aspirations

Am wondering if anyone can help me take better pictures. For example, the one below is a detail of Tower Bridge. The photographer must have been quite a long way away, so how did he (David Springfield) get such a clear image?



The next one, by Frederick Evans, is not out of focus but has this wonderful - I like it anyway - hazy effect - anyone know how to achieve this? Vaseline?

This one by Josef Sudek - how did he get the figures so clear?

And this one by Karel Brassai - well, did he have to get the couple to pose, I wonder. Which makes me wonder if we mightn't get together and be models for each other sometime - not in the classroom, but like this one, in a pub, or somewhere with atmosphere and interesting things like mirrors. If we took time to each decide what kind of photo we wanted and who we wanted to be in it - I won't be insulted if you don't want old wrinkly, especially if you want a snoggy picture - we could get really organized and do something constructive as a team.

Do tell me if you think I'm being too ambitious.

alternative urban landscapes

Delete Libraries in Urban Settings, replace with Reflected Urban Landscapes

This is half of a photo I half like from earlier landscape project. I think what I've learnt from both projects - portraits and landscapes - is if don't like the photos , don't do.

Peckham Plaza

Should have cropped more from the bottom of this one - done in haste - another lesson to learn!

alternative urban landscapes

Reflecting on my attempt at a landscape project I'm not a happy woman. I only like one of my six photos and even that's not a favourite. It seems difficult for me to create on demand, it's like being back at school where getting the thing done takes over from being creative.

The only 'library project' photo I half like is the one of Peckham Leisure Centre reflected in Peckham Library and I was thinking how much I like my photos of reflected buildings. I know the concept's not original but anyway my pictures are my pictures and no two people's pictures - presumably - are ever the same! What's going to happen when we have to make a statement of intent and follow through on a project? DK. A set of fairly boring but meets-the-criteria pictures!

What I should have done was gone back to the places I took photos I like and retake in the name of PROJECT. I didn't, but if I had...

Canary Wharf

Cannon Street

Mary Axe Street

Shad Thames

Gt Turnstile Street

Three Libraries - three colour photos

Peckham Library, opened 1999, with Peckham Leisure Centre behind.

Swiss Cottage Library, opened 1964, with unidentified, shapely building behind.

Dulwich Library, opened 24 November 1897, with local bank behind.

Landscape project final day

"The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

For my project Libraries in Urban Landscapes I decided that I didn't have time to visit any more libraries so would present two photos of each library.

I went back to Swiss Cottage to get more photos today - it's very close to where I work - the weather was worse than last week - greyer - though not actually raining. The man in the photo above looked really warm and cosy inside.

My other three photographs are less landscape-like I think - each features the library and only one other building, is taken more close-up. I'm also going to present them in colour as I think this suits two of them better than b & w.

Landscape project day 3

I decided for my landscape project to make the theme Libraries in Urban Landscapes. My third library is Peckham. I followed the format of the previous two photos by having the library on the right of the picture. The only reason this makes any difference is that it makes the surrounding landscape more equally comparable. However, the surroundings are not equally comparable because I couldn't get the same distance vantage point for all three photos. I think this is the reason that the lines are not so straight in this one or the Dulwich one, whereas for the Swiss Cottage one I was a long way from the building.

What I like about this one is that the left-hand side shows some of the dereliction of the area, right behind the prize-winning, state-of-the-art library building.

Robert Frank at Tate Modern 2004

Unfortunately I missed this exhibition - it would have suited my old-fashioned love of selected singly framed photographs! And they don't have to be hugely enlarged (at the recent Photographers' Gallery exhibition of Kertesz's work On Reading the photos were even smaller than those above).

Robert Frank at Tate Modern 13/11/2009

In 1957, Frank casually showed his American photo essay to the young beat writer, Jack Keruoac, whom he met at a party in New York City. Kerouac was impressed and responded with– “Sure I can write something about these pictures,” and penned the introduction to the U.S. edition of The Americans. Robert Frank’s work is now widely considered an important, intimate peak inside small-town America, but originally it was not met with open arms by all– at the time of its release many of the images were considered controversial, while other critics just outright dismissed his work as a blurry mess of nothingness.

I've been trying to work out why I failed to appreciate the photography of Robert Frank on display at Tate Modern. Theories:

1. my lack of sympathy with American culture
2. the way it was curated
3. my laziness
4. not liking his photos

1. Well, I don't much like seeing the American flag or cowboy hats but on the whole American photography is as interesting to me as any other.
2. I didn't like the way the strip photographs were framed and hung on the wall - probably because it's not what I'm used to and also because I wouldn't want to hang such a framed picture on my own wall. I would have liked to have seen a few photos enlarged and framed singly.
3. I did find it hard work to look at all those small photos. However, if they'd been presented as if in a book - which is how Frank himself presented them, as I understand, and as many works of art are presented at Tate Modern, in glass cabinets - then I think I'd have made more effort. I know this doesn't make a lot of sense!
4. Of course I don't like all his photos but there are plenty I do like.

I love the following photos which I found on Google images:



For me this one represents multi-cultural America and technically is brilliant with the pair in the foreground in focus and those in the background blurred. The light trim on the woman's dark coat helps to make this a great B & W picture.

From a series called 'From the Bus' which was exhibited at Tate Modern in 2004. I also like taking photos from the bus! This is what he wrote about it:

'The Bus carries me thru the City, I look out the window, I look at the people on the street, the Sun and the Traffic Lights. It has to do with desperation and endurance - I have always felt about living in New York. Compassion and probably some understanding for New York's Concrete and its people, walking... waiting... standing... holding hands... the summer of 1958.'

I love the facial expression of this child, and the dark/light contrast between the two overcoats.

I like the way Frank has captured the social class diferentiation of that time.

I found the following extract quite interesting and I acknowledge the importance of his work:

Sociologist Howard S. Becker has written about The Americans as social analysis:
Robert Frank's (...) enormously influential The Americans is in ways reminiscent both of Tocqueville's analysis of American institutions and of the analysis of cultural themes by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Frank presents photographs made in scattered places around the country, returning again and again to such themes as the flag, the automobile, race, restaurants—eventually turning those artifacts, by the weight of the associations in which he embeds them, into profound and meaningful symbols of American culture.

Landscape photo project day 2

A beautiful day and so off out with the camera.

A theme for my landscape photos has emerged: Libraries in Urban Settings. Two down, four to go.

The photo I posted a couple of days ago featured (by sheer serendipity) Swiss Cottage Library on the right hand side of the picture and today's photo features Dulwich Library (a planned execution) on the right hand side of the picture (unplanned). The theme could be: Urban Libraries on the Right. For anyone with the curiosity of a cat I can identify some other buildings in the photo below. Next to the library, in the background, is a pub called The Plough, there since 1830 (some earlier history quoted below). To its left, more or less in the middle of the picture, is a bank. I don't like banks at the best of times so I'm certainly not going to mention whose bank branch it is. On the left are terraced houses with shops below, one an estate agent, one a chiropodist (which I've never visited - I have visited the pub on a few occasions, drinking only in moderation of course, and the library on hundreds of occasions, taking out books not in moderation and not always returning them on time). I hope none of my readers will be corrupted by the story of Thomas Jones.

In Lordship Lane, there was, in the time of William Hone, an inn called the "Plough"—an old-fashioned wooden structure—on one of the windows of which was the following inscription, cut with a diamond:—"March 16, 1810. Thomas Jones dined here, eat six pounds of bacon and drank nineteen pots of beer."
From: 'Peckham and Dulwich', Old and New London: Volume 6 (1878), pp. 286-303.

Class outing - Jim Goldberg

I found the Jim Goldberg exhibition Open See very moving because of the harrowing stories of asylum seekers. However, the photographs that I liked were those least graphically illustrating that theme. In fact, I sometimes wondered whether they belonged to the project at all, both because they didn't match that theme and also because the format was different. I suppose the large format photographs, as opposed to the small Polaroid snaps with written stories, more illustrated the hopefulness of the subjects. The young man in the photograph below looks very well-kempt and seems to be soon to have a good feed. I love the black-white contrast and in particular the pale delicacy of the dried corn husks aganist the black.

The photograph I liked best, of a Congolese family in front of their tent, I can't find a copy of on Google images. I thought it was a brilliant composition in which Goldberg had managed to engage all the personalities of the people depicted as well as their unity as a family. Technically, it was quite a dark photo but I liked this and it reminded me of a woodcut print.

Landscape photo project

Urban landscape, Swiss Cottage, November 2009

"You must use the lens that will bring out the best composition. This is accomplished by becoming familiar with the perspective of your lenses. That comes from experience. I tend to shoot more with telephoto lenses because I like to pull the little compositions from the greater landscape before me. Telephotos not only isolate and allow me to eliminate distracting elements, they allow me to get compositions and subject matter that nobody else has. I can stand at one spot and shoot 20 different landscapes...With telephotos, I get a lot of private compositions." Art Wolfe

Apparently most people use wide-angle lenses for landscape photography. This is the lens I have:

"The Canon EF-S 18-55mm lens f/3.5-5.6 is a wide-angle to mild telephoto zoom lens for digital single-lens reflex cameras with an EF-S lens mount. The field of view has a 35 mm equivalent focal length of 28.8-88mm, and it is the standard kit lens on Canon's consumer DSLRs."

I read somewhere that landscape photos should be dynamic, not static. It's difficult to see on this reproduction but there are quite a few figures in my Swiss Cottge photo above - a few on the ground and a couple of workers on top of a building on the left. I don't know if it works, but I hope that by having some figures, especially those working on a building, this makes the picture less static. It was a very grey, damp day - probably not ideal light conditions! Rain stopped play.