Posts Tagged ‘New York’

Jesse Jackson, Cuts & Paris • New York • London Opening 2010

Sunday, October 20th, 2024

Jesse Jackson, Cuts & Paris • New York • London Opening: Wednesday 20th October 2010 was an unusual day for me. I don’t often photograph conferences, but I started at one where Jesse Jackson was speaking and then went to lobby my MP over tax justice. Kwasi Kwarteng was seldom seen in the constituency but later became notorious when he helped Liz Truss crash the economy. From there I used to cover people marching to Downing Street against the government spending cuts before leaving to go to the Shoreditch Gallery for the opening of a show by three photographers I had organised, ‘Paris – New York – London’ (I was Paris.)


Jesse Jackson & Christian Aid Lobby – Westminster

Jesse Jackson, Cuts & Paris • New York • London Opening 2010

2,500 Christian Aid supporters including my wife had come to Westminster to lobby their MPs on 20.10.2010, asking them to press for transparency and fairness in the global tax system and for action on climate change.

Jesse Jackson, Cuts & Paris • New York • London Opening 2010

According to campaigners for tax justice various forms of tax dodging by multinational companies was then robbing the global South of more than $160 billion a year. And our high dependence of fossil fuels had led to a climate crisis which impacts these countries far more severely despite their much lower per capita carbon footprints.

Jesse Jackson, Cuts & Paris • New York • London Opening 2010

The rally took place in the vast Methodist Central Hall, opposite Westminster Abbey, and as we were reminded where the United Nations started. There was a huge ovation for US Civil Rights leader, activist and politician Jesse Jackson, a protégée of Martin Luther King president and founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.

But there were also other distinguished speakers including the then new director of Christian Aid, Loretta Minghella, Suzanne Matale from Zambia and secretary of state for international development and MP for Sutton Coldfield, Rt. Hon Andrew Mitchell MP.

Jesse Jackson, Cuts & Paris • New York • London Opening 2010

After the rally we met our local MP Kwasi Kwarteng and went with him into a pub opposite Parliament where he he listened to us and basically told us we didn’t understand global finance and climate change, before going outside to pose with for photographs.

Outside there was some street theatre by younger Christian Aid supporters as people queued to meet there MPs and I made a few pictures before rushing away to find people marching to protest against government cuts.

Jesse Jackson & Christian Aid Lobby


March Against Spending Cuts – Malet St & Lincolns Inn Fields

Earlier in the day the government had announced there would be considerable cuts in welfare benefits and the loss of many public sector jobs as services are cut following their comprehensive spending review.

The deficit left by New Labour had given the Tories in the Con-Dem coalition a perfect excuse to slash the public sector and privatise services in a way they would never have dared before. £83 billion to be cut from public services, in a move that the Coalition of Resistance pointed out will mean many workers with less to spend and cause a slump in the economy.

But as I commented “Big business must be rubbing its hands with glee at the thought of the profits it will be able to make in the health service, from so-called ‘free schools’ and elsewhere.”

But for the rest of us the prospect was bleak. More than a million jobs lost – and some would be replaced in the private sector with lower wages, fewer benefits, lower standards of delivery and safety and higher workloads. Profit will come before anything else in the kind of “efficiency” we’ve seen in hospital cleaning – where I found used needles and dressings under my hospital bed as cleaners were not allowed the time to do the job properly.

I went to photograph students setting off from outside the student union in Malet Street for the march to Downing Street, then went to Lincoln’s Inn Fields where trade unionists and more students gathering and there were speeches from an open top bus before they too set off.

But I went in the opposite direction to my opening at the Shoreditch Gallery.

March Against Spending Cuts

Paris • New York • London Opening – Shoreditch Gallery, Hoxton Market

Me at the opening where I gave a speech – photograph © Paul Baldesare, 2010

This show contained work by John Benton-Harris from New York, Paul Baldesare from London and myself from Paris and can still be seen online.

Addicted To Jesus – Arthur Avenue, Bronx NYC – 14th March 2009 © John Benton-Harris

John Benton Harris (1929-2023), one of the finest photographers to come out of New York, settled in London in 1965 but continued also to photograph his native city and elsewhere. He was long a personal friend and I worked with him on a number of his projects including his Café Royal Zines and his unpublished book on the English.

Window dresser, Oxford Circus, London © Paul Baldesare, 2010

Paul Baldesare, another friend of mine with whom I’ve often shown pictures and a former student of John Benton-Harris showed work from one of his many projects on London, He is probably best known for his pictures on the tube.

And I was showing a selection of images made in Paris in 1988 from a book I had also then recently published on Blurb.


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Kwasi Kwarteng, Cuts & Paris, New York, London

Thursday, October 20th, 2022

Wednesday 20th October 2020 was a rather different day for me. I started photographing speakers at an indoor rally, something I rarely do, went off to meet with my MP in a pub, then photographed a march against cuts in welfare and the loss of public sector jobs, ending the day at the opening of a show featuring myself and two other photographers, one of whom, Paul Baldesare took two of the pictures in that section of today’s post.


Jesse Jackson & Christian Aid Lobby – Westminster, Wednesday 20 October 2010

I was one of the 2,500 or so Christian Aid supporters who came to Westminster to lobby their MPs on 20.10.2010, asking them to press for transparency and fairness in the global tax system and for action on climate change.

The day started with a rally in the Methodist palace of Westminster Central Hall, opposite Westminster Abbey, the hall where the inaugural meeting of the United Nations General Assembly took place in January 1946. The Methodists had then moved out for a few months to allow this to take place, and special seating, translation booths installed, along with extra lighting to allow the event to be photographed and televised. But I think that lighting must have been removed as it was pretty dim inside for me to photograph the speakers. But I and a small group from my constituency were fortunate to be inside as there wasn’t enough room for all who came.

Supporters outside Methodist Central Hall

There were speakers from this country and abroad, but the star of the event was undoubtedly the Rev Jesse Jackson, a noted US civil rights and political activist, president and founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988.

After the rally and a hurried lunch a small group of us from his Spelthorne constituency met with our then recently elected MP, Kwasi Kwarteng, who suggested we find a place in the St Stephen’s Tavern to talk rather than have to go through the tedious business of queueing to go through security to meet inside the parlimentary offices. Although he was still relatively unknown it was rather easy to find him, as there are relatively few extremely tall black male MPs. Though rather more share his educational background of prep school and Eton.

Since then his rise to fame has been rapid, though after his recent sacking after only 38 days as Chancellor of the Exchequer, perhaps that should be notoriety. He has only visited his constituency on fairly rare occasions and I’ve yet to meet him again, though have seen him from a distance outside parliament.

He listened – or at least stayed fairly quiet – while my wife and others talked about the campaign for tax justice and the need for reforms to stop the various forms of tax dodging by major companies robs poor countries of more than $160bn a year, while climate change and the natural disasters it is bringing have a vastly greater impact on the poorer countries who are most vulnerable, despite their much lower per capita carbon footprints. They suffer from the results of our high dependence on fossil fuels.

But his response to the lobbying was perhaps best described as ‘mansplaining’; we were not at the time aware of his work as a consultant for the Odey Asset Management hedge fund or the recent allegations by Private Eye that he has continued to receive undeclared contributions from them. Certainly his activities as Chancellor have resulted in them and other hedge funds who bet against the pound making millions.

More at Jesse Jackson & Christian Aid Lobby.


March Against Spending Cuts – Malet St & Lincolns Inn Fields, Wed 20 Oct 2010

This was the day that the government announced the results of their comprenhensive spending review (CSR) which involved considerable cuts in welfare benefits and the loss of many public sector jobs as services are cut. The deficit left by the outgoing New Labour government had given the Tories in the Con-Dem coalition a perfect excuse to slash the public sector and privatise services in a way they would never have dared before.

More than a million public sector jobs were expected to be lost, with some being replaced by private sector workers on lower wages, fewer benefits, lower standards of delivery and safety and higher workloads. There will be more cases of people suffering as private companies expand into healthcare, putting profits before the needs of people, and similar changes in other areas.

The Coalition of Resistance who called the protest say the £83 billion to be cut from public services will plunge the economy into a slump. Rather than cutting jobs, pay, pensions, benefits, and public services that will hit the poor ten times harder than the rich, they urge the government to cut bank profits and bonuses, tax the rich and big business. Rather than contract out the NHS, they should axe Trident and withdraw from Afghanistan.

I had to leave before the rally at the end of the march at Downing Street to prepare for the opening of an exhibition I had organised in Hoxton.

March Against Spending Cuts


Paris • New York • London Opening – Shoreditch Gallery, Hoxton Market. Wed 20 Oct 2010

Paris, 1988

Together with two photographer friends I had put on the show Paris • New York • London at the Shoreditch Gallery which was attached to a cafe in Hoxton Market, a small street just off Great Eastern Street, close to Hoxton Square. Rather confusingly this is not where the actual Hoxton Market is now held which is in Hoxton St.

Me in a red jumper at the opening © Paul Baldesare, 2010

The show was a part of the East London Photomonth annual photography festival, and over the month it was on attracted a decent number of visitors and comments. My section was Paris, and I’d ordered a decent number of copies of my book, Photo Paris, still available at Blurb, most of which sold at the show. Unfortunately I think it now costs around twice as much as I was able to sell it for then.

Jiro Osuga, Townly Cooke, my book and Me © Paul Baldesare, 2010

Paul Baldesare’s pictures of London and pictures taken by John Benton-Harris in New York completed the show and you can still see the work online on a small web site I wrote for the event. Thanks to Paul for some pictures taken at the opening where I was too busy talking to use a camera.

Paris • New York • London Opening


9/11 Remembered: 2010

Saturday, September 11th, 2021

September 11th 2001 was a Tuesday and I had been teaching all morning and was picking up my bike from where I kept it safely in the caretaker’s store to go home just before 2pm when a colleague who had previously lived in New York came in extremely agitated to break the news to me of an attack on the World Trade Center there. I rushed with her to her office a short way along the corridor and watched with her the news unrolling on the screen of her desktop computer, sharing her horror.

American Airlines flight 11 had been piloted into the north tower at 8.46am, and while we were watching news came through of the second plane, United Airlines flight 175 hitting the south tower at 9.03am.

I was then as well as a little part-time teaching working full-time as a freelance providing content about photography for an American web giant and knew that I had to find out more and particularly more pictures and write about the event. I cycled home, switched on my computer and started searching, not the news agencies and papers but for first person accounts and photographs by those who had been inside or close to the twin towers when the planes hit.

Social media was very much in its infancy in 2001, but I knew that people would be posting their experiences and some photographs in various forums on line, and I was soon able to find some. Normally I would have contacted people and asked for permission to use their images and text, but there wasn’t time for this, and I mainly linked to their posts with just short quotes and wrote about the pictures in these.

It was the first major news event where most of the immediate content was posted by the people involved, citizen reporting. Most of the pictures were snatched on phones and their blurred and poorly framed images gave them an authentic quality that more professional results would have lacked, rather like those ten or eleven frames snatched by a shaking Robert Capa lying cold and wet on a Normandy beach.

I don’t think the post I made a few hours later has survived – at least I can’t find a copy of it, but I doubt if it was one of my better written or more interesting pieces. But however ephemeral it did meet the occasion and within 24 hours had been read by over a million viewers, more than ten times my normal viewing figures, and the biggest immediate response of anything I wrote in the seven years I worked on the site.

The EDL returned to protest against the Muslims and the press.

This year, 20 years on, there are going to be plenty of films, TV programmes and magazine and newspaper articles about 9/11 and still a few clinging to the discredited conspiracy theories that quickly sprung up around it. But there seem to be few if any live events taking place in London to remember those who died other than a private gathering for families who lost relatives on Saturday 11th.

In 2010 the event became controversial when both the EDL and Muslims Against the Crusades decided to remember it. The EDL came first, marching to pay their respects to those killed on 9/11 at the Grosvenor Square memorial, going on for a brief stop at the American Embassy before going on to protest at the Saudi Embassy.

Later in the day around a hundred extremist Muslims from Muslims Against the Crusades, a fringe group led by Anjem Choudary, arrived at the US Embassy. As a response to Florida pastor Terry Jones’s threat to burn the Qur’an on the anniversary of 9/11, they had called for the day to be made ‘International Burn The American Flag Day’ and for groups around the world to burn the US flag, which they see as a symbol of unbelief and of war – military, ideological, social and economic – against the Muslim religion. I don’t think anyone else followed there lead and they found the flag hard to set alight despite lighter fuel being poured on it.

The EDL came back to shout and threaten the Muslims, but fortunately police were able to keep the two groups apart. I’m still unsure why Choudary was allowed to carry on his activities for so long without arrest, but the suggestion that he was used by MI5 to attract Muslim extremists so they could be easily identified seems likely.

More on My London Diary:

EDL Protest Against MAC
Muslims Against Crusades Burn US Flag
EDL Remember 9/11


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.


Kamoinge Workshop

Friday, December 18th, 2020

Thanks to Antonio Olmos, a Mexican photojournalist, editorial and portrait photographer based in London and one of the finest photographers working for the UK press at the moment for posting a link on Facebook to a current show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop.

Of course I won’t be travelling to New York before the show closes on Mar 28, 2021 (nor for that matter after that date, as I generally don’t do air travel for environmental reasons and am unlikely to be offered a yacht trip) but have enjoyed looking at the show online. Should you be in New York the gallery may be open – at your own risk – but you will need to book a ticket in advance.

The Kamoinge Workshop was set up by black photographers in New York in 1963, taking its name from the Kikuyu word for a group of people working together. The Whitney show has around 140 pictures from 14 of the photographers – 13 men and one woman – from the first two decades of the collective: Anthony Barboza, Adger Cowans, Daniel Dawson, Louis Draper, Al Fennar, Ray Francis, Herman Howard, Jimmie Mannas, Herb Randall, Herb Robinson, Beuford Smith, Ming Smith, Shawn Walker, and Calvin Wilson.

A few of the names are familiar to me, with scattered photographs in various of the many books I own, but I’d not really appreciated the work of this group as a whole. According to the museum web site:

Nine of these artists still live in or near New York City. The photographs provide a powerful and poetic perspective of the 1960s and 1970s during the heart of the Black Arts Movement. Working Together also presents an overview of many of the group’s collective achievements, such as exhibitions, portfolios, and publications.

Clicking on each of their portraits links to a video of each photographer talking about their career and work as well as reproductions of their works in the show. The photographers also speak about one of their works in the audio guide and there is a section devoted to archival works, several of which lead to versions of portfolios and publications digitised by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. And there is a series of installation views

It’s a show of some fine work and remarkably thoroughly documented on the web site. Although it’s always good to see actual prints, in some ways I think the site (assuming you can view it on a decent monitor) is a better experience than the real thing, and certainly less tiring on the legs, as to see it all will take you a couple of hours. I spent so long looking at it all that I nearly didn’t get this post written.

Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop
Antonio Olmos



The New York School

Saturday, October 10th, 2020

Another exhibition I would like to be able to see opened in Montpellier on 7th October (until 10th Jan 2021), at the Pavillon Populaire, the Espace d’art photographique de la Ville de Montpellier, a venue whose very existence screams a very different regard for photography (and culture in general) in France compared to the UK. I’ve never been to Montpellier, a large city on the Mediterranean coast with a long history and considerable historic remains, but it would certainly seem worth an extended visit in other times.

The show, featured in The Eye of Photography, is The New York School Show. New York School Photographers, 1935-1965, “presenting, for the first time in Europe, a project specifically dedicated to this movement considered to be a true visual revolution” and the ‘Eye’ features an introduction by Howard Greenberg, Exhibition Curator and Director of the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, which you can also read in French on the Pavillon Populaire web site (a section of the municipal web site). From there you can download the exhibition booklet in English (or French) which contains, after an introduction by the Mayor a longer text by Gilles Mora, former artistic director of the the Rencontres d’Arles and since 2010 exhibition curator of the Pavillon Populaire and biographies of the 22 photographers included in the show. It’s an interesting selection including both very well-known figures and just a few previously not known to me – I think I have written at least a little about 18 or 19 of them.

Although Jane Livingston coined the name ‘New York Photographic School’ in her 1992 book (The New York School: Photographs, 1936-1963), when I was writing ten years later about the Photo League it was still not widely known, and I received considerably email from people about the articles, including from a number of photographers who had been involved, some of whom I had as yet failed to mention, but mainly from those previously unaware of the huge body of work from this era. I republished one of 2001 articles on the Photo League in general on this site in 2015.

Livingston included in her book The photographers included in the publication were Sid Grossman, Alexey Brodovitch, Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Louis Faurer, William Klein, Weegee, Ted Croner, Saul Leiter, Leon Levinstein , David Vestal, Bruce Davidson, Don Donaghy, Diane Arbus, and Richard Avedon, with shows based on her work adding Roy DeCarava and Ed Feingersh; 13 of them appear in the Montpellier show.

Many of them were of course included in the wider show  ‘American Images – Photography 1945 – 1980‘ at the Barbican in 1985, thanks largely to the personal knowledge of New York photography by one of the three curators of that show, John Benton-Harris, born in the Bronx and had became an active part of New York’s photographic culture before coming the the UK after serving in the US Army as a photographer in 1965. Although not dedicated the ‘New York School’ it introduced many of us to some of the main figures in it, and the catalogue, ISBN 9780140079883, available secondhand for under a tenner, remains worth buying.


Davidson & Goro

Friday, April 10th, 2020

Two photographers (at least) made extensive documentary studies of blocks of low-income housing in New York in the 1960s. One of them you are probably familiar with, Bruce Davidson’s ‘East 100th Street’, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and published by Harvard University Press in 1970 and now featured on the Magnum web site.

The other you may well be unaware of. New York photographer and journalist Herb Goro (1937-2019) lived for over a year in the East Bronx around 1966 working on a project about which he wrote:

The Block I have chosen is within fifty-five square blocks designated as one of the city’s worst health areas. It’s population is approximately 50’000 with 48 percent Negro, 48% Puerto Rican and 4% elderly white. This section has a significantly high infant mortality rate (29 deaths per 1’000), a tuberculosis rate three times higher than the city average, and a significantly high venereal disease rate. As high crime area it ranks among the worst in New York City.

The Block by Herb Goro, its subtitle ‘Human Destruction in New York City‘ was published in 1970 by Random House. As well as his pictures it contained “slightly edited transcripts” of the tape recordings that he made with the people who lived there, as well as a block worker, a landlord, policemen and Sanitation Department employees who worked in the area.

You can get a good impression of the book in a post made in 2008 on the Artcoup blog, which has half a dozen double page spreads, and on Google Books from the book Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines. Another of his stories, ‘The Old Man in the Bronx‘ is reproduced from the 1972 New York Magazine (the fifth result featured) and a 2014 blog from Oi Polloi, Through The Magpie Eye: The Block By Herb Goro has a good set of reproductions as well as text and some comments worth reading. Someone did buy the film rights to the book but I don’t think a film was ever made.

One of the comments on the Oi Polloi blog comes from someone whose family featured in the book, some of whom went to the Supreme Court seeking a permanent injunction and damages against publishing their “pictures, names or biographical accounts of their lives, or purported first person narratives“. Goro had releases from some of those in the pictures (and had paid them adequately) but had been unable to obtain them from others, and some he had paid disputed what they had been paid for.

The court denied the motion for a temporary injunction and commented “What appears to be really sought here is money damages.” You can read more details here.

You may be lucky and find a cheap copy of ‘The Block‘ and I almost bought one on the web for £2.91, but just before I clicked found the postage was over £30 and I decided against it.

The two photographers methods were very different, and their pictures make an interesting comparision. Though Davidson’s was in some ways an exemplary and highly admirable documentary project, Goro’s are far more visceral and apparently truer to life.

I got the urge to find out more about Goro after reading the repost by A D Coleman of the review of Bruce Davidson’s “East 100th Street” which he wrote for the New York Times, first published on October 11, 1970.It remains well worth reading and was among the first to broach in a national platform the issues around “the power dynamic inherent in the act of representation, and the difference between representation created from within a given community and representation produced by an outside observer — the politics of insider vs. outsider representation, and the ramifications thereof” as they relate to photography.

In the comments Coleman clarifies the position that he took in the review which have often either been misunderstood or ignored.

At the time of first publication he suggested to the New York Times that they should publish a second review by someone from the LatinX community along with his, and But Where Is Our Soul by Philip Dante, son of Puerto RIcan immigrants and some-time assistant to Gene Smith, appeared alongside his. Although I’m not a subscriber to the NYT, I was able to access this, a damning critique of Davidsons approach – “Davidson’s one-sided preoccupation with the vile is a damaging oversimplification.”

Dante concludes:

The work will doubtlessly be praised and applauded by photography’s esoteric circles, but it would be ironic and unfortunate for a photographer who has produced such commendable achievements in the past to be lifted into a state of eminence by an accomplishment so devoid of feeling. “East 100th Street” is an essay so contrived and demeaning that it can in no way endure as an art—unless it is the function of art to desecrate.

I wonder what Dante made of ‘The Block’.



NHS Fundraising Sale

Tuesday, April 7th, 2020

I don’t normally publish press releases, but here an exception:

James Hyman Gallery announces the launch of a special fundraising sale.

All profits will go to support the National Health Service.I know that at this time of international crisis, the last thing on people’s minds is looking at art, let alone buying it. In my case, one of my daughter’s has coronavirus (thankfully mildly) and we are under quarantine and waiting to see if we also catch it. All being well my wife, Claire, will return to her job as a surgeon in a major NHS hospital next week.

Unfortunately, NHS Hospital staff, on the front line in the treatment of patients with Covid-19, are still working without the proper PPE (personal protective equipment), and there remains a shortage of testing kits and ventilators.

As everyone pulls together I have been thinking what I can do as an art dealer. I feel very helpless. What I have done is put together a selection of works by some of the major photographers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and will donate all profits to the National Health Service.

It would be wonderful if you could take a look and let me know if anything is of interest to you.

http://www.jameshymangallery.com/exhibitions/2682/press/special-fundraising-sale-for-the-national-health-service

Although some of the pictures are at least of some interest to me, the prices are a little out of my league. But wealthier readers of this blog (if there are any) might be interested. Regular readers will also know that I think the fetishisation of of the photographic print rather misses the point of our medium and its infinite possibility of reproduction.

As I’ve pointed out here before, if you want an Atget to hang on your wall you can have one at little or no cost, and it will quite likely be a rather better print than you can buy from an art dealer. The one hanging in my front room certainly is. And I’ve certainly printed better Walker Evans prints than were made of his work back in the 1930s.

But this is a generous response to the crisis, and I hope it that some will buy and enjoy these pictures, mainly but not all photographs, quite a few of which are images I’ve not seen before.

At least one other dealer has made a similar response, with New York based dealer and gallery owner Hans P Kraus Jr putting up a sale of prints by Early British Photographers, with 10% of the sales revenue going to support New York healthcare workers. The works for sale include some by Talbot himself, as well as Hill & Adamson, Anna Atkins, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton and others. The print which attracts me most is a later reproduction of Hill & Adamson’s ‘The Bird Cage (the Misses Watson)’, a carbon print made by Jessie Bertram in 1916.

Both these sales were featured in posts by Michael Pritchard in the blog on the British photographic history web site.


Frank continued (part 2)

Monday, September 16th, 2019

Here is the second of three parts of my longish essay about Robert Frank, certainly the greatest influence on other photographers including myself in the years that followed publication of his book ‘The Americans’ in 1958/9. The final and I think most interesting part, in which I take a look at that book in some detail will follow shortly.


New York and Travel

As soon as he possibly could, in 1947, Frank left Switzerland and moved to New York. Art director Alexey Brodovitch encouraged Frank to photograph for Harper’s Bazaar and other fashion magazines. Frank soon found fashion restricting and also contributed to “Life”, “Look”, “Fortune”, “McCall’s”, and “The New York Times”.

Frank also began to travel, coming back to Europe in 1951, where he photographed in mining villages in Wales and in London, as well as photographing in South America for a book including work by Swiss photographer Werner Bischof and the French photographer Pierre Verger who devoted more than half of his life to the study, promotion, and practice of Afro-Brazilian culture.

In Wales he took a powerful if slightly predictable close view of a miner coming back from the pit, blackened by coal. It is a powerful portrait, the cheery face beneath a cloth cap heightened by contrast with the broader out of focus miner in the left of the frame. His picture of children playing on the slag heap, and of a miner at home scrubbing himself in a zinc bath while his wife sits at the table reading the newspaper are vibrant reminders of vanished times, and were surely informed by pictures from the 1930s of similar scenes taken by Bill Brandt.

In London too he was drawn to the stereotype, but rendered it in a personal and interesting fashion; men in bowlers and top hats stroll through the fog of city streets, carrying umbrellas. There are also some odd moments and places – a dog in a foggy street, an angel peering over a wall, mothers (or nannies) struggling with giant wrapped babies and prams in the park, bombsites and hearses.

Back in New York in 1953, Frank began to work with Edward Steichen in selecting work for an exhibition on ‘Post-War European Photographers’ at the Museum of Modern Art, and later on ‘The Family of Man’, although as Frank says, he did not share the ‘Captain’s’ sentimental vision behind this. Frank took Steichen to visit the studio of Jacob Tuggener among other photographers, and his work was included in the exhibition.

American Influences

Meanwhile, Frank had discovered another of the elements that was to influence him greatly, Walker Evan’s seminal book ‘American Photographs‘. Again this was a carefully and subtly sequenced work, with picture linking visually to picture and recurring themes. Evans possibly drew his ideas about sequencing more from literary than film sources. Frank took his work to show Evans, who was impressed; it was Evans who was the major support behind Frank when he successfully applied for a Guggenheim Grant to make a journey across America taking photographs.

A further influence on Frank was also largely literary (although at that time derided by the literary establishment.) This was the ‘beat generation’ – writers and poets such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Kerouac had written ‘On the Road‘, his second book, using a single long roll of paper in his typewriter so he could let his stream of thought flow out through its keys to paper without interruption, without pausing to think or editing. The book is based around a series of four largely pointless journeys by Kerouac (Sal Paradise), driving across America with or to visit his friend ‘Dean Moriaty’, whose wild behaviour and unreliability are legendary.

Written in 1950, Kerouac’s publisher turned it down, and it did not appear until 1957. Frank was probably not familiar with the detailed text, but certainly was aware of the movement and had met some of the principals including Ginsberg in the early fifties before his own road trip around America, and in his attitudes and view of America he echoed those of the beats.

On the Road

Frank’s journeys across America were however rather less frenetic than Kerouac’s and fuelled more by his experiences than drugs. Much of the the time he was accompanied by his wife and son who both appear in the final image of the finished book. Throughout 1955/6 he crossed America, driving a second-hand car given him by Peggy Guggenheim, shooting around 500 rolls of film, photographing on the streets and in post offices, Woolworth stores, cafés, small hotels, bus stations.

He started work early in the mornings and usually continued all day. He seldom talked to people and usually tried not to be noticed while he was photographing, though his subjects in some pictures are clearly reacting to his camera – and not always positively. After his travels he edited the roughly 18,000 images down to the 83 which appear in his book, on average around one from every six films.

The journeys were not without problems, particularly when he was arrested and held in jail for 3 days in Little Rock, Arkansas. A police officer saw a Ford with New York plates being driven by a badly dressed and dishevelled Frank; he stopped the car and spoke to him and discovered not only did he have a strongly foreign accent, but saw that there were several cameras and other boxes and bags in the car. Clearly this was a spy, and that he had a piece of paper with something about Guggenheim on it (another foreign name) made circumstances even more suspicious.

So Frank was arrested and left in jail for around seven hours before being subjected to a series of interrogations for another four hours. This was at the height of the cold war and McCarthyism, and the police were totally unable to understand what Frank was trying to do. Why was anyone photographing America other than to supply information to a foreign power? Every possible point in his papers and his attempted explanations was fuel to their paranoia –the name Brodovitch – one of his Guggenheim sponsors – was clearly Russian, one of his children was called Pablo – a foreign name, he had marked routes on his maps and so on.

Fortunately Frank was able to persuade them not to have any of his films developed locally as they had threatened to. When they asked him if he knew anyone in politics or the police or similar, he told them he knew Steichen, and that his wife’s uncle was a close friend of Mayor Wagner of New York.

What concerned Frank most after he had been released was that his fingerprints had been taken and sent to the FBI; he was worried that this might prejudice his application for American citizenship.


The final piece of this essay, first published on the web in 2000, will appear shortly and looks at the content of ‘The Americans’ and then concludes with a very brief section on his later work.

The Falling Man

Wednesday, September 11th, 2019

Most if not all of us remember what we were doing when we heard about the tragic attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 9/11, the 11th of September 2001.

I was just getting my bicycle ready to leave college after a morning’s teaching – I was then working part-time and had finished for the day – when a distraught colleague rushed up to me to tell me the news. She had grown up in New York, and had just seen pictures on her computer showing a plane flying into one of the towers. We shared our horror at what was happening, and watched for short time together unable to beleive what was happening.

After a few minutes I left her and got on my bike and cycled home. I couldn’t eat lunch but began to search for more information on the web, finding both the pictures on the news channels and also a number of posts of mobile phone pictures and video taken by those close to the events, including some making their way out of the building. It was these pictures, with their rawness, often blurred and indistinct that really brought home the horror to me, and I sat and wrote an article linking to them and to some of the professional imagery.

I don’t know that it was a very good article, but I clearly saw the event not only as a terrible act of terrorism, but also as a clear indication of the power of ‘citizen journalism’, perhaps the first major world event where the story was told and illustrated most immediately and effectively by those caught up in the tragedy rather than profesional journalists. And it was a story that attracted around a million views in the next 24 hours or so.

Of course we soon saw a great deal of fine coverage from the professionals, particulalry of the later stages of the event, but these lacked the rawness and immediacy of those first acounts – which their technical shortcomings emphasized (as does the grain and shakiness of Capas D-Day pictures).

Esquire Magazine has published a long and very interesting feature about the photographs of people who fell from the burning towers, and in particular the ‘Falling Man’ captured in a series of images taken by photographer Richard Drew. Originally published on the front pages, it quickly became the subject of controversy, and disappeared from view except on some insalubrious web sites. As the feature reveals, it caused considerable distress among at least one family of a man who died and was apparently wrongly identified as the man in the picture.

The story by Tom Junod is an interesting one, which also raises many issues about the use of these and other photographs, and about what photographs can tell us about what they depict. He concludes that this image of one of the perhaps 200 men who jumped from the upper stories of the WTC rather than await the death that seemed inevitable is of the man who “became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen.