A new international photography magazine - FRAMES

 

We live in a digital age. In fact, photography has undergone a dramatic transformation in the last few decades.The overwhelming majority of photographs now are captured digitally. Additionally, we use our computers and mobile phones to consume photographs most of the time.

But… how about paper?  Enter FRAMES.

Friday, September 18th 2020 marks quite a special day on the contemporary photography publishing scene. My good photography friend Tomasz Trzebiatowski, is launching a quarterly printed photography magazine. Yes, printed. On paper. And it is looking wonderful.

What is pretty unique about this publication is that FRAMES Magazine embraces all possible photography genres and formats. Each quarterly edition will feature the work of photographers using digital and analogue cameras, mobile phones, even pinhole cameras.

“Excellent photography belongs on paper” - is Tomasz’ motto. The common denominator connecting all the images being printed in FRAMES is simply their visual quality and inspiring, thought-provoking character.

The magazine itself is looks gorgeous. In essence, it is a top-notch, quarterly photography book, printed the wonderful 140gsm uncoated Edixion Challenger offset paper manufactured using 100% ECF pulp. Each edition consists of 108 pages (!).

In the first edition you can see the work of such acclaimed artists as Michael Kenna and Phil Penman as well as some great photography by emerging photographers such as Robert Atwater, Olga Karlovac, Yalim Vural, and Curtis Salonick. What’s more, the first issue also includes two in-depth exclusive interviews with Magda Keaney (Senior Curator, Photographs, National Portrait Gallery in London) and Richard Tsong-Taatarii (photojournalist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune).

But that is not all. When you become a FRAMES subscriber, you automatically get access to the entire suite of their digital offerings: FRAMES Digital companions, online Photography Masterclasses and the insider FRAMES Photo Community. It seems like FRAMES is set to become an impressive blend of printed and digital photography assets through the creation of a passionate international photography community with the magazine and its additional digital components as its hub.

You can become the member of FRAMES today for a monthly fee of $14 USD, (Just under £11 a month). This is an early bird offer which you can access through the link at the end of the blog. 

Your membership will secure you annual access to 4 printed editions of FRAMES Magazine, 8 editions of FRAMES Digital Companions, 4 Photography Masterclasses and the private community and forums. This is exceptional value and allows you the opportunity to help build the community too. It is also a comparatively cheap method of collecting some excellent work with print being the best method of collection these days.

If you would like to start your FRAMES Magazine collection from its very first issue, ensure you become a FRAMES member by October 15th 2020. I am acting as the representative of FRAMES in the North of England and you can follow this link to check out their wonderful site and subscribe today. Using this link ensures you will receive the best deal available: http//:joinframes.com/nigel 

My Influences - Cig Harvey

Cig Harvey

Back in July I wrote a review for a book (her third monograph) called "You an Orchestra You a Bomb" by Cig Harvey and said a little about her. This time she has a whole blog to herself. 

I first came across Cig's work online when I discovered some of her early work around the time of her second monograph "Gardening at Night" although by then she had already shown work a number of times in both solo and group shows starting in 2000. I was impressed with her monotone work although most of her pictures are in colour and in fact colour is immensely important to her. Her work often shows edges, hints, and segments;  small pieces which allowed you to wonder and it was this storytelling element of her work that I found attractive. She herself has said that she is influenced by magic realism and has attracted comments comparing her work to that of Rene Magritte.

Looking further I found a long interview with her which was a talk recorded at The School for Visual Arts in New York. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUG-JYvcMwk ). At over an hour it will tell you as much as you need to know up until 2014 when it was recorded. It is never boring and shows many of her early pictures as she discusses motivation rather than technique.

Cig is English and was born in Devon in 1973 but later travelled abroad, working in different countries before settling in the USA where she still lives in Rockport in Maine.

Her first monograph "You Look at me Like an Emergency" was published in 2012 and all her books are now collectors pieces, partly because they are produced in limited numbers by a specialist company in Rockport where she lives. 

She has received many awards and recognition for her work in the intervening years. In 2018 she was named the 2018 Prix Virginia Laureate, an international photography prize awarded to one woman each year. Her recent work has been largely centred on family and firends with some echoes of Sally Mann. Where she will go next is less certain I feel but she is certainly a photographer to watch for me. 

Here is her website to browse https://www.cigharvey.com/ 

Why black and white photographs are still relevant

 

In the history of photography the use of colour is relatively recent. Although the process for chemically recording colour was proposed by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1855 and the first colour photograph produced six years later for a lecture by Maxwell (by the photographer Thomas Sutton), it was not until the 1970's that colour film began to sell in industrial quantities. It had been more widely available since the 1930's but the colour was not great and the film was expensive and difficult to develop without the right facilities.

This means that when we scan photographic history most of the pictures we see are in black and white. Perhaps that begs the question is monochrome still relevant in these days of far more reliable colour films and digital cameras which can create great colour reproduction in comparison to early colour film? I'd argue that it is, as much as anything because it is available and can serve a purpose.  There are several reasons you might consider using mono in a photograph.

1)   Due to the history of photography black and white photographs appear more timeless. Removing colour makes it more difficult to date a photograph.

2)   A lack of colour exaggerates the drama of shadows and light immediately and photographs with dramatic lighting can draw the attention of the viewer more quickly.

3)   Fine art photography often uses black and white to distance the viewer from the reality of the subject. Because we see the world in colour the viewer has to stop and work out what they are seeing. This makes the viewer pause and look more closely, however briefly, at the picture. As Joel Sternfeld said, "Black and White is abstract; colour is not. Looking at a black and white photograph you are already looking at a strange world."

4)   Many photographers would say that portraiture is more stark and exacting in black and white and that removing the colour allows an audience to see the face and eyes without distraction. As photographer Ted Grant once said, "When you photograph people in colour you photograph their clothes. When you photograph them in black and white you photograph their souls."

So it is a good rule of thumb when deciding whether to convert a picture to mono (given that all digital camers will shoot a file in colour even if it gives you the option to adjust the settings for black and white) to consider the light, form and texture of the picture. And don't forget to shoot in RAW if using the mono settings on your camera as the retention of the colour information in the file allows for considerable leeway in post processing...

Images with a wide range of tonal values tend to be better for black and white photographs and images are usually most successful when the tones contain both the blackest of blacks and the whitest of whites with a range of grays in between. 

The photograph below was taken as a challenge to make an image in which almost everything in it is white. This means that the only way to distinguish the content of the photograph is by shade and tone. You can decide for yourself whether that works. As the model had dark hair I even sourced a blonde wig to get as white as possible...

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