Irish faces

This must be the fifth or sixth consecutive year that I have photographed Birmingham's St Patrick's Day parade. It gets bigger and bigger. This year I wanted to try and capture something different: focusing on people as they gather and get ready produces by far the most interesting pictures to my mind anyway, and here the occasion has the atmosphere of a small town festival.

Watt/Madin/McLauchlan

Further to this post, here's another of Birmingham statuary -- James Watt with John Madin's brutalist central library in the background, currently adorned with Lucy McLauchlan's artwork. Worth taking, I think because this particular conjunction won't be observable for all that much longer -- if Madin's masterpiece does come down. Interestingly, as I noted in the earlier post Madin still seems to feel that it will be saved...

UPDATE: Amazingly, I just stumbled across this -- a September 1973 (74?) issue of Birmingham's Grapevine, the free press pre-cursor to What's On, devoted to a very critical assessment of Madin. Fascinating stuff. With thanks to Brian Homer.

Winter light

Winter graveyard/winter rush-hour

A beautiful winter graveyard..where we are all headed, I suppose.

Two scenes in Chinatown

The River

I have hung around photographing the floozie in the jacuzzi -- Dhruva Mistry's The River -- off and on all winter, hoping that something in this much photographed scene will translate itself into a worthwhile picture.

Finally, I got a picture I love. For me, this reinforces the idea that sometimes you just have to keep plugging away at something until you finally get to photograph it as you see it. It may be just a detail, it may be in particular light, it may be a specific moment -- the interaction with people, a split second's drama -- or it may simply be finally catching an otherwise 'well-worn' view in a way that finally coincides with what you had in your mind's eye.

Winter catacombs

Purple/Elvis

Ian Berry's Whitechapel

There was an excellent piece in yesterday's Observer -- a huge double-page spread photograph taken by Magnum photographer Ian Berry in Whitechapel in 1972. It captures the changing look and feel of the streets during that period and was taken as part of a project commissioned by the Whitechapel gallery to document life on the gellery's doorstep.

What in many ways is most interesting about it is Berry's assessment that it just misses being a 'great picture' because the overall composition is spoilt by a 'white car'. Now, Berry doesn't say which white car -- the one exiting the frame left (and which to me seems to balance the black cab entering the frame right), or the VW, just visible behind the head of the woman on the left... Which car convinced Berry he hadn't quite nailed it?

It also reinforces the fact that with street photography, luck, judgement and subsequent editing are everything -- the difference between great and enduring, and not quite...

Misha Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt is probably one of my favourite Magnum photographers. In recent years his pictures have been well very published -- Taschen and others have done some superb productions of his books and new and rarely seen work has come out in considerable quantity.

His austere B&W photos are often funny, charming, witty -- and always humane. There's virtually nothing he can't do with a camera. From the simplest, most classical composition -- like this, in which there is just a beautiful object (Pablo Casals' cello) and the careful rendition of light, tones and textures, the art that lies at the heart of B&W photography; to this, a smudged, slow, melancholy river-side moment in NYC -- Erwitt's pictures give immense pleasure.

Amongst his most famous -- and touching -- pictures must be this one of Lucienne, his first wife, with their daughter and a rescue cat in their Manhattan apartment.

There's a lovely article about it here written by Misha, Erwitt's son. And no, as Misha is at pains to emphasise, he is not the naked baby in the picture: that's his sister, Ellen.

This is family photography as public history.

And a quick update (15/09/11): I've just discovered a great Erwitt slideshow on the Time blog here. This is a lovely selection, the scans are good and there's a full screen feature (don't miss the button top-right like I did). But best of all the pictures have Erwitt's own gruff, laconic, no bullshit captions.

I never look at Erwitt pictures without coming away feeling slightly better and lighter of heart. How many photographers can you say that about?

Networking

Sometimes the overall mix of colours when photographing indoors -- clothes, lighting, complexions, furniture, decor -- can all serve to be a bit distracting. But B&W simplifies and takes away and can do an awful lot to make indoor photographs more elegant and 'timeless'. And sometimes less is more... I like this one a lot for its energy and expressions.

Dappled light

The late summer, with interesting stuff going on on the streets and lovely dappled light to take advantage of all seems an awful long time ago...

William Bloye

I've long been fascinated by some of the older civic buildings on Gt Charles Street -- such as the old Birmingham Chest Clinic. They have a sort of pea-souper, inter-war atmosphere about them.

I thought the relief work on the chest cliic might be Eric Gill, but it isn't -- it's by William Bloye, who was born in 1890 and died in Italy in 1975. But until that time, and especially in the 30s, 40s and 50s he was Birmingham's unofficial civic sculptor, working on an extraordinary range of civic and commercial commissions from his studio on Golden Hillock Rd in Balsall Heath.

And interestingly, he did study lettering under Eric Gill.

Anyway, this is how I see the chest clinic -- in grainy monochrome, the light failing. If I turn around I know that men will be hurrying past in trilbys and tightly belted overcoats, pre-war Austins and Humbers creeping along Charles St in the rush hour traffic.

Running man

In a swirl of silver thermal blankets and blazing late-autumn sunshine, the first runners in the half-marathon came home...

Breakfast conversation

This was taken at an event I photographed for a local voluntary organisation, but I liked the atmosphere and intimacy of it sufficiently to regard it as a 'personal' picture.

Pope's visit

They waited in gardens, on the pavement, and in upper storeys where the view would be better.


And they waited outside bars.


Some came in jubilation...


And some in anger...


And they came with messages...



All in all, it was one of the most curious events I think I have ever been present at.

We buy gold

Flogging our gold: it's something we may soon all have to resort to.

Time travel

At the tail-end of the summer I went again to the open day at the Museum Collection Centre. The nicest thing is that you get to travel there and back on an old bus. This one was a 1960s bus, I think. I suppose it would have been in service well into the1970s -- it's certainly how I remember bus travel being in the 70s.



On the day I went even the parked traffic seemed obligingly in character too.

Remembrance Day

I'm no great fan of the Remembrance Day set-pieces. Unless you've got a really good vantage point -- or access to the ceremony itself -- and good long lenses, they are very difficult to photograph. But what I like more and more is what happens before and after the event, the small things going on in the margins as people prepare or as they leave....

Is it art?

I think it is. I'm catching up with some long-stockpiled film which has just been processed. This was in September and I rather think it was some kind of street performance as part of ArtsFest.

Or maybe it was one of those strange glitches when people forget that they are out to shop and slip into a dream state?

Matchgirl

I love this. She almost was a real, live matchgirl -- except what she was selling happened to be street art, handmade silkscreen prints taken, I imagine, from Indian designs.

Anyway, it has a lovely, slightly out of kilter feel to it -- simple, but on the other hand puzzling.



And then once you start to look, street art seems to be all around you...

Memento mori

I was walking through the Jewellery Qtr one Sunday morning. This looked like a pre-prepared religious allegory, a memento mori.

Polish Prayers

Taken some while ago at a Polish Community Centre where everyone was very welcoming and patient -- even when I somewhat mistakenly (in retrospect) carried on photographing as prayers were said.

Another from the same event -- song sheets are handed out for guests to sing traditional Polish folk songs and hymns.

The Big Pride

Another from a few months back -- Pride in the rain...again. I love photographing at Pride and the chance juxtapositions that happen on its fringes. The rain adds a different atmosphere.

Voja Mitrovic, Printer to the Greats

There is a great two-post article by Peter Turnley on The Online Photographer website about Voja Mitrovic ('Voya'), master B&W printer to many of Magnum's photographers, including Cartier-Bresson. If you ever wondered what role printing plays in the production of photographic masterpieces, and why -- and how -- some people can coax finer images out of a photographic negative than others, then wonder no more, just read the article.

Part 1
Part 2