Spinning

This was taken two or three years back at a 'Celebrating Sanctuary' event, I think it was. Sometimes you snap away all afternoon at these things and nothing falls into place. The dynamic, close-up pictures you thought you had die as soon as you look at them: there's too much unresolved clutter in the frame, everything refuses to cohere into a pleasing, well-composed moment when things fall into place, never to be repeated -- at least, not quite as they were at that fraction of a second when you pressed the shutter.

This was one of the lucky moments. A good sky, beautiful buildings offering a fine background, lovely action in the foreground. Click.

(And in the spirit of the huge new book Magnum Contact Sheets, I've just been looking at the frames that led up to and away from this moment and they are....rubbish.)

The elegance of hats

All human life...

Age

Another from this sequence. I really ought to get round to archiving larger scans from these negatives and maybe I will, but for the moment these relatively small ones will have to do.

John Loengard

The great thing that the internet has done for photography is to make it possible to stumble almost endlessly on names and work that is new to you.

That is also the worst thing it has done – opening the floodgates to billions of mediocre and uninteresting photographs, often posted (in fact all too frequently posted) on websites devoted to high-end photographic equipment. One might almost be tempted to explore whether some sort of inverse relationship exists between owners of the most expensive cameras and the interest of the pictures they take...

But put that aside. There is an interesting article here by photographer and picture editor for both Time and Life, John Loengard. A new name to me. Which I'm sure reflects my appalling ignorance rather than his obscurity.

I enjoyed it because he reduces what is often a grossly mystified subject – how to take good, interesting photographs – to the plainest of speaking. He says:

"It is not important if photographs are “good.” It’s important that they are interesting."

He also says:

"...I assumed that 'good photographers' took 'good pictures' because they had a special eye. What I found was that good photographers take good pictures because they take great pains to have good subjects in front of their cameras."

Those three sentences alone constitute a photography class...

The message

What makes an 'urban landscape'? How much or how little is needed in the way of detail, action, scenery, whatever?

This picture is a sort of ongoing discussion I am having with myself about how to photograph landscape....

Sometimes you get lucky...

This was one of earliest street photographs I took. I just found it again while reprocessing some old scans (that's one of the other things that happens -- you realise your early attempts at film scanning desperately need improvement).

Anyway, it's a picture I'm very fond of. One of those (very rare) instances when a fully-fledged composition just unfolds in front of you...

At the community centre

More rediscoveries from a few years ago. These men in the picture below are Poles and are waiting for lunch to be served at a Polish community centre -- in fact, the centre you can see in the second photograph.


These were taken some time apart. The one below on a Saturday during a bitterly cold winter's afternoon, not long before the light became too poor to carry on taking pictures. I was attracted by the Katyn memorial and so grabbed a shot as the young man with unmistakeably Slav features emerged. I didn't know then that I would go back there to photograph during one of the centre's events.

Dancing with light

The other day I came across a link to the website of a French darkroom printer -- a woman called Nathalie Lopparelli, and her printing business in the heart of Paris.

What an enviable set-up. The tall atelier windows look out on a courtyard of cobblestones and potted shrubs. But what really counts is what goes on in the darkroom -- and this woman has printed for Salgado, Haas, Stanley Greene, Doisneau and other greats.

Traditional darkroom printing is an arcane skill, but her website has a rather marvellous short film so you can see for yourself. Watch as her hands weave gracefully in the light from the enlarger -- she is burning and dodging to bring up or suppress particular areas of the print, but to me she dancing with light, and it is as choreographed as a secret ballet in the dark.

If you have ever wondered why -- or how -- the black and white photographs of the real masters look as luminous as they do, the answer is that behind them there is someone like this, dancing with light.

The deluge

Toin Adams' sculpture, the Deluge, and a shopfront James Bond poster in the Custard Factory's Zellig building.

Faces in the crowd

More pictures that come from the previous post -- faces in the crowd that caught my attention. I especially like the second one -- the pool of warm golden light in which the woman is standing as she talks animatedly, the elegant jawline of the young woman just visible in the top lefthand corner, the lush bluey-greys in the background...

Worshippers

Further to the previous post, here are some pictures taken at this year's Rathayatra festival.

A devotee prostrates herself before the chariot.


A woman moves amongst the crowd painting the tilaka on worshippers' foreheads -- shaped like a tuning fork, it represents the footprint of Krishna.




An elderly woman makes sure she has a prime place for when the time comes for worshippers to draw the huge chariot forward.


The chariot is pulled along. A devotee shelters Krishna from the sun while a woman showers holy water onto the crowd.

Scent of lime and camphor

Rathayatra, the festival of chariots, is celebrated by devotees of Lord Krishna all over the world. In Birmingham it will be celebrated on Sunday 24th July from about noon.

This is a picture taken last year but I shall be photographing there again this year. In this picture Krishna worshippers are preparing to offer what I think is called arati -- a coconut, sometimes dyed with tumeric and I think filled with lime juice, is topped with camphor and lit. After chanting, the coconut is thrown to the ground, the shell shatters and a wonderful smell of camphor and lime fills the air. You can just see a lit coconut held aloft in the background.

Michaelgate, Lincoln

I loved the timeless beauty of this scene... And I waited and waited until I could catch it almost entirely free of people -- just the two women approaching in the distance to offer some scale, but for the rest, just a concentration on the gorgeous perspective. Not my usual kind of photograph but I do like this.

Machine that uses a 1000 years to shut itself down

It isn't often you can photograph a modern artwork, its title (apparently hovering in the air) and the chamber dedicated to its display all in one frame, but it was possible at theIkon gallery recently when Kristoffer Myskja's Machine that uses a 1000 years to shut itself down was exhibited.

To be quite honest, I thought the piece resembled a posh hamster wheel, and I didn't -- as the Ikon did -- find its "fragile beauty and thought provoking nature...antidotes in a world too informed by ideologies of functionalism."

But it made for a pleasing photograph.

Mysterious moment

Grainy black-and-white reinforces a sense of catastrophe, but in fact this was a perfectly ordinary moment at a children's mask-making session. The camera may not lie exactly, but it does tell a very selective truth. And it has the power to render the ordinary mysterious, which to me is one of the most curious qualities of photography.

Slow Photography

I get so tired of reading the endless diatribes on camera user forums about the latest firmware, the best post-processing routines, the advantages of this four thousand quid aspherical lens over that two thousand quid non-aspherical lens, that sometimes I despair of photography. These technical matters are assumed to hold the key to 'IQ' (image quality), whereas in fact they have nothing to do with quality, the mysterious characteristics of photography that make us return again and again to a picture as it gradually gives up its secrets...

As the Slow Food movement was a fight against the values and domination of fast food and junk meals, I think we need a Slow Photography movement to help us reassert the simple pleasures of taking pictures more meditatively, relishing every step of the process including the wait as film is processed and scanned and we work gradually through the images, assessing the merits of each one carefully, selecting, rejecting, revisiting, rejecting....

I look almost constantly at the Magnum Photos website to remind myself that some of the greatest photos have been taken with the simplest of equipment. And that whatever it is that moves us about a picture has little to do with technical excellence and everything to do with content.

Pictures like this... Raymond Depardon's opium smoker in Vietnam. The same photographer's picture of camels crossing the Tenere Desert, where only the tiniest silhouettes of a camel train demarcate sand from sky. Erich Hartmann's oblique, touching pictures. The miracle of timing, incident and composition that is Henri Cartier-Bresson. Inexplicable combinations of events which nonetheless have their own logic and grace, as in this picture by Nikos Economopoulos.

The historian Tony Judt has said in a different context, "In the arts, moral seriousness speaks to an economy of form and aesthetic restraint..." If he had been talking about photography then I feel sure he would have been thinking about pictures like these.

More summer scenes

I'm not a great fan of summer -- heat and harsh overhead light don't make for great photographing weather. But one of the things I do like about summer is that you can often just let the moment and its extravagance of colour take over. They don't necessarily have a deeper meaning, but somehow the profligate colours become as much a subject as the other things in the frame...

Summer scene

'Hollister, California, 1922'

Well, of course it isn't California. It's Birmingham. And for all the corn-fed homoerotic Americana, it's just shopping.

I could be wrong but I guess that like many other Abercrombie & Fitch campaigns this is shot by Bruce Weber. There's a strange picture of BW in bed covered in cameras here.

Secret skatepark

I was wandering around the area behind the Custard Factory and heard a curious noise coming out of a warehouse building underneath one of the railway arches. There was an open window; I stuck my head in to see what was going on and saw this.



I'm sure it isn't 'secret' to the many kids who use it, but to me it seemed secret -- the kind of place I would have wanted to go when I was young, had skateboards been invented and had I been able to use one without killing myself...

World of Leather

Getting ready...

Crowds begin to gather to watch the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton on a large-screen broadcast in Birmingham's Victoria Square.

More on Madin

There are a number of posts on here in which John Madin's brutalist Central Library features. When it was announced that it was scheduled for demolition, I started to look deliberately for pictures in which it featured -- such as the one below.


It makes for an iconic backdrop if you can find the right kind of action happening in front of it, as in the more recent ones below.

Felliniesque

I've written before about the angels of photography -- the photographs you wind up with when something else seems to take over and look after pressing the button.

I shot lots of film again at Pride this year but in many cases, no matter how you try, what you get looks resolutely like what it is -- a gay pride procession, and no matter how much fun this may be, what I'm looking for ideally are photographs that transcend their literal circumstances and are open to wider interpretation. For me, that's when photographs start to get interesting.

This was the best picture I took in three rolls -- and it is the one I have literally no recollection of taking. The focus is off by miles, but what the hell -- sharpness isn't everything, the angels of photography know that.

I do also like this one:

Chris Steele-Perkins talk in Brum

Further to this post about the outdoor exhibition of street photography by Magnum members, there will be an audience with Chris Steele-Perkins at the Library Theatre from 6pm-8pm on Monday 6th June. See below and note that you have to book to: events [at] rewiredpr [dot] com.

2-2

Another one from St Patrick's Day. Another set is featured here.

All day breakfast cold drinks

Sunday morning at the Synagogue

A quick shot of a dignified lady who was talking to the greeters at the synagogue, taken on the same Sunday morning and just moments after the Cube mall photographs. Somehow, Sunday morning light often seems gentler and more lovely than at any other time of the week. Perhaps light is partly a frame of mind.

Singers Hill Synagogue -- which I have featured previously here -- is a lovely place to photograph in and around. If it opens its doors to the public again this year (I believe an open day is planned again as part of the annual heritage open days weekend from the 8th-11th September) then I shall definitely be there.

Lovely People

Opening a new upmarket retail mall in the current economic climate must be a triumph of hope over expectation. Here is the new Cube development (alongside Birmingham's Mailbox) deserted on a Sunday morning. The curious sculptures, collectively called 'Lovely People', are by local graffiti artist Temper and feature Midlands people whose stories are inspirational.



There's something rather spooky about some of these figures when the mall is empty, shimmering under its carefully designed lighting system.

Merry-go-round

Art gets everywhere

Training taxi-drivers

Taxi-drivers being given disability-awareness training, Birmingham.

'Take to the Streets'

Kudos to everyone involved in making this happen... From the 18th May a free street photography exhibition opens in the Snow Hill Plaza -- photography about the streets, on the streets.

'Take to the Streets: Street life around the world through the eyes of Magnum photographers'.


And here's the exhibition in situ -- Chris Steele-Perkins' 'Young mothers outside a Print Club photo booth, Tokyo', with Birmingham passers-by.



And Richard Kalvar's 'Tired dog, Paris, 14th arrondissement, Rue de l'Ouest, 1974' with newspaper headline poster and passer-by.

Sunday morning

'The Photographer'

I've just bought a copy of The Photographer -- a book I had never heard of, by a photographer I had also (shamefully) never heard of. Published by Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders, The Photographer combines the graphic novel with the photographs of French photojournalist Didier Lefevre, who died aged just fifty in 2007. Lefevre photographed Afghanistan over the course of about twenty years, including the Soviet war.

The Photographer is a sort of photography book-cum-graphic novel. Once you see it -- and it isn't a small floppy comic book: it's as large and as well-printed as many photography books -- you'll wonder why no one thought of combining the two mediums before.

You can download a great press briefing about Lefevre, his fellow graphic artist Emmanuel Guibert, and the book that became a phenomenon here. There's a 'Sunday book review' of The Photographer in the NY Times here.

And it really is superb. If you're put off because you're not fanatically interested in photography, don't worry: it isn't really about photography. It's about human willpower and determination -- it's about journeys, it's about 'mending what others destroy', it's about.... Well, read it. That's the best advice. It certainly isn't quite what I expected. If you wonder what MSF expeditions in war zones entailed twenty-five years ago, then this will tell you. And if you want to know more about Afghanistan during the final years of the Soviet occupation, this will tell you. And if you want the shortest and most succinct history lesson about the twenty years that led up to the 11th September 2001 attacks, the brilliant little intro to this book will tell you.

In fact, for someone who has never before read a graphic 'novel' of any description, I can't recommend it highly enough.

And of course, in many respects the saddest and most touching thing is that this book is largely responsible for whatever public profile Lefevre now has as a photographer. He died in 2007 having only published one collection of photographs in his lifetime -- now out of print, of course -- and with the vast bulk of his work unknown.

Birmingham mods

For all the scary looks, these guys were incredibly patient while I dogged their footsteps (and tire marks) taking pictures...