A favourite photograph

 

Sometimes people ask me if I have a favourite photograph among all those I have taken. Of course I have many. I recall ones of my children and especially one taken in Normandy around 1994, them walking ahead of me aged 2 and four holding hands as the sun cast a wonderful glow on the summer lane that evening. I have pictures of friends, some now passed away and of places which help me recall events. I also have photographs which were challenging in one way or another or required a lot of planning or else happened right in front of me that I captured out of good luck rather than any skill. It is surprising to me how much I can recall about the circumstances of photographs taken many years ago when all else about the circumstance or place has been forgotten.

 

But if pressed then I always come back to this picture which was taken in Liverpool around 2010. It is fairly nondescript although as an architectural picture it has some merit in balance, compositional terms and colour. The reflective surface helps, but it has a more significant memory and a holds a metaphor for me as well.

Not only is Liverpool a sea-faring city but my father was a seaman, working for Shell all his life. This building, which rears like the prow of a massive ship with a seagull flying past in the glowing clouds, reminds me of that. It stands at the edge of an old graving dock next to Albert Dock, much gentrified in recent years and certainly an improvement on when I used to crawl under fencing to access the old warehouses with my camera in my late teens. 

The area is called Mann Island and in the late 1960's a prefabricated hut stood on the site which served as the offices of the British Shipping Federation. This was a sort of benevolent society which paid seaman an allowance when they were "between ships" and waiting to go to sea again. For whatever reason their pay was allowed alongside any unemployment benefit they could claim for being out of work. So in a corner of the BSF office was a small area which served as an office of The Ministry of Labour - as it was still called then - and I worked there with a couple of other people calculating and making the weekly benefit payments to the around 200 or so seaman each week. I was 17 and it was a fun time. Poetry and music abounded in the pubs and clubs, Penny Lane became famous, and All You Need Is Love was all you needed at a party along with a Party Seven of Worthington Special. Alan Ginsberg had even declared the city the centre of the universe in a recent visit!

   It might be offices now (and house the lovely Open Eye photography gallery) but for me it is the prow of that proud ship, reflecting a past as well as the noisy seagull of my youth and with its open windows looking like portholes, It reminds me that time sails on. 

I had a great time that year and it helped make me who I am and yet, it is an ordinary photograph which no-one else might look at more than once or twice........

Don McCullin - His exhibition at Tate Liverpool (Sept 20 - May 21)

 

Don McCullin is arguably the best known living photographer in Britain today. Few can come close to either his output or the scope of his work. Now in his mid-eighties and still working hard he has covered most genres in his work as a photojournalist and in his own, more gentle work, in later age.

Born into a deprived childhood in London he left school at fifteen and later did his National Service in the RAF, where he discovered photography. and saved for his first Rolleicord camera. Back in London he photographed some local gang members in a bombed out building and was advised to send the pictures to The Observer who promptly published them, setting him on his road through photojournalism, initially with The Sunday Times. He covered homelessness in London, Northern Ireland during The Troubles, The Biafran famine, civil war in Cyprus and most famously Vietnam where his reflective, frank, hard-hitting style caught people's imagination. During this period his attention was always on the people involved, the storytelling, narrative aspects of the situation.

Since then he has photographed the Beatles, travelled widely in Africa and the Middle East where he recorded the ruins of Palmyra prior to ISIS decimating the site (which he later returned to with Dan Cruikshank the historian to record the damage caused for a TV programme) become a CBE and been knighted. A 2012 documentary McCullin by David and Jacqui Morris was nominated for two Baftas.

He now lives in Somerset and has been recording much of his local area in his landscapes which he says "My landscapes are dark. People say: “Your landscapes are almost bordering on warscapes.” I’m still trying to escape the darkness that’s inside me. There’s a lot of darkness in me. I can be quite jovial and jokey and things like that, but when it comes down to the serious business of humanity, I cannot squander other people’s lives." That says much for the humanity of a man who has seen the worst of the world.

Now a new exhibition shows his amazing Tate Britain Retrospective from 2019 at Tate Liverpool. The show opens on 16th September 2020 and runs until 9th May 2021. Tickets must be purchased online and are timed so that the one-way system to help deal with Covid works for the safety of all. Over 250 works assembled over 60 years and all printed by McCullin in his darkroom are on display. Despite visiting the show in Londo I am keen to see it again and look forward to a visit during the run.

Five of the best - World Photography Day

August 19 is World Photography Day, a day to pay homage to the history of photography, celebrate the present and leave a positive trail for the future. World Photography Day originates from the invention of the daguerreotype, a photographic processes developed by Louis Daguerre. It is arguable as to whether Louis Daguerre got there first but he was certainly a very early bird in the photography stakes.

By now it is estimated that over 20 billion photographs are taken every year throughout the world. That is a lot. In fact if you looked at each one for a second it would take you 636 years (less a couple of days) to see them all. We don't have that much time of course which means we will only be able to see a fraction of the photographs taken.

So to celebrate I have decided to help you and show you five photogrpahs that have caught me eye this year. I hope that you like them. 

The one at the top by the way was taken by Amdad Hossain and was a winner in the photojournalist stakes, of a homeless woman in Bangladesh and reminded me of how lucky I was.

Russian photographer Oleg Ershov took this picture which was a winner of the International Landscape Photographer of the year recently. He took it in Cumbria, which shows that us Britons don't have to go far to find winning pictures - we just have to see them...

British photographer Sam Rowley captured these squabbling mice on the London Underground to win the Lumix wildlife prize...again showing that what is around us can be a winner.

This architectural phot by Hazel Parreno of Hintze Hall at the Natural History Museum also caught my eye. It's simplicity belies the detail within the picture.

Last but not least is this picture which won the Birdlife section of the British Photography Awards. It was taken by Kathryn Cooper. It may not be obvious what it is a picture of so here is what Kathryn says of it :- 

"A small group of starlings lead the way as the entire flock surges overhead. In a new take on long exposure photography, I capture short bursts of frames and use my own simple algorithm to flatten them into a single image in post processing. I find that insights emerge from the resulting images that traditional long exposure techniques are not sharp enough to capture. I studied the mathematics of natural phenomena such as murmurations and avalanches during my doctorate and have found the process of turning this flock behaviour into art quite fascinating. This image was taken at RSPB Old Moor in Yorkshire, UK. I visited the reserve several times during the winter of 2018/19 to refine this technique and capture the fluid motion of the starlings. Visitors are lucky enough to be able to stand directly underneath the starlings' flight path and the noise of so many birds moving as one is phenomenal."

All pictures used in this Blog are copyright of the photographers who took them.

Intentional Camera Movement (ICM)

Humber Fish Co., Humber Street

ICM is not new in photography and has often been used in the past to create more complex, dreamlike and painterly images to counter-balance some of the increasing sharply focussed work often on display.

Intentional Camera Movement is what it says and involves the photographer moving the camera during a long exposure to create something slightly other worldly. The impact can be very boring and look like a slightly out of focussed amateur attempt, very abstract or stunningly beautiful and Turneresque. There are some very experienced experts out there who, by their own admission, may take hundreds of shots to get the one or two they are looking for.

I have had my interest renewed in the nature and practie of ICM following a conversation with another photographer, Iain Cairns when we met for a coffee recently and a link he sent me to the work of Andrew S Gray in Northumberland whose work you can see here :- https://andrewsgray.photography/ . Very atmospheric!!

I am miles away from anything like having the skill of Andrew but I also think that increasing my repertoir is as essential as using the full facilities of my camera. So I have set out to practice with ICM and these pictures are the first taken over the last week.  I have a long way to go. 

I have not attempted to do very much post editing with them as I wish to get the balance right first between what can be seen and what can be hinted at. This essentially means how much or how little movement I get into the shot and that is practice and good luck. The greater the movement the more abstracted the picture. I have certainly learned that having some point of focus helps and that usually minimal movement makes a more understandable picture. Equally a lot of movement can give a very pleasing abstract effect and result in unpredicatble colour swatches in the final photo.

In addition I decided to experiment with a technique I have been using for some time now and utilising my camera's ability to take up to twelve photographs and merge them in-camera to gain an overlayed result. Again I have learned so far to work with two imposed images and ICM but not more.

The basic camera set-up varies depending on the weather. A very bright and sunny day will allow much more play than a dark and stormy one and the colour palette on the final photos will be very different. In order to reduce the light entering the camera you also need a variable Neutral Density Filter. These allow you to make speedy changes to the light entering the lense. I have usually set the ISO on the camera to 100 (which in itself can require a longer exposure) and set the timer to anything from half a second to considerably longer. I can then marginally adjust the ND filter, the timing or the ISO to improve results...but it is hit and miss to some degree although if you stand in one place and take a number of photographs it is likely you will get nearer to the result you want with each picture taken - unless the sun goes in or pops out again!

My experiments have taken me into the city and countryside over the last ten days and you can decide which you like best from these shots below. I will post again on this topic in the coming months as I learn more and use increasingly different methods to achieve my results. Comments are welcomed - and remember if you don't wish to miss any of my blogs you can always pop your email into the top right hand box and then you will get a reminder when I post ! You can also reverse that process if you get fed-up with me!

Sky and wall

Spurn Lightship, Hull Marina

Path near South Cave

Family outing to the woods

Landscape with single tree near Elloughton

Gavin Prest - Book One

 

Gavin Prest is a Yorkshireman from Hornsea and, like most Yorkshiremen I know, proud of it. He specialises in fine art prints, usually in black and white. His exacting style and boundless imagination having helped build him an international reputation with his work now selling to collectors worldwide. 

As a leading member and mentor of the Guild of Photographers he has spent much of the recent lockdown conducting Zoom interviews with leading photographers on behalf of the Guild including the likes of Sean Tucker, Martin Parr, Kevin Mullins, Frances van der Merwe and  Debbie Longmore. Last year he was a judge of the largest photography competition in the world, The Trierenberg Supercircuit which took him to Austria.

With his passion for mono and a storytelling style his photographs are easily recongnisable to many, although he can still surprise at times, as he did with his successful bid for a second Masters Award with a series of pictures which were not only in pastel shades but appearing to feature a mannequin - it wasn't, it was a model ! 

His work requires exacting focus and ideas from him and his models, many of whom he has worked with for some time, but also a good deal of careful work in the post production stages....and what Gavin doesn't know about the technical issues of studio lighting is hardly worth bothering about...

His first book - obviously entitled Gavin Prest Book One  - is a lovely hardbacked, well produced and well presented selection of 39 early images which helped build his reputation spread over 80 pages. The paper qulaity is high, as you would expect, using 200 gsm silk paper and the square format suits the style. Surprisingly the volume is only £25.00 pp and tells you a little about his work and motivation. From the title I would image there are more books to come!

You can find out more about the book here:-  https://www.gavinprest.com/the-release-of-book-one/ 

Sally Mann

 

This American photographer grew up in Lexington and studied photography in the late 60's at the Ansel Adams Yosemite workshops and later at colleges in Vermont where she graduated not only with photography as her major but with with an MA in creative writing.

She has long had a reputation for disquieting photographs of familial relationships, of young girls on the cusp of womanhood, of the familiar natural world shown in an unfamiliar and slightly awkward way which draws attention to the often unseen, for the themes of death and decomposition and themes of complex identity in the American South. Her own family feature strongly in her work including her children, the decline of her husband Larry with Muscular Dystrophy and the decaying remains of her much loved greyhound. This is not work for the easily disturbed but her techniques and subject matter repays close attention.

Usually working with an 8x10 bellows camera she has explored many printing processes to suit her work.

A Guggenheim Fellow, named "America's Best Photographer" in 2001 by TIME Magazine and a three time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship she has also had two documentaries made about her work; "Blood Ties" (1994) and "What Remains" (2006) both of which were nominated for major awards. Both can be found online and watched for a small fee.  Her work now appears in galleries and museums across the world.

The following is a one hour You Tube interview with Charlie Rose from 2016 which has a really great beginning :-) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4jaRBwGVYc 

The photos below show the reason for controversy they have caused with accusations of her taken advantage of her children and showing them in provocative poses. Her children very much support her work and have always voted on the photographs she can show. One of the main things I take from her work (apart from the beauty of natural light) is to not be afraid of following your instincts.

 

Calla Lillies

Every year I grow Calla Lillies in pots in my garden. They are now taking over and I need to re-pot at the end of this summer. Some have a purplish tinge to their veins and interior and others are deep orange.

Each year I pick one to photograph always looking for new angles or lighting. This year I use a 100mm lense which is often the one I use for portraits. It enables me to take shots pretty close up, the only drawback being the extremely narrow depth of field. This means that I then have to decide where I lay the emphasis on the focus for the flower.

Whilst I love the colour of this particular lilly I also happen to enjoy them being reduced to mono so there is always a debate inside my head about which might look best left in colour and which converted to mono. 

I usually use a single low light source from one side and slightly about the flower - a classic Rembrandt lighting technique in portraits. I don't feel that I have pushed this as far as I might yet but I'll keep trying. After all John Blakemore has been photographing tulips for over 24 years...