photojournalism.co.uk

Visa pour...heart of darkness.

Perpignan passed me by again. In fact I didn't even think about it until a friend told me to check out Foto8's blog on the festival. Harry Hardie and Anna Pfab have done a wonderful job of condensing their experiences at this year's Visa. They identify a whole cast of familiar players from "Wolves" to "Shamans" with a keen eye. In fact it's so good I feel like I was there and I'm glad I really wasn't.

Melon Rouge Photo Fringe

Photographers are invited to submit work with an Asian theme to the Melon Rouge Photo Fringe, which takes place from Nov 28th - Dec 5th in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Further details here. Good luck.

When to look away

      © Dominick Tyler

Pastor Jones saw the light and called off his Qur'an burning but according to reports there were others who decided to commemorate the 9/11 attacks by burning or ripping-up the book sacred to Muslims. Leaving aside the idiocy of these actions it's interesting to note that the US media seems to have agreed on a near complete black-out of images from any Qur'an burnings. There was already an understanding that had the event in Florida gone ahead the networks would not have covered it, I suppose the news media extended the decision. Lives have already been lost over this whole sorry affair and it's not hard to imagine how provocative the images would have been, it's quite possible that more people would have died in further protests and even possible that attacks against US targets would have been provoked.

So when do we decide to look away? And when does denying a crackpot the oxygen of publicity become preemptive appeasement? Should I refrain from photographing something that someone will find offensive if that offense might lead to violence?

In the case of the Qur'an burning it seems like the media had already magnified the significance of the story to the point where any reporting of the actual event would be dangerously charged. The frenzy surrounding the personal opinions of a pastor with a congregation of under 100 built like a perfect media storm over the last few weeks, feeding off the reactions of outraged Muslims and counter-outraged islamophobes. In these circumstances I wouldn't have wanted to shoot it, not just because of the effect of the images but because the story was no longer about the burning, the story was about the story. Had there not been the crazy build-up I think I would have felt differently, then the story would have been about a marginal anti-Islam extremism in small-town Christian America, a loon and his bonfire.

This case shows up one of the problems with the way that news clusters around stories: how can you report on the insignificance of something when everyone is looking at it? One of my working maxims is "illustrate the general with the particular" but this can lead to minorities representing more than they should. Pastor Jones surely does represent a part of the American population, hopefully a very small part, but the coverage he got might lead you to believe he spoke with the voices of millions.

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.

In Memoriam

from "Foaie Verde"

My NUJ press card says that I'm a photojournalist because that's what I first called myself when I applied for it nearly 20 years ago, but when I renew it I'm going to change it to "Photographer" for three reasons:

1. It better describes my work.
2. It's needs no explanation.
3. Photojournalism is dead.

Photojournalism has often been declared dead. When I started taking pictures many voices were already lamenting the end, some had been at it for a long time already. It's an established part of photographers' lore now that photojournalism is dead. It certainly makes for some good anthropomorphism: Our beloved and honorable friend, who fought the good fight against the disease of public indifference and corporate greed, seeking to shine a light of truth on injustice and war and poverty and all bad stuff, has sadly passed away after a heartbreaking decline into decrepitude. We mourn the passing of the one true art.

Neil Burgess' recent opinion piece on the Editorial Photographers UK website "For God's sake, somebody call it!" has renewed the mourning, pointing out that most of what is now called photojournalism is actually photo-illustration and that news media have no interest in paying photographers to act as reporters.

Despite the title of this blog I'm not really in the photojournalism world, although I have skirted the fringes in the past. I was never focused or driven enough to pursue the traditional path of the photojournalist and I'm really more interested in a different kind of story-telling; but I still love photojournalism, it remains, for me, a powerful visual medium. So how is it that I feel strangely unmoved now that this powerful communicator has been silenced? Am I in denial? I don't think so.

I care that journalism is being corroded and that the information we receive as news is often regurgitated PR. I care that the news media seems complicit in continued dumbing-down and an obsession with banal celebrity. I care that advertisers have a passive veto on ugly stories and that we seem to care more about buying stuff than learning stuff. I care about all that and yet I'm not sure I care that photojournalism is dead.

Perhaps we have spent too much energy trying to preserve an ideal of photojournalism, an image so seductive it draws thousands of students into courses each year despite the dire prospects for graduates. When I first found photography it was the excitement of photojournalism that captured me, I imagined a life filled with physical danger, creativity and humanitarianism. There was a mythical quality to the work and to my photographic heroes and heroines. Over time my feelings about the work have become more complex, maybe more grown-up, and I can now strip away a lot of that mythology. What I find underneath is more ambiguous. I look at photojournalism and wonder what it's for. The images that fill the World Press Photo yearbook are honored as great photojournalism but where is the journalism if they aren't in the magazines? What is the point if only a handful of people see the work and even then it's presented not so much to tell the story as to celebrate the telling of it?

Given that we all know there's no space for photo-stories in the mass media, why are they still the focus of our ambitions and attentions? Are they all destined for niche photo-magazines, hopeful candidates for book deals, exhibitions and awards? Is it possible that we are all so in love with the mythology of photojournalism that we want to do it even when it no longer fulfills it's main purpose? It's like continuing to run a radio station after the transmitter has been removed because you like twiddling the knobs.

So, let's take a moment to give thanks for photojournalism and lay it to rest in the hope that, before long, we might use the energy we once expended trying desperately to keep it alive to find new ways of communicating important stories to the world.

Indigenous views

from "The Edge of Two Worlds"

Some of my work from Canada and Botswana has been featured in a new book called "We Are One" which has been published in association with Survival International. For the last forty years Survival has campaigned on behalf of tribal groups and the book celebrates both the diversity and the shared humanity of the world's tribal peoples. My images are in humbling company with work by Sabastiao Salgado, Brent Stirton, Andrew Testa and Kate Eshelby amongst many others.

Tribal people or indigenous people (I'm not sure about those two definitions) have always been an attractive subject for photography, from the early ethnographers, recording exotic sights and behaviour with the detached interest of a scientist to his/her subject. Old ideas of "the exotic other" have been challenged routinely over the years and today's photographers look with a less imperious eye, but there's still a meaty debate to be had about how photographers approach these kind of stories without falling into using powerful but inaccurate cliches. It's a debate touched on in an article in the BJP, written in response to the book's publication.

Separate ways

Dominick Tyler

I've recently left the documentography collective where I'd been a member for a little over three years. The decision was mine and it was made after a good deal of consideration and with great regret but I'm sure it's the right thing to do. Hopefully the friendship I've enjoyed with the other members of the group will not been affected by my departure.

I have gained a huge amount from my time with documentography, professionally and personally, and I think the group's potential is unlimited. I'm looking forward to finding inspiration in their work for many years to come.

Autumn leaves

Dominick Tyler - Autumn Leaves

News that Grazia Neri has gone into liquidation after 42 years at the forefront of photojournalism is just the latest in a series of deaths that begins to seem like the falling of autumn leaves. And for the first time I'm feeling a little panicky. I'm not by nature an optimist, even so I've resisted the urge to mourn the death of photojournalism and until now I've held to the conviction that photography is just too powerful a medium to fall victim to market forces (or media trends, or social trends or whatever...). But for heaven's sake, things do look bleak when great agencies like Grazia Neri find their incomes nearly halved in less than a year.

This Editorial over at The Digital Journalist has an novel suggestion about how to save photojournalism (a kind of pump-priming from philanthropic donations until the public awaken from their slumber and become interested in news again) the comments make interesting reading too. Another post I read recently on Photo-Muse bemoans the invisibility of the heirs to Don McCullin, James Nachtwey and Gilles Peres: "Who [now] is doing work of a similar calibre, work as powerful and searing as this and getting it published?"

Everywhere you look there are signs that winter's coming, and it might be a harsh one.

Over and under: homage to Doubilet

Dominick Tyler - George fishing

I can vividly remember the first time I saw David Doubilet's photography in National Geographic Magazine, they were obviously images made by a great photographer who happened to be underwater as opposed to images made by a great diver who happened to have an underwater camera. Rather than accepting the limitations of working submerged, Doubilet always seems to push the boundaries to tell fascinating, beautiful, visual stories.

I don't know if he was the first person to do an "over and under" shot, where the surface of the water splits the image, but he has certainly perfected the technique over the years. I have certainly NOT perfected the technique, but on a recent commission for the Guardian Weekend Magazine I had a pretty good shot at it. Part of the secret is in the kit, you have to use an underwater housing with a domed port, the bigger the better, so that there is a reasonable distance from the waterline to the lens. The water needs to be very calm, because the peaks and troughs of even small waves will make the water-line obscure most of the image, and also clear, to minimize the difference in exposure above and below the water. Lastly you need something to photograph: Doubilet has photographed all the world's oceans and most of the species of fish and mammals in them, I have photographed a mackerel. I did grill and eat it on the beach later though, and you can't do that with a whale shark, or can you?