Political leaders as a manifestation of a nation's state. Who's dumber/crueller/uglier/more corrupt?

Bing, Bing, Bong, Bong, Bing, Bing, Bing by Kenneth O'Halloran is a very simple book. It's an oversized series of pictures of people responding to the Trump star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In fact the most complicated thing about the book is the title, which comes from a speech Trump made in 2015. But it's simple in a good way, in a topical way, in a way that connects to what we are all thinking. Loathe him or loathe him, we all have an opinion on Trump after all.

The pictures in the book start with a series of portraits of people walking past the star, so in that sense it's a kind of cross section of America in the Year of the Trump.



Fingers are pointed. Index fingers are raised as people respond in a variety of ways. There are smiles, sneers, frowns and then the phones come out - and we see people photographing the star; so we go from half-page spread to a line of thumbnails all lined across the top of the page.

The star shots are broken up with more Trump quotes and images of Sunset Boulevard during a movie launch. Then we go into details shot long; a raised finger, another finger but this time down the throat, then more fingers, raised and on cameras and phones.



Muslims, Jews, African-Americans and Mexicans look at the star. It gets spat at, stamped on, and splattered with tomato sauce. It's scrawled over, defaced and modified in a variety of ways. There's a couple of pages of Instagram images of the star defaced.

'Someone drew a swastika on Trump's star on the Walk of Fame and there's no way to know if it was done by someone who hates him or supports him,' reads one of the captions.

So there you have it. It's a book about the Donald Trump star.

I was given the book by Kenneth O'Halloran at Gazebook in Sicily and I had a quick glance through it.

Then I took it home some more and looked some more. Despite or maybe bccause of  the simple subject matter, there's quite a lot going on which all hangs together.



First and foremost, it's a book of street photography; imagine Beat Streuli crossed with Paul Graham crossed with a lot of Californian sunlight and high body-mass indices.

But then again, it's a kind of cross section of US society and its response to an explicitly divisive man, all shot with an eye on ritual grimacing that links (if only slightly) to the Stump work of Christopher Anderson.


Stick all that together and you end up with a sickly book, a big book (too big perhaps) that's a fetid mix which is as much about the end of an empire and the mythology that created it as it is about Donald Trump. Trump ends up just being a symptom of the disease, as does the star, as do all the people in the book, as do all of us who watch in gobsmacked horror and fascination as the impossibility of Donald Trump becoming POTUS becomes ever more real.

We stand in awe of the stupidity of a nation that might elect this buffoon as president. Oh, but then again, who am I from the Brexit nation to talk? Our situation is so bad that you can't buy marmite for your toast here anymore. It's like the Blitz all over again. God Save the Queen. Land of Hope and Glory, When I'm Cleaning Windows, Bombay Duck and powdered egg. Truly greatness beckons once more.

It probably won't happen, as we say in the UK. But it might.

Buy the book here.

And watch George Formby here.




And here's Marlene Dietrich.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBQvl-0JOkg

Waiting for the Property Bubble to Burst. And Waiting. And Waiting. And Waiting....

Estate, by Robert Clayton tells the story of the Lion Farm Estate in the Black Country, a heavily populated, industrialised/de-industrialised region in the Midlands of England. It shows life in and around the nine residential tower blocks that made up the estate (six of them were demolished in 1992).

The book begins with texts by both Jonathan Meades and Laura Noble which set the scene of the Lion Farm Estate, how Clayton began photographing in 1991, shortly after the 'right-to-buy' had both extended the possibility of home ownership to millions at the cost of creating a two-tier housing system, and effectively putting an end to social housing in Britain. We can still feel the effects of these policies in Britain's overheated housing market, a mass psychosis in which the possibility of affordable, decent housing is ruled out for the majority of the British population.

Where once, affordable housing was more or less affordable to all, now the only way to get it is if you buy it. And if you don't live in an area where housing is affordable, then the only way to buy it is if you are wealthy already. And if you are wealthy already then you have property. So the only people who can buy houses are people who own houses. That is exactly how it works in large parts of the UK and the best thing is it's cheaper to buy a house than to rent a house. It's unfathomable and unsustainable but somehow we can't seem to accept that things can be any other way - even though they were a relatively short time ago.

The book starts with a wide shot of the estate, the towers rising above green fields and the rooves of terraced housing. It goes closer into the estate, the empty car parks, the boarded up windows, the general neglect of a recession hit England.

Then there are interiors which fall somewhere between Nick Waplington and David Moore, but with a more natural feel to them. They show people living normal lives in normal rooms in normal flats. Everything is a little bit crowded; the piles of clothes, the slide in the living room, but it is recognisable. I've lived with piles of clothers with slides in the living room and so have most people I've known. It's the way most people live.

There are high views of empty car parks; car parks with no cars in. Which is telling. And then we're into the exteriors. The bad sculpture, the kids playing, the people moving furniture, the advice being given in the estate office (there's a nod to Paul Graham here maybe), the shops, the graffiti and the food.

It's a very strong overview in other words, one that fits in with books like Peter Mitchell's Memento Mori, a strong documentary aesthetic that combines British colour with a strong social voice. The book itself is a basic hardcover picture-on-a-page-kind of affair. The printing isn't great, but never mind that. The book is a really strong study of British housing. It's not spectacular, it doesn't have the explosive effect of Richard Billingham, it isn't gritty or overly grim, and that's what makes it interesting. It's a snapshot in time, an overview of housing as it used to be and is no more, a book that finds a middle ground between affection, sentiment and the crushing reality of the property market in Britain today.

Buy Estate here.

Paul Graham's Rainbows

I wrote something the other week in this post about people  in the Independent how 'Cultivating vegetables and herbs at home is also just an extension of the modern foodie culture, in which visiting farmers’ markets, home-brewing, and splurging £4.50 on a loaf of artisanal bread is increasingly the norm among urban-dwelling twenty- and thirtysomethings.'

I think that is a despicable thing when it is done in that particular precious way that is elitist and excludes others from food culture and claims good food as something that is only attainable through either great expertise or great expenditure..

And then I thought about photography and wondered about photography, wondered about this blog and how we could change a few words around so it was all about photobooks and handmades and Japanese stab-bindings and spending £126.73 on an artisanal crafted edition of 45 with slipped in leaflets... and well, we're talking about me and a fair few other people as well. 

Oh well, so it goes.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is I was sent Paul Graham's new book, Does Yellow Run Forever  in the post a few weeks ago. 

Sometimes it takes a bit of time for Paul Graham's work to filter through, sometimes it only filters through in conjunction with other books. So perhaps I'm wrong on this. 

But I couldn't really work myself up to liking it. The pictures are super-glossy and run through a rainbow, dreaming girlfriend, US gold shops riff ( pot of gold, streets paved with gold, sell your gold) but it all seems a bit artificial to me. Or maybe not artificial enough. It seems like the metaphorical is being pushed but it's got stuck in the photobook mode of presentation. Whatever it is Graham is trying to say is somehow blocked by the fuzzy cover and the glossy pages. Or it might be that it's not that interesting a story. 

Maybe it's because I got it at the end of the summer and I am just not in the mood for this obtuse kind of narrative when there's a more obvious one might do. The story feels disguised by the format rather than revealed . Or maybe I am out of practice and need to get back into my artisanal groove and appreciate it a bit more. 

Or maybe I just don't like gold.

I do like Teletubbies though. That's why I have the picture up.

I'm sure it will sell out though. You can buy it here. 

And here's an interesting interview with Michael Mack about the book here.

London, a City Paved in Grey

There is a lot of photography of London but somehow it doesn't quite seem to be as photographic a city as Paris or New York for example. Maybe that's because nowhere has been so consistently photographed as Paris or New York. Even in projects that are very different the visual symptoms of stress, romance, aggression or cuisine are still there to link in to an overriding visual idea of what a city is.

You have to go out of your way to make Paris not look like Paris and New York not look like New York. It's difficult to do. That's why books like Paul Graham's The Present is such an interesting idea of a book. It's pictures of a New York that doesn't look like New York. Except that maybe it does; a New York that is a bit unglamorous really, and more like the rest of America than some would like to imagine.

So what about London. That's still kind of stuck in some 1960s Austin Powers/Blow Up image. It's a city of villages, of cliches, class gets in the way. Maybe there is a lot of London photography, it just doesn't seem that way given the size and self-importance of the place.

Lots of foreign photographers have photographed the city. Recently, Lorenzo Vitturi captured a small slice of the city and the changes it is going through in Dalston Anatomy. A lot of people, including myself, really love that book for its colour, energy and sense of place. Some people have a real antipathy to it, because of its colour, energy and sense of place seen through non-purist, Dalston eyes. Which is interesting in itself.

Then there is Anthony Cairn's LDN2,  published by the Archive of Modern Conflict. Here process is everything. The pictures were made on 35mm transparencies which were developed, solarised, developed some more and then printed onto aluminium sheets before heading for the printed page. So what comes out is a bunch of messed up metallic prints with flaws, fingerprints and scratches.

The book is an oversized loose leaf affair ( and it looks and feels great - here's the original small edition that is long sold out). The budget isn't in question here. We're not talking about a publisher struggling to make ends meet by the look of LDN2. You slip it out of it's wrapping and grab the black cover with your grubby hands and hey presto, the processing and printing flaws are suddenly mirrored by the touch of your greasy palms on the near-black cover. And then the dust settles. And then you notice a little nick and then suddenly you mint edition isn't so mint anymore, an effect that seems to be somehow built into all of their books, by psychological accident if not design.

The London of the book also match the processing. This is a London of neutralised and defensive space; it's grey tarmac with bollards, post and lights. There's a dull sheen to this London, its walls, alleys, office blocks and car parks. No people, just anonymous places where bureaucracy and business happens. And even when a place is recognisable, it's still anonymous; this is a London that has been stripped of life, that has fallen victim to a corporate social cleansing.

It's a post-apocalyptic London, but you with an apocalypse that has crept up on the city, that has been constructed around London  by stealth. One minute this was a city with a soul and a heart and a life, the next it is a globalized city state in which all signs of non-corporate, non-consuming life are swept away at night by some kind of urban social cleansing.

The pictures look like they are part of that cleansing. The processing flaws give them a forensic feel. They look like surveillance pictures on which disallowed ways of being, of moving, of thinking register. @And once they register they need to be removed. But they never can because that is not the nature of either people or places, even the non-places that feature in LDN2.

Thepictures are depressing and that's where their heritage kicks in. They have a Japanese feel to them, reminding the viewer of Nakahira's For a Language to Come; pictures where the city almost collapses in on its high contrast self. In that sense they connect to other photographers working with extreme processing - Daisuke Yokota for example - and so bring the psychological language of 1970s Japan back to London.

So LDN2 is a globalised photography working in a globalised city with traditional techniques. It's contradictory and it's not pretty. But it does make sense, and for work that is operating in such marginal places it has a remarkable sense of place. More importantly, it gives us a feeling of the ideology that has made that place.

The Swap with Jesse Alexander

by Colin Pantall

Stuart Pilkington is organising this thing called The Swap where photographers swap portraits of each other.

I'm in this with Jesse Alexander. Now I haven't picked up a camera for a while so I needed a few tips on what to do. I also like to work without a light-meter (because light-meters cost money and well, you know...).

I like to think I do pretty well at this, but Jesse told me that pictures such as the one below are actually over-exposed.

I dunno. Paul Graham did something like this and everyone liked those, but that's another story.

So Jesse put me right. He used to shoot in tunnels a lot and became sensitive to light down there. That's why he never uses a light meter and never gets it wrong!

Here are Jesse's metering rules for top of the ground - 100ASA Provia film only (adjust accordingly) at 1/125th second.

Close and cover your eyes for 10 seconds. Look at the main light source.

f22 - white after image on retina, purple patches linger for 1 minute plus.
f16 - yellow after image on retina, spotty after images on retina (colours across the spectrum)
f8 - red after image on retina, fading quickly to black
f5.6 - little or no after image on retina

f4 - Scene is initially dark then comes into view
f2.8 Everything is a bit murky.

And that is what that picture is of - Jesse demonstrating how light comes into the eye and changes its shape depending on its brightness.

Margaret Thatcher: Beyond Caring

Paul Graham: Beyond Caring

Rachel Whiteread made an interesting comment in last week's Guardian on the frustration of teaching people who..

..."wanted to know how to become a wealthy artist. It wasn't really about making work any more, it was about having a big career. I just kept saying 'keep your head down and get on with it'. If the work is good enough the career will come."

I think that might be a bit romantic, but the spirit of it sticks. It fits this death-of-Margaret-Thatcher week. Thatcher believed that everything is a market - and not in a good way. She believed it in an ultimate kind of way, that was unconnected to the creative and vital energy of growing, making and creating things, the vitality of small trade but as something predatory, where the Big Fish eats the small fish and the small fish eats the prawn. The older she got, the more she moved up the food chain, the bigger the fish, the better, the more disconnected it was from community (there is no such thing as community, she almost said), the better.

I find her death tremendously sad, not because I liked her, but just because of the way that she transformed the UK. It's not just what she did, but the way that she did it, the way that she demeaned vast swathes of British society in such a manner that things that as a nation, we have become brutal, we have lost compassion, we have become greedy little money-grubbing, gizmo-desiring number punchers. Like Rachel Whiteread's Careerist Art Students, we have lost sight of the point of our existence.  There's nothing to celebrate about that. 


Robert Wyatt put it best in his version of Shipbuilding. Is it Worth It?

  

Best Books of 2012

 

It's Best books of 2012 Listorama in both the BJP and Photo Eye. I have a bit of a hate love thing with lists, but this year the love won ( aka I was asked) and so I have a list in there. Some seriously good books in there with ( based on a true story) top of the pile just for being so cool. But Billy Monk has the best pictures and The Present is best of a series, Less Americains has the best art history roots (and is the most provocative), Sasha wins the teenage narrative prize, Lebensmittel has the best pairings, A Possible Life and The Altogether the best page turning/cutting design, Live Through This explodes through the intensity ratings, A Girl and Her Room is the best in the world of interiors.

And just in case you missed it, here is Blake Andrews' Best Books list from last year. 

The Brave New World of Photography: Day 5 - Paul Graham, Claus Stolz, Olivier Jobard and others

Oh my giddy aunt, it’s Friday already. So who to choose? I think I’ll go for  Paul Graham just because he makes pictures that are make the USA look rubbish and are kind of rubbish in themselves but in a good kind of way. A case in point is The Present. For this Graham photographed New York – but it doesn’t look like New York. It’s just another city. It’s a bit crap. That’s quite an achievement. 

Here’s a review I wrote of it for Photo-Eye.

 

But then the other thing that is new is the scale of photography. There’s JR with his massive prints sited in strange places. It’s kind of new even though it’s been done before. I don't think the pictures are very good, but, hey, they have a certain impact and the siting is spectacular from particular perspectives.

 

Following on from Abelardo Morello and his transformation of rooms into camera obscura, there are Richard Learoyd’s giant long exposures made in a giant pinhole camera. Or there’s Chris Mccaw with his huge cameras and explorations of the burning nature of the sun. That’s not new – people have been staring at the sun in some form or other for millennia. 

 

Claus Stolz also works with the sun, burning negatives into beautiful patterns that have a certain physicality to them.This picture is from his Heliografien series. 

 

Oh, and while we're at it, how about some photograms. I love Elaine Duigenan's work (made on a scanner) and then there are Adam Fuss's BabyGrams (Darkroom, warm water, cibachrome and baby). Marvellous, elegant and new (ish)!

 

Finally there’s the whole multimedia thing, the use of sound and music to help tell the visual story. Is it new? I’m not sure it is, but we're talking narrative photography here. And ultimately it’s the story that matters. There's not as much good work out here as one might expect, but the work that is good is outstandingly good. My favourites  are Kingsley’s Crossing by Olivier Jobard and Prison Valley by David Dufresne and Philippe Brault.

Kingsley's Crossing is the story of one man's dream to leave the poverty of life in Africa for the promised land of Europe. We walk in his shoes, as photojournalist Olivier Jobard accompanies Kingsley on his uncertain and perilous journey. See the project at http://mediastorm.com/publication/kingsleys-crossing

Pain, Dentists and Appalachia

Bint Photobooks featured Dr Hans Killian's Facies Dolorosa 
last week and also linked to an Issuu upload of Elisa Primavera-Levy's article on the book. Published in 1934, Facies Dolorosa shows Killian's patients suffering from a variety of conditions. The book is his attempt to show the change in the psychological state of the patient as well as the physical state, to capture the mood or "stimmung" of the sickbed. He was after the essence of the sickness, an imponderable that could also have a direct influence on the diagnosis.

He was trying to use photography of facial expressions and moods to identify the essence of illness - photography as truth. This is what Primavera-Levy says about Killian's work.

"Killian's photographic project raises pertinent questions about medical ethics, patient-doctor relationships, the limits of photography, and not least, about the contextualisation of representations of suffering in arguing for a humanist cause. Yet another crucial issue concerns the reasons why a surgeon with a camera chose to photograph faces in pain."

Primavera-Levy also writes about the conflict between the typological and the humanist, the eugenic subtext of physiognomic typologies and the idea of 'ideal faces' and Killian's near mystical belief in the ability of photography to capture an underlying truth. She also writes about Killian's early adoption of Nazism and how context can influence our perception of the work.  The full article is below.

All this talk of faces and pain reminded me of Broomberg and Chanarin's Trust (the highpoint of which is people going under the drill at the British dentists).


And then I saw Stacy Kranitz's Appalachia story: Regression to the Mean and went over to her website and saw this picture of a kid at the dentist. Which kind of links in to the Good Doctor Killian and Broomberg and Chanarin..

It turns out Stacy didn't like the edit that CNN did. “I feel ashamed and humiliated for trusting CNN. I am stunned that they would take my work out of context,” she said in this interview.

In his turn, Joerg Colberg asked what does Appalachia look like? And that is the question that Kranitz is trying to answer. I like her pictures alot, and I like the fact that she is trying to establish some kind of 'mean'.


But what does Appalachia look like? Well, Kranitz starts her slideshow with this picture.

I don't know, but it kind of sets the scene for a particular perspective. The thing is, I don't really have a problem with that perspective. Just as I don't have a problem with Chris Killip's representation of the Northeast of England or Martin Parr's of New Brighton. Rather I embrace it. It might not be a 'mean' but then who wants the 'mean' if the mean is tedious and boring. Who wants to know what Appalachia really looks like? Especially when that 'really looks like' is up for negotiation in the first place. Perhaps that burning car is what Appalachia really looks like (especially if you're the kid on the car), or does  it really look like that place that Bill Bryson wrote about, or is it that Duelling Banjos kind of territory of Deliverance, or is it something more banal and possibly tedious?


There are photographers that photographer what places really look like, but the work generally ends up being rather squalid in a dull sort of way. That's what Paul Graham does with New York in his latest rather good book, The Present. He removes the Spectacle from the city and makes it look pretty much like anywhere else, anywhere else that is environmentally, socially and culturally bereft at a non-transactional level. But then Paul Graham's Paul Graham and he can do that and it's good that he can do that. But the world would be a terrible place if everybody photographed like him; a place without the spectacular, dramatic and cinematic; a place without the New York that  Lee Friedlander, Bruce Gilden, William Klein, Robert Frank and many others photographed.

So what does a place really look like, what do we pretend that it looks like, what do we want it to look like, what can we photograph it to look like? And what is the effect of the way that we make a place look? Those perhaps are the questions that Paul Graham is grappling with in the Present (that's a big perhaps by the way). And in a very different way, Kranitz is also grappling with the same questions.  

Articles on Issuu

So I'm finally getting to grips with Issuu which I delved into as an experiment for a lecture I gave - it proved really easy to use. Here are some pdfs of old articles on Raghu Rai,  Trent Parke, Paul Graham and   A Shimmer of a Possibility.


I've also uploaded old features on Elaine Duigenan, George Georgiou, working with NGOs, Reuters, Daido Moriyama (especially Memories of a Dog), Kampung Komodo and Mao's birthplace. There's my MA dissertation on Loretta Lux and Children in photography, writing and photography on childhood in Year Zero, and an interview with  Robbie Cooper

 More of my documents are here.

Beyond Caring: It's the women that's to blame!

We know that BBC's Newsnight is dying a slow death. Now Today is following suit if this item on Social Mobility is anything to go by.

Listen to this. 

So the only non-mobile person that is interviewed is a mother who left school at 13 after being in a children's home and has never worked. She has a child who wants to either be a policeman because he can arrest people (to make the world better) or work in a shop. All very good, but it is a bit lazy and pointless.

Meanwhile Evan Davies gives University and Science minister, David "Half-a-brain" Willets, a ridiculously comfy ride. Willets imagines that Social Mobility has decreased because of more women going to university and that the answer to making the UK more mobile is getting more students to do traditional A-levels, so increasing their ability to get to 'competitive' universities - the very phrase is an oxymoron and revealing of an attitude that is antithetical to all that is good, clean and honest in life.

Willets also believes in increased access to Further Education courses and old qualifications - but this is coming from a government where any in-work or post-compulsory education is being cut to the bare bone, where every FE department is living in fear of its very existence, where the confluence of cuts in education spending, housing benefits and jobseekers allowance are making a perfect storm of lost opportunities for a generation of the most disadvantaged and poor.  Besides whichThe very phrase competetive universities is so revealing of a mentality that is antithetical to all that is good in life.

The problem is the 'competetive' universities themselves and the people who go there, the problem is the 'competetive' schools and the people who go there. The problem is with the people who think of their children's futures and send them to private schools - schools where one of the underlying attractions is one of exclusion - where children of certain backgrounds, certain colours and, in particular, certain economic backgrounds, are not included. It is the ghettoisation of childhood along class and economic lines. The interesting thing is these schools do not exclude particular difficulties. Go to any private school and the range of behavioural difficulties is astounding. Depression, lack of self esteem, eating disorders are prevalent, more so even than at state schools. Go to any girls' school in Britain and you can spot the eating disorders a mile off. Depression? Of course, because whilst half the children are there because their parents want them to 'do well', the other half are there because their parents don't really like them that much.But that's alright because, these are Upper-Middle Class ailments so don't really count do they.

God help us all with the kind of half-baked ideas that David Willets is coming up with. This is a government that believes that their is not enough ethnic/religious integration in the country - and thinks a solution to this problem is to have more religiously divided schools. God help us all.

Oh and the question to tie all this in with photography is, where is the photography related to the cuts in spending in the UK, the slow murder of the voluntary sector, the impending ending of EMA, the closing of university access to poorer students (please don't say that you don't have to pay off the loans etc. That's not the way it works in reality.), the increased quotas to force people off higher-paying benefits. Who is doing work on this kind of thing? Who is planning to do work on this? Let me know, send a link and I'll put it up..

In the meantime, a blast from the past with Paul Graham's Beyond Caring.

How not to Photograph: Street Credibility

picture: Colin Pantall - Does my bum look big 0n this?

First of all, I love street photography. The history of photography is powered and invigorated by the street. If it weren't for the street, photography would collapse under the weight of its essential vanity and self-regard. Walker Evans, Robert Frank, William Klein, Henri Cartier Bresson, Garry Winogrand, Daido Moriyama, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Trent Parke, Paul Graham believe-it-or-not, Bruce Gilden, Mark Cohen (and I could go on ) are all fantastic examples of the broad spectrum of photographers who have used the street as their location.

At its best, street photography has an energy and vitality of its own, the photographer fuelled up on adrenaline and fags flits around the city capturing the nervous edge of the people and spacial politics of the city. The photographer becomes one with the street, personal, private and public merging into the amorphous mass that is the urban zeitgeist of a particular space.

The street photographer maps the psycho-geography of the built-up environment in other words. That's the idea anyway.

But it doesn't always happen like that. The street photographer has the street as his location for a reason; the street is anonymous, amorphous and impersonal. And sure, you can pursue your obsession with the amorphous for years and years, and if you are obsessive and hard-working enough you might end up producing something as great as the photographers mentioned above.

But most of the time, having the street as a location is an abdication of responsibility and choice. We forget the hard-work bit and use the street because we couldn't be arsed to do anything better. We don't have to choose, we don't have to focus, we don't have to relate to anything beyond a second. We photograph whatever comes into our rangefinder and rationalise it away with some mumblings about...? About...? About what exactly? I'm not sure really. Most of the time street photography is a cop out, a simple expression of our dysfunction as human beings, our failure to relate to each other, our limited attention span.

We can be in-your-face like Gilden and Cohen (and I love the work of Gilden and Cohen, but one of each is enough), but what is that apart from a photographic invitation to be at the end of a slapping. We can do the blurry Daido-thing (and I love the blurry Daido-thing), but then doesn't everywhere end up looking alike.

If we live in a really big city where lots goes on (aka New York or Tokyo) we can search out those random locations where shop displays, loading bays and wealthy women of a certain age collide to provide us with Winogrand-lite visions ofa lovable, huggable but essentially crappy Whimsy City. It's low rent slapstick, the photograph equivalence of the film scene where someone walks across the street holding a giant pane of glass.

Or we photograph the light, we try to do what Trent Parke did so brilliantly in his black and white work of Australia. We lurk on street corners waiting for the sun to come round and shine on the faces and bodies of those coming towards us. We can borrow some ideas from Philip-Lorca diCorcia's Heads and mutter something about "the individual" and "isolation" and "the loneliness of the long distance commuter".

But our pictures will be pictures of patches of light - because that's what all pictures are. Unless you tie them together with a visual web where environment, history, people and place combine to make a beautiful and cohesive whole (as Parke did with his Australian work or di Corcia with his heads).

And I haven't even mentioned typography, signs, or advertising hoardings. Or flags. Or dogs. And I'm not going to because that would be to go into such a dark place that I would never emerge into the daylight again.

Street photography is the ultimate cop-out. It's for people who are too lazy to engage with the real world, for people who are scared of the intimacy of meaningful photography so seek out the sequential one-one-hundred-and-twenty-fifth-second-stand of the street, for people who just want to hang around on street corners snapping strangers, smoking fags and drinking coffee with fond imaginings that they will be the next Cartier-Bresson/Winogrand/Parke.

I know this because I am lazy and think this every day. I forget the foot-slogging, brow-beating unrewarded drudgery of it, the endless rolls of film wasted hanging around waiting for something to happen even if it's nothing much at all.

I forget all that and think how I'd love to be a street photographer!

Paul Graham's Best Shot

Paul Graham talks about his best shot in the Guardian (link here for all the best shots).

"This picture is actually part of a sequence of photographs I took on the first evening of a two-and-a-half-year trip around America, starting in Pittsburgh in 2004. I was just travelling with no particular purpose, taking photos along the way. This was in the car park in front of the motel where I was staying, and there was this guy cutting the grass of an entire huge field with a very loud old push-mower.

A "great shot" is the antithesis of what this work is about. It's about appreciating the flow of the moment, the rhythm and currents and eddies of life, rather than neatly packaging the world into perfectly formed little jewels.

He saw me and lifted his hand at one point, but he didn't really care. So I kept on taking pictures, with the sun shining directly into the camera. (It's lovely to do everything that Kodak tell you not to.)

In one image from this sequence, he is to the left, then he's to the right, then he's wiping his face with a cloth. Then this beautiful moment happened: the sun burst through and the rain came down, and all the raindrops were illuminated in the shaft of light. It was quite extraordinary.

I like this shot because, besides the obvious reason of its beauty, it confers a nobility on what the man is doing. He was working with dignity on this unbelievable task - and, with perseverance, he was probably going to get it done. Many moments are mundane and seem worthless, but they form and shape our lives. They are quite different from the Herculean labours and extraordinary moments that photographers are addicted to."

As he says in the interview, Paul Graham is not really a best shot kind of photographer. He works with an apparently incidental ("I was just travelling around with no particular purpose" my arse!) cack-handedness and makes it into something intelligent and new, and still references the history of photography in a hundred different ways. It's beautiful-ugly.

Graham's Best Shot comes from Graham's book, A Shimmer of Possibility, which is up for the Deutsche Börse Photography prize. It is surprisingly rare for photography to create something really original or influential, something that will stand the test of time. A Shimmer of Possibility is one of those somethings.

You can read my interview with Paul Graham here.

Also up for the prize are Emily Jacir, Tod Papageorge and Taryn Simon. You can read about the best shots of Tod Papageorge here and Taryn Simon here.

Paul Graham on Portraiture

More from Paul Graham from End of An Age


“Because portraits are one of the most profound things that one can do – to express who we are through our material presence. To look at someone, to simply and truly see someone, and express their sentience.


This is a starting point with the portraits I have tried to achieve in my piece of work, I am attempting to show the dignity in the human beings I have photographed. By including the space they occupy for whatever reason that may be, shows how the space is being used, whether that be an interior of a church or a warehouse used for a clothing manufacturer, the area surrounding the person conveys a little more about the personthemselves. I wanted the viewer to have a direct connection with the subject, which is why many of the individuals in their environment are looking straight towards the camera and are the main focus of attention. The environment reveals more about the person themselves and also the reason they occupy the area. In the objective study and scrutiny of the individual I am trying to reveal more that is initially hidden beneath the surface.

Whether this is successful or not often depends a lot upon the individual and whether they want to reveal anything of themselves. Today people are so aware when a camera is pointed at them it is difficult to reveal anything other than a record of that moment in time with the individual, but I am trying to achieve some sort of connection with the person in front of me, and also with the viewer without any irony or cynicism. There is a certain amount of trust between myself and the sitter as I explain the reason behind the images and what I hope to achieve with them, but there is still a power dynamic involved with all portraiture, ultimately I am trying to make it believable but with a slight moment of tension. With this slight tension, either in a look or in the pose of the individual, I am trying to allude again to the sense of unease and alienation in the city the size of London.

Due to the fact that all the images were taken using a medium format camera and a tripod, which slows down the whole process of taking a portrait, it affects the whole procedure and gives the subject time to get used to the process of being photographed and gives me time to further explain what I am trying to achieve."

(Thanks to Tadhg Devlin for this)