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.

Lothringen and the Valleys

A few weeks back, I went to the Winding House in New Tredegar with the Documentary Photography students of the University of South Wales (Newport Division).

This was the eastern end of the Valleys, mining communities that are not mining communities any longer, that are becoming satellite towns for the Cardiff area. We saw the pictures from “Coalfaces: a mining community in photos – Bargoed in the 1970s.” This featured featured a series photographs taken around the Bargoed area in the 1970s by a young Swedish photographer, Kjell-Åke Andersson.

Those were great, but what was even more interesting was hearing a talk by Paul Cabuts on the history of the valleys explored through images, seeing how layers of geology, migration, exploitation, transport and housing mixed into the social and cultural make-up of the valleys.


It's a stunning landscape, but faded, with nature disguising the old industrial focal points, with new developments and transport links adding an anonymous edge to what was once a dynamic, cosmopolitan community of people who worked in some of the more dangerous environments the world has to offer.

Then I received Anders Pascal's book, Lothringen in the post and it struck a chord - faded industrial, landscapes mixing with new build roads and infrastructure, overlaid with an air of cultural stagnation. There's even a supermarket across a main road. It's a small book, self-published, a perfectly-formed example of the modest photo-book/zine, but with the added bonus of being free if you fire off an email in Pascal's direction.

There's not much information on Pascal's website, except for this ironic quote from former President Mitterand (and a translation of sorts is below).

 L'espoir de la Lorraine, ce doit être aussi l'espoir de toute la France, celui d'une nation qui se retrouve, qui refuse le déclin, décidée à se hisser à la pointe des nations industrielles.

The hope of the Lorraine region, this must also be the hope of all France, is that of a nation that finds itself and refuses decline, that is determined to reach the cutting edge of industrial nations.

Order Lothringen free here.

Mothers, Death and Macquenoise

The French TV series, The Returned is about people who had died, who had been mourned and were gone -  suddenly returning to life. It was quiet and still and filled with expressive faces and hidden truths and simmering resentments. Amidst all the stillness there was envy, lust and rage. Much of that rage came from a pair of brothers who lived with their mother in a secluded farmhouse on the southern edge of the French Alps; a home from which both brothers would hunt and kill from. Sometimes it would be animals they would kill, sometimes people.

Macquenoise by Pierre Liebaert reminds me of the Returned. It's a series of pictures focussing on the life of a mother and son living in an isolated town on the French/Belgian border. There's hunting and killing and expressive faces peeking out from behind trees or sleeping in raggedy armchairs. The sensation of viewing the pictures is of remoteness and isolation, of a basic existence tempered by ever-present reminders of the participants' own mortality. The pictures are printed on newsprint - which is stitched down one side and merges with the accompanying gatefold sleeve which wraps around it. This is just beautiful, with a graphically printed image of a dead rabbit (that also appears in the newspaper) staring out of you in red, black and white colours.

Remembering What you See: Rein Jelle Terpstra

pictures by Rein Jelle Terpstra

A break from dos and don'ts now.

So what would you want to remember seeing if you were going blind, if you were never going to see again?







‘Blindness is like a giant vacuum cleaner that takes over your life and sucks up almost everything. Your memories, your interests, your idea of time and how you would like to spend it, the places themselves, even the world; everything is hoovered away. Your consciousness is being emptied.’

John Hull in Touching the Rock (1990), the book in which he describes how all images gradually disappeared from his head after he went blind. Within just a couple of years, Hull had forgotten what his family or his house looked like .

That text (and the initial question) comes from Rein Jelle Terpstra's project and book on blindness, Retracing. It's a complex project about seeing, remembering, forgetting and losing one's sight (and with it one's visual memory) - and then relating this in book and exhibition form.

It's a thought-provoking and really engaging project which is collaborative in much that way that Anouk Kruithof's Happy Birthday was.

This is how Terpstra describes the project on his website.

InRetracing I am working with people who are about to lose their eyesight. I have asked them about images that are valuable to them. How would they like to remember these images and how can they do this? In a sense, I am looking over their shoulders to photograph the things they point out: the things they see, but also the things they still think they see or would like to see.

These images include the sea, someone's handwriting, the reflection in a mirror of a young woman applying make-up to her eyes, the view from the window, the studio of decorative painter, and much more.

All the images were shot on Kodachrome slides in 2010. Besides having special colours and sharpness, Kodachrome is known to last long. These images of light outlast human memory, which after all lasts only one lifetime.

I was able to have the films developed just in time in America, at the only place that still provided the service. They stopped developing this famous stock for good on 31 December 2010.

I will present this – analogue – series as a slideshow installation with multiple projectors.

For the people I work with in this project this is an urgent theme. For them, perception is no longer a given and has become a precious thing. Photography’s role of preserving images here becomes an ambivalent one.

Two human motives for photography – the wish the document certain moments and show the results to others – now have a different effect. For that reason I want to follow up this project and document it.

I keep in touch with these people. I give them prints of the slides and in a couple of years I will tell them about these prints. I will describe the photographs carefully in words, in an iconographic way, so that the images can be invoked in their heads through language.

So when you open the book you know you are seeing pictures of things that people want to remember. On the whole, the people featured in the book ordinary things that  have a tactile quality to them; a view from a window, a shiny length of piping, a paint splatted floor, an hand rubbing on eyeshadow, a trail of animal prints in the snow. Part of the reason for this is the gradual realisation on the part of the subjects that though they won't have a visual sense of the things that Terpstra is photographing, they will have other sensory experiences of those objects - the visual is being remembered through the auditory, the tactile, the olfactory senses.

Half of the book is filled with these pictures of ordinary things, with Terpstra photographing them in the service of his subjects.

The other half of the book is filled with pictures of the slide show in which the images were exhibited, with each one fading in and out rather like the blindness that will come to the people who chose those images. These are printed on a different paper stock and the background is black. Terpstra is running with a theme here, elevating the everyday into something that is to be savoured. The pictures are banal - they're not 'good' pictures, but the ideas around them elevate them into something altogether different,  something that is part of another person's experience, something that is about to be lost, something that extends beyond the picture on the page.

Terpstra says that he takes "...pictures of what they see, or think they see, and what they don't want to forget. The project is about farewell and loss, about almost anything that runs through your fingers... These people know exactly what images they will lose. One of the participants wanted me to record the insignificant, everyday images. "Those are the ones you will forget about first," she said."


Buy the book here. 

Reach Out/Ask Questions: Jim Mortram's Dos and Don'ts

pictures by Jim Mortram

More Dos and Don'ts, this time from Jim Mortram. If you are at all unsure of where Jim is coming from, go and have a look at Small Town Inertia.

Don't:

Don't underestimate anything. Ever. Be it yourself, the community around you or your peers. It’s easy to fall back on sayings like ‘From small acorns’… but there’s always a seed of truth in such gestures. If you have a need to find a truth, no matter what obstacles there are, you will find a path to uncover them, to report them and ultimately to be able to share them. To communicate them.

Everyone has a story. You spend 10 minutes, ask the right questions and listen more than you talk. Everyone’s had an amazing life. Do not underestimate anyone. Ever. You can be in a room of strangers and in an hour have the making of a community. This may sound idealistic but ask questions, listen, listen harder and through the exchange trust flourishes, bonds knit and fuse together, common ground is discovered. These are the very building blocks of a community. At least, that’s the community I want to be a part of!.

These actions of enquiring, asking, listening, not judging, showing and sharing empathy and a genuine interest in those around you will always be the greatest tools any photographer can have. Without communicating, without asking questions & without listening you may as well leave your lens cap on. 

Don't be scared to reach out and ask questions, there is an ever expanding community of people, willing and ready to share information, advice, support.

Don't keep that which you have learned for yourself. If you teach 100 people to use a chisel, you'll find a hundred different sculptures will be made as a result of learing to use that tool, it's the same with photography, you can share techniques, ways of shooting, unravel and de-mystify processes, it's good to share, to pass it on, we're talking photography, not being a member of the 'skull and bones', let all you know flow through like a river, those waters will irrigate future minds, their ideas will blossom, you'll have played a vital, sustaining part in that growth. 

Don't seek an aesthetic by merely observing other photographers, all the arts are there for you, literature, cinema, theatre, painting, be a sponge and soak it all up and allow other elements over the visual affect you, be it admiring anothers morality, approach. An Aesthetic will evolve naturally, don't ever be scared to make a mistake, there are no mistakes, merely learning something that you can, for now, discount. 

Don't ever think photography is dead, or does not count, every image you make (Not take) will out live us all, shoot for the now, and shoot for those that will come after us, share for us all, and for those of us yet to be.

Do:

Learn to surf. 

Obviously, I can't surf but what I'm suggesting is riding the waves that will come crashing towards you in life as life is never a mill pond, it's always going to be up's and downs, the trick is to find a balance through it all. So, learn to surf!.

Make your interest in the person you are photographing more visible than your camera, this will render your camera invisible. If you render your camera invisible, you can take all the images, in any circumstance you require to best communicate them and their story. 

Be genuine to yourselves. Go for stories that you care for. No matter what confronts you, you’ll find a way past it. 

Lastly and the most important part of the equation is always whom you’re pointing your camera at. Those whom you ask questions of, those whom you photograph for without those people in front of you and their trust and selflessness you’re forever all alone with nothing to photograph and nothing to communicate.

Don't Give Up: Brian David Stevens' Dos and Don'ts

all pictures by Brian David Stevens

Today we have Brian David Stevens giving us the Dos and Don'ts of Personal work. Be yourself! is the message here.

Ok? Ready? Let's do it.

Just who the hell are you? 

Answer this first before you start, if you don't know, find out. You're not McCullin, Parr, Norfolk or any of your heroes.

Being yourself is your calling card, no-one else will think like you, see like you. When starting out it's the one thing you have in your favour. Exploit it.

If you want to produce personal work you have to work out how to pay for it, there's a good chance this money won't all come from photography, it will come from bar work, waiting tables, carrying bricks on construction sites, bank jobs, selling blood, living with your parents, living in squats. If that gets too much you could try crowdfunding, then when you're truly in the gutter, grants.

Why should you do this

Production of personal work is important, it's the pictures you want to make, it's why you are doing this.

These are the pictures that will stick in art directors minds

These are the pictures that you will talk passionately about in meetings

These are the pictures that will get you work.

Make sure you've got cards with a least some personal work on, producing cards has never been cheaper so get lots and give people a choice of images to take away, this also works as free market research, see which images are the most popular, and tailor your portfolio accordingly.

Make sure this work is well represented on your website (you do have a website don't you?)

These days more often or not you'll be asked to send PDF portfolios, tailor make these for each client, it costs you nothing and only takes a small amount of time. 

keep blogs up to date, show your thinking, show your working methods, let people into your head

There's only one thing that you shouldn't do and that's give up

Brian David Stevens

web: http://briandavidstevens.com/

blog: http://driftingcamera.blogspot.com/

twitter: http://twitter.com/driftingcamera

You want to be a photographer, then be a photographer! Owen Harvey's Dos and Don'ts

above pictures from Owen Harvey's Mod UK 

Today on the blog, just-graduated photographer Owen Harvey is giving his dos and don'ts of being a photographer seeking his way in the world. 

You can see Owen's work on exhibition at Mother Advertising agency in London ( supported by Magnum Photos and IdeasTap).

As a recent graduate this year and a relatively young photographer, I’m going to mainly aim the following at those of you who are soon to be in that horrible situation of finishing Uni yourselves. So, you will probably be skint, jobless and thinking about what on earth to do with yourself. I’ve realised in my short time out of Uni, that there are a lot of things you should do and definitely a few you most probably shouldn’t…

Do

If you want to be a photographer, then be a photographer. Shoot, shoot, shoot. In fact there’s a lot more to it than that. If you aren’t out shooting pictures, you should be planning projects. If you aren’t planning projects, go to exhibitions and events. If you aren’t at exhibitions or events, then you should most probably be out shooting again. It sounds simple, but if you want it to be a job, treat it like one, a fun one.

On the other hand…

Don’t

Don’t burn yourself out. If you have a little bit of an obsessive personality like I do, then it’s important to remember you can’t work 24 hours a day. If you overwork yourself all the time, you’ll end up like a zombie and have to go to photographic rehab. Don’t be afraid to work hard and play hard. No one wants to talk purely about photography constantly. You’ll end up boring everyone to death; sometimes it’s good to just talk rubbish over a pint. Also, as tempting as it is, don’t go the other way and drink 24 hours a day either I should add.  

Do/Don’t

Do be proud of your work!  All artists go through a lot of sacrifices for good projects and nothing comes easy. If your work is being well received then great! Don’t get complacent though. Remember your next project has to be on par or probably even better than your last.

Don’t

Don’t rush getting your work out in every corner of the world. Sometimes it’s good to sit on a project for a while. If you can’t wait for people to see your project because you honestly think you need it out there that much, then at least hold back some images. I’ve got a lot of images from projects that I really like, but I haven’t done anything with. The reason is that if you want to make a book etc. you are going to want fresh images in it. If everyone’s seen the whole project in print already or online, then who is going to want to buy the book or go to the exhibition with nothing fresh in it?

Another Don’t

This is probably the most important point and the most obvious. Make work you are passionate about! (This also translates to being in honest in what you do). Before you go out shooting, ask yourself ‘Do I really care about this?’ If you don’t, then take your shoes off and don’t waste your time. If you don’t care about the work, no one else will and if you do care, it will show.

Do

One of the most important points I was passed down by any photographer was always do carry a snickers (this translates to Mars Bar, Twix, and Kit-Kat etc.). If you are shooting people all night, or trekking through fields looking for the perfect landscape shot, or whatever you are choosing to do, sometimes you need a snack. Don’t get caught out, out of energy, in a food mood and nothing to solve the problem. Take a snack on a shoot. Also make sure you do a checklist before you leave. I once turned up to a shoot and forgot a singular piece of kit that meant I couldn’t shoot all night. A mistake you don’t make twice.

Don’t

I think this one is pretty much common sense as well, but basically don’t be an arsehole. Help people out, be supportive of other people’s projects, and don’t see everyone and everything as competition. Remember the circles in photography are small and what goes around comes around in life. I’ve heard many of stories of photographers doing dumb things to try and climb the ladder of success and where has it got them? A bad name at best. Be honest with people, be yourself and most importantly have fun. Photography should be fun, it’s the reason we all do it because we enjoy it. Don’t lose sight of that.