Tuesday 24 August 2010

On Photography

I thumbed through a copy of Susan Sontag's "On Photography" today while on my rounds. Although this is considered a seminal work by many photographers - so much so that it is now printed in the Penguin Classics range - I have to say that the few pages I read seemed impenetrable and pretentious.

For someone who "writes" a photography-based blog, I don't much like reading about photography. I don't consider myself an "artist" and I'm not much interested in postulating about this theory or that one. I'm quite a simple creature in my tastes. I approach every photograph with one simple question: "Do I like it?" If I do, then I wonder why - and I try to appreciate the photographer's skill and composition.

Photography is about two things for me: Entertainment or Information. If a photograph is neither of these, then I move on. I'm entertained by skilful landscapes, action-packed sports shots, clever compositions and a myriad other things. What I am categorically *not* entertained by is 400-odd pages of pretentious artistic waffle.

Tuesday 17 August 2010

Fighter squadron in formation

This is a classic image of a Spitfire squadron in formation, straight from the National Archives. I can only imagine at the preparation going into this image - even down to the weather, this shot wouldn't have worked without a cloudy background.

The image comes from one of my favourite sections of Flickr, known as "The Commons" - a place where famous institutions from all over the world upload collections of photographs, in the spirit of sharing and bringing them to a wider audience.

Wednesday 11 August 2010

Cardiff After Dark

Following on from my last post, I noticed a great set of photos on Flickr, posted by Polish photographer Maciej Dakowicz, entitled "Cardiff After Dark". It is a striking set of around 200 images, shot over the past couple of years by Maciej around the city.

The set shows everything I find familiar about a night duty - drunks urinating in the street, people fighting, passed out on the pavement - in effect, turning urban areas into gigantic, uninhibited human sewers after around 10pm. Maciej's photos are like a tragic slice of urban theatre. His photos have gained recognition recently in Amateur Photographer.

If you want to understand some of what is so wrong with Britain today, you could do a lot worse than look through his collection.

Saturday 7 August 2010

Night Shift

I see all manner of things in the course of my job. This week, I've been doing a stint on night duty CID - we only have to do it a few times a year, and it's one of my favourite duties because we have to cover all manner of incidents. The image on the left is the remnants of a typical Saturday night - that broken bottle you see on the floor was smashed into someone's face after a typical drunken brawl. The blood sprayed over the ground nearby was the result of some very deep lacerations that will leave the victim scarred for life. On top of that, over the 7 nights, I've attended a double stabbing, numerous other assaults and a drug-related car crash where the driver had tried to run over and kill some associates.

I've often toyed with the idea of asking for formal permission from the borough commander to do a "photo essay" of various parts of my OCU, just to show people some of the things we police officers face on a daily basis. Until I became a copper, I thought I was pretty streetwise and that there wasn't much I hadn't seen. How wrong I was. I just wish I could share so much more of it with the public. I don't think any images would shock - Hollywood has pretty much taken care of that for us, and nothing really replicates the feeling of "being there". Still, I don't know of any other police officers doing anything similar, and I think it would make a change from all the "Cops on Camera"-type police shows, which, although are fly-on-the-wall in nature, have still passed through the hands of TV editors and producers.

Terrorists 'sick of being treated like photographers'

This made me chuckle!

Terrorists 'sick of being treated like photographers' |

Thursday 5 August 2010

Lewis Hine

The Mill - Lewis Hine

Lewis Hine is another of my favourite American photographers. Hine's early work, around 1905, was concerned with working conditions in the steel industry. As he travelled, he became more interested in child labour, from around 1908 - 1912 - so much so that he left his job as a teacher in order to become an investigative journalist for the National Child Labor Committee.

Hine is now regarded as a master photographer, and rightly so. His images of children, often in terrible working environments, are still powerful today. Occasionally, we see images of sweatshop factories in Asia - but I still haven't seen anything as powerful as those shot by Hine. Some of his images are, admittedly, posed - probably including the example above - but it makes a powerful statement. The girl in this image is only 11 years old, and claimed that she had already been working in the mill for a year. This was unusual - most children told Hine that they were 14 (the legal working age of the time), or that they were just "helping out" casually. It seems remarkable that Hine was able to gain access to all the factories and mills as he did.

Hine died in poverty in 1940, with only one book published in his lifetime, documenting the construction of the Empire State Building. Nevertheless, it is his early images that he is best remembered for. Hine was never regarded much as a photographer within his lifetime - just as a sociologist and campaigner. Today, his images are powerful statements - masterful documentary images in every sense. His legacy was the abandonment of child labour in America. For this reason, Hine deserves his place among the great photographers.

For more of Hine's images, see the online collection held by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where around 5000 of his images of child poverty can be seen.

Monday 2 August 2010

Shorpy

I've just added a link to Shorpy - a historic photographic archive chronicling American life from the 1850's to the 1950's. It's an amazing blog, well worthy of the widespread recognition it receives. The images are largely taken from the Library of Congress archives and cover an extensive range of topics. They also sell prints of the images.

The motto of Shorpy is "Always Something Interesting" - a conclusion I wholeheartedly agree with.

Sunday 1 August 2010

Captured: America in Color, 1939 - 1943

The Denver Post has just added a stunning collection of images from 1939 - 1943, showing (largely) American rural life at the time. The gallery, titled Captured: America in Color, 1939 - 1943, shows just what was possible with colour film long before it became widely used in a consumer format. None of the images would rank as "famous", but they are evocative - particularly those of black Americans living alongside whites. Compare the work in the cotton fields to the 4th of July celebrations, especially, and the "Juke" joint.