f/2 lens. Mine was the later version with and M42 screw mount.

By 1983 I had added both a Jupiter-9 85mm f2 and a Mir 37mm f2.8 to my camera bag, as well as buying a modern relatively compact Olympus-35SP 35mm camera which had auto-exposure and 42mm f1.7 lens.

So I had the equipment to become a photographer but didn’t really know then what I wanted to use it for. My first real photographic project was taking pictures of Paris in 1973. Many of these pictures were made with the Zenith, but I found the Olympus easier to use when photographing people.

Although neither of us were still students we still were able as recent ex-students to stay at a cheap student hostel in a palatial town house in the centre of Paris, and as teachers our union cards got free entry to the museums in the city. So we were able to spend time cheaply in Paris, a city small enough for those fit and young to cover on foot, including most of the many promenades in an old French Green Michelin guide during a stay of several weeks.

We picnicked in the local parks, ate cheap meals in the hostel including as much bread and jam as we could manage at breakfast, bought cheap wine and I took photographs. After dark we struggled back up several flights of grand stairs to our room and collapsed exhausted on the bed, the room barely lit by the dimmest light bulb I have ever seen.

Eventually we had to return home and recover in time to start a new term of teaching. Over the next few weeks I developed the films and made prints, sending a batch of 10x8s to one of the better photographic magazines and receiving more or less by return a letter from the editor informing me they were to be published as a portfolio, praising my vision (and also complaining slightly that some were not quite sharp!)

I think most of the pictures here were in the few pages of that portfolio, but 50 years on I can’t find a copy or the letter from the editor though I’m sure I will have kept both somewhere. It was the first serious publication of my work, but I find I’ve not included it on my CV.

Back in 2009 I put a larger selection of images, 35 in all, from that trip on-line at Paris 73 where you can still view them. I’ll probably put some larger images online as a Flickr album shortly.

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Leamouth Panorama 1982

East India Dock Gates, Leamouth Rd, Leamouth, Tower Hamlets, 19882 32e-14_2400

It was back in July 1982 I took my first walk down Leamouth Road, where there were still high walls for the closed East India Docks and some wharves on Bow Creek were still in use, their walls and sheds hiding the river from view. But at the southern end, where the river swung around a 180 degree bend, the view opened up, with only a fence and a couple of feet of weed-covered earth between the pavement and the river wall. It was getting late and I had to rush away, but I had seen a view that I could not do justice too with even my widest lens, a 21mm f3.5 Zuiko.

Bow Creek, Leamouth Rd, Leamouth, Tower Hamlets, Newham, 1982 32f-63_2400

The fence was old and rusty, and one short section had broken, and on my return in August I made my way through the gap with my hefty Manfrotto tripod. There wasn’t enough space to set it up properly with the legs fully extended and opened, but after a bit of a struggle I managed to get it level. I checked it with the separate spirit level I carried in my camera bag, then put my Olympus OM1 in place and checked with the level again.

J J Prior, Ship Repairs, Orchard Wharf, Bow Creek, Leamouth Rd, Leamouth, Tower Hamlets, 1982 32f-53_2400

It was a slow business, and I was just a little worried that someone might come along and question what I was doing, though rather more worried that I might fall over the low wall onto the muddy shingle perhaps 6ft below.

J J Prior, Ship Repairs, Orchard Wharf, Bow Creek, Leamouth Rd, Leamouth, Tower Hamlets, 1982 32f-54p_2400

I think the lens I used was probably the 35mm f2.8 shift, though at its central non-shifted position, and I tried to position its nodal point roughly above the axis of rotation, though it was not too critical here as only the first and final exposures would include any near detail.

I then began a series of six exposures, swinging the camera on the tripod roughly 30 degrees between each exposure (the tripod has a scale in degrees) using the handle on the pan and tilt head. All went well until the last of six exposures, though it was a little tricky working in a rather confined space, and I needed to move away from where I had been crouching to the right of the tripod so as not to be in the picture.

Bow Creek, Leamouth Rd, Leamouth, Tower Hamlets, Newham, 1982 32f-41p_2400

It wasn’t a tragedy as I squeezed between the tripod and the fence, and I managed not to knock the whole set-up into the creek, but I did knock it a little out of place, and while the first five exposures have the horizon almost exactly level, the sixth was perhaps ten degrees askew.

Of course I took a replacement, and it was only after I’d printed it that I found it wasn’t quite an exact fit, and when I carefully cut and pasted the six prints to make a single panoramic image the difference showed, at least to me. So instead I put the images, cropped slightly to reduce the overlap, into a row of images with a margin between each of them. More recently of course I’ve been able to scan the images and combine the digital files, and it more or less works, but ends up with a very long thin panorama that doesn’t work well on screen.

A few years later I returned with a panoramic camera and made a very different picture just a few yards away, but the original scene had changed dramatically.

Clicking on any of the larger pictures in this post will take you to a larger version in my Flickr album, from where you can explore other pictures of Bow Creek.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

The Perfect Camera

I recently came across a post on Petapixel, My 10 Year Search for the Perfect Camera Brought Me Back to APS-C written by international photographer and filmmaker based in San Francisco Kien Lam. Although I try to avoid thinking too much about gear, like most photographers I suffer from a considerable amount of insecurity and the feeling that somehow a better camera or lens would improve my work.

It’s a feeling that over the years has led me to buy numerous cameras and lenses, most of which now lie unused in cupboards either because I can’t be bothered to sell them, or because of a feeling that one day I might just take them out and use them again.

Things were rather easier in the days of film, and there were usually what seemed to be very good reasons to change to a new camera. I got fed up with the Zenith B because it was a clunky beast that required so much force to wind on film that it was easy to rip a film in two. Its one camera I didn’t hang on to when I moved to the Olympus OM1, which compared to it seemed an almost perfect camera – and one I used until various bits fell off and I replaced it with an OM4. I still have two of these, to my mind still the most perfect cameras of their type.

But I still bought other cameras. For some types of photography I preferred a rangefinder Leica. Starting with a battered secondhand Leica M2, I later bought a nearly new Minolta CLE, another great camera with decent exposure metering well before Leica’s own. Leica’s shutter was noisy and intrusive compared to the Hexar F, another camera I loved, though its fixed 35mm lens wasn’t quite wide enough. The main problem I had with its silent mode was that I was often not sure if I’d actually taken a picture or not.

Then there were cameras of a more specialist nature, each with their uses. Several swing lens panoramic models, medium format and even 4×5″ cameras, and another favourite, the Hassleblad X-Pan.

The came digital. After some compact cameras I started seriously with the Nikon D100. The pictures were fine but the viewfinder was abysmal, reason enough to upgrade to D70, then the D200 when that came out. Then the D300… Cameras were beginning to seem disposable, each new model offering more pixels. Then came full-frame, and really I should have resisted, but I didn’t. I didn’t really need the extra pixels, but again the viewfinder was better, though I ended up taking a lot of images in DX mode and enjoying being able to view outside the frame lines.

Most of those digital cameras I’ve actually passed on to friends or swapped including the disastrous Leica M8 with its colour problems. It was that swap that really got me into Fuji, with the X Pro1. A nice optical viewfinder but rather poor with lenses outside its range which needed th electronic version.

I’ve still got my Nikon kit, two working bodies, though a couple went beyond economic repair, and various lenses. The D810 is now mainly used to ‘scan’ negatives, though occasionally taken out until the virus lockdown for its low light capability. But I find the kit too heavy for me now, and looked around for a lighter system.

For a while I used an Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II which seemed in some ways very similar to my old and well-loved OM film cameras. Some fine lenses – both Olympus and Panasonic Leica – but just occasionally I felt there was something lacking in the images from the smaller sensor.

Eventually I went back to APS-C, and like Kien Lam to Fuji, though to the less expensive options of a Fuji XT-1 and an XT-30. It was the latter than decided it for me, roughly as small and as light as the Olympus, and I bought it rather than commit to Olympus by buying a second Olympus body. Unlike Kien Lam I’m not searching for a perfect camera, and I certainly spend a lot of time swearing at the Fuji cameras with their complicated buttons and menus. But the lenses are excellent (though some are rather expensive) and I’ve yet to find myself thinking that any particular image would have been better on full-frame.

Notting Hill Carnival 2000

Some might think that pictures from 2000 have no place in an album called ‘Notting Hill Carnival – the 1990s‘, but the decade really starts with 1991 as when we move to labelling years as ‘anno Domini’ or AD the first year was 1 and not 0. It was only around 1200 that the idea of zero and ‘0’ as a number really came into European thought, though it had existed much earlier in other civilisations in Asia, the Middle East and South America. So while some celebrated the Millenium at the start of 2000, the more educated knew it really had another year to go.

Notting Hill Carnival, 2000. Peter Marshall 00-817-45_2400

But its actually just a matter of convenience and the result of a small mistake I made when I was putting together an exhibition of my first ten years at Carnival. For some reason I thought I had first taken pictures there in 1991, so this was to cover the years 1991-2000, but as I worked on the show I found I had also been there in 1990.

Notting Hill Carnival, 2000. Peter Marshall 00-819-34_2400

For the moment I’ll end this album at 2000, though probably I’ll come back later and change its name to include all those years I covered the carnival on film rather than digital, though I’m not quite sure when that was.

Notting Hill Carnival, 2000. Peter Marshall 00-805-32_2400

I’d also intended the album simply to be black and white pictures, but then I found a couple of years where I had taken few or no black and white pictures. So I’m now busily scanning colour negatives from the other years and adding them. Except for one year where I seem to have mislaid the file containing the negatives – which I’ve spend hours searching for, so far without success.

Notting Hill Carnival, 2000. Peter Marshall 00-805-66_2400

Notting Hill Carnival, 2000. Peter Marshall 00-808-52_2400

Notting Hill Carnival, 2000. Peter Marshall Notting Hill Carnival, 2000. Peter Marshall 00-809-36_2400

See more pictures from 2000 on Page 3 of ‘Notting Hill Carnival – the 1990s‘.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Notting Hill Carnival 1999

I’ve so far digitised only a small proportion of images that I took of Carnival in 1999, though I think that those I’ve put into the Flickr album Notting Hill Carnival in the 1990s are probably the best of those I took. But I’m sure there are some other pictures worth adding later from the 600 or so black and white pictures I took over the two days – and I also made around 250 in colour.

Notting Hill Carnival, 1999. Peter Marshall 99-808-34_2400

Notting Hill Carnival, 1999. Peter Marshall 99-808-56_2400

Notting Hill Carnival, 1999. Peter Marshall 99-810-31_2400

Notting Hill Carnival, 1999. Peter Marshall 99-817-35_2400

Notting Hill Carnival, 1999. Peter Marshall 99-817-61_2400

Notting Hill Carnival, 1999. Peter Marshall 99-821-63_2400

As usual, the pictures display rather small on this site, but clicking on them will take you to a larger version on Flickr. You can see all the pictures from 1999 in the album by clicking on this link to go to the first and then clicking to go to next picture to go through the other 18.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Sitting on a goldmine?

Though film is now long dead for serious photography, the past few years have seen an upsurge in film sales, driven by young people who want to have fun taking pictures. And although I don’t see much point if any if you are going to have your films trade processed and then scanned, I can see how people can get a great deal of satisfaction about developing film and darkroom printing, which still has its particular magic that enthralled me around 50 years ago.

Like the youth of today, back in the 1980s and 90s, I became interested in archaic photographic processes, going heavily into what then became known as ‘alternative processes’. Partly my interest was in learning more about the historic processes used by some of the early photographers whose work I admired, but it was also in the aesthetic possibilites offered by cyanotype, kallitype, platinum and palladium, gum bichromate et al.

My interest was shared by a number of friends, one of whom became a well-known figure in the world of alternative photography, organising international conferences and making soemthing of a living running workshops and selling prints. But eventually I realised that my interests were more in the making of images to say something about the world and that the conventional processes, which were just beginning to embrace digital photography and printing. And I found that I could make prints which seemed to me just as expressive using an inkjet printer (and Piezography inks) as I had acheived with salt printing or platinum and with much more control.

When digital first began to dominate photography around ten years ago, film cameras were redundant and secondhand prices slumped. But apparently with a new young generation wanting to shoot film they are now in great demand. The video by NBC Left Field, ‘Why We Still Love Film: Analog Photography in the Digital Age‘ includes some footage of a secondhand camera shop with cameras now being sold for silly prices. The man at K&M Camera in New York in the film says demand now exceeds supply and offers smiling customers cameras at prices that seem to have an extra zero on them. Those like me, who couldn’t bear to sell their old film cameras at knock down prices, may now find they are sitting on a goldmine.

Unfortunately for me, a quick check online of the UK secondhand camera market tells me that UK prices as yet don’t reflect those in New York, so we can either sit tight and hope they will catch up in time, or take a heavy suitcase full to the States. Though looking at those UK listings of cameras which all seem to be in at least ‘good’ if not ‘excellent++’ condition I do wonder how ‘knackered–‘ might affect the price.

It’s certainly a good thing that using film forces people to think about taking photographs rather than just keep pushing the button. Most of us who grew up on film probably still do that anyway with digital, though it has made some differences.

Long ago I remember looking at the contact sheets made by a Magnum photographer, working with 35mm film. Most of his sheets of 36 exposures only really contained perhaps two pictures, working around the subject until he was satisfied that he had probably done the best he could. Where possible (sometimes there is only a fleeting chance and it is gone) I work the same way with digital, but can now take more frames and take them in a considerably shorter time and have a higher chance of getting the scene exactly as I want it.

But it’s perhaps a good time to sort out all those old cameras and put them up for sale. And perhaps we shouldn’t leave it too long. As one of the photographers on the film in what was perhaps its most interesting contribution points out that the film renaissance is likely to be of relatively short duration because of its environmental impacts.

Danny Lyon on Frank the man

” For all artists, there is a difference between the person and their work. “

Thus states Danny Lyon in the article ‘When Fathers Die: Remembering Robert Frank‘ on The New York Review of Books site. His piece is a very personal story of the man he lived with and worked with and who he says “brought integrity to an art riddled with compromise.”

I don’t think it makes me see any more – or less – in Frank’s pictures but I found it a fascinating read, a reminder of the very different times and lifestyle in which that work was produced.