photojournalism.co.uk

Good job

 

You can see Craig F. Walker's Pulitzer-prize-winning feature here.

The bit in the video above that gets me is when Ostrom, the subject of the feature, hugs Walker and says, "you did a great job". To get that praise from someone whose darkest days you have photographed and presented to the world must feel amazing. I'd trade that for a Pulitzer, especially if I had two.

I think this is a great piece of work. It was only published online apparently, which makes me wonder how it was financed (sorry to be so materialistic). Walker is a staff photographer but did he get paid for the weeks or months spent on this work? If so how did the newspaper hope to get a return on the investment by publishing online? Now that the work is Pulitzer material I suppose the Denver Post will syndicate it all over...

I'm guessing Walker did this work out-of-hours, not as an assignment but with support from the Post. If so the Editor is asking a lot when he says, "It goes to show good work will be recognised, and we want to do a lot of good work... so do it again".

Glamour and the retouch

Marlene Dietrich by George Hurrell 1931.

With time to kill between jobs last week I went to the National Portrait Gallery to see the BP portrait award and also the Glamour of the Gods, which is a selection of photographs from the Kobal collection of hollywood portraits from the 1920's onwards. There's something wonderfully ethereal about photographs from this era, they have an almost powdery softness that always makes me think of a moth's wing. It's not just the soft-focus I don't think, it's the quality of light and the printing too. The new prints in the show, made from old negs, look immediately different, still gauzy but not so tactile. Photographers at this time were using magnificently massive cameras and alongside the portraits there are some fascinating pictures of the photographers in action.

Clarence Sinclair Bull photographing Clarke Gable and Vivien Leigh for Gone with the Wind, 1939
by Fred Parrish

There are images shot in natural light, or mostly natural light, like Elizabeth Taylor on the beach in a publicity still for "Suddenly last Summer", but most of the images are studio shots lit with incandescent lamps. In the shot above you can see the whole lighting rig more-or-less, I think the light on a stand close to us is the main light but there may be another out of frame, above Gable and Leigh is a spot which looks like it's acting as a kick light on their hair to separate them from the background, it maybe flooding onto the dress too. The little spot by the window over Gable's shoulder might both illuminate Leigh's face and highlight his jaw, or maybe it's another kick for his hair? I can't find the images this set-up produced to check what's doing what so it's a bit of a puzzle. This style of complex, dramatic lighting was exemplified by George Hurrell, who seemed to play fearlessly with shadows, often letting his subjects eyes fall into deep darkness or retouching harsh highlights to a near-metallic shine.

Since I'm always trying to improve my lighting I thought it would be interesting to try to replicate the '50's style portrait so I made some notes at the exhibition and looked through an old George Hurrell book for ideas. I didn't want to copy any image exactly so much as to get a feel for how the lights were positioned and where the shadows fell. I don't have models at hand so I used myself which also meant using a tethered set-up with my 5D and laptop so that I could sit and shoot simultaneously. I might blog about the tethering another time, it's cool to be able to do it. I shot using a monochrome picture style from the camera's menu but without the colour filter option.

For lights I used my Bowens kit but only the modeling lamps, set on proportional output so I could adjust them. I think that power-wise the modelling lamps are about the same as 1940's photographers would have had, close up they gave easily enough light for good exposures 5-6 stops down from full power. Using constant light meant that I could monitor the shadows and highlights and move my head accordingly. I had a main light with a small diffuser out front on one side and a silver reflector bouncing back to fill the shadow. Above me and over my shoulder there was a second light at the same power as my main light which gave a characteristic edge and some key highlights on my face.

I wasn't shy of retouching, since the look of those classic portraits is very worked. Hurrell would exaggerate his highlights using a soft graphite pencil on the negative plate, giving that alabaster shine and I kept dodging until I got somewhere close. I used a skin-retouching methodology that I've mentioned before (I think), it's from Joel Grimes' website and I like it because it allows a lot of control over how much detail you want and how much smoothing you apply. I also applied a film grain using the DxO labs FilmPack plugin and duotoned the final image for a slightly warm tone. Here it is:

Help, they airbrushed my face.

It looks wierdly like my dad. Looking again at the work from the show it's also a much more conservative image than most of them. In particular I've lit my eyes with a nice bright keylight whereas some of the most iconic images in the show leave deep shadows in the eyes. This composition is woefully pedestrian by comparison too, but in my defence, my model wasn't very cooperative. Lighting-wise I think it's nearly there, the Key, Bounce and Kick set-up delivers plenty of modelling. By the way you also get that contrasting gradation on the background where the lit side of the face is against the darker side by "feathering" the edge of the light so that it falls off, this works best when you light at right-angles to the camera view.

Here are some process pics that should enlarge if you click them:

Then I spied a bottle of theatrical blood on my desk (you never know when it might come in handy) and, well, this happened:

New Facebook profile picture perhaps?

On the line

The Guardian Weekend commissioned a series of portraits of people who work on the phone for a feature by Nicky Woolf. I shot the images over Christmas and it was just published last month. They asked for medium format, and film, which was nice, and the images looked really good in print. They haven't reproduced quite so well online but at least it means I can link to the article. Kaz (above) works on a phone-sex line from her home in Birmingham and Quentin (below) works for Great Guns, a tele-marketing company near Cambridge. I also photographed an NHS Direct nurse, a charity fund-raiser and a 999 operator. I'll put the set up on my website in due course.

I decided to light all the portraits so that I could isolate the subjects a bit when they surrounded by office clutter. Hopefully the images have a slightly posed feel because of this and that helps move them away from what could have looked more reportage than portrait, that and the square format. For most of the shots I used a Bowens mono-head with a brolly, but for the 999 operator I had less time and less space so I used a speedlight on the same stand with the same brolly. It's amazing how close to a studio light you can get with a speedlight. I think the secret is to use a radio trigger that's NOT TTL capable and set the flash output manually. That way you have to think about the speedlight like a studio flash and you can balance the light more accurately. Of course this works best when you can be close to your subject and so can the flash.

There was another shoot in the series but that was in India and for understandable reasons The Guardian got someone based there to do the job. Olivier Culmann shot a beautiful image of a call-centre technician in New Delhi that opened the piece. I was a little disappointed to miss out on the opening spread but I can see why his shot was chosen. It's also introduced me to his work, which is worth checking out, I especially like his "TV viewers" series.

Like a lot of the people who commented on the feature via the Guardian website I do get annoyed by cold-callers. Though I do quite like claiming to be my own greiving relative or an investigating officer from interpol or a hard-of-hearing conspiracy theorist.

Steve McCurry: Reflections

Watch in HD here.

Steve McCurry's images are both iconic and accessible but it's possible that some of their strength has been diminished by their familiarity. To see some of them afresh is to rediscover them as photographs rather than calendars, postcards or posters. In this short film he discusses some of the images on show in a retrospective at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Of his most famous image, the Afghan girl, he tellingly remarks: "It's better to be known for one great picture than not to be known at all." In fact there is a wealth of great pictures in McCurry's archive, which spans the globe and the last 30 years.

Photojournalists on film

A couple of weeks ago I was very kindly sent a review copy of the acclaimed documentary "Shooting Robert King" on DVD, but I only got around to watching it a few days ago. The film charts, sporadically, 15 years of the life and photographic career of Robert King, beginning with his arrival in Sarajevo in 1993 with the intention of becoming the youngest recipient of a Pulitzer. In the beginning Robert is naive, idealistic and, we discover, a little damaged. In the end he is cynical (though optimistic), weary and a little damaged; and while he never gets the Pulitzer, King does grow into a trusted and respected photojournalist, a "safe pair of hands", an experienced and hardened professional. The cost to his well-being for this education is mostly paid in years of alcohol and drugs and loneliness but he's come through that and now the payments are less reckless: time in the woods, time with his family, time to not be at war. While the "damaged photojournalist" is an established archetype and King fits it as far as it goes, both he and this film avoid becoming cliched through honesty and a sense of humour. Soon after arriving in Yugoslavia a more experienced photographer tells him his "military style" trousers could get him into trouble at checkpoints, "Yeah I know" says King "but they dry real fast".

Shooting Robert King joins a long list of films about photographers, documentary and fiction and watching it reminded me of examples of both so I thought I would do a quick round-up of some of my favourites in no particular order:

• Salvador: Oliver Stone directs James Woods as a photojournalist covering 1980's El Salvador. Includes cautionary tales about running out in front of fighter planes and when to shoot from the hip to avoid unpleasantness.
• War Photographer: Documentary about James Nachtwey. Reinforces much of the Nachtwey mythology as the quiet, humble, sensitive and driven photographer explains his need to photograph war. Sequences where we look through a small camera attached to Nachtwey's SLR give a mesmerizing insight to his extraordinary image-making.
• Blow-up: Michelangelo Antonioni makes a kind of mood-movie about life in 60's London with an out-of-focus narrative about a body in the park and photographic evidence. Great Herbie Hancock music.
• Public Eye: Joe Pesci does Weegee, OK his character is called Leon "Bernzy" Bernstein but it's Weegee made fiction and only just. Contrast your DSLR and laptop with the Speed Graphic and car-boot darkroom.
• Born into Brothels: A great film, a great project. Children from red-light Calcutta show us their world through their eyes.
• Rear Window: Jimmy Stewart's itchy, immobilized photojournalist see's more than is good for him when he starts to watch his neighbours. Hitchcock let's us indulge our voyeurism but for a price.

I've only scratched the surface so please add your own in comments.

Fashion

                    Kate Moss by Corrine Day. © Corrine Day

Fashion is utter nonsense to me. All the weighty affectations and nonchalant pretensions, the empty gazes of the skinny models and the conspicuous excess. Even without the bad ethics associated with a lot of clothing manufacture I look on fashion as a moral vacuum, good only to itself.

So imagine my surprise at getting engrossed in a documentary about the sacred text of the church of high fashion, Vogue. The September Issue is a behind the scenes look at the month running up to what is traditionally the biggest issue of the year. It focuses on Anna Wintour, the Editor in Chief but the bits I found most interesting were those looking at the work of Grace Coddington, the Creative Director. Notwithstanding everything I just said about fashion, listening to and watching Coddington as she conceived, prepared, directed and then fought for her shoots gave me a very different perspective on the world of fashion photography if not fashion. Perhaps an industry that supports those beautiful, grand and obscure photographic productions that only fashion magazines seem to publish has a purpose after all? But then for every visual feast there is a reconfirmation of the worst of the industry's head-up-own-arse tendencies. Step forward Steven Meisel, whose recent shoots have included haute couture re-imaginings of the Gulf oil spill, the Iraq war and "rehab chic" (more here).

For some, the "heroin chic" work by Corinne Day in the early 90's was another example of fashion imagery crossing a taste boundary. Day's work has been re-examined and re-celebrated in the wake of her recent death, and looking back through the retrospectives I see none of the crass theatrics of Meisel, in fact there does seem to be a kind of document of the times. I recognize at least a sense of the decade in which the "heroin chic" work was produced, in fact that whole style centres around a single Kate Moss shoot, Day moved on to other ideas while the fashion press seemed to get stuck on the point of a needle. In Corinne Day's photographs you get a kind of grounded honesty without the studied grunginess that followed, her later more personal photography flows on into Nan Goldin territory with exactly the kind of raw documentary that was always implicit in her work. It's not clear whether the clothes were ever the important thing for Day or whether the dressing up was a means to an end, as Anna Wintour herself said "Magazines want a pretty girl in a dress - photographers want to do art."

As social comment goes, fashion photography is deeply flawed, even when it's honest, but as a creative medium it's extraordinarily rich. I saw Nick Knight's work at the "Imperfect Beauty" exhibition at the V&A in 2000 and I've never thought the same way about photography. Here was a photographer freed from constraints with only his imagination to limit him. A time-line of Knight's work shows a steady evolution from black and white documentary to fantasies of light, colour and motion that make full use of the current arsenal of digital post-production techniques.

While most of these techniques fall way outside the acceptable palette for my kind of work I have borrowed from fashion photography techniques over the years. Elaine Constantine's work in the 90's seemed to put movement back into fashion, using simple, portable off-camera flash to capture action on location without compromising a studio-quality sheen. I saw a short film of her working and immediately bought my first off-camera TTL cable to try to get the same sense of movement in my work, and it's a technique I still use. I dare say Constantine borrowed from press photography initially and I was only borrowing back but she added value to the technique by polishing it and pushing it and it was her images that I wanted to copy, not the press work I was seeing.

Fashion is still utter nonsense to me, but nonsense can have it's uses?

Embracing uncertainties

Davey Savage Junior. © David Gillanders

In the fascinating documentary about her work,What Remains, Sally Mann talks about the idiosyncratic and temperamental nature of wet plate photography and the impact of "technical imperfections" on her work.

"I've taken some pictures in the past that were miraculously transformed by some hand other than my own, and made a better image. And I really welcome those interventions."

The exhibition of her work currently showing at The Photographers' Gallery in London seems to show an increasingly collaborative relationship between Mann and what she calls her "Angel of uncertainty". The earliest work in the show comes from Immediate Family, the work that brought Mann to wide attention, partly because of a fuss about her kids being naked in the photographs, but mostly, and rightly, because of the intensity and power of her images. These images are classic and studied, perhaps a bit contrived but they do communicate something about the relationship between a mum and her kids, in particular at the time those kids are growing more apart, more adult, more strange. It sometimes looks like Mann is trying to work out who her kids are becoming, rather than trying to preserve them in childhood, which is perhaps what a lot of pictures of children try to achieve.

There aren't many technical imperfections in this work, shot I'm guessing with a 5X4 or similar, but there are signs that Mann isn't inhibited by limiting aesthetic conventions. My favorite image in this selection is divided diagonally between an area of deep shadow in which two figures loom and an area of creamy-bright light in which a girls stands tip-toed on a table. Between the under-exposed gloom and the over-exposed glare there is no middle ground, no "correct" exposure, it would probably get one of those helpful stickers labs used to put on wonky prints, but rather than trying to fight the light to produce an image that flattens the extreme difference in exposure, Mann has made an image which ignores a sterile technical convention and is utterly magical as a result.

The rest of the images in the show are all made using the wet-plate collodion process and bear the marks of dust and tears in the emulsion and who knows what else. These images: landscapes, images of corpses in a forensic research facility and portraits of her now-adult children are more and more like paintings. In places the tones seem to flow over the image, often the photo is a combination of areas of highly detailed work and rough expressionistic shapes. The process she has chosen seems to allow Mann to prepare a canvas for chance to paint on.

Also in What Remains she says "I'm so worried that I'm going to perfect this [collodion] technique someday". By perfecting the technique she would certainly squeeze out that element of chance, leaving something much less alive, much less magical. Perhaps it's a counterweight to the way large format photography forces you to be formal, static and methodical - all the improvisation comes after the shutter has closed.

A day after seeing the Sally Mann exhibition I got a coincidentally related email from David Gillanders. David has been experimenting with this same collodion process recently and has started to blog about his experiences including a video showing his awesome mobile darkroom built in a van. This seems like a change of pace for someone whose unflinching reportage work has won many awards and a place on the World Press Photo Masterclass but in David's pictures you can also see a willingness to allow chance to play a role, maybe a background in press photography makes this a necessity? The images that David has made already are stunningly beautiful (see above) and I'm looking forward to seeing and reading more as his blog progresses.

Last week I also went to see the BP Portrait award and saw some inspiring work but also some strangely irritating photo-realist paintings. In fact some were more than photo-realist, seeming to be exact reproductions of photographs in paint, complete with out-of-focus backgrounds and flare. It was a strange contrast to Mann's work to see painstakingly controlled and technically precise images that offer, for me, absolutely no emotional resonance.

We Are One

0134, originally uploaded by Cia de Foto.

There was an interesting talk/discussion at The Photographers Gallery last night on the topic of collectives. Documentography, of which I am a member, participated along with ANRA, Unseen, Latitude Photographers and Cia de Foto. There was a lot of interest in the way that Cia de Foto, who are based in Brazil, organize themselves. Whereas it might be fair to say that the other four collectives have come together to promote and enrich the work of the individual members, Cia de Foto is a single unit with no individual authorship taken by the three photographers. For a lot of us the idea of relinquishing or sharing authorship of our work is a hard thing to come to terms with, it's something that we are programmed to struggle against but for Cia de Foto it has produced some beautiful results and listening to Pio Figueiroa describe their "hedonistic" marriage of work and lifestyle evoked a photographic utopia where we all could photograph each other and everything without the limitations of ego. I'm not ready to give up my byline though and it might be partly because of ego but I think that I need the sense of accountability that claiming authorship gives me.

Taryn Simon

Taryn Simon - Nuclear Waste

The Deutsche Borse Photography prize shortlisted artists are being exhibited at The Photographers Gallery in London until April 12th. I went to see it yesterday in-between picking up a repaired Mac and browsing cameras I can't afford. For me the most engaging work was "An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" by Taryn Simon. Her images are beautifully conceived, individually and as a set, and beautifully realised. It's a work with a clear, but not simplistic or one-dimensional vision, it tells us stuff but it has ambiguities to illuminate rather than to obscure. I hope it wins (even though I was born the same year as Taryn and usually that prevents me from enjoying another photographers success).