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FotoArtFestival Diary – 2005

FotoArtFestival Diary: Back in June 2005 I was at the first FotoArtFestival taking place in Bielsko-Biala, Poland. This was an international festival with exhibitions featuring one photographer from each of 25 countries, including some of my post-industrial urban images from London. But the pictures in this post are some of the colour pictures I made during my visit to Poland on a compact digital camera.

I was also there to give a couple of talks. As well a presentation on my own work I also talked about the work of other photographers from the UK, including Raymond Moore, Tony Ray-Jones and some personal friends including the London-resident American John Benton-Harris, Paul Baldesare, Derek Ridgers and Mike Seaborne.

I hadn’t really anticipated the problem of translation, and although both festival organiser Inez and another translator did their best to translate my talks into Polish, it meant that the talks took more than twice as long with me having to wait between paragraphs for them to repeat my sentences in Polish.

The on-screen presentations which accompanied my talks consisted almost entirely of pictures. When I went back two years later I had prepared a presentation with key phrases and captions along with the pictures and a much shorter text for the translators. But for this occasion I had to edit my presentations on the hoof, leaving out or précising some whole sections to keep within the time allowed. But you can download the full versions (without images) online.

My talks, given in English but translated into Polish, must have gone down well, as I was invited back to speak again at the second FotoArtFestival. And John Benton-Harris was invited to show work at that, while the gallery in nearby Krakov (whose director was in my audience and who I had a long conversation with) put on a show of the work of Tony Ray-Jones.

After I returned home I published my FotoArtFestival Diary which is still on-line, with many of the pictures I took during my stay. I had a fantastic time there and it was particularly great to meet many other photographers there, including some of those whose work was also on show.

Here is an extract from that diary with more about the festival and the start of my ‘Thoughts from Bielsko‘ I wrote while there.

FotoArtFestival

The festival set out to invite the best photographers in various fields from around the world, and included some well-known names – such as Eikoh Hosoe, Ami Vitale, Boris Mikhajlov and Malick Sidibe, as well as many rising stars and a few of those no longer with us, Mario Giacomelli, Inge Morath and Robert Diament.

The 26 major shows represented work from 25 countries – just one photographer from each, with a group show of older Polish photo-reportage. It was truly an effort to be international, although concentrating on European countries, including Albania, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the Ukraine and of course the UK, as well Iran, Japan, Mali, South Africa and the USA. France and Switzerland were also represented, with a representative from Magnum and a presentation on the work of Werner Bischof.

Thoughts from Bielsko

Gatwick and Hell

I hate travelling, especially travelling by air. Endless waiting in arid lounges, surrounded by retail irrelevance, shops of pointless and unwanted items.

It’s an enforced spell of purgatory, with what must be the most infuriating announcements ever devised to punish the lost souls, “Please enjoy the facilities in the lounge” in an irritatingly banal false female voice. You realise Douglas Adams travelled this way.

Eventually we are allowed to go through the departure gate, for yet another spell of waiting until we can clamber into a bus to be driven across the apron to the waiting jet.

After take-off I try to see where we are heading. The first place I can definitely place is Canvey island on the Thames estuary where I was taking pictures a couple of months back.

Two hours later we are bumping down through the clouds and into Krakow airport. Fortunately this is so small it takes a relatively short time to collect my case and go through to meet the driver who is to drive me and another festival visitor, Marta Daho of Magnum, to Bielsko-Biala.

Life Imitates Art

Life imitates Art,

Art Imitates Nature.

Nature abhors a vacuum,

Hoovers suck.

Life? Well, sometimes it happens.

Always it happens, magic or shit.

Bielsko was brimming with magic.

I Translate

I translate

It rans late

And everything did run late, due to the tremendous enthusiasm of the audience to the presentations by all the photographers who had come to talk about their work. In a later post here I’ll post part of an introduction to my talk which I wrote in my hotel room in Bielsko-Biala, as well as some more pictures including some of the other photographers taking part in the festival. And I even did a little translating although the remnants of my ‘O Level’ French wasn’t really up to it.

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Crowning of the Hayes Realms – 2008

Hayes, Bromley

Hayes in the south-east corner of Greater London in the London Borough of Bromley is at the centre of a tradition that goes back over a hundred years, the London May Queen. At its height in the inter-war period this attracted great publicity and was filmed by Pathé News for showing in cinemas around the country – you can watch some of those films on their site.

I came to the May Queens from the posthumous book of photographs by British photographer Tony Ray-Jones ‘A Day Off’, published in 1974 soon after his tragically early death which contained a handful of his pictures from May Queen festivals taken in the late 1960s.

One of these, not one of his better photographs and I wondered why it had made the book, was ”May Queen Gathering, Sittingbourne, 1968‘, which shows around 30 young women all wearing crowns in three rows in front of a maypole. I wasn’t impressed by his picture but thought it seemed an intriguing event to photograph. The location in the caption (written after his death by a colleague) was corrected in a later publication and he had taken it at the annual London May Queen festival at ‘Hayes, Kent’ in London.

The London May Queen festival still follows the design and pattern laid down at its inception by schoolmaster Joseph Deedy in 1913. The Hayes festival at which the London May Queen is crowned is simply the peak of a series of events by various May Queen ‘realms’ each with their own May Queens and retinues from various communities in this area of south and south-east London.

I’ve often written at greater length about the organisation including several posts on this site such as Ray-Jones & London May Queen – 2005. My work with the May Queens was encouraged by a major London museum who promised me a show – but this was cancelled at the last minute for financial reasons, I think a victim of the 2008 financial crisis. I had hoped we would bring out a book to accompany the show, but in the end I self-published this, bringing out a second edition with minor corrections in 2012, a year before the crowning of London’s 100th May Queen.

The book preview at the link above shows the whole book, including my fairly lengthy texts and over 70 pictures, mainly from London May Queen.

Although the event may seem rather quaint with queens, pages and other positions in the realms, the activities are designed to be fun for the young girls but also to develop their confidence and self reliance. And there are teas with cake.

Some girls drop out as they get older, and progress through the various levels of the realms and of the London May Queen group to which the realm queens move up is determined solely by seniority in the organisation.

Altogether for the project I took over 12,000 pictures, adding a few more when I was later invited back to photograph her crowning by one of the later May Queens. All the pictures with this post are from 19th April 2008 in Hayes.

More pictures from the Crowning of the Hayes Realms.

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Hayling Island Carnival – 2005

Hayling Island Carnival: On Wednesday 3rd August 2005 I went to photograph the carnival on Hayling Island with a couple of friends. I’d been there for the carnival a couple of times in earlier years, though it wasn’t really my kind of thing.

*Neptune’s court – he had plenty to keep him busy*

Two of my friends had in earlier years got money from the Arts Council to record English Carnivals and had persuaded me to go with them in earlier years and I was with one of them again in 2005.

There is an odd fascination about English carnivals, bringing out the eccentricities of the English, something that had been exploited by earlier photographers, perhaps the first being Sir Benjamin Stone (1838 – 1914), who as Wikipedia states made “an invaluable record of the folk customs and traditions of the British Isles, which influenced later photographers of note“. Notable among these, and one who inspired many before his tragic early death was Tony Ray-Jones (1941-72) and the posthumous book ‘A Day Off: An English Journal‘ published in 1974 was certainly the most influential British photographic publication of that era.

I never met Ray-Jones, who died before I was deeply involved in photography, but I did later become friends and worked with his friend, the Brooklyn-born photographer John Benton-Harris who printed much of his work, including the prints for ‘A Day Off’ and had occasionally photographed with him. And those two photographers who first took me to Canvey were ex-students and close friends of John too.

I worked with John on producing the images for what would have been his masterwork, ‘Mad Hatters – a diary of a secret people… as seen through the looking glass of – John Benton Harris‘ still unpublished, though a few of us treasure copies printed by Blurb but never made public. In mine he thanks me for my ‘Valued Technical Help‘, though we also had many discussions and arguments on the sequencing and very occasionally the selection of images, many of which I made significant improvements by some judicious dodging and burning – though always subject to his approval.

*The ladies from the Health centre were going on a booze cruise*

Actually with John virtually every discussion was a bitter argument – we were once asked to leave an event in Borough Market after a shouting match over a review I had written of a book by Homer Sykes (another of those influenced by Stone.) Sadly ‘Mad Hatters’ remains unpublished. It’s a fine body of work but a book greatly in need of an editor – something John would never tolerate.

*The Navy gets in on the act with HMS Hayling*

Back to 2005, here is the text I wrote for My London Diary about the day:

I went to Hayling Island for the carnival with Paul and Michael, and it was a nice day. Paul drove us down - it isn't too long a drive from London, really a Londoner's day out. Hayling seems full of people from London on holiday, some with second homes there, others hiring them, often from family and friends.

*A beach tableau, complete with seagull*

Despite a longer than usual hold-up at Haslemere, we arrived just in time for the official opening. Everything was happening on the day, and it started with the crowning of the Carnival Queen and her retinue, then on to the Fancy Dress.

Then came the Baby Show, after which we went down to the other end of the town, where the carnival formed up in previous years. It seemed dead there, with more housing and less shops than before, and nothing was happening. People up that end are apparently pretty fed up to lose the carnival, and we were sorry to miss another meeting with 'the King' whose playing had been a major feature of previous years.

We grabbed a meal at a restaurant and then made our way back for the Dog Show, After which it was time for the parade to form up near the sea front. There were more mermaids than you could ever imagine and everyone seemed to be having fun and I took a lot of pictures.

More pictures from Hayling Island Carnival 2005 on My London Diary.

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Bromley May Queens Crowning – 2008

Bromley May Queens Crowning – On Saturday 19th April I went to Bromley to photograph the crowning ceremony of the May Queens from Bromley Common and Shortlands in an event also attended by May Queen groups from West Wickham, Hayes, Hayes Village and Hayes Common. This is the largest of the May Queen events before the annual crowning of the London May Queen in May.

Although in recent years my photography has largely been around protests, with the occasional walk thrown in, back in the first decade of this century I was also photographing a wide range of cultural events in London, including a number of religious festivals and other celebrations. And one of the lengthier projects I engaged in was on May Queen festivals in London.

Although I’d grown up in London and lived near it for most of my adult life (and still do) I had never come across May Queen festivals, though perhaps I may have seen some of the old newsreels from pre-war days I thought they were a thing of the past.

In a post written earlier in April 2008 I described how I came to find out more and to start a project which led to me finding out more and starting a project on them in 2005:

It was the work of Tony Ray-Jones that first attracted me to May Queens, with his posthumous ‘A Day Off’, published in 1974 containing half a dozen of his pictures from May Queen festivals (though only four really connected with May Queens.) One of these – certainly the least interesting image – showed around 30 young women in three rows in front of a maypole, all wearing crowns. Despite the misleading caption, ‘May Queen Gathering, Sittingbourne, 1968’, in a later publication it was identified correctly as a picture of the annual London May Queen festival at Hayes, Kent.

Although I didn’t think it one of his better pictures it struck me as an interesting event, and even more so when I went to photograph it in 2005, and started to look up a little of its history.
Crowning of the Hayes Realms

Eventually I had enough pictures to publish a book, and had been promised an exhibition at a major museum – though this never materialised. The book, London May Queens ISBN: 978-1-909363-06-9 is still available from Blurb, either as an expensive print version or as a PDF, and the work has also been featured on other web sites including Lensculture.

Here is the Blurb blurb:
“2012 saw the crowning of the London’s 100th May Queen. The first Merrie England and London May Queen festival was held in 1913 and it has continued every year since. In the 1920s and 30s it was a major event, covered by cinema newsreels and competitions in daily newspapers, but now it is known to few outside the over 20 local realms that take part in the annual event. The 72 pictures in this work give a unique insight into this community event.“

It’s worth going to the Blurb link to see the extensive preview of the work, which includes all of the text of the book as well as many of my favourite images from the project.

Girls generally join their local May Queen group at an early age and progress through the various roles in the group as they get older – and if they stay long enough become their group May Queen, after which they can join the London May Queen group and similarly progress to become London May Queen. As well as practising for the festival events the groups also have other activities – and teas etc.

The Bromley area May Queens Crowning is one of the larger events in the May Queen Season, with a number of local May Queen groups processing through the centre of Bromley to Church House Gardens next to the Churchill Theatre where some of the May Queens were crowned. The previous week I’d been to another event where three of them had previously been crowned and the following week there was another crowning festival in Beckenham a week before the final crowning of the London May Queen at Hayes.

At the end of the ceremony the girls process back to a church hall for a tea, but I was too tired to go with them and felt in need of something stronger.

Many more pictures at Bromley May Queens Crowning.

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