Great British - John Blakemore

 

There are probably few living photographers who have been as influential as John Blakemore over the years. Yet his star does not burn as brightly as Bailey, McCullin or Parr, whom most people would name immediately. 

Blakemore was born in 1936 and discovered photography while on national service with the RAF in Aden. Self-taught, as most people were at that time, he returned to his hometown of Coventry determined to record the re-construction of the city. He had become inspired by Edward Steichen's "The Family of Man" which he had seen in a copy of Picture Post sent by his mother while abroad.

He worked as a photographer initially for Black Star agency and then in a number of studios producing portraits and commercial work. He also became a printer of black and white photographs - of which he has become a master over the years learning, and using, the Zone System made famous by Ansel Adams

After a spell as a photographer at Courtaulds he left Coventry and joined his friend Richard Sadler as a lecturer of creative photography at Derby College of Art, later becoming Emeritus Professor of Photography at Derby University where he taught from 1970 until 2001.

Landscapes and still life are his main subjects and he is known for his handmade books, many of which are now in his archive in the Library of Birmingham. He has consistently championed the British countryside and landscape, working in the same small areas for many years to develop a close relationship and understanding of them. Working mainly in black and white he says that "the silver print is my chosen and primary means of expression". His book, "John Blakemore's Black and White Photography Workshop" is still held as a masterclass in landscape work. His landscape work has been described as richly nuanced which comes, at least aprtly from his printing techniques.

He is also famous for photographing tulips for over a decade of which he says "The tulip journey, then, was ultimately a visual journey, an investigation and discovery of visual possibilities. The tulip became an object of attention and fascination. It became both text and pretext for an activity of picture-making. The photographs are not finally, or not primarily, about tulips: they contain tulips. To say this is not to diminish the role of the tulip. Had the vase of flowers on the table when I made the first tentative exposures exploring the space of my kitchen been, let’s say daffodils, then the journey, if it had ever begun, would in all probability have been shorter. The daffodil, although it is a delightful flower, exhibits a stubborn rigidity of form; it lives and dies at attention. The tulip, however, is a flower of constant metamorphosis; it stretches towards the light and gestures to occupy the space." And that observation, perhaps, say what all photography is about.

You can visit his website here :- https://www.johnblakemore.co.uk/ 

There is also a recorded talk by him presenting his work from 1955 - 2016 at the Meeting of Minds conference in 2017 here;- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa8woJC-0lg

Seven great You Tube sites to help you as a photographer

 

It is arguable that photography is far more complex these days than it ever was in the days of film. It isn't that it is simpler but the digital proliferation of equipment, lighting, programmes for post production, techniques and ways of showing work are thrown at photographers from all directions. At the same time the internet can provide more free help than was ever available even twenty years ago. So in these days of lockdown what better than to be able to access some new skills, improve old ones, or even think about trying something different. 

The problem is which help to turn to. The internet is awash but some sites are far better and more reliable than others. This blog concentrates on You Tube, which is one of the most accesible ways of getting help because it is highly visual and provides commentary yet can be variable in the way in which advice is presented. You can also halt a presentation or re-run it so as not to miss anything. The seven links provided here are a starting point to You Tube Channels I have found extremely helpful. Each example covers a different aspect of the sort of help you may want. If you find the examples I have included here useful then I suggest you subscribe to the channel so that you automatically get updates when a new programme is released. Equally if you want to find out more about the channel you can click on the their icon which will take you to their home and show you many more of their You Tube videos. Most of these are American but don't be put off by that although some interpretation may occasionally be needed !! 

ONE

PHLearn is a site that teaches Photoshop in easy stages. This seems to be the most used package in digital post production. This particular link takes you to a lesson in using the recent sky replacement tool as an example. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ognLpUNLDwM          

TWO

Tony and Chelsea Northup have some great reviews of kit and cameras - such as this one for anyone thinking of buying the new Canon EOS R5 (for instance). They give good reviews and are not afraid to point out the drawbacks too. In addition they have a live broadcasts on Thursdays which are sometimes worth watching depending on the topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93XjksrZKgQ  

THREE

COOPH proves that you don't need expensisve lighting or equipment to play a few tricks and make your photos stand out.... includes using smartphones and home shooting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIRpw_O5VzI   

FOUR

This community, SLR Lounge, is dedicated to helping photographers think more about what they are doing and why. Run by working, professional photographers there are a variety of discussions and tips. This one considers whether articifical intelligence is ruining photography. Bet you had never considered that before - or at least not framed in that way...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfHt0fMKRF4 

FIVE

One of my favourite channels with photographer Jay P Morgan who has a no nonsense approach to advice. Simple, direct and always useful. The Slanted Lense covers a variety of topics but his advice on the use of lighting, indoors and out, is invaluable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfF3-5qgyn4 

SIX

Possibly the most common photographic genre is landscape photography. It is accessible to all and costs nothing. Beauty abounds and changing light and seasons makes it endlessly variable. So here is Thomas Heaton, an English landscape photographer, to help you think about how to make those landscapes even better....although this one looks at why it took him two years to decide to make a photo book of his work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOkc4MamYgE 

SEVEN

Anthony Morganti provides by far the best help in learning the complexities of Lightroom. If you shoot in RAW then Lightroom really is the best programme to use for my money. But it is big and it is that size that makes it so good. You will never learn all the complexities by sitting and fiddling with it so someone like Morganti to guide you through it is worth having on hand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0f0NiDBPbk 

If you have enjoyed this blog or found it useful then why not subscribe and allow new ones to find their way to your inbox automatically. Feel free to leave a message for me as well. I'm always interested in the thoughts of others, including new sites which I have not yet come across. 

In My Room - a book of intimate photographs by Saul Leiter

 

Saul Leiter is known to many as one of the original New York street photographers, and notably one of the first to use colour film during the 1950's. What some may not know is that during his life he shot thousands of mono pictures of his wives, lovers and friends in his flat and small studio on East 10th Street.

In this excellent book "In My Room", with an introduction by Carole Naggar and afterword by Robert Benson, are shown a very small sample from this collection. In his afterword Benson writes "The women in these photographs are unguarded: they are naked, not nude......They are just out there, these women, frail, beautiful and deeply human." The intimacy with which Leiter worked is clear and palpable. The models are people he knows, and who trust him, which could explain why they were viewed as so private. Shot between 1952 and the early seventies they use natural light, which softens them and gives an almost accidental feel. 

They could be voyeuristic apart from the fact that we know they were shot with complicity from those involved. Many just show the preparations for everyday life. Others are more sensuous and personal. All feel as though you are being allowed into a small private world of tenderness. They could never be described as salacious. Rather they are uninhibited. The pictures are massively different from the very controlled portraits and fashion shoots he did for Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, Esquire and other top magazines with experienced models.

Some are almost abstractions which his use of black and white allows. many hold the feeling of his love for Japanese art, as he himself first studied painting.

In her introduction Naggar says "Leiter's nudes have a spontaneous and romantic quality, like the scattered pages of a diary, or stills from early movies.......Leiter's gaze is not that of the typical male: the women can be in turn shy, aggressive, or playful, but they are always partners and full participants in a give-and-take...". 

For anyone wishing to photograph women there are some wonderful lessons to be learned here about closeness and trust.

"In My Room" by Saul Leiter with an introduction by Carole Naggar and an afterword by Robert Benton is published by Steidl (ISBN 978-3-95829-103-4). 

An interview with Margit Erb of the Saul Leiter Foundation about the work can be seen here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yz-301syQ0 

Contemporary Japanese photography

 

Untitled - Daido Moriyama

Despite many of our cameras coming from Japan Western photographers do not often explore the photographs made there. I think it is well worth it as the cultural differences, the social history and the intentions of some photographic practice in Japan make it a place from which we can inform our practice.

                                                                Sans Titre - Nobuyoshi Araki

The two symbols used to represent photography (shashin) in Japanese first related to art. Sha means to copy and shin truth. So the word originally applied to the realism in Western Art. As a ban in imports and exports was in place in Japan during the Edo period (which ended in 1868) it was difficult to find a camera in Japan. Sometime after that date the word was applied to photographs and has stuck. So photography was viewed as making a true image.

                                                            from - Seascapes - Hiroshi Sigumoto

During the early twentieth century Japanese photography was mainly concerned with developing documentary styles which somewhat mirrored the concept of recording true images and influenced by photojournalism in the USA. Some surrealism began to creep in with European influences as well. 

from Illuminance - Rinko Kawachi

This development stopped during the second world war. After that photography in Japan turned to a different sensitivity completely and started to record and explore the aftermath of Nagasaki and Hiroshima alongside the upheavals in cultural norms, greater Western influence and the rapid development of industry and selling to world markets, including leading camera brands from Canon and Nikon to Fujifilm and Sigma. Street photography grew in prominence during this time. This new style was called sunappu shotto  or snapshot and was rough and ready, sometimes out of focus or blurred.

Untitled - Naoya Hatakey

In Japanese photography 1968 has become known as Year Zero. One of the most important events during this time was the establishment of a photography magazine, Provoke, which although it only lasted for three issues, provided a new focus for what photography might achieve as well as a showcase for the existing work of the time. The magazine spurred an exhibition of photographs in Tokyo, where photo galleries had been slow to develop, called 100 Years: A History of Photographic Expression by the Japanese. It indirectly led to the 1974 MOMA exhibition New Japanese Photography in New York, thus bringing the changes to an international audience

Untitled (long exposure series) - Tokihiro Sato

By the 1990's women had grown to be a prominement influence in photography and their concerns tended to be very different to those of the men who had proceded them.  Concerned with their social standing, changing role and self image women brought a new and different aesthetic to imagery. Gradually, with this influence, photographers became more sensitive to surroundings, feelings and emotion as well as social issues.

Composition of Air - Gen Aihara

Japan has always had a strong feeling for artistic expression and gradually the minimalism showing in haiku and the social lessons from Hokusai prints or the minutiae which focussed the development of netsuki found there way into photography. It is now finding it's feet on the world stage after a slow start....

Untitled from Liquid Dreams 2 - Mika Ninagawa

There are plenty of places to explore this topic further and here are a couple of links to help get you started :-

https://time.com/4035308/japanese-photography/

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2013/06/27/arts/what-provoked-japans-contemporary-photography/

Autumn Colours - an alternative approach

 

Autumn colours are everywhere at present and photographers will travel miles for a killer picture. New England in The Fall is on many a photographer's bucket list. But in the days of a pandemic and limited travel we may have to look closer to home. 

I am lucky in living near the edge of the Wolds as they start to reach out north from the banks of the Humber. The trails which lead through Welton, Brantingham and South Cave before running up towards Market Weighton through the Drewton Estate are heavily wooded and a delight to walk through in October and early November. So I set myself a challenge to walk up Brantingham Dale Road and cut off through the woodland path to South Cave and create some less than usual photographs of autumn colours yesterday. I limited myself to an hour as part of the challenge and as the weather was very variable. I also made a decison to take standard photographs, such as that above, but also to use both multiple exposure and intentional camera movement (ICM) to gain some more abstract records of my walk.

Anyone using these techniques will know that there is a degree of luck involved although you can reduce that by really thinking about the colours you are wanting in the frame, the exposure times you are allowing and the number of frames you are stacking. The greater the number of frames the more critical the exposure time and this usually needs a bit of tweaking as you see the results. I started with a stack of four frames eventually reducing this to two. The less frames you stack the more definition you may get in the picture (see the next frame below). My exposure times varied from half a second when I decided to use ICM to 1/160 when I took single frame, standard pictures.

As I always shoot in RAW I post-process in Lightroom and the images nearly all benefitted from some manipulation of the texture and colour to deepen the tones and vibrancy. Sometimes that was quickly achieved by using the overall saturation and vibrancy tools but others I achieved through working on the hue, saturation and luminance of individual colours.

Whether or not you like this type of photograph it is always interesting to see the results. The pictures here are a selection from the 129 pictures I took in the hour available. The time in post production is probably twice that of the walk at least! Comments on blogs are always welcomed whether they are constructive criticism or questions raised so do leave a comment if you wish and I will always respond.

RIP - Chris Killip

 

Photograph by Kent Rodzwicz

A British photographer died last week at the age of 74. He was Chris Killip and had been suffering from cancer. I was sad to hear this as he was a formative influence for me, even though my style is nothing like his. His gritty black and white pictures of working class life in the North-East of England and of the community in Skinningrove on the high North Yorkshire coast taught me a lot about how life was at the time and what to look for in a picture. Of course he photographed more than that, including portraiture as well as in Ireland, but these were the pictures which stuck with me.

Born in the Isle of Man in 1946 he worked as an assistant to commercial photographers in London during the 1960's and early 70's, having some early success and attracting funding for his work through the Arts Council in the form of a commission to photograph the market towns of Huddersfield and Bury St Edmunds in England for the exhibition “Two Views—Two Cities” at Huddersfield City Art Gallery and Bury St. Edmunds Art Gallery. In 1975, he was awarded a two-year fellowship through which he would photograph England’s northeast. Killip also directed Side Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne where he lived from 1977 to 1979. He said of the people in his pictures "They are at the tough end of things, the people in my photographs. It’s about the struggle for work, being out of work, fighting for work." He had never taken a photograph before he became a photographer at 17, inspired by a Cartier-Bresson photo he saw in Paris Match magazine.

These were the days before digital photography and most of his work was taken on a large format 5x4 camera - a big piece of kit to carry round that made him very visible. Probably his best known work was a series of photographs taken between 1973 and 1985 and published under the title In Flagrante and showing the impact of the deindustrialisation on people as it happened. Killip himself said of the book "History is what's written, my photographs are what happened". Martin Parr, a contemporary and friend of Killip, has said that he was "without a doubt one of the key players in postwar British photography.”

Despite Creative Camera Magazine recognising the importance of his work and giving his work an entire issue in 1977 Killip failed to gain the recognisition he deserved on Britain and moved to the United States where he was the Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University for 26 years. His major retrospective took place in the Folkwang Museum in Essen in 2012. 2018 however saw the publication of four books of earlier photographs in the UK. Some recognition at last. These are now difficult to obtain and expensive if you do find them...

It was his pictures of Skinningrove and Seacoal Beach which first drew my attention to his work as I had visited Skinningrove during the early 60's during a holiday in Staithes and later returned when I moved to the Humberside area in the early 1990's. There was not much there apart from terraces of houses and a beach. Seacoal was further north which, in the 60's still had coal on it that people collected and sold. It seemed to me that he had caught the whole spirit of these places which were desperate, forgotten and yet spirited and defiant and with a massive sense of community.

RIP Chris Killick and thanks for the unwritten history.

Shirin Neshat -

 

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian visual artist best known for her work in photography, video, and film (such as her 1999 film Rapture),which explore the relationship between women and the religious and cultural value systems of Islam. Born into the small and conservative town of Quazvin in 1957 she had little connection to the art world until attending University of California at Berkeley for her final year of high school. There she discovered Western artists and was drawn to women like Frida Kahlo, Eva Hesse and Judy Chicago. She applied for, and was accepted onto, the Graduate Art Course at Berkeley but while there the Iranian Revolution robbed her of her immigration status and could not return to Iran. She moved to New York and started work in Storefront for Art and Architecture with her then husband. The ten years she spent there she attributes her art education to.

She eventually received US citizenship and felt confident enough to return to Iran and visit her family, an experience which was significant in how she saw the world, herself and the role of women in Islam. Much of her work started at this point as she explored the culture and relationships she experienced. She often uses writing as a part of the photograph to explore her themes.

She has said that she hopes the viewers of her work “take away with them not some heavy political statement, but something that really touches them on the most emotional level.” While her early photographs were overtly political, her film narratives tend to be more abstract, focusing around themes of gender, identity, and society. Her Women of Allah series, created in the mid-1990s, introduced themes of the discrepancies of public and private identities in both Iranian and Western cultures. The split-screened video Turbulent (1998) won Neshat the First International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999. The artist currently lives and works in New York. Her works are included in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.

For me her work is rewarding because it relies heavily on metaphor. The diffierences shown in the public and private attitudes to men and wormen, to exposure and concealment and the delicate line and balance that many people have to  follow in their lives to survive, something we can easily forget in Western culture, whether politically or personally.

You can find out more about Shirin's work here :- 

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-shirin-neshat-path-art-school-outcast-contemporary-art-icon

Here her TED Talk here:- 

https://www.ted.com/talks/shirin_neshat_art_in_exile?language=en 

or watch her 17 minute film Roja here :-

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/video/shirin-neshat-roja-exclusive