So which one is it?

I took these two shots this weekend at a social gathering and can’t decide which one is the better shot. I kind of like them both, but they are my “babies”. As Paul put it so aptly in a (very timely) lecture on editing today: photographers are notoriously bad at “killing their own babies” and therefore are often not that good at editing their own work. I like her facial expression in the first image but like the way her hand holds the cigarette in the second shot…. Fortunately I don’t have to choose now.

Blatant self promotion

I just learned that I have won the third prize in the non professional category editorial/personality of the International Photography Awards with an entry from my Kiev series. Here is the entry:

Roger Willemsen at the Goethe Institute

I went to Roger Willemsen's book presentation (An Afghan Journey) this evening at the Goethe Institute in London. He was presenting and discussing the English version of the book. He reports from an extended trip he made to Afghanistan at the end of 2005. Willemsen was fairly skeptical about the chances of success in rebuilding the country and was adamant that sending more troops would only aggravate the situation. One bon mot from his book where in the course of a conversation an Afghan replied: "You have the watches and we have the time."

Objet trouvé in Richmond

Demonstration today in London...

I went to the Anti-Trident demonstration in London today to take some pictures, which attracted thousands of people (and photographers). It quickly turned into an anti-Iraq-war, ‘Don’t attack Iran’, ‘Free Palestine’, even ‘anti Gate Gourmet’ and ‘stop climate change’ demonstration. Seems it is all intertwined these days (I overheard one of the demonstrators saying to the other in slight disbelief: ‘Are we doing climate change today as well?’).

I could sympathise with the main theme though. No prizes for guessing that I was and am firmly against the war in Iraq. It was morally and ethically wrong in the first place and was started for the wrong (fabricated) reasons. The US (and the UK) created a big mess not only in Iraq but also in the whole of the Middle East as a consequence. And one can only listen in disbelief to Bush and Blair these days. How arrogantly and hypocritically they are still defending the Iraq war and their course of actions. Both the Bush and Blair regime will go down in history as one of the most morally and ethically bankrupt governments in the history of both countries. I could go on…

But that is not my point. I was not an objective observer who took pictures. I clearly had a stance standing among these demonstrators. I clearly sympathised with them. Which brought me back to a lecture we had this week with Tom Hunter who distinctly told us that he is a propagandist with his documentary photography, he has an agenda and attempts to convey it with his images. So where is the objective photojournalist, the balanced and unbiased investigator? Does she/he exist?

And I leave you with another question. I also recorded some ambient sound today while I was marching among the demonstrators. Some of it came out quite well. What do I do with it? What is the right way/medium to present it? Will anyone listen to it in isolation or is it only interesting as part of a visual slideshow?

Lighting workshop

Today we had a very interesting lighting workshop with Barry Lewis. Fascinating what you can do with light...



Alas, these damn reflectors are so difficult to fold :-)



Jenny...







Well, that's me, with Jenny getting to know my camera :-)

William Eggleston

As part of our first term assessment, we will need to write an academic essay on subject given by the course teacher. The photographer I will be writing about is William Eggleston. I have started to read up on him over the last two days and had an intensive look at some of his images (in particular his books “Eggleston’s Guide” and “Los Alamos”). The more I read about this photographer and the more I look at his images, the more I become fascinated about him and his work.

He is usually credited as the “inventor” of colour photography, not in the physical sense (colour photography had been around for a while in the early 70s) but his seminal exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976 paved the way for use of colour in documentary photography. Many photographers who have been using colour for documentary work afterwards owe their success (and the acceptance of their use of colour) to his ground-breaking work. Without Eggleston, there would be a different Martin Parr, Juergen Teller, Susan Meiselas, maybe even Alex Webb, to name but a few. And also the reception of some of Eggleston’s contemporaries such as Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld and Paul Graham would have been very different.

And I think that Eggleston not only introduced colour in documentary photography but also quite a different grammar and formal approach than what was used in the then prevailing black and white documentary photography (for example, the positioning of his subjects in the frame).

Well, I have only begun to analyse his work. You will need to wait for a few weeks and read my essay to get my full thoughts on him :-) However, I guess he struck a particular note with me because in the continuum of photojournalism and documentary photography I see myself (also) at the documentary end. And I definitely want to work in colour. So I can see that Eggleston’s work will also be quite crucial for my own personal development as a photographer.

Here are two of my favourite Eggleston images (copyright “William Eggleston”, used from his website):

Happy New Year... The Year of the Pig

Today marked the celebrations for the Chinese New Year. The new year is the year of the pig.

Today at LCC...

This happens when you put more than one photographer in the same room with a bit of time to kill…. As I read the other day: “It is easier to ask a dog to get out of a meat house than a photographer to put down his camera.” :-)

On the Piccadilly tube...

Orange British Academy Film Awards

This is the closest I could get to the festivities this evening at the Natural History Museum for the “Orange British Academy Film Awards”. I stood on the rooftop of my flat in South Kensington and shot this image :-) Well, I keep my fingers crossed for Judi Dench. She is nominated for actress in a leading role for her part in “Notes on a Scandal”. For best film, I am undecided between “Babel” and “Little Miss Sunshine”, both would deserve to win in my view.

On a more serious note, I went to the “Photographers’ Gallery” today to have a first look at this year’s entries to the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. To be honest, I only understood two of the entries, Philippe Chancel and Anders Petersen. The other two entries (Fiona Tan and The Atlas Group) I just did not get. I’ll be returning to this exhibition a few more times. Maybe my view will change and I might also write a bit more but for now I am impressed by Anders Petersen’s images. He became famous in the sixties for his book on a pub in Hamburg (Café Lehmitz), which was frequented by prostitutes, pimps, and more generally people on the fringe of society. His images for the Deutsche Börse Prize have been taken in Gap and St. Etienne in France. And, boy, he found quite some characters there. His visual language is traditional (black and white and photojournalistic style) but nevertheless quite refreshing. My clear favourite for winning the prize.

He also said on photography:"It is more like a life, you see, not really a profession." A statement I can genuinely relate to.

Sound and photography

I attended a very interesting interdisciplinary lecture yesterday on the combination of sound and photography. Peter Cusack who teaches the BA Sound course at LCC and Paul Lowe, my course teacher, each presented work in this context.

Peter presented a series of soundscapes he recorded in Chernobyl and which forms part of a larger body of work on “sounds from dangerous places”. The soundscapes are meant to represent sonic ways of what ecological disaster has done to a specific region. The samples included sounds from the exclusion zone, Geiger/radiometer readings and the sound of someone walking over books splattered across a former school floor.

Paul presented work he has done for Christian Aid, in Israel and an impressive series of portraits of grieving women from Bosnia; each presented as a slideshow and combined with sound (voice over, ambient sound and in the latter case with music from Steve Reich and a Bosnian sound artist).

Obviously a discussion followed the presentation on the combination of sound and photography. While acknowledging that it might become a commercial necessity to combine visual and acoustic elements (most newspapers have now a form of video clips on their websites and the direction is clearly towards this kind of combination), I have my reservations.

Doesn’t the combination and synthesis of sound and visual elements distract from the underlying elements? Either you focus on the photographs or the sound that accompanies it? And more importantly, haven’t “photo artists” (and sound artists for that matter) for years and years attempted to distil moments, emotions, meaning into one frame, which is so carefully composed in order for it be read in isolation? Aren’t we shooting hundreds or thousands of frames just for one short story and embark on a sometimes cumbersome, excruciating and exhausting editing process afterwards to get to the series of a few images that tell the whole story? Are we tempted to be less vigorous in composing and choosing our shots because we know we have sound and other sensory elements that will accompany it and explain what we have sloppily left out in our photographs?

House concert in South Kensington

Through one of my assignments I met David Murdoch who owns a violin making shop. He invited me to a wonderful house concert this evening in his house in South Kensington. Ani Schnarch (violin) and Piers Lane (piano) performed recitals by Tomaso Antonio Vitali, Olivier Messiaen and César Franck. It was a most enjoyable evening to listen to these distinguished musicians in a private home.







Of course for this occasion, I wore a suit and tie, which I haven't done for quite some time :-)

The long awaited snow in London

This morning, we finally had the long anticipated snow in London... It will be interesting to see how London will cope with the massive amounts of snow today :-)