We are alike you and I: Don McCullin and Lorenzo Vitturi

Don McCullin has spoken about how few people are photographing conflict and destruction overseas and missing out on the ongoing conflict social destruction and in Britain.

It made me think of a few things that I have mentioned before on this blo, especially regarding Jim Mortram. Firstly, that there are people documenting the social changes happening in Britain, but most of the time those social changes are so wrapped up in the generic formulas of art/documentary photography that the message gets lost and the photographs only become for those au fait and fully converted to the machinations of photographic representation. And complex as these machinations can be, most of the time they are as generic as a family album.

Sometimes it's the directness that matters. McCullin is direct in his photography (see the above image by McCullin), so perhaps that's where he's coming from. And perhaps Old School might be better than New School in this respect, taking Old School in the broadest story-telling sense.

And if you take it that way, then perhaps Old School isn't really that Old School after all. My favourite book of the moment is  Lorenzo Vitturi's Dalston Anatomy, a book that seems fresh and vivid and new. But embedded within it are elements that reflect on the ethnic and economic cleansing of one particular area of London. It might be eliptical and lack the directness I mentioned above, but it's there, just a fingernail scratch beneath the bright colours and powdered paint.

I'm probably way off on this and I've got a feeling I doubled back on myself somewhere along the line there, but a post that connects Don McCullin, Jim Mortram and Lorenzo Vitturi?; it has to be!

BJP Goes Monthly

It's Official. The BJP goes monthly from March - first issue comes with an interview with Don McCullin who is a true great of photography - especially his English work. (His very dark exhibition  at Imperial War Museum North in Manchester could do with somebody turning the lights on. I could hardly see anything in the darkened rooms), an interview with Gerhard Steidl and much more. Simon Bainbridge, the editor says

"We believe that print magazines have a positive future, but somewhere along the line publishers have lost sense of what makes them so appealing, and in doing so they’ve given too much ground to the internet. Why do something in print that you can do equally well on the web? So, when we began thinking about what we could deliver as a monthly, we decided to play to the strengths of print. While many magazines are cutting costs and chasing readers that now have an allegedly shorter attention span, we are investing, rewarding them with a redesigned magazine that uses higher quality paper, has superior repro and delivers more depth."
It kind of makes sense, and it will be bigger, glossier and better but I will miss the weekly BJP dropping through my letterbox.

Read the whole story here.