MA: Assignment – Three Photo Story

This week’s assignment was to shoot a story in three photographs, caption them and write a 150 word introduction to them. What the story was and what sort of narrative we constructed around it was left pretty much up to us. Because of the Vietnam conference and more time than usual at work my shooting time was very limited this week, as were suitable ideas, and I ended up doing three separate stories none of which I like:

Rehang

Sir John Soane was a British neo-classical architect responsible for designing iconic buildings like the Bank of England and Dulwich Picture Gallery. After his death his home in Lincoln Inn fields was made a museum by act of parliament, open to ‘amateurs and students’ of architecture. Soane’s origins were humble, his father had been a bricklayer, but his career was launched when a design of his for a triumphal bridge won a prestigious prize. It was discovered recently that the ornate frame Soane commissioned so he could display the drawings in his home had been sat in storage for nearly a century. The frame was dirty and missing much of its original decoration but after months of restoration work it was finally returned to the walls of the museum as part of a major renovation project currently taking place in the museum.

Making Marmalade

Marmalade’s origins are unknown but there are references to similar recipes dating from as far back as the Roman Empire and it is believed it was spread through Mediterranean European countries occupied by the Roman empire. Although Henry VIII is believed to have eaten it, marmalade only began to become popular in England around the seventeenth century when citrus fruits became more commonly available. Separating and then boiling the peels of these fruits with sugar releases pectin which causes the mixture to set into a jam like mixture. The large quantities of sugar in marmalade preserve the mixture by absorbing water, thus preventing molds and bacterias from surviving.

Your Time

There are believed to be around four thousand rough sleepers in London. In late 2011 a one legged man began sleeping on the steps of an abandoned furniture shop on Queens Road, Peckham. Over the following weeks he became a familiar sight to many Queen’s road locals. The shop he in front of was called ‘Your Time’ and there I’ve spoken to several people who commented that there was something remarkable about the juxtaposition between this name and the man sleeping on its steps in the bitterly cold winter weather. In early 2012 the shop front was boarded up, forcing the man forced to move on and sleep elsewhere. In response to this a number of local residents left angry messages on the hoarding of the shop.

My response to the assignment: Problem number one with this assignment was I had no good ideas for it and little time to find any. The course has only been running a little over a month but already I feel attrition has started to settle in a little and its getting harder to think of things to shoot each week. I think this is the closest I’ve come to totally failing to produce anything remotely worthwhile for an assignment. Here are a few comments about each individual story:

Rehang was actually gleaned from material shot for work, and despite that probably works better for me than the other two sets. The environment is more interesting which helps, there was more variety in action and I think the back story is rather more interesting. At the same time its not pullitzer prize winning stuff and I feel a bit like I’ve cheated by using something I had to shoot for another purpose anyway, hence my attempts to do something else as well.

Making Marmalade is just boring frankly, its two people making food, although there were one or two interesting moments they didn’t fit within the narrative which already misses out so many stages in the making process that it basically dosen’t make sense. Also irritatingly the passage of time and the change from natural to artificial light messes up any sort of narrative for me.

Your Time might as well be one photograph not three, I was caught up with the idea of trying a series of photos within each other after looking at a book of similar photographs. It might have worked better if the homeless man who it’s really about was there on one of the three occasions I went down to shoot and I could’ve talked to him more and perhaps included him in one or more of the photographs. On the other hand I suppose you could read his absence from the pictures as being what they are all about anyway. But the main point is that they’re boring.

Rollei VI

 Rolleiflex Rolleiflex Rolleiflex Rolleiflex Rolleiflex Rolleiflex Rolleiflex Rolleiflex:

Cult of the Conflict Photographer

I spent Friday and Saturday at a conference at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) listening to a variety of academics and journalists discussing the legacy of the Vietnam War. The topics were diverse, but one that came frustratingly close to surfacing but which didn’t quite make it into the open was the issue of the hero worship often afforded to war photographers, a sort of cult of the conflict photographer. Don McCullin, who was one of the speakers at the conference, is a good example of this. His photographs are incredible, but they are only half the story for many of his admirers. The man himself is arguably as important as the images and latterly the issues they depict. As if to demonstrate this at the end of his appearance he was swamped by eager fans and scalp hunters, after his autograph or a quick photo with the great man.

A good example of this cult is in Shaped by War, the IWM’s current retrospective of McCullins career. The exhibition is scattered with his possessions, including a helmet and combat boots, and a Nikon F camera hit by a sniper’s bullet in Cambodia. These objects have little or nothing to do with photography, but I’d argue they are part of the mystique of the photographer who owns them, and function in in a similar way to Catholic relics. They are insignificant objects gifted significance simply by virtue of their ownership. I don’t wish to pick on McCullin, who I actually rather admire (in fact I suspect he might well be someone who would prefer to be without this attention as evidenced by his dismissal of the ‘war photographer’ label). By contrast some photographers actively set out to cultivate this popularity. Robert Capa’s career was an exercise in legend building. Slightly Out Of Focus his memoir of the second world war is as much about creating a Robert Capa myth as it is about recounting his experiences in Europe.

How and why has this cult emerged, and what is the significance of it? Perhaps journalists are easier to idolise than the troops who fight wars. Soldiers form a depersonalised mass, with individuals rarely standing out from the army as a whole. In the past individual soldiers were often publicized for displaying positive qualities that their commanders wished to promote, for example the Soviet Sniper Vassilly Zaytsev. Today the public are perhaps too savvy to accept such obvious attempts to manipulate our feelings, and not ideologically partisan enough to accept individual achievements like ‘fifty enemies killed’ as meritorious. Soldiers as a group are instead often seen as complicit in the brutality of war, whether it be violence visited on an opposing force or on civilians. Journalists by contrast reveal this legitimate or illegitimate brutality, none more so than the photographer who must bravely be in close proximity to these events in order to record and report them. To borrow a line from Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, the photographer must be really ‘in the shit’.

Many of the hero worshiped photographers also fit into a popular tradition, the ‘live fast, die young’ profile of James Dean, or more recently many popular musicians, for relevancy to the Vietnam War say Jimmy Hendrix. War photographers live hard and on the edge, in the sense of choosing to cover grueling, dangerous events that most people would run a mile from. Consequently many suffer post-traumatic stress disorders, and, at least according to popular culture, some mitigate this with excessive drinking and drug taking. As an example take Dennis Hopper’s crazed photojournalist in Apocalypse Now. Whether this perception is borne out by reality is almost irrelevant, its the belief in it rather than the reality that matters. This combined with a sense of the wasted talent of those war photographers killed doing their job produces an attractive, romantic fatalism about the profession that has again little or nothing to do with the photographs it produces, but is all about the people who produce them.

So does this cult really matter at all? Arguably yes, as I began to suggest in the previous paragraph I think that as long as we blindly idolise the profession and focus heavily on the individuals involved we aren’t going to be able to properly engage with what matters most, the product and the manner of its production. War photography is vastly problematic, the fact that photographers shoot frames rather than bullets does not mean they aren’t able to be complicit in the events they are photographing, particularly when they work in close cooperation with a military force, something which is increasingly the norm. War photography can easily verge on being a form of journalistic imperialism, today more than ever. In Vietnam you could perhaps make the argument that these photographers justifiably documented a conflict that few Vietnamese had the resources to. With the proliferation of image making devices and data distribution networks even in undeveloped countries I think today we have to ask ourselves as professionals if it is better for us to defer to occupants of conflict zones in the production of war images. It’s outdated to believe that we must travel around the world to produce these definitive images on behalf of the people to whom these events are actually happening.

On another level one can argue that it doesn’t matter at all, because the type of photographer who is hero-worshiped is a dying breed. One of the speakers at the conference, veteran journalist Philip Knightley, made the point that the days of the wandering combat correspondent who goes where he wishes and reports what he wants are over. Governments are too aware of the effect the media can have on public opinion, and journalists are also now often seen as fair targets by enemy forces. The reciprocal relationship of embedding is far less romantic than the free roaming photographer of the Vietnam era, but it is increasingly vital, and needn’t necessarily mean inferior journalism, just a different journalism. So the traditional war photographer may become extinct because the environment in he existed is gone, and like a teenage fascination with an increasingly prehistoric rock band, the cult will perhaps also disappear over time.

(photo montages courtesy of Michael Home)

MA: MAJPD Portraits I

I’ve been pretty staggered by the variety of people on the photojournalism MA, as a group of thirty three we represent almost every continent on the planet, have a wide range of backgrounds and interests, and are all at different stages in our careers. I’ve been thinking it would make a nice mini-project to try and take a portrait of everyone on the course. I could do with the practice, and if any of them turn out to be famous (or infamous) I can try and sell them! Also as one of my subjects pointed out it might be interesting to return to this in a few years to see how people have changed.

I’ve gone for my usual simple approach technique wise, shooting on a Rolleiflex, sometimes with a Rolleinar II closeup lens, using natural light in various locations around college. Film is Fomapan 400 developed in HC110. Here are the first six, with links to their blogs/sites at the end.

Andy Harvey

Jia Shou (Jason)

Vicki Coe

Fabian Weiß

Will Clarkson

Jacob Balzani

MA: Assignment – Enviromental Portrait

This weeks assignment was environmental portraiture, the idea of which is to say something about your subject using the environment they are in. Here are a couple of faves from each one:

Michael Craig-Martin (artist and teacher)

Julie (ninety years old, walks on Hampstead heath more or less every day and has done for sixty years)

Mina Stevens (artist)

My response to the assignment: The first thing you’ll probably notice about these is I shot them on colour for a change. I felt colour was a requirement for this assignment simply to separate out subjects and environments a little, and also because I knew colour would be a very important feature in the artwork of one of my four subjects. I hadn’t shot any in the Rollei up to this point either and felt it was something that was overdue. I can’t say I’m overjoyed with the results but that probably reflects my total lack of knowledge of colour neg scanning more than anything else.

As to the actual shoots, they were OK if rather rushed and lacking in inspiration. In most cases I had about five minutes to decide what I wanted to do and get on to shooting. I found it much harder to take a photograph I was happy with than last week, perhaps because the added background elements make for a bit of a compositional nightmare in many of these shoots. Also for some reason my focusing seems to have gone west on many of these, possibly because I was further from my subjects and found it harder to tell when I had achieved focus, possibly just because I was distracted with trying to figure out what to do with each shoot while chatting in a vain attempt to keep my subjects a little bit relaxed while I worked.

MA: Iconography

Samuel Aranda has won the World Press Award for his photograph of a woman clutching a relative wounded during recent protests in Yemen, a photograph that is already drawing comparisons to Michelangelo’s Pieta. That this photo won is rather timely for those of us on the photojournalism MA, as much of our recent discussion has related to whether the iconic quality that certain photographs seem to possess stems from compositional similarities to Christian religious art.

The theory goes that centuries of exposure to images of scenes like the crucifixion, the Madonna cradling the dead Christ and so on, have embedded themselves in our minds to such an extent we feel a very strong reaction to images that fit a similar profile to these icons of religious art. Examples include W. Eugene Smith’s photograph of Minimata victim Tomoko Uemura being bathed by her mother, which echoes the Pieta statue mentioned above, and the notorious photograph of an Abu Ghraib prisoner forced to stand hooded on a wooden box which has resonances of the crucifixion.

One might ask (as many of us on the MA probably did inwardly) what it matters that a modern photograph has some tenuous connection with historic religious art. The significance is that this connection potentially brings with it some quite contentious ideology. In Christian belief Christ suffered and died for a higher purpose, the salvation of humanity. The implication in that is that suffering can have meaning or even value if it is directed towards a higher cause. Evidently however in the Minimata and Abu Ghraib examples such a reading is highly dubious, the suffering in both cases is simply meaningless.

Also as our tutor pointed out these iconic images have a tendency not just to stand out from the other photographs produced around them about the same subject, but to utterly overshadow them and the issues they represent. They can begin to stand for something else entirely. Having looked through a large number of Smith’s Minimata photographs, the photograph of Uemura somehow always manages to psychologically shuffle itself to the top afterwards, and I always find myself thinking it says very little about the catastrophe it is about and more about the relationship between mother and child, of which the relationship between the Madonna and Christ is the most powerful example, but not the original example.

Going back to Aranda ‘s image, if we accept this religious reading, is the implication of it that the suffering of people caught up in the Arab spring is somehow worthwhile or justifiable because it’s in the pursuit of a higher cause? Doesn’t this mean that the suffering involved is preconsidered by the victims in balance against the expected benefits of freedom? Even more dubiously doesn’t this suggest that the outcome of this conflict is already decided? There are other issues as well I’m not sure I have anything like the intellect to really explore, for example the implications of applying a very western, Christian reading of this image to a photograph taken in a middle eastern, Islamic context, and the extent to which other ideologies (democracy, capitalism) might further complicate our interpretations.

My mind isn’t yet made up about this religious art theory either way. On the one hand I know from my own experience that art informs photography. Artist’s who’s work I have admired since before I started to become interested in photography are partly reflected in the aesthetics of the photographers I admire and the style I aim for. Philip Lorca diCorcia’s photographs invariably remind me of paintings by Edward Hopper or Vilhelm Hammershoi. Similarly when I take portraits I often aim for a look similar to the Chiaroscuro effect used by Dutch masters like Rembrandt or Ruebens. Art and photography are undoubtedly entwined, but whether one reflects the other or both simply reflect preexisting individual (or human) dispositions is very unclear.

Canvey

I visited Canvey a few weeks ago with a friend. It’s an island consisting of reclaimed land in the Thames Estuary. A century ago it was a popular holiday resort but changing vacation patterns and a massive flood in the fifties put an end to that. Today it consists of caravans, retirement villages, a marina, some amusements and oil refinery infrastructure. It’s a place with a rather strange feel about it, and its definitely got under my skin. I’m considering possibly using it as the basis for my first MA project, but in what I guise I don’t yet know. Anyway here are some photographs I took while I was there, nothing spectacular but they give a rough feel of the place. All taken on crappy Shanghai GP3 film I blogged about last week, hence terrible quality.

You can see some more of my Canvey shots here.

Oral History: Voices from Chernobyl

Photography has to evolve to stay interesting and relevant and perhaps mindful of this the discipline often absorbs techniques and practices from other fields. Oral history is an area that I think might have a lot to offer photographers. It blurs the line between journalism and traditional historical study, placing an emphasis on the individual experience of an event rather than overarching grand narrative, or to put it another way taking a micro rather than macro approach to history. With this in mind I’ve lately been reading and rereading several interesting oral history texts and running through various ideas for my own combined oral history and photography project.

Probably the most powerful work of oral history I’ve read to date is Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. Alexievich is herself a journalist by profession, who was living in Belarus when the Chernobyl reactor in neighbouring Ukraine partially exploded. Over the course of a decade she tracked down and interviewed over five hundred people involved in the disaster and the ensuing clean up, from the residents of the nearby town of Pripiyat to the liquidators or ‘biorobots’ sent in to clear highly radioactive material from around the reactor building. What is remarkable is how few people died as a direct result of the actual explosion, but what an incredibly large number of lives were irreversibly altered by it.

Because of the number of survivors Chernobyl is a ripe topic for oral history, but it is also a good candidate for other reasons. The legacy and history of Chernobyl is one remarkably devoid of people. For most of us the image conjured up by the disaster is that of the crippled reactor and the enormous exclusion zone around it, from which people were forcibly removed by the Soviet authorities in the days and weeks following the disaster. Dozens of photographers have explored the visual aftermath of the disaster, to such an extent that the exclusion zone has taken on a reputation as more of a tourist site than a disaster zone. The actions and experiences of the people who were actually there are notably absent from our collective memory of the event. In short we have more of a spatial knowledge and awareness of Chernobyl than a human one, something this book goes a good way towards addressing.

Voices from Chernobyl consists only of the interviewees responses with none of Alexievich’s questions or contributions to the interviews included. This is in some ways problematic in that it is hard to understand the dynamics of each conversation that has led them to say what they say, as a historian this feels like an unjustifiable omission. On the other hand this approach results in a book of intense, uninterrupted monologues, at times it feels more like one is reading a strange hybrid of prose and poetry than a book of interviews. These ordinary people speak with such an incredible intensity about their experiences, it’s hard not to be moved by it.

MA: Assignment – Formal Portrait

Another week, another assignment, this time formal portraits. Our tutor suggested this might be the hardest yet, at least in the sense that because everything is theoretically within our control during the shoot. I struggled with that, controlling myself and a camera is already too much, anyway here are a couple of favorites from each shoot:

Danny Abse (doctor and poet)

Vaughan Smith (freelance cameraman and filmmaker, Frontline Club founder and Julian Assange’s host while he is under house arrest pending extradition from the UK)

Alex Jennings (screen and stage actor, currently starring in Collaborators at the National Theatre)

My response to the assignment: Once again just organising the shoots was tricky. This was my own fault as I decided I wanted to photograph public figures, specifically people I’d like in my portfolio anyway because they interested me for one reason or another. I drew up a short list, did some research, sent lots of e-mails and made quite a few phone calls, and by Sunday evening I had quite a few maybes but nothing definite. Monday morning was spent drinking lots of coffee, worrying and chasing people up. Fortunately by mid morning I had three shoots organised and one day left to do them in. One of my subjects I already knew pretty well, which helped.

To make life a bit more troublesome I also decided to return to the Rolleiflex for this week. My reasons for doing so were that the work of Dimitri Kasterine and Ida Karr kept coming to mind while I was thinking about how to take these photos. Both used a Rolleiflex to great effect, Kasterine advocated a Rollei because it allows you to take photographs quite surreptitiously, before your subject can assume the public mask that all well known people seem to have. See his pictures of Dirk Bogarde, David Niven and others to see what I mean. I’m not good enough to manage this, but its something to aspire to. Karr on the other hand was I think was a real master of the square format, as well as being an incredible environmental portraitist. More on her next week probably.

I used natural light throughout apart from the Jennings shoot, which relied on the light from his dressing room table. I think it suffered for this unfortunately, perhaps I’ll get a chance to reshoot with him in better light. I struggled with the direction aspect of all three shoots, tending to focus instead on chatting to my subjects in an attempt to relax them. I don’t like making people perform for me, but I understand its probably a vital skill to be able to communicate what you want and get people to do it. Anyway it was once again a great, if at times slightly demoralising, learning experience.

Michael Home

Michael Home is a photo monteur I’ve been following for a while. He uses both traditional darkroom, and also increasingly digital image manipulation techniques to create images that draw attention to a range of issues from the arms trade to food insecurity, from political hypocrisy to the current economic crisis. His is an uncompromising visual vocabulary that will be pretty familiar to anyone interested in the work of monteurs like John Heartfield or Peter Kennard.

You can view more of Michael’s work on his blog.