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      • titleMike Goldwater Collection
      • subtitleSpring 1979; George Plemper, who had made a series of medium format portraits of members of the HMPW team, having his portrait taken by Mike Goldwater. Photo by Ed Barber
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      • copyrightEd Barber © Edward Barber Estate
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      • titleMike Goldwater Collection
      • subtitleSummer 1979; As building works continue - with new window frames installed on the grond floor - Ed Barber (left) shares a joke with David Gordon (right) and Tony Sleep (centre). Photo by Mike Goldwater
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      • copyright1979 Mike Goldwater All Rights Reserved
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      • titleHalf Moon Photography Workshop Comments Book - Terra Incognita; Childbirth
      • subtitleA selection of pages from the Comments Book for Terra Incognita; Childbirth
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      • archiveFour Corners Bishopsgate
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      • authorSee sections X to AC
      • author_editorEd Barber, Mike Goldwater, Jenny Matthews, Shirley Read, Siddhiratna, Bruno Simes
      • author_writerGlyndwr Williams, Ian Macdonald, David Faddy, Angela Kelly, Frances Borzello, Stevie Bezencenet, Annette Kuhn
      • author_photographerE.J. Bellocq, Linda Benedict-Jones, Mike Disfarmer, Don English, Elmer Fryer, Nadar, Arnold Newman, Sir Cecil Beaton, Karen Knorr, Olivier Richon, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus
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      • author_intervieweeRoland Barthes, Jonathan Green, Anna Farova, Bruce Davidson, Lucy Lippard, Francis Brugiere, Lee Friedlander, Susan Sontag, August Sander, Edmund Carpenter, Doris Lessing, Cliff Richard, Yousef Karsh, Garry Winogrand, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, John Szarkowski, Oliver Wendel Holmes, Walter Benjamin
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      • tagsportrait,portraiture,photo-portrait,commodity,individuality,studio portrait photography,archetypes,poverty,environmental portraits,weegee,paparazzi,snapshots,family albums,mothers,holiday photos,memory,amateur,democratisation of photography,fame,celebrity,'public' vs. 'private' photography,19th century photography,daguerrotype,early commercial photography,early studio portrait photography,calotypes,experiences of sitters,carte-de-visite,cabinet photo,stereograph,pictorialism,portrait photography,punk,subculture,shelter,homelessness,national campaign for the homeless,housing,families,documentary,the nude,objectification,glamour,storyville portraits,hollywood,pin-up,pornography,star system,dolls,prostitutes,prostitution,second sight,record industry,album photography,portraits of musicians,publicity,david bowie,fashion photography,pop art,drug culture,commodification of sex,self-portrait,rembrandt,portrait photography vs paintings,art photography,women photographers
      • titleCamerawork Magazine - Issue 12
      • subtitleIssue 12: Portraits
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      • copyrightFour Corners/Half Moon Photography Workshop/Camerawork, Glyndwr Williams, Ian Macdonald, David Faddy, Angela Kelly, Frances Borzello, Stevie Bezencenet, Annette Kuhn, E.J. Bellocq, Linda Benedict-Jones, Mike Disfarmer, Don English, Elmer Fryer, Nadar, Arnold Newman, Sir Cecil Beaton © Cecil Beaton / Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Karen Knorr, Olivier Richon, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Roland Barthes, Jonathan Green, Anna Farova, Bruce Davidson, Lucy Lippard, Francis Brugiere, Lee Friedlander, Susan Sontag, August Sander, Edmund Carpenter, Doris Lessing, Cliff Richard, Yousef Karsh, Garry Winogrand © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Irving Penn © The Irving Penn Foudantion, John Szarkowski, Oliver Wendel Holmes, Walter Benjamin, Camera Press
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      • locationBethnal Green, London, UK (pg 2) USA. Puerto Rico. New Guinea. Morocco. (pg 3) Austria. Essen, Germany. USA (pg 6,7) Paris, France (pg 8) Birmingham, London, UK (pg 9) Japan. Glasgow, Scotland, UK
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      • pdf_textJurgen Schadeberg From ‘ Contemporary Portraits' HMPW Touring Exhibition PORTRAITS No.12 Half Moon Photography Workshop 50p/$1.50 SOME APPROACHES TO PORTRAITURE “ ‘Portrait’ . . . (now almost always) a repre­ sentation or delineation of a person, esp. of the face, made from life by drawing, painting, photography, engraving, etc; a likeness.” The Oxford Dictionary Volume VII In photography the word ‘portrait’ has been used to refer to virtually any photograph showing a representation of a particular indivi­ dual. That person may be totally unaware the photograph was ever taken, s/he may have been outraged that it was taken or may have been totally involved in the whole photographic process. Whatever the case, the photograph of that person could be seen as a ‘portrait’. Such an image would be well within the dictionary definition, but is that really suffi­ cient? Given that photographers have been making portraits for over 130 years, some examination of the portrait in contemporary photography is overdue. Just how useful, or valuable is the word? What has it come to mean? In trying to find answers to these questions it will be useful to examine the practice of portrai­ ture through the work of particular photo­ graphers. We shall also need to look at some of the factors that will affect the final portrait and the context in which it is viewed: i) intention and use ii) choice of subject or sitter iii) relationship between photographer and sitter iv) stylistic devices and techniques Portraiture has always been a significant area of photography, both in commercial and social terms. In the 19th century it was primarily a studio based activity with its roots in a painting tradition. Since then, with technical develop­ ments in photography and mechanical repro­ duction, portraiture has become much more diverse. As a commercial studio activity, portraiture flourished in the mid-19th century, providing ‘likenesses’ that could always be adjusted to flatter the sitter. The wealthier the sitter, the more readily s/he could not only obtain a photo­ graphic likeness, but also one that was suitably re-assuring. In photographic terms, money could buy deception; photographic portraits not only reinforced the sitter’s chosen social role or position, but conferred status, as well as confirming it. At the other end of the spectrum the photobooth provides the cheapest possible portrait with absolutely no contact between photographer and sitter. Until the growth of a market for amateur photography in the 20th century, photographic portraits remained the domain of the famous and the wealthy. The commissioned studio portrait had a clearly defined social use; the photographer’s role and relationship to the sitter was similarly clear. Few photographers nowadays make a living purely from studio portraiture; since the 2nd World War the demand for such portraits has diminished, whilst the amateur market has continued to expand. Nonetheless, there are commercial studios all over Britain still pro­ ducing portraits in keeping with the long established tradition of flattering the sitter. The Daguerreotype and Ambrotype have given way to the colour portrait, printed on canvastextured paper, framed in gilt. Considering the diversity of individual photographers there is a remarkably homogenous product. will be chosen carefully depending upon the demands of the particular shot, campaign or product. Their relationship with the photo­ grapher will be commercially based, as it would be in a personal commission, except that they will stand to benefit financially from the trans­ action - money will buy their complicity. ‘Greatness’ John Ford Richard Avedon I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune-teller- to find out how they are. Rejection of tradition The long-established traditions of studio por­ traiture have not only been seen as an end in themselves, but also as a point of departure for some photographers. Richard Avedon is a photographer who has reacted against the confines of the studio tradition. Avedon now uses direct confrontation with his sitters, a white seamless backdrop and flat, frontal fighting. With his large format camera he mercilessly records every line and wrinkle on the face of his sitters. Many people find the work in his Portraits book provocative - Roland Barthes called the portraits: corpses that have living eyes which look out at you, which think. Avedon has an apparently simple view of portraiture: A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he’s being photographed. Yet he recognises that people in his terms: become almost symbolic of themselves. Avedon’s approach owes much to his reaction against traditional studio portraiture - he is no longer interested in flattering, or social roles, or environments. Instead he sees himself as seeking out that which the sitter hides even from himself: I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune-teller - to find out how they are. He does, however, make no claim that his portraits have psychological insight or character revelation: My photographs don’t go below the surface. They’re readings of what’s on the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. He records his sitters in infinite detail, stripping away the facade of their public persona. In the mid- 1960’s David Bailey began a series of portraits which owed much to the stylistics of Avedon’s work: frontal, white seamless back­ drop, close-up, harsh electronic flash, high quality image revealing every pore and facial detail. Rather than individual personalities, we are confronted by individual facial topography the work of a fashion photographer who, like Avedon, has reacted against the flattering cliches of traditional studio portraiture. Portraits in promotion The potential viewing audience of the commer­ cial portrait is usually restricted to the family and friends of the sitter, but portraits now have great currency in all kinds of promotional acti­ vities. Photographic portraits are used in all forms of selling: the ‘glamour’ image per­ petuated by so many magazines, the pin-up portraits in th'e daily tabloid or ‘Playboy’ magazine, the portraits of musicians on record covers, the portraits of people in advertisements selling anything from toothpaste to hi-fi’s, the front-of-house theatre portraits of actors. The list is a long one. Basically all these uses of portraits have one thing in common: they are geared to sell a product, whether it’s news­ papers or face-cream, the intention is the same. The people portrayed are part of that process; whether they’re models, actors, ‘personalities’, musicians, their role is very similar - they per­ sonalise and endorse the objects for sale. They Portrait photographers working in the 19th century studio moulds have been primarily con­ cerned with particular individuality and obtain­ ing a ‘likeness’ of the sitter: other practitioners appear to be more concerned with fame than individuality. Yousef Karsh is one such photographer: When one sees that residium of greatness before one’s camera, one must recognise it in a flash. There is a brief moment when all that there is in a man’s mind and soul and spirit may be reflected through his eyes, his hands, his attitude. This is the moment to record. This is the elusive moment of truth. People have been beguiled by his superb technique and see the sombre tones and rich textures as infusing the pictures with dignity and grandeur - part of his capturing the ‘inward power’ which he believes all men possess. Sadly, Karsh’s portraits reveal more about his technique and vision of greatness, and its portrayal in symbolic terms, than they actually show of his sitters as individual personalities. He works well within the old Victorian studio tradition, and to one extent or another all his ' 'sitters become subordinate to his portrayal of greatness and the stylistic devices he uses. His interest lies in the social role of his sitters; he researches the sitter before the session, but invariably produces portraits that present the public mask we are used to seeing. The Surreal Ernest Hemingway Yousef Karsh When one sees that residium o f greatness before one’s camera, one must recognise it in a flash. There is a brief moment when all that there is in a man’s mind and soul and spirit may be reflected through his eyes, his hands, his attitude. This is the moment to record. This is the elusive moment o f truth. The direct confrontation between subject and camera, so much a part of traditional studio portraiture, has held little interest for many photographers. Instead they have preferred to produce pictures that are clearly an ‘imposed’ view, where the sitter is but a foil for the photo­ grapher’s imagination. Bill Brandt’s portraits show people as creatures that inhabit his surreal world. This issue of CAMERAWORK, January 1979, was produced by the Publishing Project, Half Moon Photography Workshop, 119/121 Roman Road, London E2. 01-980 8798. is designed to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, views and information on photo­ graphy and other forms of communication. By exploring the application, scope and content of photography, we intend to demystify the process. We see this as part of the struggle to learn, to describe and to share experiences and so contribute to the process by which we grow in capacity and power to control our lives. The people who worked on this issue were Ed Barber, Mike Goldwater, Jenny Matthews, Shirley Read, Siddhiratna, Bruno Simes. Printed by Expression Printers Ltd, London N 1. If you have any comments to make or articles, letters or prints you would like to contribute we would be glad to hear from you. Please make sure it reaches us as soon as possible. (ISSN 0308 1676) 9 CAMERAWORK Puerto Rican woman with a beauty mark Brandt’s work has a certain harshness, which verges on brutality and mere affectation - such heavy treatments seem inappropriate in some of his portraits. His sitters are placed in unusual settings with ominous lighting and unexpected props - he manages to create a world of looming shadows where ordinary objects take on a strange, menacing quality, and even light seems to be an intrusion. Brandt describes this quality as: atmosphere. . . the spell that charges the commonplace with beauty. His portraits, like much of his work, are more concerned with design and form, textures and shapes, than individuality or likeness. People as objects In many portraits it is the individual personality that is of prime importance, but sometimes typicality becomes the dominant force in a photographer’s work. Irving Penn is one such practitioner - he has travelled all over the world making portraits of people in his ambulant studio on what he calls ‘neutral ground’. Penn’s work in advertising and fashion led him to develop certain stylistic devices that are now almost synonymous with his work - grey back-drop, north light, high quality images, formal poses. He has photographed the rich and famous in the same way that he photographed hippies in San Francisco or Mudmen in Papua^ New Guinea. He works within the confines of the studio tradition, but transports the studio to his location and isolates his subjects from their environment. His portraits show us representa­ tives of particular groups, tribes, classes, cults they are pictures of archetypes, not individuals. Many of his sitters, one suspects, do not fully understand the camera or the implications of being photographed. Of his approach, Penn says: I have tried tofind timeless and universal qualities . . . rather than to record accidental or transitory situations. A t the same time, I am always sustained by the docu­ mentary or historical value o f these records. According to Penn, taking people away from their natural circumstances transformed them, but they responded with dignity and seriousness. Edmund Carpenter, an anthropologist present at some of Penn’s shooting, has observed fear in the subjects and that the terror in their eyes is the tribal terror o f being recognised as individuals. These people of New Guinea need not have feared - Penn has transformed them into beautifully lit objects to adorn the pages of Vogue. This process of reification has made the most primitive peoples into still life photographs immaculate, detailed representations available for us to inspect at will. They leave one feeling ambivalent - visually seduced but intellectually and morally uneasy. The people portrayed have become objects of curiosity, unaware of the exploitative power of the camera and of photo­ graphy. Portrait of a people The anthropological approach that is apparent in some of Penn’s work was used many years earlier by August Sander, working from his commercial studio in Cologne. Shortly before the 1st World War he began a study of ‘Man of the 20th Century’ - he seemed to know what he Diane Arbus wanted from the outset: a genealogy of a people, a chart of humanity. He sought archetypes as subjects: The physical types in the chart were selected in a restricted area of the Westerwald. These people, whose way of life I had known from my youth, appealed to me because of their closeness to nature . . . all the characteristic common human qualities noted. His work was interrupted by the 1st World War, and later by the 2nd, but by then he had amassed a considerable archive of portraits of archetypes, people fulfilling a particular role in society yet remaining individual human beings. Sander rarely identified his subjects, preferring to identify them by occupation or activity. He managed to include some of his commercial clients in his project, but supplied them with more flattering gum prints, and for his own purposes used a glossy surfaced paper designed for technical photographs. The cumulative effect of his portraits is powerful, his straightforward approach, lacking the visual sophistication of practitioners like Penn, has a simple directness which makes his work more convincing. As Walter Benjamin observes: Sander’s work is more than a picture book: it is a training manual. Yet one still has reservations about his portraits - his obsession with genealogy leads him to overlook the possi­ bility of individuals being reduced to specimens in a collector’s album, rather than being recognised as the particular individuals they so obviously were. Freakshow In recent years photographers have been in­ creasingly involved in photographing people on the fringe of society, part of a ‘demi-monde’. ‘Borderline cases’ some people have called them. Back in the early 1960’s Diane Arbus, an American fashion photographer, began making portraits of transvestites, trans-sexuals, midgets, circus people, prostitutes, and a whole range of people she came into contact with during the hours she spent in Central Park, New York, or wandering the streets of that city. Her work has proved controversial and influential. Arbus committed suicide in 1971 and in 1972 a major retrospective of her work was shown in New York. This exhibition and the book that accompanied it contained some 80 or more portraits and edited transcripts of conversations with the photographer: Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excite­ ment for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don’t quite mean they’re my best friends, but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were bom with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats. Such was her reverence for her subjects. They posed readily for her camera, and we can now see them caught by the electronic flash Arbus used. They stare out at us, unaware of the context in which we would be viewing them. The most disturbing aspect of her documenting ‘types’ is that seemingly ‘normal’ people have been caught in such a way as to make them look T hree market women of Rissani, Morocco ‘abnormal’. H er portraits have authority - derived from the contrast between the subject matter and their calm, attentive complicity. She has used the frontal moulds of photographic portraiture with its rhetoric of frankness, and disclosure she has gained their confidence, reassured them. According to Arbus: Photography was a licence to go wherever I wanted, and to do what I wanted to do. To her the camera appears to have been a passport cutting across moral boundaries and freeing the photographer from any responsibility towards the people photo­ graphed. Her work is a reaction against her own background and the commercial world which gave her a living. The portraits of Diane Arbus give us a view of an underworld, of victims, slow-motion private smash-ups according to Susan Sontag. Arbus brings them to our attention, but we must not be upset it seems; instead we must confront the grotesque and horrible with equanimity. They become less important as particular individuals, and instead represent certain bizarities: I do feel I have some slight comer on something about the quality of things. I mean it’s very subtle and a little embarassing to me, but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photo­ graphed them. With such a view of the world we are all open to this kind of visual exploitation - we are all potential subjects, we all have quirks and nuances as individuals that might be seen as ‘exciting’ or ‘terrific’ if one sees things in a certain way. Put such images along with portraits of a few mentally retarded people, transvestites etc. and there is a powerful trade­ off. Beautification of poverty Just as photographers have obsessively docu­ mented more bizarre and unusual persons, so have they been drawn to minority groups. Josef Koudelka has been photographing gypsies since the early 1960’s. In his book Gypsies we are presented with photographs from East Slovakia 1962-68. People pose for Koudelka’s camera, but he does not reveal their identity to us. They are portraits but not of individuals. According to Anna Farova writing in the foreword of the book: A t first Koudelka was attracted by the physical beauty of the gypsies of Eastern Europe, the strangeness of their move­ ments and their facial expression, by their clothing and ornaments; later he was completely absorbed by his subject. John Szarkowski endorses this by writing: Josef Koudelka’s photography aims at a visual distillation of a pattern of human values: a pattern that involves theatre, large gesture, brave style, precious camaraderie and bitter loneliness. The main problem with these photographs is one of context - in an expensive hardcover book they take on a different meaning, aestheticising the suffering of these people. Presumably Koudelka has other plans for photographs of gypsies, or are they the result of a misguided romantic passion, destined never to be used positively? We may recognise or admire the altruism and power of his work, but we must also recognise its shortcomings. Bruce Davidson’s ‘East 100th Street’ operates in a similar way; it offers us a view of the people inside a Harlem ghetto in New York. The Irving Penn pictures are predominately portraits - people offer themselves to Davidson’s camera, aware of the camera, complied in making the portrait: Most of my photographs are compassionate, gentle and personal. They tend to let the viewer see himself. They tend not to preach. And they tend not to pose as art. Davidson’s book is an impressive record of a Harlem ghetto, the portraits show us represen­ tatives of that street - the images are wonder­ fully photographic, they beautify the poverty they document. We can savour it in the safety of our own comfortable homes. It’s interesting to see how people received the book when it first appeared. A.D. Coleman saw the East 100th St block as a place of squalor and degradation and was angered by Davidson’s aesthetically pleasing pictures; Philip Dante viewed the block as a soulful community and was upset by Davidson’s concentration on a dark journey into purgatory. These views appeared simultaneously in the New York Tim es in 1970. Later, Jonathan Green wrote about the photographs for an Aperture publica­ tion: Davidson’s images are not primarily meant to reveal the wrongs done to the people of East 100th Street nor to motivate the viewer toward social protest; rather Davidson, like Strand, has constantly used people from various lands and cultures as the basis of a highly personal and subjec­ tive art. His conception of the medium forces him to find the raw material of his craft in external reality. For Davidson reality has become merely the touch­ stone through which he is able to crystalise his per­ ceptions of the human predicament. Emotive portraits Since the earliest beginnings of photojournalism and reportage photography, portraits have been used as an integral part of picture stories and essays, often to evoke an emotional response and with the portrait standing as a personifica­ tion of that self-same event. Working on assign­ ment for Life magazine Eugene Smith used such portraits to punctuate and dramatise his photo-stories: ‘The Country Doctor’, ‘Albert Schweitzer’, and ‘Spanish Village’ all contain examples of his emotive portraits - dramatic fighting, very atmospheric, often close-up. Smith himself has viewed some of his portraits as symbolic - in writing about the mother and child in his Minamata series he said: As we photographed other things, things around her, and even the family, it grew and grew in my mind that to me the symbol of Minamata was, finally, a picture of this woman and child, Tanoko. Yet he also appears to have recognised the problems of taking such photographs: There are many ways lives can be changed by photographs, but I don’t think just the mere act of making a photograph will cause it to change. M inamata (subtitled ‘A Warning to the World’) published in 1975 was a carefully thought-out essay on one particularly obnoxious aspect of industrialisation in Japan: There’s nothing in this essay (Minamata) that can be taken as being other than affirmative, no matter how cynical I am at other times. The basic feeling is affirmation: it is not despair. These portraits highlight one of the contra­ dictions for the skilled photographer working in reportage; whilst s/he may produce powerful emotive images to be used for propaganda CAMERAWORK t , From ‘East 100th Street’ purposes in fighting a cause (Smith’s pictures were used in the fight for recognition and com­ pensation in Minamata), once that battle is fought the now famous images can be marketed in another context as high-quality books viz. Minamata, and Is Anyone Taking Any Notice? by Donald McCullin. The environmental portrait For the past 50 years or more photographers working on assignments for magazines have been using some elements of the sitter’s surroundings when making their portraits. ‘Natural’ portraits were pursued with relentless vigour by reportage photographers like Felix H. Mann and Alfred Eisenstadt. In more recent years the ‘environmental’ portrait has been talked about as if it were a new development. Reportage photographers continue to use a person’s surroundings to place them ‘in context’. Other photographers have developed an approach that is based on relating the sitter to his/her environment. Arnold Newman’s portraits demonstrate this very well. Newman works with detailed pre-knowledge of his sitters, using the large-format standcamera and elaborate lighting. This formal approach is clearly developed from studio tradi­ tions. He employs a tried and tested formula to produce utterly acceptable and often prestigious portraits in keeping with the image of Harper’s Bazaar and similar glossy magazines. He sees his pictures working on a symbolic level: We must also show the subject’s relationship to his world, either by fact or graphic symbolism. The photographer’s visual approach must weld these ideas into an organic whole and the photographic image produced must create an atmos­ phere which reflects our impressions of the whole. Some of Newman’s portraits overstate the person’s environment - the sitter as a particular individual becomes subordinate to the symbolic use of surroundings. His portraits are rarely less than immaculate in terms of photographic quality, but his formularised approach raises doubts as to the value of such formal portraits apart from their ability to reinforce an already established public persona. Rarely do his portraits cut through these masks. Innocent bystanders For the last fifty or so years, news photo­ graphers have been relentlessly ‘grabbing’ pictures of people that later get used as portraits. Certain conventions operate in this work, one in particular dominates - the use of direct flash. The work of Weegee typifies this approach, in his Weegee’s People and Weegee by Weegee Bruce Davidson books we see his flashlight catching people in the most bizarre and outrageous poses. His pictures of people offer a sceptical view of America of the 30’s and 40’s, they are just one part of his work as a press photographer engaged in covering news events. His pictures show little regard for the feelings or thoughts of his subjects. Instead he uses his camera to interrupt the stream of events and seize upon the most outlandish moment. In certain photographs one feels the person portrayed is paying the price of being in the public gaze, a ‘personality’. The work of ‘paparazzo’ photographers, such as Ray Bellisario and Ron Galella take this to an extreme as they ‘snatch’ pictures of their rich and famous subjects, using whatever photo­ graphic equipment, (be it high-powered tele­ photo lenses or direct flash) necessary to get the picture they want. Often held up as being portraits, these unguarded moments have more in common with surveillance photographs. Similarly, street grabshots have been viewed as portraits by some historians (see the section on ‘Street Portraits’ in Ben Maddows Faces book). ‘Grabshots’ by photographers like Garry Winogrand are portraits of events rather than portraits of particular individuals. Winogrand’s curiosity is summed up when he says: I photo­ graph to find out what something will look like photographed. So much for his concern with the individual. The raw material For many photographers the actual physical appearance of the subject/sitter will be of prime importance, and may prove to be instrumental in the formulation of the portrait itself. Some photographers have been attracted to certain kinds of people, or people in certain kinds of circumstances, who ‘fascinate’, ‘interest’, or ‘attract’ them. Each and every one of us has a particular facial character, w of ray dressing, way of moving etc, etc. On the street we’re all raw material for photographs. It’s all too easy to become involved in documenting ‘types’ of people without first thinking out the reasons for doing so, the point of such pictures, the use to which they can be put. The exploitative possibilities of photography need to be clearly thought about, particularly when making photographs of people without their permission. Ed Barber Ed Barber is a member of the H.M.P.W. Collec­ tive. He is currently working on a portrait research project. Alfred Krupp. Essen, Germany, 1963 Arnold Newman 4 CAMERAWORK Janice Green. I liked the Polyfotos when they used to take whole \ relax a bit. N icci always thinks I look like theQueen,I think it’s the big sheets and you just picked the ones you wanted. You can see the pearls. I t ’s not very often that I have a photograph taken because first ones are serious very conscious o f what they are doing, thenyou j it’s usually me taking the photograph. Family Snapshots hotography has changed the way we see ourselves and our families. Through their Kodaks, Brownies, Bantams, and Instamatics ordinary people can see and sense their visual ancestry. The invention of photo­ graphy has extended the possibility of clinging to time through portraits of ourselves and others, providing for us a real link with the past. The indulgence of leaving one’s image for posterity was initially only available to the wealthy and educated, and so the picture we have of Victorian times is one of privilege which allowed lives of leisure, travel and erudition. However, patterns of use for photography were set during this period: the pursuit of the medium as an art and as a means of public docu­ mentation; and the personal family photography presented in the form of the family album. This album originated in the scrap book and, with photographs, providing an essential visual contact with the past: becomes a living social document . . . unique in its concrete, visual record o f worlds o f past experience (The Expand­ ing Eye Alan Thomas). The popularisation of photography through the simplification of processes and the develop­ ment of a photographic industry brought with it photography for all, although this development was greeted with consternation by those who had exclusive use of the medium to that date. By its mass availability photography had been de­ based and the product of this mass use, the snapshot itself, was only of value as a means of commercial exploitation. It could also be used as a term of abuse, ‘just a snapshot’, or be defined in the Dictionary of Photography as Originally a photograph taken at a shutter speed high enough to be hand held, but now most usually applied to a photograph taken without care or skill, or by a beg­ inner. So family photographs produced and certainly valued by millions of people, are given no attention except in the provision of equip­ ment and materials for their production. The amateur photographic market in the UK is esti­ mated at around £360 million for 1978. The em­ P phasis has certainly been upon consumption with scant attention given to the uses to which people might put the product. There is little doubt about what the manufacturers think should be photographed. I remember, I remember . . . says the Kodak as it clicks its way around the world. Ilford films for faces and places, Put your family in the picture. A pattern of use for photography in the fam­ ily appears to have been set in the period 1848-70, and this mode of use has been rein­ forced by advertising. It seems to fall short of revealing a total ‘record of their own way of life’, with a particular bias that everything must be viewed through a viewfinder that reinforces the happiness myth. In attempting to fix individual fragments of the pursuit of this illusory ideal, the snapshooter produces an image which has considerable emotional charge. The ‘snapshot aesthetic’ which has developed in the work of certain contemporary photographers may be an attempt to kifidle such emotion felt when looking at snapshots but not felt when looking at art photography. The first serious history of the rise of popular photography. The Snapshot Photograph by Brian Coe and Paul Gates has recently been pub­ lished. Criticism apart, the important factor is that the snapshot has come from a scrap of paper ‘taken without care’ to an art object able to stimulate a new genre of photography. In the course of my current research on snap­ shots and family albums I interviewed a number of families in order to establish case histories of the family use of photography. The second half of this article is a direct result of this investiga­ tion. Snapshots have been described as our ‘self-image’ or as ‘psychological documents, frozen dreams’. However interpreted, it is clear that they participate in a link with family and friends and our collective past. But is this a very limited view of the past distorted by the need for adequate light to take pictures by? Are there no memorable moments in winter? The people I interviewed took it for granted that one did not take pictures in winter unless they had a flash. One couple did not have any pictures of their first baby when she was very young as she was a winter baby and the flash frightened her. Sun­ light and happiness are interdependent in our human experience and the good old days are much improved by viewing them through good light. It will be interesting to see if Kodak’s launching of fast colour negative films will change this pattern, or the collective equation of summer equals photography will prevail. Holidays, children, family reunions, weddings, the chosen subjects are all about love and belonging. The camera fixes its focus to give a reinforcing, permanent form to what may be a fragile unit, but can for the sake of the photo­ graph express a unity and exclude all others by the neat white border around the print. In a family where parents and children are split, there is the photographic presence of members who are absent. The moment of rupture is stated by their absence and a break of continuity in the family narrative. There may also be hints within the pictures of changes of relationship subtly expressed and capable of detection. Ann O ’Leary, who had many pictures of weddings, had none of either of her own marriages. Since my interview in November 1977 she has visited Australia to see her daughters, leaving her second husband in Britain. It seems this depar­ ture may be permanent. The absence of some photographs may be of equal significance as the presence of others. Photographs are rarely destroyed. There seems to be a sanctity in the image on paper, however blurred, faded, indistinct or unflattering. The destruction of the photograph seems to be an act of violence, of murder by proxy. Removal from the family album is an act of casting out the olfender. In one family the marriage of one of the sons had broken up, and the subsequent death of the father wasconsidered to be a result of the stresses involved. The daughter-in-law was blamed for this and all trace of her was removed from the family album, leaving blank spaces. In modern terms this has the potency of exorcism. The photographer in the family is an impor­ tant person. Except in one case where a more ex­ pensive camera was purchased, the woman was the prime photographer in the families I spoke to. This could be interpreted in many ways; as an expression of wanting the power to control the nostalgic images of childhood, as an expres­ sion of a loving relationship with her family, and perhaps also as a show of vanity in not wishing to expose herself to the critical eye of the camera. Motives are rarely simple or necessarily obvious. Not to take photographs of children is a sign of parental indifference. As a society, we build a fantasy round the concept of an idyllic childhood within an ideal family, and reinforce the fantasy of perfect parenthood by reflecting ourselves in the images of our children. The major period of photographic activity seems to cease as the children grow older. Then teenage children start to take photographs, making their own record of their lives, and these remain in their own possession. The ageing of the parent and the assertion of independence by the child­ ren is a process which, perhaps, inhibits the parents’ desire for record-making, and the next phase is the receipt of photographs of the grand­ children. Intense pleasure was seen and remembered as children in viewing the photographs of the family. It is here that a major demonstration of family continuity was taking place. Children, through access to parents’ and grandparents’ collections, and being photographed themselves, were establishing themselves as part of the family heritage, showing that life is more than of evanescent value. Thus multinational photographic corporations provide a means of producing a tenuous, spiritual ancestry for us as more traditional values wither in mass indifference. CAMERAWORK photography in any expressive sense. Mystification wins again, but the definition of the snapshot as ‘taken without care’ is false. Taken without knowledge is much more appropriate. I have observed the snapshooter vforking with intense concen­ tration upon the task in hand. The people photographed give advice based upon photo folklore, and great care is given to pose and situation. What was clear was that people did not know any­ thing of the process they were using, it was a magic thing that happened when they pressed the button. We are in an age of great mystification reinforced by the concept of automatic equipment as a replacement of knowledge and the initiative of the individual. None of the people spoken to feel they had any technical know­ ledge of photography nor did they feel they had any ability to use I was about eighteen then and I was on holiday. It was ragged like that because it was in my husband’s wallet. W "W T hy do we so often take and see photo% / ■ / graphs of the same people? Why do ▼ * the same entertainers, sportsmen, politicians, and ‘personalities’ receive so much free publicity, and why do we appear to come back for more? The ‘we’ referred to here is not the ‘we’ who are more interested in photographs than in what or whom they represent, but the much more numerous ‘we’ who look at maga­ zines and books out of curiosity, interest, and a desire to pass the time. John Berger has drawn our attention (Ways of Remembering Camerawork No. 10) to the dis­ tinction that is to be drawn between the public and private uses of photographs, maintaining that the private context creates a continuity which is parallel to the continuity from which the photograph was originally taken, whereas the public photograph has been severed from life when it was taken, and it remains, as an isolated image, separate from your experience. Although I don’t deny that such a distinction can be made and that it is a useful and important one in some respects, it is also misleading in terms of the way we look at photographs. In considering pictures of people - loosely termed ‘portraiture’ - it would seem that there are a number of parallels between public and private usage which considerably blur the distinction and are significant in both contexts. My reservations stemmed initially from Berger’s assertion that public photographs are usually images o f the unknown, or at best, they are images o f things which are known only through other photographs. There is, however, a whole category of pictures in which this is not true. We are continuously presented, in news­ papers, magazines, books and galleries, with pictures of people with whose appearance we are already familiar and about whom we already ‘know’ a great deal - not just through other photographs, but through their television appearances, radio broadcasts, what we have read about them or by them. The fact that this ‘knowledge’ is second-hand, entirely produced through the media and possibly entirely mis­ leading, does not prevent it from producing that ‘reconstitution of continuity’ which Berger says is the special characteristic of private photo­ graphs. We very rarely look at photographs of people in order to find out what they look like. We are more interested in pictures of people we know. We may be fascinated by our own holiday snaps but are likely to be bored by other people’s. We pay more attention to and are more curious about magazine or newspaper pictures of those we have seen represented many times before than those who are new to us. Even the excep­ tions to this generalisation can be found in both public and private contexts, as when we look with interest at a picture of a brother’s wife whom we have never met or of an admired writer or musician we have never seen. It may be objected here that this tendency in Stewart Mann Stewart Mann teaches photography on an Art Foundation course and is doing research for an M.Phil. on photography and schools. He would be pleased to hear from anyone working on photography in the family. That’s me. It’s not me, but that’s how I like to seem. I think that’s fantastic. Doesn’t look a bit like me really does it?A t twenty three I can say I looked like th a t. . . the public use of pictures is forced upon us by the media, that we really don’t want to see yet another picture of Margaret Thatcher or Hitler or Bruce Forsyth, and that editors and tele­ vision producers, either engaged in some con­ spiracy to reinforce the dominance of elite groups or for the more humdrum reasons of wishing to use available material and create attractive page lay-outs, make us look again and again at the same people. There is, however, Ann: This sort of thing with your stomach sticking out, you know, having a scratch or something, that’s more me. But it’s not me as I want to go down in posterity. considerable evidence that there is genuine public demand in operation here, as in the popularity of certain photographs in galleries, or in the sale of books, or in the fact that maga­ zines featuring new photographs of the royal family or pop stars do sell better. There seems to be a desire, not to get to know new people, but to increase our acquaintance and familiarity with those already known. There is also a correspondence between the Familiar Faces forms of pictures produced in the public and private contexts. Just as the high street photo­ grapher is called in to take pictures of weddings or cricket teams or new graduates in caps and gowns, so it seems that the public relations photographs of the captains of industry or the investiture pictures of the Prince of Wales are required. Conversely, we are continuously deluged with well-known people ‘taken unawares’, ‘looking natural’, ‘in an unguarded moment’, which serve to emphasise that feeling of familiarity and ‘private’ knowledge and spon­ taneity which are valued in family snapshots at the seaside. (Occasionally the two forms are brought comically together, as in Cecil Beaton’s coronation portrait of the Queen in which she is represented in formal pose with all the trappings of a thousand years of monarchy looking like the lady next door who has just won a week’s holiday for two at Butlin’s). The forms have changed historically, also in parallel, the stern grandfatherly picture of Gladstone on the parlour wall being replaced by kindly avuncular Jim Callaghan on the maga­ zine cover on the kitchen table, the stiff unsmiling and carefully arranged Victorian family group in the photographer’s studio by the Polaroid Christmas dinner table scene with raised glasses and paper hats. There are similarities too in reactions to public and private photographs. We bring to bear our feelings and knowledge and prejudices about the subjects and see in the same smile on the face of Edward Heath either goofy grin or affable good nature, determined by both our political convictions and our previous expe­ rience of him, just as our attitudes towards relatives and friends are brought to bear upon their pictures. O f course, Berger’s distinction still survives in that the nature of private experience is funda­ mentally different to mediated public expe­ rience, and we know we are deceived into thinking we have familiarity with well-known people when we have, in fact, none. We can recognise the abuses inherent in this bogus relationship and can deplore the elitism involved, the perpetuation of the hegemonic domination of our society by the few so regularly presented to us and the consequent devaluation of private relationships and experience. We are nevertheless victims of our own pleasure in recognition, and forced to live with this, the real Family of Man created and perpetuated by photography - Mum, Dad, Auntie Gladys, Dennis Healey, Stirling Moss, Petula (dark, John Betjeman, Jimmy Carter and Annie Walker. We may not like Big Brother but he is after all a close relative. Perhaps it’s a comfort that we know him so well. David Faddy Her Majesty The Queen. 1953 Sir Cecil Beaton David Faddy is Head of Film and Photography at the Polytechnic o f Central London. « CAMERAWORK he main function of portrait painting has been to establish a social role for the sub­ ject, the concern being not for indivi­ duals, but for their place in society. The portrait served, both explicitly (display of property) and implicity (suggestion of wealth and leisure) as evidence of status. Towards the end of the eighteenth century there was an increasing demand for portraits. Wood-engraving returned to fashion, litho­ graphy was invented and then came photo­ graphy. The announcement in Paris in 1839 of the details of the Daguerreotype process, and its gift to the world, was to be the beginning of an en­ thusiasm for photography, which was directed almost immediately towards portraiture. Contemporary methods of representation, i.e. painting, drawing, and lithography possessed characteristics of uniqueness, colour, and reproduceability. The work could be produced with varying degrees of speed and displayed with corresponding degrees of realism. This was limited by the skill of the artist and defined by the qualities of the medium. The advantage of the Daguerreotype was that it required less manual dexterity and could be produced relatively quickly. The equipment was costly, the process hazardous and frequently resulted in failure. None of these factors deterred the amateurs, for it had one great advantage - the D aguerreotype by an unknown photographer. cl852 capability to reproduce ‘accurately’ and to record minute detail to a degree previously inconceivable. The qualities were obvious. This was a process that combined the singularity of painting, the speed of drawing, lacked the flat­ ness of the lithograph and exhibited a realism that none of the existing mediums could attain. Above all, it was faster and so it was cheaper. The sensitivity of the plate, which required long exposures, was a major drawback as far as portraiture was concerned, yet a contemporary account by a pupil of Daguerre’s states: Within fifteen days after the publication of the pro­ cess o f M . Daguerre in Paris, people in every quarter were making portraits. Adamson’s technical skill enabled them to pro­ As the mechanics of having one’s picture It was not that these new photographers had a duce simple, spare portraits which seem to hint taken were still rather uncomfortable in the great desire to record the public but, as portraits at the ‘individual’, as much as revealing the 1840’s/50’s it was sensible to attempt to put the became easier, interest increased. The ‘type’.The Calotype had certain advantages:it client at ease, before enduring what has been subsequent commercialisation of photography was a negative/positive method, the image was for this purpose was partially in response to a compared with a session at the dentist. Presum­ not vulnerable and it did not have the harsh demand. As the financial benefits began to be ably one ‘dressed up’ to be photographed, so ‘realism’ of the Daguerreotype. However, it did how pleasant to parade around, socialising, realised, social trends and studio advertising rather resemble a drawing, while the public pre­ admiring portraits and generally being ‘seen’, served to stimulate further demand. ferred the image that resembled the miniature. before offering oneself to the critical eye of the The first documented portrait was made in So, for the first twelve years the Daguerreo­ camera. This objective tendency to ‘realism’ October 1839. The subject had her eyes shut type ruled the commercial studio. The process against the harsh sunlight and her face was pow­ could easily be overcome by a skilled retoucher, and patent restrictions were two of the most dered for a shorter exposure. The necessity of who might well be a redundant miniature important factors in early portraiture. It was yet keeping still for several minutes resulted in a painter, now getting his revenge on another process that caused photography to rigid expression, the final result being almost photography, by obscuring all the qualities that expand and alter in the next few decades. made it remarkable in the first place. However, corpse-like. (In fact, a suitable and common despite this tendency for ‘improvement’, many subject). In the following months many n 1851, Frederick Scott-Archer introduced improvements were suggested, some by of the early portraits survive unblemished. the Wet-collodion negative. Its basis, emul­ interested scientists, most by eager he client might as well have been sitting sion on glass, was not new, nor was the albu­ commercialists. Of these, the most significant for a painting. One expected to be viewed men paper used for printing. But as the accelera­ were: toning - to improve the contrast and by the camera-operator and collaborated tion method made it possible to use Daguerreo­ protect the image; and the acceleration method, in the display and recording of information. The for portraiture, so Scott-Archer’s fast emul­ type sion revolutionised photography, especially which increased the speed of the plates. composure of the sitter and the composition of portraiture. An albumen print from a collodion By m id-1840 the first portrait studio had the photographer combined in the image. The negative combined the fine quality of the metal opened and by the end of 1841 there were transient expression was replaced by the sub­ plate process with the plural nature of the paper studios in most major towns in Europe and stantial and generalised one. one; it became the predominant process until it Many early portraits have a gentle quality to America. Success was immediate. Beard of was superceded by the dry-plate in the 1880’s. London made £30,000 in his second year alone. them and it is not difficult to relate them to There were several related forms of This was mostly from portraits, the rest being Benjamin’s idea of ‘aura’. Here Benjamin presentation: ambrotype, ferrotype and from the sale of licences. He had purchased the quotes Orlik: carte-de-visite, all of which were beneficial to patent on the Daguerreotype process in The synthesis of expression brought about by the the growth of photography. These modes were England (the only country to suffer this length of time that a model has to stand still is the instantly adopted by portraitists, which led restriction). He advertised for prospective main reason why these (early) pictures, apart from them to phase out the earlier methods, whilst at their simplicity, resemble well-drawn or painted licensees by displaying a sample price chart. the same time, offering an increasing variety of portraits and have a more lasting effect on the spec­ There were two headings: Charge and Profit. form. This development did little to alter the The latter could be 90% of the former. Competi­ tator than more recent photography. social conventions of the studio, but it did affect This quality is particularly evident in tion was a significant factor in technical and its commercialisation. commercial developments. Every operator was Calotypes. Few portraits were made using this . . . it was a little thing, a man standing by a fluted determined to offer a more advanced or process, despite the fact that it appeared almost column, full length, the head about twice the size of interesting result; e.g. Claudet, a competitor of immediately after Daguerre’s. (Two important factors were the inconsistency of paper quality a pin. I laughed at that, little thinking I should at a Beard’s, patented the use of painted backdrops day not far distant, be making them at a rate of a in 1841. The idea was immediately fashionable and the difficulty of the emulsion ‘taking’ to the thousand a day. (New York Daguerreotypist, on and hence saleable, both through Claudet’s paper.) Talbot, the inventor, in an attempt to gain money rather than recognition, had issued studio and by the sale of licences. first seeing a carte). strict patents, which covered his and other re­ Prior to 1851, a degree of craftsmanship was n theory, a portrait was now a possibility lated methods. Threatened law-suits deterred necessary to produce results. As many artists for all but the poor. At last, a truly demo­ interested photographers, who refused to pay had been forced into becoming ‘photographercratic form of representation; no longer artists’ to continue working, there was also an the high licence fees. Moreover the public had does the lack of wealth discriminate! Yet in 1843 become used to the high quality of the French element of concern for the ‘picture’. Portraits Claudet’s price for a single image, untinted, was were relatively expensive, even for the middle process and found the coarseness of the paper 21s. It actually took several years before the classes, and a studio needed only a few sitters print less attractive. One portrait studio, cheap assembly-line method of production each day to be a viable commercial began to be possible. So, even though the gap devoted exclusively to the Calotype process, lasted only a year. Apart from Hill and enterprise. had narrowed, visiting a studio was still a limited and consequently privileged activity. With the Adamson in Scotland, where there were no s the public became aware of the new and larger studios this became a social event. The restrictions, few seem to have made an extended usually cheaper pictures the studios besuccess of Calotype portraits. successful establishments combined art-gallery, L came transformed. Outwardly they ap­ meeting-place and drawing room as well as the These two men produced several thousand peared the same and if anything more lavish as ‘operating’-room. An account of Brady’s pictures in the 1840’s that are firmly based in the the fashion spread. Through names like ‘Palace style of conventional painting, yet stand apart Broadway gallery in the early 1850’s: of Photography’ and ‘Temple of Photography’ The floors are carpeted with superior velvet tapestry due to the unique qualities of the process. In­ proliferated, behind the scenes they came to re­ . . . the walls are covered with satin and gold paper. stead of considering the grain of the paper print semble mini-factories. Portrait photography became a production-like business. Not all the The harmony is not the least disturbed by the superb as a disadvantage, they used it to produce studios worked this way and this procedure did rosewoodfurniture - tete-a-letes, reception and cosy ‘breadth of effect’, a feature intermittently not necessarily produce poor results. What it chairs and marble top walls, all o f which are multi­ sought after by artists (as indeed Hill was). did produce was mediocrity, on a scale that Hill’s talent for lighting and composition and plied by mirrors from ceiling to floor. T From Commercial Beginnings T I I A must have seemed staggering to the early inven­ tors, many of whom lived long enough to experience the shift from amateur dabbling to mass industry. This in no way affected its popu­ larity. It would appear that though clients did require an image that was recognisably personal, they were apparently satisfied, and maybe even desired, to fit a general image of their ‘class’. In this decade the process became subordinated to the result. The investigations of the early practitioners and the delight in the means of representation was replaced by a desire for uniformity of image, though not of represen­ tation. The individual became increasingly type-cast with appropriate props, gestures, and background, this completed the already limited nature of the camera. The photographer as ‘interpreter’ was trans­ posed into photographer as ‘recorder’. Certain qualities of the medium were developed, usually those that were an asset to the business aspect. The arguable ability to capture ‘aura’ was neg­ lected; there were too many pictures to take; there was not enough time. This change did not happen overnight. The 1851 Crystal Palace Fair, which exhibited photographs from all over the Western world, provided a showcase and stimulant to photography. Scott-Archer provided the means. Though he gave his process freely to the world, it was not till 1855 that all processes were unrestricted by patents and practitioners could operate easily. There are two points to be made about the expansion of commercial portraiture in the 1850’s. Both are concerned with attempts to make the public purchase images of people. First, there was a movement to extend the potential clientele of the studios by offering cheaper portraits. Disderi had patented the carte-de-visite in 1854 (a method of making eight or ten images on one plate), as he knew that many could not afford current prices. Simultaneously, at the other end of the scale, increasingly large, elaborate and hand-worked pictures were being offered to attract the wealthy, presumably as an alternative to a ‘por­ trait in oil’. There arose a very complex scale of prices, from 6d. for a tintype, up to $750 for an American Imperial. There were other scales for size, number, amount of retouching, type of presentation, personal backdrop, etc. Demo­ cracy at last. Now, whatever one could afford there was a product to suit the purse. All but the very poor could obtain their picture, yet the wealthy could buy photographs suitably different, so as to be able to disassociate their pictures from the more ‘common’ side of the trade. The second point is concerned with the rise of the ‘celebrity’. The more successful studio photographers established extensive records of the famous of their time, to be sold at a great and continuing profit. Brady in America published a volume, Gallery of Illustrious Americans, in 1850, a first step towards his ambition to be the photo-historian of his time. Disderi in Paris became court photographer and by 1866 had 65,000 portraits of celebrities for sale. Mayall in London published the Royal Album, fourteen pictures of the Royal Family and sold 100,000 copies. The practice was simple. A well-known figure was requested to sit and, as they did not pay, the copyright remained with the photo­ grapher. Hundreds of prints would then be made from the negative and could be viewed by the public when they came for their own pictures. oth these factors led to an ever-increasing number of images, particularly carte-devisites . . . the social currency, the senti­ mental ‘greenbacks’ of civilisation (Oliver Wendell Holmes). Benefits claimed earlier by the Calotype were now reaped by this form. There wereperiods,such as during the American Civil War, when photographers followed their clients (in this case the army), and could not keep pace with demand. However, for some, this was an objectionable development: The appearance of Disderi and the carte-de-visite spelled disaster. Either you had to succumb . . . or resign. (Nadar) Despite the similarity of much of the studio work, there were those who managed to combine their own particular style, which went deeper than mere appearance. Nadar was such a photographer. In a lawsuit of 1856 he stated: The theory of photography can be learnt in an hour and the elements of practising it in a day . .. What cannot be learnt is the sense of light, an artistic feeling for the effects of varying luminosity and combinations o f it, the application of this or that effect to the features, which confront the artist in you. What can be learnt even less is the moral gasp of the subject - that instant understanding which puts you in touch with the model, helps you to sum him up, guides you to his habits, his ideas and his char- B i CAMERAWORK acter and enablesyou to produce, not an indifferent reproduction, a matter of routine or accident such as any laboratory assistant could achieve, but a really convincing and sympathetic likeness, an intimate portrait. During the 1860’s Nadar was one of the most successful portraitists in Paris. He had a signifi­ cant advantage in his wide circle of friends in the arts, most of whom patronised his studio. He was thus in an excellent position to fulfil his desire for an ‘intimate portrait’, since he was well-acquainted socially with many of his sitters. These pictures are surprisingly simple and non-decorative, for Nadar was an eccentric and flamboyant man, who worked in lavish surroundings. The portraits appear as a record of the interaction between the sitter and the camera rather than the sitter and the photographer. The latter relationship is suppressed in favour of the intimate act of ‘dis­ closure’ to the lens. One is aware of the lighting and the sitter, nothing else interferes. Whether Nadar achieved the depth of study to which he aspired is not easy to say. Rarely do we view his photographs without the benefit of a title, usually a recognisable name. So how do we know whether we are being informed by the image or the text? If we are already acquainted with Offenbach and Baudelaire, either visually or through prior knowledge of their lives, to what extent can the portrait work alone? Indeed, why should it? ike Nadar, many photographers have used commercial portraiture to providea secure economicbaseforother less lucrative acti­ vities. Two of his contemporaries serve as good examples - Rejlander and Robinson. Both established portrait studios in the late 1850’s, but unlike Nadar are not particularly well known for their work in this field. The studio work subsidised their pictorial activities. Occasionally a photographer might even be able to discard the protective umbrella of the more traditional commercial work to become totally involved in ‘art’ photography. This was (and in­ deed still is) a rare occurrence and there are few practitioners today who are not answerable to a client for their product. Many resent it: Another conserver of strength and saver of time has been the retouching of all my professional sittings by a paid retoucher. The work seldom means anything to me beyond money, the public does not appreciate any difference in results, so why should I ruin my eyes and tax my nerves? My one regret is that I must sign these prints . . .(Edward Weston, 1924) Whilst some worked outward from their commercial base there were others who arrived at studio work after somewhat different beginnings. It can be difficult to distinguish between amateur and professional styles in por­ traiture or to make generalisations about their characteristics. However, it is possible to be more definite about the pressures that affect the final result in examining the work of Charles le Negre, who initially took photographs as an eager amateur, later as a disillusioned profes­ sional. He was a contemporary of Nadar and though he began by using the medium as an aid to painting, he soon turned to it in its own right. He took many portraits characterised by an informal ‘family album’ quality. After some years of experimentation with the medium he was required to move to the south for health reasons. Here, embittered by lack of official recognition and in need of money, he was forced to accept portrait commissions and sell pictures to tourists. His later portraits are noticeably different to his earlier images. Many were in the form of a stereograph, a double image that gave a three-dimensional effect when seen through a special viewer. The points of comparison between the two bodies of work are few, there seem only to be points of contrast. In the later images there is none of the naturalness which characterised the early portraits. Now the lighting delineates harshly, destroying tonality and modelling. The painted backdrop does not quite blend with the jumble of objects in the foreground and parts of irrelevant studio props intrude to ensure our awareness of the whole contrivance. As for the subject, the lady appears as a cardboard cut-out placed in an equally ‘dead’ environment. (There is a distinct similarity with Pollack’s toy theatres - cut out the figure, paste onto cardboard, attach wire, slide onto stage against paper scenery and move to and fro for animation ). It is apparent that there is a significant diffe­ rence in the quality and type of portrait that le Negre produced at these distinct times in his life. It is not possible to say whether it was the photographer or the demands of the clients that caused this change in his ‘style’, but once involved in commercial photography his photo­ graphs became crude and cliched. Is this due to the pressure of earning a living, or to his dis­ illusionment? Difficult to say, but I suspect that other practitioners followed the same path. To
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      • archiveFour Corners Bishopsgate
      • vimeo_link
      • authorSee sections X to AC
      • author_editorSantiago Castrillon, Denisce DiIanni, Mike Goldwater, Liz Mackie, Jenny Matthews, Tom Picton, Richard Platt, Shirley Read (co-ordinator), Siddhiratna, Bruno Simes
      • author_writerPierre Coutanche, Caro Webb, Nicky Hughes, Bruno Simes, Paul Carter, Paul Trevor, Mike Goldwater
      • author_photographerPaul Trevor, Martin Parr, Tom Learmonth, James Ravilious
      • author_designerLiz Mackie, Richard Platt,
      • author_intervieweeDave McKay, James Ravilious, Terry Crabtree, Helen Bridges, Tom Learmonth,
      • author_organisation
      • tagsoffsite,blackfriarsyouth project,waterloo festival,islington gutter press,centreprise,community publishing,self-publishing,workers al association,street exhibition,trinity arts,the photographic gallery,blackfriars settlement,union place,community photography,alternative press,photo-journalism,documentary,arts council,paul carter,north paddington community darkroom,510 centre,darkrooms,urban aid,shelter,gulbenkian foundation,housing,national empty property campaign,the factory,pensioners,catering workers,commission for racial equality,split image,schools,manchester free school,north west arts,young offenders,mental health,hospitals,beaford photography archive,farming,womens' institutes,reading museum of rural life,printing,squatting,demolition,bonfire press,southwark general strike,paul trevor,exit,bangladeshi communities,national front,british movement,altab ali,skinheads,racism,anti-nazi league,hackney and tower hamlets defence committee,police racism,alternative technologies,photo-kit,dave hoffman,tower hamlets arts project,property developers,coin street,tape-slide,blackfriars photography project,glc,tenants action group,blind people,disability,disabled photographers
      • titleCamerawork Magazine - Issue 13
      • subtitleIssue 13: Photography in the Community
      • dimension17 pages
      • ocr1
      • copyrightFour Corners/Half Moon Photography Workshop/Camerawork, Pierre Coutanche, Caro Webb, Nicky Hughes, Bruno Simes, Paul Carter, Paul Trevor, Mike Goldwater, Martin Parr, Tom Learmonth, James Ravilious, Liz Mackie, Richard Platt, Dave McKay, Terry Crabtree, Helen Bridges
      • credits
      • related
      • location(pg 1) North Yorkshire, UK. Blackfriars, London, UK. North Devon, UK. Islington, London, UK. Birmingham, UK. Southampton, UK. Bethnal Green, London, UK. (pg 3-4) Paddington, London, UK. (pg 4) Manchester, UK. Cheshire, UK. Salford, Manchester, UK. Oldham, UK. (pg 4-5) Beaford, Devon, UK (pg 5-6) Lambeth, London, UK. (p6-7) Tower Hamlets, London, UK. Bethnal Green, London, UK. (pg 8,9,10) Brick Lane, London, UK. Spitalfields, London, UK. Bethnal Green, London, UK. (pg 12-13) Waterloo, London, UK. Lambeth, London, UK. Blackfriars, London, UK.
      • copyright_obtained0
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      • origination_date1979
      • origination_year1979
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      • created2018-06-04 14:58:00
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      • pdf_text* v v . / \ \ • ■ *■ • ■ ** CAMERAWORK An accidental double exposure at a photo-kit session at Ranwell Club Playscheme, Bow. Summer 1978. Photography in the Community NO 13 Half Moon Photography Workshop 50p/$1.50 Community Documentation Photography with Kids Community Publishing Community Relations For some time Martin Parr has documented life in the area of North Yorkshire where he lives, and has held local exhibitions of his photographs. A large number of projects work with children and youth groups. This photo was taken by a member of Blackfriars Youth Project. Blackfriars also teach pensioners and community workers. Centerprise is a community publishing project which grew out of Workers Educational Association writing classes, and which produces books written by local working people. Photographs are used in many of the publications. Trinity Arts have produced an exhibition on the life of a multi-racial community in Birmingham. The exhibi­ tion aims to promote discussion and bring racial groups closer together. Waterloo Festival 1978 Archive James Ravilious works in a village in North Devon. He is helping to strengthen a sense of community by building up an archive of historical and contemporary material through copying villagers’ photos and docu­ menting the area himself. Muslim wedding Frank Ideson, Lord Savile's head game-keeper Environmental Education Offsite is an ILEA project in which Primary schools are encouraged to develop a wide range of skills, including photography, through studies of the local environment. From this, it is hoped that a broadlybased curriculum will emerge, with which children can readily identify. 12 accounts of work in Hackney 1905-45 Exhibitions on the Street Barrington circa 1920 Community Newspapers Islington Gutter Press is a local radical newspaper which uses photos in its presentation of issues not covered by the commercial press. Tom Learmonth is one photographer who has taken photography out of the gallery onto the street. He has documented life on an estate near his home and is showing the work in the local launderette and fly­ posting prints in the area. Photographer in Residence The Photographic Gallery at the University of Southampton initiated a photography project based in two schools in the local community. ‘My Mum’ Simon Smith age 12 Street Class Mansford Street - Unitarian Church Hall Free Press Working in the Community Community photographers continue both a photographic and communal tradi­ tion. Photographers since Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis have shown the things in our society that need to be changed. People have done community work since the great charitable settlements were established in our big cities during the last century. Community photographers, however, want to give more than charity or expose social injustices. They believe that people can use photography to make their own demands and help to make them free. Individual photographers in the community will continue to fight to change a ruthless society by exposing injustices; the bad housing, run down welfare services, poverty, unemployment, the day-to-day desperation of so many peoples’ lives. Groups like Union Place and Blackfriars Settlement also know that it is important, socially and individually, to give people a knowledge of photography. It can be argued that giving someone living in one room with four children access to a camera is only a bitter joke, but we believe that the camera can be used as a revolutionary instrument. It can unite people not only with a shared picture of the world, but bring them together in the very process of taking pictures. Photographs can change a private experience into common awareness. Community photography is frequently praised. The photographs may be questioned, but the process seldom is. Community photography can be shown to be reformist; another panacea for the dispossessed; utilising the patronising social work instincts of the middle classes; sticking plaster on the body politic. State funds can be seen to be corrupting a spontaneous movement, another form of political control, bureaucratic strangulation, stopping any attempt to change the status quo. A new profession - ‘the community photographer’ could take the bite out of radical social critique. Even so, community photographers apply their ‘art’ to social needs. They have a common aim, expressed in many ways, to teach people the skills to express their personal and political realities. It is a battle to take the mystery out of a simple craft; to make a cultural tool available to everybody, not just to an elite. In this issue of Camerawork we outline some of the factors, aims and problems of community photography. We will continue this discussion in future issues. We hope our readers will contribute. We think that community photography can actively involve people in social change. We believe that it can be a vital step in taking control of our own lives. The people who worked on this issue were Santiago Castrillon, Denisce Dilanni, Mike Goldwater, Liz Mackie, Jenny Matthews, Tom Picton, Richard Platt, Shirley Read (co-ordinator), Siddhiratna, Bruno Simes. is designed to provided a forum for the exchange of ideas, views and information on photography and other forms of communication. By exploring the application, scope and content of photo­ graphy, we intend to demystify the process. We see this as part of the struggle to learn, to describe and to share experiences and so contribute to the process by which we grow in capacity and power to control our lives. This issue of CAMERAWORK, March 1979, was produced by the Publishing Project, Half Moon Photography Workshop, 119/121 Roman Road, London E2. 01-980 8798. SUBSCRIBE TO CAMERAWORK: A full subscription to Camerawork includes six issues, posters and invitations for our exhibitions. The cost for this is £6.50 (students £5.00). Subscription to Camerawork alone is £4.50 for six issues. Institutional subscription (which includes posters and invitations) is £12.00 for six issues. Overseas subscriptions cost £1.00 in addition to the above costs. Send to H.M.P.W., 119 Roman Road, London E2 0QN. Tel: 01-980 8798. (ISSN 0308 1676) CAMERAWORK n recent years some new ways of using and producing ‘socially concerned’ photography have developed. Each of these ways reflects the lives, history and culture of working people and the fight for their needs and aspirations. None of these ways are new, most are simply extensions of what documentary. High Street and local press photographers have done for years. Concern to make photography and the arts in general more accessible to working people is not new either. In the Thirties the Federal Arts Project in America and the Workers’ Film and Photo League in Britain tackled the problem. What is significant now is the scale on which community photography is done. This work falls into three overlapping areas ‘alternative’ photojournalism; locally based documentary projects; and photographic activities which involve and serve the needs of local people. All these areas interrelate and have at one time or another been called community photography. I ‘Alternative’ photo-journalism Some photo journalists make a point of working for the alternative press, pressure groups, charities, self-help organisations and political groups in order to relate their skills to their social and political ideals. These photo­ journalists generally have a workstyle which is little different from the more commercial side of photojournalism - they move from place to place on different assignments and can generally spend only a short time with the people they photograph. Community documentary Other photographers try to make better contact between their expertise and ordinary people by photographing a particular group or in a parti­ cular locality. By undertaking extended docu­ mentary projects they build up an intimate knowledge of their subjects. They often live in the locality and work at the project full or pan­ time over several years. Two dilemmas often occur in the course of a community documentary project: the demands for pictures made by local people, and the problem of what to do when the people don’t like the way in which they or the area are portrayed. Subjects can make the same sorts of com­ plaints about photographers as photographers make about picture editors - lack of control. Even if the photographer is very sympathetic to his or her subjects in principle, when it gets down to details a lot of differences can surface. Community photography Community photography picks up these dilemmas because it is more concerned with the needs and preferences of local people. It aims to provide a resource in the form of photographic equipment, darkrooms,and teaching or access to a photographer’s service. Urban working-class neighbourhoods, villages and new towns have been most affected by social and economic changes and it is in such localities that most community photography takes place. Community work is essentially an educa­ tional process, usually started by bringing people together to achieve an immediate aim for example a tenants’ association might form to get essential repairs done. Then through finding out about existing decision-making structures and planning procedures, organising petitions, lobbying and sometimes taking direct action like rent strikes, people come to learn how to make their opinions and needs felt more strongly, even if they don’t actually get real control. However community work can be as patronising a way of helping as the social welfare approach. It can end up dealing mainly with symptoms of social inequality rather than the causes. Ways of working Most of the people doing community photo­ graphy have more or less drifted into it. Indivi­ duals and groups have initiated community photography activities all over the country, with little or no knowledge of each other. Whereas five years ago there were only a few projects, there are now dozens either doing community photography as their main work or using it in their other community activities. Despite different beginnings and relatively little contact between projects, most are developing working methods which are based on a similar set of principles. Community photography is about two kinds of access. It provides access to the work of experienced photographers outside the commercial and art worlds. This is made possible through self-published books and magazines and photographic exhibitions in laundrettes and pubs. It also provides access to expertise and resources so that local people can do photography themselves. Photography for the Community Community photography makes photo­ graphy relevant to local people by making them the main subjects, audience and users of the photographs produced. Through this greater contact with photographic processes people understand, appreciate and become more critical of all the photography they see. In addi­ tion, by providing the means for local people to learn photography themselves, diverse groups are brought together and they discover more, not just about photography but also about the community in which they live. Through making their own images people can break the mono­ poly professional communicators have over the representation of their lives. Resources for learning and doing photography have to be established before such work can happen. Properly maintained equipment must be available to lend to people on low incomes and to those who need it just a few crucial times a year. Resources should be based in places where people feel welcome and comfortable. This sometimes precludes educational estab­ lishments and galleries. Youth clubs, community centres, a house or flat turned over to the purpose are often more acceptable. Normally people need a strong interest in photography as a potential profession or hobby before they can get access to photographic facilities. Many courses require academic qualifications too. In neighbourhood dark­ rooms created by community photography pro­ jects there are no such restrictions. rojects try to avoid the possibility of equipment, technique and aesthetics dominating peoples’ interest. They aim to demystify both the technical and communi­ cations process of photography. Learning is usually done in small groups. The social interaction between people involved in learning to work as a group is often as important as the learning of photographic skills. People are usually free to learn at their own pace and to develop personal interests in a non-competitive atmosphere, but with the needs of the group and the community kept in mind. Very often people’s first pictures have some immediate practical use to a community group as well as being a means for the new photographer to express something personal. People running community photography projects need to have a primary and lasting commitment to their community. Their commit­ ment to their own interest in photography has to run a close second. There is usually an uneasy relationship between these two. Most projects are initiated by middle-class people in working-class communities. It takes several years for the local people to begin to understand and change their expectations of photography and the part it can play in their lives. It also takes time for photographers to adjust their expectations and redirect their imagination in response to local priorities. Workers in a community photography project generally need to learn administration, how to teach and raise funds. It takes time to learn these skills. Also since most community photography projects are so isolated and are constantly responding to local needs rather than following an ideal established model, an enormous amount of mistakes are made. Each project will probably independently work through similar problems because there is little contact between them. Many people involved with community photography work collectively. Groups often aim for a non-hierarchical structure. Workers try to take equal responsibility for managing the project and sometimes have equal pay. In community arts projects especially, workers exchange skills. Community photography requires the photo­ grapher to involve his or her subjects in deci­ sions about what to photograph, how to photo­ graph and how to use photography. It is often easy for the photographer to be the dominant voice because he or she is the most experienced. The ‘expert’s’ job is to build up people’s knowledge and confidence over a period of time, thus equipping them to make these decisions for themselves. t is not possible to understand the role and significance of community photo­ graphy by applying the attitudes and standards of established commercial and artistic photography. The primary aim of community photography is to create awareness and social interaction within a local setting. High technical and artistic quality is not always necessary. The effectiveness of community photography has to P I be measured in terms of the needs and expecta­ tions of the particular community involved. More images are needed which show the importance of the past and present contribution that working people have made to society and of the efforts made by working-class organisations to influence the direction of their fives. Commu­ nity photography has begun to provide these images. Such photographs, generated and collected locally can be distributed through community newspapers, posters, pamphlets and the litera­ ture produced by pressure groups. They often capture the interests of the mass media and this widens their audience considerably. However, there is a lot more to community photography than its products alone can demonstrate. Its value as process is important too. This includes the personal, cultural, social and political growth that is stimulated by the work of producing and using the photographs. For example, when a tenants’ association produces a tape/slide show they also learn about their neighbours, their community, campaign­ ing and self-assertion. People doing community photography do not identify with the established photographic community since they are not striving after commercial work or one-person shows at the Hayward Gallery. Often, once they start running darkrooms, teaching and administrat­ ing they have little time to take photographs themselves. They are not seen to be fully-fledged members of the community work movement either. Many do feel part of the community arts movement, but even here photography tends to be the least understood of the media involved. The media, photographic education estab­ lishments and the photographic community all perpetuate the image of the photographer as a lone creative individual. This sort of condi­ tioning does not make photographers fit comfortably into the community context where team work and collective creativity are needed. Once a community photography project gets under way it raises the expectations of local people and highlights their needs. If it fails there are several long-term repercussions. Newly realised photographic needs can no longer be met. More important, people’s morale is severely damaged. If people have begun to meet their own needs and then resources are cut off, it will be much harder for them to try again. They are already used to being of low priority in employment and housing. The failure of yet another venture reinforces their feelings of powerlessness. taff continuity on a project is important. The longer workers stay the better they know how to run the project and the more familiar they are with the community. However, the work on a community photo­ graphy project is stressful. Demands come from every direction. Learn to type. Get cameras repaired. Reorganise the darkroom booking system. Write a report. Get to a management meeting. Go to a funding meeting. Plan and run a workshop. Take photographs needed urgently for a public meeting. Visit a club for the elderly to see how they might use photography. Show the youth worker how to operate the slide projector. And so on. S Funding Even more important than the continuity of people is the continuity of the positions they hold. Both depend heavily on regular funding at realistic levels. Few aspects of community photography are a commercial proposition so fund-raising is a continuing priority. Few project workers have had much experience of fund-raising. The aims and concepts of community photography are often new to the potential funders. It is rare for all the funds for one project to come from one source. Different funders have very different criteria for their support. Worst of all,grants are rarely given for more than a year so fund-raising is a continuous drain on workers’ time. Community photography cuts across photography, community arts, education and community work. Funds for it have come from bodies associated with all these activities. Projects are faced with the dilemma that they want to fulfill the priorities and values of the community, yet they also have to be accountable to the funding bodies, who can exert pressure on policy and have the ultimate sanction of with­ drawing funds. The other approach to fund-raising is for projects to organise their own events - like sponsored concerts and jumble sales. These are hard work and don’t always bring in much money for the time put in to them. But they are often necessary to fill in funding gaps and they also create publicity. Some projects make a small amount of money through darkroom booking fees. The picture files which are being generated by community photography activities are becoming another source of income. he money problem is the plague of com­ munity photography projects. It creates an atmosphere of uncertainty and in­ security. The lack of a guarantee of continuity makes it difficult to make long-term plans, even though these are essential for achieving the full potential of such projects. In the end projects often survive only because project workers give their time free, either when living on the dole or by living off savings. Most workers have to work full-time for long periods on part-time wages. Those who have it put personal money into the projects and allow free use of their own equipment. T T he future Roy Shaw, Secretary General of the Arts Council of Great Britain, which is the main source of funds for the community arts, acknowledges that this area is under-funded. He is, however, careful to add that its activities should not grow by cutting the budgets of established art forms. Whether and how the balance will be re­ dressed between the arts appealing mainly to a wealthy minority and the development of working-class cultural arts activities will be a major factor in the future of community photo­ graphy and community arts. Future support and interest in community photography depends very much on the ability of projects to educate funders and the public about its practice and value. This is an extre­ mely difficult task. Most projects are so tied up in their local affairs that there is little time left for mounting major educational campaigns. The long-term future of community projects depends on achieving long-term funding. For the most experienced people in community photography to be able to continue to work in the field, many are going to need wages which enable them to support growing families. It is important not to draw' experienced people out of communities into colleges and such institutions to teach others. They would soon get out of touch. An apprenticeship scheme would be a better model to pursue. Community photography projects get caught in an accountability trap with responsibilities to the community, funders, fellow workers and national coordinating bodies. Since members of the community could become the weakest lobby, it is important that they are involved in the management structures of the projects in more than a token way. Few community photo­ graphy project groups as yet have any formal accountability to members of the community. Some argue that they would have to compro­ mise their vision of their intervention too much if they did so. This will be an important debate in the future of community photography. eople involved in community photo­ graphy need to get together, and to work out what theoretical and practical options are open to them. This issue of Camerawork deals with some of the ways of using photography in a local community. However I am wary of heralding this work as a major step forward in the democratisation of photography and society. There are many dilemmas to resolve yet before its real worth can be measured. For despite good inten­ tions, the extension of resources to the least powerful members of the society does not in itself bring about a change in people’s con­ sciousness or control over their fives. This is more determined by the particular uses the photographers and photographs are put to and the ideas which form the context of this work. These resources can be put to fascist as easily as socialist uses. If the photographic activities serve mainly to focus people’s consciousness on particular problems - eg. bad housing or unemployment, then the perspective gained is of only limited use. This is true too if awareness and action revolve totally around local identity, local problems and local needs. The local community cannot be seen as an isolated entity unto itself. It is a part of a wider economic unit and contains in microcosm its ideology and structures. For no matter where anyone fives or works, or what problems or needs they have, the primary issue is one of class. Working-class people through­ out the world have fewer resources, fewer oppor­ tunities and the least power. If community photography activities are really ‘developing the community’ then this issue of class needs to be taken into account when determining priorities. I think that it is crucial that people working in local communities look closely at the ideas about P 3 CAMERAWORK photography and politics produced by the more academic circles of the photographic community, and that they see how these ideas may be applied or developed among the people they are working with. For what is the long-term future of commu­ nity photography activities? Will the State try to subvert the power of community photography by making it fashionable, as a first step towards diffusing its potential? Is community photo­ graphy mainly a context for people to exercise their entrepreneurial spirit and find interesting jobs for themselves? Will community dark­ rooms be essentially entertainment centres where people can avoid confronting the causes of their powerlessness? Is using photography in community action and education blinding oeople to the fact that they are getting a voice but not a vote on decision-making committees? Will the growth of community photography mainly benefit the photographic companies who will be selling equipment and materials to increase their profits with the help of public mny oe ? Paul Carter P a u l Carter set up and ran the Blackfriars photo­ graphy project for five years. H e is now collecting information, with the help o f an Arts Council grant, for a book on the uses o f photography in the local community. This article is a very generalised overview o f the work going on and by no means a definitive statement; he would like feedback o f peoples’ reactions to this issue o f Camerawork to help better define what is going on with photo­ graphy in the community. H e can be contacted at 56 Chesil Street, Winchester. 510 Centre North Paddington Community Darkroom is based at the 510 Centre which is a meeting place and an information and advice centre. The Centre recently lost its Urban A id grant which is a large part of their funding. The grant was stopped by Westminster Council because o f a 'Don’t Vote N a z i’ leaflet put out by the Paddington Campaign Against Racism which is based at the Centre. The Darkroom has two part-time workers who provide a photographic resource in the form o f darkroom equipment and cameras. They also teach photo­ graphy and take pictures for the community. N icky Hughes spoke to Philip Wolmuth. When did the Centre itself actually start? The Centre has been going for about four years as an information and drop-in centre, funded by Urban Aid. It consists of a building and four part-time workers, two of whom work on the information desk, one administrator who does accounts and typing, and one group worker. Then there’s a whole lot of people like me who get grants from other places based here, so in fact there’s a staff of twelve. One person, for example, is funded by Shelter and works on housing with various tenants’ associations. We all have a commitment to the Centre and it actually takes all of us to keep it running. The four part-time people could in no way keep it running by themselves. Display made for Lanhill and Marylands Tenants’ Association There’s a lot of unemployment - a high propor­ tion of immigrants of all kinds who are either unemployed or working in low-paid jobs like catering or cleaning. There is a lousy council that’s done nothing about housing. H ow involved are the local people with the Darkroom? There are a lot of people interested in having photographs for themselves, for their groups or their activity. There’s a lot of demand for me to come along and take pictures but I’m trying to get people to take pictures for themselves. One of the blocks is that we haven’t had enough equipment. With the equipment grant that we got yesterday I want to buy some automatic cameras that you just have to focus and press the button. I think that will change things quite a lot. We should have had them ages ago. Do people come to the darkroom mostly through word o f mouth? Yes. That’s pretty effective because of the large number of groups that meet at the Centre. I’d say that every group that meets here has used the Darkroom in one way or another - tenants, pensioners’ groups, womens’ groups, guitar class. H ow do you function here? Photographs as evidence: fungus and damp in a hall­ way. For Walterton Road Residents’ Association H ow did you get involved? I was living locally and taking photographs for myself and was told that some people here wanted photographs taken. I did them and the demand seemed to grow and grow until it was suggested that I try and set up a proper project at the Centre. With quite a lot of help from Paddington Print Shop I wrote off grant appli­ cations and eventually got one from the Gulbenkian Foundation in 1976 - one part-time salary for a year. I got about £100 from the Centre here and £50 from a local charity and that was about it. I did an appeal on Capital Radio for an enlarger and got one. I built the darkroom and put in a bit of my own equipment. The Darkroom actually began working in November 1976 when we got the Gulbenkian grant. H ow are you funded? We, the Darkroom (we’re funded separately from the Centre) now have one full-time salary from the Arts Council. It started in April 1978. Apart from that we have no regular grants. We just managed to get a one-off equipment grant from the Gulbenkian - £880, which is basically the first equipment money we’ve ever had except for the £100 or so we had at the beginning. We’ve sort of scrounged the rest. We divide the salary between myself and Kathy Trevelyan. I get three days, she gets two. Her main responsibility is to do the classes. I do the rest. I tend to pick up all the loose ends. H ow would you describe the area you’re in? It’s a dump. It’s a large slum with no facilities. The Darkroom’s open and available to anyone who wants to use it. It’s pretty much booked up all through the week. It’s 15p per hour to use plus the cost of materials. All the materials are here. There are also cameras that can be loaned out. We have classes all day Wednesday, small groups. We do very little stuff with kids. It’s almost all adults. The teaching before was very informal and we haven’t been doing classes as such for very long. Now we’ve started to regularise it; on Wednesdays there are either two or three sessions in the day - morning, afternoon, and evening. People do come in to use the darkroom at other times and we give them help when necessary. H ow many people can you take in a class? It’s not a very big darkroom so it’s better if there’s no more than four. It varies from class to class. What’s been good is that, as we’ve developed, rather than only individual users coming along, we’ve had two or three groups of people who’ve started using it regularly there’s a class that comes from the local women’s centre and an adult literacy scheme. There’s always one or two people in a group who are interested in going the whole way and learning all about photography. Do you have a deliberate policy not to work with kids? In a way, yes. I enjoy working with kids but if we wanted to work with kids in a large way it would take up all the resources of the Darkroom. I prefer trying to explore other ways that photography can be used because being based in this Centre there are a lot of community groups that are involved in all sorts of political and local community action and they all need photographs. It’s much easier in a way to work with adults than with kids because we can give them three or four classes and get them on the right road and then they can just come in and book the darkroom without supervision any time they want. I’ve done that a lot and I sometimes find it frustrating. I have a plan to the extent that I have a political view about what goes on in the community and how I see various people in this Centre operating in the community. I see the Darkroom very much linked to what the local groups are doing. I have certain reasons for doing this work which are primarily because I’m really interested in photography. I want to be taking lots of pictures and encouraging other people to do the same. The two things sometimes conflict. Like sometimes, if I were given the chance. I’d be quite happy to take a whole lot of pictures for somebody even though I perhaps should be putting a lot more work into encouraging them to do it; on the other side of that is the time factor. Some weeks I can spend my whole time writing letters, doing administration, phoning people up, that sort of thing, which leaves absolutely no time for photography at all. It’s a compromise. Do you do the administration o f the Darkroom? Yes, my work involves a lot of administration. Every other day I have to write letters to do with grants, accounts, insurance. I have to do the stocking of the Darkroom so I have to keep a check of what’s there. I also have certain responsibilities to the Centre as a whole. We work as a collective. Do you do quite a lot o f service photography? Yes, there’s quite a demand for display boards, leaflets, etc. There are also people coming in who want photographs for newsletters, or posters, or evidence for something. As likely as not, they should be able to find them in the files. If not, I’ll do it for them. Incidentally, the files are not files of prints. They’re files of contact sheets which, unfortunately. I’m the only person who really understands. D o you find yourselves always responding to a need? W hat about exhibitions? When we’ve got the time, we try and do special projects - we did a large permanent travelling exhibition for the National Empty Property Campaign, who are based here. Initially, this was done for a press conference in the House of Commons that was called by the local MP. It’s been going all around the country to various housing action centres. More recently we did another exhibition: I’d been involved in setting up a large Community Arts Centre up the road called ‘the Factory’. They paid me a full-time salary to continue running the Darkroom here on a part-time basis if I did them an exhibition for their opening day, which was May 1st 1978. As they’re a big community leisure centre they wanted me to find out what was going on in the area, what facilities were available, what people did in their spare time. The idea was to involve as many people as possible in taking these pictures and in creating the exhibition. But the vast majority of the pictures were taken by me which was a shame. I became a bit disillusioned about using photo­ graphs to create exhibitions. The exhibition took a lot of time and trouble. When it was up for the opening it was really well received but after a few days I think it just becomes like wall­ paper. I think that there is a specific galleryexhibition viewing public, which isn’t the sort of public which lives round here. I don’t think that people round here are used to looking at pictures in that way or even want to. In a way I think their attitude’s quite healthy and I don’t want to change it. I mean why should they want to look at an exhibition? The things I want to do now are tape-slide shows. I think they reach people in a different way. They can also really involve people in the making of them in a way that with exhibitions it’s more difficult to do. For instance even if I ended up taking all the pictures for a tape-slide 4 CAMERAWORK show, there’s still a lot of creative work in ordering them, editing them, writing the script, which people in tenants associations could easily do. We are working on a tape-slide show about the problems faced by workers, in the main migrants on work permits in the catering industry. The catering industry is an important employer in North Paddington and is renowned for its chronic low pay and appalling working conditions. We got involved in this project mainly through one of the workers at the Centre, a Columbian employed by the Commission for Racial Equality. A lot of his case-work has involved dealing with migrants facing deportation and other difficulties as a result of the work-permit system and the way it operates in the catering industry. A group of Columbian catering workers that he has been dealing with were very interested in learning photography, so we arranged a series of classes with him as translator. As part of their classes they decided to take some pictures of conditions in the kitchens where they worked. We will be using some of these in the tape-slide show. They will also be helping to make the tape. W hatdoyou think are the successes o f the Darkroom? A lot of people are using it and getting a lot of enjoyment out of it. Plus the photographs are actually used for something: they’ve made a lot of difference to all the various pamphlets and leaflets that have been put out from here. It’s also automatic here now that if someone wants to put out a leaflet they come for a photograph. A lot of people have got a lot of pleasure out of making the photographs; other people and they themselves have got a lot of pleasure out of looking at them. knowledge the children have already. Where they know very little we work first of all with pinhole cameras. We have up to twelve children in a group and we provide each of them with a biscuit tin which they make into a pinhole camera. We encourage them to take whatever they feel like and advise them on the length of time to leave the sticky tape off and to make sure it’s put back securely. W e’re there the whole time but the emphasis is that they do it all. They very quickly take to it. We’d probably do that type of work for a day. Then gradually, over the following sessions we would take the children through all the processes. Are there problems working within a school? One of the very real problems we’re facing in schools at the moment is the indefiniteness of the kids turning up. We’ve been invited to schools partly as an attempt to overcome the truancy problem; we’ve definitely been dealing with those children on the periphery of the school. There’s an excitement level attached to those people who arrive from outside the school or playscheme and who offer something interest­ ing and different. It can undermine what’s already going on in the timetable. In our area this is a current debate in the community arts field - the relative value of the communitybased artist as opposed to the mobile community artist. W hat were the problems o f the first project? The problem was that the people who were teaching were relatively unfamiliar with informal teaching situations where you need the sort of expertise that is not necessarily photo­ graphic but more a communication skill than anything else: an ability to put people at their ease. W hat happened to all the people involved in the teaching? The Job Creation money ran out in August 1978 and so did the jobs. Some of the people are doing photography still though none of it’s really what they want to do photographically but there’s no opportunity in Manchester for them to use their skills. Richard decided he wanted to continue the project. The fact that it got going at all again was due to his determination and commitment to the idea. North West Arts agreed to fund the salary of one worker but there was no other money from Do groups always approach you first or do you sometimes approach them? It’s primarily them approaching us. We are being increasingly asked to do exhibitions. We’ve got three to do in a matter of a few months. It’s not something that the original project did before. When we work with groups we’d like to think that we might be heading towards holding an exhibition. At the moment a hospital is asking for an exhibition to put in their waiting room and we will concentrate on the work done by children. We’ll also use it as publicity for what we do. Also the NW Arts are interested in us taking photographs of both our own activities and those of other community arts groups with a view to an exhibition. Do you deal only with ‘straight’ photography? We feel an important part of this scheme is the opportunity to introduce new techniques. We have to learn about these. We’ve got interested but also inside them, towards people coming in and disrupting the routine. H ow do you see your role then? As a non-community based project we are making skills and ideas available to a variety of groups who are not necessarily ‘communities’ in the generally understood sense of a geographical area. We feel it is important that people gain their independence photographically so that we can move onto other groups and different areas. B u t do you find that many groups do gain their independence? This is a problem. We have consistently worked with some groups and yet they’ve come back again to ask us to run a project. But to balance that, the Ordsall High School where we’ve been teaching has a different attitude - the Head­ master there has put aside funds to establish a darkroom and buy cameras and the necessary equipment. Do you do any service photography other than the exhibitions you’ve been asked to provide? Other people who stage exhibitions know that we tend to have photographs illustrating certain viewpoints. We aren’t exactly non-partisan in the comments we make through photographs, e g, anti-Nazi demonstrations. Do you support campaigns or issues such as housing? I think we certainly will in the future. We don’t really do anything like that now though. It’s largely a matter of energy. I feel very motivated to record what’s happening locally and to encourage other people to use photography in that way too. However, our emphasis at present is work with children. S o do you think you are contributing in some part to social change by what you are doing here? W ill it be a natural step for you to establish a base where people could come to you for workshops? How can you assess that? I have no idea. It’s difficult to separate photography from the overall activity of the various groups and campaigns. It’s also difficult to assess exactly how much those groups are contributing to change. It’s not all a matter of photography. I’d very much like that. Our new premises in Oldham offer more opportunity of that in terms of size and facilities available. Whatever scheme we work on now, we want to have something concrete, to achieve a deliberate objective. I must say that I personally did have some mis­ givings when I started. I thought, ‘Will kids really be able to do that?’ I wasn’t convinced until I’d done my first workshop. These kids were spending hours of concentrated activity, they just couldn’t do enough. They were asking all the most pertinent questions. It was a dazzling reinforcement of the idea that anyone can learn photography. Split Image S p lit Image is based in Manchester and works with children in Greater Manchester and Cheshire. They have two full-time workers who run work­ shops to teach children photography, training work­ shops for playworkers and youthworkers and playscheme projects in the school holidays. N icky Hughes spoke to Helen Bridges. Beaford Archive H ow did Split Image begin? Helen White and Richard Raby, who’s still with the project, were working with Manchester Youth and Community Service (MYCS). Helen was particularly interested in setting up a photo­ graphy project. They undertook it as a Job Creation Scheme and got funding from MYCS. They set up the project early in 1977 and it was funded until August 1978. The project had two full-time supervisors - Helen and Richard - and five full-time trainees, all employed under Job Creation. It was a big scheme that had problems attached because of their inexperience in running something like that. W hat were their ideas? Very much community-oriented. They worked with any agencies - clubs, adventure play­ grounds, schools, etc - that were interested in introducing photography to their children. They wanted to introduce the idea that photo­ graphy needn’t be the sole realm of the expert, the professional, but that it could be a very creative medium that inexperienced people could use. H ow did they start work with children? With certain groups they did day projects, e g, Manchester Free School and Ordsall High School in Salford. They not only worked with groups of children aged from five upwards but also ran workshops with groups of playleaders, youth workers, etc who were interested in using photography on their sites. An important part of Split Image’s intention then and now is to initiate the idea and teach the relevant skills to the point where the play­ ground, school, or club would be prepared to spend a bit of money and set up their own darkroom. D id they set up darkrooms on the spot at places they went to? Yes. They would arrive and select a suitable space which was quite often the toilet, and simply convert it. W hat sort o f children’s workshops do you do on site? It depends on the kind of information and Richard Raby from Split Image working with children from Ordsell Free School. them for running costs. He had an enlarger and some cameras left from the Job Creation project. It was then put to NW Arts that another worker was needed to make the scheme viable. They have a very sympathetic community arts panel. The scheme had been a success so it was relatively easy to get another full-time salary approved. in tape-slide shows which are a sort of extension of the straightforward taking of shots. This involves taking sequences and dramatising or producing a story, mixing music and sounds with images. We spent a day producing two slide sequences at Burton Manor in Cheshire where they have the necessary equipment to do this. H ow do you fund your activities now? Why are you particularly interested in tape-slide? It’s a matter of making more applications for grants, e g, we’ve applied to Granada Tele­ vision, the Gulbenkian Trust, Marks and Spencers. We do ask for some payments from user groups, if they can afford it, to cover costs of materials, but usually they’re as hard up as we are. We are also under the umbrella of MYCS so we get all sorts of benefits from that in terms of accommodation and some sort of outlay towards rates. When did you join the project and how did you become involved? I joined in November 1978. I’d done a bit of work for the Manchester Free School so I knew about Split Image. I’m a teacher and I’m very interested in the educational aspects of the project. I like the idea of a constructive creative medium which allows people to develop their own insights and make their own statements as well as teaching them a skill. D id you do any photography before you joined Split Image? Not to any large extent. I’d taken lots of photos but I hadn’t done any processing. There’s been a lot to learn. The idea is that photography should be accessible to anyone. That should apply to me, so Richard gave me a crash threeday course before I started. I think that it’s a viable project to do with a group of children. Using tapes and slides we can entertain whilst producing, say, a record of a day at the adventure centre or a day’s outing, with people talking through it as the narrative. It’s exciting and affords a little bit more of a live concept than a static print. There’s a lot of work that children can get involved with in producing a tape-slide show. Are there other specific projects you’re working on? There are two other projects we’ll be working on from early in 1979: one is with a group of young offenders. We were approached by a social worker who has a group he works with on evenings and weekends. He has concentrated a lot on sporting activities and weekend trips away. He wants us to do a scheme that would give them scope to develop their self-awareness and self-respect while learning something new. They are all under 14 and therefore under the age of criminal responsibility and in difficult family set-ups. The other project is working in a psychiatric hospital with adults. We’re anxious to do this sort of work as there is a great need in hospitals for some sort of creative activity. There is great hardship experienced by people who are cut off from and ignored by society. At the same time there are a lot of obstacles that seem to come from prejudice, not only outside the hospitals, The Beaford Photographic Archive is part o f the Beaford Arts Centre in central North Devon. The Centre was founded eleven years ago by the Darlington Hall Trust with the aim o f revitalising the area. The archive employs onefull-time and one part-time worker who are building up an Archive o f copies o f old photographs and modem documenta­ tion o f the area. N icky Hughes spoke to Jam es Ravilious. H ow did you get involved with the Beaford Centre? The Archive proper started in 1971; a photo­ grapher called Roger Deakins was asked by the Centre to make a record of modern Devon. He worked for a year until the money ran out and the whole thing was more or less dropped. In 1972 I got a job teaching wood-engraving and lino-cutting for evening classes at the Beaford Centre. I asked the director if I could take a few pictures. Did you have a photography background? No, originally I was very anti it. I didn’t like it at all. I was trained as a designer. I was a painter manque, I think they call it - a failed painter. I was teaching drawing but I gradually took a few pictures and really liked it. When I came here it was suggested that I be paid £15 a week to keep the Archive going. In fact I worked full-time on it. I didn’t do anything else. It was so interesting to do. I bought the equipment and that was it. With your own money? Yes. All the cameras and the best darkroom equipment at my house are my own. What kind o f area do you cover? We are in an area which is claimed, and I dispute this, to be a depressed area: poor industry, mostly farming, mosdy relying on holiday­ makers. There’s more money made from tourism than from farming in North Devon. Therefore statistically I suppose you can say it is a depressed area but I have a fierce feeling that if you go around saying this it becomes selffulfilling. It’s an area of small farms. There are lots of young people who are unemployed, so people are tending to go to the towns. CAMERAWORK Dolton circa 1910 Landkey circa 1880 When you started here, did you have an overall plan? N o, I almost never have a plan. Simply by living in a place for a long time, by sheer accumulation of what you see out of the comer of your eye, you build up a total picture. I went to the dentist the other day with my wife and I took pictures of the dentist. Gradually you take the shop­ keepers, the doctor . . . it all adds up. So after five years, which is how long I’ve been here, I have a huge collection. Now that’s the great strength of the Archive. If you wanted an exhibition on thatch or hedging, I could provide you with one tomorrow. O f course when I say I’ll provide you with one tomorrow I’d probably have to take a few fill-in pictures, but it’s all basically there. We’ve got all kinds of exhibitions, on farming, landscapes and also things like ‘Follies and Grottoes of North Devon’. You also copy old photographs, don’tyou? How did this begin? That was how we originally started. It seemed to us that it was very rich here, very untouched. I decided to start from the centre and work outwards, so I started with Dolton, my own village?! went to a farmer’s wife I knew who had 70 or 80 really good pictures. I copied these photographs - some family snaps, lots of Dolton and a few from round about. I asked them if they had friends or relatives who might have more. I’d go to those people and so it went on. And I thought why not make a slide-show of them? People would come. So originally it was slide shows o f old pictures? Yes. Ashreigney was the first village we chose. W'e collected everything we possibly could. It’s done systematically, and all cross-referenced. We chose 70 or 80 slides and tried to make a story - starting with the village itself, the people, the shops, then the jolly events, the carnivals. When it was all ready we were sitting down waiting for perhaps 20 or 30 people to come when suddenly, about five minutes before the show began, the entire village to a man appeared - 112 people. We also had a little exhibition of objects that people had collected in their own homes - clothes, tools, fantastic old things. I didn’t really give a talk. I just showed the village. In the slide show I showed a selection of other photographs from round about, at first, and then when the first slide of Ashreigney came up there was an ‘aaaaaaah’. It was a terribly boring picture but they were absolutely set alight. From then on I was shouting to say what was on the slides. The pictures were probably mostly about the Twenties when the village photographers were there, and they’re very good plate camera contact prints, marvellous quality. In fact at the time I wasn’t thinking of extending the slide-shows. I did that one because I liked the people and they’d been very helpful. Archie Parkhouse. Dolton 1975 James Ravilious palaver, and it can go into the smallest village hall. T hat’s the most important thing. You tailor the exhibition to the village. Most of them are farmers, and farmers are damn busy and they don’t have time to go to the exhibitions, so I must try and take them to the villages. The general idea is lightness and flexibility so a large exhibition of 90-100 photographs can easily go in my small three-wheeler. Are you interested in taking the exhibitions further afield? Well, we’ve so far only done one or two exhibi­ tions outside this area. I’ve had one at Southampton University, one at the Reading Museum of Rural Life and one in Brest, in France, at the Palais des Arts et de la Culture. Also I’m hopeful of an exhibition in London next year. So you’re looking outward quite a lot? I’m being pushed that way, quite rightly, because I think in order to survive and get the grants the Archive has to be a bit famous. What about publications? The only book that I’ve done that is finished and is definitely coming out is called All Around the Year, published by John Murray. It is partly an educational book. It’s a diary of a farm and I’ve taken photographs throughout the year. There are 52 pictures, some drawings by my wife and 12 poems by Ted Hughes. What about posters and postcards? Well the accountant at Dartington Hall put up some money to print four posters. Unfortu­ nately they’re rather too large and it’s difficult to get people to stock them. But the postcards, they sell like hot cakes, locally anyway. We do a set of 12: six old photographs and six new. Do you have any contact with schools? Yes, I’m beginning to. They use the Archive because they are often out looking at buildings and I can show them how things have changed. I’ve started giving talks to schools. I was talking about thatch and cob at a school last week and it went down very well. That particular school has asked me to do three different classes for the next year. Do you provide photographs for schools? I’ve just packed off 105 of my own photographs to the Devon Schools Museum Service, who already have a large selection of both old and What about funding? I ’m always relying on grants that are sporadic. The principal source of income is the South West Arts but I’m on a sliding scale so the grant gets less every year. I get a small grant from the local council and some money from Dartington Hall - little bits here and there, scrabbling for money. One’s future is always uncertain. One feels constantly threatened. It would be nice to think that we could get one solid grant. A lot of photographers working on this sort of project find that they are spending so much time trying to justify themselves, and trying to get money and generally hassling, that they have no time for photography. What about the future? There’s the Barns Project. The Beaford Centre owns three barns, in a row, which we want to turn into a permanent place for the Archive. It’s not being exploited anything like as much as it could be, so the idea is that in the barns we have a darkroom, a place for people to study, a project room, a shop perhaps and a little library And then there would be an exhibition place. W e’d have a good cross-section of what the Archives contains - the early photographs and the modern ones. It could become a tourist attraction - there’s a nice garden for teas, it’d be a pleasant afternoon out - although I think it is important to stress that the Archive is princi­ pally for local people. It’s Devon’s own history for Devonians. Union Place Union Place was started in 1974 by a group of people living and working in central North Lambeth. They believe that consciousness, organisation and action in this deprived area of South London could be assisted by providing people with practical means of communication. The Centre works with local groups producing posters, exhibitions, leaflets, newspapers, badges and so on. They work as a collective of around ten people of whom two to three work with photography. Nicky Hughes spoke to Dave McKay and Terry Crabtree. When and why was Union Place set up? It’s been going over 416 years now. The idea for the place came out of experience inside housing groups on local estates and squatting groups and so on. Virtually the only way you could get a leaflet done in those days was to go to North London. That stifled a lot of local initiative. Initially, the idea was just to produce stuff like local leaflets but it grew quite quickly. Groups were finding out that it wasn’t simply a matter of duplicating leaflets. They were finding out more and more that they were confronting the State in quite a public way. They realised that some­ thing a little more sophisticated than a grotty half-readable sheet was required. So it moved from duplicating to including silkscreen and then we got an offset machine. Over the last 4Vi years, silk screen, offset and photography have been available to groups coming in on the principle of us showing people how to produce their own posters, photographs, exhibitions, leaflets, booklets. During that time, user groups have gone up from forty in the first year to 400 now. How did it get going? Originally it was open only in the evenings and the people who ran it went on working in their own jobs. Money was raised by holding jumble sales and there was a donation of a duplicator. As far as I can work out the people who started Union Place moved in and then asked the GLC if they could stay. The building is on a short lease for a very reasonable rent. How would you describe the area you’re in? One of the poorest areas in North Lambeth. The area has suffered blight from the planners. Houses have been knocked down and during the time that Union Place got going people were being evicted from those houses. A lot of big industry has moved out in response to the Government initiatives of the Sixties so there’s very little work for people. The net result of that is that you have a high population of old people and single parents: a very poor community. People either move out to get work or they’re unemployed. Was photography used at Union Place right from the beginning? Yes, some of the people who started Union Place had been doing photography for some time. Very early on, two streets round here that were squatted were billed for demolition and Union Place produced a number of street exhibitions which were used to support the demands that these squatting groups had. Union Place was working with these groups, not just providing a service but encouraging people to join in. What kind of street exhibition? The first one that I was involved in was around Villa Road. We helped produce an exhibition that was a brief photographic history of the street. It included what the plans for the houses were, how long it had taken the council to decant people, what was happening to the houses in between times plus the kinds of things that were going on in the street - street meetings, squatting houses, houses being wrecked by the council, etc. And was it because of the response that you realised that this was something that could really be developed? Yes, we decided to provide slide-shows and the various Womens’ Institutes organised them, and it’s gone from strength to strength. I’m booked up now for the next year. How do you do exhibitions? We’re doing four in four different villages. One every fortnight - probably present day photo­ graphs. There’ll be four prints to a stand and these stands, wooden T-pieces, stand on trestletables because all village halls have trestletables. This way we can have an exhibition put up for a day and taken down quickly without new photographs. St Giles in the Wood circa 1910 Were these exhibitions geared towards the council? No, towards the general public. For example, we went to the centre of Brixton with the Villa Road exhibition on the big shopping day in the market. The exhibition was fairly crudely pre­ sented and not very sophisticated at that time. We leaned the boards against the railings at one of the busiest junctions - no permission from the police but they didn’t seem to mind. I learned some interesting things about present­ ing photographs. The whole function of a 6 CAMERAWORK projects was looking at Camberwell New Road. We were suggesting to the kids using photo­ graphy in such a way that they could pick up on ideas through it, or on the reality around them that simply hadn’t been articulated. Of course, that works for adults as well as it does for kids. I think that quite often they get a sense of them­ selves that had been missing before, that expresses something concretely outside them­ selves. This type of process is very important. The particular way I think that it is important is working through something in a collective fashion. The whole process of learning in a group how to use photographs might well provide for some people a whole model of collective practice they simply haven’t experienced before. This particularly applies to people who are employed in hierarchical situa­ tions and whose domestic situation is very often an isolated nuclear family. To experience the collective way of organising is much easier than say fighting a battle on your own whether it be which prints to choose or supporting a Compul­ sory Purchase Order. gallery or an exhibition in a gallery has to be seen as a middle-class one, unless it’s some­ where obvious like in a trades hall but even then, the extent to which it is public is quite limited. We found that by putting the exhibition right there where people were we got a very good response. It gave us a chance too to hand out a bit of literature and talk about our particular situation. I’ve often felt that a lot of images broadly produced by the Left become stereotypes unless they’re talked through. Design of our exhibitions has become very important. We have had to draw people from a distance over to look at an exhibition, that’s why we use photographs in odd shapes, in triangles, hexagons, and so on. People will cross the street to look at them. What about funding? During its second year Union Place started to receive a small amount of money, basically for administration and overheads. A small propor­ tion was left over which amounted to three quarters of a salary between five people. Last year it was £9,000 but you can see how that much relates to the financial needs of the place when you realise that the collective has nearly always been between seven and ten people. People have mainly been on Social Security. It’s very much a case of people donating their time. It wras just about sufficient in conjunction with the printing revenue. We’ve always charged people cost price plus a small overhead charge. When Inner City funds became available there was a feeling that we ought to apply. Noone wants to go on working for nothing no matter how politically sound a motivation it is. We applied for all sorts of monies in 1977 but we were turned down on every front. Our first successful application was made at the beginning of 1978. We made an application for the running of Union Place as a whole, for the photography project as a separate project, an outreach worker, and extra money for what we call Community Education Workshops, which teach skills, including photography. We’d identify local groups who we’d get interested in that, e g, women on local estates, shop stewards in the area, and kids. Up to now the State has defined certain areas within its responsibility as deserving of finance, split up rigidly into housing, social services, health, etc. Nowhere is there a category that covers popular communication. Our applica­ tion had such good local support that we were able to lobby. We asked for letters from all our user gro
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      • archiveFour Corners Bishopsgate
      • vimeo_link
      • authorSee sections X to AC
      • author_editorSantiago Castrillon, Mike Goldwater, Liz Mackie, Jenny Matthews, Tom Picton, Kate Saunders, Siddhiratna, Chris Steele-Perkins
      • author_writerEd Molony, Karen Margolis, Liz Curtis, Ron McKay, Steve Peak, Belinda Loftus, Paul Carter, Chris Steele-Perkins
      • author_photographerBo Bojesen, Neil Goldstein, Colin Jones, Bill Kirk, Alain Le Garsmeur, Buzz Logan, Raissa Page, Syd Shelton, Peter Marlow, Chris Steele-Perkins, Homer Sykes, Peter Kennard, Brian Aris,
      • author_designer
      • author_intervieweePhilip Elliot, Colin Jones, Simon Hoggart, Lord Justice-General Cooper, Bo Bojeson, Simon Winchester, Syd Shelton, Tom Atkins, Andrew Stephen, Chris Steele-Perkins
      • author_organisation
      • tagshistory of ireland,paramilitary organisations,1916 easter rising,sinn fein,unionists,british army,british empire,ulster defence regiment,bloody sunday massacre,ira,ruc,internment,catholic communities,housing,child poverty,sectarian violence,the troubles,unemployment,republicans,long kesh prison,british press,british media,peter kennard,daily mirror,mcgurk's bar bombing 1971,roy mason,sunday times,daily express,daily mail,steve chibnall,orange movement,infrastructure,industrial development,john z delorean,workers' research unit,peace rally 1976,visor magazine,army intelligence photography,special branch,ira funerals,snatch squads,tom atkins,syd shelton,colin jones,buzz logan,bo bojesen,chris steele-perkins,raissa page,photo-journalism,upi,social work today,censorship,the observer,mass surveillance,army computers,dhss,police surveillance,tony benn,amnesty international,police violence,castlereagh holding centre,war & conflict peace movement,
      • titleCamerawork Magazine - Issue 14
      • subtitleIssue 14: Reporting on War & Conflict. Special Issue
      • dimension21 pages
      • ocr1
      • copyrightFour Corners/Half Moon Photography Workshop/Camerawork, Ed Molony, Karen Margolis, Liz Curtis, Ron McKay, Steve Peak, Belinda Loftus, Paul Carter, Bo Bojesen, Neil Goldstein, Colin Jones, Bill Kirk, Alain Le Garsmeur, Buzz Logan, Raissa Page, Syd Shelton, Peter Marlow © Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos, Chris Steele-Perkins, Homer Sykes, Peter Kennard, Brian Aris, Philip Elliot, Colin Jones, Simon Hoggart, Lord Justice-General Cooper, Simon Winchester, Tom Atkins, Andrew Stephen
      • credits
      • related
      • locationBethnal Green, London, UK. War & Conflict, UK (pg 4-7) Ulster, West Belfast, Lower Falls (pg 9) Derry, Armagh, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Antrim (pg 14-16) Shankill, New Lodge, The Markets, Creggan
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      • origination_date1979
      • origination_year1979
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      • created2018-06-04 14:58:05
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      • pdf_text1 CAMERAWORK ■ i On the 14th of August 1979 British troops will have been on active service in Northern Ireland for 10 years. Our understanding of the situation in Northern Ireland has been conditioned by press and television coverage which encourages the notion of a community, decimated by religious bigotry and mindless violence being held in check by the peace keeping British Army. There has been little attempt to provide a reasoned explanation for these violent events that considers their history and economic motivations. The general assumption that the military presence is a necessity is rarely questioned. In Vietnam film and photography played a significant role in changing public understanding of American involvement in the war there, leading to American withdrawal. It is fair to say that photography has not played this role in Northern Ireland. Thousands of photographs have been taken there, but the few that appear in the British press have concentrated on the violence, underlining ‘The tragedy of it all’. The way they have been used distorts our under- standing of events by failing to put them into an appro­ priate context. The information we receive is censored both by the Army and by editorial decisions within the media. Camerawork makes no claims to provide answers to the problems of Northern Ireland; but we feel that we can publish photographs in a context that will demystify the issues that affect the Six Counties - a context in which they can be understood. So far the Daily Mirror has been the only national newspaper to call for the government to set a date for military withdrawal from Northern Ireland. Camera­ work endorses this view - recognising that military withdrawal does not in itself resolve these problems. However, it is an essential first step towards creating a climate in which an acceptable political solution can be found. The situation in Ireland directly affects us all in Britain. Civil liberties and democracy are being steadily eroded. It is in all our interests to bring back the army from our nearest and last major colony. SHORT HISTORY OF IRELAND keeping control of Ireland was to colonise it. This was known as ‘plantation’. Just as the Pilgrim Fathers drove the Indians off the best land in America, so the native Irish were driven off their land, which was given to settlers from England and Scotland. It is from these settlers that today’s Irish Protestants are descended. ULSTER Northern Ireland Area 5,000 sq. miles Pop. 1,500,000 Irish Republic Area 27,000 sq. miles Pop. 3 million 1. Ireland today is divided into four provinces: Ulster, Leinster,ConnaughtandMunster. These are the four provinces of ancient Ireland before the British came. The section marked with a Union Jack has a population of one and a half million, about the same as that of Birmingham. It is ruled by Britain; the whole of Ireland was ruled by Britain until 1921. 4. This situation has existed for 800 years, since England first invaded Ireland in 1169. There are two main reasons why Britain has always wanted to control Ireland. The first is strategic, the second is economic - for hundreds of years the exploitation of Ireland’s agri­ cultural products and cheap labour has been a major prop to the British economy. 7. The native Irish were still Catholics. Religion became the badge that distinguished the invaders from the people they had dispossessed. In other countries skin colour has played this part. King William of Orange is still a hero to the settlers’ descendants because he was a Protes­ tant king who successfully defended Ireland against the Catholic King James, who sided with the native Irish. The Protestant organisa­ tion, the Orange Order, is named after William of Orange. 9. Again and again, the unbearable conditions drove the Irish to revolt. They were met with martial law and violent repression. This engraving of a travelling gallows dates from the Rising of the United Irishmen in 1798. The British not only used military means to put down the Rising, they also used the tactics of divide and rule. 2. It has been said that Irish history is divided into two parts: first, the British repressing Irish men and women . . . 5. English soldiers in Ireland in the late 1500s return from battle carrying several heads. A series of brutal wars were fought to try and gain control of the whole of Ireland. The northeast put up the most determined resistance and was not conquered until 1607. 3. . . . and second, Irish men and women fighting back. If you read the papers or watch television you will know the first as ‘keeping the peace’ and the second as ‘terrorism’. 6. The cheapest and most efficient way of 8. By 1700 the native Irish owned only 15% of the land in Ireland, though they were three quarters of the population. The huge increase in the transfer of land between 1640 and 1688 results from the Cromwellian conquest. After the Irish people had risen against British rule in 1641, Cromwell carried out a campaign of exter­ mination and confiscation of their land. At the siege of Drogheda, 30,000 Catholics were slaughtered. Thousands of Irish people were sold as slaves and shipped to Barbados. 10. Wolf Tone, the leader of the United Irish­ men, was a Protestant, and so, at first, were many of his followers. They were Presbyterian manufacturers and merchants who objected to the way the big landowners, in alliance with Britain, were holding back the development of industry in Ireland. The British decided to play on religious differences to divide and defeat the movement. The British General Knox said ‘I have arranged . . . to increase the animosity between Orangemen and the United Irish. Upon that This issue of CAMERAWORK, August 1979, was produced by the Publishing Project, Half Moon Photography Workshop, 119/121 Roman Road, London E2. 01-980 8798. is designed to provided a forum for the exchange of ideas, views and information on photography and other forms of communication. By exploring the application, scope and content of photo­ graphy, we intend to demystify the process. We see this as part of the struggle to learn, to describe and to share experiences and so contribute to the process by which we grow in capacity and power to control our lives. The people who worked on this issue were Santiago Castrillon, Mike Goldwater, Liz Mackie, Jenny Matthews, Tom Picton, Richard Platt, Kate Saunders, Siddhiratna, Chris Steele- Perkins. (ISSN 0308 1676) CAMERAWORK animosity depends the safety of the centre counties of the N orth.’ Ireland continued. Any Irish industry which threatened to compete with Britain was suppressed, so that most of Ireland remained agricultural. Lenin wrote: ‘Britain owes her ‘brilliant’ economic development and the ‘prosperity’ of her industry and commerce largely to her treat­ ment of the Irish peasantry. While Britain ‘flourished’, Ireland moved towards extinction and remained an undeveloped, semi-barbarous, purely agrarian country, a land of povertystricken peasant farmers.’ from the yoke of England and for the establish­ ment of a free and independent government on Irish soil.’ at a meeting of the Orange Order in 1963 ‘Many a company director has marched with his lodge today, shoulder to shoulder with wage earners. This is a healthy state of affairs. This is the right grounds on which to build the soundest of industrial relations.’ In spite of the fact that a higher percentage of workers are in trade unions in the north of Ireland than in Britain, trade union militancy died in 1919. Unemployment has always been higher there, and real income much lower. Hack m d T an * Illl llll-ll I'll W k l \ N T I I \ 16. Irish people were portrayed as ape-like savages from the early 1800s until 1920 - from the point of view of the British ruling class, all the peoples of the Empire looked like this. The same attitude is shown today in so-called Irish jokes. 21. When Carson mobilised a Protestant para­ military force, the Ulster Volunteer Force, UVF (above) to oppose Home Rule for Ireland, the Liberal Government in London instructed the Army to move against them. But a brigadier and 54 officers at the Curragh military camp mutinied and refused to move against the UVF. The Government backed down. n a m e d a tta r a paefc of hunting h ou n d * 25. The British recruited a new force, the ‘Black and Tans’ who pursued a policy o f‘indis­ criminate reprisals’: shootings, burnings, looting, large-scale arrests and widespread destruction. Meanwhile in the north east troops were ordered not to interfere as Orange mobs and the Special Constabulary continued pogroms against the Catholics. Between 1920 and 1922 428 people were killed, 1,766 wounded, 8,750 Catholics were driven from their jobs and 23,000 Catholics made homeless. UI.STKR Northern Ireland Area 5,000 sq. miles Pop. 1,500,’000 Irish Republic Area 27,000 sq. miles Pop. 3 million 12. In the terrible famine of 1845-9 a million people died. The tragedy was that the famine was artificial; there was enough food in Ireland to feed the starving people, but the peasants had to sell their produce in order to pay their rents to absentee landlords. When charity ships came from Europe with food for famine relief, they were surprised to see six times as many ships leaving Ireland with cargoes of grain, wool and flax. 17. York St. Mills, Belfast, before the first World War - it was then the largest in the world. The north east of Ireland was to become a base of opposition to Irish independence. While the rest of Ireland had remained mainly agricultural, the north east had been industrialised under the control of British capital. By the end of the nineteenth century, over three quarters of Irish industry was con­ centrated in the Belfast area. NAILEDTOTHEAMT 22. Sackville Street in flames. The 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin marked the first great crack in the British Empire. Bernard Porter of Hull University wrote recently: ‘Ireland was where the colonial rot really set in. That Britain could not keep firm hold even of her ‘Other Island’ was ominous. Colonial nationalists looked on, and drew their own conclusions.’ Within three years, Britain was to be faced with a wave of revolt throughout the empire, beginning in Egypt, India, Iraq and Persia. 13. Emigrants being blessed by their parish priest. Between 1845 and 1855 two million destitute people left the country for Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia. 18. The industrialists were fearful for their position if the link with Britain was lost. Under the leadership of Carson, a Conservative MP, they mounted a violent campaign to oppose the Liberal Party’s Home Rule Bill. 14. Evictions continued throughout the nine­ teenth century, just as in Scotland, peasants were driven from their land and replaced by flocks and herds. Here British soldiers and police help to break down the door of a cottage with a battering ram. In 1841 there were over eight million people in Ireland; by 1891 there were just over four and a half million. 15. The Fenian movement, which was formed in the 1860s, called for ‘the liberation of Ireland 23. The Easter Rising was savagely suppressed by the British. Fourteen of the leaders, includ­ ing James Connolly, were executed, and over 2,000 people were interned in British jails. 19. In order to destroy both the growing mili­ tancy of the workers and the movement for Home Rule, the industrialists took advantage of Protestant fears of Catholic competition. The Protestant monopoly over the job market would be seriously undermined in an independent Ireland, so the Protestant workers were brought into a class alliance with High Tory interests. 20. This alliance still survives. As Faulkner said 24. In the 1918 General Election, Sinn Fein, which stood for an independent Irish republic, won an overwhelming victory with 73 out of 105 seats. The Sinn Fein members established an Irish Parliament, the Dail Eireann, demanding the withdrawal of British forces. Britain declared Dail Eireann illegal and banned national movements. Thousands of troops were poured into Ireland with tanks, armoured cars and weapons; but the Irish Republican Army, small as it was (2,000 men) fought back and the war of independence began. 26. Unable to defeat the Irish forces outright, the British Government proposed a treaty under which Ireland was partitioned. 26 counties became a ‘Free State’ with dominion status within the Commonwealth. Britain retained direct control of the 6 north eastern counties which were 60% pro-British and contained the main Irish industries. 27. Irish businessmen and church leaders in the 26 counties were in favour of the treaty: workers and peasants were against it. Civil War developed. The British backed up the pro-treaty forces and supplied them with guns. Here pro-treaty forces use British artillery to shell the republican forces. Finally, in May 1923 the Republican forces laid down their arms and effective opposition to Partition went under­ ground. 28. O f the one and a quarter million people of the six counties at the time of Partition, more than half were concentrated in the city of Belfast, in County Antrim and the northern half of County Down. Here there were 552,000 Unionists and 149,000 Nationalists. In the remaining 4V counties were 281,000 Nationa­ 4 lists and 268,000 Unionists. To keep the province under British control, electoral boundaries were engineered by the gerrymander. Catholics were herded into one constituency while Protestants were split into several. In Derry for example, where there were twice as many Catholics as Protestants, the Catholics elected only 8 councillors while the Protestants elected 16. The need to maintain this precarious and unequal situation explains the notoriously undemocratic nature of the state in Northern Ireland, and the need for police and army to enforce ‘law and order’. 3 CAMERAWORK 29. Jobs and houses were allocated on sectarian grounds. As a ‘moderate’ Unionist MP put it in 1961: ‘the Unionist Party should make it clear that it is the Loyalists who have the first choice of jobs . . . The Unionist Party was founded to further the objects of Loyalists.’ This discrimi­ nation ensured that Protestant workers remained loyal to British interests. 30. To forestall rebellion, the British province was turned into a police state. In 1920 the police force was armed, as was the volunteer Special Constabulary, the ‘B’ Specials. The police force was and still is almost entirely Protestant. In emergencies the British Army could always be called upon. The Special Powers Act of 1922 gave the police sweeping powers of arrest and detention. Internment without trial was brought in when­ ever the Catholics showed signs of open rebellion. 34. In August 1969, this policy led to a massive police attack on the Catholic Bogside areas of Derry. The battle raged for two days and the police were forced right out of the Bogside. Free Derry was born. The barricades stayed up until the British Army, under pressure from the Loyalists, knocked them down two years later. Unable to control the Catholics, the Inspector General of the Royal Ulster Constabulary asked the Northern Ireland Government for military help, and at 3.00pm on 14th August, Chichester-Clark, the Unionist Prime Minister, passed on the request to Downing Street. At 4.30 Wilson, Prime Minister, and Callaghan, Home Secretary, telephoned their agreement. 38. The British Government claims that there would be a ‘bloodbath’ if the troops were with­ drawn. But by building up the Ulster Defence Regiment, which is almost entirely Protestant and contains many former ‘B’ Specials, the British are themselves creating the conditions for a Loyalist pogrom against the Catholics. the south thousands of workers downed tools to join protest marches, and 30,000 people burned down the British Embassy in Dublin. In the north too, there were strikes accompanied by rioting in every single Catholic area. The IRA campaign escalated rapidly. To try and regain control of the situation, the British Government dissolved the provincial government, and parliament and brought in direct rule. A number of political ‘solutions’ offered ‘power sharing’ to the Catholic middle class while continuing to repress the Catholic ghettos. The Sunningdale agreement proposed a power-sharing government in the north under British control, linked to the south through a Council of Ireland. This was unacceptable both to Catholics who had had enough of British rule, and to Protestants who rejected any kind of compromise with the Catholics. 43. In protest the Protestant Ulster Workers Council called a strike. The army failed to inter­ vene, the British Government backed down and Sunningdale collapsed. The Protestant-inspired Convention was no more successful a solution. 35. At 5.00pm on 14th August 1969 British troops went into the heart of Derry. It is one of the great myths of the British propaganda machine that the troops went in to ‘keep the two sides apart’ and to ‘protect the Catholics’. The troops were sent in at the request of the Northern Ireland police and Government because they could not control the Catholic minority without them. 39. On the political front, the British Govern­ ment has repeatedly yielded to Loyalist demands. From mid-1970, hardline Loyalists demanded Internment without trial, and on August 9th 1971 Internment was again intro­ duced. The army launched dawn raids on the Catholic ghettos and lifted 342 people. Many of the internees were tortured. CS gas was widely used against whole Catholic areas when people protested against Internment. 44. British policy now consists of simply repressing the nationalists and attempting to isolate the militants from their communities. If Britain is to control the north, she cannot afford to undermine the Unionist regime. This means that discrimination against the Catholics will continue. In this situation there is no prospect of an end to the violence. Ill 31. It was only when the Civil Rights Move­ ment emerged in the late Sixties, campaigning for equal opportunities in housing and jobs, and calling for electoral reform, that world opinion became aware of the conditions in Ireland. The police repeatedly attacked the demonstrators, hoping to drive them back into silence. Ill ■ ■ III I I I 40. Rubber bullets have been responsible for many injuries. Today these have been replaced by plastic bullets, which are harder and more accurate. Thirteen year old Brian Stewart died in October 1976 after his skull was smashed by a plastic bullet. 45. In 1970 the IRA was a very small organisa­ tion but it has grown since. The Catholic working class had to recognise that the British army would never be an agent of peaceful change and in the absence of political solutions, and in the face of escalating repression, many Republicans saw no other course. 36. At first the Catholics welcomed the troops because they felt they signalled the defeat of the hated RUC. But the Army, which had stayed in the background for 50 years, soon fell back into its traditional role of keeping the Catholics down. Massive house to house arms searches were carried out in Catholic areas. 41. In September 1976 the European Court of Human Rights found Britain guilty of the use of sensory deprivation during the Internment period. Torture in various forms still continues and was the subject of an Amnesty report in 1978. 32. Paisely brought his Ulster Constitution Defence Committee out onto the streets to attack the Civil Rights marchers. Here they stop a march through Armagh with sticks, billhooks, scythes, clubs and guns. ^ 33. Despite opposition and injuries, the Civil Rights movement continued to grow, encouraged by mass support in the south and broad sympathy overseas. The Northern Ireland Government began to promise minor reforms, but also launched a campaign of repression against the Catholics to appease Protestant fears of reform. ■! 37. Since World War II the British Army has been forced to withdraw from its Empire and grant independence to its former colonies. While still resisting withdrawal, it developed and refined techniques that were copied by the Americans in Vietnam and later used in Ireland. Concentration camps, internment without trial, sophisticated intelligence-gathering operations, sensory deprivation, torture and black propaganda were all used. General Kitson drew heavily on his experience in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Oman in working out British military strategy in Ireland, where, again, the main task has been the suppression of a people struggling for inde­ pendence from British rule. mt ^ - 46. Little has changed in the relationship of Britain to the Irish people over the last few hundred years. When the first regular army was raised in the seventeenth century, two reasons were given for its existence: ‘suppression of the Irish’ and ‘defence of the Protestant religion’. The presence of the army has not solved any problems. The continued status of the northeast of Ireland as a province of Britain favours only a small number of industrialists. Catholics are discriminated against and repressed; Protestant workers, too, suffer low living standards. The industrialists profit from the split between the two, and the British Army maintain their rule by occupation and repression. fm r 42. Bloody Sunday, 30th January 1970. Paratroopers opened fire on a massive peaceful demonstration in Derry and killed fourteen men, none of whom were armed. Her Majesty the Queen later conferred the OBE on Lt. Col. Derek Wilford, who led the paras into action. Ireland exploded after Bloody Sunday. This history has been extracted from the Troops Out M ovement slide show. CAMERAWORK CATHOLIC W EST BELFAST Rioting is the familiar image of Northern Ireland - here a Royal Ulster Constabulary Landrover is stoned on the Falls Road in Catholic West Belfast. This is not simply another act of random violence. It is happening because the British Army and RUC are seen by many Catholics as the strong-arm of the social and economic repression they experience in housing, employment, law and basic human rights. The occasion for the incident is the anniversary of the British policy of internment without trial (August 9). Although this policy is no longer in effect, its memory is lasting and bitter. The Catholic sense of community is strong; here kids dance at a 12 hour marathon disco to raise money to improve their community centre. CATHOLIC WEST BELFAST Nearly all working-class Catholic families have been traumatically affected by the violence, with family and friends either killed, injured or arrested. The McCabe’s 4 year old daughter, Siobhan was shot dead while playing outside their house - caught in an exchange between the army and a gunman. Lunch for this family is bread, margarine and tea - probably less nutritional than a bowl of rice. Many families ran into debt following a rent strike and they now have money deducted from state benefit before receiving it. Overcrowding is a consequence of large families, a chronic shortage of houses and the poor condition of those in existence. This family has another room but the damp is so bad that the parents will r.ot allow the children to sleep there. 1 ms lowers their income well below the poverty line. The Child Poverty Action Group recently reported that V of all families in Northern Ireland are living below the poverty line. 3 a The Divis Flats tenants group has pressurised the Norther Ireland Housing Executive into recognising the inadequacies of the flats, and offering five million pounds to refurbish them. But tenants insist that the flats are so appalling that the money should be spent on building new houses in their place. CAMERAWORK Collecting firewood from the rubble of redevelopment in the Lower Falls. Since the start of the troubles, sectarian threats and violence have caused over 60,000 mainly working-class Catholics and Protestants to move from religiously mixed areas to ‘safe’ ghettos. This has overstretched an already appalling housing problem. A family is still living in a house on the left. Two youths are held for an identity (P) check outside the city centre. They are bored and resentful of a procedure which is a part of daily life for many Catholics, particularly the youths. abuse this security measure and employ it as a form of harassment. Unemployed youths on a street comer. Lower Falls. Catholic unemployment is 2Vi times that of Protestants, and in the ghetto areas like this, unemployment runs at about 40%. It is very simple for the army to The Youth Employment Scheme pays £20 per week and trains both sexes in manual skills. However, the fundamental problem of a massive job shortage remains unchanged. The gun is a toy. Many Catholic kids identify with the Provisional IRA who they refer to as the Army - British soldiers are simply ‘Brits’. Identifica­ tion will continue to change into membership so long as they feel oppressed and harassed by ‘Brits’. 4 CATHOLIC WEST BELFAST Although the Catholic Church still dominates the education of children, its spiritual presence is felt most strongly by the older generations. The funeral of three IRA men who were shot by the army and RUC while planting a bomb at an industrial site in Belfast. The shooting was so indiscriminate that a Protestant passer-by was also killed. Almost 19,000 people, including army and RUC, have been killed, and almost 20,000 have been injured in Northern Ireland over the last 10 years. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- -- -- -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -! - - - - — - - - - - - ~ - - - - - - - - - I I I One of the regular marches in the Falls Road demanding political status for the Republican prisoners in H-block of Long Kesh prison. Almost 400 prisoners are naked, except for a blanket at night; living in filth and squalor, refusing to wear prison uniform or undertake cleaning duties until they are accorded political status. Some of the prisoners have been ‘on the blanket’ for over 2 years. H I mu A soldier peers down his telescopic sight; in the background hijacked vehicles bum to mark the anniversary of internment. As long as the British Government fails to take any initiative for the removal of British troops from Northern Ireland, ‘solutions’ will be backed by violence, and the army will be increasingly seen -both here and abroad —as an army of occupation. » s every person who is actively interested in the war in Ireland knows,if you want to find out what’sreally happening you ^ JBLhave to resign yourself to buying the Irish Times and other Irish publications. This applies even if you want to read speeches on the subject made by MPs at Westminster. After all, which British paper gave the full text of Gerry F itt’s speech explaining why he was unable to support the Labour Government in the crucial vote of confidence that brought it down - or reported that the reason for Frank Maguire’s abstention in the same vote was the govern­ ment’s refusal to grant political status to prisoners in H Block? This judgement about the relative unrelia­ bility of the British press is borne out by the detailed research done by Philip Elliott of the University of Leicester (Reporting Northern Ireland, Ethnicity and the Media, Unesco 1978). Elliott concludes that the British media are heavily reliant on government and army (official) sources to provide them with accounts of incidents, that the media jump to the ‘socially acceptable’ conclusion that the Provisional IRA is responsible for all violence, and that they con­ centrate on simplicity and human interest in the presentation of stories and neglect political background. While the Irish media, and especially the openly censored broadcasting service Radio Telefis Eireann, are not exempt from criticism, Elliott finds that ‘generally the Irish papers were much more open about the information available to them, the relative value they put on it and so the account of events that seemed to them the most plausible.’ He continues: ‘In Britain scepticism of the official account was rarely shown. Such accounts were usually explicitly identified so the reader was presented with them on a take it or leave it basis. The Irish media often went further, not just printing alternatives but dropping versions, including official versions, they no longer believed and taking on themselves the responsibility of pointing the reader in the right direction. More­ over the Irish media were less inclined to concentrate on simplicity and human interest in their presentation of the news. Partly this was because they were less preoccupied with the single story of violence in the north and more concerned about political developments and the political future of the province.’ Elliott notes that while the Irish and British establishment newspapers share the assump­ tions of ‘liberal western democracies’ about factors such as what constitutes legitimate political activity, the main difference between them ‘was one of national ideology, based on the different involvement of the two nation states in the Northern Ireland conflict.’ In fact in Britain today there are two funda­ mentally conflicting views about British involvement in Northern Ireland. On the one hand the major parliamentary parties hold that N orthern Ireland is an integral part of the ‘United Kingdom’ and that the army is involved in a peace-keeping operation cum war against a small band of criminals. This view is at odds with majority opinion in Britain, which opinion polls have repeatedly demonstrated is in favour of withdrawal from Northern Ireland - the most recent poll, conducted by Yorkshire Television, showed a 56% majority in favour of withdrawal. The single major paper to back the majority view has been the Daily Mirror. In calling for withdrawal, the Mirror is reflecting the opinion of a liberal section of the establishment that in the long term this offers the only hope of stability for Ireland, and is at the same time, acknowledging the popularity of the call for withdrawal. The remainder of the press has stayed firmly within the framework of the parliamentary bipartisan policy. In terms of the quality of reportage, the costs of so doing has been high. For, as an increasing number of journalists are coming to realise, to present the situation in Northern Ireland as the authorities would have us see it requires that the truth be doctored. The British authorities run a large public rela­ tions operation in Northern Ireland. Andrew Stephen reported in the Observer of 29th February 1976 that ‘The Army alone has more than 40 press officers operating in Ulster, and they have a back-up staff of over 100. The RUC have a full-time team of 12 press officers, and the Government employs 20 Belfast-based people, specifically briefed to deal with the press.’ The Army’s PR machine is the most exten­ sive and influential. Guardian journalist Simon Hoggart has written, ‘When the British press prints an account of an incident as if it were an established fact, and it is clear that the reporter himself (sic) is not on the spot, it is a 99 per cent certainty that it is the army’s version that is being given.’ (.NewSociety, 11th October 1973) The army of course is not a neutral supplier of news. It sees press relations - and this has been CAMERAWORK fact been shot from behind and had not touched any weapons. When the then Northern Ireland Secretary, 'I'v e alw a y s assu m ed th e official line is we put the Roy Mason, suggested in 1976 that there should a rm y 's version first an d then an y o th e r/ be a D-notice system to control the dissemina­ tion of news from Northern Ireland, there was - BBC TV new s su b -ed ito r an outcry from the ‘quality’ press. But the effects Mason desired have largely been achieved without direct government interven­ tion. Some newspaper editors have openly stated their allegiances. In November 1971, a month after torture of internees had been revealed in the Sunday Times (two months after this was common knowledge in Ireland), and when allegations of censorship were growing, the Daily Express warned, ‘While British troops are involved in fighting a terrorist-anarchist organi­ sation . . . there is no room for impartiality . . . There is no question here of political censor­ ship . . . people who bomb, kill and maim in order to smash the fabric of society put them­ selves outside the normal conventions, which include freedom of speech . . . the soldier or the policeman who never knows where the next shot will come from deserves support in a hazardous and desperately difficult task. The snide remark which undermines his morale is almost as bad as the sniper’s bullet.’ (11th November 1971) On the same day the Daily Mail deplored the appearance of the ‘apologists of violence . . . lounge suited and sitting in a [television] studio’, and went on to say, ‘all newspapers and all TV producers must take a far more critical attitude to what is, directly or indirectly, IRA propaganda.’ The press has proved willing to go along with the propaganda emanating from the authorities. In 1975 when Scotland Yard wished to dub Margaret McKeamey ‘BRITAIN’S MOST WANTED WOMAN TERRORIST’ in order to create a smokescreen on behalf of the Northern Ireland office, the papers were happy to convict her in inch-high letters on their front pages. Again, in 1978, the papers were happy to oblige the police - who wished to prove that they were protecting the nation with zeal and deter­ mination after a spate of bombings in London by describing the innocent Cornelius McHugh as ‘Bald Eagle’, ‘mastermind’ of the IRA bombings. On occasion the papers will do their bit without any prompting. In 1976 the Daily Express caused an outcry among the Irish community in Britain with the story that Irish people were heading a £200 million social Photomontage Peter Kennard security swindle and channelling millions of pounds to the IRA. The story was subsequently exposed as a myth by a government ministry. Steve Chibnall, in his book Lavo-and-Order News (Tavistock 1977) recounts how following the trial at Winchester of the people charged with the bombing of the Old Bailey in 1973, journalists collaborated to produce a fictional story, which involved an IRA plot to kidnap ten English villagers as hostages against the release of the convicted bombers. One journalist refused to submit the story because he thought ‘WAS IT MURDER BY MISTAKE?’ The rest it was ridiculous: his office told him, ‘If you spelled out by counter-insurgency expert of the press pursued the same theme with the prove to be w'rong then you’ll have to answer for General Frank Kitson - as an important front on exception of the Guardian, but, while Simon it.’ which the war is being fought. Kitson has Winchester suggested that ‘Protestant written that the government must ‘promote its Often a story acquires propaganda value extremists’ were responsible, the bulk of his simply through the slant put on it by headlineown cause and undermine that of the enemy by article was devoted to the army’s theories. disseminating its view of the situation, and this writers. The Evening Standard of 4th March Loyalist paramilitaries have mainly tried to 1977 producing the mind-bending headline, involves a carefully planned and coordinated achieve their political aims through the random ‘Faulkner, target of IRA, dies in fall from campaign of what for want of a better word must association of Catholics - using this grisly tactic horse.’ And, in January 1978, when the regrettably be called psychological operations.’ whenever British security policy appears to Guardian reported the Fair Employment In practical terms this means firstly maintain­ them to be going ‘soft’ on the IRA. Thus, Agency’s finding that Catholics in Northern ing the army’s image as a ‘peace-keeping’ force, Loyalists have been chiefly responsible for Ireland were two and half times more likely to which involves minimising violence committed sectarian assassinations. However, this fact did be unemployed than Protestants, and more by the security forces, and projecting a flattering not tally with the authorities’ aim of depicting likely to have unskilled jobs, the headline ran: view of the army. (This includes such things as the IRA as the main threat. So -a s a senior Irish ‘Catholics Fail to Climb Jobs Ladder’ providing provincial papers with photos of local journalist revealed to the Leveller of June 1978 - implying that it was the Catholics’ fault, rather boys on the front line). Secondly, ‘undermining the Northern Ireland Office requested editors than a structural problem of the Northern the enemy’s cause’ is achieved by blackening the and reporters not to state the religions of the Ireland state. name of the IRA (blaming it with all acts of (mostly Catholic) victims of such assassinations. violence including those committed by Loyalists British journalists, as well as editors, have When soldiers are responsible for deaths, the their allegiances. In his book In Holy Terror, and the security forces) and by denying the army press statements - duly taken up by the Guardian journalist, Simon Winchester - one of Republican Movement its chance to put across press - flow thick and fast, frequently contra­ the better reporters on Ireland - confesses to its political perspective. dicting one another. When 12-year-old Majella voicing more regret at the death of a British Elliott found that, during the periods he O ’Hare was shot by a soldier in 1976, the army soldier than at the deaths of two Irish men: studied, the main concentration in the media first said she was shot when a gunman opened ‘There was an indefinable feeling of being in a was on Republican - or supposedly Republican fire on a patrol, then said that she was shot in foreign country in Ireland - North or South - violence, while, in fact, during those periods, crossfire. The police later revealed that the only and, it must be admitted, there was some identi­ fifteen Catholics, six Protestants, one member bullets had been fired by a paratrooper. of the security forces and one other, were killed. fication, some commonality between the Again, when 13-year-old Brian Stewart died ordinary British squaddie on the street and the The army’s handling of the bombing of in 1976 - after his skull had been smashed by a ordinary British reporter or photographer who McGurk’s Bar in 1971 provides a potent soldier’s plastic bullet - the army invented a riot followed him around and wrote about him or example of how this media bias is achieved. in which Brian had ‘unfortunately’ been killed. took pictures of him or whatever.’ Fifteen people were killed in the bombing of Later, an army spokesman appeared on TV to this Catholic pub in Belfast, and all the evi­ Aside from their personal inclinations, call Brian a ‘leading stone-thrower’. dence at the time pointed to Loyalist responsi­ journalists come under pressure from their bility. In 1978, Robert James Campbell, a 42And when 16-year-old John Boyle was shot editors to report the authorities’ views and to year-old Loyalist, was convicted of the 15 by the SAS in 1978, the army’s first statement slant the news to match the official perspective. murders and given a recommended sentence of claimed that a patrol had challenged three In part, this is due to the media convention that 25 years. Yet at the time the army gave a press armed men, and that when one of the ‘terrorists’ if news is to have any weight it must come from conference asserting that an IRA bomb had ran away the patrol shot and killed him. Their ‘authoritative sources’ or ‘experts’ recognised exploded in transit. The Times fell for this hook, next statement said that John had been killed by the establishment. Steve Chibnall writes. line and sinker, announcing, ‘Blast that killed when he pointed an Armalite at the patrol. Sub­ sequent police evidence showed that John had in 15 may have been IRA error.’ The Sun cried, Continued on page 18 The British Press and Ireland CAMERAWORK The Economics of Sectarianism The visitor to Belfast wanting to flee the red­ brick drabness and dourness of the city for the more heady delights of Dublin a hundred miles away, has to drive along the Ml, one of Northern Ireland’two motorways for the first s six miles of the journey. The first mile or so of that journey presents the traveller with a micro­ cosm o f Northern Ireland and much o f the reason for the last decade o f violence. On the left is Protestant South Belfast and at that edge o f the motorway lies a huge industrial estate with factories, warehouses, garages, and banks - employing nearly two thousand people. Like a sword, the motorway cuts that part o f the city into two separate and distinct parts. On the right hand side lies Catholic West Belfast, and it too has an industrial estate reaching down to the motorway. But this one is different. Half the buildings are empty and most o f the others contain businesses tottering on the edge of bankruptcy. Less than five hundred people work in this estate. Northern Ireland is full o f sharp divisions such as that created by the M l motorway. The biggest o f them is one that cuts the west of Northern Ireland from the east, and follows a line gouged out by the river Bann. To the west o f the Bann lie Derry city and the counties of Fermanagh, Tyrone, Derry and South Armagh, over 400,000 people live west o f the Bann and nearly 70% o f them are Catholic. East of the Bann contains Belfast, and counties Antrim, Down and North Armagh. Over a million people live here and over 70% of them are Protestant. But that line is more than a sectarian ruler - like the M 1motorway, the Catholic side o f the Bann has massive unemployment, while the Protestant side enjoys relative prosperity. Ever since 1920 the Catholic population has suffered enormous unemployment and poverty. And, given that over the years that situation has been institutionalised, there is little hope of change without radical political and economic restructuring. The economic advantages of the present situation to business are the same as they were in the 19th century, when Northern Ireland’ prosperous factory owners and s business class flocked to join the Orange Order and built the Unionist party. A working class divided into Protestant and Catholic is a weak working class. A weak working class is more profitable. It is that legacy that has torn Northern Ireland to pieces in the past decade and given Protestant workers the illusion that they have something to lose if the link with Britain were severed. On the face o f it, Northern Ireland would appear to suffer a generally severe unemploy­ ment problem, but the present workless rate hovering between 11% and 13% - disguises more than it reveals. It disguises, conveniently for British politicians, the plight of the mainly Catholic area west o f the Bann. Here unemploy­ ment is, and has been since 1920, astronomically high. Strabane in the far west, for instance, has 28.5% o f its working population idle while other towns are not much better off. Newry, on the border, has an unemployment rate o f 24.6%, Cookstown has 23%, and Derry 18%. Similarly, the lower than average rate o f 9% for Belfast fails to reveal the dire state o f West Belfast (on the wrong side o f the Ml) where, in areas like Andersonstown and Ballymurphy, unemploy­ ment has been unofficially estimated to range from 30% to 50%. It doesn’take a statis­ t tical genius to work out that the problem of unemployment in Northern Ireland is a Catholic one. In fact, a government antidiscrimination body, the Fair Employment Agency, has admitted that for every Protestant on the dole there are three Catholics. Furthermore, the underlying reality is that since the creation of the state unemployment has been endemic in Catholic areas. There are several reasons for this. Towns and businesses on the border were deprived, overnight, of their natural hinterland, when the North was parti­ tioned from the rest o f Ireland. Derry for instance, was once a thriving port, providing the natural outlet to Britain and elsewhere for county Donegal and much o f the West of Ireland. Similarly, Newry was once a bustling canal port importing and exporting coal, agri­ cultural produce and manufactured goods from the prosperous plains o f Ireland. Since parti­ tion, both towns have withered into economic insignificance. Far from pouring financial aid into the floundering west o f the Bann, successive Unionist governments since 1920 have done all in their power to ensure that it never recovered from post-partition shock. When it came to constructing economic and social infrastruc- Soldiers pay a routine visit to the Delorian car factory. Located in Twinbrook, West Belfast, between Catholic and Protestant estates, the British government has invested £52 million in grant aid to attract the factory to Northern Ireland. The project was initially presented as providing 2,000 jobs, the majority of which would go to relieve the massive Catholic unemployment in Belfast. But the company is run by hard-headed business men and the majority o f jobs will go to those who have the appropriate skills. This means, because of the prevailing structure o f employment in Northern Ireland, that most employees will in fact be Protestants. ture, Unionism behaved as if the west didn’ t exist. In the 1950s one of the two rail links to Derry was axed, making it even more unlikely that an investor would choose the city to site a factory. In the Sixties the plans for a new University were changed. Instead of going to Derry, where there already existed a college o f University status, it went to the Unionist stronghold of Coleraine, just on the eastern side of the Bann. The first motorway, the M 1 was not built to , Derry, and not even to link up via Newry with Dublin in the future, but to the staunchly Protestant town o f Dungannon via Lisburn, the present headquarters o f the British Army in Northern Ireland. The second motorway, built ten years ago, services the Loyalist town of Larne, whose electricity power station workers brought the government down in 1974, and it services Ballymena, stamping ground o f Ian Paisley. Similarly, even though the neighbour­ ing towns o f Lurgan and Portadown, both Unionist strongholds, had few unemployment problems, the Unionists chose Craigavon, named after their first prime minister, as a site for a new town and growth spot. Northern Ireland’electricity stations - which were built s in the forties and fifties - were all sited near Belfast and the province’only airport was built s just north o f Belfast. Nearly 30,000 houses, almost a quarter o f the total stock in Belfast, are considered unfit for human habitation. Another 61,000, just over half, need repairs or improvements. Nearly 40% o f the 113,000 households in Belfast have a weekly income o f £25 or less. 16% o f these households are overcrowded. 60,000 people have fled from mixed areas under threat to comparatively safe, but slummy, ghettos, leaving 10,000 houses bricked up and decaying. am/ Braces Roadshow .................... ............................................... These infra-structures, built by Unionist governments, ensured that industry would be attracted to the mainly Protestant eastern part of the land. The west could rot, and o f course it did. Unemployment soared and the only route to a decent standard of living was on the emigra­ tion boat. Since most o f those who left were Catholic - and therefore hostile voters, and allegedly prodigious breeders o f future oppo­ nents - unemployment in the west was actually to the electoral advantage o f Unionism. Belfast was a different problem. In Belfast there existed a substantial number o f Catholics. T o ensure that they didn’ share in the city’ t s prosperity and thus undermine Protestant workers’ illusion o f well-being, an overt policy o f discrimination was the order o f the day. Sectarian hatreds would be deliberately inflamed and Catholics were regularly ejected from Harland and Wolff shipyard and from other factories where they had managed to gain t a toehold. T o ensure that Catholics didn’ receive training for industrial skills, Govern­ ment Training Centres were sited in the Protes­ tant eastern and northern parts of the city. The only two training centres located in West Belfast were built in the sixties and are concentrated almost exclusively on building skills - an industry in which 20% o f Catholics work. Catholics in Belfast have always shared the three same stark choices as their counterpans west of the Bann: emigration, unemployment, or casual work in building or farming. For these reasons, any new industry looking for investment potential in Northern Ireland is inevitably propelled towards Protestant Northern Ireland. There is skilled labour accustomed to factory discipline, good road and communication systems, and access to the large British and European markets. In the fifties and sixties, when Northern Ireland experienced a wave o f foreign investment, eleven o f the twelve large multi-nationals located themselves east of the Bann - and there is no reason to suppose they would act any differently now. The present economic crisis however, has some substantial differences. For the first time since the ‘ hungry thirties’Protestants in large , numbers are beginning to join the dole queues. And this is because they work in technologybased industries that are often at the centre of any general economic decline. The present economic policies o f the British government are unlikely to see them off the dole queues; together with a radicalisation brought about by appalling housing conditions, the coming years could see Protestants in unfamiliar, economic conflict with their bosses. In November last year the seriousness o f the economic situation in Northern Ireland was offi­ cially recognised. The then Industry Minister described the outlook as ‘ grim’ and estimated that a further 30,000 jobs on top of the present level o f job creation was needed to reduce unemployment to 7% by 1981. The Ministry of Commerce has since revised that figure upwards to 40,000, and the Economist Intelligence Unit has predicted an unemployment rate o f 18% by 1981. Whatever the differences between the experts, it is clear that Northern Ireland faces a dramatic recession. The present economic strategy to fight unemployment will, in fact, make the situation worse. The government depends on an extra­ ordinarily generous package of incentives to attract industry to Northern Ireland - but the structure o f that package ensures that the type of industry attracted will hold out the least hope of further job creation. According to a government spokesman, investors in Northern Ireland need pay only 60 pence per £100 invested to set up shop in Northern Ireland. Capital grants are at 50%, electricity charges half the domestic rate and there are 50 per cent research and development grants. Altogether £700 million has been made available for industrial incentives over the next five years; but they are all grants likely to be most attractive to technology-based, capitalintensive industries having an in-built impulse to reduce dependency on labour. Thus in order to provide jobs, the present strategy will create greater future unemployment. It is also a policy that has in the past led to vast sums being paid out to industrialists who move out as soon as the grants have expired, and also led to open-handed largesse for charismatic entrepreneurs like John Z. De Lorean and his mysterious car factory. Significantly, the United States now seems on the point o f over­ taking Britain as the largest single investor in both parts o f Ireland. Similar generous incen­ tives exist in the South o f Ireland, and Tip O ’ eill’ recent pronouncements on Northern N s Ireland take on added significance in this light. ‘ John B ull’ Other Island’ rapidly becoming s is ‘ Uncle Sam’ 52nd State’ s . Adding to the existing economic misery. Northern Ireland can only expect more of the same from the new Tory administration. Tory policies on the sale o f council housing will badly hit Northern Ireland’ already low stock of s housing, and public spending cuts (£23 per man, woman and child) can only swell the dole queues. The outlook for Northern Ireland’working s class is indeed ‘ ’Self-help solutions, such grim . as the creation o f co-operatives, seem woefully inadequate given the size of the problem. The only glimmer o f hope, short of a total British withdrawal, lies in the possible radicalisation of Protestant workers. Bad housing, poverty and unemployment have always been the lot of Catholic workers, and now, Protestant workers are beginning to experience the bitter taste. Whether they react by retreating into their prejudices or emerge to find common cause with their Catholic compatriots is a question that will for some while have to remain unanswered. Ed Moloney Workers’ Research Unit, Belfast CAMERAWORK The photograph is a powerful weapon in the armoury of autho­ rity in Northern Ireland. Its main use is to put people in prison. Camerawork received this report about an ex-army photographer through the post. Tom Atkins is a soldier in Northern Ireland. He moves with an alert spring in his step. For most of his years in the British Army, Tom Atkins has been a photographer. He has already spent four tours in Northern Ireland where the photograph is as important a weapon as the bullet - rubber or lead - and the baton; where pictures have sent as many people to prison as ‘information received’. The most innocent use of photographs in N orthern Ireland is for public relations. Soldiers are photographed suitably heroically, and the photograph is sent to their local news­ paper, kind o f ‘local boy makes good’ stuff. The same pictures are used in the Army’s own N orthern Ireland magazine Visor. Most of Tom Atkins’ work in Northern Ireland is for Intelligence. He takes photo­ graphs from low flying helicopters of all the Army and police ‘forts’ and the maze of streets that surround them in Belfast and Derry. These are used to brief soldiers before they patrol an area or begin a cordon and search operation. Senior officers use photographs to report upwards, like salesman reporting to their marketing manager. Elaborate tape-slide pro­ grammes are prepared at the Lisburn head­ quarters every four to six weeks for this purpose. Hundreds of things are copied - documents, photographs. One IRA funeral can be attended by three or four photographers ‘all working for the same organisation - the State . . .’ ‘There would be the Special Branch photog­ rapher and several other photographers from units on the ground in the area. There might even be someone fioni another organisation. There they all are, all photographing the same event and all churning out copies. The whole thing is quite chaotic. Sometimes the photo­ grapher from one unit might not have pictures of certain things, and none of the others would be willing to part with their negatives. They send him a print, and he would have to copy it to churn out more prints. Churn out and churn out - an enormous quantity.’ The output of prints is vast. At one riot he might take sixty to seventy 120 films and twenty 35mm films. Six prints will be made of every single frame, almost 10,000 prints. They are printed on an automatic machine. ‘The photog­ rapher just sits there for hours and hours churning out piles of these prints . . . they literally have to be picked up in a vehicle. Two men, four men couldn’t carry them. There will be a whole Land Rover full of prints . . . ’ The prints go to Intelligence collators. ‘They find key people, put little chinagraph rings round them and put them in their file. It’s unbelievable the amount of information. In one intelligence section they have a whole office of collators and that is for, well, not a small town, but not a particularly big area. All a collator does is collate information. They don’t do anything else but just sit there for at least eight hours a day, often more, and put informa­ tion into an index that can be referred to. That’s all they’re doing all day. And of course, there’s a large investment in computer involvement in all this as well.’ Photographers often work together using both video and stills equipment. They are pro­ tected by a bodyguard of soldiers and often accompanied by someone from Army intelli­ gence or the Special Branch. ‘They stand behind you during a riot and say: ‘Get a picture of him’ or look through their binoculars and say: ‘That guy, third from left, get a good picture of him! They must have a massive file system.’ ‘Northern Ireland is really a very small place; you can drive from one end to the other in a couple of hours. There are thousands of people there (one and a half million, the population of Birmingham) but the personalities are known. Not just the leaders, but a hell of a lot of the ordinary people involved are actually known by sight. Not necessarily by the photographer, but by the Special Branch and by the intelligence officers whose job it is to know. They can put a name to a face.’ Funerals are a favourite place for the Army to take photographs. ‘They often get uniformed people, and if you get a photograph of a uniformed person, you’ve got someone in jail for five years. It used to be two years but it’s five years now. So the Army takes photographs of people at funerals. ‘And then rallies - you know - where people stand up and speak, because there are all these lovely laws about what you can say. If you stand up and say you don’t like the British, that’s incitement to racial hatred. ‘Maire Drumm spent so many years of her life in jail for doing just that. She did nothing else but stand there and say ‘Let’s get the British out of here, it’s not their country’, and she spent years in jail just for that . . .’ Photographs are used in court in many diffe­ rent ways. ‘During Internment, which lasted a long time, it was evidence. I mean, Internment was a big excuse to get by the law and just put away anybody you wanted put away. So photo­ graphs were used as evidence. Internment just meant a judge sitting in a room without any­ body else but the Army and maybe a few legal people, but basically they’d just sit around a table and say, ‘Look, we’ve got a few pictures here of so-and-so going into this house, obviously meeting somebody. Let’s shut them away. They’re obviously involved.’ And that was enough, whereas in a court of law, proof is needed.’ Since Internment, much the same thing happens as far as photographs are concerned. They are acceptable in a court of law as evi­ dence. That’s how photographs are used. ‘If you’ve got hardly any evidence on some­ body the police use the argument that they know all the time. And, in fairness, seventy per cent of the time, maybe more, they’re right, they do know. But that’s not the way that law works. It’s not fair. You can involve so many innocent people simply by saying ‘I know’. ‘In Southern Ireland it only takes a police inspector to say: ‘I know that he is a member of the IRA’. That’s all the evidence you need - a police inspector or above - to say just that. You don’t need anything else. It’s not quite as bad as that in Northern Ireland. So they have to prove it, and photographs are often used as the only evidence, except for police people, Special Branch people, standing up in court and saying ‘It is known, we know, we’ve seen it.’ Apart from that, that’s about the only evidence and the thing is, it’s such crude, ridiculous evidence, because very often the photographs are taken from a long way away, with long lenses, but still involving big blow-ups.’ One ‘suspect’ he photographed had long, lank dark hair and was clean shaven. When he appeared in court he had quite short, neat hair and a beard. ‘There’s no way you could tell him from the photograph, but he was put away. The whole thing’s a ritual really, it doesn’t actually matter. You could put in a photograph of Edward Heath and it would do as well. It’s just like, it’s a photograph, and there’s something you can grab hold of and call evidence. It’s not always used like that, but quite often.’ ‘Photographers are used to build up a picture of someone, I mean metaphorically build up a kind of dossier, so that you can look it up and see that this guy was in a riot here and a meeting there and he went to this funeral. Having built up a lot, then you decide that this particular person is really worth having a look at.’ Army photographers also take the ‘gory’ pictures, showing the results of bombings. ‘Bits of bodies strewn about in the various corners of a room. Then there are the ‘slab shots’ - shots of bodies on the slab cut up for a post mortem and put together again very roughly. Those are nauseating. They do literally turn your stomach.’ ‘Gory’ pictures are very popular among the soldiers as pin-ups. ‘I know it sounds incredible. Especially if it is known, like lots of the names are known by ordinary soldiers, like one of the leaders of the ProVos blows himself or herself up - there are lots of women in the IRA - then the ‘gory’ produced from that would be very popular. People would see it and maybe have copies.’ Photographers work at various levels of secrecy. Most openly, they wear uniform along­ side other soldiers at a riot. They may be wearing the same gear as the heavy squad - flak jacket, visor and helmet. Slightly more covertly, photographers also work in civilian clothes. This is often because the Army does not have the six or seven men needed to provide a body­ guard. They use various kinds of cover. The Army and police own thousands of civilian cars in Northern Ireland. For some time Army photographers working in civilian clothes used press cards. Unfor­ tunately for the Army, all the photographers used the same card. The IRA soon realised that anybody with one of those cards was from the Army. ‘We kind of ceremoniously burned our cards.’ ‘Ideology in the Army is total. Soldiers really believe. I have seen soldiers cleaning up in the Glasgow dustmen’s strike, cleaning up the streets, and I’ve actually talked to soldiers who lived on the street they were cleaning up, and one of them whose father was a striking dust­ man, and he didn’t see that as a problem. They really do see it as some kind of glamour. They really do believe you should do anything you’re told. That’s what being a soldier is about.’ ‘Being a professional soldier is being totally obedient, and that’s what professionalism is all about. I suppose being a professional photog­ rapher is being able to do almost anything and turn out the goodies, turn out what’s wanted. Well, in the Army that kind of professionalism involves doing exactly what you’re told, regard­ less. I’ve met soldiers in the artillery, in the infantry in Ireland, who are actually on patrol in their own streets, doing house-to-house searches, turning people out of bed at three o’clock in the morning, pulling their wallpaper down, and their curtains - on the street where they live. That sounds ridiculous to a civilian, but in the Army it’s not. It’s professionalism.’ ‘Any kind of notion of subverting the Army is ridiculous. They are loyal to the last, and there’s just no area of dissension at all. If there is, they get out. People who dissent get out. There are a number of people who have left. I know of an intelligence operator who just got so pissed off watching their Sergeant beating the shit out of helpless Irish kids in a chair for information, that they just got out. But it very rarely happens that people’s consciences get touched at all.’ ‘The biggest heroes in the Army are One Para - the guys who opened fire on Bloody Sunday. Like it’s something you boast about in the Army, that you were in Londonderry on Bloody Sunday, that you know, or you were there. To be one of the Paras is the ultimate, but even to be vaguely connected with that operation is some­ thing that you boast about. So ideology is total.’ Tom Atkins was once too shocked to take photographs of soldiers beating up an un­ conscious man. The man had come forward by himself and the fighting had died down because both sides thought he was asking for a truce. It happens like that - someone comes forward and says, ‘Look, we’re willing to go home if you let us. We’re willing to call a halt.’ When this man had got close enough, he threw the brick hidden behin
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      • archiveFour Corners Bishopsgate
      • vimeo_link
      • authorSee sections X to AC
      • author_editorSantiago Castrillon, Mike Goldwater, Liz Mackie, Jenny Matthews, Tom Picton, Richard Platt, Shirley Read, Kate Saunders, Siddhiratna
      • author_writerJohn A. Walker, Graham Wade, Judith Rugg, Mark Haworth-Booth, Laurie Flynn, Jessica James, Jenny Matthews, Malcom Green, Theodore Scheimpflug
      • author_photographerPeter Kennard, Helmut Newton, Marcia Resnick, Judith Rugg, Larry Herman, Barry Lewis, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Humphrey Spender, Christopher Ekani
      • author_designer
      • author_intervieweeHazel Peasley
      • author_organisation
      • tagsfantasy,humour,advertising,benson & hedges,adverts,deconstruction of media,media representation,de-coding advertising,cigarettes,woman's identity,self-image,angela kelly,larry herman,clydeside,shipbuilding,shipyards,labour,being disabled,a kind of life,helvard kjaervik,photographic collecting,photographers' gallery,limelight,lunn gallery,v&a,cameroon,west africa,congo,jumble sale,fees for freelancers,
      • titleCamerawork Magazine - Issue 15
      • subtitleIssue 15: Images of the Disabled
      • dimension17 pages
      • ocr1
      • copyrightFour Corners, John A. Walker, Graham Wade, Mark Haworth-Booth, Laurie Flynn, Jessica James, Jenny Matthews, Malcom Green, Theodore Scheimpflug, Peter Kennard, Helmut Newton, Marcia Resnick, Judith Rugg, Larry Herman, Barry Lewis, Henri Cartier-Bresson © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, Humphrey Spender, Christopher Ekani, Hazel Peasley
      • credits
      • related
      • locationBethnal Green, London, UK (pg 6,7) Clydeside, Scotland, UK. Glasgow, Scotland, UK (pg 10) Southampton, UK (pg 12,13) USA, Canada, Europe (pg 14) Cameroon, West Africa
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      • pdf_textRailway workers at Clapham Junction by Barry Lewis. From ‘Coming and Going’ an HMPW Touring Exhibition about travelling in London. Larry Herman Mark Haworth-Booth Jenny Matthews John A. Walker Judith Rugg Images of the Disabled N o 15 Half Moon Photography Workshop $1.75 1 CAMERAWORK Photomontage by Peter Kennard People who worked on this issue of Camerawork were Santiago Castrillon, Mike Goldwater, Liz Mackie, Jenny Matthews, Tom Picton, Richard Platt, Shirley Read (co-ordinator), Siddhiratna. is designed to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, views and information on photography and other forms of communication. By exploring the application, scope and content of photo­ graphy, we intend to demystify the process. We see this as part of the struggle to learn, to describe and to share experiences and so contribute to the process by which we grow in capacity and power to control our lives. This issue of Camerawork, September 1979, was produced by the Publishing Project, Half Moon Photography Workshop, 119 Roman Road, London E2. 01-980 8798. SUBSCRIBE TO CAMERAWORK: A full subscription to Camerawork includes six issues, posters and invitations for our exhibitions. The cost for this is £6.50 (students £5.00). Subscription to Camerawork alone is £4.50 for six issues. Institutional subscription (which includes posters and invitations) is £12.00 for six issues. Overseas subscriptions by surface mail cost £1.00 in addition to the above costs. For details of air mail rates please contact us. Send to H.M .P.W ., 119 Roman Road, London E2 0QN. Tel: 01-980 8798. (ISSN 0308 1676) CAMERAWORK From ‘Possessions’ by John Hedgecoe Through the Lens Fantasy Early morning and a rush to the tube. Time to note a new face on the hoarding at the end of the road - a female raincoat flasher, selling bras it seems. Past the ticket collector - the sultry blonde selling peanuts and temptation has gone to join the other ghosts of the underground, the disembodied legs seeking the answer to their riddle ‘When was the last time a man said you had a great pair of jeans?’ and the vamp on the tiger skin waiting for the fire to be lit, two amongst a cast of thousands. Finding my eyelevel coincides with a female crutch I look up to find a leg erect in the air - ostensibly selling tights, but in reality communicating a whole lot more. It’s still only 8.30 and already I’ve been bombarded by images of women who neither look nor behave anything like me. The women’s movement has made an effort to attack sexist imagery in advertising but all too often the ad agencies, realising they have gloss and an ideal world on their side, go on to use sexual humour and exaggeration to capture hearts and minds. So the juicy, fruity, fresh and cheap women disappear to become badges on a tee shirt, and other adverts slip closer to a tasteful pornography. As nakedness becomes less of a taboo the debate over pornography and sexist images hots up and the images themselves have become part of the acceptable face of consumer society. At a public debate in April 1979 Arthur Scargill, the miners leader, vigorously defended the use of pin-ups in the union paper, and, as might be expected, the Sun used its page as an integral part of the General Election campaign. The Daily Star goes so far as to advertise the paper solely on the strength of its pin-ups. Pornography may have its uses (one view on current thoughts on porno is presented in Screen Education, Spring 1979), but one of its greatest dangers is that it encourages the idea that women are unreal, part of a fantasy world. Photography has always served as a sexual surrogate. ‘Produce your own’ is one reason often given for many people getting into photo­ graphy, and the covers of magazines at both ends of the market (Amateur Photographer at 25p and Zoom at £2) tend to reinforce this equation of photography and sex. Avoiding the temptation to indulge in phallic imagery and photography, it is sufficient to note at this point that the very illusionistic potential of photo­ graphy makes pornography possible. It is against background of advertising and mild pornography that it is interesting to review three books: Helmut Newton’s Sleepless Nights, John Hedgecoe’s Possessions and Women on Women. Adverts provide a good context within which to view such books as it is through them that we are constantly confronted with female flesh. (The tabloid pin-ups can also be considered adverts since they sell more papers than hard news does). Adverts are also con­ structed images, as are many of the photos in the books in question. Contemporary advertising photography involves considerable skill and technology, obviously helped by enormous budgets. The very fact that the picture is built up means that its ‘message’ can be so much more effective than a chance social documentary shot - for each factor can be manipulated until the desired overall effect is obtained. A recent trend in advertising has also been to produce enigmatic advertisements which do not overtly state what they are selling but are designed for sophisti­ cated social groupings who can bring their cultural consciousness to the image and thus understand it. The French photographer, Guy Bourdin, for example, has for some time now produced mysterious shoe adverts for glossy magazines. One of his adverts, like a photo by Newton, is often a whole tableau vivant in itself, a frozen moment immaculately lit and photographed, with the audience left to speculate on the message. However, the audience is assumed to be visually literate and can be relied on to search for the message and decode the advert. Helmut Newton comes from this up-market commercial world (Vogue in particular) and, like Bourdin, his work has been recognised as ‘good photography’. Their photographs have become products in themselves and are repro­ duced in books and magazines. Consumer society consumes not only the final product, but also is responsible for the current vogue for publishing posters and record albums in book form. There are many issues over which it is easy to criticise Newton. Firstly, the content of his pictures: a woman is often a sex object par excellence. In one photo she is laid out on an office desk, in another she is crouched on a bed with a saddle on her back. The women are always slim, long legged, beautifully groomed and made-up. They belong to a world of fantasy - male fantasy, so they are submissive, unquestioning - their static poses are arranged for the convenience of a voyeur. Other photos simplify violence and enable a compositionally pleasing photograph to represent an event which, had it been real, would have meant danger and suffering (the bodies on the balcony). Of course there is always a limit to be pushed, bad taste made into good taste, fame obtained through outrage. But at the same time some areas are offensive because they infringe on individual freedom. Thus the outrage that exploded over an evening paper’s fashion spread on ‘Clothes to be Raped in’ can also be directed at certain of Newton’s photos. The viewer becomes involved in the aesthetic of the picture at the expense of emotional involvement with the subject. The French magazine Photo frequently brings the sex and violence angle to an even more horrific juxtaposition. In its March issue some of Helmut Newton’s photos closely followed Marc Riboud’s reportage on atrocities in Iran; the camera did not differen­ tiate between simulated and real suffering. The context in which Newton’s pictures are used also leaves a lot to be desired - they are often used to sell sex in Playboy and Oui and clothes in Vogue - in these cases catering to a readership which is striving to identify with the opulent cosmopolitan settings, and which through photography settles for a vicarious enjoyment of the unobtainable. Newton’s pictures are very much a personal indulgence, the work of someone who is privileged enough to be able to follow up his whims. In a TV programme made about him, he explained how, in the pictures with plaster casts and surgical trusses, he was following up his own obsession with Eric von Stroheim. He had great difficulty in getting hold of the equipment he wanted until a leading Paris hospital was willing to co-operate with his desire to half-dress beautiful models in casts and surgical appliances. Newton’s work is only possible because a class society means expensive, often frivolous, clothes are required by a bourgeois elite. Their ‘culture’ demands sophisticated adverts to sell them goods. Thus there is a job for a photo­ Additions by Camerawork. grapher to produce sumptuous, often risque, pictures. A mild surrealism (the floating hands) is quite permissible, as is a not so mild sadomassochism. At the same time a sexist society has created a market for images of women with beautiful and available bodies. Women are portrayed as models for the real world to imitate - imma­ culately groomed decorative beings, mere life­ less masks. In some of the photos dummies replace ‘real’ women, but it’s difficult to tell who’s the dummy - the live models themselves are only acting out a part. In this way the pictures first exploit the women who are paid to contort themselves before the camera (hilarious to watch in the TV programme where models verged on physical exhaustion whilst repeating shots from a diving board). Next men look at the pictures, recognise the fantasy, and then look for it in the world around them. This means ordinary women are exploited on a second level: for in order to ‘get their man’ they have to try to reenact the fantasy that these women are acting out, mere figments of a male’s imagination. And so the world goes round. One of the redeeming features of Newton’s work might be its humour. It is quite obvious that his pictures ridicule the very world that they portray, although one of the dangerous charms of the bourgeoisie is that it can take jokes against itself. The straight pictures that occasionally appear - the Virgin Mary, butchers shop, Andy Warhol/sleeping angel - are visual jokes on another level. They reinforce the satirical tone of the whole book, a satire which is hardly a saving grace, for all the other images have been exaggerated into seductive fantasies and present a dangerous model of how the world might be. An editor of Vogue talked about the work as ‘social comment’, but for this to mean anything it would have to go much further. Ultimately Newton is very much at home in the bilingual world of cherie/darling. He may talk of his models as ‘little beasts’ but they are decorative enough to be tolerable, and a means to his end. From behind the lens he sees the artificiality and awkwardness of the model’s poses especially as he repeats shots to get it just right and boredom sets in. However, he is also aware of the distorted fantasy he will produce: an immaculate picture of an immaculate woman, an image to keep the world working in the hope that one day it will be attainable. For the moment the viewer is always a voyeur though, outside the world portrayed, which is both exotic (as seen in its colours, locations and longlegged, self-assured women) and disturbing 3 CAMERAWORK c B E o ■s c o c E o £ a S Q £ Skie was horrified iv learn th a t she had been walking around schoolall day with her skirl hiked up in the back. (people in plaster casts, half naked women but fully dressed men, women wrapped around each other for the sake of provocation). The photos are also disturbing in the odd sense of perfection that they emanate - this comes from careful picture construction, so that nothing is left to chance, Newton has visualised the ‘scenario’ and set it up to get the maximum effect from reflections, pictures on the wall, diagonal lines, spaces, contradictions. The two titles, Newton’s Sleeping Nights and Hedgecoe’s Possessions, give an indication of how far both books are from the world where most people live. Newton’s book is not about coping with teething babies, living next to a motorway or life without Mogodon. Nor is Hedgecoe’s book about fighting for a home, stereo, washing machine or even a Ferrari. The two titles also give an indication of the style and worldview of the books, whereas Newton’s is a fantasy dream world of surfacing repressions and unreal situations, Hedgecoe’s is the fantasy of wealth, what one can possess with money . . . ‘these women are possessions, they are the beautiful expensive objects that furnish the rich man’s life and amuse him during the long hours o f his leisure. ’ Hedgecoe’s background is similar to Newton’s - his magazine assignments (for Queen) took him into the world of the upper class. He decided to stay and use the sumptuous setting as a background for his fantasies, to create a world of beautiful, passive women who are bought along with the rest of the furniture. Clive Lancaster heavily criticised the book in the British Journal of Photography No 46 (17th November 1978) and the following week Hedgecoe leapt to his own defence ‘I f you have not realized by now, Possessions is in fact a satire, debunking the reverence paid to this mode of photography. It is related to the style o f over 20 different painters and photographers containing all the cliches o f our medium today. . . If, for example, you look at the photograph . . . o f the two girls attending to their hair, you should notice that this is a David Hamilton-type pose but with a glossy magazine advertising background. Yet one girl has hair like Rip Van Winkle (look it up for signifi­ cance) and the other would not disgrace the image o f a Lancashire millgirl. As John Berger pointed out in Ways of Seeing, the relationship between painting and advertising is a well established one. On pages 136 and 137 he gives examples of adverts and the paintings they are based on. Hedgecoe does not help his reader at all, and for the joke to work presupposes a considerable knowledge of art history. But are people really reverent towards glamour and advertising photography anyway? And is this the way to satirize it - so well that it looks like the real thing? One way to effectively attack and manipulate advertising photography is through image and text, as in the work of Victor Burgin and Derek Boshier, where simple juxtaposition or the addition of text clearly show the vacuous word of glamour and advertising. Hedgecoe’s concluding statement in the BJP gives a better explanation as to why this book was produced and foisted onto an unsuspecting Christmas panic-buying world: . . Why did I produce Possessions? For the same reason that people do crosswords: because o f interest, relaxa­ tion, stimulation and I enjoyed being just a photo­ grapher for eight days.’ Great - of course people should be able to enjoy themselves (for some it’s easier than others), but unfortunately those interested or who will bother to work out the derivation of the cliches are few and far between. More buyers of the books will be enticed by the bare breasts and buttocks, thinking that this sort of photography of women is OK if it is by a photographer with academic credibility and published in a hard-back book rather than a magazine. ‘D on’t you think your work is an insult to women?’ This is the gist of the question a woman reporter asks the eponymous heroine of the film T he Eyes of Laura Mars. The film centres around a woman photographer who is trying to work out her feelings about violence, m urder and everyday life in chic New York through pictures of models in re-staged murder scenes. In fact many of the photos used in the film were taken by Helmut Newton (some of them are published in Sleepless Nights, others in his previous book. White Women.) It is very signi­ ficant that in the film the photographer is a woman, for in the battle of sexual equality it has become apparent that women are just as good as men at shooting female flesh. The underlying dangerous assumption is that if women do it, it must be OK. Whereas men are looking for a turn on, women are explaining ‘basic realities’, producing pictures which ‘truly reflect [their] minds and emotions’ and give back to women ‘their hidden and secret side’. The words in inverted commas all come from W omen on Women a female companion to M asterpieces o f Erotic Photography. This book contains portfolios from twelve women photographers, all interested in explor­ ing female bodies for one reason or another. As in the case of Newton and Hedgecoe many of these women have worked in fashion and advertising, highly competent work to sell a product, and this ethos pervades their work. Linda Benedict-Jones’ work is a notable excep­ tion, but is very lost in a sea of gloss. The personal statement each photographer makes rarely enlightens the reader - take Sarah Moon’s explanation to her work (pictures done for Cacharel, Pirelli and Nova). ‘I am an applied fashion photographer, and inside these limits I am just trying to express what I feel about a certain moment in a certain situation in which women are involved.’ At least Alice Springs is as open as her husband Helmut Newton, about what she is doing__ ‘I am a voyeuse. . . ’. The cumulative effect that emerges from the book is the rather odd idea that an attractive model can be taken as representative of women in general and that the world of fashion and its props is the ‘real’ world. Shirley Beljohn may see her work as pictures of women removed from glossy idealized roles, but photography enables her to create an equally unreal fantasy world, playing with subde colours, comic juxta­ positions, frozen shapes and moments and construct a visually interesting and provocative picture. It is not enough to mock female sexual exploitation by just changing a few of the props. As with Newton and Hedgecoe humour can be very easily misunderstood. The picture of the woman on the lavatory with her feet on a half watermelon (subtle green with red fruit flesh) can be seen as a degrading picture of a woman rather than as a satire on contrived sexual behaviour. For me the most successful section of the book is Marcia Resnick’s work which very adroitly recreates the awkward moments of adolescence. Here again humour is an impor­ tant aspect of the work. But it is society’s expec­ tations that are mocked, rather than the subject herself. The inter-relationship of image and text is absolutely vital here, and it seems at the moment that any work which is undermining, or even just satirising d o m i n a n t ideology needs image and text to make the message clear. Straight visual satire leaves itself wide open to misinterpretation. Lucy Lippard pointed out this danger in a much quoted essay in From the Centre. ‘When women use their own bodies in their art work, they are using themselves; a significant psychological factor, converts these bodies or faces from object to subject. However there are ways and ways o f using one’s own body, and women have not always avoided self-exploitation. A woman artists’s approach to herself is necessarily compli­ cated by social stereotypes. I must admit to a personal lack o f sympathy with women who have themselves photographed in black stockings, garter belts, boots, with bare breasts, bananas, and coy, come hither glances. Parody it may be . . . but the artist rarely seems to get the last laugh. A woman using her own face and body has a right to do what she will with them, but it is a subtle abyss . . . The rest of the book ranges from Caroline Arber’s rather weak version of David Hamilton to Christa Peter’s bold sumptuous glossy mag colour. Too many of the portfolios merely reflect the male dominated market for sexist images and have successfully imitated current styles without undermining them. Obviously the fault does not fully lie with photographers. They are earning a living by servicing a need the demands of a publishing industry and the products that it wants to sell because of a histori­ cally determined market. The point at which women can intervene is to be aware of the images they are producing and question ones which present women as avail­ able, passive bodies. Women on Women also suffers from a change of context. Many of the photographers first produced their work for a commercial market (the end credits acknow­ ledge Stem , Lui, Pirelli and Nova as original publishers), and this work has then been repro­ duced as a personal statement, edited by the publishers into a saleable commodity. This change of context is a problem with all three books. Newton’s is a compilation of several years commercial work brought together with fantasy as a common core to bind the whole into a product. John Hedgecoe would like us to believe he produced the book for himself, and thus sees the pictures, within his personal perspective, in a very different way to the average (male) punter to whom its being sold. Ultimately Sleepless Nights, Possessions and a good two thirds of Women on Women come up against the hurdle that advertising photography has so successfully identified images of women (especially nude or seminude) with selling that female sexuality is auto­ matically read as an integral part of the cash nexus. Humour is also a key feature in market­ ing, as well as the most insidious means of main­ taining sexist, racist, etc, stereotypes. Combine these two - women and humour - and you have a very loaded product. Any reader will have to cut through layers of cultural conditioning before these images can be seen as other than exploitative and thus degrading. Jenny Matthews Possessions John Hedgecoe (.Mitchell Beazley Publishers Ltd, London. £9.95) Sleepless Nights Helmut Newton (Quartet Books L td, London. £10.95) Women on Women Twelve photographic portfolios (Aurum Press Ltd. £14.95) 4 Although the Tate Gallery is an art institution of the British state charged with the responsibility for collecting examples of contemporary British art it does not recognize advertising photo­ graphy as art. Nevertheless, full colour advertis­ ing photography is, arguably, the true public art of our time (true in the sense that it embodies the central values of our present culture). Western art lovers sneer at the Socialist Realism of the Eastern Bloc countries but accept without demur the Capitalist Realism displayed so prominently on the streets of our cities and in our mass circulation magazines. There can be few people in Britain who have not noticed, and been intrigued by, the adverts for Benson & Hedges gold special filter cigarettes. The series is noteworthy for the high quality of its colour photography and for the inventiveness shown by the advertisers in playing variations on their basic concept of a gold box of cigarettes placed in various settings. One image from the series a view through a window to a village green - I find especially compelling: it induces in me a profound sense of gloom; this emotion is in itself somewhat unusual because most adverts celebrate positive rather than negative values. This text is an attempt to explain how the image could produce such a response. Photographers have inherited a system of pictorial representation - linear perspective perfected by painters during the Italian Renais­ sance and they have also inherited a sophisti­ cated system of pictorial rhetoric developed by the painters of Western Europe over many centuries. Avant-garde artists constantly question the languages they employ Modernism in art often implies a language crisis, a rupture with meaning - whereas advertising photographers prefer to exploit the pre-Modern heritage of Western European painting and caricature. Adverts play with linguistic and pictorial rhetoric, but since their primary function is to communicate with a specified fraction of the general public, that play is limited in order to preserve coherence and intelligibility. Some adverts, it is true, make use of the artistic innovations of Dada and Surreal­ ism - the Benson & Hedges series amongst them - but their homage to art generally stops short of total obscurity and meaninglessness. When images whose meaning is indeterminate are used (the latest Benson & Hedges adverts fall into this category), their purpose is to attract and to puzzle the viewer in order to hold his or her attention. 66 . cigarette ads are not ads for smoking, but for brands. ? ? 66 . . the cigarette industry does not need advertising to maintain its level of consumption. It needs it only for the purposes of competition. The bene­ ficiaries of that competition ultimately are the consumers. If advertising were banned the strong brands would grow stronger and the weak weaker. ? ? Quotes from Rex Van Rossum (marketing director of Carreras Rothmans (UK) ‘Cigarettes and the Right to Advertise’ Campaign 17th March 1978 pp 30-32. T he open window motif My argument that advertising photographers generally prefer to exploit the pre-modern heritage of painting is borne out, I contend, by the Benson & Hedges image under scrutiny: it makes use of a compositional device especially favoured by the painters of German Romanti­ cism, namely, the open window motif (a view of landscape seen through a window from the interior of a dark room). In an article on the iconography of Romanti­ cism Lorenz Eitner writes: ‘The pure windowview is a romantic invention - neither landscape, nor interior, but a curious combination o f both. It brings the confinement o f an interior into the most immediate contrast with an immensity o f space outside . . . I t often places the beholder so close to the window that little more than an enclosingframe o f darkness remains o f the interior, but this is suffi­ cient to maintain the suggestion o f a separation between him and the world outside. He is actually put in the position o f the ‘figure at the window’. The situation closely resembles a favourite theme in Romantic literature: the poet at the window surveys a distant landscape and is troubled by a desire to escape from his narrow existence into the world CAMERAWORK encompasses both past and future.’ However, she adds this proviso: ‘since the picture is finished and the future events are never open, but specifically directed . . . So the spectator is put in possession o f a closure, a narrative sequence which is inevitably pre-determined.’ The ideological significance of this closure will be considered later. On page 162 Williamson gives the following analysis of the Benson & Hedges advert: ‘Here the open window links the present o f the foreground to the future; it signifies promise, and the distant light in the sky bears this out. The objects in the foreground are part o f the structure o f the myth, the story o f the picture. The cricket ball and wicket show w hat has been happening: they were playing cricket when it rained and spoilt the game. The pictures inside and the old church provide a basis in The Past (this hovers on the boundary o f ‘history’ since it represents a cultural, common ‘past’). A ll these things give clues as to the type o f person this is (and we are invited to be the person . . . ) . I t is quite clear in one static shot, the story o f the situation may be told. However there is a less clear dimension involving projection: the advertisement links a mythical present (the ‘story’ already described) to a mythical future, via the product; drink/smoke this and you will be led out o f the window . . . in the direction o f the future; but a future constructed . . . out o f a mythically structured past (the old church, the tankard, etc). The perspective o f the picture helps this trans­ porting to the mythicalfuture: the edge o f the picture frame and the frame o f the open window form a bounded perspective pointing inwards to the church at the other side o f the cricket pitch. The movement is then carried up and out o f the picture, via the church spire. So in fact our vision skims over the present, the abandoned cricket pitch, the rainy window, and already lodges (imaginarily) in a brighter future. As the caption says: ‘Every cloud has a gold lining.’ This implies a deterministic ‘happy ending’ to present events - also that time is as uncontrollable as the weather; you must simply wait for the sun to come out again, or for things to improve. ’4 This analysis can be schematized as follows: Top: above, background, far, outside, future, spiritual. spread out before him . . . The window is like a threshold and at the same time a barrier. Through it, nature, the world, the active life beckon, but the artist remains imprisoned, not unpleasantly, in domestic smugness. The window image thus illus­ trates perfectly the themes o f frustrated longing, o f lust for travel or escape . . . I t contrasts w hatA .W . Schlegel called the ‘poetry o f possession’ - the intimate interior - with the ‘poetry o f desire’ - the tempting spaces outside. This juxtaposition o f the very close and the fa r away adds a peculiar tension to the sense o f distance, more poignant than could be achieved in pure landscape.’1 A number of reasons can be given for the special appeal of the interior-with-window-view motif: (1) a viewer looking at a picture gazes into an imaginary space which he or she cannot literally enter, hence the imaginary beholder’s relationship to the window parallels the viewer’s relationship to the image. Furthermore, the window view (an instance of the picture-withinthe-picture device) is placed at a double remove from the viewer thereby increasing the poign­ ancy of his or her longing to enter it; (2) the motif echoes the very structure of visual perception itself, that is, our consciousness of being located inside a head (a room) looking out through our eyes (windows) to a world beyond us. In other words, the motif seems to be a visualization of the subject/object dichotomy of philosophy; (3) the movement from dark to light, from construc­ tion to expansion, as the eyes of the beholder penetrate the depths of the picture, space dupli­ cates the passage of a child from the womb to the world during birth. The absent spectator Judith Williamson explains in her text Decoding Advertising: ‘Every advertisement assumes a particular spectator: it projects into the space out in front o f it an imaginary person composed in terms o f the relationships between the elements within the ad. You move into this space as you look at the ad, and in doing so ‘become’ the spectator.’ Adverts shout, or whisper, ‘Hey you!’; ‘The ‘ you’ in ads is always transmitted plural, but we receive it as singular.’2That is, adverts are always aimed at groups in society but they are perceived one at a time by individuals. They interpellate concrete individuals as concrete subjects (here Williamson makes use of Althusser’s writings on ideology). No one is depicted within the ad but the picture is constructed in such a way that a person is suggested outside the picture space. Analysing another ad from the same series Williamson comments: ‘The perspective o f the picture places us in a spatial relationship to it that suggests a common spatiality (as in all ‘classical’ art); everything is proportioned to the gaze o f the observer - us, the absent person ‘meant’ by the picture’ 2 When I look into the picture I occupy . the position of the abstract subject constructed by the image: I am in a darkish room looking out of a window towards the village green where the cricket match has been abandoned because of bad weather. Before me on the window ledge is a cricket ball and bails, a mug of beer, a packet of cigarettes and an old photograph. The ducks/The birdcage/The art gallery/ The Christmas tree/The mousehole 48 sheet poster series was awarded the ‘Best of the year’ honour by judges from the Design Council in 1978: 66 We felt in many ways that the Benson and Hedges series was a milestone in poster advertising. The brilliant use of surrealism arouses curiosity and has created a talking point. The series has tre­ mendous brand impact and illustrates, perhaps, how the constraints on cigarette advertising can act as a spur to creativity. We had no hesitation in choosing the Benson and Hedges ‘Birdcage’ as the best poster of the year. 66 Special Filter is selling at the rate of well over 1,000 million cigarettes a month and has emerged as the group’s most profitable brand, while some of the older lines like Senior Service, Kensitas and Park Drive have slowly faded. Ronnie Roter Quotes from “Gallaher: Lessons We Learn from our Failed Brands” Campaign 16 Feb 1979 pp 37-39. Time as a commodity In chapter seven of Decoding Advertising Williamson discusses time, narrative and history. She claims that ads ‘can represent not only an event, but a series o f events’; ads can ‘evoke the past, promise the future, or tell a story which Bottom: below, foreground, near inside, present, material. It is clear that the movement of our vision into the imaginary depths of the picture space is a movement in time (if when travelling along a road we look towards the horizon we see how far we have to travel to reach our future goal); it is an imaginary projection into the future. But that future is not merely the possibility of brighter skies and the resumption of the game of cricket but the certainty o f death. The perspective lines of the window frame direct our gaze irresistibly towards the vanishing point: the church on the horizon, the exit point of Christians. As Williamson points out, the spire exits out of the picture space (it thrusts upwards towards the heavens). We are now in a position to comprehend the melancholy character of the photograph. It is not merely the grey skies and sombre colours, it is the latent message of the image: ‘I am alone; play has stopped; my cup is full; soon I will leave this world; in the meantime there is the consolation of beer and cigarettes.’ Whether the advertisers consciously or unconsciously intended to make a connection between cigarettes and death I do not know, yet I am convinced the picture asserts such a connection. (The ‘author’s’ intention is often thought of as the ‘truth’ of a text, but this overlooks the difference between an intention and an action the two frequently fail to correspond). Cigarettes are a consolation for the inevitability of death but since cigarette smoking is a contri­ buting factor to lung cancer they also hasten death. Thus the unconscious message of the advert seems to be: ‘death is a cloud on the horizon; cigarettes bring it nearer, but on the other hand, the pleasure of smoking is to some extent a consolation for death’s inevitability.’ Ideology The photograph links a modern product with a number of traditional English values - beer, cricket, the village green, the local church, previous generations (the photo on the window ledge), and in doing so, it imparts a thoroughly quietistic worldview: ‘each individual faces death alone, you must accept it without struggle.’ The picture sees the future only in terms of the past, or rather, in terms of a particular reading of the past. That is, a reading which stresses conservative values as against, CAMERAWORK say, revolutionary values. Since I am not a smoker or a Christian the physical and spiritual consolation offered by the ad has no appeal for me. Politically I am opposed to the quietism of the ad. However, these personal reactions are not sufficient to explain the sense of unease produced by the ad, because, after all, even a non-Christian can respond sympathetically to works of art such as those by Bellini or Casper David Friedrich which were motivated by a genuine religious sentiment. Ultimately what makes the ad so hollow is the recognition that its producers have left themselves out, that is, the people who actually made the ad served simply as agents for the manufacturers —no personal commitment was involved. In all likelihood the media workers do not believe in Christianity or even in the English heritage; the only thing one can be certain they believe in is commodities and the necessity to move them. These remarks can be justified as follows: when the series of ads as a whole is examined, it becomes immediately clear that what the advertisers appropriate and manipulate are existing systems of meaning common throughout our culture (what Williamson calls ‘referent systems’); examples are: the Olympic games, the cup final, holidays abroad, the thirties, Christmas, Space travel, the pyramids of Egypt, etc. f t Cigarettes are Britain’s largest packaged goods product category. Consumer expenditure is a massive £3.5 billion per year, of which over £2.4 billion goes in revenue to the government. The industry exports over £200 million per year, employs directly over 30,000 people and indirectly, through suppliers, retailers, etc, contributes to the employ­ ment of at least two million more. Over half the adult population buys the product almost daily. It is sold through over 300,000 retail outlets and is normally their biggest turnover item. It is one of the few packaged goods that is asked for by name. It is largely consumed in public and frequently offered as a gesture of friend­ ship in social and working conditions. There are over 150 brands on sale, prices are high - an average of over 50p per pack - and competition is very keen indeed. For an industry as large and significant as this to lose its basic freedom to compete by the use of advertising would be a very serious matter indeed. Rex van Rossum Advertising has a voracious appetite for these meaning systems because it consumes them so rapidly. The problem which the media workers constantly face is to find ways of injecting new life into tired meaning systems. Advertising as a system is indifferent to the content of the meaning systems it processes. Hence, it can make use of images of the heroes of the left, and it can make use of revolutionary rhetoric - safe in the knowledge that all authentic meaning will be contained by being trivialized and made humorous. The distanced, ironic manipulations of material hostile to advertising by media workers ensure that no one misses the point: ‘When we talk of revolution, we are, of course, only joking.’ Simultaneously the system demonstrates its enormous power and flexibility: ‘Look we can assimilate and bend to our own purposes even those who are opposed to us. Don’t worry about communism, capitalism is stronger, we show you that communism is harmless, that it is not serious; rest content.’ John A. Walker John A. Walker lectures in the history of art at Middlesex Polytechnic and at West Surrey College of Art. References: (1) L. Eitner ‘The open window and the storm tossed boat: an essay in the iconography of Romanticism’ Art Bulletin 37 (4) December 1955 pp 281-290. (2) J. Williamson Decoding Advertising: Ideo­ logy and Meaning in Advertising (Marion Boyars, 1978) p 50. (3) Op cit (2) p 78. (4) Op cit (2) p 162. Photo-silkscreen by Judith Rugg (original size 655mm x 500mm) Problemsofan alternative image In between Rembrandt and early exploration of photography was the exploration of changing self-image as form. Because of the dominant nature of the medium, formal aspects of paint­ ing were primary concerns, rather than the subjective aspects of self representation. The debate around photography as Art, and the threat that photography made to the dominance of painting as two-dimensional representation at the end of the eighteenth century is reflected in the kind of imagery used by early photo­ graphers. An acceptance of the nature of painting asserts itself in the nature of the photo­ graphic image. Working from a feminist critique as a photo­ grapher, and challenging kinds of forms and imagery by working with an alternative imagery of women, one has to examine the way in which the form of photography supports the imagery. As photography is the main vehicle of commu­ nication which presents us with negative images of ourselves, what need to be examined are the mechanisms inherent in the medium which account for the success of these negative images. I see this in terms of examining the form, using the medium to comment on itself. Taking photographs (or for that matter working in any medium from a critical point of view in relation to the subject matter) necessi­ tates a recognition of all the associations that the subject matter implies. This is in addition to its presentation within a fine art context, which context implies an aesthetic. There is a paradox in what Angela Kelly describes as the essentially private practice of self-portraiture in photo­ graphy (Self Image: the Personal is Political Camerawork 12) and the presentation of the image in a public context. This public presenta­ tion affects the original intentions of the photo­ grapher, and while Angela Kelly acknowledges this in her writing, it is difficult to interpret this in her piece Woman’s Identity. At this point I should define the term ‘feminist artist’: those women who are working in a critical visual way and who have an aware­ ness of the machinations of our oppression as women, and who are attempting to subvert it in visual terms within the context of fine art. Having defined it thus, we must acknowledge and analyse the common problems: is the perspective of so-called feminist artists/ photographers necessarily evidenced in a work regardless of content and subject matter? It doesn’t seem so to me. Woman’s Identity conveys meaning on certain levels. These are altered by knowing the political/ideological point of approach of the photographer. This is not always apparent in the work itself, but in statements by the person who produced the work. The group of images presented as Woman’s Identity appear to be a collection of isolated images. There is no coherence between them. As such they are dangerously on the brink of supporting what it is they are intended to oppose. As such they do not take cognizance of the fact that because of the supportive historical system behind sexist imagery, there is no need for it to have textual explanations - the imagery locates itself automatically. We are dis­ advantaged by our images being presented in isolation, as even positive re-evaluated female imagery is in danger of being neutralised or sub­ sumed into the dominant patriarchal culture. With reference to Angela Kelly’s point that Jo Spence’s photographs are inseparable from the text, is it because of the range of associations we are conditioned to have of a media reinforced image of women? I do not necessarily agree here that the text is essential to the reading of the photographs or that the photographs are illustrating the text; surely this places the image within a particular framework - as illustration. On the same level of criticism of Angela Kelly’s point here, I would question how a visual medium could make a literal statement, since I think that Jo Spence’s photographs support themselves as images and as such are not illus­ trative to the text. An essentially visual medium has to make a visual statement, and in order to successfully disrupt the pattern which forms the ways images of women are received and under­ stood, I think it is important to understand what that statement is, how it came to be made, and its importance to the actual medium. As feminist artists/photographers do we also have to identify the context in which we present our work if the meaning of the subject matter is related to the context? E.g. work presented in a gallery has a meaning which shifts when that work is reproduced in a magazine such as Camerawork where it is supplemented by text. In relation to self-portraiture: in order to produce a polarised image one has to question the kind of image one has of oneself in relation to the bombardment of derogatory images of women we are confronted with daily. In order to present a photographically positive image of oneself, one has first to have a positive selfimage. The inability, at this point in the modern tradition of photography, to make statements of facts or ‘objective truths’ is related to the kinds of ways in which women have been and are pre­ sented to the world. Nonetheless, the perpetua­ tion of a supposed norm (subordination of women) necessitates that we understand photo­ graphy precisely in terms of its supposed ability to objectify truthfully. We need to recognise this in order to de-construct it and re-evaluate the imagery we are confronting on our own terms. By challenging the images of role stereotypes perpetuated by the media, one is also drawing on an historical assumption and association related to that form of imagery in order to change it. When one is forced to make a point of one’s stand as a feminist the problem arises of how to make that point as part of the image itself. Whilst we are working to change the ways images of women are being presented we must acknowledge that we are, to an extent, part of an ideology that oppresses us. If we produce nega­ tive images of ourselves - if our work is under­ stood as not referring to but supporting sexist imagery - then we collude with our own self­ oppression. The clarity of one’s critical position is crucial. In describing Lee Friedlander’s approach to self-portraiture, Angela Kelly disregards the content of the image which is used to illustrate his work, where we see the familiar arrange­ ment of the protagonist male and the seemingly irrelevant passer-by who happens to be a woman. The fact that she happens to be a woman reinforces the point Angela Kelly is opposing. There is no such thing as a neutral (i.e. without pre-determined association) imagery where women are concerned. Simi­ larly, in the presentation of Richard Greenhill’s photograph from Family Self Portrait, a woman is represented as bringing a Christmas pudding to what we may imagine is a table crammed with waiting family members. The zone which Angela Kelly describes as the ‘area of art making’ cannot be dealt with until the area of art making and the reasons for criticising it have been clearly formulated. How does one, working in an aesthetic medium escape the tradition of the ‘fine print aesthetic’? If one is working within a specific set of defini­ tions of ‘art practice’, redefining the area to suit one’s needs can become an area of critique implemented within the work. It seems to me to be necessary to question the form of the photographic image in order to relocate photography as a potential force to question its own validity. Or, as far as we are concerned, to question its own validity as a vehicle of negative imagery. Does the practice of ‘art making’ become an activity primarily concerned with art as a commodity and there­ fore part of a system which advances our self­ oppression? One solution to part of the problem would be to make one’s work unsaleable and avoid, to an extent, the implications of the ‘fine print aesthetic’. However, if the look of the ‘fine print aesthetic’ is congenial to one’s subject matter it operates on a different level (i.e. it can be used to support the subject matter). A problem inherent in my own work is the way these levels operate in conjunction with the method of presentation and with clearly stating my case. Working with a medium like photo­ graphic silkscreen, it is an important part of my work to reintroduce the kind of aesthetic, seductive quality of advertising imagery which itself employs certain devices used in painting. The problem of a feminist imagery being under­ stood within a barrage of contradictory state­ ments is one which I share with many feminist artists currently working with photographic material. Judith Rugg a CAMERAWORK Primarily using photography, I have constructed a statement about a specific geographical area whose people are on their knees. But if their economic well­ being is desperate, Clydesiders are not defeated. The women and men of West Central Scotland have a mili­ tant past and their future security is theirs to make. As a journalist I recorded a period of time. I am an optimist because I am a socialist. The struggle to achieve political and therefore economic control of our lives will be long and difficult. I hope these photographs will contribute to that continuing struggle. LARRY HERMAN Processing turkeys, Pinkerton’s, Paisley. Many women are employed in low-paid assembly-line work in the factories that have grown up around Clydeside. When I was little my parents taught me a rhyme about their city, based on Glasgow’s coat of arms. It went as follows: This This This This Coats mill, Paisley. The multinational Coats group of companies made pre-tax profits of £ 16.2 million in the first six months of 1975. During the first half of 1976 pre-tax profits were £31.9 million. Assembly track, Chrysler Linwood. Workers’ ferry from McAlpine’s oil rig construction site at Ardyne Point to Wemyss Bay, after a twelve hour shift. This, the last site working on the Clyde was due to close a few months after this picture was taken. The labour force, already cut to 1600, will be redundant. is is is is the bell that never rang the fish that never swam the bird that never flew the tree that never grew Those four lines tell so much of Glasgow’s story. O f the obvious physical confines in which Glaswegians have lived their lives. Of terrible houses, hard jobs and foul working conditions, of freedom denied and potentiality crushed. But for all that, those four lines fall far short of reaching Glasgow’s most extraordinary feature, its inner soul, its extraordinary people. Defeated but invincible, deprived but possessed of great style and elegance, downtrodden but amazingly resilient and funny. And most of all, lovable and loving. In its people the ‘sweet green place’ of the Gaelic lives on. It was a small entity until the nineteenth century. Then one hundred years of explosive growth set in. People were extracted from the Highlands, the Islands and across the seas in Ireland to feed the shipyards and the steelmills and the coalmines required for this, the arsenal of the British empire. For every mile of the Clyde there was a millionaire. And for every major slum property development too no doubt. So fantastic were the takings in the good years before the end of World War One that captains of industry developed guilt feelings. The beastly Burrell, for example, Scotland’s own Citizen Kane/Cain was a compulsive buyer of bounty and treasure on an unbelievable scale. He finally tired of personally fondling his items day in and day out and struck a nice balance between shame and tax avoidance by leaving the lot to the City. Most of that Glasgow is now gone. The Coal Board cleared the Lanarkshire coalfields. The Steel Industry has closed door after door. In shipbuilding the czars are state grandees nowa­ days, concerned exclusively with browbeating Glasgow’s few remaining sons of the shipyards into meeting the output standards of Far Eastern shipyards where trade unionism is a one way ticket to the prison cell. In place of the ghettos and slums have come new towns, Cumbernauld and East Kilbride, outside Glasgow and hundreds of high rise blocks within. Then there have come dual carriage ways and motorways which stick out like sore thumbs in a city where car ownership is lower than any other in the UK. The old industrial base has gone. And in have come the capital intensive multinationals concerned not with the assembly of art collec­ tions but the repatriation of profits to fictional homelands like Luxembourg, Lichtenstein or Grand Cayman. Once again the people’s health is a source of terrible anxiety, with Glasgow the undisputed cancer capital of the world. Time again perhaps for the tree to grow and the bird to fly. Laurie Flynn Britain has a mixed economy with many firms under public ownership. This policy has been used, particularly since the Second World War, to facilitate the expansion and profits of the private sector because it has always been the weakest businesses that have been nationalised. We do not believe that nationalising our industries can solve the problems of the men and women who work in the yards. But with public ownership, we can begin to reverse the deterioration. Therefore, state ownership is the demand of the shipbuilding workers. It is not a case of having the choice in the matter. Regard­ less of weaknesses in public ownership of other industries, there should be no doubt that if our industry is left in private hands, the historic decline will accelerate and in a few years we will have very little shipbuilding in Britain. The management view during the past decade has been that shipbuilding has not been profitable. But they have never taken a broad view of society. The major decline of British shipbuilding not only affects jobs in the yards. In a fundamental way it affects steelmaking. Small specialist suppliers to the industry suffer, and, of course, unemployment affects local shops. Basically shipbuilding is an asset to the community and it is an asset to the whole region where the yards are located. Yards are operated inefficiently and this is caused because profits are hardly ever reinvested in shipbuilding. They are sent abroad, invested in other domestic industries or are used to finance speculation in the commodity, money or property markets. Our industry has been badly managed with the workers left powerless regarding decision making at management level. Britain is primarily an importing and export­ ing nation, and not to have an overall plan for shipping is economic lunacy. Today, ship­ building cannot be successful if it is left in isola­ tion from deep-sea and coastal cargo handling. In a planned shipbuilding industry, ship repair would be nationalised too since virtually all repair yards are part of shipbuilding groups. The labour movement must recognise that the traditional economic theories and values operating in this country are anti-social. We must demand a planned economy. The public ownership of industry must be used for the regeneration of our manufacturing base. There has to be forward planning of the British merchant fleet so we can build for future needs. Once our industry begins to expand and the confidence of workers is established, secure in the long-term prospects of their industry, then tensions within the industry like demarcation will disappear. Joint Shop Stewards Committee, Govan Shipbuilders Ltd, Glasgow A ll photographs by Larry Herman, whose work in Glasgow was financed by three grants from the Arts Council and support from local shop stewards committees. The pictures are available as a travel­ ling exhibition from Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, and a book is in preparation. 4 CAMERAWORK Jim Russell, one of the elected worker-directors, with the first copy of the first edition of the Scottish Daily News. Funded by Government business and public subscription, the paper was started when the Scottish Daily Express moved its printing to Manchester. Workers occupied the building for a year to safeguard the presses, but the paper only survived from May to November 1975. Ship’s painter, Govan shipyards. Clydeside is Scotland’s major port. It covers an area of 450 square miles or river, estuaries and sea lochs. 13,000 vessels and 19,000,000 tonnes of goods pass through the port every year. January 1974: the last day of full-time working before the start of the three-day week. Main Gate, Chrysler Linwood. Mass meeting of public transport workers striking against redundancies and the closure of Partick Garage. Since 1967 the number of people working on the buses has been reduced from 7000 to 4000, the number of buses in service from 1500 to 900, and fares have gone up 10%. It is now cheaper to travel by taxi if you go in a group of four. Retired boilermakers annual outing, Largs. Many boilermakers suffer loss of hearing by the time they retire. Picket, Clydeport Container Terminal, Greenock. Lorry drivers’ strike 1974. CAMERAWORK Photography for the Disabled? From the stark fact that, ‘There are over three million disabled people in Britain’, the text of Being Disabled quickly moves on to the more personal. The photo-essays build up very solid impressions of personalities and attitudes. A sequence on Maxine Wilson, a young black woman chairbound from birth, paints a parti­ cularly strong picture. Part of her own commen­ tary runs: ‘People sometimes make me feel unhappy, their altitudes towards you. It can be rather uncomfortable sometimes, the things they say about you. They think I shouldn’t mix with white people.’ The show is largely devoid of harsh pictures. Something in the photographs has struck me. 1 have always loved children since I was nine. I have always wanted one, but that is some­ thing that will never be. There is no chance of us adopting. They are very anti disabled people adopting. I mean you have to prove yourself. One of the few shows a middle-aged man, suffering from multiple sclerosis, being sus­ Adjusting to becoming disabled has been rather traumatic both for me and my parents. It affected my parents in as much as they had to move house to a suitable bungalow that was accessible both inside and out, but even then extensive adaptations had to be carried out which caused considerable upheavals. They also had to come to terms with me being utterly dependent upon them to do everything for me. I couldn’t make a cup of tea or any­ thing during the period that I was living with them. It put a lot of strain on them actually. pended from a complicated hoist contraption over a lavatory. Some of the photographs of children almost fall into a category of senti­ mentalism, yet possibly the worst offender which captures a boy and a girl of about five kissing each other while they support them­ selves on trolleys - is an excellent picture. In a workmanlike way, evidence on matters of education, transport, access and so on is constructed. Clearly there should be much better provision and a lot more thought devoted Paul Lucas and Hazel Peasley (quoted above) with Hazel’s sister and her child Peter White, who is blind, playing with his son on his day off. to the disabled so that they could more easily visit cinemas, use trains and get up kerbs. And clearly this thought is largely absent. Unfor­ tunately the exhibition is weak on offering any solutions. It is a little quirk of mine, that I would like to see the head of a council in a wheelchair for a day, because if you stuck every councillor in a wheelchair and said right, get about your business, they could never manage, they wouldn't know what to do. They would never be able to get around Southampton, because of all the difficulties involved with pavements and crossings and all the rest of it. I have probably got an ideal world in which my life is totally acceptable and you don’t have to bother about getting help anywhere. It is extremely thorough at presenting the current situation of the physically disabled and competently manages to show them as human beings with a whole range of hopes, desires and fears - just like anyone else. It seems to suggest that by being nicer and more concerned ordinary people may make a significant contri­ bution towards changing the rough deal the disabled get at the moment. But is this enough? It would be foolish to deny that the organisers of this exhibition - which in itself is something of a radical breakthrough for a straight photo­ graphic gallery to create - were not subject to certain constraints. And it would seem, rightly or wrongly, that they settled for portraying the experiences of the disabled and not digging deeper. The text towards the end warns the viewer that the exhibition is only a starting point for breaking down the popular stereotypes that attach themselves to the disabled. However, this line does appear a little transparent. It neglects to even suggest that commercial interests, the economics of capitalism, political discrimination against minority groups and sheer exploitation of human beings might have anything to do with it. Why are the disabled badly done by? Why is the National Health Service crumbling away before our eyes? Why don’t Mecca ballrooms make it easier for disabled people to attend them? Why do Mecca ballrooms also have a record for discriminating against blacks? Why do Mecca ballrooms support the Tory Party? Are any of these questions related? It is this line of investigation that is absent from the exhibition. I think that the photographs are quite good, in as much as they portray some of the diffi­ culties that we come up against. They don’t show that I can’t feel from the armpits down. It doesn’t portray either how you manage to get over most of the problems. It doesn’t portray the actual living conditions in some cases or the noise from the street for instance.. As I looked at the exhibition in that university hall, a cleaning lady came up to me and asked whether I was connected with it. She went on: ‘You see my husband’s disabled, and since it happened he hasn’t been able to find any work - do you think the people to do with this might know some way o f helping him out?’ The reality of that woman’s problem - and that of millions of others - will hang around until enough people start asking the right questions. Questions that have been avoided, consciously or uncon­ sciously, in Being Disabled. Graham Wade A Kind of Life is a laminated touring show avail­ able from H .M .P .W . Tel 980 8798 Being Disabled is a touring show laminated on panels available from The Photographic Gallery, University o f Southampton. Tel. Southampton (0703) 559122 Barry Lewis Barry Lewis Lily and Roy Harlow outside their home Barry Lewis Paul Lucas In the 19lh century Doctor Diamond took photos o f‘insane people’ to use as illustrations for a medical text­ book. Ever since, mentally and physically handicapped people have been photographed for a variety of different reasons -from conscious exploitation to social concern. Last year two exhibitions took place on the theme o f disability, both propagandistic in favour o f their subjects, seeking to show ‘how things really are’. Being Disabled was exhibited at The Photographic Gallery, Southampton. This exhibition was researched by Paul Carter who followed up a it/ish from the gallery to cooperate with the Department of Rehabilitation at the University o f Southampton. The aim was to create an exhibition which would break down stereotyped ideas o f the physically disabled. Barry Lewis was chosen as the photographer, and together with Paul Carter, interviewed the people who had been photographed. The exhibition was finally edited by a large group ofpeople, half o f them professionally involved in photography, and half of them disabled. A Kind of Life by Halvard Kjaervik was exhibited at the H alf Moon. The photographer documented the lives o f some o f the residents in an institution for the mentally handicapped in Northern Norway, whilst he himself worked there as an attendant. He hoped his pictures would present a case for the integration of the mentally retarded into society, rather than their isolation in institutions, and also show that the menially handicapped are human beings. Both exhibitions were praised as being sensitive and useful in explaining the situation of handicapped people to the world, but both were also criticised. The following review of Being Disabled by Graham Wade, and a letterfrom Peter Kennard and Jessica James on A Kind of Life indicates some of the problems o f working on the representation o f handicapped people. The quotes (in boxes) are by Hazel Peasley and Paul Lucas from the Being Disabled exhibition. CAMERAWORK Panel 4 from ‘A Kind of Life’ by Helvard Kjaervik Panel 5 from ‘A Kind of Life’ by Helvard Kjaervik Panel 9 from ‘A Kind of Life’ by Helvard Kjaervik ear Camerawork, Kjaervik’s exhibition sounded inte­ resting and different.He claimed to be taking photographs of mentally retarded people from the standpoint of someone who was involved and who had an intimate understanding of the mentally retarded from the experience of three years work in a large institution for them in Norway. He had not, it seemed, intended to take pictures as a photographer might in his search for unusual or sensational subject matter but rather to use the camera as an extension of his job. Furthermore, he appeared to question the exis­ tence of such institutions and the society which perpetuates them. As he writes in the notes accompanying the exhibition: ‘It was depressing tofind myselfa participant in a system which I felt I could not accept?. And he writes at some length of the need to inform the public about the mentally retarded before their integration in society can become a reality. But his text is often confused and, combined with his photographs, shows neith
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      • pdf_textANNUAL REPORT 1979-80 ■§Hi6i^| HALF MOON PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP-.- ANNUAL REPORT 1979/80 (including funding proposal for 1980/ 8 1 ) CONTENTS 1. Annual Report for 1979/80 Introduction Exhibition programme Camerawork The New Building Links with other organisations Camera Obscura Darkroom Programme Photographic Project Groups Postcards & catalogues Archive Administration Members of staff & Collective 2. Financial Estimates for 1980/81 Summary Revenue-Expenditure Income Capital-Expenditure & Income Notes to accompany estimates 3-Appendices Appendix I-Touring Exhibitions Touring Exhibitions-Bookings 1979/80 AppendixII-Payment for Camerawork Contributors Appendix Ill-Plans of New Building Appendix IV-Details of Darkroom Programme Appendix V-Sources of Funding PAGE 1 3 5 7 8 9 10 11 13 lf ^ 15 16 17 18 21 23 2k . 25 26 29 30 32 33 Annual Report for the year 1979/80 INTRODUCTION The Half Moon Photography Workshop came into being in October 1972 with the specific aims of showing documentary photography and discuss­ ing its role. Since that date the work of the HMPW has concentrated, though not exclusively, on two main areas: the production of Camerawork magazine and of photographic exhibitions. The first issue of Camera­ work was published in 1976, and the Half Moon Gallery mounted exhib­ itions in the foyer of the Half Moon Theatre from 1972 until March 1978. Central to the work of the HMPW is the idea that social documentary photography should reach a large audience, and in order to achieve this the HMPW moved into premises in Roman Road, Bethnal Green, which are being renovated to create a centre for photography that will be unique in the United Kingdom. We had originally hoped that these premises would be complete in 1979/ 8 0 ; unfortunately structural problems and the shortage of labour and materials have delayed the conversion programme. It is anticipated that the building work will be complete by the autumn of 1980 , when the gallery and darkrooms will open. This building will then provide a photographic resource centre from which we shall be contributing to the propagation and direction of new photographic work through photographic courses, project groups, seminars and the gallery. The HMPW, through Camerawork and its exhibitions, has always placed emphasis on the subject matter and social use of photographs. The work produced in the darkrooms yill be encouraged to develop this practice. Despite the lack of facilities, the year 1979/80 has seen a continued growth in the work of the Half Moon Photography Workshop* The work of producing exhibitions has thrived; although they have initially opened in other venues; all the exhibitions were laminated and form part of the HMPW's Touring Show service. This Touring service has expanded greatly over the last year. The HMPW has had 2^ shows available for hire; these have been hired over 100 times and have been shown in a wide range of venues, from arts centres, educational organisations and community centres to launderettes. Demand for Camerawork has increased, and as well as selling each issue to subscribers and directly in bookshops, there i 6 a constant demand for back issues. There has been a notable increase in sales abroad, in the USA, Australia and Northern Europe in particular, and in the coming year extra efforts will be made to increase sales both in the UK and abroad. The opening of the darkrooms and new gallery in the next financial year will lead to significant developments at the HMPW. For*the first time we will be able to embark on a substantial programme, teaching and initiating new photographic work, and through this developing a real local involvement. All our varied activities will take place under the one roof, and this will create exciting possibilites when different photographic areas overlap and feed in to each other. In the meantime, work on project groups is already underway and will continue throughout the year. During the last summer, members of the HMPW built a camera obscura, a 6 ' 6 M square black tent which acts both as camera, by means^of a lens in one side, and as darkroom, in which basic principles of photography can be demonstrated. This was taken to various community festivals in the E^st End, where it proved to be the centre of 'much fascination and interest. It is proposed that this will be developed and continued on a larger scale furing the coming year. The HMPW now employs nine people, two full-time and seven part-time. During the next year as the workload increases with the opening of the new building it is proposed that this number should be increased to nine, and that more part-time workers should become full-time .Vi At the moment three people work on Camerawork, one of whom is respon­ sible for distributing Camerawork, two people work On preparing exhibitions, one of whom is also responsible forytouring shows and publicity, one person co-ordinates the work' oiuthe new building, and two people do general administration* including book-keeping, fundraising, and subscriptions for Camerawork. Our projected revenue expenditure for the next financial year is £SE>5°72 , with an expected earned income of £32,873'. In Addition we shall also need capital of £1^,400 to complete and equip 1the new building. At the end of this report there is a financial summary and a detailed financial breakdown. In order to enable Us to fulfil the commitments of the organisation during the coming year we shall be applying to various funding bodies for grant aid; a list of organisations from which we ho^e-to receive grants is given after the financial breakdowns. We believe that if we are subsidised adequately we shall be able to make full and proper use of our new building. - 3 - EXHIBITIONS PROGRAMME After five years of regular monthly exhibitions, the HMPW vacated its gallery space in Alie Street, Aldgate, in April 1979* This was a conscious decision to expand and develop our already substantial exhibition programme by opening shows at selected galleries and spaces while our new gallery was being converted. Naturally, this has entailed a great deal more organisation and co-ordination with other galleries and groups. It has, however, proved extremely worthwhile and has both broadened our audience for shows, and established important links for future collaborations. Having our own gallery space again will certainly provide us with a much needed stable base from which to launch shows, but this period of transition has proved to be very valuable. As in previous years we have chosen to laminate all our shows under plastic, thereby allowing maximum portability and ease of hanging. This is very important pursuing our policy of touring exhibitions, further details of which are given in Appendix I. We began the year by opening 'Brick Lane 1978' by Paul Trevor at the Whitechapel Art Gallery - a show specifically designed for small local venues, and including both English and Bengali text. This was followed by 'Lost at School', a series of portraits by George Plemper, which we opened at the Institute of Education. It was primarily aimed at schools and colleges. Later in the year we launched 'Bethnal Green 19^9-52' by Nigel Henderson at Central Library in Stepney; it proved to be a show of great local interest. Meanwhile, 'Coming and Going: Travellers in London' by Barry Lewis was appropriately opened at the Polytechnic of Central London in Regent Street, provoking a response from commuters and tourists alike. During the last few months of 1979 the HMPW researched and organised our most ambitious and largest show to date: 'Bringing It All Back Home - an exhibition about Northern Ireland' is three times the size of any other show we tour. Building from the work done for Camerawork 1^ 'Reporting on Northern Ireland', this show was launched at the Cockpit Gallery, Holborn, and moved to Action Space, Chenies Street, to coincide with the London festival of Irish arte and culture 'A Sense of Ireland'. Towards the end of the financial year we organised 'The Teds', an exhibition baaed on a book by Chris Steele-Perkins and Richard Smith, which opened at the Side Gallery, Newcastle, in February. Before the end of March we will also be producing a show by Glyn Satterley on the North-East of Scotland. It will open in London and then go on tour in Scotland. As this financial year draws to a close, we are actively organising and researching new and larger shows, for our own gallery as well as for other venues, before we open. By the end of March we will have twenty-six laminated shows on tour. - k- The Half Moon Photography Workshop has always recognised the need to pay photographers; once a touring show has earned enough money to cover the cost of its origination, the photographer shares subsequent earnings with the HMPW. However, we were very pleased to be part of the Greater London Arts Association scheme for the payment of artists during this year, and we look forward to this system continuing next year in conjunction with the Arts Council of Great Britain. - 5 - CAMERAWORK The end of this year will see the publication of the nineteenth issue of Camerawork magazine. In the six issues produced during the year there has been a consolidation both of the readership of Camerawork and of the direction of the magazine itself. The magazine has benefitted from widespread awareness and public discussion of issues raised in the magazine in conjunction with exhibitions and other Half Moon activities. This will be reflected not only in increased demand, and improved sales figures, but also in continuing to maintain the standard and vitality of the photo­ graphy and the debate within the magazine. The full-time co-ordinators work in conjunction with the editorial group who work in an unpaid capacity, meeting weekly to decide the content of the magazine. In addition, staff and volunteers contribute to the production work, and particularly to the mailing of Camerawork to subscribers, for which we greatly rely on volunteers' assistance. There is still no budget allocation for paying contributors, and a proposal regarding this is included in Appendix II. This means that the editorial standard can be maintained only by dint of the goodwill and commitment of the contributors. The editorial group must commit a lot of time to discussion and negotiation with potential contributors, as photography does not have an established tradition of writing, debate and analysis, and we feel the role of the magazine is to help create this. Thus extensive and time-consuming research is a fundamental and crucial mainstay of Camerawork's success. Great pains are taken to ensure that with the consequent demands on our time neither editorial nor production standards are compromised. One small change which will improve our position is doing Camerawork's layout and paste-up on the Half Moon premises rather than in an outside design studio. This will streamline the process, and cut down the cost of outside help. Camerawork 13 was a thematic issue which investigated the practice of community photography, a widespread and vital tradition of photographic activity. The issue helped promote mutual awareness for people working in community photography of their common problems and their strengths. Camerawork 1^, 'Reporting on Northern Ireland', was another thematic issue. It comprised a seven-page dossier of contemporary social documentary photography showing working and living conditions in the province, an investigation of photography's role - in Northern Ireland, by local newspapers, amateurs, and the security forces, and also in the mass media in the rest of Britain. All these were placed in context by a brief, illustrated history of the facts leading up to the current situation, and a discussion of social and economic conditions* there were three pages relating the experiences of professional photo­ graphers who have worked in Northern Ireland. - 6 - Camerawork 15 was a compilation issue. Photographs and text documented life on the Clydeside; there was a section looking at images of the disabled; the practice of photographic collection was examined; two articles looked at images of women in photography; there were articles on advertising photography, photography without electricity, and an information section. Camerawork 16, another compilation issue, looked at a Manchester project to create a photographic archive of popular history, the use of photography in reporting on Nicaragua, Japanese photography, and our Camera Obscura project; it discussed the implications of our Lewisham issue number 8 , and there was a final letters and information page. Camerawork 17 consisted of an article on cultural history and trends in fashion and advertising photography, extracts from and discussion of the Half Moon Touring Show 'Who Killed Blair Peach?', a review of the new annual*Photography/Politics', a dossier of photographs of the 1888 matchgirls' strike from the National Musuem of Labour History, a spread of photographs of Windscale, a look at current uses of the postcard, its history and how to make your own, an article on photog­ raphy and the law, and a letters and information pelge. Camerawork l8 includes an examination of still images and photographs on television; a discussion of the conventions of pornography, a look at how the media and the 'News of the World' approach the problems of squatting; a dossier of photographs documenting the steel and mining areas of South Wales, along with reviews, letters, and information. Camerawork 19 is planned as a compilation issue, including the work of a little known photographer in the Thirties, a study of meaning and context of images, a look at the practice of amateur photography, a continuation of our series on photography and the law, how to set up a photographic archive, a look at Pinhole photography - co-ordinating with a planned HMPW exhibition on Pinhole photography, and more. Much thought is being given to planning distribution strategies for the forthcoming year. The Publications Distributions Co-operative are continuing to distribute 2 , 5 0 0 copies of each issue to a well established network of alternative, community and art bookshops throughout England, Scotland and Wales. We supply a number of major London retail outlets, and work on new and potential retail outlets. There is tremendous scope for Camerawork sales in many regional outlets, such as gallery bookshops and arts centre bookshops, which are not covered by PDC. On our own we do not have sufficient resources to supply this market throughout the country and we are discussing forming a confederation of similar magazines to exploit the market more aggressively. Similarly, it has proved very diffi­ cult to distribute Camerawork abroad, although the large number of enquiries we receive indicates that there is considerable demand for Camerawork in many countries. Our efforts will be directed towards a wider and more efficient distribution for all Half Moon publications and products, such as postcards, along with Camerawork itself. We welcome the possibility that the Arts Council may organise a distrib­ ution system for publications it supports; we would be pleased to encourage this and contribute to discussions in setting it up. - 7 - THE NEW BUILDING In April 1977 we of 119-121 Roman These two floors ground floor has signed the lease for the ground floor and basement Road with the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. comprise approximately 5,000 square feet. The a ^O foot shop front onto a main shopping High Street. The new building will offer the following facilities: GROUND FLOOR Entrance via double doors in the shopfront. Gallery space of approximately 200 ft. of running wall space* Reception counter with sales facilities. Small seating area. Offices for all areas of the Workshop. Meeting Room. Storage for slide and print archive. Toilets. These plans result in a much larger gallery than the Alie Street space, which had only 70-80 ft. of running wall space. We can expect to have adequate office space for the first time. BASEMENT. Entrance via separate door on left hand side of shopfront, allowing darkroom to remain open when the gallery is closed. This makes it possible to maintain a security check on the darkrooms. Communal darkroom with nine enlarger bays. Five individual darkrooms. Film processing rooms. Two finishing rooms. Copying room. Co-ordinator's office. Toilets. Several bodies were approached to meet the costs of conversion. By December 1977 we had raised most of the necessary funds, which total approximately £90,000. Material costs are being provided by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets (£20,000), ACGB Arts Capital (£2,000), ACGB Housing the Arts (£3*000) and the labour costs are being provided by the Manpower Services Commission's Job Creation and S.T.E.P. programme (£60,000). A further ACGB Art Capital grant of £3,000 was awarded in 1979/80. The London Borough of Tower Hamlets is sponsoring the conversion scheme, and the administration of funds and supervision of the conversion are therefore being done by them, to plans and detailed specifications provided by us , shown in Appendix III. The conversion began in March 1978. Although the work on site is now nearing completion, progress has not been as rapid as we had hoped. This is due to a number of problems inherent in the Manpower Services Commission programme, which have resulted in continual shortages of skilled labour, shortages of materials, and in admini­ strative delays. However, the conversion is now entering its final phase, and we anticipate that all facilities will be complete by the autumn of 1980, ready for the launching of the Half Moon Photog­ raphy Workshop's new programme in September. - 8 - LINKS WITH OTHER ORGANISATIONS I Educational Activities Members of the Half Moon Photography Workshop group have been conducting workshops, teaching, and lecturing throughout Britain. HMPW members teach at the following places: North East London Polytechnic, London College of Furniture, Harrow College of Art and Design, Sir John Cass School of Art, Workers Educational Association and evening institute classes. Visiting lectures have been given at the Royal College of Art, the Winchester School of Art, Trent Polytechnic, Manchester Polytechnic, the Polytechnic of Central London, Sir John Cass School of Art, Maidstone College of Art, the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, and the Institute of Contemporary Art. Weekend workshops for teachers have also been held in Birmingham, organised by the West Midlands Arts Association. These varied and rewarding links will prove invaluable to the HMPW when its darkroom teaching programme gets underway later this year. II Advice A large number of people from all over the world visit the workshop every year - some just drop in for a chat, whilst many seek technical or critical advice for their work or projects. Consequently, paid workers at HMPW spend considerable amounts of time dealing with these visitors, in addition to answering many enquiries by telephone and by letter. We have also had four students on placement with us, and many other colleges and educational establishments paying visits to the office. Although it is time-consuming, we realise the value of this kind of personal contact, and endeavour to accomodate visitors whenever it is possible. - 9 - THE CAMERA OBSCURA As a result of discussions about the best way to publicise the activities of the Half Moon Photography Workshop at local events such as the E.l. festival, the idea of building a portable Camera Obscura was evolved. In essence a large black box with a black cotton lining, the Camera Obscura has a lens installed in one side, which throws an image onto the opposite wall. By standing inside the box, it is possible to see a clear, inverted image of the scene outside around six feet away. This was used to demonstrate the elementary principles of photography to the largest possible number of people in a way that they could see rather than just hear about. By standing in the box, people could watch the image being formed on the screen on the wall, and then see the picture being developed in photographic chemicals. The box functions both as camera and as darkroom. The machine provoked a lot of local interest, and we gradually made improvements. We had a lorry cover made to the size of the Camera Obscura, making it completely light proof, and we changed from using conventional photographic paper, which gave a negative image, to a direct positive paper. Communicating the enthusiasm that members of the Half Moon feel for photography is often difficult, and the Camera Obscura solved this problem admirably - it allowed the people with whom we came into contact to discover the fascination for themselves. It demonstrated the simplicity of the basic principles, and at the same time showed a little of the magic of photography. A report of the project, showing some of the photographs taken, appeared in Camerawork 16. We hope to continue this aspect of our work throughout the coming summer at local festivals and fetes. 10 - DARKROOM PROGRAMME The darkrooms will Programme outlined for hire will also many photographers enable us to carry out the Practical Workshop on the following page. The darkrooms available provide a much needed resource in London for the without their own darkroom facilities. The darkrooms will be open to public use on the basis of payment of a yearly membership fee. Members will be able to book the use of an individual darkrooms for a three hour session, or a bay in the communal darkroom. Three people will be needed to co-ordinate the photographic work taking place in the darkrooms. One of these people would have overall respon­ sibility for the organisation of the Practical Workshops; while the other two people would be involved in teaching, they will take on major responsibility for the running of the darkrooms. With three people working in the darkrooms, we will be able to have two skilled people at any one time to maintain the darkrooms and offer advice to people using the facilities. We feel it essential that the darkrooms are well serviced; otherwise it will not be possible to make full and proper use of the facilities that will be available. Photographic materials will be available for purchase in the darkrooms for slightly above wholesale cost price. In order to establish a stock of film, chemicals and paper, we will require a capital sum of £ 5 0 0 . PHOTOGRAPHIC PROJECT GROUPS The HMPW feels that the work of the Photographic Project Groups is very important for the future of the organisation. By providing people with the opportunity of working together around a common theme, many objectives are achieved. The groups will provide the opportunity for people to learn from one another while producing new work. Working in a group means that a project can be embarked on that may appear too large for a person working alone. The teaching and learning situation in a group is a dynamic one as the photographic work of people working together evolves in different ways. In the Spring of 1978 a women's group met at the HMPW and produced an exhibition, 'Sisters', for the Theatre Royal at Stratford East. The 'Squatting Documentary Project Group', which received a grant of £750 from GLAA last year, was set up with the help of the HMPW, and will produce an exhibition in the early summer. When our darkrooms open we foresee further groups being established, in which we will be directly involved, basing their work at the Half Moon. This photo­ graphic work will eventually be produced in exhbition and publication form. Towards the end of the financial year we received a grant of £^,300 from the Greater London Arts Association to fund two project groups. Ths grant gives us our first opportunity directly to sponsor the origination of photographic work, which we will be able to make into exhibitions and use for Camerawork. We have advertised the projects, and invited people to apply. There have been over 16q enquiries, and the projects are creating a great deal of interest. Two groups will be set up, each to work on one of the following topics: Women's changing role in society, the impact of Nuclear Power, or a documentary study of the East End. As well as suggesting the above themes, we have also said that we would welcome suggestions from applicants about projects they would like to start or complete. Each group will be established and overseen by the Project Groups Co-ordinator. The aim of each project group will be to produce an exhibition or publication of its work, with photographs and text, and to provide the Gallery with small 'work-in-progress' shows. Selection for the projects will take place at the end of February 1980 , and we hope to be able to support further projects in the next financial year. It is proposed that two different forms of group exist - one for the commission of work from established photographers, and the other for less experienced photographers. Major Project Group Many photographers feel the need to collaborate, with others on the coverage of an issue, but generally find this impossible, as assign­ ments are rarely for more than one photographer at a time. The market demands that photographers often remain isolated. We would like to set up a project group for a small number of such photographers. We see their participation in a project group as being part of their 12 - •job' as photographers, and thus expect that they should be paid for two days work a week. We will employ three photographers two day a week for six months; they will be selected by interview and submission of a portfolio. They will meet as a group and will be expected, in collaboration with i;he Project Groups Co-ordinator, to produce a detailed plan of their work within a month of the commencement of the project. The work will be aimed at being produced in exhibition or publication form within three months of the end of their six month period. Minor Project Groups We also propose to establish two more 'minor' project groups of less experienced photographers - one of the darkroom co-ordinators will be responsible for establishing the groups. Each group will meet for six months and will consist of five people. The groups will be allocated time in the communal darkroom to work together once a week. Since these groups will be of people of varied experience, the co-ordinator's role will be to make sure that those with less knowledge of photography acquire new skills during their partici­ pation in the group. It is not proposed to pay those in the groups for the work they put in, but, since it is expected that an exhibition and publication will result form the groups, materials and travelling expenses will be given to each of the five participants. - 13 - POSTCARDS AND CATALOGUES During this last year year the Half Moon Photography Workshop launched its second set of postcards - six images taken from the Nigel Henderson Touring Show 'Bethnal Green 19^9-52'. So far these images have proved extremely popular. We hope to produce further sets in the next year. In the next year the distribution of our postcards and catalogues will be undertaken in conjunction with that of Camerawork, so as to establish a network of retail outlets in shops and galleries. As with Camerawork, we are encouraging efforts to co-ordinate distribution with other organisations which have similar ranges of products and similar marketing concerns. - 1* f ARCHIVE The Half Moon Photography Workshop has been building up a collection of photographs - mainly slides of our exhibitions, but also some prints mostly from past issues of Camerawork. As material has been growing, and requests to use slides and photographs have increased, it has become clear that a demand exists for slide sets that we can produce for hire, and for prints that can be used for reproduction. At the moment our exhibitions are copied onto slide so that we have a perma­ nent record of each show, as well as copies we can hire to schools. The Archive already provides a link between all parts of the HMPW, and it is important as a resource for the areas of work that we are involved in. The Archive will expand to include the work of photographers from Britain and abroad. Already we are producing a comprehensive slide bank of the work of eighteen major 20th Century documentary photogra­ phers, comprising a collection of 800 slides. The prints and slides in this part of the Archive will be a useful source for people giving illustrated lectures and talks. The Archive will act as a bank for material produced in the darkrooms and will thus feed back into the Practical Workshops. This will be of use not only to us in planning future courses, but also to outside organisations and individuals teaching photography - we already receive numerous requests for information on organising courses. We see much of the photographic work that will be produced in the darkrooms centring around social documentary photography, much specifically recording the life of the local community. Tower Hamlets has been influenced considerably by the declining docklands - one of the projects undertaken in the workshops will be an attempt to document the changing docklands and the consequent developments in the area. The work from this project will feed directly into the Archive, providing a valuable record of the area. We already receive a constant stream of requests for material. We envisage that among those using the Archive will be people teaching photography at the Half Moon and elsewhere, people using the dark­ rooms researching projects, people organising seminars or talks, schools and colleges, local institutions who may need pictures of the area, and newspapers and magazines. We anticipate that the Archive will thus partially have a commercial use, so that after a while it will move towards being partially self-financing. - 15 - AIMINISTHATION AND SUNNING COSTS As the work of the Half Moon Photography Workshop expands, increasing demands are placed on the time of the staff, although these have not increased as much as had been anticipated because of the delays in the completion of the building. In 1980 / 8 1 , with the expansion of the organisation, more staff time will be needed to run our new activities. In addition to this, we shall face higher running costs. Both rent and rates will increase with the revaluation of the building. There will also be increases in expenditure on all the major overheads due to our expansion into the new building, and to inflation. To cope with the increased requirements in the coming year, it is proposed that some of the people who at present work part-time should work full-time. It will also be necessary to make further appointments to work in the darkrooms. Salaries, PAYE and National Insurance Most of those employed at the HMPW are not on PAYE, although all new appointments in the last year have been made on this basis, as will future appointments. During this financial year all members of staff have been paid a salary of £*t,2 0 0 on a pro rata basis, depending on the number of days per week they work. In the next financial year we intend to raise this salary to £^, 8 0 0 . At the present time the HMPW employs nine people, one full-time and one full-time since February 1980 . The rest are part-time. We anticipate that the same number of people will be employed in the next year, although seven appointments will be full-time and two part-time. It will also be necessary to employ some photographers and teachers on a sessional basis to run courses in the darkrooms. Capital equipment Our new building will require a considerable amount of office equip­ ment, particularly as we have always been poorly off for furniture. At the moment much of our office equipment belongs to members of the collective. - 16 - MEMBERS OF STAFF Administration Jill Pack (replaced by Marguerite McLaughlin in August 1979)• Keith Cavanagh (replaced by Liz Kessler in October 1979)* Camerawork Shirley Read Liz Mackie (replaced by Greg Kahn in November 1979) Richard Platt Keith Cavanagh (distribution) Exhibitions Ed Barber Nicky Hughes (Touring Shows organiser) Building Co-ordinator Mike Goldwater Members of the Collective Ed Barber, Keith Cavanagh, Mike Goldwater, Nicky Hughes, Marguerite McLaughlin (associate member), Liz Mackie (associate member), Jenny Matthews, Jill Pack (until July 1979)» Richard Platt, Shirley Read, George Solomonides (associate member) and Paul Trevor (until February 1980). - 17 HALF MOON PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP - FINANCIAL ESTIMATES Financial Year 1980/1981 SUMMARY 1. REVENUE INCOME EXPENDITURE 300 5638^ 16800 15765 Practical workshops 3315 351^ Darkrooms 2780 1330 Gallery 8675 12321 628 1100 Administration Camerawork Publications ^500 Project groups Archive 375 TOTAL 958 32873 95872 2300 lMtoo 2. CAPITAL FIXTURES & FITTINGS (see notes) - 18 - HALF MOON PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP - FINANCIAL ESTIMATES Financial Year 1980/1981 1. REVENUE EXPENDITURE Administration Rent Rates (including rate relief) Rates (water) Gas Electricity (6 months @ £100-) 6 raonthe @ £400) Building repairs Vehicle - running costs " - servicing, tax, insurance Travelling expenses Telephones (4 lines) Postage Stationary Printing (office) Photocopier Bank charges Accountants fees/auditing Job advertising Insurance (contents of building) Burglar alarm maintenance Volunteers expenses Cleaning materials Cleaning - labour (6 months @ £18.75 p.w.) Roller towels (6 months @ £65 p.ra. for 12 units) Entertaining ( mailing and exhibitions) Tea, coffee etc for office Training course fees Wages National Insurance contributions Depreciation TOTAL 3400 800 120 650 £00 250 566 *+ 0 *+ 120 1200 900 700 150 430 200 400 200 420 300 500 180 488 39° 300 120 200 36960 4000 l£0O 55W 56384 - 19 EXPENDITURE continued Camerawork Picture sizing materials Typesetting (£250 per issue x 6 issues) Printing costs (£1300 per issue x 6 issues) Half tones and line prints (£*+00 per issue) Binding and folding (£300 per issue) Paste-up materials (£15 per issue) Postage- mailing Stationary - mailing Cassettes Proof-reading fees Paste-up fees Publicity Contingency 150 1500 7800 2*+00 1800 90 270 l80 25 200 1000 200 150 TOTAL 1575515765 Practical Workshops 1 . Beginners courses (6 courses per year) Fees to tutors (2 tutors per course) Materials (£50 paper, £25 film per course) Overheads, repairs etc 2 . Documentary photography workshops (1 day per week x 2 6 ) Tutor fees Materials (£l8 per week x 26) Overheads, repairs etc 3 *Specialist short courses (2 sessions per week x 2 * ) + Tutor fees Materials(£l 8 per week x 2*+) Overheads, repairs etc * .Seminars + Posters Sound recording and transcribing Participants fees and expenses Publicity for workshops Contingency 600 *+50 150 260 *+68 23*+ 2*+0 *+32 110 120 50 200 100 100 TOTAL 31+ 5 * 551^ Darkrooms Chemicals Repairs and renewals Materials service Library books Materials for camera obscura l80 250 500 100 300 TOTAL 13301330 - 20 - EXPENDITURE continued Gallery 13 exhibitons 2160 200 1110 Posters Repairs and renewals Typesetting Photographic printing and writing Mounting materials Lamination Touring show leaflet Information sheets/press releases Touring cases (10 @£2k each) Foam,pins etc Touring show insurance Film and slide mounts for copying shows Touring show carriage Payments to photographers Payments to photographers (A.C.G.B. scheme) Postage 1550 360 3000 200 l8 o 250 100 326 170 350 1000 1025 350 TOTAL 12321 12321 TOTAL 600 300 1100 1100 Publications Catalogues Postcards Project groups 2^00 1800 200 100 Payment to photographers Materials allowance Travel expenses Contingency TOTAL 5500 5590 Archive Slide hanging filing system (500 @ £kO per 100) Film,paper and slide mounts Information leaflets (20 per year, 500 copies) 200 500 TOTAL TOTAL EXPENDITURE FOR HALF MOON PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP 258 95H" 958 95872 95872 - 21 - INCOME Administration 100 Photocopier use Use of van 200 TOTAL 300 300 Camerawork (6 issues) 5250 4950 1200 P.D.C. (2500 per issue a 35p each) Subscriptions (1100 @ £4.50) (100 3 £ 1 2 .0 0 ) Direct sales ( inc. back issues) 1000 @ 60 p 12000 @ 40p (orders of 10 plus) 600 4800 TOTAL 16800 16800 Practical workshops Beginners courses (6 weekend courses) 10 per course@ £20 each 3 per course@ £10 each (students) 3 per course& £2 each (unwaged) 1200 180 36 Documentary photography workshops (1 day per week x 26) 12 per course@ £2 per week 6 per course® 50 p per week (unwaged) Specialist short courses (4 courses - 6 weeks each, 2 sessions per week, 24 weeks) 7 persons @ £5 each per week 2 persons @ £ 2 .5 0 each per week (unwaged) Seminars (6 seminars, 80 people per seminar S 5Qp each) 624 78 840 120 240 TOTAL 3315 3315 Darkrooms Membership fees (full fees £10 p.a., unwaged £5 p.a.) 200 f £5 l (6 months only) 50 ® £ 2 .5 0 (6 months only) Darkroom hire: Communal darkroom (9 enlargers for 15 sessions per week @ 50p per person per session. Assuming 50# capacity) Individual darkrooms (5 darkrooms for 15 sessions per week @ ?5p per person per session. Assuming 50# capacity) Camera obscura 1000 125 844 731 80 2780 2780 - 22 - INCOME continued Gallery Touring shows (150 @ £^0 average) Payments to photographers (repaymentfromA.C.G.fl.) Touring show carriage Sale of posters TOTAL 6000 1025 550 1500 8675 8675 Publications Catalogues750 & 25 p each Postcards2000 < lOp each 9 2000 < 12p each 9 188 (wholesale) (retail) 200 2^+0 TOTAL 628 628 Archive Hire of slide sets: to schools < £1 per day, £5 per week, £15 per month 9 to colleges < £5 per day , £15 per week , £50 per month 9 50 hirings a year < average of £2.50 per hire 9 125 Sales of information sheets (5000 @ 5p each) 250 TOTAL TOTAL EARNED INCOME FOR HALF MOON PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP 575 375 52875________ 52875 DEFICIT 62999 TOTAL (income + deficit)__________________________________ 95872_____________ 2. CAPITAL EXPENDITURE Darkrooms Office furniture Building fees 5*kX) 6000 300° and equipment T CTAL lM+OO l V + O O INCOME Money for which we can claim on the production of receipts Deficit 2300 12100 2300 - 2 .i*- HMPW FINANCIAL KgfIMATflS - 1930/1981 Notes to accompany budgets; 1. It is anticipated that the new building will be finished and fully operative from September onwards. It is hoped that the building will be ready in July and that it might be in limited uae from July; teaching programmes etc. are however planned to start in September. 2. Six issues of Camerawork are planned for the forthcoming year; each issue will be sold for 60p although the HMPW will give a 33# reduction for the purchase of 10 or more copies, and PDC is supplied with copies at 35 p each. 3. Ten major and three minor exhibitions are planned for the forth­ coming year. The hire fee for exhibitions will vary according to the size of the exhibition and the means of the hiring venue, however the average rate will be f ^ 0 per month. c4 k. The income shown on the summary sheet is earned income. ated grant income is shown in Appendix V. Anticip­ - 25 “ APPENDIX I TOUKING EXHIBITIONS HMPW believes that photography is a powerful educational and social tool but that it is frequently misused and undervalued in contemporary society. Everyone is surrounded by images yet there is little discussion of the role of photography and its effect on our life. In an attempt to use photography with a greater awareness we produce touring exhibitions for hire which present photographs in an inform­ ative broadly educational, and enjoyable context. We have 2b exhibitions on a variety of themes and issues with text forming an integral part of the shows. Subjects covered include classrooms, factorywork, Northern Ireland, the circus, Bethnal Green, the sheep industry, photography by blind children. The photographs and text are mounted on standard white panels which are laminated under plastic film to seal them. This makes them lightweight, waterproof and durable. Each panel has eyelets in the corners for easy hanging. The shows vary in panel size from 12"xl5" to 2^Mx30", and in number of panels from 19 to 100. Each show travels in a portable fibreboard case and weighs in total between 12 and ^+0 kilos. The exhibitions are designed in this way so that they will not be confined to gallery situations* Their format ensures that they are suitable for most spaces - libraries, schools, community centres, churches, launderettes, museums, foyers, bookshops and even outdoors. We are thus able to reach an audience that would not normally visit galltf’ ies, and one which is well beyond London. We have been making strong local links with various organisations who now regularly take our shows on a package basis, and in the coming year this is an area we shall develop. One member of staff devotes three days per week to the organisation and publicity of the touring show service. She is responsible for touring show enquiries, bookings, dispatch, collections, as well as overall publicity for HMPW. The touring show information sheets which were produced early in 1979 and which we send out regularly nationwide have meant that we receive dozens of enquiries a week. Approx, two thirds of our 2b shows are;touring at any one time. A number of the shows have already covered their initial costs of production and, where appropriate, the photographers concerned are earning a 50 # share of the net profit on the shows. The average cost of each show has been £55 p«r month (our usual hire period) though occasionally we reduce the fee to organisations that cannot afford to pay it in full. We are now producing larger exhibitions of up to 100 panels, as well as our smaller shows, and these will operate on a sliding seals of hire charges up to £60 per -month. We have proved the importance of having a member of HMPW devoting her time to the organisation and promotion to the touring shows. The thouring show service has grown enormously and shows every sign of continuing to expand. It is significant in enabling the work of the gallery to be less dependent on funding. 26 - HMPW TOURING SHOW BOOKINGS 1979/80 SHOW VENUE Bethnal Green N igel Henderson Bancroft Road Library, El Centerprise Bookshop Woolwich Building Society, El Circus Travelling Lawrence Migdale Hollyhead School Duncan Jordanstone College of Art Magnum Leisure Centre People Portraits Edward Barber Whitechapel Art Gallery Family Self Portrait Richard Greenhill Midland Group Rochdale College Portugal Paul Harrison Bethnal Green Institute Classrooms Janine Wiedel Institute of Education George Green School School of Art Education City and East London College Dudhope Arts Centre Home Economics Teachers Centre Growing Old Mike Abrahams Ruhr Planning Authority Centerprise Bookshop Dame Colet House, LBTH Holloway Prison Midland Group Japanese Freestyle Glynn Williams Palace Theatre, Newark Magnum Arts Centre Life in the Orkneys Chick Chalmers Derby College of Further Education Hyde Library, Cheshire Lyth Arts Centre Ruhr Planning Authority Mile End Launderette Staffordshire Art College Spirit of My Country Jan Siegieda Camden Library Charnwood Arts Council Derby College of Further Education Shuttles Steam & Soot Daniel Meadows Wrekin & Telford Arst Association Ruhr Planning Authority Palace Theatre, Newark Winchester College of Art Merlin Theatre, Frome Museum of Lincolnshire Life Native Dancers Naomi Weissman Lyth Arts Centre, Wick A Kind of Life Halvard Kjaervik Polytechnic of Central London Camden Library. SHOW VENUE Factory Photographs N ick Hedges SCARP Conference Ruhr Planning Authority Hull College of Art Chester College South Yorks Photography Project Birmingham Polythechnic Bournemouth & Poole College Document on Chile Peter Kennard G a r n e r Arts Centre First of May Bookshop Lancaster University Hull College of Fine Art Mid Warwickshire College Using Photography Blackfriars Photography Project Institute of Education Montefiore Centre, LBTH Rednock School, Glos. Blackfriars Settlement Catford Link Bethnal Green Institute Cockpit Gallery Arnolfini Northern College Fleet Community Education Centre Hampshire Teachers Centre Three Brothers Karli Gros Ruhr Planning Authority Lyth Arts Centre Toynbee Hall Cumbria College of Art Contemporary Portraits Group Show South Yorks Photography Project Sir John Cass College Biddick Farm Arst Centre Oxford House LBTH Socialist Book Fair Isleburgh Photographic Club Derby Museum Trent Polytechnic Sheep Industry Jim Byrne/Pete Addis Swansea University St. Pauls Church, Margate Carslile Museum Bankfield Museum Halifax Sheffield City Polytechnic St. Edmunds Art Centre Ruhr Planning Authority Coming & Going Barry Lewis Polytechnic of Central London Ruhr Planning Authority Visions of the Blind Photographs by blind children Institute of Education Southfield Church Ruhr Planning Authority Toynbee Hall Southfields Library - SHOW 28- VENUE Brick Lane 1978 Paul Trevor Whitechapel Art Gallery Montefiore Centre LBTH Kent University Cockpit Gallery Fleet Community Education Centre City & East London College Ceiterprise Lost at School George Plemper Institute of Education Oval House Ruhr Planning Autority Mile End Launderette Bringing It All Back Home Group Show Cockpit Gallery Action Space Midland Group Royal Court Theatre TOTAL Zb 106 (Laminated copies of Camerawork 8 ,Lewisham,and 14, Northern Ireland are also available for hire) -2SL APPENDIX II Payment to Contributors to Camerawork It has become clear to us that, although the magazine can run for a time on goodwill and the generosity of others, after a period it has a professional standard and reputation to maintain and must sometimes pay for the services rendered to it in the form of articles, prints, research and so on. The Editorial group of Camerawork meets weekly to discuss content, design andlayout of the magazine. This has always been and will continue to be, unpaid work; but, until now, contributors have not received fees for their work. This has limited us in our ability to commission articles from experienced writers. We would there­ fore like to pay a small page rate of £20 to our contributors. The attached budgets do not make any allowance for the payment of contributors to Camerawork; we should however like the Arts Council to fund this seperately, perhaps on a similar basis to that for paying artists who exhibit in certain galleries. The annual cost of such a scheme would be approximately £2000. -30 'ArVC/ •v/IAT APPENDIX III 'n • O # *A. A n ,fc , * 7 ^ M oor* //?- / / z O r-C X JrvO * s » <:*/ve a tvoiz/cStnor* R em oter rvc^FV/A^. /V_^ " '» ■ RHO-ro o e . fit?I f y i\, «*> p//r>< ^ ^ ' '*r ■w «> >y ll+*HiBI*-t f»7 « , f-ciuoLt.-, /U ..//M 5 A«► -" C n m n J ^ U ^ TL*
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      • archiveFour Corners Bishopsgate
      • vimeo_link
      • authorSee sections X to AC
      • author_editorSantiago Castrillon, Mike Goldwater, Liz Mackie, Jenny Matthews, Shirley Read, Siddhiratna, Mike Swift, Keith Cavanagh (Distribution)
      • author_writerDavid Russell, George Black, Mark Holborn
      • author_photographerEikoh Hosoe, Alon Reininger, Yoshikatsu Saeki, Chris Steele-Perkins
      • author_designerRichard Platt, Ken Sprague, Ernst Volland
      • author_interviewee
      • author_organisationManchester Studies Archive
      • tagsmanchester studies archive rescue,history,archives,oral history,family collection,industry,sandinista,managua,fsln,somoza,nicaragua dictatorship and revolution,civil war,photojournalism,news photography,photography agencies,japanese photography today and its origins,canon,eikoh hosoe,camera obscura,diagram,instructions,do it yerself,lewisham,camerawork,horror,race today,community,political,realism,marxism,capitalism,photography theory,phototography practice,photography analysis,anti-realism,visual representation,socialism,community photography,self-image,camerawork readers' meeting,
      • titleCamerawork Magazine - Issue 16
      • subtitleIssue 16: Manchester Studies Archive, Nicaragua in the News, Japanese Photography Reviewed, Camera Obscura, Camerawork 8 and the Political Photographer
      • dimension17 pages
      • ocr1
      • copyrightFour Corners/Half Moon Photography Workshop/Camerawork, David Russell, George Black, Mark Holborn, Eikoh Hosoe, Alon Reininger, Yoshikatsu Saeki, Chris Steele-Perkins, Richard Platt, Ken Sprague, Ernst Volland, Manchester Studies Archive
      • credits
      • related
      • locationBethnal Green, London, UK (pg 1,2,3) Manchester, UK (pg 4,5,6) Nicaragua (pg 6,7) Japan (pg 10,11,12,13) Lewisham, London, UK
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      • pdf_textTravelling Boxing Booth, Lancashire 1936 Manchester Studies Archive Manchester Studies Archive Nicaragua in the News Japanese Photography reviewed Camera Obscura Camerawork 8 and the Political Photographer No.16 Half Moon Photography Workshop 60p/$1.75 1 CAMERAWORK W orkm en building the M anchester Ship C anal, 1880’s Any Old Albums ? — building a people's history 7 think there was more good deeds, as regards getting a man a job, in the Vault than ever came from the Rectory or from the - where you sign on - Labour Exchange. There was more jobs got, more good deeds done in there, in the Vault.' ardly the stuff of the historian; especially coming, as it does from a man recalling his experiences of the Depression in a small, heavily industrialized and isolated part of Manchester. The affirmation of the practical help to be found as a matter of course amongst the camaraderie and intimacy of the male preserve at the local pub, and the denial of the efficacy of those agencies established to ‘assist those in need’, are the sort of notions that often crop up in conversation with people who were directly affected by the catastrophes of the Thirties. What may surprise, perhaps, is that this man’s memories of the home, childhood, school, work and leisure, as well as unemployment and poverty - in fact, of all the routine and extraordinary in his life in that neighbourhood are preserved on tape, and are kept in the name of ‘history’. And so are those of many of his contemporaries and of their children. This man has also kept a number of photographs taken in his district during the early decades of the century; photo­ graphs that, for instance, show local men setting off with whippets to hunt rats and hares on a Sunday morning, show the neighbourhood’s Original Burlesque Peggy-Leg Band, children at school and at play, Whit Sunday processions, charabanc outings, carnivals and pageants, show his family standing in their front doorway on the eve of the sons’ embarkation for the Great War, and show those same people individually photographed amongst the trappings of respec­ tability and material prosperity which the local studio photo­ grapher felt obliged to provide. These photographs comple­ mented by appropriate extracts from transcribed taperecordings, have recently been included in an exhibition that toured Manchester and Salford - an exhibition which, judging by the response of librarians and public alike, has gone some way towards provoking a serious evaluation of the historical content of the family photograph album. The photographs too are preserved, and permanently available to anyone who wishes to use them. At present, they constitute one of nearly nine hundred deposits in a collec­ tion totalling some fourteen thousand photographs. The collection differs from the usual local history collecuon in its emphasis on the human rather than the topographical. Its definitive and unique feature is the visual documentation of the individual and communal life of the working people of Manchester and the North-West and the subject matter is mainly families, families which make up the overwhelming and, in most ways, historically by-passed proportion of the population of the region. Whilst being systematically indexed and gathered in files of contact-prints and corres­ ponding information-books at Manchester Studies, this collection is, in print form, being channelled into the appropriate local public collections. And we have come to realise that it is a collection which provokes just as many questions as it provides answers. We receive innumerable straightforward appeals for practical assistance, for example, ‘I’m a local librarian/ teacher/community worker intending to put on an exhibi­ tion comparing the community spirit in Salford now and fifty years ago; have you any photographs I might be able to use?’ - which we’re well equipped and glad to deal with. Apart from this, the one question that the existence, useful­ ness and ensured growth of the collection has answered is that of the cynic: ‘But why go around begging people to let you have their old photographs, photographs that they them­ selves have dismissed to lie in an old biscuit tin under the stairs? What’s the point, whom does it help? Photographs can’t tell me much, they can’t provide the information that a book, a scholarly work written by an expert, an historian trained in the appropriate methodologies, statistical approaches and objectivity can provide.’ Thankfully, judg­ ing by the service we are increasingly being called on to provide for writers of history, this sort of attitude is on the wane with the realization that photographs give, by the immediacy with which they communicate and by their universal accessibility an extra, legitimate, dimension to the subject. If you have any comments to make or articles, letters or prints you would like to contribute we would be glad to hear from you. Please make sure it reaches us as soon as possible. is designed to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, views and information on photography and other forms o f communication. By exploring the application, scope and content of photo­ graphy, we intend to demystify the process. We see this as part of the struggle to learn, to describe and to share experiences and so contribute to the process by which we grow in capacity and power to control our lives. SUBSCRIBE TO CAMERAWORK: A subscription to the magazine contributes TWICE as much to our income as a sale through a shop! ABROAD (surface) £7.50 £6.50 £6.00 £5.00 £13.00 £12.00 £5.50 £4.50 for our exhibitions * UK ABROAD (air) £10.50 £9.00 £17.00 £8.00 This issue o f Camerawork, November 1979, was produced by the Publishing Project, Half Moon Photography Workshop, 119 Roman Road, London E2. 01-980 8798. Printed by Expression Printers Ltd, London N l. Full subscription* Full subscription (student)* Institutional Subscription* C am eraw ork only T his includes posters and invitations People who worked on this issue of Camerawork were Santiago Castrillon, Mike Goldwater, Liz Mackie, Jenny Matthews, Richard Platt, Shirley Read (co-ordinator), Siddhiratna, Mike Swift. Distribution: Keith Cavanagh. To subscribe send remittance (abroad - STERLING DRAFT drawn on London please) to: H .M .P .W ., 119-121 Roman Road, L o n d o n E2 OQN. Tel: 01-980 8798. (ISSN 0308 1676) 9 CAMERAWORK But the sort of feeling that has been commonly voiced, and which manifests itself in a distilled, and doubtless school-induced form, is the initial reactions of many of the people to whom we go for photographs: ‘What? You don’t want to see me donkey-stoning the front-step, or setting off as an eight-year old on a Band of Hope picnic. You’d much rather see this one of the old King visiting Manchester.’ However, pictures of informal, communally organised festivals, like street parties to celebrate a coronation, tell a great deal about the neighbourhood life of past generations and can contain a wealth of detail. At the same time a snap of a renowned national figure can provide the same sort of detailed information. For instance, A.J. Balfour electioneering at Manchester City’s football ground is also interesting for what it shows of the composition, appearance and segregation of a 1900 football crowd, spectators in the standing enclosure being exhorted by posters to ‘Beware of Pickpockets’. But photographs of events and personalities, whether they be local or national, whether taken by someone in the crowd or a professional photographer, only tell half the story: the half that has always monopolised history and the attention of the historian. The reasons for a photograph of the King taking precedence, even today, over importance and interest invested in a family collection, and over a photograph of the children playing in the street, spring directly from the notion that history and documentation should be concerned with the oustanding and extraordinary. Simi­ larly, studio portraits are seen as being more publicly presentable than the comparative spon­ taneity of a group taken in the backyard; just as the formal, officially prescribed sort of record, the filled-out form, is considered more valuable than the bits of paper, (the shopping lists, bills, scribbled messages) - generated during the course of an ordinary ‘uneventful’ day. Traditionally, because public libraries and record offices saw their purpose as the accu­ mulation and storage of the documents detailing administrative and executive transactions, the range of documentation they held reflected a rather narrow spectrum of interest - the day to day functioning of public bodies, official organi­ zations, large business and commercial institu­ tions and so on. This was all very well if one was solely interested in the impersonal and distant goings-on of our civic representatives and indus­ trial concerns. But what if you wanted first­ hand evidence of life, of all sorts of life, in your own street or neighbourhood? What if you wanted to know how the residents felt about their physical environment and how it worked on them, and what if you wanted to know from the residents themselves, and not from the pen or camera or paintbrush or whatever of some peculiarly gifted, impartial, outside observer? What if you wanted to know, for instance, about the organisation and workings of the credit system in corner shops during the 1920’s? Or about the forms of illicit backstreet gambling that proliferated during the years of the Depres­ sion? What if you wanted evidence of the feelings and attitudes, as manifested in letters and diaries, of the people involved? And what if your curiosity could not be satisfied by written or printed evidence, but required visual sub­ stantiation, the sort of corroboration that only a photograph might be able to provide? The Manchester Studies Archive Rescue scheme was established, with the co-operation of local libraries and archivists, to combat the scant regard shown towards these documents: the documents produced and accumulated by working people during the routine course of their lives. Almost immediately it became apparent that, if a family had kept any records of its forebears, photographs would predominate. Perhaps the physical act of tearing or burning the image of a relative one remembers, or has heard talked fondly of, repulses some. Perhaps, if faced with the choice of discarding a bundle of documents and letters or a collection of photo­ graphs the former will go because its content cannot immediately satisfy passing curiosity. Whatever; though the photograph is far and away the domestic document that most regularly crops up and, though our efforts have subse­ quently taken a bias toward their rescue, we cannot afford to assume that families would stop throwing out old photographs - and the danger of complacency is consistently emphasized. An oft-repeated lament we hear runs along the lines of, ‘If I’d only known about your work six months ago then I’d have kept the suitcaseful we had; but we were moving house and they took up so much space . . .’ We are working against time. Though not exclusively, we tend to concentrate our efforts on retrieving material produced before World War II, simply because it is the records of those generations that are in immediate danger of loss or destruction. Similarly, the need for this sort of work assumes added urgency with the rapid h m Studio group, Blackpool w Bowlers on the green of the Spread Eagle Hotel, Turton Bottoms 1880’s/90’< change, or even complete disintegration, of longestablished neighbourhoods. It is in these circumstances, when the compulsory purchase orders have been served, and with change of family home and transfer of small business premises imminent and widespread, that many of the most evocative and informative of records are lost - particularly photograph albums and the hordes of glass-slides and negatives accu­ mulated by long-gone local photographers, which are only to be found left behind in cellars and sheds. Ironically, the destructive process of the property developer and local council provide the opportunity for what, so far, has proved to be one of the most successful methods of retrieving material. The residential area at the heart of Manchester’s Trafford Park industrial estate is now half-way demolished and will have vanished within two years. The area was once, simply because its location demanded it, a near selfsufficient community, a cluster of some seven hundred houses, built at the turn of the century as ‘model dwellings’, for the ‘hands’ at the nearby giant engineering and manufacturing works. The people there considered themselves to be from Trafford Park and Trafford Park alone, rather than from Manchester or Stretford or whatever boundaries officialdom constructed around them. They were isolated and their isolation gave them a fierce love for their homeplace. As a result of an extensive programme of doorto-door leafleting, appeals in the local press and talks to the Community Centre, Senior Citizens Club and the like, we managed to amass some seven hundred photographs, a variety of docu­ ments and thirty hours of tape-recorded personal reminiscence. Our work, the ‘profes­ sional’ interest of outsiders who previously knew little or nothing about Trafford Park, gave people the chance to talk frankly and spon­ taneously about their lives and their district and, furthermore, about their contribution to the development of their community. This exercise released a strong interest in the social, economic, political and religious forces at work on their parents’ generation and their own. As a result we put on an exhibition of the photographs and recollections because we felt it right to return to the people of Trafford Park collectively, what they had given independently of one another over a relatively long period of time. The exhibi­ tion was free, and in an easily accessible locabooked to show at thirteen venues - as opposed to the four we originally intended. This exhibition has also, as we expected, stimulated people to offer over two hundred further photographs. The Trafford Park exhibition is just one of several currently on show in the Greater Manchester area. In addition, exhibitions of local interest are currently on display in a hospital waiting room, school, a library and a shopping centre. There are, given a reasonable standard of con­ dition and content, the photographs that demand inclusion in any exhibition: the striking, the unique, the well-made. But exhibitions can never truly reflect the ‘average’ individual collec­ tion of photographs that make up each deposit. To generalize, if you talk about the ‘average family collection’, then what you might find is any number of family portraits, many taken in the studio, a few school photographs and others of organized groups and formal gatherings, and then one or two oddments, depending on the interests and vocations of the family. There are, obviously, exceptions: one lady, a keen and active member of her church’s Mothers’ Union, had masses of professionally photographed church events because she had volunteered to act as the local retailer for the photographer. Another man had over a hundred prints of work in progress, in 1901, on a particularly large industrial site; he had them because his wife’s great uncle had worked in the Clerk of Works’ Office on site and, being a good company man and enthusiastic photographer, had taken the photographs for his own pleasure and future reference. However, nearly all family collections contain something unexpected or unusual, whether it be an interior shot of a shop or factory or a candid snap on the beach at Blackpool. Whilst we want exhibitions to reflect the range of photographs we have, and they do, insofar as the pictures are always grouped thematically series on work, leisure, school, church, cele­ brations, holidays and so on - a proportional representation of the different sorts of photo­ graphs within the whole collection would, if not dull the exhibition, render it less likely to stimulate and provoke. This is not to belittle the bulk of the standard family collection. A series of family portraits provides a fascinating record of the oustanding moments that household experienced - a pictorial census of births, marriages and deaths. It also providesevidence of the internal squabbles (why Aunt and Uncle aren’t on this one at Granny’s wake when they’re on every previous one), evidence of who was 3 CAMERAWORK entrusted with the responsibility of taking the photograph, thus forfeiting their presence on the finished product, and evidence of more blatant expressions of the family image - its social standing and togetherness (as manifested in clothing, stance and location). Consequently we are not at all selective when offered photographs, all are copies and are indexed. We cannot fore­ tell, and we would not wish to determine, what others will find of interest. School photographs taken during the period from 1900 to the 1930’s may, for instance, looked at en masse and a first glance, appear to be nothing more than picture upon picture of what could well be the same carefully arranged rows of happy and conscientious scholars. But they bear witness not only to the specialisations of certain photographers, but also to certain trends within their craft. For instance: moves between outdoor and indoor shots, attempts to represent constructive and enjoyable classroom activity by the careful positioning on desks of the tools and materials of the schoolchild, and the short-lived vogue for elaborate physical compo­ sitions on May Day and school-play photo­ graphs. They also chronicle the changes in class­ room furniture, not least the demise of the once ubiquitous aspidistra. However, the school photograph, like the family photograph, can, if too heavily empha­ sized, deaden an exhibition with its uniform content and composition. Exceptionally, when an exhibition results from an area survey, as with Trafford Park, school photographs, in parti­ cular, can exert an attraction. Many people will recognize themselves, often in a photograph they haven’t seen for thirty, forty or fifty years, and it will act as an introduction, a way in, to the rest of the exhibits. The purpose and nature of exhibitions raises the question of selection, which in turn provokes the question of how far our work, or rather our presentation of the results of our work, can put a particular gloss on the past. For instance, the photographs can perhaps distort what actually happened, and we don’t know what’s going on, or has gone on, out of camera-shot. Our peculiar subjectivity also influences the sort of photo­ graphs we show and thus the reactions of the audience. The pictures we select for public con­ sumption might give substance to the perennial myths of'Those were the days; ah, happy times’, on the one hand, or ‘We’ve come a long way from tion and thus, hopefully, go some way towards remedying the imbalance in the source material historians rely on. Secondly (perhaps more importantly) to provide, especially through free, easily accessible public exhibitions of locallyretrieved material, a stimulus for the people of Manchester and the North West to actively realise the extent of their individual and collec­ tive contribution to the development of the region, and for them to continue the sort of work we have begun. In the long term the production of books containing photographs and remini­ scences will provide what, in many instances, will be the sole testimony to once thriving, now rapidly disappearing, small neighbourhoods. qj David Russell and the Manchester Studies team Dep * Bicycle Repair Shop, Todmorden, Yorks those dark times thank goodness’, on the other. However, our work is above all else a practical exercise in retrieval; our success or failure, in our own eyes especially, depends on the amount of photographs and other documents, that we get in and return to the community by passing them into the public collection. Having said that, constantly working with such a large and varied collection does give rise to particular, personal predilection. And these preferences are un­ doubtedly reflected in the exhibitions which are, after everything else, exercises in publicity - the only means we have of reaching, at first hand, a wide audience of potential donors. Whilst we do not see ourselves as interpreters or critics of the vast store of original material we have at our disposal, it is becoming increasingly apparent that work needs to be done on the whole method of operation of the local photo­ grapher. From the ornately designed advertise­ ments backing portraits, and from the minimum of information (‘Printed by . . . Sold by . . .’) carried by the photo-postcards, we can guess at Workers at the Russian Petrograd Boot Company, Trafford Park, Manchester during the First World War the number of studios, the number and type of retail outlets, the prosperity and the specialisms of individual photographers. We can tell that there were a number of intinerant photographers who, it would appear, humped their cameras up and down streets and photographed whomever was about to position themselves in mockinformal representations of casual street activity. We have been told, during the course of taperecorded interviews, that photographers turned up on spec at carnivals, Whit Walks and similar communal events, took so many photographs, and then used local people as their retailing agents. Interviewees have also talked about photography clubs in their place of work - you paid so much per week, and then waited for your turn to take the annual late Friday afternoon trip to the studio. Given the time and the opportunity, we will turn to this sort of work which will enhance the usefulness and give more sense to the collection. As things now stand we see our purpose as being twofold. Firstly, to augment the public collec­ Manchester Studies is an oral history and archive rescue project started in 1974/5 and based at Manchester Polytechnic. It is one oj the main centres in this country to use oral history as a tool oj historical research and a method oj recovering the past oj those sections of our society whose history has been largely ignored. As well as the work described above Manchester Studies runs projects which include the following: The Cotton Industry Records Project which in an effort to preserve a record of life among the Lanca­ shire mill workers has interviewed and sought out photographs and documents from elderly workers. This project has produced a teaching pack for schools. The Jewish History Project has located over 1,000 photographs recording the migration from Eastern Europen in the late nineteenth century and the life of Jewish immigrants in Manchester. A record of the Black community in Manchester is being built up with the help of the Manchester Black Women’s Co-operative. The Film Archive (funded by Granada TV, North West Arts and Greater Manchester Council) is working to establish a home for regional archive film and a base for the study of the history offilm making and thefilm industry in the North West. A t present Manchester Studies Unit employs thirty researchers but when its Manpower Services Commission grant ends in December 1979 the staff will be severely cut back and the whole project threatened unless alternative funding can be found. CAMERAWORK “ 124 : MICRBftlUa'' ' ' Ml'HTLfcHtt .... .... UHFUHIEII THEIR .. uic IB5I STR0R6H0L0- T°M V 1 SOBOZH'5 EI8 HUNDREDS BCS05S * c „c rUFRRILLftS W W CH ED TO +El BUNKER THt CRP1TBI*. HUNDREDS OF GUERR1LL«^ , » » > ™ ‘ , T “ ,TH0UT ,E S ,5 1 M * ’ M . , HEEE TEE» » « 8 ' 8LS " T ,HE T E h b rc h h h s H H 18 s5 THEV ENTERED UE„ I 0 HIS RRIVHTE » * » NT LflV ....... * « " « - 1"15’ FLR0 8EH1ND 1HE" »E 5 lK K IT H T O O T H PA S T E The raw material of a news story comes as copy over the teleprinter and pictures arrive over the wire or via a press agency. The function of the newspaper is to take this raw material, fashion it, refine it and reduce it to a finished product that goes on sale. Long before the pictures reach the newspaper and are selected and manipulated to fit the news story, however, the photographer is aware of having to work within a whole series of constraints to sell the pictures and work accordingly. Originally we intended to run a picture story on Nicaragua and contacted Alon Reininger, a photo­ grapher working for a N ew York photo agency. Contact. The picture editor chose w hat he thought the London agency should have, and we selected from there. We soon found that where­ as a documentary photographer would be expected to produce photographs that reinforced each other so that the culminative effect was an ‘insight’ into Nicaragua at a particular period in its history, the work of a news photo­ grapher is very different. Here the emphasis is on providing one selfcontained, simple, direct picture. We therefore decided to use the photo­ graphs as a basis for commenting on the production and use of news photo­ graphs. We have also recontextualised them with information on the recent events in Nicaragua to counteract the fragmented view provided by the daily press. NICARAGUA News photographers are constrained by the politics of the newspapers or magazines that use their work and the ideology that these papers serve and propagate. For the bourgeois press news consists largely of shock, horror and drama. The newspaper acts as a spotlight on the world’s disasters, moving on as the spectacle subsides. Until hit by an earthquake in 1972, Nicaragua | was virtually unheard of. As a news story the revolution was around for nearly two years, but only achieved any prominence when the Sandinistas showed signs of success. Since July 20th, when Somoza fled, Nicaragua has received scant news coverage in the major daily papers whilst the left press has moved on to the next stage in the revolutionary scenario - Nicaragua Reconstructs. “DO N’T GET INVOLVED” Regardless of personal politics and commit­ ment, a news photographer working outside the tew left-wing agencies has to adopt the neutral standpoint of his or her agency. An International Press Card is a passport to all sorts of situations where the photographer’s role is that of an observer, detached from events, recording rather than interpreting. This distancing is most clear in the way a news photographer tries to cover both sides ot a war as long as personal safety is not at risk. No one else is able to take up such an ambivalent position. The role of news photos is not to inform but rather confirm ideology - to reproduce a view ot the world that the reader will recognise, to prove what’s happening and what stance the reader should take towards it. Nevertheless the photos themselves are often ambiguous, and it is the captioning that determines the way that they are interpreted. Since news photographs are seen as evidence of an event and thus the ‘truth’, captioning tends to be read as fact rather than a particular point of view. News photographers have to corroborate the news story and provide an objective record of what the reporter is saying. No one believed that Che Guevara was dead until a picture of him in his coffin was published. Nicaragua equals war, and so the media need pictures of soldiers, guerrillas and damage. The camera is also capable of faking evidence though, and the participants in any struggle are obviously aware of the power of the media, and will use it to further their cause. It is almost possible to imagine a battle being refought because the cameras were not in the right place. Such performance for the camera reached an obscene level in Vietnam:"You don t know what a media freak is until you’ve seen the way a few of One of the great dangers of news coverage is an identification of the event with the location. How many people have a mental picture of Northern Ireland comprised of soldiers, hooded men and burning 1978 January - Assassination of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, editor of the opposition La Prensa and leader of UDEL, results in two week general strike called by business community. February - Indian slum of Monimbo in Masaya rises up in first popular insurrection against Somoza. May - Broad Opposition Front (FAO) formed. July - Members of Los Doce return openly to “WE WANTED IT YESTERDAY” The fact that news has to be as instantaneous as possible influences the way a photographer works, trying to produce a product which will be saleable to a particular audience at a particular time. Since Vietnam brought war into the sitting room, photographers have been competing with electronic news gathering equipment. In order to use the picture on time the news photographer on foreign assignment often has to completely relinquish control after framing, focusing and pressing the button, letting an agency develop, print and select pictures. Again, time prevents the photographer con­ tacting all the newspaper and magazines with syndication rights from that agency to find out how the photos will be used, and often never even sees them in print. Even a photographer wiring his own pictures to a newspaper will have no control over how “KEEP IT SIMPLE” The demand is for simple, direct and easily read photos which will catch the reader’s attention, for newspapers will rarely use more than one photo of an event that day, and it will often be cropped for the page layout and downgraded during printing. War images thus tend to fall into a limited range of readily understandable categories - conflict, joy, grief, uniforms, suffering, death, children and physical destruction. From the newspaper’s point of view the more visually stunning a picture is the better, but Nicaragua is an example of a conflict that did not produce the sort of iconic images that people remember from Vietnam. Fortunately events are not always that spectacular, but it is the job of the photographer at best to make the news exciting. If that is not possible straightforward visual information is good enough, so for weeks the news coverage of Nicaragua alternated between pictures of guerillas and pictures of soldiers. If a news event is featured daily over a considerable period of time, it becomes a problem to find a new twist and original pictures. The Pope’s visit to Ireland gave photographers a new opportunity there, just as Bianca Jagger became a new angle for those covering Nicaragua - even the Guardian saw fit to print her picture before that of the new government on July 20th. “IF IT ’S IN THE PAPER IT MUST BE TRUE” Residents coming out of hiding after the battle in which the National Guard retook the town of Masaya from the Sandinista forces. CHRONOLOGY those grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that there was a television crew nearby; they were actually making war movies in their heads, doing little guts-and-glory leatherneck tap dances underfire, getting their pimples shot off for the networks . . . We’d all seen too many movies, stayed too long in Television City, years of media glut had made certain connections difficult.’ (Michael Herr, Dispatches) they are used. Photographers caption their photos but newspapers, again using speed as an excuse, insist on having final rights over them, using them the way they want. Nicaragua. August - Sandinistas storm National Palace taking over 1,000 hostages including members of government: Somoza accedes to demands for ransom and release of political prisoners. FAO launches general strike. Popular uprising in Matagalp. September FSLN launches attacks, supported by popular insurrection, in Chinandega, Masaya, Esteli, Leon and Diriamba. All towns retaken by National Guard On a slope near Lake Managua, where several bodies were discovered, Nicaraguans search for family. There were reports that the bodies were of young men shot by the Guardia. Latin American papers are generally sensationalist and display a constant barrage of corpses. Recently the taboo on publishing pictures of dead bodies in the British Press appears to have been lifted. The pictures are nearly always of foreign situations, the distancing adds a layer of unreality and enables the picture to be read more in terms of formal composition and less in terms of emotional response. A family reunited with a released political prisoner outside Managua's Central Police Station on the day of Somoza’s departure from Nicaragua. vehicles? These are not pictures of Nicaragua as a social and political entity, but they are likely to be identified as such. after indiscriminate aerial bombardment. Thousands of civilians fleeing from National Guard atrocities seek refuge in Honduras and Costa Rica. Death toll estimated at over 5,000. October - Organisation of American States (OAS) sends international team to mediate between FAO and Somoza. November — IMF loan to Nicaragua refused because of US objections. Members of FAO, including Los Doce, walk out of mediation talks. Costa Rica breaks diplomatic relations with Nicaragua. OAS Human Rights Commission publishes report strongly condemning Somoza regime. 1979 January - National Patriotic Front (FPN) formed following failure of mediation talks. March - FSLN announces unification of their three factions under joint command. April - FSLN launches major offensive in north ot country temporarily occupying Esteli. May - Leaders of FAO and FPN detained. CAMERAWORK AFTER THE NEWS . . . Once the dramatic news is over the market for pictures will be very different. Special interest journals and magazines will have more space, higher quality reproduction and longer dead­ lines. However, unless they despatched a photo­ grapher at the time of the event they will still be relying on the same agencies, and therefore the same photographers, for pictures. Because of the constraints with which s/he was originally working, the news photographer is unlikely to have produced an in-depth photo story. If such a story did exist then the outlets for it, in Britain at least, are extremely limited - colour magazines wedged between consumer overkill. Susan Meiselas’ powerful colour pictures of Nicaragua ended up immaculately printed between the soft-porn covers of Photo magazine, a position infinitely worse than fuzzy newsprint fated to wrap up chips. New’s photographers are in a powerful position, they see what the media dilute and distort. They are, however, cut off from the power to control their pictures by a division of labour brought about by the cut and thrust newspaper world, which demands today’s pictures today. It would be useful for the rest of us if they had the commitment, over and above their job, to find alternative ways of producing and using the ‘rest’ of the news. Jenny Matthews Sandinistas point American M-16 and Israeli Galil automatic weapons at a poster of Anastasio Somoza Garcia. FSLN commando members and supporters celebrating their victory in the streets of Managua. Two reference pictures to remind us o f who's who. The picture of the guerrillas, although posed in ‘good fa ith ’ by the subjects to express the jubilation of victory, could be interpreted by the right as the chaos o f young upstart extremists. The two photos reveal the youth o f both sides, although neither picture can by itself set such youth in the context of Latin American society where children and young people are an essential economic force. G iven all the forces influencing the production of news pictures, the staged picture can be very valuable - viz. Bert H ardy's photo o f a soldier offering a dying comrade a drink, a photo only possible because H ardy asked the soldier to do it, and had to give him his canteen. The moment is false but the photographer would argue that it refers to other moments that did exist when a photographer w asn't around. The mock bayoneting o f Somoza is not such a good example o f a created incident because it brings up the problem o f the photographer as theatrical agent, stagemanaging events, and the viewer might well become suspicious of the ‘truth’ of other photos. AFTER SOMOZA: SOCIALISM OR REFORM? All wars come to an end. All too often, this also means the end of press coverage. As long as there was military conflict between Somoza and the Nicaraguan people, the international press was content to turn its eyes towards a previously neglected country. But since July 19, no attempt has been made to understand the implications of the FSLN victory. Once again, Nicaragua is not considered ‘newsworthy’. Violent death may remain useable - the British press covered the poisoning of Sandinista guards by counter-revolutionaries and an explo­ sion in Chinandega killing thirteen people w'hile broader political developments are dis­ missed by editors despite the flow of material from their correspondents and the agencies. Even during the war, a BBC story about Somoza’s imminent resignation was omitted in favour of a long interview about the quality of food in the British Club in El Salvador after the withdrawal of Britain’s ambassador. The Sandinista victory in itself guaranteed no more than an end to dictatorship, and it is clear to anyone visiting Nicaragua since July that many conflicting forces are shaping the ideo­ logical definition of the revolution. Of all the media caricatures which emerged from the Nica­ raguan war, none was more misleading than the conventional portrayal of Somoza as psycho­ path. To describe him as cruel, greedy and corrupt is certainly true as far as it goes, but it misses the point. With overthrow a certainty, Somoza cold-bloodedly set about levelling Nicaragua’s major cities and pillaging the remnants of the national economy. The results u'ere clear: to impose the need for national unity in reconstructing the country, allowing the FSLN minimum room for manoeuvre and obscuring the class nature of the struggle. The composition of the Government of National Reconstruction was certainly a master­ piece of diplomacy by the FSLN, but within a ► Guardia soldiers patrolling the city after recapturing it from the Sandinistas. All Photographs by Alon Reininger/Colorific IMF agrees US $66m. loan to Somoza govern­ ment. FSLN launches all-out ‘final offensive’ taking Jinotega in the north and entering country from Costa Rica. June - General strike called by FSLN. Heavy fighting throughout country. Sandinistas take Chinandega, Matagalpa and Leon. Esteli falls. Opposition sets up provisional Government of National Reconstruction. Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Brazil and Panama break diplomatic rela­ tions with Nicaragua. Special OAS meeting passes resolution calling for Somoza’s resigna­ tion. Battle for Managua ends in FSLN withdrawal following heavy bombing. Civilian refugees put at over 150,000, hundreds dead. By the end of June Sandinistas hold over 20 cities including Diriamba and Masaya. Intense diplo­ matic activity by US. July - Sandinistas take Jinotepe. Battle for Rivas continues. National Guard counter­ offensive against Masaya halted. US continues efforts to find political solution. FSLN have iManagua encircled but hold back final assault. Somoza fails in attempt to enlist military support of fellow Central American dictators. Foreign ministers from Andean Pact countries meet pro­ visional government. Provisional government names cabinet. 100 senior National Guard officers removed from active service. Somoza resigns on 17th July and flies to Miami, naming leader of Congress, Francisco Urcuyo, as interim President. Fighting flares up again when Urcuyo refuses to hand over power to provisional government. Members of provisional govern­ ment fly into Leon from Costa Rica. National Guard in disarray; many surrender; fleeing deserters hijack Red Cross plane. Urcuyo flees country’ after only 48 hours as President. Sandinistas enter Managua. Provisional government members arrive in Managua on 20th July to tumultuous welcome. from Nicaragua, Dictatorship and Revolution, available from PO Box 134, London NW1. 75p CAMERAWORK -----------------------very restricted range of options. The economy had to be regenerated and thousands rescued from starvation and this meant the appoint­ ment of experienced ministers to create that familiar ‘climate of confidence’ which attracts massive foreign aid, while in no way being sympathetic to the socialist transformation of Nicaragua. While some key political appoint­ ments have gone to Sandinista leaders (Tomas Borge as Interior Minister, Jaime Wheelock in charge of Agrarian Reform), the economy is handled by technocrats, capitalists and social democrats from the old anti-Somoza private sector. This uneasy marriage of interests is reflected in the five-person Junta, where the Social Democrat Sergio Ramirez holds the pre­ carious ‘moderate’ role between two FSLN/MPU militants and two representatives of conservative business interests. The under­ standable chaos of the first few weeks has given way to a new and more disturbing administra­ tive paralysis: who makes the decisions in the new Nicaragua? The FSLN nine-man direc­ torate or government ministers? Meanwhile, the massive concentration of capital in the hands of Somoza, and the dominant state sector created by the expropriation of 51% of all cultivatable land and 180 industrial enterprises is often cited as a strong basis for socialist change. But the contradiction is that anti-Somoza landowners and businessmen can sleep easy in the knowledge that the state has neither the imme­ diate wish nor the administrative capacity to attack their economic power. The ‘loss’ of Nicaragua was a major humilia­ tion for the consistently inept policies of the USA, but it will take more than the overthrow of Somoza to frustrate American geopolitical ambi­ tions in their own traditional backyard. The comical sabre-rattling of the mock invasion of Guantanamo and the creation of a Caribbean ‘task-force’ are one facet of a new regional strategy. The other is shown by US support for the overthrow of General Romero in El Salvador. Whether or not the States directly engineered the coup, they are delighted by the prospect of further popular discontent in the area being con­ tained by the new Salvadorean colonels, who will avoid the worst excesses of a Romero or a Somoza while doing little to alter fundamental power structures. As for tampering with the internal affairs of Nicaragua, this may now be done more plausibly through the amenable democracies of Central America and the Andean Pact. This analysis is very much concerned with superstructural politics, but the visitor has only to step out of the Hotel Intercontinental in Managua, now the seat of government, to realise that the Nicaraguan people, armed and organised, hold the real key to the country’s future. Slogans are everywhere: ‘Organisation and more organisation’; ‘Power to the workers and the peasants’; ‘The people armed are the guarantee of the revolution’. These phrases are not arbitrarily imposed from above. They express a principle which has been shown to work in practice, and the five organs which provide Sandinista strength locally - the Trade Union Central; the Association of Nicaraguan Women; the Sandinista Youth; the Defence Committes; and the Association of Rural Workers - also give the basis for popular power. Even if the people do not yet use overtly Marxist vocabulary, their political maturity and strength of organisation are the firmest guarantee of a socialist future in Nicaragua. George Black A family mourning a dead Sandinista fighter in Chinandega Hospital. George B lack is a member o f the Nicaragua Co-ordinating Committee and can be contacted at 20/21 Compton Terrace, London N l l( h- I ' r« ft of) iJ j c Y f 4T b r Guardia soldiers in a makeshift brothel in Masaya. Victorious Sandinista, Managua ‘W oman fighter' has become a powerful image for the left and a useful variation on the theme o f soldier/guerilla fo r the press in general. A whole media fantasy has emerged around the female revolutionary. , Unforlunalely the sorts of photographs that a newspaper photographer is pressured to take end up perpetuating a stereotyped view o f a particular country or area. Nicaragua has been no exception. Brothel pictures are acceptable as long as they are Third World women, right at the bottom o f the exploitation ladder. Since the late 1960's the Revolutionary has been an acceptable media figure, again as long as it’s suitably distanced by being m Latin America (i.e. fa r away). I t ’s a romantic image, not quite the terrorism the press fears on its own doorstep. FSLN guerilla takes a bath in Somoza's bathtub in his 'bunker' headquarters. CAMERAWORK / ------------------------ apan is a country of extremes; it is a society of many contradictions. As often as a characteristic peculiar to Japan or possessing a quality we might call ‘Japanese’ is defined, that definition is contradicted or denied. The land of harmonious aesthetic, refined sensibility and sympathy with the natural elements and seasonal cycles, is also the land of devastation, photo-chemical smog and mercury poisoning - with a history of unprecedented destruction of the environment. There is a tension between the survival of the traditional life and a futurist explosion. Colossal forces have accelerated the develop­ ment of Japan during the Sixties, and as we enter the Eighties in Western Europe, we are alarm­ ingly ignorant of Japan. Western commentators, such as Herman Kahn, a futurologist at the Hudson Institution,1 have suggested that by the end of the 1980’s Japan will have entered a ‘post­ industrial stage’. Its role as a financial superpower will give it super political or military pow'er, and the focus of international affairs will shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The post-war Japanese development offers not only an economic challenge to the West, but a great challenge to the Japanese people. The Japanese identity has become confused. There is very clear evidence that the Seventies was a decade in which many Japanese expressed a desire to reassert elements of traditional life, questioning the benefits of the ‘economic miracle’. There is also a post-war generation not yet born when the Emperor was divine for which Japanese tradition is a myth. This gener­ ation grew up under American occupation, and have lived in the densest urban environments. Japan is a volatile society caught by the tensions of identity crisis and direction. From time to time the tension explodes with great fero­ city, such as the student riots of the late Sixties, the seige of Tokyo University in 1968 and 1969 by the Zengakuren, and the continued struggle on the runways of Narita Airport. It is hard to reconcile that image of Japan in conflict, with the image of Japan as the centre of Zen Buddhism where sportsmen, politicians and film stars do zazen meditation before important occasions, where the temple continues to be a great social institution, not a museum. Like the traditional spontaneity of sumi-e brush and ink painting, photography has imme­ diacy, a quality most attractive to Japanese sensi­ bility. Photography in Japan has. become a medium which can suggest the tensions, contra­ dictions, serenity and violence of a nation subject to transition on an enormous scale. In the mid-Seventies the Japanese have been producing about 5 million 35mm cameras per year. In such a competitive society, the photo­ grapher can achieve superstar status quite beyond that of photographers who might be household names in Britain. Kishin Shinoyema, the most popular of the younger generation of photographers, appears not only on TV commercials and in the columns of the fan maga­ zines, but also on fifty foot high advertising hoardings in the centre of Tokyo. As a weapon in a high-powered marketing campaign, the photo­ grapher can receive high rewards under the generous sponsorship of the manufacturers. Despite initial superstitions and taboos about the medium, photography is now in the main­ stream of Japanese culture; in typical fashion it both confirms and denies a traditional aesthetic. At times it appears imitative of Western trends, and at times it is foreign and bizarre. It was not until 1974 that the first major exhibition of Japanese photography was held in the West, at the Museum of Modem Art in New York. Then in 1977 the ‘Neue Fotographie aus Japan’ show was held in Graz. This August, at last, a Japanese show reached London. It was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art under the sponsorship of Canon cameras. Although the recent exhibition was called ‘Japanese Photography Today and its Origins’, suggesting a broad historical context, it actually revealed very little about Japan. Much deeper analysis and presentation was missing and it is needed to penetrate the glaring contradictions in Japanese society. O f all the photographers in the Canon Exhibition, Eikoh Hosoe is probably the most significant. Through an enormous body of work he has produced images that touch the core of the Japanese tradition. However, he does not operate like an archaeologist exploring the remains of a past culture. He uses the streets of urban Japan in the same way that he uses the rice fields. Two of his important series have a specific historical setting, but they are also timeless. He is confirming the vitality of the tradition. A figure crouches high on the tall wooden fence, on which the rice straw is hung to dry. He stares across the plain, brooding and, we are told by the photographer, Eikoh Hosoe, he is pos­ sessed by the spirit of Kamaitachi. This key image w'as selected by the ICA to be blown up J and hung at the entrance to the exhibition. It is part of a long sequence of nearly forty photo­ graphs by Hosoe that are mythical, rooted in tradition and highly pertinent to contemporary Japan. Hosoe has said, ‘the images of this story do not need much commentary: I would like the specta­ tors to use their own imagination.’ Nonetheless the background to these pictures is of enormous significance. Although the series is now ten years old, the photographs are a sequence set in Hosoe’s memory of 1944, and as such, they form the most explicit starting point to modern Japanese photography. Hosoe uses the language and metaphor of dream, myth and dance to explore the fertile folk imagination of village life, adolescent sexual awareness and the confronta­ graphs. Hosoe has followed Kamaitachi with another long and as yet unfinished series called Simon: A Private Landscape. It follows in close chrono­ logical succession since it is based on the days shortly after the surrender in 1945. Thirty years later another model as a ‘catalyst’, he has set the series against the landscape around Tokyo, through which he wandered as an adolescent. Simon has a long, angular body. His face is made up. He wears a woman’s kimono. His mask is that of a pierrot who mourns amongst the market stalls, lies spreadeagled in the grass on the outskirts of the city like a broken doll, smiles like some Myshkin figure amongst the children, dances around the fortune teller’s tent and howls on the streetcorner. Hosoe has said that the tion of this physical, exuberant life with the life of the streets of modern, urban Japan. Signifi­ cantly, the ICA show begins and ends with Hosoe. In 1944 American bombers fire-bombed every city in Japan except for Kyoto. The old capital was mercifully preserved because of its cultural heritage. In a single night raid on Tokyo more bombs were dropped than in the entire London blitz. Nearly all wooden buildings - urban Japan - was in ashes. Hosoe was then twelve years old and was evacuated to the country village where his mother had been brought up. The farmers’ children thought the city kids different; they were pale and emaciated from lack of food. Hosoe’s wartime adolescence was spent in comparative solitude as an outsider and spectator amongst the robust farming families. It was then that he learned the story of Kamaitachi. ‘ Kamaitachi is an invisible weasel with very sharp teeth like a sickle. But nobody has ever seen him. Nobody knows when or where he appears. Only that he attacks men in the fields. I had a complex feeling however, that I should never hate the land where my mother was born and raised and if I hated it I would hate my own mother.’2 Hosoe’s explanation of Kamaitachi is almost a premonition of the terrible, unknown weapon that would strike the following year at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then all Japanese values were turned inside out. Patriotism and love of the Emperor had been taken to incon­ ceivable limits during 1944 and 1945. The conflict was between love of the mother country and the divine Emperor and the knowledge of the fact that Japan could not win the war; surrender was unprecedented, and the traditional ethical course would be mass suicide. An adolescent imagination might well conjure demons at such a time. The photographic manufacturing boom enabling Japan to be a great exporter of cameras has also flooded the domestic market with camera equipment. This is also the case with electrical goods. The Japanese urban home, though modest by Western standards due to lack of space and a sympathy for uncluttered sim­ plicity, often has more than one colour television and an assortment of electrical equipment and cameras. Hosoe has used a dancer, Tatsumi Jijitaka, to portray the figures possessed by Kamaitachi. Hosoe has managed to create a vision from memory; it is the realisation of a personal image carried in his imagination for twenty-five years, despite any historical interpretation. The idea of a narrative series is common in Japan, since photographers are often working in book form on a specific theme, rather than for exposure in an exhibition. Despite the recogni­ tion of photography as mainstream culture, ironically, there are relatively few Japanese museums or galleries that are exhibiting photo­ model Simon will eventually vanish and the final Mishima defined the coexistence of the savage half of the series will be empty landscapes. and the lyrical in Japanese photography. There are desolate images. They coincide with Recognising the power of Mishima’s state­ an almost indescribable desolation of that ments, it is still difficult to accept that at the end period, 1945 the critical date. It is the beginning of the Seventies the traditional Japan, for which of a new Japan; not only is photography radically Mishima died, can ever reemerge as anything different before and after 1945, but for many other than an anachronism. In the historical Japanese, 1945 must have seemed like the end of section of the Canon show, the samurai are por­ the world. When the Emperor addressed the trayed with a sad dignity in the 1860’s, less than nation for the first time on radio on August 15, ten years after Commodore Perry’s famous 1945, following the second atomic explosion at intrusion in the ‘Black Ships’ in 1853. These Nagasaki, he broadcast that, ‘to preserve the pictures are the last visual testimony to a vanish­ tradition of the Yamato race, the people had to ing age, comparable to Curtis’ work amongst the endure the unendurable and suffer what is American Indians. unsufferable’. A defeated army prowled the Since the pre-war period is diplomatically ruins of the capital, many committed suicide, safe, the exhibition included pictures such as and an alien army entered and bartered trinkets. ‘The Hanging of the Korean Revolutionaries’ in In the wake of defeat and the collapse of the 1919, and pictures of prisoners in the Sinonationalist ideal came the purges, the trials, and Japanese war in 1938, in which Japanese troops the dismantling of state Shinto. Not only were committed appalling atrocities. industry and the economy shattered, but the There have been a number of fine Japanese myth of an inviolable history was also shattered. war photographers since 1945, several of whom The Canon show most diplomatically avoids died in Vietnam. Two Vietnam pictures were the period. One wonders if this period was docu­ included in the exhibition, one by the Pulitzer mented by the military or if the trauma of the prize winner Kyoichi Sawada. Japan was a spec­ surrender and the occupation was too devastat­ tator in the Vietnamese conflict. However, there ing to record. There is only one photograph of are many conflicts within Japan, which have the occupation; it is from five years later, 1950. been consistently recorded by Japanese docu­ A large sign hangs from the high wire fence of an mentary photographers, such as: Hamaguchi’s American zone in Hbiya, the centre of Tokyo. In work at Narita; Tomatsu’s work on the streets of great letters and small Japanese characters it Shinjuku in 1969 or in Okinawa where the proclaims ‘Dead End’. Hosoe has entered the American presence had been the scene of violent period through a private landscape thirty years controversy. Neither photographer had work later. exhibited in this show, though Tomatsu is the he Canon catalogue carefully states most celebrated photographer in Japan. ‘. . . with an Emperor forced offi­ Hamaguchi’s work will soon be shown at the cially to deny his divine preroga­ Half Moon Photography Workshop. tives, Japan saw a New Constitution The arrival of the first Leica in the Thirties proclaimed, education reformed enabled realist documentary work, recording and land reforms initiated in a transformation the conflict of the pre-war years, and the that was to be termed “Americanisation” . Thus suppression of the unions in the wave of nation­ reformed under Allied control and fitted into an alism that accompanied the expansionist foreign American-orientated economic system, Japan policy. A Marxist photo cooperative was estab­ was able from the early fifties on, after American lished by Kimura, and produced work in sharp occupation ended in 1952, to set about its own contrast to the imitative and fashionably cubist economic reconstruction, which was to blossom or constructivist work of Nakayama and his forth in the sixties.’3 The Sixties were indeed a colleagues. boom period for Japan, economically and crea­ The post-war period represented by this tively, but within the pattern of sweeping exhibition is clearly divided into two genera­ Americanisation, were the seeds of a crisis of tions: a generation whose references are deep in identity which has been clearly demonstrated by Japanese tradition, or are seeking to discover the Seventies. and reassert those references, and a new, In 1971 Japan was stunned by the public younger generation whose work has no sense of seppuku (hara kiri) of the most celebrated specific location. Shoji Ueda, now in his late Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima. His death is sixties, has mixed the surreal with the Japanese well documented, but its significance as a logical sense of space, which marks traditional design. conclusion to his cycle of four novels, The Sea of He photographs in a country which is claustro­ Fertility, is still not understood. Minutes before phobic due to the density of its population and he died, in his speech to the assembled troops of the intensive cultivation and habitation of its the Ground Self Defense Force at their H.Q. in non-mountainous areas. Tsuchida, Ikko Tokyo, Mishima accused them of being ‘drunk Narahara and Shinoyama, though much with prosperity’. younger, have produced work which explores Mishima epitomised the conflict of the time. Japanese roots. In his series Zokushin: The He was a complex and seemingly contradictory Race of Gods on Earth, Tsuchida has followed personality. He was obsessed with the classical the Shinto spirit, with its origins in prehistory. T Western cult of the body, very familiar with European prose, and lived in rococo, baroque surroundings. But at the same time, he vigorously practised the traditional samurai code and took the discipline to its extreme conclusion. Public response to his suicide was one of dismissal, and accusations of posturing and fanaticism, although Kawabata, the Nobel Prize winner, said that Japan has a writer of Mishima’s calibre only once every five hundred years. The Japanese were embarrassed; Mishima reminded them of truths which had been neatly obscured under the canopy of Americanisation. Hosoe used Mishima for an extraordinary series of photographs, Ordeal by Roses. These were originally taken in 1963 and republished in 1971, the year of Mishima’s death. Hosoe and Shinoyama’s early work on tattoos was also exhibited. It is a link with Ukiyo-o, the Floating World of Edo; tattoo designs are based on this. His enormous work, The Japanese House, was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1976. He also produced great portraiture work of Kabuki actors and a series on Mishima, two weeks before the writer’s death. His diversity is staggering and accounts for some of his great commercial success. n the greatest manufacturing/consumer society in the world, one would expect advertising to be slick. Bishin Jummonji, a former assistant of Shinoyama, has pro­ duced commercial colour work for Hitachi that is both bizarre and hilarious - a series of frozen moments in which the models are literally caught in mid-air. The social and cultural alienation of the younger photographers in Tokyo or Osaka is common to the frustrations expressed in London, New York and the cities of the West. Ayako Senda, has focused on the desolation of broken televisions, rusting cars and trampled toys on the vast refuse dump in Tokyo Bay. Kiyotaka Takauchi says, ‘The system; a monster . . . drags people into the endless gulf, like an avalanche. We live in an enormous hyper­ modern town and we live a prefabricated life. Food in tins, walks in tins, little tins of houses. Our culture is tinned culture. To all appearances I am a sane man, but my mind is sick.’3 Maybe he will find a cure, if, like Hosoe, he turns to the roots of his culture, before it vanishes altogether. The very title of the Canon show, Japanese Photography Today and its Origins, suggests that we should have a broad perspective on modern Japan, and the forces at work in that society. In fact the spectators will probably leave that exhibition with an image of the country that is more confused than when they entered. It is not enough to place a hundred photographs, taken over a period of more than a hundred years, side by side in a small room and claim that it describes the origin of photography in a country as complex as Japan. The show is an attempt to define Japanese photography, as if it started at point A with the first cameras and moved through a logical development to point B, where there is the dubious title, ‘Eight Masters of the Twentieth Century’. These photographs need explicit translation and context. What is so significant about this exhibition is that it tells you so little about Japan. The absence of the work of documentary photographers such as Tomatsu is curious; Tomatsu and Hamaguchi’s statements are very explicit. There is also an absence of the older generation of post-war photographers such as Ishimoto, Iwamiya or the non-documentary work of Ken Domon. They have a very clear aesthetic. They have produced landscape work, framed in such a way that it is definable as ‘Japanese’, with clear links with the Japanese visual tradition. The exhibition almost ignored any post-war landscape work. These conspi­ cuous absences are perhaps understandable when you realise that many photographers are receiving sponsorship from Nikon or Pentax, and cannot be exhibited in the Canon show for •contractual reasons. Prejudices and misconceptions about Japan survive in the West from the pre-war and war­ time years. The Japanese are anxious to project a new image if they are going to establish stronger commercial ties with Western Europe. The Japanese economy, though strong, is still very vulnerable. In any relationship between the West and Japan, there are certain taboos over the events of 1945. Much of post-war Japanese history is about the loss of a traditional identity and reaction against the terms of the surrender and American Occupation of 1945. If those areas are to be explored in the interests of diplomacy, then the context of both Hosoe’s work and that of the younger generation will be lost. The pre-war nationalist, militarist image of Japan in the West has been replaced by a post­ war image of an expansionist, economic monster. The Japanese are anxious to rectify this. However, the Canon show serves to exagge­ rate those elements of Japan which remain alien and bizarre to the Western spectator, the spec­ tator who leaves the exhibition no clearer as to what lies behind the mask and what is the real Japan. I Mark Holborn References: (1) Herman Kahn, The Eme
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