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Senior Love Triangle: Photographs by Isadora Kosofsky - LightBox

I find this work very moving and I'm not sure why, perhaps because it seems to show a lot of vulnerability. Projects like this make me realise that I often over-complicate my work when a simple, emotional story is always most powerful.

Magnum hits the road, and tumblr

Imagine you are sitting in an easy chair on the porch of your roadside gas station (yes "gas" because we are imagining that we are in America (readers already in America can skip this bit)). It's hot, let's say it's rural New Mexico where I'm guessing it's hot a lot, and dusty and generally windblown and deserty. The old beat-up Coca-cola fridge is buzzing away and so are the flies and every so often a car joins in and buzzes past. Not many cars stop here any more, what with those new fuel-efficient models with their double-digit MPGs. But what's this? A bus is hefting down the road and, I'll be damned if it isn't turning in, better get the only working pump primed up and ready. Hang on though, it's stopped a ways from the pump and now five people have jumped out. Each of them has a camera, looks like some of them have a couple strung around their necks. Looks like tourists, except that one's just taken a picture of his own footprint and that there other one looks like he's got an antique film camera and two of them are wearing cotton scarves and holy shit, why do I suddenly feel like a National Geographic DPS. Comes to that what does "DPS" mean? 

And relax, you're back in the room.

Thanks for coming with me on that short journey into imagination, to the moment when Paolo Pellegrin, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Alec Soth, Mikhael Subotzky might have stopped off during their roadtrip last year from Texas to California, which resulted in the Magnum project Postcards From America.

This year 11 of Magnum's photographers are in Rochester N.Y. working on a similarly collaborative project, House of Photos, which is being broadcast via tumblr. The Postcards from America project became a limited edition book/box-set. I understand a similar end-product is planned for this project but right now tumblr is a great way to see the work and a fun game to play: guess the photographer.

I'm unclear about the impetus behind these projects, here's what Alec Soth said to The New Yorker:

"...we are trying as an agency to experiment with new ways of working together and engaging with our audience. As we did with the road trip, Magnum is interested in reaching out and having a direct relationship with our audience. So we brainstormed different ideas. One idea was to do something at the public market. After talking it over together, we agreed to create a portrait studio and each take turns making free portraits of visitors to the market. Another idea was to do a pop-up show in a public space"

Does anyone else think that sounds a bit, well, sad? Magnum used to go out into the world and bring us the stories we could never otherwise see, now they hang out in malls and ask if they can take our portraits for free. I know, I'm deliberately ignoring a higher reading of this desire to have a "direct relationship with [the] audience" but a $350 limited edition box-set is only a direct connection with a very particular audience. Are there now so few opportunities for photojournalism, has the old relationship between photographer and audience completely fallen apart now that no-one reads newspapers and no-one pays for images? Eventually your best chance of seeing work by Magnum photographers will be in a gallery, or perhaps you'll get lucky and a bus-load of them will come to you.

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".

In from the cold

Image © Dominick Tyler 2012

I just got back from a long-ish trip away in northern Canada. Actually I've been back a couple of weeks already but it feels both like I was never away and like I was only there the other day, weird. Perhaps it's because, while I've slotted straight back in to "normal life" and the old routines, I am spending much of my time editing and processing the images I came back with. I'm transported back every day to the snows of Quebec and Labrador, even as the Spring sun shines outside.

For part of my time in Canada I was walking with a group of Innu who were following old hunting trails from community to community to raise awareness of the epidemic of Diabetes that has affected them since they gave up nomadism and settled in towns. Whilst I was with them we covered about 120km or so on snowshoes through a landscape of spruce forests, frozen river valleys and lakes. Some nights we stayed in cabins, other nights we set up tents, carpeted with fragrant spruce boughs in the Innu style. I actually slept much better in the tents, even when the temperature dropped to -50 degrees C (props to Alpkit for their sleeping bags, a wise investment). The coldest nights were the clearest nights of course, and I had a chance to try some long-exposed starscapes. The night skies were glorious, a high definition explosion that made me realise how impoverished night in the city has become with it's cataract of light pollution.

I had some concerns about my DSLRs coping with the extreme temperatures but they worked perfectly throughout. On one of the coldest days, after about 8 hours outside, the LCD panels started to fade and slow and the focus got a bit gluey but I still shot images without a problem. My biggest problem was operating the camera through my mitts but at -50 you don't take your mitts off.  Image © Dominick Tyler 2012

Visuals

 

 

I've been busy preparing for a trip abroad, about which I'll post anon, but this short video reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend recently about the power of the graphic to convey complex information quickly and directly. My friend's example was a map drawn by Charles Joseph Minard in 1869 that shows Napoleon's disastrous march on Moscow in 1812. The graphic shows, by the thickness of the line, the attrition of Napoleon's troops and illustrates brilliantly the effect of the long march and the winter weather.

For more on information graphics check out Edward Tufte's website.

Now that we get so much information from websites I would expect designers to be better at using graphics not just to prettify and amuse but as core features of well produced journalism. Illustrators should be taking (maybe retaking) their place alongside writes and photographers as news-gatherers and reporters.

New year's cheers

Libération, Le Mag 24-25th Dec 2011

Ah the French, I love working for the French. At least I love working for Libération, a newspaper so beautiful that even though I require a simultaneous translation to read it I always buy a copy when in france, just to look at the pages. Before christmas I was sent by Libé to photograph the only whisky distillery in Wales. The Penderyn Distillery is a relatively new enterprise but has already received high praise and awards from the whiskey experts. My brief from Libé was typically liberating "...do what you feel...this is the best thing". And so after shooting the barrels, the still and portraits and suchlike I asked the MD, Stephen Davies, if we could go up the road to the edge of the Brecon Beacons to get some landscapes. It had been a grim, grey day, but the clouds were beginning to shift and as we drove along the road the light started to break through. I ran about shooting for ten minutes or so before I had to leave for my train from Port Talbot but I got a few nice frames. I edited the set and sent it the next day, making a mental note of my favourite images and hoping that one of them would be used. In fact the three images that were used in the christmas edition were all on my list, and that hardly ever happens. Best of all one of the landscapes was there looking great, something I felt like doing had been appreciated. And I was given a bottle of the most delicious whisky by the lovely people at Penderyn! And that is why I love working for Libé.

Farewell to all that

Ice-tree, Labrador. ©D.Tyler 2004

This week marked the close of a chapter in my photographic life. After much soul-searching and some cold, hard reasoning I finally sold my two leica rangefinders.

I used those leicas in temperatures of -40C in northern Labrador when I had to put tape around the viewfinder to stop my skin sticking to the frozen metal as I shot. They survived sandstorms in the Kalahari and rainstorms in Transylvania and endless bone-jolting rides on Skidoos, rickshaws, motorbikes and 4x4s. They recorded death and new life, through them I saw amazing and terrible things and with them I shot most of my favourite images. I think I could work myself up into sentimental grief over selling them, but otherwise I'm strangely unmoved by their absence. The fact is they were wonderful tools but they were overtaken by the death of film and much as I would have like to buy the new digital Ms I don't have that kind of money to spend on what would always be a second kit after my DSLRs.

Now that I think about it, I will miss the faint, nearly-un-sound of the shutter and the dense weight of all that glass and metal, the huge window of a viewfinder and the ghost-focusing. When I first picked up a leica I remember wondering how anyone could get used to so many idiosyncrasies and then, when I did, I marvelled at how the weaknesses had become strengths and how the camera had made me unlearn so many bad habits. In fact the leicas taught me to shoot in a very different way, a more considered and thoughtful way perhaps, certainly a slower way. Instead of snatching images, with the rangefinders I started to stalk images. I hope all that is still in my brain somewhere and can hold out against the DSLR, double-tap everything and let post-production sort 'em out way of working.

On a positive note the leicas really held their value, I think I might get more than I paid for them and that means new toys, I mean tools, for the new year.

It's what they would have wanted.

Cover versions

The Fens, standing in for the Ouse. © D.Tyler 2010

I heard Olivia Laing talking about her book To The River on Woman's Hour in April and immediately felt that this was a book I was going to love. The idea of weaving a narrative through and along a river had been haunting me since reading Dart by Alice Oswald, a book that I was drawn to after swimming that river at various points for Wild Swim.

Anyway, "To The River" is a wonderful book, you'll find excellent reviews all over the place, many evoking the "new nature" writings of Deakin and Mabey and the psycho-geography of W.G.Sebald. I think it's beautiful, honest and transportive and when I was contacted by the publishers to ask if I might have a image in my archive for the paperback edition all I could think was that I really hoped I did.

Initially we looked at work from Wild Swim and in particular images that were strong but that didn't get into the book. As well as these I sent some other work from different projects that I thought might be suitable and it's one of these that was eventually chosen, an image from my Watermarks project. The proofs (see below) arrived yesterday and I'm delighted with the result, even more so because I hear that the author and the publishers are also pleased. I can't think of an un-cheesy way to express how proud I am to be a part of a really great work, a small part, but a part.

Old wrecks

Hackney's abandoned cars. Click for larger image. © D Tyler 2000.

Whilst searching for some ancient scans last week I popped an old, un-labeled CD into my computer and I found a series of images that I'd almost entirely forgotten: images I'd made soon after moving to Hackney focusing on wrecks of cars. When I first lived in Hackney, back at the turn of the century, one of the area's most characteristic features was it's wealth of abandoned cars. At the time you had to pay to have cars scrapped and so many were left on side roads to slowly fall apart or become magnets for more unwanted scrap. These cars, and those stolen and then torched by joyriders, kept the area looking edgy and deprived even as the first wave of neo-yuppies (like me) moved in, carrying with us the seeds of gentrification. Hackney is very different now, in some ways. There are fewer abandoned cars and more fixed-wheel bikes, fewer empty shops and more deli's, it's less edgy and deprived perhaps but still referencing edgy and deprived, ironically and with retro flair. Nevertheless for a big part of the population the last ten years evolution has meant nothing more than a greater range of things to feel excluded from. Hackney's underprivileged youth have yet to reap the benefits of the hipster influx and the two groups are suspicious if not hostile towards each other. The abandoned wrecks are off the streets now, but have they really gone away?

I might well never have remembered these images without accidentally finding them, which is a shame, not because I think they are particularly good, but because ten years on they form a historical record and serve as a reminder that photographing the ephemera of daily life can ground your recollections in interesting ways.

 

Richard Feynman on Beauty, Honors, and Curiosity | Brain Pickings

Brain Pickings is one of my regular stops in search if inspiration or diversion. I have to restrain myself from re-blogging everything they do but this series of films made from stock footage and interviews with the late, great Richard Feynman are too good not to share.

Richard Feynman on Beauty, Honors, and Curiosity | Brain Pickings