Robert Frank in Wales: Sixty Years Later

I posted this picture of Robert Frank in Cymparc in the Rhondda Valleys in 1953 a few weeks back. (above)

I like a little rephotography, so below is  Jon Pountney's  picture of Cymparc in 2013 below.

"The steam here is from the Park Colliery. You wouldn't even know it was there now. I'm told the white house on the far left was the Pit foreman's house."

Robert Frank in Wales and David Bailey Eyes

This is Robert Frank in the Valleys. Fantastic! He's smiling!

And this is a David Bailey poster which is part of the Valleys Archive. Fantastic also.

Very JR, but 25 years earlier and different - it's always interesting how ideas go around and come around, and get pushed to the outer limits. I still don't see the point of JR - but it looks exciting! And that's the point.

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!

How not to Photograph: The Fifth Flyover

picture: Colin Pantall - Empty Estuary and The Fifth Flyover


The Fifth Flyover is different to the typological approach but similar. It's about repetition within a wider theme, where the photographer feels the need to show us the same thing over and over again, but they think they are showing us something different each time. Robert Frank had juke boxes running through The Americans, Alec Soth had empty beds running through Sleeping in the Mississippi, but they were always different and always served the purpose of helping to illustrate the much more interesting aspects of human life which these photographers explored with their pictures.

Too often we find ourselves photographing an empty bed simply because we are attracted to empty beds, we know it'll make a nice picture and we think we can slot it into a wider body of work. Why not, everyone loves an empty bed, especially if it's stained and unmade, but nicely composed! If we are really attracted to them we might try an empty bed typology (which has been dealt with already in this series) which is always a bad idea because that will remind the viewer where they are heading after flicking through a few empty bed images.

Most times, the empty bed, empty building, barren flyover or sparsely vegetated field becomes a visual trope that resonates throughout a photographer's work. By the time we have seen the eighth one, we've got the picture. Empty buildings are really empty, barren flyovers are really barren, and sparsely vegetated fields are, er, sparsely vegetated and there are a lot of them about if you care to look for them. Critical mass is reached at an early point (scientific research shows us critical mass is reached at 8 pictures) and if we see any more than this number it is like having one, two or three drinks past the point where you are absolutely legless. Nausea kicks in and vomitus follows soon after.

The illusion is that the similarities of the emptiness/sparseness ( or whatever other lack or absence you choose to mention) will neutralise each other and illuminate the differences so that, if we look, really, really hard our visual understanding will transcend the tedium of what we are seeing. Maybe so, but who could be bothered. It's just not that interesting. Most of us would rather boil our ankles rather than look at work of such unremitting emptiness.

The only exception is when it's my (or your) own work - and then this kind of emptiness takes on a miracle transformation. It becomes endlessly fascinating and engaging. But only to me, which is no good at all, because I have an audience of one and I'm back in the solipsist nightmare of talking to myself, alone again in the darkroom of my soul .