tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32675111106476797262024-03-19T00:20:22.769-07:00Peter Dench(no relation to Dame Judi, that I know of)
follow me on twitter @peterdench instagram @denchphotoPeter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.comBlogger50125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-50009623129436332152023-09-19T10:34:00.002-07:002023-09-19T10:34:44.248-07:00<p>Tom Stoddart<br /> <br />A tribute to photojournalist Tom Stoddart who died on <span><span class="LrzXr kno-fv wHYlTd z8gr9e">17 November 2021</span></span>.<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">In May 2022, at the three day Photo North festival in Manchester, hundreds of people gathered in an innocuous basement studio at the former Granada Studios in central Manchester to witness a photography exhibition, Extraordinary Women by Tom Stoddart. The following month, thousands made the pilgrimage 40 miles east through the great west doors of Chester Cathedral to view the same month-long show. <br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Some of the visitors were new to Tom’s photography, many more were loyal and had travelled great distances to see images by a man who had photography in his DNA. People journeyed to pay their respects and talk about the personal contact he had with them. Tom would regularly drive across the country to camera clubs and lecture theatres to deliver presentations. He wouldn’t talk about his awards, accolades, or the thousands of pounds he raised for charity, more motivated to share his enthusiasm for the profession that consumed his life, that and perhaps a bottle of wine. <br /><br />After a gutsy fight against cancer, Tom passed away in November 2021, 11 days shy of his 68th birthday. His wife Ailsa said the house was quiet and full of light, just as he liked it and a lot like the man. After a life travelling the world and residing in London (including 20 years in Wapping) he had returned to his beloved north east of England. Tom left a legacy of half a century of photography covering many of the world’s major events and hotspots from the civil war in Lebanon, fall of the Berlin wall, Romanian Revolution and inauguration of South African President Nelson Mandela. These events contain some of the pictures he was proudest and tell the story with a thorough understanding and humanitarian quality. <br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Born in Morpeth, the son of a farm worker, young Tom’s morals were instilled by his mother and the headmaster at the mixed comprehensive school in the fishing village of Seahouses, where he rose to be head boy. From school, most of his peers said Auf Wiedersehen Pet and went off to build a life rebuilding Germany. Tom, however, spied an advertisement in the Berwick Advertiser for a photographer. Only having really achieved in English at school, a 17-year old Tom saw this as a platform to becoming a reporter and successfully applied – more down to having just passed his driving test than to possessing any photographic portfolio. After day two, and an assignment photographing on location at a Women’s Institute party, he knew photography was for him, rather than a life hammered out behind the typewriter. In 1978, he moved to London and began working as a freelancer for the Fleet Street tabloids and later, covering stories for the Sunday Times.<br /> <br />In the early 1990s, Tom photographed comprehensively in Bosnia & Herzegovina during the civil war tearing the former Yugoslavia apart. ‘After watching the TV pictures early on in the siege, I decided I had to go to Sarajevo to document what was happening. I arrived in the city in July 1991 and was immediately struck by how close it was to London, and other capitals in Europe,’ he said. His photographs from the siege of Sarajevo are amongst some of his most exemplary and show considerable bravery: women sprint across the most dangerous intersection of Sniper Alley where many Sarajevan’s were shot; five-year-old Amra runs into the arms of her mother Sedija who lost both legs after being hit by a grenade; a young widow grieves over the coffin of her husband in Sarajevo’s Lion cemetery; 67-year-old Antonia Arapovic hugs her neighbour’s child in the darkness of a cellar during a mortar bombardment; a young girl stares silently through a shattered window. <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpUpSDgGz5D_aD7FBoP2iXl0NQ1_xKEo4QUpDlKmlDF_0ElyP8rv4N_VGU3kQ8GPi0M8xvWnmOER0Ilu-BgR1f7uivOAwAX0KhiB-nKShql8DFFBH7sLeCjOy4rCqJeLnYxgcAFP0Tn-Tjd42CMJ2oW-5Db4ABMQLAFUsgtkzV07EOL2URcXSbuf6NuWA/s1024/Tom&DENCH.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpUpSDgGz5D_aD7FBoP2iXl0NQ1_xKEo4QUpDlKmlDF_0ElyP8rv4N_VGU3kQ8GPi0M8xvWnmOER0Ilu-BgR1f7uivOAwAX0KhiB-nKShql8DFFBH7sLeCjOy4rCqJeLnYxgcAFP0Tn-Tjd42CMJ2oW-5Db4ABMQLAFUsgtkzV07EOL2URcXSbuf6NuWA/s320/Tom&DENCH.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p style="text-align: justify;">During the siege Tom was severely injured resulting in a shattered ankle and his shoulder fitted with a titanium plate. After taking a year out to recover, as soon as he was able, undeterred and with one leg now inches shorter than the other, he returned and captured one of his most praised photographs. ‘I was shooting a story about women in the siege and I saw this lady walking along towards me, it was in a part of the city called Dobrinja, which was a very difficult area to work in and I saw this kind of vision coming towards me and I just backed away from her and shot six, seven, eight frames maybe and then she was gone. When my agency distributed the set of photographs, LIFE magazine wanted to run this as a double page spread but of course I had no details, I didn't know who she was, her name or anything about her so I literally went back to Sarajevo with a photograph and asked around and found her. Her name is Meliha Varešanović. I was able to do an interview with her.’ The image of Meliha defying Bosnian Serb sniper bullets and mortar fire, wearing high heels, pearls and smart floral dress has become an iconic image of courage and dignity. His pictures from Bosnia were published around the world, highlighting the crisis and helped raise it to the top of the political agenda in European governments and embassies.<br /> <br />Tom’s commitment in what he believed was relentless. Rejecting advice that the HIV/AIDS pandemic wasn’t newsworthy or cost-effective, during the late 1990’s and early years of the new millennium, he travelled extensively, at his own cost, across Sub-Saharan Africa documenting the catastrophic AIDS crisis blighting the region. The resultant photo-essay, entitled Lest We Forget: AIDS In Africa, won first place in the 2003 Pictures Of The Year World Understanding Award. When Tom sent it to then Prime Minister Tony Blair (who gave Tom exclusive access to document his 1997 election campaign), he received a letter, part of which reads: I know from my own experience your dedication to your work and the power of your photographs. I’m delighted that your skills are being used to educate us all about what is, without any doubt, one of the biggest problems and challenges faced not by Africa but the whole international community. <br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Tom had begun transitioning from flash and long lenses to Leica cameras and fixed 28mm and 35mm lenses before landing in Yugoslavia. ‘I like to be as invisible as possible. My job is to creep in, capture moments that reflect what’s happening and then get out as quietly and quickly as possible. I like to build up a rapport with the people that I’m working with, the people I’m photographing in a difficult situation I find myself slowing down, you kind of drift in, you become completely non aggressive, your body language is very slow, the way you look at people, the way you talk, the way you speak, even the size of my cameras, the Leicas are very small cameras they have very silent shutters, everything is geared to building up a trust between myself and the people that I’m there to photograph.’ Tom is rarely pictured with a camera over his shoulder or with the lens cap on. They hang around his neck, one above the other, straps carefully tailored for maximum efficiency, always ready for the next shot.<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHfDE1tSB8x6vb_QtQANTlQb_dwtjIyWQH-EDeGu7HnPGu2ISj5qKboB37kjhMhT8DLDp0Opko6hUXYh911KWxh0ezwLoI6WHIdYJ9mtwdanqUsPC_mJtzx12CSbFRODYHp5T8RQZbvg88HoUWoGXjemc9NcI44CMvDs2F1j6gxADH0R-8nrma0dcuko0/s2048/473671_10151140710540953_336575864_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHfDE1tSB8x6vb_QtQANTlQb_dwtjIyWQH-EDeGu7HnPGu2ISj5qKboB37kjhMhT8DLDp0Opko6hUXYh911KWxh0ezwLoI6WHIdYJ9mtwdanqUsPC_mJtzx12CSbFRODYHp5T8RQZbvg88HoUWoGXjemc9NcI44CMvDs2F1j6gxADH0R-8nrma0dcuko0/s320/473671_10151140710540953_336575864_o.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;">A skilled craftsmen, Tom expected the same from those that worked with him as former assistant and now Tom’s image curator, Caroline Cortizo, testifies: ‘When I started to work for Tom, he sent me home with a really old Leica and lens that he didn’t use, I can’t remember what it was but it wasn’t one of his beloved M6s - this one was battered but still worked. Tom was so professional and with hindsight, protective, unless you could show him that you could load it in the dark, under pressure, you weren’t allowed to load the Leicas. He gave me the camera to go away and learn how to use it and to be able to change the film within a minute in the dark and I had to do that with a bag or a towel over my head, something to give complete darkness and also make you stressed and it worked. I would have to sit with him and show him I could do it. It did take a bit of time for him to trust me. The Contax and the Mamiyas, the SLRs were simple and he never doubted i’d not get these right but let me tell you when you are miles away from home in a god forsaken place like Sri Lanka after the Tsunami or in Chernobyl in a high stakes situation and where something was happening really quickly, Tom took full control. I can reflect and be proud of watching sweat drip of Tom’s nose in intense heat with stressed people all around us and the opportunity to unwind by hand his film and concentrate on loading correctly, consistently and focussed, it makes me think it helped him find his inner calm and concentrate on his job in hand. Those moments were at breathtaking speed but almost spiritual, dare I say it. He really didn’t want anyone to have that stress and far from thinking you weren’t good enough or he didn’t trust you what was going on was bigger than that. Tom always took full responsibility.’ <br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">Tom understood there was always more to learn. ‘A good photo editor can read what you’re thinking in the 36 frames on your contact sheets. They can teach you, they can show you your contact sheets and notice that you always seem to hit your best pictures at frame 16 or 17. They can show you you’re not bending your knees enough, that you’re shooting everything from the same height, simple things like that.’ For motivation, two photographs were fixtures in his office that he thought were among the greatest photographs ever taken: Larry Burrows’ 1966 colour photograph of wounded Marine Gunnery Sgt Jeremiah Purdie reaching towards a stricken comrade and Shell-shocked US Marine, The Battle of Hue 1968 by Sir Don McCullin. <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHBw5EZeMVlipCdchzWh1yFnC2bnamhNOynahoGSwiYX7FvNH4pIKv56Xmf9jlDr36cY6bksYsxUP1Hex1K2CXC29p6P_INeqFa9HXTKkIgQO9RCiMJ44RqBK5w1bSssCJWDxRoF0EpoU_b5ReUQEC2FRujvpWadJnrYpL7wvO2gvTh7F0LoreVFVkm4w/s893/F3CD6511-A709-43F6-A03D-96C1F4CB3692.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="893" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHBw5EZeMVlipCdchzWh1yFnC2bnamhNOynahoGSwiYX7FvNH4pIKv56Xmf9jlDr36cY6bksYsxUP1Hex1K2CXC29p6P_INeqFa9HXTKkIgQO9RCiMJ44RqBK5w1bSssCJWDxRoF0EpoU_b5ReUQEC2FRujvpWadJnrYpL7wvO2gvTh7F0LoreVFVkm4w/s320/F3CD6511-A709-43F6-A03D-96C1F4CB3692.JPG" width="215" /></a></div><p style="text-align: justify;"> An indicator of what kind of man Tom is and the impact that his photography has, is affirmed by those willing to collaborate. Actress, filmmaker, and humanitarian Angelina Jolie wrote the foreword to Extraordinary Women, Images of Courage, Endurance & Defiance (ACC Art Books 5 Oct. 2020). Singer-songwriter and political activist Sir Bob Geldof wrote the foreword to iWitness (Trolley Books 1 Oct. 2004) and former broadcast war reporter and independent politician Martin Bell the introduction to Edge of Madness, Sarajevo, a city and its people under siege (Hayward Gallery Publishing 1 May 1997). Looking to the future, devotees of Tom’s work will take comfort that with his blessing, work is already taking place for the legacy of his archive. Exhibitions in Germany, Bosnia and Newcastle are already being planned for 2023 along with a special evening at the Bosnian Embassy hosted by the Ambassador to honour Tom for all the work he did in Sarajevo. <br /> <br />I first met Tom in 2000 when I joined the prestigious Independent Photographers Group (IPG), part of Katz Picture Agency. IPG photographers were the big hitters, bull hippos and competition winners; they were the Katz cream and I lapped it up. For some beautiful and unfathomable reason, Tom took an interest in me and what I did. A professional interest became a personal friendship, mainly forged in the pub than on assignment. The photographers I admire the most are the ones who do what I don’t, I’d like to think that perhaps a small part of Tom felt the same.<br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">As a source of inspiration to my family and I, Tom’s images hang around my home and his advice continues to reverberate around my head, some appropriated or parodies from other photographers but to me, indisputable ‘Stoddisms’: Photography is a champagne lifestyle on a beer salary; the most difficult thing is to keep swinging your legs out of bed; never trust a photographer with clean knees; If you photograph in colour, you see the colour of their clothes, but if you photograph in black and white, you see their soul; art photography is about look at me, photojournalism is about look at this; F8 and be there.<br /> <br />‘Photography doesn’t by itself change things that are wrong, it’s only one small part of something that may lead to change. When I’m on my own, you realise you’re a very small cog in all of this. There’s always the dream for any photographer, especially one whose covering news, you always dream of hitting the big moment. History is littered with photographs that are seen every day, the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, the Kennedy assassination, the child running down the street in Vietnam. These are split seconds in history that every photographer would give his right arm to have taken and if I have a dream, it would be to leave behind one image that has become an icon for the period that it was taken in.’ The Leica Society Magazine was one of the last things Tom read and understood the importance of keeping this magazine going - the images across these pages suggest he has achieved well beyond his dream. <br /></p><p>To keep up to date with developments of Tom’s legacy, exhibitions and publications visit: www.tomstoddart.com</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0Wpi_zwP_l1J_oiE-23iOHwVrC4brSs-5RvtynXvO-CbVBdYC_90erKF-tpeSYirgxbLlPEmn3F6gKWs1nriXViNfWFy1EQTCXDYvjXy-L6-_hIEzmroxwxHILul88WhIQDPo2XpKwZs2GoVEalt-1NUuXXYNVm9OSOQzeRMMrA-dJjdtw8Dz5EAu46Y/s935/281525919_10160123119425953_6550874805694016415_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="935" data-original-width="526" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0Wpi_zwP_l1J_oiE-23iOHwVrC4brSs-5RvtynXvO-CbVBdYC_90erKF-tpeSYirgxbLlPEmn3F6gKWs1nriXViNfWFy1EQTCXDYvjXy-L6-_hIEzmroxwxHILul88WhIQDPo2XpKwZs2GoVEalt-1NUuXXYNVm9OSOQzeRMMrA-dJjdtw8Dz5EAu46Y/s320/281525919_10160123119425953_6550874805694016415_n.jpg" width="180" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p> <br /> <br /> </p>Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-433080587867121212022-11-14T10:12:00.001-08:002022-11-14T10:12:18.916-08:00Brake Out<p style="text-align: justify;">After lockdown, a rumour has been building about the increase in popularity of the photo-van as photographers let loose and take to the road.<br /><br />In an unassuming Gloucestershire town, in an unassuming street, nestled among a cafe, charity shop, butcher, bank and frozen food store, a quiet revolution is taking place. Walking through the door at Clifton Cameras, you find a significant percentage of employees have taken out cash and taken up tools to purchase and convert vans to drive their adventures in photography.<br /><br />“The two biggest things in my life are photography and mountain biking. Both came to a stop during lockdown. I was furloughed, all University study was based from home. That’s where the idea blossomed. To be able to travel and ride and photograph while sticking to the rules. The idea had been floating around for a while, lockdown was the ignition to get started,” explains 23 year old Alex McDowell, part-time sales assistant at Clifton Cameras and second year photography student at Gloucester University. Alex sourced a van from the several dealerships he could walk to during lockdown, eventually settling on a 2011 Peugeot Vivaro 2900. After it was stripped, cleaned, insulated, sanded, fitted with electrics, roof vent, solar panel, windows, tiles, worktop, taps, cupboard, cabinets, bed, mattress and off road tyres - after several months of graft, Alex was ready to go and he didn’t hold back, shooting a large portion of his 17819 km British coastline project using the van. <br /><br />Despite travelling far, Alex has also been utilising the van closer to home. Through the viewfinder of his living room window during lockdown, he began to take an interest in observing the locals. Inspired by Richard Avedon’s book, In the American West, he set out to document people living within a 30 mile radius - Freeminer, Field Sport Enthusiast, Allotment Owner and Horse Academy Rider. Following the Avedon pop-up studio technique, Alex hung a white backdrop from his van or nearby structure. Using a simple Speedlite flash and softbox set up, he captured subjects on a large format camera using black and white film. Energised by his successes, he’s about to add to his fleet: “I’m on the edge of building another van, a small darkroom that can be driven around, I do a lot of Collodion based practice, it will open up so many opportunities”<br /><br />Walking across the wooden floor at Clifton Cameras, we meet 57 year-old buyer (and former optics specialist) Martin Drew. In the summer of 2016, on a trip to South Stack off the northwest tip of Anglesey, as hundreds of Manx Shearwaters streamed past the famous lighthouse, Martin had an epiphany. In the clifftop car park he witnessed a scene that would have life changing consequences - a grey VW camper van: the side door was open, one occupant swivelled on the passenger seat, another lolled on the fold down bed, the smell of coffee pervaded. “We’d arrived early in the morning and it was clear that the VW dwellers had overnighted there. The weather had been glorious all week and we could only wonder at the truly spectacular sunset views these lucky people must have experienced the previous evening. We left South Stack subtly changed - for the first time in our lives, we really wanted a camper van!” reveals Drew on the Clifton Cameras blog www.cliftoncameras.com <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Od9Q37dJxBvAwUZ6c1-wudMdZZwB0JpxejzeZB1JB-1pB1Vft2H_25972Ek5pavQEegYl6sWDW-9E3u68ATiWbR5mAQFWWUVNYO5V-Ed98AE6qfUUqnx6oKbFxyDuYCrn6svjJ8G7OkJps-_7u0i0ytI1Hqeq0C6scb8eEPfcpojdTbq-QmWANva/s4882/AP05042022_Vans_Dench-compressed_Page_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3357" data-original-width="4882" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Od9Q37dJxBvAwUZ6c1-wudMdZZwB0JpxejzeZB1JB-1pB1Vft2H_25972Ek5pavQEegYl6sWDW-9E3u68ATiWbR5mAQFWWUVNYO5V-Ed98AE6qfUUqnx6oKbFxyDuYCrn6svjJ8G7OkJps-_7u0i0ytI1Hqeq0C6scb8eEPfcpojdTbq-QmWANva/w400-h275/AP05042022_Vans_Dench-compressed_Page_1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p style="text-align: justify;"> Four years rolled on and the image wouldn’t fade. Fuelled by his passion for birding and developing interest in Astrophotography, the search for the perfect family photo-van was on. “We spent the next few months researching vehicles. We had pretty much decided to go for the classic short-wheel-base (SWB), pop-top roof setup as this would allow the van to be used as an everyday vehicle rather than just something to be used for trips away. We considered a number of brands - VW, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, Ford. On Boxing Day 2020, we found ourselves 130 miles from home inspecting a recently-converted SWB Renault Trafic. The van was in really nice condition (albeit in boring white) and sported a standard side conversion featuring a twin gas burner, sink and numerous cubby holes for storage. A rock & roll double bed provided sleeping space for two downstairs and the pop-top roof concealed an elevating bed suitable for one smallish adult - ideal for our then fifteen-year-old daughter, Jess.” <br /><br />During family excursions, Jess began to take a lot more notice of the remote natural world that Raven (as the van was christened) was able to take them too. She photographed waterfalls and experimented with shutter speeds. Jess is now in the first year of sixth form taking photography as an option. Despite the family fondness for Raven, their wings felt clipped and have traded her in for Skye: “The single most important thing for all three of us is to be able to stand up. With Raven we had the pop-top which is great but if you’re just popping into a lay-by for a cup of tea it’s a bit of a faff. We like coastal locations and if you park somewhere and it’s windy you have to be very careful as you don’t want to buckle the struts. Being able to stand up is huge for us, we’ve gone from two metres high to 2.5 metres.” <br /><br />Restocking the Olympus cameras in Clifton Cameras is 35 year old sales assistant, Craig Pitts. Travelling every year since he was 19, lockdown made Pitts stop. Going stir crazy at home, he dreamt of owning a VW Transporter T5 but his wallet said no. Undeterred, he started researching online and discovered a community of individuals building stealth camper vans, vans converted to a camper or living quarters but still has the look of a regular van, allowing campers to sleep in their vehicle without drawing attention to themselves. In Spring 2021, tired of sleeping in the boot of a car with his mate on photography road trips, he bought a Ford Transit Connect to convert into a stealth camper to travel around the UK pursuing his landscape photography. <br /><br />Pitts made sure a robust electrical system was built to charge all his gear and laptop during drives between locations. In the middle of a pandemic, he took a Welsh summer road trip adventure to Rhossili, Tenby and St Govan’s. Has the stealth van worked? “I don’t want to bring attention to myself where I’m staying. I’ve got a vent but it just looks like a builders van. I’ve stealth camped in Elan Valley before where they banned camper vans but if you drove past my van you wouldn’t bat an eyelid. You’d think it’s just a contractor van, unless I had the door open you wouldn’t know. I’ve not had a bang on the door yet but I kind of want to tick that off!”<br /><br />History<br /><br />Converting vans and vehicles for the purposes of photography is not new. In the mid-1800s, Roger Fenton captured the lives of soldiers in Crimea from his mobile, horse-drawn studio and dark room, reportedly converted from a wine merchant’s van. More recently, between 1992 and 1996, Magnum Agency photographer Mark Power drove around the British coast in a VW camper van photographing the 31 areas for his book, The Shipping Forecast. Photographer Simon Roberts wouldn’t be without a van. Photographing his We English project, an investigation of the English at leisure shot between 2007-2008, Roberts utilised a 1997 Express Talbot Swift Capri for his extended journeys across the UK. To capture people situated in the landscape, he often photographed from on top of the Capri. In 2013 I turned on the Sat-Nav and slid alongside photographer Anastasia Taylor Lind in the front of her 2006 Peugeot van as she set off across Europe on her Negative Zero project about fertility rates and population decline. Purchased for £5K, the van with extra costs and insurance took the total to nearer to £7K. For her odyssey, she had stocked the van with a coat hanger, electric blanket, baby wipes, Heinz food products, Earl Grey tea, cartons of dry noodles, a fluffy rug and six books. In the hilarious 2017 television mini-series, Confessions of the Paparazzi, controversial Pap, George Bamby, regales mischievous tales from the back of his van containing Pap-essential items - bunk bed, kettle, football and drone. In the episode, Extra, Extra: My First Time with Mary, he attempts to frame Britain’s baking darling, Mary Berry, by Papping her from a lens sized hole cut in the side of his van. Photojournalist Tom Stoddart decided to stop travelling around in a van for his reportage, The Britons, after he went to photograph a Hull boating regatta, parked under a bridge to sleep for the night and had a rude awakening from Doggers. <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRZe65RI_svgK1tdJCfeDEccaj_8z_2kSEPT937cF-FuqDGQ0nuYZhroX1_wOrSo8-qM6juRkfNcBTKLObcx60MKCehzRgS63fW0K5oNqEFY4VZtP-pdh1xBO-H_zEaaX72ca5wWMYxzYyJbCIpDsQnZFTpKMG9dmhj1aKtrR_GohOOw_lztSCnPWc/s3150/AP05042022_Vans_Dench-compressed_Page_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2166" data-original-width="3150" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRZe65RI_svgK1tdJCfeDEccaj_8z_2kSEPT937cF-FuqDGQ0nuYZhroX1_wOrSo8-qM6juRkfNcBTKLObcx60MKCehzRgS63fW0K5oNqEFY4VZtP-pdh1xBO-H_zEaaX72ca5wWMYxzYyJbCIpDsQnZFTpKMG9dmhj1aKtrR_GohOOw_lztSCnPWc/w400-h275/AP05042022_Vans_Dench-compressed_Page_2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p style="text-align: justify;">Versatility<br /><br />Landscape photographer Thomas Heaton remembers being WOWED! looking through a magazine back in 2004-5 and coming across an article about photographing grouse in the Scottish Highlands. The photographer talked about his workflow pictured alongside an old motorhome used as a base. 15 years later, Heaton got his first camper van, a Ford Transit. “I left my job to do photography full time so it was like an investment. The problem with camper vans is people buy them then don’t use them because they don’t have the time. I’d always wanted one. Two main reasons for not having one was price and time to use it. The odd weekend in summer doesn’t really cut it. I was full time, this is it, now or never. Got the camper van and never looked back,” except to park. <br /><br />Moving on from the Ford Transit, in 2021 Heaton imported a 2002 Mitsubishi Delica camper van from Japan to convert into an off grid, off road, go anywhere 4x4 camper van. He’s cleverly incorporated the van into the storytelling of his landscape photography, making it part of the bigger picture. His YouTube channel has over 508K subscribers. A new video is posted every Wednesday, many featuring the van. The first of a four-parter documenting his Mitsubishi received over 973,000 views. “For a photographer, especially a landscape or wildlife photographer or any photographer who needs to be outdoors, a van is as important as a lens, or tripod, it opens up the landscape. I can’t believe I used to sleep in my car, pay for expensive hotel rooms or camp in a tent which is great but not practical if it’s bad weather. Having a vehicle to sleep in, back up and edit images, check all’s well is huge. The van encourages me to go out more, see more places and be a lot more versatile. I can check the weather before deciding if I set off north or south. If you don’t have that luxury of versatility and you’ve pre-booked a hotel or caravan then you’re kind of stuck with what you’re given.”<br /><br />On a recent warm and welcoming early Spring afternoon, I stroll into the Vinyl Cafe in north London to meet legendary photographer Andy Earl. It’s a fitting place to meet the man who’s shot over 120 covers and iconic album sleeves for Pink Floyd, Duran Duran, Cranberries and Bow Wow Wow among others. Earl’s decision to adopt a photo-van also rose out of lockdown. He sold his elderly Range Rover and in July 2020 invested in a Mercedes Benz Marco Polo. “COVID hit big time so I thought it would be great if I could go along and do photo-sessions and turn up and be completely independent - sleep in it, eat in it, do everything and not be infectious or infected. That worked quite well but people were still very cautious, preferring I set the camera up and walk two metres away to take the picture. There was so much nervousness,” he says, stirring a flat white. <br /><br />Earl opted for the first class experience, the Mercedes equipped with Wifi, sink, double cooker, fridge, loo, cold shower, air conditioning, night heater and bed with sprung mattress. You could put the roof up, rearrange the seats, sit comfortably and work in style. The van could be adapted to host talent in an on-board green room and make-up area. In the end it proved too high-end. “It was so smart you had to keep it clean the whole time. If I’d have got something and converted it that might have been better. I got a bespoke piece with all the trimmings and that’s what I was attracted to. I was swayed by the comfort, it was lovely to drive, economical. All those were good but that was my only everyday car. That was the problem, running down to the shops to get a paper you didn’t want to jump in the van.”<br /><br />Earl’s long term dream was to echo Irving Penn’s, Worlds in a Small Room, travelling to meet people and communities to photograph against a heavy plain canvas. “Every time I put a sheet up the bloody thing blew away.” After just under two years, Earl's adventures in vanning are over. He cashed out and cashed in getting back what he paid for it. “It was great when I used the van and great for that time. I enjoyed it. I’ve never done camper vanning before. It got a massive response from everybody wanting to do shoots and then when it came to it they didn’t need the van. I wasn’t using it as a way of earning money by hiring it out, none of that, if you wanted me, the van came too.” This modernist of photography is now contemplating a SUV size Tesla Model X. <br /><br />A van may not directly improve your photography skills but will give you more opportunities and freedom to learn. It’s hard work but can be tremendous fun. At the end of another busy trading day at Clifton Cameras, 23 year old new recruit, Megan Bendall, joins Martin, Alex and Craig sitting around a white table. The conversation turns to plans for the weekend. “I might take a trip out in my converted 2014 Ford Transit Minibus photo-van,” she says. Safe travels.<br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ-6Pygjp2L_f-ja7rnoJTkH1rlHzOTLn1kdBfCcqbTaGl9DEVvt5Hd1Eh9sG4iowbxdP7RSrKN1rUKGEIiu-ss3cLHsU9q2oYQA3PvttsQfPiK9YXVyUWxlf9KVx29a4GoLgH4D3YOatnacAvd3qWdcJ5rbrgDRzZoGE0JRL2GRaayqnvePcSUtke/s4898/AP05042022_Vans_Dench-compressed_Page_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3368" data-original-width="4898" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ-6Pygjp2L_f-ja7rnoJTkH1rlHzOTLn1kdBfCcqbTaGl9DEVvt5Hd1Eh9sG4iowbxdP7RSrKN1rUKGEIiu-ss3cLHsU9q2oYQA3PvttsQfPiK9YXVyUWxlf9KVx29a4GoLgH4D3YOatnacAvd3qWdcJ5rbrgDRzZoGE0JRL2GRaayqnvePcSUtke/w400-h275/AP05042022_Vans_Dench-compressed_Page_3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p style="text-align: justify;">TOP VAN TIPS<br /><br />Do your research. Don’t buy the first van you see on the market. You might not enjoy it, it’s not always luxurious and can be quite miserable at times, it’s cramped. Maybe hire one, see if you enjoy the process.<br /><br />Don’t just buy the cheapest van, it may end up costing you more long term. If able, take someone along who knows what they’re doing when it comes to vehicles.<br /><br />Create a 3D model of your van layout. Tinkercad is web based, free and easy to use.<br /><br />Apply sound deadening. It cuts down on road noise but more importantly makes it soundproof at night. Without it, when the rain or anything hits the metal panels of the van it creates an amplified and intimidating sound. Deadening adds density to the panel and absorbs sound. There's many options available including Noico.<br /><br />Fundamentally you need three things: somewhere comfortable to sleep (a van with a mattress in would do the job). Somewhere to make a cup of tea and somewhere to store your camera gear.<br /><br />According to Comfort Insurance, there are no UK laws stopping you from living in your motorhome, camper van or van full-time. The only requirement is that your vehicle has passed its MOT and is fully road legal.<br /><br />There may be restrictions on where you can park up and reside, which you’ll need to research yourself depending on where you decide to go. Being able to take your home with you doesn’t mean you can park anywhere any way you like. Try an App like Park For Night and consult The Highway Code.<br /><br />Watch a bunch of van build YouTube videos. They give you an idea of what you want your van to look like. How you want it to function. Think about the purpose of your van. Is it something you’ll be living in full-time or just use at weekends or week-long photo-trips.<br /><br />Test different vans, some of the smaller ones are just no good. The short wheeled versions are more stealthy but may not be practical. The size of the van dictates the layout of the van.<br /><br />Consider adding some big off-road tyres so you can park on a grass verge or more rugged terrain.<br /><br />The van community is generally friendly but proceed with caution, be careful who you talk to. Don’t draw attention to the fact it’s a photo-van with thousands of pounds of gear inside. It might not be there when you pop back from the loo.<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">SOCIAL MEDIA<br /><br />Alex McDowell : Instagram @the.vanproject or <a href="http://www.alex-mc-dowell.format.com">www.alex-mc-dowell.format.com</a><br />Craig Pitts: YouTube www.youtube.com/c/CraigPitts or <a href="http://www.craigpitts.com">www.craigpitts.com</a><br />Tom Heaton: YouTube <a href="http://www.youtube.com/c/ThomasHeatonPhoto/videos">www.youtube.com/c/ThomasHeatonPhoto/videos</a><br />Andy Earl: <a href="http://www.andyearl.com">www.andyearl.com</a><br />Megan Bendall: Instagram @meganthebendall </p><p style="text-align: left;">A version of this article first appeared in <a href="https://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/">Amateur Photographer magazine</a><br /><br /></p>Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-56340963577927816282022-11-11T07:10:00.000-08:002022-11-11T07:10:07.557-08:00War Stories<p>At the time of writing, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 12 journalists and media workers have been killed in Ukraine since the Russian led invasion on 24th February. For many, the war is only a cheap flight or drive away. Experienced photographers are following a trodden path and novice photographers have the opportunity to wet their boots. With little opportunity to embed with the military and unpredictable nature of the conflict, what are the daily challenges, how are photographers being treated, are they being targeted and is their photography being used for propaganda? <br /><br />Jay Davies (JD) is Director of Photography at Getty Images (GI) overseeing news coverage in Europe, Middle East and Africa. GI is primarily a news agency that gathers pictures and sells them to subscribing news organisations, newspapers, magazines and and television broadcasters. Jay manages seven news photographers and can draw on several dozen other photographers from the sports and entertainment divisions if necessary. With the staff photographers spread thinly, freelancers also provide a crucial contribution. <br /><br />JD ‘In the years prior to the invasion where the conflict in the Donbas was somewhat of a cold war, we worked with a freelance photographer based in Kyiv and a handful of others from time to time. We periodically cover news in the Ukraine beyond just the conflict, Zelensky’s election and campaign for the presidency was newsworthy. We had our freelancer there covering different parts of that campaign and also taking periodic trips out to the front-line areas near the occupied Donetsk and Luhansk. We stepped up the tempo when there were fears that Russia was looking to escalate in some way at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022. At that time we reached out to other freelancers that are not based in Ukraine who we’ve worked with before who started going to the country with more frequency so we periodically put them on assignment and then in January 2022 we sent one then another of our staffers to Kyiv. We had photographers who raised their hand very vigorously, I would say the majority of them, there were some that were not very comfortable with it or their families were not comfortable with it because it was not something they’d routinely done. We have photographers who went to Ukraine before during peacetime but this is a different matter.’ <br /><br />Leon Neal (LN), a staff member on the GI editorial team, was assigned to Ukraine several months into the conflict arriving shortly after a holiday in Mexico.<br /><br />LN ‘I travelled to Ukraine with a handful of notes of ideas to consider, plus a bunch of screen-grabs in my phone of interesting stories and photographs that I’d seen online. The GI team was spread out across Ukraine with different cities or regions to cover. I was assigned to concentrate on the gateway to Ukraine, Lviv.’ <br /><br />While international news interest in Lviv was waning, Leon grafted for interesting stories he thought would capture the attention of GI core markets. <br /><br />LN ‘One of the biggest challenges for me in Ukraine was identifying and documenting features and ideas that had previously gone unreported. As the fighting had moved towards the South East, many media teams had moved with it, leaving Lviv behind. I wanted to dig into the story of Lviv and show what was happening. As the nearest major city to a popular crossing point, Lviv had become a hub for refugees fleeing the Russian invasion and every day saw more people passing through on their way out of the country. The other challenge was that of witnessing so much grief and unhappiness. As the wartime rules prevented men aged between 18-60 from leaving the country, the station became a daily backdrop for the heartbreaking view of families being torn apart. I soon came to recognise the look on the faces of men walking away from the coaches, after saying goodbye to their wives and children, as they battled to hide their emotions until out of view.’ <br /><br />JD ‘Leon was a good example of a staff wire photographer just how industrious you have to be. Our photographers are both reporter and photographer and they’re operating with guidance from me but with a whole lot of autonomy.’ <br /><br />LN ‘I covered everything from evacuated bears in a sanctuary to coffin makers, the race to move gallery artworks into safe storage to children drama performed in air raid shelters. It really allowed me to push as far as I could into a story and the resulting publications around the world showed that I managed that successfully.’<br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAq4nIDTuqHGUsJajtJTjlQIg1OX3pqkisL-NwqtetKd-yymzy2b8XBDD5NWhF5igOLPXScqGmDaSTimCuxLj6F2agM_2x4Ssy3rO4jsir4raWnfuJkcJDhwv9VmDf4tCddHzttOnFQ47eTGPEa4CsqzFKwdFdjJsMiGxX2VQbvfLtVJjLYCr0Bzpf/s1575/26-31_UkraineDench_AP_Aug23_Page_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1083" data-original-width="1575" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAq4nIDTuqHGUsJajtJTjlQIg1OX3pqkisL-NwqtetKd-yymzy2b8XBDD5NWhF5igOLPXScqGmDaSTimCuxLj6F2agM_2x4Ssy3rO4jsir4raWnfuJkcJDhwv9VmDf4tCddHzttOnFQ47eTGPEa4CsqzFKwdFdjJsMiGxX2VQbvfLtVJjLYCr0Bzpf/w400-h275/26-31_UkraineDench_AP_Aug23_Page_1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p>Freelance photographer JB Russell’s first serious attempt at reportage photography was in Russia and Ukraine just after the fall of the Berlin wall. He borrowed money from his grandmother and took a ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki then a train to Moscow. 31 years later, after a career that has sent him around the world, he knew he had to return to Ukraine. <br /><br />JB ‘It was one of the first major news events post COVID. I was moved by the outrageousness and in-justness of the situation, the historical significance, it’s a huge story worldwide with repercussions and it’s what I do. I was in Paris and unable to leave straight away as I was doing a commercial job. As soon as I could I went. It was close, it was easy. I didn’t have to fly to the other side of the world and spend £1000 on a plane ticket. I flew to Krakow, Poland and was there in a couple of hours, it cost around €70. I rented a car in case I had to be mobile and drove to the border. The refugee crisis was my first stop and spent 4-5 days at the train station and border posts. I didn’t have a fixer, it was pretty straightforward. That situation was extraordinary, I’ve never seen anything like it. It was all volunteers managing a constant flow of primarily women, children and the elderly fleeing the country. I photographed that, it was bitterly cold. I found a little hotel in town. I think I got in early enough. Afterwards it became difficult to find a place to stay, some refugees were taking up hotels, also the media was coming in. For the rest of the trip the biggest logistical challenge was finding a place to sleep for the night.’<br /><br />JB left for Ukraine without the proactive cloak of a staff position or assignment but trusted his instincts. Before leaving he reached out to previous clients and informed his agency PANOS of his plans. Already being on the ground proved advantageous.<br /><br />JB ‘Before, a client would fly me out on assignment but now, particularly in the press, no one has money any more so they might prioritise finding somebody who is already there rather than flying somebody out from London, Paris or New York. I got an assignment via PANOS for OXAM so I stayed four extra days. Then I got on the train and went to Lviv for a few days. There were a lot of funerals happening, it was the hub for humanitarian mobilisation, food and medicines coming in and being distributed around the country and hub for refugees leaving the country. Then I got on the train and went to Kyiv. I got there just after two journalists were killed and the situation became so dangerous and difficult even the evacuation stopped, the Ukrainian military couldn’t continue as they were being targeted. Kyiv was being bombed every day, civilian apartments and residential complexes were being hit by missiles. I photographed that. Kyiv was a city on war footing, everything was shut down, the streets were empty, checkpoints every few hundred metres, barricades at every intersection.’<br /><br />LN ‘Air alerts came regularly in Lviv, sometimes up to five or six times a day. When out and about, it would involve either finding a tunnel or shelter to photograph those taking cover, or continuing to walk the streets, looking for images to show those who refused to have their routine changed by the threat of missile strikes. Alerts that came in the night proved more disruptive with my mobile app producing a siren, followed closely by the air raid sirens in the street, followed by the receptionist broadcasting through the speaker in my room, telling everyone to head to the shelter. After weeks of these 3am wake-up calls, it became a little tiring. Around the weekend of the Russian Victory Day celebrations, tensions were very high in Lviv with reports of major airstrikes due to take place on military and civilian targets throughout the city. Air alerts became more frequent as the date approached and I must admit that my nerves were on edge for the three days around May 9th. Thankfully, in the end, nothing came of the threats.’<br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4y6TYCUxBpbG7CKTUOtfavLpub93N4FYbV2tK1UsGUZUZ5QnOvErxfTLArW_D8A5tvBY9p2XZRINejxOTcz9xxWSiRL9XTTdat_u632W6rGDOrY-gQGH6qvSnJBaUqq8wJ7f3-EaY8rX6rM43yHVg7VaZmYRxrfu1g8S6PAAGiqk7jeKlxze8TRPA/s1575/26-31_UkraineDench_AP_Aug23_Page_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1083" data-original-width="1575" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4y6TYCUxBpbG7CKTUOtfavLpub93N4FYbV2tK1UsGUZUZ5QnOvErxfTLArW_D8A5tvBY9p2XZRINejxOTcz9xxWSiRL9XTTdat_u632W6rGDOrY-gQGH6qvSnJBaUqq8wJ7f3-EaY8rX6rM43yHVg7VaZmYRxrfu1g8S6PAAGiqk7jeKlxze8TRPA/w400-h275/26-31_UkraineDench_AP_Aug23_Page_2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p>JD ‘The biggest challenge in the first days of the war was the kinetic nature of it. In the months since, the war has consolidated around a certain geography, things are in some ways a little more predictable than the first month and a half. It’s not like going and visiting a very well established front line, everything was changing on an hour to hour basis in a lot of cases. You go into a neighbourhood and you’re told by a Ukrainian soldier at a checkpoint this is a safe route to travel, Russian forces are over there and then on your way out the Russian tanks have moved and told you should stay where you are. That was the biggest challenge in the first few months of the war. The fluidity of it and trying to maintain some operational security in what was a really dynamic environment.’<br /><br />JD ‘A lot of wars that GI have covered have been ones in which the US military is a participant and we have often covered it from in the context of an embed also we’ve covered it from the perspective and point of access of the dominant military actor where that factors into our safety and comfort level. As dangerous as some environments have been where our photographers have worked in Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s often been with the US military. In the first weeks of the war in Ukraine, Russia was the larger military power and that changed the equation for how photographers can navigate a conflict and seek to embed with forces. That said, it’s not like we had a lot of opportunities to embed with Ukrainian forces for our organisation as we didn’t have a full time presence in Ukraine in recent years. We also don’t have those relationships, a very small number of photographers in the first days of the war had the relationship to get alongside a Ukrainian military unit where you saw them moving around town with them. It was a very fluid environment with no official access necessarily even though we all had military accreditations.’<br /><br />propaganda<br /><br />JB ‘It was one of those conflicts that was accessible. The foreign press in general were welcomed and appreciated because the Ukrainians understood all wars are information wars. I found among the people and refugees they were very conscious of Russian propaganda. Some were quite wary about being photographed, not because they were afraid to have their picture taken, but afraid that if it was published somewhere out on the internet the Russian would use them and twist them around for propaganda. The Ukrainian population were attuned to the potential of propaganda and what Russia was doing and their image being used for the benefit of Russia. It’s hard to monitor if someone screenshots your picture on the internet and uses them for something in Russia. There’s processes you can do to follow up on that but it’s long and tedious and difficult to do. We’ve seen how Zelensky has been incredibly deft at using the media in communicating not only to rally and unify the country against attack but also to solicit help and support from abroad and getting their story out there. It’s not pure propaganda, it’s not a Trump-like alternate reality. Like in any war, they don’t report how many casualties are Ukrainians, trying to keep people's morale up. They re using the information for their own interests and purposes of course’<br /><br />LN ‘One of the biggest shocks for me was just how open people were to being photographed. As the UK becomes more and more restrictive on when and where you can photograph and the public trust in news photographers continues to decline, it was such a relief to work in a country that trusts photographers and media to be doing their job. For my first few days, I was massively overcautious in my approach until I realised how relaxed the public are about being photographed. It made my job much easier to concentrate on making photographs and not battling to get permission to work. From a photography point of view, I was reminded to be braver with my photography. On day one I was carrying three camera bodies, with the wide, mid and long zooms, plus a belt pack with assorted other primes. By day three, I was down to two bodies, a 24mm and a 50mm. That forced me to get closer to the story and my images improved dramatically through that.’<br /><br />JD ‘GI don’t have a dedicated team monitoring the web for misuse of images for propaganda, but it's something all editorial staff and contributing photographers are alert to and address these instances as and when they arise.’<br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuH_vHq-FlF2ee8YG4QKQYD2cPB9OhRWw16QV0hWGb9i06Jq1xO-MbTqqTsI4vbAM9zEHJR2vSRyZh1BzEHnYAz2SxV36ibnbXTsJapVpChkF4SK6tRkCsSYx26pOr-7eb9mkp_0Unadbxg8LBIKvWd-KUbX2gCQUM6CSZ84ZKE6tr4TXuNgFVNNwl/s1575/26-31_UkraineDench_AP_Aug23_Page_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1083" data-original-width="1575" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuH_vHq-FlF2ee8YG4QKQYD2cPB9OhRWw16QV0hWGb9i06Jq1xO-MbTqqTsI4vbAM9zEHJR2vSRyZh1BzEHnYAz2SxV36ibnbXTsJapVpChkF4SK6tRkCsSYx26pOr-7eb9mkp_0Unadbxg8LBIKvWd-KUbX2gCQUM6CSZ84ZKE6tr4TXuNgFVNNwl/w400-h275/26-31_UkraineDench_AP_Aug23_Page_3.jpg" width="400" /></a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Russ O’Connell (RO) is Picture Editor at The Sunday Times magazine. The magazine’s 10 day lead time makes it difficult to keep up with the rapidly evolving situation in Ukraine, preferring to publish longer term stories. Submissions have been tumbling in.<br /></div><p><br />RO ’You’ve got your key people who are in the moment and know how to work those situations. Properly experienced photographers right on the front line getting images but also know when not to get the images. A lot of submissions seem to be coming over from people I haven’t heard of before, the aftermath as opposed to the front line. Even though they’re over there to document it they’re not really dipping their toes in as much as the professionals who have the experience and know where to go and have the proper network and contacts. A lot of the images I’m getting are post conflict and after the event, burnt out tanks in the street, destroyed structures and war crimes where they’ve been going through the villages after. There seems to be a lot of that, everyone seems to have gone over to the areas where it supposedly happened and taken pictures of bodies in peoples back gardens and mass graves. I think there’s definitely a divide. I can tell who had the experience of being a conflict photographer working in hostile environments and the people doing it for the first time around. I have mixed feelings on photographers out there shooting it, a massive majority are not trained professional combat photographers and have never been in hostile situations but have flooded there to christen themselves in the field of war photography, which not only makes it dangerous for them, but for other professional photographers, medics etc.’ <br /><br />RO ‘The Times and Sunday Times newspapers have staff photographers in Ukraine. When you’re commissioning them you’re responsible for them. Anything that happens to them you’ve got a duty of care. If they’re injured you have to take the appropriate steps. Security wise you have to make sure they’re in a safe place. The types of photographers The Times commission for those kinds of assignments would have to go through hostile environment training and have good knowledge to deal with those situations down to knowing how to tie a tourniquet. The company has a history of these kinds of conflicts and to make sure they can be as safe as possible.’<br /><br />A photographer or journalist can only see the situation through the lens of their own perspective, culture and experience. The idea of journalistic neutrality is false, nobody is completely objective and no single journalist can tell all sides and facets of the story. What’s important to those I spoke to is to try and report from Ukraine as honestly as they can and add their visual chapter to this extraordinary passage of global history. <br /><br />JB ‘Truth is a relative word too, what is the truth? If I’m moved by something personally or there’s a human story, an emotional aspect about it I think it’s ok to do that. To show a certain side of a situation. You have to be honest the way you’re doing it and not pretend to be neutral.’<br /><br />Leon returned from Ukraine Working just under one month and found himself fenced off in a photographers pen covering the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations: IG @leonnealphoto www.leonneal.com<br /><br />JB returned to Ukraine and decided to crowdfund to continue reporting on the situation: IG @jbrussell www.jbrussellimages.com</p><p></p><p>A version of this article first appeared in <a href="https://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/">Amateur Photographer magazine</a><br /><br /></p>Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-4198330528633531082022-11-10T03:40:00.002-08:002022-11-10T03:41:24.133-08:00Being Able<p>Disability can strike at any time. It can be there from the beginning, middle or end of life. Much like photography. Having a physical or mental condition that limits movements, senses, or activities, doesn’t mean the end of photographic aspirations. In some cases it can trigger the beginning. Advances in camera technologies have largely been positive for those with a disability. A wider understanding of what is needed has developed in support groups and charities. At the forefront is the <a href="https://www.the-dps.co.uk/">Disabled Photographers’ Society</a> (DPS), a registered charity formed in 1968 to help make photography accessible to those with disabilities. Run by a team of dedicated volunteers, many of whom are disabled photographers themselves, the DPS offer individual members adaptations, equipment, support and advice. They loan equipment free at the point of need and enable opportunities to meet like minded (and bodied) people through exhibitions, competitions, social media and their quarterly magazine, In Focus. I spoke to three individuals with differing disabilities that have all been assisted by the DPS.<br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzU0ZPpOG78gDANVZBoXPiEoN6_mjY122M_IZ7bcCbHhVn22emN-YoMYM67eUh1-IS70G8kt91IF8BNSwk9SUbRUN9TmGj1AKV_FUsOrfBMuGv-G08y_WTqMiWEPxzIB2u1FkOWC6yKBfnd3qliu0kWyioiN0q_iFzVa-6na0Z_Ml6vg741JOs7X1u/s3519/34-37%20P_Disabled%20photography%20Jun28%20SF%20GH2%20JP_Page_2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3519" data-original-width="2560" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzU0ZPpOG78gDANVZBoXPiEoN6_mjY122M_IZ7bcCbHhVn22emN-YoMYM67eUh1-IS70G8kt91IF8BNSwk9SUbRUN9TmGj1AKV_FUsOrfBMuGv-G08y_WTqMiWEPxzIB2u1FkOWC6yKBfnd3qliu0kWyioiN0q_iFzVa-6na0Z_Ml6vg741JOs7X1u/w291-h400/34-37%20P_Disabled%20photography%20Jun28%20SF%20GH2%20JP_Page_2.jpg" width="291" /></a></div><p>Rais Hasan<br /><br />Without surgery to treat a brain tumour, Rais was given a worst case scenario of four months to live. He chose surgery which was complicated, long and left him house bound for well over a year. The former Senior Manager at a Youth Service could no longer read or write. Post surgery was the beginning of a new life of survival. Unable to walk outside unaided, his family bought him a small digital camera for his 50th birthday and Rais started taking photos around the house as a diversion to daily struggles. He’d ask his sons where the photos were taken? More often than not, they didn’t know. Short walks into the countryside followed to develop his interest. Galvanised, Rais went on to college to complete a two year photography course. Only after he qualified did he mention his trouble with memory, reading and writing. Rais has gone on to achieve more letters after his name that are in it: ADPS, CPAGB and LRPS among them. He has been President of the Bradford Camera Club, crowned monochrome photographer of the year and had several images in this magazine and the press including a recent front page of the Bradford Telegraph and Argus. A decade on from his surgery, Rais remains on large doses of medication and still makes regular visits to the hospital specialising in the surgery he had. Poignantly, he now photographs on behalf of the Yorkshire Brain Tumour Charity, creating a memory for families of what they’ve gone through or the moments before. Rais’s disability isn’t immediately apparent but can compromise his photography. Post production is not always easy, he learns it, keeps pushing but the retention is bad. The weight of his Nikon cameras, usually a D810 with lenses, means he has to sit down after a while. He’s undeterred and sees the brain tumour as releasing a talent for photography that otherwise may have stayed hidden.<br /><br />Paul Hinchliffe<br /><br />Photography for Paul started when he got married, started seeing more of the world and progressed it as a serious hobby in 2006. Seven years ago he started to drastically lose his eyesight. Paul has no central vision of any detail and uses peripheral vision to do everything. This usable vision helps him to take photographs, he can see shapes and colours primarily and shadow. While glasses improve but don’t correct his vision, he feels he can see best through a camera lens. The camera autofocuses and he can zoom in and out of the image with his preferred Sony A7III (which upon release had one of the best autofocus systems) allowing Paul to capture his fast moving, young sons. Familiarity with his camera and menu system is key to dealing with poor vision, relying a lot on muscle memory to change the aperture or white balance without having to look. Paul has many colourful conversations about why he bothers taking photographs? For him it’s therapeutic, taking the image and even seeing the final image. Using a lot of magnification software allows him to examine details of an image he didn’t notice before and relive the experience of that coastal sunset all over again. Paul produces a photo-book each year documenting his children’s adventures to give to his parents and in-laws, uploading the photos from his iPad to the affordable Snapfish platform before using a computer to edit, save and print. When Paul first started to lose his sight, his wife took him along to The Photography Show and the support of the DPS. He advises anyone going through what he has or any other form of disability, to reach out and find someone to talk to.<br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoCMkEjjJfzqoSn5S4hzYcxvqukzbYLlWUDfkJP12eA_6_i4MzhxAsGpHOioNRuY5xyusRbgg81BysWjTSZXzcpyXludTtIpVWDockY14ct9Z0f9aWS_Ysq8sPoSHlPvUk6KYs7Ug9G9UnGoq58h_3eQyg0eDApkFjXi9WQzPE9qtImCf1DA15WANp/s2025/34-37%20P_Disabled%20photography%20Jun28%20SF%20GH2%20JP_Page_3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2025" data-original-width="1473" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoCMkEjjJfzqoSn5S4hzYcxvqukzbYLlWUDfkJP12eA_6_i4MzhxAsGpHOioNRuY5xyusRbgg81BysWjTSZXzcpyXludTtIpVWDockY14ct9Z0f9aWS_Ysq8sPoSHlPvUk6KYs7Ug9G9UnGoq58h_3eQyg0eDApkFjXi9WQzPE9qtImCf1DA15WANp/w291-h400/34-37%20P_Disabled%20photography%20Jun28%20SF%20GH2%20JP_Page_3.jpg" width="291" /></a></div><p> Lorraine Spittle<br /><br />An injury at work in Lorraine’s teens triggered Spondylosis, a degenerative condition of the spine. Her youthful optimism that everything would be ok took a beating when she found herself struggling to grip or feel hot and cold with her fingers. The Spondylosis was further exacerbated the following decade in a car crash in 1987 (in which she was blameless) causing a C7 spinal cord injury further affecting her ability to move wrists and straighten elbows. Limited hand functions didn’t limit Lorraine’s determination to fight the boredom and she found photography when her former Police Force husband bought her a camera to capture the grandkids. I feel lucky talking to Lorraine, not because of the medical conditions she’s survived but the scrapes in pursuit of her photography. She’s been wheeled out of shopping centres, punctured a wheelchair tyre when going off road and was so engrossed trying to capture a Filey winter sunrise, only when sparks started to fly from her electric wheelchair did she realise the tide had come around and about to cut her off. Being in a wheelchair doesn’t always bring the keen street-photographer the kindness of strangers. After a particularly threatening encounter when photographing children in the fountains at Bradford City Square, she didn’t pick up a camera for a while. When Lorraine does pick up her camera it has to be thought through. She can’t make a proper fist to hold smaller cameras, preferring a Canon 5D MK IV she describes as a brick. The first thing she does is put the camera on a table or over a soft surface then bends and slips the strap over her neck so it doesn’t drop straight through her fingers. She has to look at what she’s doing and prefers the audio clicks and bleeps of the camera to be on to confirm what she’s done. Lorraine doesn’t clamp the camera to her chair, preferring to react more fluidly. She has experimented unsuccessfully with tripods, monopods and gimbals and adapted her own methods. She has utilised the odd cricket bat to support her 100-400mm lens and if she doesn’t think she’s at the right viewing angle, will simply throw herself onto the floor. Using this strategy to shoot upwards as the Tour De France hurtled through her village had many of the cyclists quizzically rubbernecking! <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9-zSfgvpSaXUl85w7cKFEFVpuwfKnAQHdF2EpKQgDrZfAcdyh8WnH_72Mpql3Dkb296X4iGqBnN8VCktC_H2giydvsavabG9HJ0QFSr0HCC3CaorRuyzWWLjm1dFp7kl_lFfmBHiSdjH2F2WwTM-rr8e61PFzJmi2xiBgO-pjjI5plBUEekn8v6Em/s1949/34-37%20P_Disabled%20photography%20Jun28%20SF%20GH2%20JP_Page_4.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1949" data-original-width="1418" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9-zSfgvpSaXUl85w7cKFEFVpuwfKnAQHdF2EpKQgDrZfAcdyh8WnH_72Mpql3Dkb296X4iGqBnN8VCktC_H2giydvsavabG9HJ0QFSr0HCC3CaorRuyzWWLjm1dFp7kl_lFfmBHiSdjH2F2WwTM-rr8e61PFzJmi2xiBgO-pjjI5plBUEekn8v6Em/w291-h400/34-37%20P_Disabled%20photography%20Jun28%20SF%20GH2%20JP_Page_4.jpg" width="291" /></a></div><p>Adaptations<br /><br />If members of the DPS are having problems regarding the mechanics of pressing the shutter button, equipment coordinator Gillian Birbeck is the person to contact and always on the lookout for new devices to make their lives easier. “As a charity we give free advice to anybody who wants it and ask people to be members. If that’s the case they can have equipment on free loan. There’s a limit to what that equipment can be, in general we have a few things that can help a lot of people. Occasionally we get an odd or difficult request,” explains Gillian. She receives emails from all over the world from people needing help and first asks what the person cannot do with regards to taking a photograph, what they have difficulty with, she doesn’t necessarily need to know their disability or name of their disease to help. <br /><br />“Some illnesses mean people shake a lot which obviously affects photography. Some people can’t lift their arms, some can lift a camera up but not for long enough, some people have difficulty seeing through the viewfinder. Whatever they say they can’t do, that’s what we try and sort out,” she adds. The most common request is for a support to fix a camera to a wheelchair. With many cameras now having a tilt screen, it doesn’t have to be put to the eye, it can be down by their right arm or wherever it’s comfortable to see the screen.<br /><br />The DPS support of choice is the Manfrotto magic arm or variable friction arm which Gillian thinks better. “It’s beautifully manufactured, it’s solid, the variable friction one takes up its shape with a Knurled Knob which is easier for most people to use than the lever which the magic arm has which needs quite a bit of strength to put into place. We have to try to find somewhere on their wheelchair to use something like a super clamp to attach it. What happens is the camera is in a fixed solid position and they can move the camera position just by moving their wheelchair.”<br /><br />Available from retailers are the Canon HG-100TBR Bluetooth, Sony GP-VP2BT Bluetooth and Panasonic DMW-SHGR1 Wired, shooting grips which are specifically designed for one-handed use, with shutter, video and zoom controls. They tend to be designed to work with small compact or mirrorless cameras. Not necessarily cheap given that you have to buy the right camera but potentially useful for people who can only use one hand.<br /><br />Difficulty in pressing the shutter button is quite easy to deal with as most cameras have a remote control that comes with it or you can buy it as an optional extra. Small button size can be problematic. “Get a little plastic box, cut a U shape in the top, put the remote control in the middle and that U shape becomes a bigger button which goes on top of the button,” advises Gillian. <br /><br />If somebody can’t press the shutter button, there are such things as bite controllers or tongue switches available from Hypoxic Electronics. If somebody can’t use their arms at all, a bite switch is ideal. Gillian recalls a quadriplegic who couldn’t move anything below the neck. The DPS supplied a Hague motorised panel and tilt head camera powerhead which fixed onto the wheelchair with the camera on top tethered to a computer with up, down left, right controls on the screen. This was controlled using a stick on a velcro strap around their head, all they had to do was lean forward to tap the screen. If your disability causes you to shake a lot a simple lesson in photography can be enough: increase the ISO or use of flash is suggested. <br /><br />Gillian would like the return of left handed cameras. Many DPS members have had strokes and if they’re right handed, it's that one that tends to go. As it is, they have to make an adaptation so a camera can be held in the left hand. Post production is another area the DPS advises. “We try to have workshops where they can learn. For some people it would be impossible, they might have a personal assistant in their everyday life who can help. In the past these personal assistants had been told by disabled people to take a picture for them. We actually give them the independence to do it themselves. That is so important, they are in charge. Post production often doesn’t matter so much to them.” <br /><br />With so many difficulties to deal with, why take photos at all? “Some people look at photography as something they have to have, others think of it as something they quite like to have. If somebody’s been a photographer all their life and has a stroke, they are desperate to get back into photography. They will email us to discover exactly what they want. Other people are bored and don’t know what to do in their life and find photography and inquire. The impetus comes from the individuality of the person. We don’t discriminate between those that just want to point and shoot and those that want more. A lot of people with disabilities have to compromise but we can make it possible or easier to do more than they were,” reveals Gillian. With the help of the DPS, members with disabilities develop outstanding photographic ability.<br /><br />Donations of unwanted working photographic equipment help to fund the DPS - please contact chairman@the-dps.co.uk</p><p>A version of this article first appeared in <a href="http://amateurphotographer.co.uk/">Amateur Photographer magazine </a><br /></p>Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-37144674735330926132022-11-09T05:58:00.000-08:002022-11-09T05:58:26.359-08:00Ethics in Wildlife Photography<p>There are few better pursuits in life than grabbing your camera and striding into the great outdoors to immerse and engage in the natural world. The drive to get the shot can become maddening, obsessive. With no centralised industry resource on what is and isn’t acceptable, moral boundaries can blur to the point of illegality. Opinions on how to behave as a wildlife photographer, wildly differ. Lines are drawn, choices are made. <br /><br />Photographers can’t all be expected to be experts in animal behaviour but do have a duty of care. A deep love of nature is paramount, every life form appreciated with equal importance; invertebrate, amphibian, reptile, bird or mammal. Nature stories need to be told and great photographs can still be achieved within ethical confines. If you’re asking yourself uncomfortable questions about whether your approach to photographing a subject is ethical, then it most likely isn’t, you just have to learn to tread carefully. <br /><br />LIVE BAITING<br /><br />Should live bait be used for the purposes of photography, are you even a wildlife photographer if you do? The industry swell is to reject live baiting, photography shouldn’t mean the death of an animal. The Wildlife Photography of the Year (WPOTY) rules state: Live baiting is not permitted, neither is any means of baiting that may put an animal in danger or adversely affect its behaviour, either directly or through irresponsible habituation. Any other means of attraction, including bird seed or scent, must be declared in the caption for the Jury and us to review. <br /><br />Neil Aldridge, is open about his approach.’ I do not live bait my subjects. If I aim to attract an animal for photographic purposes, I use scent baiting which involves the careful placement of a strong-smelling naturally-occurring food derivative, such as honey or oils (depending on the subject). This practice limits the impact on my subject’s actions, expectations and, importantly, relationship with people other than myself. There are species that will only hunt live prey like with Kingfishers, you either do it by live baiting or you do it by spending a long time waiting and perfecting your craft. It is possible.’<br /><br />TAPE LURES<br /><br />Recorded bird song played to attract birds may seem ethical but can adversely disrupt natural behaviour. Will Nichols has reservations: ‘You should never use tape lures during breeding seasons as this can disrupt a bird’s normal patterns of behaviour. For example, when a male should be defending its territory from real intruders, it may instead spend its time trying to fend off the non-existent bird you are imitating.’<br /><br />CAMERA TRAPS<br /><br />A non intrusive way to capture wildlife is to use a camera that fires automatically when an animal is detected. To turn your DSLR into a trail or camera trap, all you need is a sensor that can detect animals which then trigger your camera. It can then be left for days or weeks at a time once set up. It may not be photography at its purist but the longer you leave it, the greater your chances of capturing an ethical frame of an elusive animal. Will Nichols is an advocate. ‘Camera traps are becoming incredibly fashionable and it opens up a whole new unseen world to wildlife photographers. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that camera trapping is extremely addictive. The entire process, from setting up your DSLR camera trap to checking it weeks later for the results, has a real thrill about it.’ They can have setbacks as Neil Aldridge explains. ‘When you use camera traps you can make mistakes like putting the camera on motor-drive. If you take two or more pictures, the first picture you get the natural looking picture, the animal’s not aware of the camera when the flash and shutter goes off. The next picture is the surprise at what’s happened and the third picture is it running away.’ </p><p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4cUAI1iuQ4dbihHI1_yfydRvskUntBdFVvdhZSUUWIiczUoUiC4bjtZi6UEUwX-wM2pcov73Xrv_eHvUBaFmH1z7vrN75tS-jGSx8GBRdDJRyRe0Vvf8qiKAiG0zPTe0cTiEyt8Ti1xY9qdEKjmCtGmy7rmwnY6VAJptEywyAQDgAJN01ksrvAfHR/s6662/AP_30082022_PD_WildlifeEthics_Page_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4591" data-original-width="6662" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4cUAI1iuQ4dbihHI1_yfydRvskUntBdFVvdhZSUUWIiczUoUiC4bjtZi6UEUwX-wM2pcov73Xrv_eHvUBaFmH1z7vrN75tS-jGSx8GBRdDJRyRe0Vvf8qiKAiG0zPTe0cTiEyt8Ti1xY9qdEKjmCtGmy7rmwnY6VAJptEywyAQDgAJN01ksrvAfHR/w400-h276/AP_30082022_PD_WildlifeEthics_Page_1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div> <p></p><p>HANDLING SUBJECTS<br /></p><p>Nicky Bay, shares his point of view on the temptation to handle or immobilise animals for better photographs: ‘It requires many years of training to be able to exert the precise force in handling any tiny subject without causing any injury or death. Attempting to handle them directly is strongly discouraged. It is NATURAL for subjects to run about. Forcefully holding a subject’s leg to prevent it from moving can lead to permanent injuries to the subject. In the wild, many living things only eat once in many days. Some spiders have to use up a lot of silk just to get one prey. Be mindful that touching these subjects or stressing them may lead them to drop their precious prey and essential food for the week.’<br /><br />AVOID DISTRESSING ANIMALS<br /><br />Understanding and empathy for subjects is important to Gil Wizen: ‘Photographs of small animals can be a great tool for communication and education by revealing the hidden beauty of overlooked creatures. However, we tend to forget how things are from their perspective. They do not like to be cornered or pushed around. The last thing they expect is a giant being trying to manipulate them to pose in a certain way.’ Putting your camera on silent mode or using a telephoto lens with close focus can maintain enough distance to allow your subject to behave naturally. For macro shots use longer focal length macro lenses. Portable hides and camouflage allows the documenting of wildlife without disturbing them. Don’t destroy habitat for a clearer view or deliberately draw attention as Will Nicholls explains: ‘Intentionally spooking an animal by shouting or throwing objects towards it can be more problematic than you might think. Not only is there an unnecessary energy expense in an animal’s flight response, but you could be scaring a parent bird away from a nesting site.’ Drones have huge potential for ethical research but should be used with caution. A 2015 study documented the effect of drones on the heart rates of black bears in Minnesota and found though there were no outward signs of stress, bears’ heart rates rose as much as 123 beats per minute above the pre-flight baseline when a drone was present. <br /><br />HABITAT<br /><br />Entering an animals habitat inevitably has impact. Keep noise to a minimum, apply discretion and don’t move or destroy vegetation for a clearer view, let nature envelop you as photographer: ‘Serendipity being what it is, other things happen if you are open and aware. If you have a love and awareness of nature you begin to see things. After you’ve been a certain length of time by any bit of water or whatever, nature just accepts you, you’re there and it ignores you. You’ve got dragonflies and mayflies around you, you’ve got a hundred opportunities,’ advises Paul Harcourt Davies.<br /><br />ARTIFICIAL SCENES<br /><br />‘A nature photographer documents nature, so staging artificial scenes may present a false representation of nature. If it has to be done for art, it should be clarified that the subjects were artificially coerced into certain behavior, positions or habitats. Some scenarios are biologically impossible so fake captions and descriptions tend to fall through. Photos of artificially transported subjects may also provide false information to researchers on its natural habitat,’ suggests Nicky Bay.<br /><br />Paul Harcourt Davies prefers to construct his images in situ: ’I’m not an artistic photographer. I find it slightly arrogant that some people look upon nature as their canvas and they interpret nature in some ways. I have an innate love of nature and my rule is to try and reveal often things that are hidden using whatever ability I can summon technically but also with arranging elements in a picture that makes something attractive. I look for design in pictures and shapes and interaction and so on. It’s a communication thing, fundamentally I’m out to try and make people aware of what’s out there and is worth protecting and saving. If people use their photography as a basis for finding out facts about plants and animals it engenders a greater love and appreciation of the subject, people become a lot more conscious of wanting to protect and to preserve.’</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWNqC6e5xsO4gbxk9BHt529oG7w45B3GC6f1BqVwndOmMSqM52x9OruuBQMnpR0WtBGGyfztWkElIMlH8cJ0oQERQqF80y0urn94loIDl_bs9c4WdnVm0S0bkS-cythukni_50_PGX9MHgIsn0RqerRyw_93frDRaxf8-8GGpGrmw_DXjMl6sUCGU3/s6048/AP_30082022_PD_WildlifeEthics_Page_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4158" data-original-width="6048" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWNqC6e5xsO4gbxk9BHt529oG7w45B3GC6f1BqVwndOmMSqM52x9OruuBQMnpR0WtBGGyfztWkElIMlH8cJ0oQERQqF80y0urn94loIDl_bs9c4WdnVm0S0bkS-cythukni_50_PGX9MHgIsn0RqerRyw_93frDRaxf8-8GGpGrmw_DXjMl6sUCGU3/w400-h275/AP_30082022_PD_WildlifeEthics_Page_2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p>GAME FARMS & PHOTO TOURS<br /><br />Captive animals offer a convenient way for photographers to practice technical skills and add species to their portfolio and stock photography that they may not have the chance to photograph in the wild; Snow Leopard, Lion, Bear, Wolf. Arguments for the benefits of game farms are that you don’t travel to remote locations spending days or weeks staking out an animal in the wild which reduces pressure and intrusion on fragile habitats. At the more distressing end of the spectrum, many farms have a less than exemplary record for animal security and welfare. Reports suggest tigers being illegally de-clawed and use of a cattle rod on a bear to make it growl for the camera. When the animals are no use for pictures they’re sold off so people can shoot them. In 2012, an animal trainer employed by Animals of Montana game farm was mauled and killed by a bear. <br /><br />Live or maimed mammals have been used to lure animals in front of the lens of paying customers. Neil Aldridge organises tuition and tours from the Cairngorms to Botswana, has his approach: ’The industry has become high yield where everyone wants things quicker. If you pay the money you want the shot. You're not only paying for the equipment but you’ve only got seven days holiday a year and you want to go to the arctic and come away with the photo of the snowy owl. That expectation has developed because of the success of photo-tours. If people do choose to travel with me they do so on the understanding where I’m coming from. I never put anything into an itinerary saying we’re going to set this up, we will visit photography hides but there’s water there and the animals are free to come and go as they want, we’re not going to bait or live bait.’<br /><br />LIGHTING<br /><br />Most nocturnal animals are extremely sensitive to light. Powerful light sources, such as flash, LED panels or even UV light can be harmful. The National Audubon Society, an American non-profit environmental organization dedicated to conservation of birds and their habitats state in their guide to ethical photography: ‘Photographing animals at night, the practical approach is to use flash. Use flash sparingly (if at all), as a supplement to natural light. Avoid the use of flash on nocturnal birds (e.g., owls, nightjars) at night, as it may temporarily limit their ability to hunt for food or avoid obstacles.’ <br /><br />To capture his photographs of the Grey Long Eared Bat, Neil Aldridge photographed with red light filters over nine flashes. ‘Our current research shows they aren’t impacted by red light. I use flash sensitively and only when necessary. Wherever possible, I use off-camera flashes placed widely so as not to trigger directly into the eyes of my subject and at greatly reduced power output. I do believe that flash use has its place in photography but only when used considerately and with knowledge of the specific subject in mind. I also remain open to learning from scientific findings around the impact of flash use in photography, both underwater and terrestrial.’<br /><br />FAKERY & MANIPULATION<br /><br />Be wary of viral photographs on social media, a frog riding a beetle, a snail riding a frog riding a turtle or five frogs riding a crocodile are likely to be fake. Cute or funny could mean cruel or deadly with subjects being glued, clamped, taped, wired, refrigerated, shaken or killed before positioned for a photo. A public community Facebook page by concerned nature enthusiasts, Truths Behind Fake Nature Photography, is trying to educate by highlighting fakes when they spot them.<br /><br />In 2010, The Natural History Museum, Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner, José Luis Rodriguez, was stripped of his £10,000 prize after judges found he was likely to have hired a tame Iberian wolf to stage the image (‘entries must not deceive the viewer or attempt to misrepresent the reality of nature’). In 2017 entry by Marcio Cabral’s winning image was disqualified for featuring a stuffed anteater after it was decided it was ‘highly likely’ a taxidermy specimen. WPOTY enforces its view. ‘Images must not portray captive, restrained, manipulated animals, animal models, taxidermy animals, and/or any other animal being exploited for profit. The only exception is when reporting on a specific issue regarding the treatment of animals by a third party, in which case you must make clear that the animal was captive, restrained, a model or a taxidermy animal.’<br /><br />POST PROCESSING, CAPTIONING & PUBLISHING<br /><br />Think before you publish your photographs, be accurate but sensitive in the caption. Sharing an image could alert poachers to a rare breed, nest or plant. <br />Nicky Bay offers guidance: ‘Avoid stating the full species of any subject unless you are absolutely certain or have consulted an expert who is certain. Identification is based on a specific set of characters and NOT simply based on visual similarities on photographs. Subjects that appear ‘identical’ in photos to an untrained eye should not be assumed to be the same species. Conversely, subjects that look radically different can actually be the same species but different gender or morph. Most scientists will refuse to identify based on a photo because they need to examine the specimen under a microscope to accurately determine the defining characters. For some subjects, it is not possible to identify them accurately without dissection or DNA analysis.’ <br /><br />Process digital images within with the accepted rules and expectations of respected photography institutions, publications and competitions using digital software that reproduces a faithful representation of reality, crop to a minimum and only remove dust and reduce noise and you should be ok.</p><p></p><p>A version of this article first appeared in <a href="https://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/">Amateur Photographer</a> magazine<br /><br />RESOURCES<br /><br />Audubon’s Guide to Ethical Bird Photography and Videography : <br /><a href="http://www.audubon.org/get-outside/audubons-guide-ethical-bird-photography">www.audubon.org/get-outside/audubons-guide-ethical-bird-photography</a><br /> <br />WPOTY Rules : <a href="http://www.nhm.ac.uk/wpy/competition/rules">www.nhm.ac.uk/wpy/competition/rules</a><br /><br />Nicky Bay : Macro photographer, instructor and book author<br /><a href="http://www.nickybay.com/macro-photography-ethics/">www.nickybay.com/macro-photography-ethics/</a><br /><br />Paul Harcourt Davies : <br /><a href="http://www.paulharcourtdavies.com">www.paulharcourtdavies.com</a><br /><br />Will Nicholls : Wildlife cameraman and tree climbing specialist<br /><a href="https://www.willnicholls.co.uk/">https://www.willnicholls.co.uk/</a><br /><br />Neil Aldridge : Photographer, filmmaker and conservationist www.conservationphotojournalism.com<br /><br />Gil Wizen : Naturalist <br /><a href="http://www.gilwizen.com">www.gilwizen.com</a><br /><br />Melissa Groo : wildlife photographer, writer and conservationist<br /><a href="https://www.melissagroo.com/">https://www.melissagroo.com/</a><br /><br />Truths Behind Fake Nature Photography <br /><a href="http://www.facebook.com/fakenaturephotography/">www.facebook.com/fakenaturephotography/</a><br /><br />Website targeted to nature and outdoor photo enthusiasts<br /><a href="http://www.naturescapes.net">www.naturescapes.net</a><br /><br />North American Nature Photography Association : <br /><a href="http://www.nanpa.org/tag/wildlife-photography-ethics/">www.nanpa.org/tag/wildlife-photography-ethics/</a></p>Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-77770157049325829822020-12-23T08:15:00.002-08:002020-12-23T08:15:44.451-08:00Office Christmas Party<div style="text-align: justify;">The traditional Office Christmas Party (OCP) was an opportunity for company directors to reward their staff. Desks and chairs would be pushed back, triangular white bread sandwiches unwrapped, complimentary loose cigarettes placed in a wide glass and the punch bowl filled. The white wine was warm, lemon bitter, there was sherry for the more mature employee. With the scene set, at 5pm, women would appear fresh from fixing eyelashes in the cloakroom mirror, tongues sticky with hair spray. Men in bland coloured suits would fidget until that first drink loosened ties. The OCP was potentially the greatest pitfall of the social year - some looked forward to an evening that others dreaded. You didn’t want to end the party with a 12 month hangover, to be that person who fuelled months of office gossip - did I really say that to the boss!?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvx5g_YLXnURYspseWm0d1K9m57AAuzBLejihRl-LQnoS6qKw7BeeQ4oL6TEwtIcFmtfF1WER3O97z2Jlz9Le1wuLLOYE3yxUTYEtccPLGKR1zAKrztWr616YY35nAOo_AnwLdOj71-EE/s850/Alcohol%2526England066.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="683" data-original-width="850" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvx5g_YLXnURYspseWm0d1K9m57AAuzBLejihRl-LQnoS6qKw7BeeQ4oL6TEwtIcFmtfF1WER3O97z2Jlz9Le1wuLLOYE3yxUTYEtccPLGKR1zAKrztWr616YY35nAOo_AnwLdOj71-EE/s320/Alcohol%2526England066.jpg" width="320" /></a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">©Peter Dench</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjKuPwMq7bEDQuDBOvxaQ408PTIFre7Is9L83h4GpxH7hq6eH48xc5SsF2XlB6K4TFAQIENAfMEL53vAuifIbw85d1kGMKKEuXbp8TSv1Fovd2yfqi7Lx6MhDLXsEl1tBp9lsP6HXkk9s/s850/Alcohol%2526England110.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="844" data-original-width="850" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjKuPwMq7bEDQuDBOvxaQ408PTIFre7Is9L83h4GpxH7hq6eH48xc5SsF2XlB6K4TFAQIENAfMEL53vAuifIbw85d1kGMKKEuXbp8TSv1Fovd2yfqi7Lx6MhDLXsEl1tBp9lsP6HXkk9s/s320/Alcohol%2526England110.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">By the late 1990s, the OCP had developed into a more lavish concept. I often had to choose which one to go to or attend several in one evening, thundering across London in the back of a black cab. In 2002, I set out on assignment for The Sunday Telegraph Magazine to document the modern OCP scene. They were far removed from the office and nearer to Halloween than Christmas - something for companies to compete over. At one, a well known travel company had erected a giant marquee in the grounds of the Honourable Artillery Company in London. Employees were transported in from all over the country and from abroad, as far away as Cuba. The evening was billed as The Night of a Thousand Stars. Each guest walked up the red carpet being snapped by fake Paparazzi. Their were dodgems, diamanté Deely boppers, a swing band, celebrity sing-a-likes, mandatory free bar and blankets for the journey home. The real Jason Donovan ducked flung bras singing, Sealed With a Kiss. Slade, Hot Chocolate, The Human League, ABC, Kim Wilde and Tony Hadley from Spandau Ballet, were rumoured to be other acts available for the OCP circuit. <br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivXM4iYOPiYF9CwrvhEo8KBiu9yxJsxRhN9xxQo5Dh6R3p0duWrxH2jpeoZTxj2rdq0aUmfOvLeRuKfpNZYHu0FxkrOTS4uOSSood4Nt9g4QqzgWlxC9c1-glDAtCuZXJCeYi03FBrGo4/s850/Alcohol%2526England098.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="682" data-original-width="850" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivXM4iYOPiYF9CwrvhEo8KBiu9yxJsxRhN9xxQo5Dh6R3p0duWrxH2jpeoZTxj2rdq0aUmfOvLeRuKfpNZYHu0FxkrOTS4uOSSood4Nt9g4QqzgWlxC9c1-glDAtCuZXJCeYi03FBrGo4/s320/Alcohol%2526England098.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">©Peter Dench<br /></div><div><p style="text-align: justify;">The photograph below was taken at The Rainforest Cafe, London, where Lawrence Graham, a firm of solicitors were hosting their OCP. There was fake forest, plastic elephant, recorded gorilla growls, table football, name tags and limbo. John Graham of Lawrence Graham, takes the hand of guest David Smith and a lady whose name I didn’t record. Their application and athleticism shames the culture of the back bending dance. The pin stripe power suits more Tory Party than Trinidadian.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">With the hospitality industry devastated, curfews in place and after-work drinks almost certainly off the 2020 Christmas menu, I’m going to OCP like it’s 1969: wrap tinsel around the computer, tack mistletoe to the ceiling, scan body parts, binge eat cheese on a stick and drink Blue Nun until I vomit into a plant pot. You’re all invited, virtually. Don’t be late. Merry Christmas.<br /></p><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiebgxEcQVXRM6r6IPvJjCfiKTq1UwcKabnFbPhzHokhzdzMvharae5jwx4HTKIdpuxmqjoJVY7OHfWy2ZICidGApaRLW-c-zzsyY4T6lntX_VdiXWFgUUjbmSnxPFTOY70YZ269GMZ9fM/s850/Alcohol%2526England112.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="846" data-original-width="850" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiebgxEcQVXRM6r6IPvJjCfiKTq1UwcKabnFbPhzHokhzdzMvharae5jwx4HTKIdpuxmqjoJVY7OHfWy2ZICidGApaRLW-c-zzsyY4T6lntX_VdiXWFgUUjbmSnxPFTOY70YZ269GMZ9fM/s320/Alcohol%2526England112.jpg" width="320" /> </a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">©Peter Dench <br /></div></div>Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com38tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-76976351416426444272020-12-18T02:15:00.003-08:002020-12-18T02:16:11.821-08:00Robert Blomfield<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #999999;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>The Loves and Loneliness and of an Amateur Photographer<br /><br /></b>The archive of one of Britain’s greatest amateur photographers won’t be forgotten, Peter Dench discovers more.</span></span><br /><br /><a href="https://www.robertblomfield.co.uk/" target="_blank">Robert Blomfield</a> was an amateur photographer. He didn’t earn an income from his photography, use a studio or fulfil a client brief on demand. He didn’t seek fame, rarely showing his photographs outside immediate family and close friends, preferring to simply take them, print them and put them away in a box. Photographs are taken to be seen, increasingly today, when every plate of food and holiday sunset is posted on social media. What was it about the act of taking and printing a photo that was enough? “I was just a private sort of person and I didn’t want to share them. It wasn’t that I didn’t think they were good. I think I knew they were good and a few people who did see them said they were. But I’m just not the sort of person that needs other people to tell me what they think. I just did it for myself.” <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB1BMlYEgn3bYKuZfypwM4zI89c3iTIMTuyG9S4mhU33AOrwjgANeSfME2UdrS4DGLTOd78DgKY37AiEUzQVxGZzaLuYK3lw_v_tCrPJ7vAXpAcCDyVIYfgXhTyDsAXd47cMQCbefZvrM/s2048/20201121_Feature_Blomfield_Dench_reduced_Page_1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1408" data-original-width="2048" height="311" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB1BMlYEgn3bYKuZfypwM4zI89c3iTIMTuyG9S4mhU33AOrwjgANeSfME2UdrS4DGLTOd78DgKY37AiEUzQVxGZzaLuYK3lw_v_tCrPJ7vAXpAcCDyVIYfgXhTyDsAXd47cMQCbefZvrM/w453-h311/20201121_Feature_Blomfield_Dench_reduced_Page_1.jpg" width="453" /></a></div><p style="text-align: justify;">Robert Blomfield was a professional photographer. He pored over magazines for tips and guidance, meticulously processed and printed his work and forensically studied the practice of his heroes <a href="https://www.robert-doisneau.com/en/portfolios/" target="_blank">Robert Doisneau</a> and <a href="https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/henri-cartier-bresson/" target="_blank">Henri Cartier-Bresson</a>, even adopting the Frenchman’s tactic of covering the polished parts of his camera with matt-black paint and pieces of tape to be more covert. He was consumed by photography and loved his craft. “I think it’s a form of love. You should love the picture. I really loved taking photographs. I love the photographs. I sort of love the people. If it’s a good photograph, it’s a lovely thing,” he explains in the 2018 documentary, <a href="https://vimeo.com/300574961" target="_blank">An Unseen Eye</a>, by Stuart Edwards.<br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH8Y3mybk2fozu6W3sPLYswvUPzuhyhYrvCS6Z6zZd4VlAkzHXknyAv-Bk3WsZ9G4G8ADV2gMCk9zofPTe5OsdnFBKi-ddiJ6onvsVpq7469mSwyi9FzXuSktPAULrkkGPy55mui0Nb1o/s2048/20201121_Feature_Blomfield_Dench_reduced_Page_2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1408" data-original-width="2048" height="321" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH8Y3mybk2fozu6W3sPLYswvUPzuhyhYrvCS6Z6zZd4VlAkzHXknyAv-Bk3WsZ9G4G8ADV2gMCk9zofPTe5OsdnFBKi-ddiJ6onvsVpq7469mSwyi9FzXuSktPAULrkkGPy55mui0Nb1o/w468-h321/20201121_Feature_Blomfield_Dench_reduced_Page_2.jpg" width="468" /></a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">Born in Leeds 1938, Robert spent much of his teens in Sheffield. His father George was a keen amateur photographer and Robert would sometimes help him develop and print the film shot on family excursions in a makeshift darkroom. Aged thirteen, Robert borrowed his father’s Leica II 35mm and began to make his own pictures, for his fifteenth birthday, he received a second-hand Contax. Nikon F single-lens reflex cameras followed in 1960, allowing him to be more precise with focus, aperture and shutter speeds. He invested in an f/3.5 28mm Nikkor lens and later a 105mm and continued to photograph until 1999, when a stroke left him partially paralysed. He now lives at home in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, a compact digital camera always within reach.<br /></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /><span style="color: #999999;">Edinburgh</span><br /><br />Robert moved to Edinburgh in 1956, aged 18, to study medicine. The following decade, photographing on the streets of ‘Auld Reekie,’ Robert took some of his most startling pictures: passengers wait for a bus in a fog draped street, sunlight invades the windows of a bar. The under-construction Forth Road Bridge emerges from the gloom. Children swing from scaffold. climb fences, sledge, scoot, peer from prams and play in drains. The images are close but unobtrusive, stark but kind, there are echoes of photographers <a href="https://www.redeye.org.uk/opinion/interview-denis-thorpe" target="_blank">Denis Thorpe</a>, <a href="https://www.moma.org/artists/3373" target="_blank">Dorothea Lang</a>e and early <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/don-mccullin-7026" target="_blank">Don McCullin</a>, who was introduced to Robert and his images by a mutual friend, Don was complimentary. <br /><br />In 1965, he met his life love, history of art student, Jane, also a keen photographer and the biggest advocate of his photography. After she graduated, Jane moved back to London to continue a post-graduate course at the Courtauld Institute Of Art. In 1967, Robert took up a post at London’s St Stephen’s Hospital. They married and had three sons. With his medical and family commitments, were there periods when he wasn’t inspired, when the urge to to swing his legs out onto the street, leaving loved ones behind, failed him? “I never grew bored of photography. I sometimes took less photos when my studies or work demanded my attention but I was always motivated. I was fascinated by people. I think I thought of cameras as this ingenious, man-made mechanism that enabled me to record what I saw in every day life. I suppose it was that mixture of the technical aspects and the human that attracted me.”</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7HhThWKJ77lu8_itz3SFcmCJHpIPiHsIt5sYYsNxft2z_xPL-j_ZYdoNX7dAGKE8QWXapIfUVX8KLCkfh0nc2Afig4ePQwHUjuYbnsb9t147ccPmqINCBsA8eSoeVzgL3ef9_3GnCzFs/s2048/20201121_Feature_Blomfield_Dench_reduced_Page_3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1408" data-original-width="2048" height="334" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7HhThWKJ77lu8_itz3SFcmCJHpIPiHsIt5sYYsNxft2z_xPL-j_ZYdoNX7dAGKE8QWXapIfUVX8KLCkfh0nc2Afig4ePQwHUjuYbnsb9t147ccPmqINCBsA8eSoeVzgL3ef9_3GnCzFs/w486-h334/20201121_Feature_Blomfield_Dench_reduced_Page_3.jpg" width="486" /></a></div><p style="text-align: justify;">In November 2018, 60 images were displayed at Edinburgh’s <a href="https://www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/whats-on/robert-blomfield-edinburgh-street-photography" target="_blank">City Art Centre</a>. Four months later, over 41,000 people from Scotland, England, Australia, Brazil, Russia, Italy, Finland, Spain, the USA and many places in between, had pushed through the doors to see the show. Around 2000 comments compete for space in the visitors book - outstanding, inspirational, fascinating, magical, excellent, thank you and please produce a book of this collection - are all inked regularly. <br /><br /><span style="color: #999999;">Colour Shift</span><br /><br />Robert was a naturally shy photographer, he photographed alone, never joined any photographic groups or societies. How did he react to the very public responses to his exhibition? “I find that difficult to answer. I like to think the answer is in the photos themselves. I hope people would find them of interest and maybe even be inspired to go out and take some photos themselves. I do find it interesting to look back at Edinburgh from 60 years ago, the architecture, the lack of cars, the children playing in the streets. It just all seems more innocent.”<br /><br />During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, some great reportage photography was produced by medical staff. Did studying medicine and working as a doctor benefit Roberts’ photography? “I don’t think so, no, although I suppose both require an interest in people. For me photography just requires a greater visual awareness than medicine. If anything, my medical studies interfered with my photography because when I had to study, I wasn’t out taking photos.” Perhaps photographers can make great doctors!?<br /><br />“I used to be lively but I’m not now. Ever since I had a stroke which paralysed my whole left side, I’ve been struggling to stay alive really. And there’s not really much of me left…, except for a few jokes,” he says in An Unseen Eye. Jane, who passed away in 2011, tried to organise Robert’s archive but it was a difficult task, many boxes simply labelled, ‘miscellaneous.’ Most of his black and white photographs have yet to be revealed. From a roll of 36 frames, it was rare for more than a dozen to be printed, often only two or three. There’s a stockpile of slide film after he shifted to colour in the 1970s, taking more of an interest in nature, recording things that black and white film couldn’t. There are enough Edinburgh photographs to mount five more exhibitions of the same scale and calibre as the City Art Centre. In January 2020, Robert’s family approached <a href="https://bluecoatpress.co.uk/product/robert-blomfield-edinburgh-1957-1966/" target="_blank">Bluecoat Press</a>. Edinburgh, published November 2020, features over 150 photographs from 1957-1966, many taken when Robert was working as a junior hospital doctor at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. I suspect, there are many more publications to come, after 50 years behind the lens, there is much of Robert Blomfield left.<br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnsVeGjvp56hR0t60K6ANu60YNWuy4ZL9F84GW2kv98afZJyGGFEaSn2Zu4xmN4jJOTvjN9IjHdzx3TZ5BAbkuCFgAgp9M0RMkPHakv7l_9CnQCTUQ0JFmBvOynkFRORuX9PP8qH4yR58/s800/Edinburgh-cover-artwork.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="800" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnsVeGjvp56hR0t60K6ANu60YNWuy4ZL9F84GW2kv98afZJyGGFEaSn2Zu4xmN4jJOTvjN9IjHdzx3TZ5BAbkuCFgAgp9M0RMkPHakv7l_9CnQCTUQ0JFmBvOynkFRORuX9PP8qH4yR58/w426-h426/Edinburgh-cover-artwork.jpg" width="426" /></a></div><p style="text-align: justify;">Having learnt extensively from reading Amateur Photographer magazine, has Robert any tips for aspiring photographers reading it today? “Keep it simple. Don’t worry about expensive cameras or lenses. Just look for interest. There should be something in your shot that captures your interest. The rest follows. Maybe go and see a good art exhibition – that might help!” And conceivably growing a beard? Throughout his life, Robert has exhibited one of fibrous magnificence. As a loner and shy, was the beard along with the camera, something to hide behind? “I’ve never really thought of it like that – maybe it was. Maybe it was a sign of my existential angst. Or maybe it was just because I lost my electric razor on a climbing trip once and was too lazy to replace it or shave the beard off!”</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Robert passed away on the 14th December 2020 shortly after he <span>achieved his ambition to publish a book.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span>A version of this artcile originally appeared in the 21st November 2020 issue of <a href="https://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/" target="_blank">Amateur Photographer</a> magazine. <br /></span></p>Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-65049044614145792422020-07-25T06:49:00.000-07:002020-07-25T08:04:29.305-07:00Classic OLYMPUS Advertisements<div style="text-align: justify;">
My first camera was a second hand Pentax ME Super. I didn’t remember the adverts for Pentax cameras. I remembered the adverts for Olympus cameras, the ones with photographer David Bailey. I wanted to be Bailey. Part of me still does. He was cool and hung out with rock stars, models and gangsters. </div>
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The television commercials from the late 1970s and 1980s, screened during soap opera Coronation Street and sporting spectacles like the FA Cup final, reached millions, turning Bailey into a household name and Olympus into a household brand, except my house. “Who do you think you are, David Bailey?” would be levelled at anyone pointing a camera at a birthday party, wedding, in a pub, street, office, park or playground.<br />
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The bold, brilliant and often blokeish ads had Bailey being confused for someone else. In one, Monty Python’s Eric Idle reprises his 'nudge, nudge, know what I mean, a nod’s as good as a wink’ character, mistaking Formula 1 driver James Hunt for Bailey. The on set gossip is that Idle, after stepping on a nail, ad-libbed his way through infuriating the director. In another, Bailey is taunted for his tiny all-in-one Olympus camera by the all-gear-and-no-idea elitist ‘professional photographer’ played by George Cole.</div>
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The Olympus ads worked. Before Ian Dickens joined Olympus in a junior role in 1979, he worked in a camera shop. “I saw the sharp-end. After the first television ad [where Bailey, using the Olympus Trip, out-shoots an old school wedding photographer] people would come in and ask for an Olympus, the one Bailey used. They couldn’t be persuaded otherwise. I just had to take the payment.” Dickens was so impressed, it prompted him to apply for the job with Olympus where he remained for 21 years rising to Marketing Director. “The ads were designed to entertain, amuse, surprise and challenge. Build a brand perception that customers would have an instant warmth to.”<br />
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The creative agency behind the Olympus ads were Collett Dickenson Pearce, CDP, the same agency that paired Hamlet cigars with failure, Heineken beer with refreshing the parts other beers cannot reach and Hovis bread with brass bands and steep, sepia hills. And that’s jus the brands beginning with H.<br />
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“The agency’s brief was to do whatever they wanted, be as outrageous as they wanted and we’d take it from there,” says Graeme Chapman, Managing Director at Olympus from 1980 -2008 (including six years as European President of its Consumer Products division). Which is just as well, CDP had a reputation for only tolerating a certain amount of client interference. They took full advantage of Chapman’s advice, delivering humorous narratives and headlines. The philosophy was to treat the consumer with respect and provoke them into action.</div>
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The adverts displayed across these pages certainly provoke, one even suggests - ‘This Christmas, indulge in a little blackmail, extortion and torture,’ above a compilation of frivolous photographs featuring topless men, men with their tongues out, trousers down and sucking the toes of other men. The camera price is ‘… a drop in the ocean compared to the price you’ll be able to charge for the negatives’ it concludes, years before television shows offered financial rewards for the submission of embarrassing video clips.<br />
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‘Which part of the divine Ms Campell’s body holds the most allure for people? Her legs? Her lips? Her breasts? Perhaps her brain? No, it’s unquestionably her right hand’ declares another ad. At a time when fashion models were thought by some as a bit dim, Naomi Campbell holds aloft an all-weather Olympus Mju II under the copy, ‘Black. Sleek. Beautiful. Amazing features. Tiny brain.’ Naomi, a model with a large brain, was up for it. “She found the ad absolutely hysterical. She understood the humour as most celebrities featured in Olympus ads did.” says Dickens. </div>
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Chapman always took legal advice. The only ad that presented any real challenge featured Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas. An undisclosed fee eventually being donated to a designated charity. <br />
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The business owners in the Japanese boardroom didn’t always understand the intent of the British ads but certainly understood the impressive sales figures. Their inspirational president believed in globalisation through localisation and Chapman and his team continued unhindered. Olympus UK were consistently the global market brand leader.<br />
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“It was a case of having a fantastic agency doing groundbreaking stuff. Other camera brand ads, sadly, were just pictures of cameras. We rarely did that. We wanted to stop the audience in their tracks” adds Chapman. </div>
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“I used to hate cameras.” says the empowered looking American actress Koo Stark, probably better known for her relationship with Prince Andrew. “One day the paparazzi turned up on my doorstep, training their zoom lenses on me like a firing squad. It went on for years. In self-defence, I started snapping back at them.’ Stark went on to become an accomplished photographer and patron of the Julia Margaret Cameron Trust. <br />
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While grabbing the audiences attention, the Olympus ads also engaged with them. Below the hero images of Bill Clinton with a brunette, a staring, snarling Sarah Bernhard and glistening torsos of rowing heroes Ed Bayliss and Stu Turnbull, are highlighted some of the latest Olympus camera benefits (they were always referred to as benefits not features): built in flash; built in zoom lens; auto film loading; auto film speed setting; auto winding; auto rewinding; auto program; auto focus; drop-proof; waterproof and one of the biggest challenges, red-eye-reduction.</div>
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The ads were cheeky, irreverent and often topical, the kind that the satirical and current affairs news magazine Private Eye used to employ on their covers. Convicted financial rogue trader, Nick Leeson, is pictured in an ad for the Olympus Superzoom 120 above the slogan, ‘Perfect for those that like to take long shots.’ A Princess Diana ‘leg-a-like’ poses in a luxurious looking chair; ‘Avoid getting your head chopped off by the in-laws this Christmas’ is the quip for an Olympus AF-10 mini gift set.<br />
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Alongside Bailey, there was a royal rat pack of other more than capable photographers to endorse Olympus: Patrick Lichfield, Barry Lategan, John Swannell and Don McCullin. Not all the adverts featured celebrities, or cameras. One ad for binoculars takes the 'ooh er missus’ approach promising dedicated ornithologists; ‘We won’t resort to cheap jokes about birds, boobies and tits’ above a picture of Phalacrocorax aristotelis, or to you and me, The European or common shag, a species of cormorant.</div>
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Olympus are known for their innovative ads. They offer an insight and rich archive into the advertising and photography culture of a time when celebrities were nationally recognised and copyrighters were king. </div>
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A version of this article first appeared in the October 15th 2019 issue of <a href="https://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/publication/amateur-photographer/amateur-photographer-19-october-2019">Amateur Photographer</a> magazinePeter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-10494908217802018522020-07-25T06:22:00.000-07:002020-07-25T06:22:01.181-07:00Football's Hidden Story<div style="text-align: justify;">
The shortlist for the assignment is down to two photographers and there is one question left to ask. “Do you shoot digital?” I don’t, but say yes. My colleague and competitor, says no. After being informed in 2007 that I had won the commission, I bought myself my first professional digital cameras, two Canon EOS 5D MKI’s. I put the batteries in and dialled the phone number of renowned photojournalist Marcus Bleasdale. “Marcus. Help! What settings should I use?”</div>
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Haiti ©Peter Dench</div>
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I had an inkling at the time it was going to be one of those jobs you remember for a lifetime. It’s taken me twelve years to fully appreciate just how phenomenal it turned out to be. Football’s Hidden Story (FHS) was a FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) funded initiative: 26 photo-stories in 20 countries across the globe: from Colombia to Brazil, Thailand, Nepal, Norway, South Africa, Senegal, Haiti and many places in between. A series of emotive human interest documentaries showing the positive impact that football has had at grassroots level on individuals and communities all around the world.</div>
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Liberia ©Peter Dench</div>
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In Banda Aceh, Indonesia, I photographed Martunis at home stood under a news clipping of him with then Portuguese national football team manager Luiz Felipe Scolari. Martunis was seven when the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami struck. He was found 19 days later wandering on the beach wearing the Portuguese national football shirt. Broadcast images of Martunis became a symbol of inspiration and hope. Visits were subsequently made by players from the Portuguese national team including Cristiano Ronaldo. Martunis was reunited with his father but his mother and sister were never found.</div>
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Indonesia ©Peter Dench</div>
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In east Africa I documented the Amputee Football Federation of Liberia, an answer to one of the most intractable questions in the postwar nation: what to do with around 100,000 former militiamen, many of whom started fighting as boys and grew up thinking that the unspeakable was acceptable. After over a decade of civil war, Liberians still grapple with the aftermath. Football and amputee football in particular, is as much about reconciliation as competition. Former fighters from enemy militias now play in the same team. Mixed among them are civilians who got caught in the violence. Together they share, sing victory songs and play the beautiful game.</div>
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Liberia ©Peter Dench</div>
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<br />I captured Alessandro in Italy during a football therapy match in Rome. Before he got into football he was very sick, suffering wild hallucinations and hearing multiple voices. Most of these symptoms were ameliorated by football. There was 16 year old Laura, practising her football skills against a brick wall near her home near Birmingham, UK. She admitted to having once been a bit of a tearaway, missing lessons and bunking off school. After being told by a teacher that if she didn’t work harder, playing football would be forbidden, she turned her life around. Laura achieved at school and studied for her coaching and refereeing badges. There were Gypsy children in Bucharest clutching posters of Romanian soccer star Bãnel Nicoliþã at an anti-racism football game played in the Romanian capital Bucharest and I’ll never forget an historic football match between a Syrian team of Druze from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and Arab-Israelis, the first ever Syrian-born team to play in Israel.</div>
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Israel ©Peter Dench</div>
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<br />Many times during the 15 month campaign, I took a deliberate step back to absorb and appreciate the situations that having a camera allowed me to access. I understood that photography can help keep humanity alive. It can bring nations together and promote unity. It has the power to heal and to help, to motivate and give freedom to dreams. I learnt a lot and created memories I’ll never forget. It’s the assignment I refer back to when times are tough. I remember just how beautiful, inspiring, rewarding and diverse the profession can be. </div>
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<br />There are songs from the trip I can’t listen to as the memories associated with them are too intense. I can recall the voices of many people I met that lift the darkest of moods and I have photographs that I’ll be proud of for a lifetime. There are millions of us using photography, we can use it to bring a positive dimension to our lives and those of others.<br /><br />If I can leave you with one valuable piece of advice I picked up when shooting the FHS story on landmine clearance in Iraq, never run into an uncleared field if you can’t find a toilet.</div>
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Iraq Peter Dench</div>
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<br />A selection of images from Football’s Hidden Story is published by <a href="https://fistfulofbooks.com/product/footballs-hidden-story/">Fistful of Books</a> </div>
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A version of this artcicle first appeared in the 25th April 2020 issue of <a href="https://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/">Amateur Photographer</a> magazine <br /></div>
Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-74695964446176508332020-06-12T03:47:00.002-07:002020-06-12T03:47:52.527-07:00The Lonka Project<div style="text-align: justify;">
“We were watching TV, December 2018, there was a report on American news channel CNN. They’d done a survey in France and found that around 15% of French people had no idea what the Holocaust was, which was very shocking to both of us. We watched this and thought how can this be? France was occupied by the Nazis for four years during the war and split the country up, so we just started thinking what can we do as photographers to remedy this as a way of Holocaust commemoration and remembrance, to increase awareness in an educational capacity?” explains <a href="https://www.epa.eu/photographers/jim-hollander">Jim Hollander</a> speaking on the phone from his home on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Israel. Equally astounding, in a recent report by Claims Conference: ‘While there were over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos in Europe during the Holocaust, almost half of Americans (45 percent) cannot name a single one – and this percentage is even higher amongst Millennials.’</div>
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<br />Jim and his wife, <a href="http://www.artnet.com/artists/rina-castelnuovo/biography">Rina Castelnuovo</a>, are both professional photographers. Jim, now 70 has worked for United Press International, European Press Agency and Reuters. Rina has photographed for The New York Times in Israel since the mid-nineties, as well as Time magazine, Stern, and the Associated Press previously. As well as general news, both have covered Holocaust survivors and associated events in Israel. They hit upon the idea of reaching out to the community they knew, at first photojournalists, asking them if they could volunteer to do a portrait of an Holocaust survivor. The response was overwhelming. No direct guidance was given except to avoid a simple headshot. “What struck us is the survivors have a powerful will to live that many people don’t have. They survived such horrendous years of torture and suffering and they’re powered to get on with life and to live and enjoy life - we expressed that to the photographers - we’d like a portrait of their power to live.” <br /><br />The number of portraits received is heading towards 250, taken by some of the world’s leading photographers including <a href="https://www.rogerballen.com/">Roger Ballen</a>, <a href="https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/stuart-franklin/">Stuart Franklin</a>, <a href="https://www.stevemccurry.com/">Steve McCurry</a>, <a href="https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/gilles-peress/">Gilles Peress</a>, <a href="https://alecsoth.com/photography/">Alec Soth</a>, <a href="http://www.peterturnley.com/">Peter Turnley</a>, <a href="https://heidilevine.photoshelter.com/index">Heidi Levine</a>, <a href="http://www.janeevelynatwood.com/">Jane Evelyn Atwood</a>, I could go on. The collection is called <a href="https://www.thelonkaproject.com/">The Lonka Projec</a>t, a tribute to Rina's mother, Dr. Eleonora ‘Lonka’ Nass (1926-2018). It’s a compelling testament to the power of living. Attara and Yosef Dekel, photographed in Hadera, Israel, touch hands sat on a bed surrounded by stuffed soft toys. Adam Han-Górski poses wearing sports kit at an outdoor gym in Plymouth, Minnesota, USA. Hungarian Olympic gymnastics champion, Agnes Keleti, stretches on her bed at home in Budapest, Hungary, her legs as wide as her grin. Anne Frank’s stepsister, Eva Schloss, is photographed in London stood by a string of 90th birthday cards. The Lonka Project isn’t trying to photograph Holocaust survivors across the globe but a few key countries remain important and elusive; a survivor can’t be located in Spain, a few survivors live in Portugal but a photographer has not been assigned.</div>
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<br />Has Jim a favourite portrait? “There’s one I thought very lovely I would consider for the cover of the book [there are plans for a book, hopefully by the end of 2020, a German publisher Jim met at Paris Photo has expressed an interest]. It’s by <a href="https://marissarothphotography.com/">Marissa Roth</a>, who photographed <a href="https://www.dorothybohm.com/main.php?section=home">Dorothy Bohm</a> in London, the mistress of photojournalism photography in England. Bohm, who is in her late 90s, was friends with <a href="https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/henri-cartier-bresson/">Henri Cartier-Bresson</a> and the Magnum crowd in the late 1940s. She was a survivor, her parents were able to get her out of Europe and bring her to London. She became a very well known photographer in the UK.” Bohm was closely involved in founding The Photographers’ Gallery, London and has published over a dozen books. In 2009 she was appointed Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. Her portrait has her stood stoically behind her Rolleiflex camera.<br /><br />Alongside each portrait is an accompanying story. Some are vague in detail, others are devastatingly poignant. Ralph Hakman photographed by <a href="https://www.barbaradavidson.com/">Barbara Davidson</a>: ‘Ralph regularly observed his SS supervisor driving to the crematoria in a Red Cross van, donning a mask and emptying three canisters of Zyklon B crystal pellets into designated ports. Ralph heard the screams of the dying Jews, and then 15 minutes later, when the doors were opened, he saw the bodies tumbling out.’ Miriam Ziegler photographed by Moe Doiron: ‘When Miriam was nine, all prisoners were put on cattle cars and deported to Auschwitz where Miriam was separated from her parents. Her father was killed in the gas chambers. Miriam was tattooed with the number A16891, shaved and was kept in the barracks where experiments were performed on the children. Miriam managed to survive until Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945.’ Film director, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Polanski">Roman Polanski</a>, is casually snapped by Franck Leclerc, a jacket hooked over his shoulder. ‘ Roman’s mother, Bula, expecting a child, was taken from her family and sent to death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.’ The stories are distilled horrors of man.<br /><br />Many of the portraits show the survivor with their identification tattoo but not every survivor portrait is from the death camps. Photographers can interpret holocaust survivor as they like. The Lonka project includes people who were hidden underground, in forests, homes, monasteries, nunneries, and fled to other countries. Ben Frenecz, photographed by <a href="https://www.andyandersonphoto.com/">Andy Anderson</a>, is not a Holocaust survivor but he is responsible for hundreds of thousands of survivors. Born in Hungary on March 11, 1920, Frenecz was an investigator of Nazi war crimes after World War II, becoming Chief Prosecutor for the United States at the Einsatzgruppen Trial, one of the twelve military trials held by the U.S. at Nuremberg, Germany. All of the 22 men on trial were convicted: 13 received the death sentence, four were implemented. This wider range of stories increases the educational value of the project.<br /><br />Photographers contributing to The Lonka Project have clearly been affected as <a href="https://www.martyumans.com/">Marty Umans</a> recounts in her experience photographing Samuel Beller, aged 94, at his home in New York: ‘I had a very emotional shoot yesterday. In working through the weeks and process of setting up this portrait session I had not given much thought to what to expect emotionally when talking and spending time with our subject. I have traveled the world and photographed children in Africa for Operation Smile, Ethiopian Jews being resettled in Israel for Hadassah, teens in NYC for Avenues for Justice for over 20 years but never a 94-year-old in Brooklyn who still lives his past like it is today. It was a rewarding two hours spent with an amazing survivor and example of the unsung heroes of the Holocaust. Samuel is open and willing to share his experiences which are horrendous. He lives them every day without the ability to block them out. I did not expect that. It took him decades before he was able to share his experiences but I don’t think it has been a healing, more of a cause, and at 94 he doesn’t have the same energy to share his story. I am grateful for his two hours and cherish my time.’<br /><br />93 portraits were exhibited in 100ft of space at the United Nations in New York on the 27th January, National Holocaust Day. More exhibitions are scheduled at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre, Moscow, in Berlin, maybe South Africa and other venues around New York. There will be a month long outdoor show in Jerusalem. <br /><br />Two photojournalists working in stressful circumstances, I had to ask Jim how they have stayed married for 35 years.? “We’re both photographers covering the news, we used to work quite a lot together during the First Intifada (Palestinian protests and violent riots against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza), and some of the wars, the Scud war in the 1990s. Rina works with The New York Times and I work with Reuters and EPA, so we’re both out covering the story of the day. Israel being a very small country, you can be a conflict photographer on the front line all day long, then an hour and a half later your back at home with the kids, you have dinner and forget all about what you saw during the day and you become a family. It’s easy to get back home, so its not like you’re away on assignment for months and months at a time.”<br /><br />Rina’s polish parents were both survivors. It was something that was never spoken about. They used code words when speaking about it with their survivor friends. They never sat Rina and her sister down and explained what they went through, only opening up a little more when Rina was much older on a trip to Poland, visiting family homes and concentration camps, five of which her mother survived including Auschwitz and Belsen.</div>
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<br />On the 20th March, 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Aryeh Even, became the first Israeli to die of coronavirus. The Lonka Project has never been more relevant and urgent.<br /><br />A version of this article first appeared in the 9 May 2020 Issue of <a href="https://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/">Amateur Photographer</a> magazine</div>
Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com218tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-8945591167050647782020-06-10T09:03:00.002-07:002020-06-10T09:03:56.040-07:00The Longest Week<div style="text-align: justify;">
Hello dear reader. I’m writing this during a week when 20,000 troops are on standby to help deal with the coronavirus crisis. Schools have shut down and exams cancelled. Social distancing has been implemented; cafes, restaurants, pubs, clubs, gyms and bingo halls ordered to close. Supermarket shelves are being stripped clean. The worst in society are doing bad, the best are stepping up. Lockdown seems imminent. The Queen released a statement reminding us that ‘our nation’s history has been forged by people and communities coming together’ (as long as it’s no closer than two meters). Prime Minister Boris Johnson is ‘absolutely confident that we can send coronavirus packing in this country.’ The situation is serious, the situation is changing rapidly. It will have changed again by the time you read this. <br /><br />The photo-industry is being decimated. It will recover but associated businesses and individuals might not. Photography shows, events and exhibitions have closed, cancelled or postponed. Camera manufacturers expect to take a big hit. Work has flatlined. The world has been reset. BC will come to mean something different. I am living my story, you have yours, I hope it’s not too terrifying. I reached out to a few to hear theirs.</div>
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“I’ve never know anything like it, the work has just dropped off, it’s like shaking a dead Christmas tree. A month of work gone in four days, upward of 15 jobs. One morning, in the space of 25 minutes, four jobs cancelled,” explains freelance photographer, <a href="https://matt-horwood.com/">Matthew Horwood</a> from his home in Cardiff. “I’m just getting used to not having jobs to do, not having to be somewhere at 9 O’Clock - not having any work is really strange.” Matthew was staff photographer at the The Western Mail before being made redundant in 2014 and thrown into the world of PR and event photography. With no PR or event photography to do, he’s being proactive shooting news stock for Getty Images. “It’s a bit bleak to be honest, going out and shooting the same thing over and over again and having the same conversations. I am at least free to do what I want want.” He says with a chink of optimism.“I don’t think every photographer’s going to get through it without doing other jobs. It’s very bleak,” he adds. Does he expect to be able to photograph himself out of adversity? “I don’t know how long it’s going to go on for. Depends whether there’s new opportunities for pictures every day. Every photographer’s going to be doing this, there’s probably more competition than before, people who did PR and news are now just doing news. It does make it difficult.”<br /><br />Fashion and celebrity photographer <a href="https://www.jaymclaughlin.co.uk/">Jay McLaughlin</a> has a strategy. “Everything is postponed until further notice. I had enough to pay all my bills. Now it’s like, what can I sell?” What he can sell are his books: Bailey’s Stardust, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age, his Peter Lindbergh and Mario Testino’s. “Do I need books when I have an internet of pictures, sure they’re nice to have but are they necessary?”</div>
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If Jay, is selling photo books, is anyone buying them? “Sales are going through the floor. In the last five days I haven’t sold a book online. On a normal week, 5 or 6 books a day this time of year,” says Colin Wilkinson, who founded <a href="https://bluecoatpress.co.uk/">Bluecoat Press</a> in 1992. “2008 was the first shake up of the book publishing industry, the financial crisis along with the growth of the internet meant traditional bookshops and outlets vanished very quickly, publishers had to find new ways of selling and develop an internet presence. The problem now is people have got other priorities. He has one book potentially funded and the book, Juvenile Jazz Bands by Tish Murtha, is funded. “We hit the £10K crowdfunding target in two days, since then, in two weeks around another £1.5K, normally it would be treble. It’s quite obvious people are not spending. If in a years time we’re in a world recession, I would probably think there’s no point in continuing which is a great shame as I have six brilliant projects lined up which I really want to do.” These include books by Jim Mortram, Margaret Mitchell and <a href="http://www.carolynmendelsohnphoto.com/">Carolyn Mendelsohn</a>.<br /><br />I talk to Carolyn just after she’s rescued her eldest son from the University of Manchester party scene and is understanding about the situation at Bluecoat Press. With her three children safely back home, she’s being creative in the circumstances, making formal portraits of her daughter Poppy on the eve of her fourteenth birthday and snapping her as they walk around Asda supermarket. “My son Sam, who’s 15, is writing a journal and I’m taking simple domestic photographs. We’re going to put them together and make some kind of blog. It’s really for ourselves and I’m sure lots of people will be doing similar things.” I hope they are and in time, can make a small but significant contribution to this extraordinary chapter of history.</div>
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<br />Also this week (it’s been a long week), The Church of England has restricted wedding ceremonies to five people. Does this include a photographer? I ask <a href="https://www.leeglasgowphotography.co.uk/">Lee Glasgow</a>. “I’ve a wedding tomorrow and the registrar has said I’m not allowed in the room, only close family. I’m planning to set the camera up on a tripod and take pictures remotely from the room next door. It’s not ideal but a solution. I’ve advised the couple to hold the kiss for a second longer as the remote app is a lot slower.” Lee photographed over 50 weddings in 2019, 38 are booked for 2020 but is likely to reduce, he has taken £20K of deposits. “In the wedding industry we call them booking fees - apparently, legally, you don’t have to pay booking fees back because you’ve done an amount of work.” He’s not money grabbing, just being sensible. Lee is advising clients to call him for a conversation, keep things verbal, on a case by case basis, see what can be worked out amicably. He’s stepped in and volunteered a few hours of his time to photograph a wedding at short notice. “In wedding world, I think we’re up against it anyway because everyone’s a photographer, do weddings need a photographer, do they see the value a photographer brings? The price of quality cameras is coming down, picture quality of mobile phones is going up so the market has been shrinking for a long long time.” Lee is savvy and established and expects to be in business next year, weddings will still go ahead, just not now. Other photographers may not be so fortunate. “I know a number of photographers that want to work one day a week and left good jobs to become a wedding photographer and now realise the industry might be disappearing, they’re going to be buggered.”</div>
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It’s not just professional photographers who are in turmoil, amateur photographers and those studying it across the United Kingdom are being affected: projects have been suspended, some have collapsed. Camera clubs, many who have members in the vulnerable category for coronavirus, have temporarily closed. Harrogate Photographic Society cancelled a coach trip to Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool. Open Eye won’t miss out out on 40 plus visitors because it closed their doors to protect staff, artists and clients. Likewise The Photographers Gallery London, Side Gallery Newcastle and Anne McNeill, Director and Curator at <a href="https://www.impressions-gallery.com/">Impressions Gallery</a> Bradford, made the decision to close the building. “It’s really important to stress how crucial the building is to us, it’s not just four white walls, it’s a community space as well. The reason I do it is for photographers and visitors to experience photography in real life and to have a meeting place, we wouldn’t want to lose that.” Enterprising Anne, gave an impassioned message to her staff as they left to work remotely from home. ““Use this time as thinking time, we might come up with a great new idea, we might not, that doesn’t matter - work out a strategy how we can build up our virtual community and reach out to all photographers, what learning advice we can offer for free, are there any paid opportunities we can do online for photographers. Even when the building opens again, hopefully this new way of working will stay with us.”</div>
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<br />From the gloom there always springs hope and the photography industry has sprung high. There’s a Photographers Under Quarantine Facebook Group, group video chats, free expert advise across all social media or at a knock down price with the proceeds going to charity. “Every situation is neutral, nothing is good, nothing is bad, it’s only how you feel about it that makes it good or bad - you can choose. We have forced free time, if you cannot work what can photographers do?” Ponders Jay McLaughlin, a keen reader of philosophy and influenced by Marcus Aurelius. I ask on social media what photographers can do? ‘Review hard drives, memory cards, back up important images, update websites, improve SEO, make prints, write more blogs, record vlogs, keyword stock, be kind.’<br /><br />Stay safe, sane and sanitised - thanks for reading and hope to see you smiling on the other side.<br /><br />A version of this article first appeared in the 11 April 2020 issue of <a href="https://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/">Amateur Photographer</a> magazine<br /></div>
Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-25437954480544430822019-12-10T03:57:00.000-08:002019-12-10T04:44:33.131-08:00John Downing : Legacy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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John Downing MBE, doesn’t look terminally ill. Pulling open the front door to his Henley on Thames home, the 79 year old Welshman and former Chief Photographer at the Daily Express newspaper, looks a rakish Sir Ian McKellen. His crisp white shirt is unbuttoned and wavy grey hair combed back behind the ears. “I’ve lost two stone and half a lung,” he says laughing and directs me into the kitchen. The lines around his pale blue eyes suggest he’s laughed a lot. His photographs often document the less hilarious parts of humanity.<br />
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At approximately 2.50am, after a long day covering the 1984 Tory Party conference, the type of assignment he says can be “mundane and hateful,” John heads to the bar of The Grand Hotel in Brighton, “as all good journalists would,” he grins. Down on his haunches, talking to a husband and wife sat at a table, at 2.54am, the Irish Republican Army bomb goes off. A 5-tonne chimney stack comes crashing down through the floors into the basement tearing a hole in the Victorian hotel’s facade. The bar goes dark and fills with debris, dust and silence. An earlier briefing at Chelsea Police station and John’s own experience of bombs kick in. Fearing a shower of small sharp shards of glass will devastate the woman’s face, he pulls her to the floor and covers her head with his body, emasculating the husband. While others in the bar are being led to safety, John works his way to the front entrance to photograph what he assumes is a car bomb. The entrance is stacked with fallen chimney. Climbing through a window, he sees an injured policeman lying on the ground and takes a photo. Out of the corner of his eye, he recognizes the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher’s private detective running at full pelt. Charging after him, John asks if Thatcher is OK? The detective isn’t sure and endorses John to the gathered Police who allow him to stay. Coming down the fire escape, John spots a composed Thatcher. She calmly puts her attache case in the boot of a car and climbs in alongside her husband Denis and aide, Cynthia Crawford. The car takes off at speed. John instinctively jabs his pre-focused lens towards the car and depresses the shutter. One shot, one flash. He has the exclusive and knows what to do next. Covered in dust, he runs to the nearest hotel to use the phone, well aware that the deadline for closing the edition of the Daily Express is imminent. John pleads for it to be held. On Saturday the 13th October, under the front page headline ‘UNBOWED’ is John’s remarkable photograph of Thatcher, complete with pearls, earrings and handbag, looking stoically straight ahead.</div>
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The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/gallery/2009/oct/13/brighton-bomb-margaret-thatcher">Brighton bombing</a> cemented John’s name as one of Fleet Street’s finest. His earlier photographs from Uganda established it. A year after Idi ‘The Butcher of Uganda’ Amin seized power in a military coup, John was in the country covering the expulsion of Asians, many of whom were British passport holders. The assignment was going well until Amin declared that all Europeans were spies. John was arrested in his hotel room and taken for interrogation. In the frightening chaos that ensued, he had an army colonel press a gun to his ear before being tossed into the bowels of Kampala’s Central Police Station prison. They had forgotten to confiscate his camera. John did what he was paid to do. He took pictures of prisoners alongside him in the open sewer prison. He took pictures as they lined up to get food, the camera hidden under a towel, the shutter clicks masked by coordinated coughing. Once deported, on Friday 22nd September 1972, the Daily Express ran five and a half pages of his pictures. The set includes an exceptional photograph of British brothers, Andrew Stanley (4) and Robert (2), the tough and adaptable boys climbing the prison bars as if in a gym, staring into a ferocious sun at a world gone mad.<br />
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The Daily Express wasn’t the tabloid newspaper obsessed with royals and right wing political parties it is today. Launching as a broadsheet it 1900, by the time John arrived (after a five year internship at the Daily Mail he started aged just 15), it was a pioneering power with the largest newspaper picture team in the world, around 64 staff photographers and 14 freelancers, of which John was the lowliest. He worked his way up by being talented and smart. He recounts his first big break, an assignment to Eastern Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to document the Cholera outbreak rife among refugee camps. John was the only photographer to have an up to date Cholera inoculation, they had to send him. A photograph from the reportage, of a nurse trying to administer a vaccination to a terrified child, won 2nd prize, general news singles, at the 1972 World Press Photo contest. Not bad for a relative beginner. During a career that has spanned over five decades, 100 countries and all seven continents, John has witnessed wars in Vietnam, Rhodesia, Beirut, Iraq, Somalia, Rwanda, Croatia, and Bosnia. He’s reported on natural, man-made disasters and famine. He has covered royal tours, political events, photographed the famous, infamous and poor. His efforts have accumulated a cluster of awards including seven for British Press Photographer of the Year. He was appointed a judge on the competition panel so he couldn’t win an eighth.</div>
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Moving into the showpiece lounge, I’m introduced to his third wife, Anita. When I telephoned to make the appointment with John, it was Anita who answered. From her articulated voice, I thought I’d dialled the 1950s: “Hello Henley on Thames 123.” Sitting on the sofa in white jeans, mustard coloured top and precise cut bobbed hair, she resembles a 1963 Una Stubbs - the Summer Holiday year. When Anita met John, she was 33 and-a-half years younger than him, she still is. She is younger than me and John’s two sons. The room is a forest of Get Well cards. Who sends Get Well cards to a terminally ill man? Anita, an established pianist and teacher at Eton College, explains they were sent after John’s lung removal operation. “Clinton Cards don’t really cater for the terminally ill market.” Perhaps they should do, ‘Oh Well’ or ‘Demise with Dignity’ cards? As we take a tour around the sun saturated apartment, the humour is often dark. <br />
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John’s MBE nestles among his awards in a glass display cabinet. “I felt a failure to my father, who was a teacher, not having got into Grammar school. The MBE and awards are a part way of resolving that.” Moving on, he locates the four toilets, the walk in shower he’s always wanted, a bedspread from India, mirror from Jordan, chest from Iran, stick from Burkina Faso and a Mosque themed clock that plays the Muslim call to prayer. John’s not particularly religious. “I’m not down on dying,” he says, entering the walk in wardrobe. A trumpet hangs silently in the centre, not the best instrument for a man with half a lung missing to learn. “I’ve lived a fulfilled and healthy life,” he adds, running a hand across the red members jacket of his beloved London Welsh Male Voice Choir. He last sang as a bass before Christmas 2018 and hopes to have the breath to rejoin the choir for rehearsals. “My only regrets are leaving Anita…” he sighs, plopping down on the music room seat next to her Austrian Bösendorfer piano, “…and not having had a book of my work published.” </div>
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When news of John’s illness hit friend and renowned photojournalist, <a href="http://tomstoddart.com/">Tom Stoddart</a>, Tom initiated a process to get a book of John’s work published before, well, you know. A crowdfunding campaign was launched and a day later, I’m here to talk to, and photograph John to help drive momentum. There is no need. Seven hours after the launch, the £8,000 funding target is breached. By the time I arrive in Henley, it’s doubled. My day with John and Anita has become a celebration. We head across the road for a late lunch at Shaun Dickens at the Boathouse. Over plates of Porthilly oysters, tartare of salmon, pork tenderloin, skate and chilled glasses of Languedoc wine, we exchange stories as boats chunter merrily along the River Thames. John recounts dressing in a Burqa to enter Afghanistan; a shooting challenge with the son of a Mujahideen chief in which the loser would be shot dead (John won, no one was killed); starting the Press Photographers Association (now The British Press Photographers’ Association) as a response to the creeping trend in paparazzi photography and a way to preserve quality; mastering black and white photography, “I had a secret method for preserving detail in the blacks.” The challenges of shooting colour. “Only two things work better in colour, fire and blood, but I never felt so in control.” For a man rapidly losing weight, John can eat what he likes. When the waiter brings low in salt butter, we ask for more salt. When the Languedoc runs out, we ask for Sauterne. <br />
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John is not in pain. He is not bitter at the possible causes of his asbestos related cancer. He’ll refuse Chemotherapy as long as he can. We walk through Henley in the August warmth among men returning from Lord’s loosening their Marylebone Cricket Club ties. “I don’t feel like you’ve asked me anything important,” he says. I embrace the important and inspirational Press Photographer I’ve only just met and may never meet again. As the train pulls out of the station, I check the crowdfunding campaign - it says, 28 days to go.<br />
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John Downing: Legacy published by <a href="https://bluecoatpress.co.uk/product/legacy/">Bluecoat Press</a>: hardback book with dust jacket, size 270 x 290mm (landscape) and 192 pages.</div>
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A version of this article first appeared in <a href="https://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/publication/amateur-photographer/amateur-photographer-19-october-2019">Amateur Photographer</a> magazine UK 19/10/2019</div>
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Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-57771618467583491552019-09-03T10:16:00.001-07:002019-09-03T10:16:39.081-07:00Raiders of the Lost Archives<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Canning Town is the most depressing place I’ve been to in London and I’ve been to the Emirates Stadium to watch Arsenal play football. It’s a place you pass through not go to. There are bus depots and taxi ranks. Underground and overground trains. Subways and bridges. The whole area is on the move. The walk to my destination is brutal and bleak. Lorries pin me to razor-wired walls. Electricity cables crackle ferociously above. There are warning signs, police sirens, guard dogs, dirt-filled pot holes, dust, discarded laughing-gas canisters, CCTV cameras, tyres, hub caps and skips. The parrot in The Durham Arms swears at passing strangers. I have a clearly printed ‘how to get here’ sheet of paper and get lost twice. Stood among the industrial units of Toolstation, Edmundson Electrical and Screwfix, there’s a clue to my destination. A man smoking a roll-up cigarette wearing a brown apron sips hot tea from a mug. On the mug it says <a href="https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/editorial-images">Getty Images</a>.<br />
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Welcome to the <a href="https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/collections/hulton-archive">Hulton Archive</a>, a remarkable visual resource of over 80 million images contained within 1500 individual collections. At the turn of the 21st Century, Getty Images merged London based Hulton Picture Collection with Archive Film and Photos, New York creating Hulton Archive. The buzzer says press firmly and await response. I fluff the firmly bit and await response. This state-of-the-art facility was around two years in the making. I push open the state of the art door and breathe in.</div>
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Melanie Llwellyn (née Hough) in the Hulton Archive ©Peter Dench</div>
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The gigantic archive is overseen by one of the world’s smallest curators. Melanie Hough is ‘five foot nothing.’ Her jaw is strong, face freckled, grip firm and blue eyes imposing. Melanie is in her thirties and third year as curator of Hulton Archive. She has been in the photography and gallery business for over a decade, working her way up after graduating from Goldsmiths University, London, with a BA (Hons) History of Art and an MA Contemporary Art Theory. Stepping onto the temperature-and- humidity controlled level one (of two) of the Hulton Archive, the scale of her task is staggering. This is what The Cloud must look like. 13 kilometres of racks and rows of boxes, packages and files. That’s 8,530 head-to-toe Melanie’s.<br />
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The heart of the Hulton collections is the seminal British weekly <a href="https://www.gettyimagesgallery.com/exhibitions/"><i>Picture Post</i></a> magazine and it’s one of the first things you see. Melanie snaps on pair of latex gloves. “I find cotton gloves clumsy, these more dextrous,” she says, and flips to a spread by photographer <a href="https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/print-sales/our-artists/bert-hardy">Bert Hardy</a> of 'Firefighters during the London Blitz, 1941'. From the accompanying contact sheets you can track the picture editors forensic eye and process. Another latex flip and there’s a lay out of Hardy's iconic images from the Korean War Battle of Incheon, which James Cameron wrote the article for. Between 1938 and 1957, over 9,000 articles were commissioned for <i>Picture Post</i>. Only 2,000 of these actually ran in the magazine and the other 7,000 were filed away. Around half a dozen photographs accompanied each published article, from the hundreds, sometimes thousands of negatives the photographers delivered, creating a colossal archive of unpublished and often unprinted images. Readership in Britain during the second world war reportedly peaked at over 80% of the population.</div>
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“There are probably 200 negatives to one print in the Hulton Archive” says Melanie. “Less than 1% is online. Around 30,000 images are digitised a year with more coming in all the time.” She adds, pushing her tawny hair behind a pierced ear without an earring. It’s a job for life and the challenges are daily: researching; identifying and documenting; devising strategies for library care, accessibility and conservation; acting as spokesperson; leading tours of the archive; assisting external researchers, scholars and curators find what they didn’t know they were looking for. She even handles the Instagram account @Gettyarchive. Melanie is always busy during the day and often kept awake at night. Terrors include: reticulated negatives (the distortion of the emulsion layer of a film); indecipherable index codes; problems with original and now inappropriate captions and the most horrifying of all, off-gassing, film that is actively decaying, often known as vinegar syndrome as the film begins to release acetic acid, as you’d find in the vinegar doused over chips. The process cannot be recovered, only stabilised. We both rapidly sniff the room. My stomach starts to rumble.</div>
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During my tour of the archive, one of Meanie’s two curatorial assistants ghosts past, triggering on the strip lights. A herculean librarian who has been working at the archive for 20 years and spends their entire time meticulously patrolling the racks, rewriting faded labels and refiling requested material - requests that often mirror what is happening in the modern world. Demands this month are for women playing football (the FIFA Women’s World Cup is currently under way) and images of D-Day in this 75th anniversary year. Images of royals and British royals in particular are among the most popular genre.</div>
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Melanie has a shifting top 10 of her favourite photographs. Among them an image by renowned photojournalist, <a href="https://www.gettyimagesgallery.com/collection/terry-fincher/">Terry Fincher</a> (pretty much every photographer in here is renowned): a scene of Carravaggion-quality captured on 35mm film of Marine chaplain Eli Tavesian giving communion to marine Louis A Loya, at Forward Command Post in Hue, Vietnam, 1968. It’s also a favourite of the Archive Vice President and Melanie’s boss, Matthew Butson. It was to Matt that Fincher (one of the many photographers he knew personally), confessed to shooting the image from the hip - it still didn’t need cropping. A <a href="https://www.gettyimagesgallery.com/collection/john-chillingworth/">John Chillingworth</a> image is another of Melanie’s favourites: a controlled test reveals the frightening speed with which clothes can catch fire, published in <i>Picture Post</i> alongside the article, <i>10 Seconds Can Mar A Life</i>, 1953. <br />
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Opening the boxes and peeling back the beaten wrappers of parcels, I realise everything I thought contemporary has been done deep in photography’s past. There’s macro photography of insect tongues; erotic photography featuring tongues and food photography to make your mouth water. There are drawers full of political cartoons and maps charting new territories a century before Google. 5% of the Hulton Archive is estimated to be non-photographic: etchings, lithographs, postcards, letters and valentines cards among others.</div>
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History is democratic: boxes of prints of comedian and actor <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001350/">Benny Hill</a> alphabetically align alongside those of Adolf Hitler. History is also fluid, a tide. No ones place in it is guaranteed. There are gatekeepers, authors, editors and curators who prioritise what’s important and champion some photographers over others. Melanie understands and welcomes that the findings and decisions of the team of ‘Hultonites’ at the London facility (including five editors, four in scanning and an on-site conservator whose job is to stabilise and repair) can be challenged or changed as new, old archives are opened and verified.</div>
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The doyens of photography at Hulton Archive are resident in Melanie’s favourite room, the Vintage Room. One of only five people with access, she fobs us into the windowless space, the walls lined with <a href="http://www.artnet.com/artists/brassa%C3%AF/">Brassaï</a>, <a href="https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/bill-brandt-an-introduction">Bill Brandt</a> and Lewis Carroll. She delivers to the viewing table the book: <i>Illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Other Poems by Julia Margaret Cameron</i>, one of only eight known copies in the world. Other lifted lids reveal hermetically sealed stereo Daguerrotypes (a photograph taken by an early photographic process employing an iodine-sensitized silvered plate and mercury vapour), Ambrotypes (a positive photograph on glass made by a variant of the wet plate collodion process) and Calotypes (an early photographic process introduced in 1841 by William Henry Fox Talbot, using paper coated with silver iodide). There’s an order of service from Ronald Kray’s funeral; a 1738 letter from Louis XV of France (the most beloved Louis); a 3-D stereoscopic of the moon and marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of Queen Victoria, one of the latest discoveries from the archive files. Believed to be the earliest image of any British monarch by a woman photographer, the portrait was captured by Frances Sally Day (c1816-92), possibly on 26th July 1859, according to Victoria’s own journals. We respectfully whisper our conversation across her royal highness.</div>
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Melanie ends by showing an image by <a href="http://www.eadweardmuybridge.co.uk/">Eadweard Muybridge</a> (1830-19040, the English-American photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion. He’s arguably best known for shooting and killing his wife's lover, a crime for which he was acquitted in a jury trial on the grounds of justifiable homicide. It’s been an overwhelming and dramatic three hours. I feel guilty for only glimpsing a fraction on offer at this analogue centre of excellence. Melanie half-jokingly suggests checking my bag on the way out. I suppress my inner Indian Jones (Raiders of the Lost Archive?). In truth, I don’t want to steal anything, I want to leave something and consider slipping a folio of my images onto the shelf. <br />
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The Wiltshire-born, Devon raised lass, who hates being photographed and is driven by what she is yet to see, has to go. She softly guides me back into the open and I stride deeper into the drizzle. “We didn’t even make it to the <a href="https://www.manray.net/">Man Ray</a>’s!” She shouts.</div>
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A version of this feature first appeared in <a href="https://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/">Amateur Photographer</a> magazine 24th August 2019</div>
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Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-22153187565973883642019-08-22T06:31:00.002-07:002019-09-03T09:54:16.438-07:00Viewpoint : Imposter Syndrome<div style="text-align: justify;">
When do you become a photographer? When you receive your first camera? When you graduate from college or university? When you receive your first professional commission, sell your first print, publish your first photo-book, reach a 1000 YouTube subscribers or decide to watermark your Instagram posts?</div>
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©Peter Denc'</div>
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On a recent visit to the hairdressers, to have what hair I have left cut, I was asked by Kostas, my assigned barber, what I did for a living? I hesitated. Assignments had been a bit sparse, my photo-mojo a bit dulled. The words, 'I’m a photographer' lodged in my throat. I felt a fraud. The weight of photographic history pounded in my mind. Images by <a href="http://www.jamesnachtwey.com/">James Nachtwey</a>, <a href="http://www.tomstoddart.com/">Tom Stoddart</a>, <a href="https://donmccullin.com/">Don McCullin</a>, <a href="https://pro.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL535353">Robert Capa</a>, <a href="https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/robert-frank?all/all/all/all/0">Robert Frank</a>, <a href="http://www.artnet.com/artists/diane-arbus/">Diane Arbus</a>, <a href="https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/nan-goldin">Nan Goldin</a>, <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm">Walker Evans</a>, <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pstd/hd_pstd.htm">Paul Strand</a> and <a href="https://edward-weston.com/">Edward Weston</a> trampled across my retina. “This and that.” I finally squeaked. “Bits and bobs.” I added. Kostas finished the cut in silence.<br />
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I was a Judas to my my craft! The denial of photography felt biblical. Was I still a photographer if I hadn’t taken a photograph for a few weeks? Would I become one again if I went home and grabbed one of my three Olympus cameras and went out to photograph for the day - was it that simple?<br />
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I’d always believed I’d been a photographer since the age of 14, when I took myself away from the distractions of the amusement arcades and flirty girls to patrol the local nature reserve snapping herons, coots and butterflies with my second hand Pentax ME Super.<br />
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It’s not the first wobble I’ve had and won’t be the last. I’ve had my photography career interrupted by necessary stints working in a canteen, as a builders mate and jet-washing patios (a word of advice, don’t wear flip-flops when jet washing patios or try to clean your feet with the high pressure jet wash).<br />
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In a time when everyone’s supposed to be a photographer, I don’t see a deluge of outstanding new photographers. Great photographs have to be grafted for and photography has it’s own unique attributes that have to be mastered: composition, content, colour (or lack of), lighting and perspective. It’s a ridiculous way to live, trying to make sense of the world and how you feel about it, through a rectangle or square. <br />
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Photography can be a deeply unsatisfying pursuit and profession but a compulsive and all-consuming one. Renowned photographers, often without question, spend days away from their loved ones, spending money they may not have, in situations they may not like, hunting that moment when everything, for a fraction of a second, makes sense - when all problems and doubts are blown away and the only thing that matters, is they got the shot. <br />
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If you don’t understand that, then you’re probably not a photographer, no matter how many social networking followers you have or how many expensive cameras and gadgets are hanging around your neck. It’s a state of mind, you just know.</div>
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This article was first published in Amatuer Photographe magazine March 2019.</div>
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Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-34148086158371021982019-08-13T05:51:00.000-07:002019-08-13T05:51:52.289-07:00Documenting The Fallout<div style="text-align: justify;">
In 1984, anxiety over nuclear war was at it peak. American President Ronald Regan’s Strategic Defence Initiative (Star Wars), intended to protect the United States from attack by ballistic strategic nuclear weapons, was in development. The landmark television film Threads, about the effects of a nuclear holocaust on the working class in the British city of Sheffield and the eventual long-term effects of nuclear war on civilisation, disturbed the nation. The British New Wave band, Ultravox, released Dancing With Tears In My Eyes, their second single from their seventh studio album Lament. The music video depicts band frontman, Midge Ure, driving home after discovering that a nuclear explosion is imminent. The video ends with the power plant exploding. I was twelve years old and I was terrified.</div>
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And then in happened. At 1:23:58 AM (Moscow time) on 26th April 1986, a catastrophic nuclear accident occurred at the No. 4 nuclear reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in northern Ukraine. The reactor exploded and burned, spewing radioactive material into the atmosphere. It was the worst nuclear accident in history. My family and I would gather round the television to watch the news and progress reports of the radioactive cloud. I would sit at the front so no one would see the tears in my eyes.<br />
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The first photograph to be taken of the reactor 14 hours after the explosion is accredited to Igor Kostin. Shot from the first helicopter to fly over the disaster zone to evaluate radiation levels, the view is fuzzy due to radiation, which may explain why the photograph wasn’t taken too close to the window. Radiation experts later learnt that at 200 metres above the reactor, levels reached 1500 rems (a measurement of the biological effect of absorbed radiation), despite the fact that their counters did not exceed 500 rems. Working for the Novosti Press Agency, Kostin was one of only a handful of photographers in the world to take pictures of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (he died in a car crash in 2015 aged 78). In subsequent years there would be many more photographers. The area has an undeniable lure.<br />
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In 2002, a week before my wedding, I was on assignment for <i>Men’s Health</i> magazine in Minsk, the capital city of Belarus. I was shooting a reportage on male life expectancy - the men die nearly 12 years before the women. About 70% of the radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl disaster landed in Belarus, heavily contaminating a quarter of the country, a fifth of its agricultural land and affecting at least 7 million (of around 10 million) people. Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant lay less than 4 miles from the border of Belarus. The journalist and I locked eyes, we both agreed we had to go and scrambled on to a train heading 300 kilometres south. </div>
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©Peter Dench</div>
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The town we alighted at was primitive. Patched-up cars were filled with fuel from plastic containers. Home made alcohol was swigged from plastic containers. Plates of mushroom stroganoff were devoured feverishly from plastic plates (in an area where radiation was prevalent, it seemed absurd to eat a soil based fungus, however delicious a food source). We hired a local to drive us to the edge of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ), an area of approximately 2,600 km2 immediately surrounding the nuclear power plant where radioactive contamination from nuclear fallout is highest and public access and inhabitation are restricted. Belarus has more territory classed as a ‘dead zone’ as a result of the catastrophe than Ukraine. The country has two exclusion zones: one in the south near the Ukrainian border, and one in the east near the Russian border. The drive took us through a damp flatland of marshes, meadows, forest, abandoned farms and the occasional horse drawn cart. The soldiers at the red fence that marked the edge of the CEZ, posed for the camera with guard dogs and smiles. If we’d felt inclined to pass through, for a few rubles, we think they’d have let us. </div>
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©Peter Dench</div>
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There were less than twenty people on the flight home. Myself, the journalist and a dozen ‘children of Chernobyl’ with their carers. The children had suffered terribly, their bodies evidently handicapped. The air stewards had to lift the drinks trolley over giant rucks in the airplane carpet. Faded wallpaper peeled from around the windows. 'What type of aircraft is this?' we asked. 'Second hand Aeroflot,' was the reply. Aeroflot didn’t have the best safety reputation; a second-hand Aeroflot jangled our nerves. 'What have you to drink?' we asked. 'One bottle of red wine. One bottle of white wine.' The journalist grabbed the bottle of red. I grabbed the bottle of white. Neither of us grabbed a glass. Landing in London, I didn’t feel the immediate urge to photograph in the CEZ.<br />
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Photographer <a href="http://www.dsmcmillan.com/">David McMillan</a> felt the urge. He first photographed in the CEZ in 1994. His 22nd visit was in November 2018 and he’s not finished. "I’m still intrigued by the place and I’ll go as long as I feel I’m still getting new photographs. If I can’t add anything to what I’ve done, it will be time to stop." says David. "The scope of Chernobyl is broad enough to make me want to return. I haven’t found an alternative as compelling." he adds. 200 photographs are published across 262 pages in his poignant hardback book, <i>Growth and Decay: Pripyat and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone</i>, (Steidl 2019). "Until relatively recently, when I started using a digital camera, I used 6x7 cm and 4x5 inch film cameras. There were no precautions taken to protect the film from radiation and no consequences from my lack of precautions." The images are mostly devoid of people but full of presence. They’re poetic, have beauty and depth and light. Perhaps an echo of his early training as a painter? "I trained as a painter but I think it’s all about a person’s sensibility - how one reacts to the world and what one finds significant. But then there’s also one’s colour sense and use of the frame and all the formal choices that transforms the world into a picture. It’s probably small, incremental things that makes a photograph resonate."</div>
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<a href="http://www.lmasseyimages.com/">Luke Massey</a>’s main reason to photograph the CEZ was to see how nature is reclaiming it. The naturalist, conservationist, educator, film maker and photographer spent 12 days in 2016 laying camera traps and searching for wildlife. He didn’t fail, witnessing among others: hares, moose, mice, red deer, bees, black grouse, black woodpeckers, great white egrets, raccoon dogs, beavers, cranes, ospreys, kestrels and most unexpectedly, a wolf. "I didn't get to photograph it as I was clambering across some very uneven ground on the edge of one of Chernobyl's cooling ponds when I looked up to see my first ever wolf exploding from the reeds below me and running in to the forest. Pretty epic to not only see a wolf, but in the CEZ too!" You could edit Luke’s photographs to make the CEZ appear a wild Eden. His images of the rare and endangered Przewalski’s horse, now thriving in the CEZ, are divine. "My work in the CEZ was to show it for what it is, not what has been written about it in the past, of mutant animals, where wildlife is thriving without the interference of humans."<br />
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It was human error that contributed to the disaster and human interference is returning. Ukrainian photographer <a href="http://andlomakin.com/">Andrey Lomakin</a> was born in 1974 and raised in Pripyat. On April 26 1986 he went to school as usual. "My family survived but it affected our health. My mum, sister and I were evacuated on April 27th. Dad stayed in Pripyat - he worked at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as shift manager of one of the reactors. We were reunited in October 1986 in Kiev." For Andrey, the CEZ is all about the people. "I cannot imagine Pripyat without people. On the first trip I could not take pictures at all. Just watched. I wanted to see at least some life. Even if it was just tourists." Andrey, who can assemble an AK-47 with his eyes closed, a legacy of the Communist regime he hates has returned home five or six times to shoot his reportage, 'Visitors'. He only travels for a day or so at a time as health doesn’t allow any longer. The sharp, crisp black and white photographs show people taking pictures and posing for pictures and looking at pictures on their phone next to a statue of Lenin. "This is normal. That's the way people are. But it’s still hard for me to accept. Tourists will never understand the pain of the inhabitants of Pripyat. As a child, I could not imagine that this ordinary city would become famous to the whole world this way.”<br />
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If you’re planning a trip to photograph the CEZ, here’s some advice about what you need and need to do:<br />
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“Good shoes with thick soles. There’s a lot of broken glass and debris on the floors.” David<br />
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“Do it properly, get a good guide and the correct permits.” Luke<br />
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“You need to plan a story that you will shoot, not a visit. There is a huge amount of photos from the Chernobyl zone. And they are all the same. Do not be afraid of radiation, you will not be taken to dangerous places. But stay away from large metal structures. And take some batteries for the camera.” Andrey<br />
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As I flick back through the work of David, Luke and Andrey, I’m reminded of the impactful words of <a href="https://www.gerdludwig.com/">Gerd Ludwig</a>, photographer of the book, The Long Shadow of Chernobyl: (Edition Lammerhuber, 2014). “As engaged photographers, we often report about human tragedies in the face of disaster, and take our cameras to uncharted areas with the understanding that our explorations are not without personal risk. We do this out of a deep commitment to important stories told on behalf of otherwise voiceless victims.”</div>
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A version of this feature first appeared in <a href="https://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/">Amateur Photographer magazine</a> 3rd August 2019</div>
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Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-32104239100322339272019-06-10T05:13:00.001-07:002019-06-10T05:13:29.784-07:00In Conversation With John Bulmer<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/don-mccullin-7026">Don McCullin</a> is running, running as fast as he can. His mouth is open, hair neat and jacket crumpled. In his arms is an elderly woman, her thickset legs bent over McCullin’s left arm. Her gnarled right fist clenches two long sticks; wire and trees blur in the background. This unlikely couple are fleeing missiles fired into Turkish territory by the Greek army during the 1964 conflict in Cyprus. It’s McCullin’s first conflict and the now-famous war photographer is captured in action in an extraordinary black and white photograph. The previous evening, McCullin had crashed on the spare bed in the hotel room of the photograph’s author, who then drove them both into battle the following morning: “If I was going to get killed, I thought I might as well take some photographs.” The photographer is <a href="http://www.johnbulmer.co.uk/">John Bulmer</a>. </div>
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©John Bulmer</div>
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Strolling past the lake populated by pike and stopping to pull cobwebs from the bronze busts cast by his wife, the sculptor <a href="http://www.angelaconner.com/">Angela Conner</a>, on display in the grounds of his Herefordshire home (a house he bought on the telephone for £5,000 in 1965), Bulmer seems far removed from the front line. It’s 49 years since he captured that moment on an assignment for the Sunday Times (McCullin was shooting for the Observer).<br />
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Bulmer was one of the first photographers to adapt to the sudden change to using colour photography for editorial photojournalism and one of the first to be employed by the Sunday Times Magazine (STM) when it launched in 1962. The professional relationship secured him a 60-page-a-year contract and had him travel to around 100 different countries in more than a decade on the newspaper’s behalf. The magazine’s first cover featured a footballer photographed by Bulmer surrounded by pictures of Jean Shrimpton’s armpit, photographed by David Bailey, who Bulmer initially thought “a bit of a shitbag,” before swiftly mellowing his opinion of him.<br />
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This credible Doctor Who doppelgänger (more Jon Pertwee than Peter Davidson) with his ebullient frame, pince-nez spectacles and thick white hair, has the knack of being a master manipulator of time. The 75-year-old was a pioneer of colour photography ten years before <a href="https://www.martinparr.com/">Martin Parr</a>, deliberately stalking his subjects through rain and fog with slow-responding Kodachrome and Ektachrome, well before the publication of Parr’s Bad Weather. </div>
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©John bulmer</div>
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When Hunter Davies took over editorship of the STM and explained to Bulmer a change in direction of the content of the magazine to “crime, middle-class living and fashion”, he diversified into film-making where he remained embedded for the next 35 years, making documentary films for the BBC, Discovery and National Geographic television channels among others. Bulmer photographed and directed the films Fat Fiancees; Planes, Pigs, and the Price of Brides; The Witchdoctor’s New Bride and other films not featuring brides. In the film Beehives and Runaway Brides, written, photographed and directed by Bulmer for Essential TV Discovery Channel, husbands talk about the price of brides, brides gone AWOL, having several brides, forcing brides to marry and brides marrying cousins. Women with ferocious facial piercings talk about being beaten. It could be a script live and direct from the studio with Jeremy Kyle but is a matter-of-fact tale of the Sheko people living their real-life soap in the far western highlands of Ethiopia.<br />
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©John Bulmer<br /><span id="goog_1873103691"></span><span id="goog_1873103692"></span><br /></div>
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Malaria has weakened Bulmer twice and in 2005, after recovery from a tropical disease stole a year of his life, he decided it was time to hang his travel hat back on the rack and attend to his archive of stills photography. Sheltering from the afternoon rain, we each take a seat in his low-beamed office and nestle among myriad rosettes that Bulmer achieved in carriage driving, the sport that keeps him trim and his love of horses sated. The short-sighted Bulmer peers at his Apple Mac from inches away and presses a digit on the keyboard’s oversized bold black letters. The screen illuminates into life, showing life after life; more than 200 pictures from his in-progress new book were thrown down in a day into a Blurb layout. The provisional title is Other Places*, that’s places other than The North (of England), the title of his first solo monograph.<br />
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Published in 2012 by the local interest, Liverpool-based Bluecoat Press (Thames & Hudson didn’t reply to his book proposal, ditto Dewi Lewis) The North quickly sold out and it wasn’t even about the fun part of England (a 2nd edition has been published). Other publishers should have replied, the profit from the 2012 book was enough to buy a house over the telephone in 1965. The book put Bulmer firmly back on the photographic map; the north was part of the map this Herefordshire-born black sheep hadn’t witnessed before he first headed to the Lancashire town of Nelson. It’s the first town the viewer visits in the book, a town Bulmer thought as “exotic as darkest Africa.” Around 78 photographs in the 224-page book are in colour and 47 of those were shot in Manchester on commission for German Geo magazine, whose picture editor wanted him to capture the ‘swinging Manchester’ of 1976. Bulmer didn’t capture swinging Manchester; he captured empty canals and isolated pubs; cluttered corner shops; terraced houses being demolished and ravaged faces pulled taut against the elements by too-tight headscarves. When the Geo article was published, pictures from other sources had been used to complement Bulmer’s. Though annoyed at the time, he can now understand why. The quality of the printing of The North has had its critics and the criticism is valid but they miss the point. Bulmer is not a ‘look-at-me photographer’, he’s a ‘look at this’ photographer, bred from the mass circulation magazine market. All of the images have been scanned and cleaned by Bulmer and some scanned from prints when that’s all that remained.<br />
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Bulmer was sent down from Cambridge six weeks before the finals of his engineering degree, officially because “the University believed I wouldn’t pass my degree” (they would probably have been proved right, he spent more time focusing on photography) and unofficially because he had recently sold a set of pictures to Life magazine (under the alias, David Brinkman) depicting students climbing university buildings at night. The images were captured with an investigative style and starkness that <a href="https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/weegee?all/all/all/all/0">Weegee</a> would have been be proud of. The company of English photojournalist, <a href="https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/larry-burrows?all/all/all/all/0">Larry Burrows</a>, (best known for his for his pictures of the American involvement in the Vietnam War) had already alerted Bulmer to a broader life beyond the roof of Senate House, where he had photographed a car positioned there by the prankish night climbers. Bulmer headed to London without a degree of regret and to the offices of the Daily Express where he quickly secured a job that gave him the confidence to set out and stride the globe.<br />
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Bulmer’s Other Places are other worldly and of another time: wide-grinned Cubans smoke long fat cigars; there are half-naked Romanians who welcomed him to photograph their picnic and completely naked Germans in Romania who flung mud at his lens; there’s a shot from a bathroom in North Korea, away from his watchful minder, and mindful shots in China where he spent five days photographing without restriction after defecting there when he missed a connecting flight in Moscow en route to North Korea. Figures stare out from across the landscape of Ethiopia, his fondest country to photograph from all of his travels and one where he had to run for a mile alongside a carriage in which Queen Elizabeth II sat, head cocked, flashing her pearly whites at Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie. Only when the crowds had fallen back did it allow Bulmer the opportunity to shoot a clean frame, this exertion achieved while carrying four cameras, usually two Nikon’s and two Leicas, loaded with a mix of colour transparency and black and white film.<br />
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The most recent photograph Bulmer took was on his phone three days before we meet for a chat; his last photographic assignment was three years before I could talk. He checks his digital watch for the time and it’s time for wine; it’s Chilean. “A New World wine,” I declare as I tsunami the welcome taste back over my tongue. Bulmer scoffs and winces at the memory, when, in 1965, a vessel he describes a “hog’s head” holding 144 bottles of Chilean wine that he had had shipped in from the New World was accidentally smashed on the road of Elgin Crescent near his home in Notting Hill. I make a mental note to pay my respects at the disaster spot on my return to London. <br />
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As the glasses of wine are vanquished, Bulmer tells tales of sharing a darkroom with P<a href="https://pro.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL535HON">hilip Jones Griffiths</a> during the printing of the Welsh Magnum Photographer’s opus Vietnam Inc; of infuriating the captain of the QE2 on its maiden voyage after he climbed to the top of one of the ship’s funnels to photograph her arrival into New York; he talks of his disrespect for religion and disgust for the public school system to which his cider-making father decided to send him. He remembers Travellers Cheques; receiving free first-class flights around the world; 42-hour six-stop flights to Australia; flights with no security bag checks; meeting Henri Cartier-Bresson and Eugene Smith; of missing an historical photograph of Winston Churchill as the former Prime Minister was loaded into an ambulance (Bulmer had nipped away to make a call from a telephone box). He remembers a lot but regrets little and rarely looks back.<br />
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This ahead-of-his-time-traveller has always embraced change; he shot in colour when ‘traditionalists’ shied away; drank New World wine when wine was white, warm and meant for women; he used lightweight 35mm cameras while others persisted with the physically restricting Rolleiflex (with flash) and he wrote words to accompany some of his reportage features when words were meant to be the exclusive domain of writers. <br />
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We down glasses and jump into Bulmer’s TARDIS blue coloured, environmentally friendly car and smooth past the humdrum semi-detached homes of Hereford and back to the railway station where the next train home isn’t for an hour. That’s what happens when you visit the countryside. The only open and nearby place to grab a bite to eat is a fast food outlet. That’s what happens when you visit the countryside. Inside, families order their burger box and fries while a kid sweating out a viral infection cries for an overdose of Calpol. Fed, alone and thirsty, I seek the company of the Commercial pub across the road. “What would you like to drink?” asks the cherubic barmaid. There are bottles of Echo wine for £6.99 and another brand for a pound less but I ask for the only drink that can be drunk after a day like today: “I’ll have a pint of Bulmers cider, please.” <br />
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The North is published by <a href="https://bluecoatpress.co.uk/product/the-north/">Bluecoat Press</a><br />
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*Other Places was eventually titled Wind of Change published by <a href="https://bluecoatpress.co.uk/product/wind-of-change/">Bluecoat Press</a><br />
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Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-38959318485535815382019-06-08T04:13:00.000-07:002019-06-08T04:28:27.878-07:00In Conversation With Peter Dench<div style="text-align: justify;">
Peter Dench is a late imitator of colour photography, best known for his projects endorsing stereotypes of the British working class. I meet him in The Alex, the pub where he now lives in a small room above the bar scratching out a living doing odd jobs for pork scratchings and the occasional leftover scotch egg. Dench, now 60 years old, looks nearer 80 and still dresses as he always has: in the tired football casual terrace style of the 1980s, a vintage, vintage, vintage, red Fila polo shirt buttoned up under his cascading chins. He is sat staring at The Alex’s impressive 6D television in the spot where he can be found during the rare moments he hasn’t s**t himself. This fecal incontinence is an unfortunate medical consequence of being brutally attacked at the 2012 Visa Pour l’Image International Festival of Photojournalism by a gang of photographers who had had enough of his formulaic photography, an action that was largely applauded by the industry. Repeats of the American TV sitcom Cheers flicker past as I introduce myself; Dench barely acknowledges my arrival and mutters an order for a litre of cider.</div>
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Dench threw away a promising career as an opening batsman for his county cricket side and, by the age of 14, had finally stopped wetting the bed and started wetting his appetite for photography snapping butterflies and coots at the local wildlife reserve in his hometown of Weymouth. From there, he pursued a routine academic path in photographic education graduating from the University of Derby in 1995 with a third-class degree and a portfolio of prints depicting himself in various stages of undress. Arriving in London, Dench was deluded, delivering his portfolio to the Reuters news agency UK headquarters where he hoped to become a regular contributor. The portfolio was lost in the Reuters system. Consequently, Dench signed on the dole for two years and sponged off his parents, spending most of his days flipping the 50 pence pieces he could muster into the pint pot for topless dancers at the Griffin pub in Clerkenwell. </div>
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After his parents tired of supplementing his slothful lifestyle, Dench momentarily pulled himself together producing a reportage on the alcohol drinking habits of the English; what was essentially a three-year pub crawl produced a significant archive of images, one he has since bled to exhaustion. Initially, the industry took notice and awarded him a <a href="https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/2003/31662/12/2003-Peter-Dench-PNS3-AL">World Press Photo</a> award for the People in the News Stories category for his Drinking of England reportage; this subsequently generated a purple period of assignments from editorial publications; Frank; the Face and Arena magazines, all of which were forced to close shortly after Dench began contributing. As the editorial market declined and digital photography swept aside analogue, Dench failed to adapt and decided to take up the pen, with catastrophic results.</div>
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Dench pinpoints his demise in the photographic industry to the day his first <a href="https://unitednationsofphotography.com/2013/08/22/the-diary-of-a-sometime-working-pro/">Dench Diary</a> was published in Professional Photographer magazine; a cringing account of his incapabilities to succeed in the industry. The diary was commissioned on the understanding that it was as an honest account of the daily life and struggles of a sometime working professional photographer. The diary begins with an entry chronicling a time Dench was forced to take a job flipping eggs in the canteen at Capital Radio to help pay for his hair regain treatment. He now sees this as a missed opportunity and believes if he had remained working in the canteen at Capital Radio, he could have achieved the position of deputy shift manager. The Dench Diary backfired spectacularly after his often shocking travails and tales of binge drinking were exposed as fraudulent. This, ironically, lead Dench to begin boozing heavily. Professional Photographer magazine sued and an industry turned its back. Increasingly desperate attempts to ingratiate himself back into favour with his profession ended in shame when Dench exposed himself during a book signing at the prestigious Arles photography festival in France.<br />
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After an uncomfortable hour in his company, I ask the taciturn Dench; “Is there anything you miss in life, anything at all?” I’m sure I detect his eyes moisten as he fixes my gaze. “I miss… I miss… I miss the cricket.”</div>
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Peter Dench is an innovator of 21st-century image-making, best known for his projects documenting important social issues in a witty style. I meet him in The Alex, the bar he now owns and from where operates his global business. Dench, now 60, doesn’t look a day over 40 and still dresses as he always has: in the revered football casual terrace style of the 1980s - a vintage, vintage, vintage red Fila polo shirt buttoned neatly under his noble chin. He is sat in the spot where he can be found when he isn’t off doing charitable deeds under the ‘Freedom of Perpignan’ plaque awarded to him after he thwarted a riot at the 2012 Visa Pour l’Image International Festival of Photojournalism, which had threatened to engulf Perpignan’s main square. Dench propels himself enthusiastically from his seat as I arrive and shakes me warmly by the hand, whispering a request for a bottle of 1989 Château Haut-Brion and two glasses from the sartorially elegant and delightfully fragrant maître d’.</div>
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Dench achieved what he set out to do as a cricketer before turning 14 and then turned his attention to photography, documenting the life of the elderly at the care home where his doting mother worked. From there he romped through academia achieving a double first from the University of Derby for his photographic reportage on upper-class English schools and a dissertation that redefined the work of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Welch_Diamond">Dr Hugh Welch Diamond</a>’s use of photography in the treatment of nineteenth-century female lunatics (a copy of the paper is available on request from the British Library and The Royal Society of Medicine). Arriving in London, Dench immediately impressed and was invited to join the prestigious Independent Photographers Group (IPG), an agency that represented many photographers Dench had studied at university, photographers that are now friends and godparents to the eleven children he adopted after they were orphaned as a consequence of the civil war that engulfed Scotland shortly after it rejected independence. In collaboration with IPG, Dench would eventually complete an assignment in every country across the planet.</div>
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After Dench had paid off his parents’ mortgage and upgraded them to a house in Poundbury, Dorchester (a town built according to the principles of Prince Charles), he embarked on an ambitious three-year project documenting the alcohol-drinking habits of the English. The reportage became an instant classic, delivering the first of his 13 World Press Photo awards and was subsequently published as a book translated into 27 different languages, a book described by international thriller writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Tom Knox as: “A clever, poignant, challenging, sometimes dazzling, sometimes affecting photo-diary of Anglo-Celtic drunkenness. The result is a unique and compelling visual history, full of photography that bears a striking resemblance to the drinking it depicts: at best it is perfectly intoxicating.” Dench’s editorial career blossomed, his constant contributions to the Sunday Times, Telegraph, GQ, Marie Claire and Tatler magazines reversed a decline in editorial publications and revived an industry. As the editorial market continued to recover, Dench decided to take up the pen in addition to the Olympus, with hilarious results.</div>
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Dench pinpoints the catalyst for his global success in the photographic industry as the day his first Dench Diary was published in Professional Photographer magazine; it was a sharply observed, layered and satirical account of his life as a sometime working professional photographer. The diary begins with an entry chronicling a voluntary eleven-day stint he undertook, flipping eggs in the canteen at Capital Radio to raise money for the Save the Children charity. The Dench Diary became to photography what Kitchen Confidential is to the culinary world. The royalties enabled Dench to launch the flagship Gallery Dench UK in London’s Mayfair, a brand that has been rolled out across Europe and become a career highlight for photographers to exhibit at.</div>
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After an engaging afternoon in his company, I ask the enigmatic Dench; “Is there anything you miss in life, anything at all?” I’m sure I detect his eyes moisten as he fixes my gaze. “I miss… I miss… I miss the cricket.”<br />
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Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-56322041677053311662019-06-08T03:14:00.000-07:002019-06-08T03:14:51.930-07:00In Conversation With Chris Floyd<div style="text-align: justify;">
What is love? Before Christ, at a Greek drinking party, Plato hypothesised about the purpose and nature of love. In A Lover’s Discourse Roland Barthes pontificates on love: “I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.” And in 1993, the Trinidadian-German singer Nestor Alexander Haddaway, better know by his stage name, Haddaway, sang the question: “What is love?” Love has led nations to war and back again to peace; it has inspired men to greatness and driven them to take their own life; it has given us the freedom to dream and a million reasons to breathe.</div>
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©Chris Floyd</div>
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<br />What is love? I take a trip to Marylebone railway station, arguably the most adorable gateway in to and out of London. Men in straw hats smooth their Marylebone Cricket Club ties; the shoeshine stand is brisk with business; soft bellied ramblers and academics dressed in paisley mix among the smell of freshly baked bread; an elderly gentleman rubs charcoal across a sheet of paper covering a blue plaque fixed to the wall dedicated to poet and friend of the railways Sir John Betjeman. With the Haddoway hit resonating around my head, I board a train to Banbury to meet the man who has answered the question ‘what is love?’ He has seen it, experienced it and, most remarkably of all, photographed it.</div>
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At Banbury, the man I’m here to meet isn’t and I’m instructed instead to take a taxi to the Falkland Arms pub (silver award winner of the Toast of Wadworthshire 2013 Marketing Pub of the Year) in Great Tew. The taxi driver asks which route to take; I tell him I’ve no idea how to get there. It’s a rookie mistake; he chooses the longer of the two routes. As we sweep past green ‘Fresh Asparagus for Sale’ signs, and brown ones to denote ‘Ducks Crossing’, the taxi driver asks if I mind if he makes a phone call. I say I don’t mind; it’s a rookie mistake as it turns out I do mind. In between snapping chewing-gum bubbles, he hacks forth a dialect down his cell phone loud enough to be heard in the dustiest corners of Baghdad. <br /><br />Stepping from the taxi at this outpost of English countryside, I take an outside seat at the 300 year old (looking) table opposite the forty-something (looking) portrait photographer, <a href="https://www.chrisfloyd.com/">Chris Floyd</a>. The pubs motto swings silently on the sign behind him: In Utroque Fidelis ‘faithful in both’. As Floyd gets the beers in, I look through his book of love Things May Change, But This Will Stay The Same. Across the thick textured pages, amongst the autumnal colours and setting sun, we are able to join Floyd in his infatuation. We gaze at a flame-haired young woman stretching out in a car; disrobing in the bathroom; eating a sandwich; smoking a cigarette; sleeping. Sometimes she gazes straight back, more often not. The book represents a short sharp moment in time of how you fall in love. The relationship between Floyd and the young woman, ten years his junior, accelerated from the ruins of 9/11 across the roads of the USA; New Orleans - Houston - Alberquerque, - frequently stopping at motel rooms and Amaretto-stocked bars until, inevitably, this listless drifting love with no agenda reached the end of the road.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ4jymsC_opS0ddJaTKJCPeNRMXP-uwqWT8Mou3wyXPCn11dBFtVoDqM06H6KvRWg8LXJbwrVnVwnyI9l5SAz-JQjRRzS3BtLcl3qCOLcUHelEoM9FRljV21GYuxFPXkoZFjc-zFiox6c/s1600/DENCHDOZEN_Proof_5_Page_36.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="686" data-original-width="1372" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ4jymsC_opS0ddJaTKJCPeNRMXP-uwqWT8Mou3wyXPCn11dBFtVoDqM06H6KvRWg8LXJbwrVnVwnyI9l5SAz-JQjRRzS3BtLcl3qCOLcUHelEoM9FRljV21GYuxFPXkoZFjc-zFiox6c/s320/DENCHDOZEN_Proof_5_Page_36.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<br />He tells me the name of the Botticelli beauty but I won’t tell you. If you have seen, or you own, one of the 100 books produced, you’ll already have your own name for her. As Floyd writes so eloquently in the introduction; “It doesn’t matter what her name is because I’m looking at an ideal of how I wanted love to be and remain, of how I saw a woman when I fell in love with her. This is love, for the first time, as shell shocked and stunned wonder that this thing, this person, has been put here, on Earth, in front of me, in my lifetime and has the emphatic power to make the time in my days go quicker, slower or nowhere at all.” In time, Floyd has loved again and relocated from London to the countryside with his loving family: wife Alice and children Scarlet and Belle. It’s taken time for this self-confessed London obsessive to readjust to the country and its everyone-knows-about-you life. <br /><br />Aged 22, during a summer break from his studies at a Surrey technical college, Floyd left for London, his head full of stories from his London-lived grandfather who was hit on the head by notorious British gangster, Jack Spot. Against a backdrop of Poll Tax riots, Floyd quickly landed a job (via an assistant photographer’s recorded message telephone hotline) with a jobbing photographer shooting for Woman’s Own, the TV Times and crafting head shots of aspiring thespians. Floyd quickly lost the job, on the anniversary of the French Revolution, after too many rolls of film perished on the metal spools in developing tanks. Floyd was only familiar with the self winding white Patterson brand plastic spools.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdTUZ3bjO3F3iV7Z1wYIwJLeNA-DgLfILCUKMPUfTcdl8pK85jqvgmLywU6R53C_qk-ow8vwsFTx-U6Quuwuo0IMcFlZZxrQOLNixVWfbHFGIXjS8lIRX_W-UgmiiNUqevBpIAjb3_tXo/s1600/DENCHDOZEN_Proof_5_Page_37.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="686" data-original-width="1372" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdTUZ3bjO3F3iV7Z1wYIwJLeNA-DgLfILCUKMPUfTcdl8pK85jqvgmLywU6R53C_qk-ow8vwsFTx-U6Quuwuo0IMcFlZZxrQOLNixVWfbHFGIXjS8lIRX_W-UgmiiNUqevBpIAjb3_tXo/s320/DENCHDOZEN_Proof_5_Page_37.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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As Floyd forks ham and eggs into his mouth and German-American parents change a baby’s diaper in the boot of a Volvo parked opposite, he explains discovering photography in his mid-teens and rapidly realising it could be an effective tool to meet people who do great or even dastardly things. He talks of the photographers he admires – <a href="https://ewenspencer.com/">Ewen Spencer</a>, <a href="http://www.industryart.com/artists/elaineconstantine/">Elaine Constantine</a>, <a href="https://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/juergen-teller">Juergen Teller</a> – and he talks about his passion for listening to black soul music jamming sessions. It’s a process not unlike his own photographic practice, where each image is layered with choices: lens, location, post-production and light – each element building up a style and momentum that can be tweaked, enhanced or pulled back on. His work has taken him from London to Paris to New York (where he met Alice) and to many places in between. His portraits and short films of some of the world’s most high-profile stars have earned him global recognition and accolades. Floyd was there at the beginning of the lad mag phenomenon, photographing for Loaded magazine and he was one of the few photographers who made the successful transition to GQ magazine, when Loaded’s inaugural editor, James Brown, took the helm there.<br /><br />Floyd puts down the lady’s hairclip he’s been intermittently fiddling with and we depart the Falklands Arms in high spirits, then immediately burn our backsides on the black seats of his leased Mercedes Benz estate. Driving like a Londoner, Floyd points out the general direction of the home of fellow portrait photographer <a href="https://www.nadavkander.com/">Nadav Kander</a>, that bloke who created the Daleks and fashion designer Patrick Grant, who persuaded Floyd to move here after they toured the country together on assignment for Esquire magazine. We scorch to a stop at wine bar in Chipping Norton, sommelier Richard informs us he has just spotted actor Patrick Stewart, then we scoot over to Trev Beadle, the family butcher, for rib eye steaks. Unfortunately Trev wasn’t there after busting his leg in a field, Floyd asks Lee, who has a pig hoisted on his shoulder, to send Trev his get well wishes. A final look at the book shop before finally heading home towards family Floyd, past Tracy Farm, a proposed new outpost for the Soho House set and across the boundary of Hook Norton, a village on the way to nowhere.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh80t9tZDmxucu31CquppbB1arwsaMfev4p71iJH8O-YRfCNurh5GByoV-aRXHO8olPrM3YzkHtQCSXHbYo5PaHaCErWSoG2cqThBQskSXacC4_Iyds13SS4C8_gBrnpTLC5j9fuXEn62g/s1600/10431487_10152491852135953_389601742623997608_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh80t9tZDmxucu31CquppbB1arwsaMfev4p71iJH8O-YRfCNurh5GByoV-aRXHO8olPrM3YzkHtQCSXHbYo5PaHaCErWSoG2cqThBQskSXacC4_Iyds13SS4C8_gBrnpTLC5j9fuXEn62g/s320/10431487_10152491852135953_389601742623997608_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Stepping over sleeping schnauzer Marmite (I love him), past a framed David Bailey contact sheet, Floyd takes me up to the ’hub’, a former cinema room in the house from which he conducts his day-to-day business. There are open draws full of Kodak Portra 160 and Ilford FP4 film and party invites from the American Ambassador to London as well as notes of thanks from fashion designer and film director Tom Ford and former visual editor of the New Yorker Elisabeth Biondi. A bronze cast of Belle’s baby foot stands on stacked Agent Provocateur postcards, a commission that has unfortunately run its corset (insert groan). </div>
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<iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/13185669" width="640"></iframe><br /><a href="https://vimeo.com/13185669">#Portwit - The Great Twitter Portrait Project - Day One</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user3846297">Chris Floyd</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
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<br />In one corner of the hub leans a framed poster from another of Floyd’s notable projects, which I finger with regret. In the summer of 2010, Floyd began to photograph the people he followed on Twitter. I received an email asking if I’d like to participate, the sun was out, a bottle of wine was open and I declined the invite. Others flocked to take part and the project ended where it had to, at 140 characters, the maximum number of a single tweet. The Great Twitter Portrait Project (TGTPP) aroused the interest of a nation. Never the quickest to realise a good idea, I belatedly tried to get involved, taking my family to be photographed at Wallpaper* Tweetlife, a TGTPP inspired initiative hosted at the 2011 Multiplied Contemporary Editions Fair at Christie’s in South Kensington. Heading downstairs to take the kids to the convenience store for sweets, Floyd summarises that for him, truly creative individuals make truly creative things whether they are being paid or not and confesses to having a short attention span, lacking confidence and being prone to focusing on his failures and what he hasn’t achieved. </div>
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Back from the shop, I excuse myself from a conversation with Scarlet about earwax and probe the kitchen, where Floyd and Alice are squabbling about the type of taps required for the new shower room. I grab a San Miguel lager from the fridge, exit for a seat in the garden among the warblers and blackcaps and open Things May Change at an image of a jackknifed juggernaut by the side of a road. As the ballad It Must Have Been Love by Swedish pop duo Roxette crescendos on Absolute 80s radio (‘the UK’s only 80s music radio station’) Floyd strides purposefully past en route to the Banbury bathroom showroom, clips closed the gate, pauses with keys in hand at the car and turns back to face Alice who is leant against the front door frame and asks “Blow me a kiss?”. </div>
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Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-55061404331928450282019-05-09T03:36:00.005-07:002019-06-19T03:37:37.491-07:00The English Summer Season : Buy a Print<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="background-color: white;"><u><span style="color: orange;">THE ENGLISH SUMMER SEASON EXHIBITION</span></u></span></span></h2>
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Delighted to announce the 20 'artist proofs' currently on display in London are available 'off the wall' at the end of the show. </h4>
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<span style="color: magenta;"><span style="font-size: large;">£125<span style="font-size: small;"> (inc shipping)</span></span></span></h4>
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20% of sales go to Macmillan Cancer Support.</div>
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The prints are 60cm x 42cm matt, non-reflective <a href="https://www.cutplasticsheeting.co.uk/blog/uncategorized/what-is-dibond/">Dibond</a> mounted with a hanging rail on the back.</div>
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<span style="color: magenta;"><span style="font-size: large;">They're very nice!</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX1sYJamkJNGfoVjG_jPsejhPVATdtnTDcY9nqYsna5O4FxiH6Rw6F6NpOZKxi90JczsfO3GbrR2HT542aHIioua90u88AcCOCA2QRAlUG6el7V_DgUbEM7VNZ7jCZfesmrQ1N4-5kdwU/s1600/LondonLiveTV.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="723" data-original-width="1016" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX1sYJamkJNGfoVjG_jPsejhPVATdtnTDcY9nqYsna5O4FxiH6Rw6F6NpOZKxi90JczsfO3GbrR2HT542aHIioua90u88AcCOCA2QRAlUG6el7V_DgUbEM7VNZ7jCZfesmrQ1N4-5kdwU/s320/LondonLiveTV.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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See them in situ in an interview for London Live TV <a href="https://www.londonlive.co.uk/news/2019-05-08/peter-dench-exhibition-at-wex-gallery?fbclid=IwAR1LXAm3M6aZsWToKucSC1Fsp021qPj7J0g3f606-6n3FiHIuvswRx4N3c8">HERE</a></div>
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The 20 prints are...<br />
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If you want one, please <a href="https://www.paypal.me/PDench">PayPal</a> the amount and I'll reserve it for you. </div>
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Images will be shipped to UK customers only, early July 2019.<br />
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If you're visiting London why not pop along to see them for yourself at <br />
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Let me know when you're around & I'll try to be there. <br />
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All images shot on an Olympus OM-D E-M1 MarkII<br />
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Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-21149466556628042192019-05-04T02:31:00.001-07:002019-09-26T03:56:36.944-07:00The English Summer Season : Buy the Book<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: magenta;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: magenta;"><b><span style="background-color: purple;"><span style="background-color: magenta;">The English Summer Season</span></span></b></span></span></h2>
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Once the bastions of gentility, the height of decorum and the preserve of the upper classes, events of The English Summer Season like Epsom, Royal Acot, Cartier Queen's Cup Polo, Henley Royal Regatta and the Glyndebourne Festival, are now a riotous free-for-all of drunkenness and debauchery, re-writing the rules of society.</div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
The English Summer Season<br />
Peter Dench<br />
50 pages/full colour images<br />
202 x 272mm<br />
Numbered edition of 125<br />
Colour digital printing / wire bound</div>
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£10 [inc P&P]</div>
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Purchase <a href="https://fistfulofbooks.com/product/the-english-summer-season/">HERE </a></div>
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Featured in The Sunday Times magazine</div>
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and Stern magazine</div>
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below is John</div>
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he came to the exhibition opening</div>
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Also featured in:</div>
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<a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8852353/racegoers-antics-revealed-sun-snogging-pimms/">The Sun</a></div>
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<a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6916027/Racegoers-antics-revealed-photographs-racegoers-wild-attitudes.html">Mail Online</a></div>
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<a href="https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/771926/horse-racing-pics-espsom-ladies-day-queen-s-cup-royal-ascot-booze-alcohol">Daily Star </a></div>
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<a href="https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/the-english-in-the-spotlight-unseen-work-by-british-photographer-peter-dench/">Creative Boom</a></div>
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<a href="https://photobite.uk/in-conversation-with-peter-dench-as-the-english-summer-season-exhibition-launches-at-wex-photo-video-gallery-in-london/">PhotoBite </a></div>
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Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-40660974841541275412019-01-08T09:05:00.001-08:002023-10-16T05:34:42.677-07:00Trans-Siberian World Cup Book & Exhibiton Launch<h2 style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Join me at the <a href="https://www.afternynegallery.com/">After Nyne Gallery</a> for the private view of
‘Trans-Siberian World Cup’ – a new exhibition & book sponsored by <a href="https://www.olympus-imagespace.co.uk/what-is-on/trans-siberian-world-cup-peter-dench/">Olympus</a>.</b></h2>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b> </b></h2>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The 2018 FIFA World Cup: 32 nations; 62 football matches; millions of
fans. Russia: 11 time zones across two continents; home of the
Trans-Siberian Railway – 5,772 miles across seven time zones in seven
days. The world’s greatest football tournament and the world’s longest
and most iconic single train journey in one of the world’s most powerful
countries.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNNvH4LdZsKkTU7Az4YDzQ5ndUzCPYnwLrXd5Y6xEdV_53Gs88a0-fNH_Cwl9j0e79KEp9miMtI5CgjhG5CuZXIif4XF0QXw8bTCYTFO-_tgrqGQU0bbzWvgRXKrAj5TEEnTezEht7IIg/s1600/P7030793.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNNvH4LdZsKkTU7Az4YDzQ5ndUzCPYnwLrXd5Y6xEdV_53Gs88a0-fNH_Cwl9j0e79KEp9miMtI5CgjhG5CuZXIif4XF0QXw8bTCYTFO-_tgrqGQU0bbzWvgRXKrAj5TEEnTezEht7IIg/s320/P7030793.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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©Peter Dench</div>
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This journey was an opportunity for the most epic of football away
days, documenting the global passion for football while riding the
Trans-Siberian, a lifeline that connects a nation and nationalities.</div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
©Peter Dench</div>
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I captured the unexpected and confusing scenes: Brazilian fans posing for pictures with Argentinian fans. A Mexican fan wearing traditional German Lederhosen. An English fan wearing a Swiss team shirt, another dressed as Román Torres, the Panama captain. Russian fans singing English songs. Tunisians drinking beer with Belgians. Danish fans clearing up their litter. French supporters smiling! </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgHlPfsJx0zH7mJbFRhcqiKh9X6ljQdBYq8u8EB5XoJzs5wMx-WyDDrTX8wEURwXe6SWJGr_XzK5rERcI4nFnqatfHyBzsXmCNyfpMarCF__l149GGfed9LCcrhGYDc8O7oXDNcSaicC0/s1600/DENCH_TRAN_SIBERIAN_WORLD_CUP203.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1181" data-original-width="1575" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgHlPfsJx0zH7mJbFRhcqiKh9X6ljQdBYq8u8EB5XoJzs5wMx-WyDDrTX8wEURwXe6SWJGr_XzK5rERcI4nFnqatfHyBzsXmCNyfpMarCF__l149GGfed9LCcrhGYDc8O7oXDNcSaicC0/s320/DENCH_TRAN_SIBERIAN_WORLD_CUP203.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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In the Bastards Irish Bar, Moscow</div>
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To coincide with the London exhibition, there will be a <a href="https://www.olympus-imagespace.co.uk/what-is-on/trans-siberian-world-cup-private-view/">VIP private view</a> – with wine, fine company, and a free 189 page full colour hardback book with photos and words and even a map (available om a first come first served basis). </div>
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During the evening, I'll give a short
talk and insight into my photographic
approach.<br /></div><div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAOnA0nNoWHymqX-n4mFYtB-3v0rQpKgZkKXf2QQCa4VTO7dHFy2A2T9C5orUnN5S9ayWmLmuoXuQSC5mNnsiwRooKOLesC92ra_SjXi1_G7CUBHBKieCmP9wFDNT1nnQKaZmIylzSb-w/s1600/Peter+Dench+-+Invitation.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1277" data-original-width="900" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAOnA0nNoWHymqX-n4mFYtB-3v0rQpKgZkKXf2QQCa4VTO7dHFy2A2T9C5orUnN5S9ayWmLmuoXuQSC5mNnsiwRooKOLesC92ra_SjXi1_G7CUBHBKieCmP9wFDNT1nnQKaZmIylzSb-w/s320/Peter+Dench+-+Invitation.jpg" width="225" /></a></div>
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Bring a friend or a Firm. Dress casual. Preferably <a href="https://www.80scasualclassics.co.uk/">80s Casual</a>.</div>
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All prints will be on sale for a bargain with a % going to Macmillan Cancer Support.</div>
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Meeting the Russian Firm</div>
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</div>Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-2582894374924177312018-10-17T06:36:00.002-07:002024-01-30T02:09:17.970-08:00In Conversation With Brian Griffin<div style="text-align: justify;">
Millwall Football Club’s infamous fans race on to pitch at The Den, towards the AFC Bournemouth fans among whom I’m stood. One fan slides on his belly across the goal line into the back of the net, hundreds of others posture and gesticulate threateningly; a thin, fluorescent police line holds them at bay. I’d never been to South Bermondsey, the home of Millwall FC, until this week and today was my second visit in seven days. On my earlier visit, my inaugural trip took me deep into Millwall territory to meet a 40-year fixture of the photographic industry.<br /><br />On the day of a London tube strike, I double the estimated time it would take me to get to Rotherhithe; the time it takes is actually quicker than it would be on a non-strike day. The spring sunshine is blazing as I board the 381 bus towards my final destination; geese flying in formation in the 20ºC heat point the way. Arriving early, I sit on the South Bank of the Thames and gaze northwards; planes rise and fall towards City Airport, a sea rescue helicopter choppers past, Thames ferries chug their passengers west and discarded plastic bottles, forks and yoghurt pots bob about in the wash from a speeding river police boat.</div>
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Heaving back the heavy door I present myself to the two ladies at the residential reception and request today’s company. “He’s a doctor,” suggests lady left; “No, a professor.” suggests lady right. While I wait, they mention they are Millwall FC fans; I ask them where away fans could get a drink near the ground for Saturday’s match. They advise not to drink anywhere near the ground, or to wear team colours, or to look anyone directly in the eye. I begin to hope AFC Bournemouth lose on Saturday to secure Millwall’s survival in the Championship, the second tier of English football. As we continue to pass pleasantries, the Derby University honorary professor, Birmingham University honorary doctor and all round film-maker and photographer Brian Griffin appears. <br /><br />When Griffin moved to Rotherhithe, knackered wire fencing wrapped around weed-scattered scrubland and thick barbed wire fenced in gnarling Doberman breed dogs here. As we walk briskly towards the Piccalilli Caff at Surrey Docks Farm, past private roads protected by thick iron gates, a succession of fragrant cotton-clad nannies push by and well turned out joggers jostle the blossom from trees.<br /><br />Griffin couldn’t speak ‘proper’ English until he was around 12 years old, relaying his childhood needs in the dialect of the Black Country, the colloquial name given to the traditional coal-mining region of the Midlands just outside of Birmingham. The dialect is still noticeable as he puts in an order for fishcakes with poached eggs, hollandaise sauce and a Limonata fizzy lemon drink which he decants into a glass, flipping in a straw. Despite the dialect disadvantage, Griffin managed to pass the 11 plus exam and secure a place at grammar school, where he rose to captain the school chess team, an early example of mastering a skill in black and white.</div>
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Photo Courtesy of ©Gareth Tibbles</div>
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<br />As I sip my Tea Pig mint tea and try not to speckle Griffin with my pulled pork ragu tagliatelle, he explains that in 1969 he turned his back on a promising career as a Nuclear Power Station Pipework Engineering Estimator (on the cooling water section) to study photography at Manchester Polytechnic (MP). It was here he met <a href="https://www.martinparr.com/">Martin Parr </a>(MP), his good friend and best man at his first wedding. Griffin suggests that from his time at MP, MP and himself were the only two that really made it as photographers, two-and-a-half if you include <a href="https://www.photobus.co.uk/">Daniel Meadows</a>, but he went in to teaching, so that doesn’t really count, does it?<br /><br />After graduating, Griffin moved to London (where he has lived for as long as my life) working as a photographer and director of television commercials, music videos and short films. Accolades include the Centenary Medal from the <a href="http://www.rps.org/">Royal Photographic Society</a> in recognition of a lifetime achievement in photography; the Guardian proclaimed him ‘Photographer of the Decade” in 1989. There have been many books and exhibitions; he is patron of Derby city’s FORMAT Festival and received the Freedom of the City of Arles, France, in 1987. The success has been sustained and it’s not surprising: Griffin’s imagery is constantly in metamorphosis. He’s applied a surrealist approach to portraits of George Melly and Siouxsie and the Banshees and cast the influence of film noir over his self portraits. He has photographed still lives of pig’s feet and black pudding, and photographed portraits of workers lying with their tools as one might witness a knight laid to rest with their sword in a cathedral crypt. He has photographed album covers for pop bands and the stars of Star Wars; he even went to war, covering the conflict in Beirut for a Canadian colour magazine. His work has been exhibited in Tokyo, Paris, London and Reykjavík. Griffin’s photographs swell collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum, British Council, National Portrait Gallery and Arts Council of Great Britain.</div>
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Griffin would have given it all up for a career as a motorcycle speedway rider; the sport involving four riders competing over four anti-clockwise laps of an oval circuit has been a constant skid mark in his life since the age of 11, when his parents took him to his first meeting at the home of the Heathens in Cradley Heath Speedway. A young Griffin had discovered new heroes to line up alongside the Lone Ranger and Davy Crockett. Cycling 60 miles along the Lea Valley at ten miles an hour is as close as Griffin now gets to fulfilling his childhood dream of becoming a speedway rider. During lunch, as pert mothers idly breastfeed their babies while sipping percolated coffee and pigs squeal their Orwellian demands towards the banks of Barclays, HSBC and Citibank brooding on the Canary Wharf skyline, Griffin imparts some finer points of the sport. Kings Lynn, UK, has the best quality shale track in Europe; Great Britain, Poland, Sweden and Denmark have the best teams in Europe.<br /><br />Consistently during lunch, Griffin’s mobile phone bings and bleeps, buzzes and pings but there’s one distinctive recurring ring, from his partner Brynja Sverrisdottir, a former fashion model who posed for the lenses of <a href="https://www.avedonfoundation.org/">Richard Avedon</a> and <a href="https://irvingpenn.org/">Irving Penn</a>. Confusingly, they’re not married but were blessed in church by the local vicar, a vicar who has since died of alcoholism. Brynja is having difficulty heating the water for a bath; Griffin calmly explains to her that the hot water is timed to come on in the morning when most people are preparing for work and again in the evening when most people are returning home from work. This must be bamboozling for the Icelander (now a successful jewellery designer), heralding from a country so abundant in naturally hot water that it geysers it skywards for fun. </div>
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As Griffin completes his lunch, I ask if he knows the significance of the large map of Algeria hanging on the wall where we’re sat. “Probably to do with the owners.” The owners are a young couple called Craig and Scarlett. We move on from the Piccalilli Caff and dock ourselves at the nearby Ship York pub where Griffin explains once spending two years scripting a film called Bluetown. From what I can gather, Bluetown centres on a fictional USAF thought-manipulation centre located on the not-so-far-away Isle of Sheppey; or the script could have been about and influenced by, how Buffalo Bill transported his Wild West Show so efficiently on tour to London in 1887. The truth is, I’m already on my second pint of cider and distracted by how freakishly clean the pub is, arguably the cleanest pub in which I’ve ever imbibed. Perfectly fanned pink napkins are reflected in violently polished tabletops; the copper pipework of the urinals is so spectacular, I linger long after I’ve finished, much to the discomfort of the man peeing next to me. The hand dryer has accompanying ear muffs for the sensitive of hearing and the landlord, Russel, is fondly referred to as Dussel, on account of the dust-free environment. Griffin remarks that the pub is a Millwall football fan stronghold, which can be no coincidence: the world’s cleanest pub for, arguably, the world’s dirtiest fans. Griffin concludes his film pitch and expresses regret at turning down an offer of around a million pounds to produce it.</div>
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<br />Born in 1948, this Black Country boy from Stocking Street in Lye (once the bucket capital of the world), would not have become a photographer had Sandy Black not broken his heart, a heartbreak which mobilised him away from the predestined future of factory life that claimed so many of his peers. However, growing up in a world of iron and steel where the pounding beats from in-your-face factories provided the rhythm to each day, has inevitably left its mark. Griffin’s photographs are crafted with the skill and creativity those born in the Black Country would recognise, including his father who lived and breathed in so much industrial pollutant it eventually killed him. Griffin’s photographic legacy is awesome, as awe-inspiring as it must have been for locals to observe the 16-tonne anchor destined for the ill-fated Titanic being hauled by 20 shire horses across the streets of Netherton, just north of Lye.<br /><br />On the bus back to Rotherhithe railway station, I take a seat downstairs at the back; a seven-year-old boy with a Millwall FC badge on his schoolbag sits opposite and starts to stare. His carer informs me that I’m sat in his favourite seat; I sit firm with a smirk and watch as he wipes away a sniffle with the arm of his blue Peter Hills school sweatshirt. Dench 1: Millwall 0.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify;">Griffin died in his sleep on 26 January 2024, aged 75 <br /></div>
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<br /><a href="http://www.briangriffin.co.uk/">www.briangriffin.co.uk</a><br /></div>
Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-50638668803194583672018-10-14T05:16:00.003-07:002018-10-14T05:16:42.225-07:00In Conversation With Anastasia Taylor-Lind<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Should I squirt before I wipe?” It’s a fair question. I’m in a white panel van racing across northern France to the Photoreporter festival in St Brieuc, northwest France. The journey was estimated at seven to eight hours; the journey would eventually take fifteen and a half. The driver hasn’t used the Garmin sat nav before, or any kind of sat nav before. The driver hasn’t driven for a while, or owned a car for five years. The driver is VII agency photographer, Anastasia Taylor Lind (ATL).<br /><br />We meet at 6.45am as the mist lifts over Brixton where fishmongers slap their cod stock over ice on Atlantic Road and overhead trains thrust tired commuters towards their shirt-and-tie-required jobs. The van (yet to be named but ATL is sure it’s a women) was purchased for £5,000, with extra costs such as insurance taking the total to nearer £7,000. It will transport her the 8,000 or so miles she expects to drive across eastern Europe for the first part of her new project, Negative Zero, about fertility rates and population decline in Europe. Before she heads east, we continue west; fifteen and a half hours west.</div>
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<br />ATL talks about photography a lot but knows it’s now time for her to take some more photographs, she needs to take them. Her last significant project, Siberian Super Models, was a few years ago; a self-initiated reportage (part funded by the Telegraph and GEO magazine) still ended up costing ATL around €8,000 as she was obliged to travel first class along with the international model scouts scouring the route of the Trans Siberian railway for the next face worth 35728000 Rubles. Siberian Super Models was published worldwide and received critical success achieving first prize in the Feature Picture Story Freelance/Agency category at the Pictures of the Year International awards and a finalist in Arts and Culture category at the Sony WPO awards. The reportage adheres to ATL’s interest in documenting the lives of women who live isolated from male society; an interest that has seen ATL document Women of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) Guerrillas and Women of the Cossack Resurgence, a reportage where she got to frequently indulge in her love of horse riding. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr4wZJu1kvaWC98u7lFqhu_vOfDs3n78Fuiw4PJ1IbQJdKkg22jgZ1fbKqqaB2h9vTcHImCWSgwHA8whs9SflrYtOwrVQji-0CIeX2IX6StxqNl7xTpbKPRniV0TsYc3Q_sUwcTLiJWRE/s1600/Taylor_Lind01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="699" data-original-width="1048" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr4wZJu1kvaWC98u7lFqhu_vOfDs3n78Fuiw4PJ1IbQJdKkg22jgZ1fbKqqaB2h9vTcHImCWSgwHA8whs9SflrYtOwrVQji-0CIeX2IX6StxqNl7xTpbKPRniV0TsYc3Q_sUwcTLiJWRE/s320/Taylor_Lind01.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<br />I first witnessed ATL giving a presentation about the Cossack women for the Royal Photographic Society in 2010 and immediately assumed this horse-appreciating, double-barrelled delight was posh; it was a chippy assumption I often make about someone who is a success. ATL isn’t posh, in fact she only had one name for the first 18 years of her life, her unconventional family of travelling stock eschewed convention and gave their newborn girl just one name, a surname, Anastasia; she can be forgiven for making up time by now having three names.<br /><br />En route to the Eurotunnel crossing at Folkestone, we pull in for some stomach fuel. Jade, who has four stars on her badge, is our designated McServer. The bacon is missing from my muffin and a coke is served instead of a coffee; that’s four-star service for you. We grumble past Jade, head back towards the van and observe a Romanian family boiling pans of water on the roof of their current hatchback home. It looks quite luxurious in comparison to ATL’s own upbringing, which was delivered without electricity, running water and mostly spent with her parents clip-clopping by horse and cart across southwest England looking for odd-job opportunities.<br /><br />Driving onto the brightly painted train that will take us under the Channel, we’re reminded too late not to leave our pets at home alone. ATL manoeuvres the van into position and we jump out of the front and into the back, resisting the temptation to close the curtains and rock the van from side to side to provoke the stoic middle-aged, middle-class couple sat in the vehicle behind peering at maps over half-moon spectacles.<br /><br />The back of the 2006 Peugeot van has one coat hanger and an electric blanket-smothered bed; there are enough baby wipes and photographic film to service ATL until Christmas. There’s Heinz tomato ketchup and Heinz baked beans; Earl Grey tea and dry cartons of noodles; a fluffy rug and six books including Painted Bird (Kosinki, Jerzy); HHHH (Laurent Binet); one on fertility decline and, I’m delighted to report, a copy of the collected Dench Diaries (Peter Dench). As we ejaculate from the tunnel to the tunes of Johnny Cash, ATL fidgets her Lee jeans into a comfy position, raises her neat, dark, slightly wonky eyebrows, fixes her Swedish-inspired blue eyes on the road and her Negative Zero European adventure begins, sort of; the sat nav initially blinks the location of Croydon Ikea before adjusting to a foreign field.</div>
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Munching a sour Starburst sweet, ATL explains her experience of hostile environment training and ways to extract yourself from the van if we plummet from the bridge we are driving across; I diligently write this down and am now afraid of bridges. Joining us in the van on our Commonwealth Expeditionary Force across France is <a href="http://viiphoto.com/">VII</a> agency snapper, <a href="http://donaldweber.com/">Donald Weber</a>. His exhibition War Sand, about the D-Day landing beaches, is being exhibited at the Photoreporter festival; between his frequent naps, we’re entertained by Don’s D-Day trivia. Arriving at the Photoreporter festival, ATL parks the van and points the bonnet eastwards in preparation of her odyssey. “Should I squirt before I wipe?” The vans windscreen jet wash is so feeble it doesn’t matter but I suggest, that yes, she should.<br /><br />Back in the cosy confines of my London flat, I watch ATL plot her Negative Zero route online and follow with enthusiasm the posts of her editing contact sheets in London and Bangkok. Square-format film photography defines ATL’s practice, from depressing the shutter to editing the contact sheets with a coffee in the kitchen. It’s an approach she refused to deviate from when money was tight and when National Geographic magazine expressed an interest in her work but not in the square format for their preferred, double page spreads. Eventually, Nat Geo came around to the square and commissioned ATL to shoot a two month long, 200 rolls of film feature along the Yangtze river in China. </div>
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On 21 November 2013: the cabinet of the then Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych abandons an agreement on closer trade ties with the European Union, instead seeking closer co-operation with Russia. Small protests escalate dramatically into 2014. Ukraine has the lowest life expectancy for men in Europe and is a crucial destination for ATL and her Negative Zero project. She arrives in Kiev, a city in chaos, and struggles to find a way to photograph among so many other photographers. She eventually decides on a unique approach: to assemble a pop-up street portrait studio with a black backdrop to photograph the photographers covering the conflict, then the rebel fighters, who the photographers increasingly come to resemble through their dress. After witnessing the bloodiest day of violence on the 20 February 2014, ATL begins to photograph the female mourners who arrive in their thousands, portraits that are more affecting than any from the frontline. Zhanna and Oksana carry red roses; Olia, Galina and Lolita red carnations; Katerina holds white tulips; Hanna cradles red tulips and Valentina holds a box of bread. The women’s eyes are defiantly moist, picked out by a golden reflector bouncing light into the darkness, the tears are matched by ATL’s own.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvpvTQZu1G4WH-ZK9DKwrHp7NzJmF_5G29PMnsJ5YCKDc84ZMwTt7gHaQ5PUoDAeLRW00b3B2Z-1BGcVIzwQDL3TF3nR_G3UPqYNRSWJSbsmfKLKMOgfac2PZ8lWbXWV8b57VqlPwsndA/s1600/21373623_281641218989278_4188175343661613056_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvpvTQZu1G4WH-ZK9DKwrHp7NzJmF_5G29PMnsJ5YCKDc84ZMwTt7gHaQ5PUoDAeLRW00b3B2Z-1BGcVIzwQDL3TF3nR_G3UPqYNRSWJSbsmfKLKMOgfac2PZ8lWbXWV8b57VqlPwsndA/s1600/21373623_281641218989278_4188175343661613056_n.jpg" /></a></div>
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ATL is constantly in transit and travels so she can do what she enjoys most about travel, coming home. Arriving home from Ukraine, she was offered the opportunity to publish her portraits made in Kiev as a book; five months later, Maidan - Portraits From The Black Square is published by GOST. I’m first in the queue at the <a href="https://www.frontlineclub.com/">Frontline Club</a> in west London to purchase a signed copy. ATL’s sun-streaked hair is tied up loosely in a bun. I request the thicker of her signature pens, a signature that is surprisingly neat for someone home schooled until nine years old. If ATL hadn’t found a book by Don McCullin while studying for her A Levels, I may not have this book in my hands. Over wine, we remember our trip across northern France and I ask about the van. ATL has had to sell it to fund the Maidan book project. Fixers, translators, film, food, accommodation have all taken their toll and driven her bank account down to a derisory negative zero.</div>
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Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-63175978930701349232018-02-22T07:37:00.000-08:002018-02-22T07:38:48.207-08:00ONE TO ONE LONDON STREET PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP<span style="background-color: yellow;"><span style="font-size: large;">Hello! I’m photographer <a href="http://www.peterdench.com/">Peter Dench</a> and I’d like to offer you the opportunity for a one to one, one day workshop.</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUIdNX1v8V4fls4kzHcW8qcwyTU02GvvHafBfv17sbK_EubJ20g40sH9_7_GMnx06VDaPf0kbqlJwX9zC-rKF5lQXNlSifjGVDaV3mHnzjOzdXwN5EUgE4auI2d2H8KgCF9LXOhmjl_yY/s1600/DENCH_ENGLAND_UNCENSORED032.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="641" data-original-width="800" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUIdNX1v8V4fls4kzHcW8qcwyTU02GvvHafBfv17sbK_EubJ20g40sH9_7_GMnx06VDaPf0kbqlJwX9zC-rKF5lQXNlSifjGVDaV3mHnzjOzdXwN5EUgE4auI2d2H8KgCF9LXOhmjl_yY/s320/DENCH_ENGLAND_UNCENSORED032.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Join me photographing at some of my favourite central London locations looking to capture the humour and irony in English society. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9Mmfe5e1VO7pLzy9NWSRZoMEePCSSQSf9AB_gQwnLes1Q8kBsLpHG2URGRbjKoNH0HaDftqoBZKTgNG3Dwpc0Wyeityzr97llx5EtoRksf15i_CBpg73rU5xTM8G5YqTf4lMZukwGD_8/s1600/DENCH_ENGLAND_UNCENSORED067.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="646" data-original-width="800" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9Mmfe5e1VO7pLzy9NWSRZoMEePCSSQSf9AB_gQwnLes1Q8kBsLpHG2URGRbjKoNH0HaDftqoBZKTgNG3Dwpc0Wyeityzr97llx5EtoRksf15i_CBpg73rU5xTM8G5YqTf4lMZukwGD_8/s320/DENCH_ENGLAND_UNCENSORED067.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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The route will take in the grandest tourist spots London has to offer: Oxford Street - Piccadilly Circus - Leicester Square - Covent Garden - Trafalgar Square - Westminster & Whitehall.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjlIGQdmFjWjEfcR_chKYomCmy1t_N1KqhQt3r3osTyId_QqArIlB66ClR4WPH__S3pRCVndKPdKzI0XX1r72DTpaCW8y71kfdnrqNsTCkjrZTEQ0o3pkokaO8UxgXJJNwGcc2J796OeI/s1600/DENCH_ENGLAND_UNCENSORED025.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="680" data-original-width="547" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjlIGQdmFjWjEfcR_chKYomCmy1t_N1KqhQt3r3osTyId_QqArIlB66ClR4WPH__S3pRCVndKPdKzI0XX1r72DTpaCW8y71kfdnrqNsTCkjrZTEQ0o3pkokaO8UxgXJJNwGcc2J796OeI/s320/DENCH_ENGLAND_UNCENSORED025.jpg" width="257" /></a></div>
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The day will include a pub lunch, probably involving a pork pie, pint, crisps and a large pickled onion.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEfI211i39M6C6C7yRlRCoSpDNbE2QUzy3L1LlnhIf1n6XeY8yOW2-8NowunT7LtUH8I4wPUjP0JpEoieiGmhyphenhyphen4oujbQSq9OvisAKqfw7T6LxYMX8Ik8WMmZksZHYHY1qCGhjrn7JID8Q/s1600/DENCH_ENGLAND_UNCENSORED141.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="680" data-original-width="548" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEfI211i39M6C6C7yRlRCoSpDNbE2QUzy3L1LlnhIf1n6XeY8yOW2-8NowunT7LtUH8I4wPUjP0JpEoieiGmhyphenhyphen4oujbQSq9OvisAKqfw7T6LxYMX8Ik8WMmZksZHYHY1qCGhjrn7JID8Q/s320/DENCH_ENGLAND_UNCENSORED141.jpg" width="257" /></a></div>
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A signed copy of England Uncensored and a print of your choice (from the book) is also included.<br />
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From the workshop you can expect to improve your approach to photographing people in public spaces. It's designed to show how to shoot with speed, confidence, respect, humour and above all, to have fun.<br />
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You will become more competent in creating bright clear photographs whatever the weather, often using flash. I will demonstrate how to document a familiar London location in new and exciting ways, how to develop strong themes within the work, and how to build a project and edit with skill. Each participant will receive a detailed critique on the work produced.<br />
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The workshop is suitable for beginner and intermediate photographers, capable camera handlers, aspiring professional photographers, dedicated hobbyists, thinkers and beer drinkers (wine and spirit drinkers also welcome.)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9C99HzWu25eA20NEpiofK625gLrmQJwol9wfRghUWJlQXi5ofv-Ux4l3v6RBZX4pizqAOTxwelZZj-iAxW0fdfwkr-2uglRivoCFVm44cauIOjIvJ1DvTLUWbO12QcYugjHRYkILIYLM/s1600/DENCH_ENGLAND_UNCENSORED003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="647" data-original-width="800" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9C99HzWu25eA20NEpiofK625gLrmQJwol9wfRghUWJlQXi5ofv-Ux4l3v6RBZX4pizqAOTxwelZZj-iAxW0fdfwkr-2uglRivoCFVm44cauIOjIvJ1DvTLUWbO12QcYugjHRYkILIYLM/s320/DENCH_ENGLAND_UNCENSORED003.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Participants should be in possession of a Digital SLR or micro-four thirds camera.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKTRobJrlygyK9UHCQG2l32MF5zjDZstTgtrpp9M1qf2ewtcjje7NmLiu3lMiw5iu26OxKg2EvBQ_Px7UY4D97tBj0d0D9jvdv0aOFOl3Dk3_0tr1ygaqRL9R9xElzvB4smie0CoFJg_Q/s1600/Workshop+Voucher.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1132" data-original-width="1600" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKTRobJrlygyK9UHCQG2l32MF5zjDZstTgtrpp9M1qf2ewtcjje7NmLiu3lMiw5iu26OxKg2EvBQ_Px7UY4D97tBj0d0D9jvdv0aOFOl3Dk3_0tr1ygaqRL9R9xElzvB4smie0CoFJg_Q/s320/Workshop+Voucher.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: yellow;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">£345</span></span></div>
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If you are buying this as a gift for someone, I can send you a voucher (and also the book and print) ahead of the workshop for your loved one to open.<br />
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To discuss dates, an alternative city and for payment instructions, please email me at: petermdench@gmail.com<br />Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3267511110647679726.post-76437729792517659962018-02-13T07:37:00.000-08:002018-02-13T07:37:37.819-08:00A&E: Alcohol & England Print Box <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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1. A man laughs during a picnic in the car park on Derby Day at Epsom Downs Racecourse. June 2001 </div>
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<span style="color: #999999;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;">Hello! I'm photographer Peter Dench and I thought it would be nice to offer 12 "10x12" prints for sale from my series;</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #999999;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;"> <span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.peterdench.com/alcohol-england/"><span style="color: #999999;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-color: white;">A&E: Alcohol & England</span></span></span></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: white;">The work has been published extensively worldwide and received an award from <a href="https://www.worldpressphoto.org/people/peter-dench">World Press Photo</a> </span></span></div>
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Each photograph is printed on Giclée Hahnemüle Pearl, a textured paper with a bright neutral
white base. It creates really natural black and white images and offers
vibrant color reproduction and great detail. The paper is resin
coated with a fibrous feel. The satin finish of the resin coating gives
depth to the image which combined with the texture and vibrant colour
reproduction gives the image the feel of an oil painting.
This is one of the most suitable of the Giclée Art Paper range for
mounting.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieXWtAw1iqFkk2vwtHKKvaaoet4FvRkyya1-l1Smdy0ZMxON01lB6ZrXiz5cBGBTb0ExGFtnX7GW0GKvqHqKtuhxRMkh2PlZG1gF2SHYFGSpunkfxntBnPetyD5mYR5DnfT2bR0_Kc17s/s1600/0043014E.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieXWtAw1iqFkk2vwtHKKvaaoet4FvRkyya1-l1Smdy0ZMxON01lB6ZrXiz5cBGBTb0ExGFtnX7GW0GKvqHqKtuhxRMkh2PlZG1gF2SHYFGSpunkfxntBnPetyD5mYR5DnfT2bR0_Kc17s/s320/0043014E.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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Images are <strong></strong>provided in a polyester sleeve, the perfect compromise
between access and preservation, protecting material from handling and
atmospheric hazards yet allows 100% visual access whenever required. The
superb glass-like clarity of the polyester and the smooth precision
weld on three sides provide the strongest, clearest, safest home for the photograph. The sleeves open on the narrow
end for maximum security. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiyfDAXfnGi7_eOXBB9ul9NmrkmOVgOrvGmZ027Omf7Z3RsnpIUZMC7XXK1T555e_LlLwEXrcZBZLv9jJl0-lKDDtxpsaCk0FgOSo_HwfzJKZI24IsaWIFosz861MO0ucnCbWSbt8Fmvs/s1600/004597CB.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiyfDAXfnGi7_eOXBB9ul9NmrkmOVgOrvGmZ027Omf7Z3RsnpIUZMC7XXK1T555e_LlLwEXrcZBZLv9jJl0-lKDDtxpsaCk0FgOSo_HwfzJKZI24IsaWIFosz861MO0ucnCbWSbt8Fmvs/s320/004597CB.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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The 12 photographs are presented in a portfolio box, using quality materials to offer long term, archival
storage of your valuable photos. The box is covered in
black buckram cloth. The materials are both acid and chlorine free. The
adhesives used are both pH neutral and solvent free. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH0Vgfp5kOnHtMPkEesNLLGg3jVQvugd2XAdHQy1kuMGM5ffuityLkspp-eRE8n-tSy6KcvCmP2eAI9n7npRhVbMkFGMs8QWuGax0HihXvvtcK-Z9rD_maGWlNOkDjQu-G6NJ2wvgRiG0/s1600/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG049.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="904" data-original-width="1133" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH0Vgfp5kOnHtMPkEesNLLGg3jVQvugd2XAdHQy1kuMGM5ffuityLkspp-eRE8n-tSy6KcvCmP2eAI9n7npRhVbMkFGMs8QWuGax0HihXvvtcK-Z9rD_maGWlNOkDjQu-G6NJ2wvgRiG0/s320/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG049.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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2. A couple kiss while a man is sick nearby on Derby Day at Epsom Downs Racecourse. June 2001</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkyM27bbCBRtMkxlMQcV8DNvTlCgqlRoUqGD3Ud-yDZbBsAmcHdtF0Wl66uBNkK5PSfuDJKJVSPdj2CavgFI0kGL0xikFQsuuN0ZCzF5XH9JVy8MBT5FYfFlOE01k9zF30M6ve2mdvGCA/s1600/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG083.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="904" data-original-width="1132" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkyM27bbCBRtMkxlMQcV8DNvTlCgqlRoUqGD3Ud-yDZbBsAmcHdtF0Wl66uBNkK5PSfuDJKJVSPdj2CavgFI0kGL0xikFQsuuN0ZCzF5XH9JVy8MBT5FYfFlOE01k9zF30M6ve2mdvGCA/s320/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG083.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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3. A young couple kiss passionately by a red wall in a Newquay nightclub. July 2001</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqRVGoZDaHR0Yq3pZx3vB4F6T4jShHSccQ1Vi9QmeqT1wIVGHtlueDlgpVTl17jmsMfjSxxSA9IeQTpWZtLF7MQN_Zje7iktHhHRYIooLYZVQHTfr5CiyMrfKOtS388VWAgQufdajIhyphenhyphen8/s1600/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG101.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="904" data-original-width="1130" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqRVGoZDaHR0Yq3pZx3vB4F6T4jShHSccQ1Vi9QmeqT1wIVGHtlueDlgpVTl17jmsMfjSxxSA9IeQTpWZtLF7MQN_Zje7iktHhHRYIooLYZVQHTfr5CiyMrfKOtS388VWAgQufdajIhyphenhyphen8/s320/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG101.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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4. A bare-chested skinhead postures in a pub in the Lancashire town of Bacup. April 2001</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxHiudY4lv2ZQFRI6V6fKV-FmVzwKRzT_lCbRnKrOB8qe5AmEHrw4ldq2uVg4A-P0OWc4NMV80tH8RB79DXsGnNjd_JUpdC4jshGT-WKXRk_7GQNh7duPe59Tf4AkgUQ8hNjaMoMe7F94/s1600/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG015.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="904" data-original-width="1126" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxHiudY4lv2ZQFRI6V6fKV-FmVzwKRzT_lCbRnKrOB8qe5AmEHrw4ldq2uVg4A-P0OWc4NMV80tH8RB79DXsGnNjd_JUpdC4jshGT-WKXRk_7GQNh7duPe59Tf4AkgUQ8hNjaMoMe7F94/s320/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG015.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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5. A group of friends in fancy dress drink outside the Sloop Inn in, St Ives. May 2001</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAGFHN9OisBW_xvc9TehsEtarKihH1mLSSnTXXNISL-IPFBr1uOsA88dTEU7OURFA4A1vy13Ag4RGeEC30wPB3Lctq8pK3Ga8uWQiY74laFm1Ajxg6TmHHCZqxSI41Q4Y7HVUnYFysdXA/s1600/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG022.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="904" data-original-width="900" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAGFHN9OisBW_xvc9TehsEtarKihH1mLSSnTXXNISL-IPFBr1uOsA88dTEU7OURFA4A1vy13Ag4RGeEC30wPB3Lctq8pK3Ga8uWQiY74laFm1Ajxg6TmHHCZqxSI41Q4Y7HVUnYFysdXA/s320/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG022.jpg" width="318" /></a></div>
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6. A visitor to the Great British Beer Festival at London’s Olympia. August 2001</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf17x7tMIvjjozzbSwGMtpSpm1qPceowr9J0AaXAAU7-EvQhLF9tbOaRVP7F2RlCW_lfpOlytyYjbdYq3YVaPsykTjHWjO1YX7NbwCoI-diFarj_1-Ag05YFfq7TzPaiq3Cax1Dm_j9gY/s1600/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG014.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="904" data-original-width="1128" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf17x7tMIvjjozzbSwGMtpSpm1qPceowr9J0AaXAAU7-EvQhLF9tbOaRVP7F2RlCW_lfpOlytyYjbdYq3YVaPsykTjHWjO1YX7NbwCoI-diFarj_1-Ag05YFfq7TzPaiq3Cax1Dm_j9gY/s320/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG014.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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7. A visitor to the CLA Game Fair at Shuttleworth Park, Bedfordshire. July 2001</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQDhOphDxvplcvj1qWshUYowSeNfIO54NE3Jv8emAlVlAlBRCOWbQYz-e2wI5zea71B6WKxxaNStB9JJ14l9VChQs_CDtaYZ-gc2imOLEso9qjAA5uetOezBqgrkAGXVpp0JnCW_uEPQE/s1600/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="904" data-original-width="901" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQDhOphDxvplcvj1qWshUYowSeNfIO54NE3Jv8emAlVlAlBRCOWbQYz-e2wI5zea71B6WKxxaNStB9JJ14l9VChQs_CDtaYZ-gc2imOLEso9qjAA5uetOezBqgrkAGXVpp0JnCW_uEPQE/s320/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG004.jpg" width="318" /></a></div>
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8. Friends Daniel (left) and Smudge drink cider at Cleethorpes bus station. July 2001</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh64bvXGgr9XujsbPInRjo3h3AyoRigvrpBUn7_h7Dd8cklUDV0ySK7xtW3NIkvRoWwggLUMp8VnIRnesqgV9NNwv7pGxGPIibtuIlbCe0vixxyooedojxuUA0zx7RKIxh2qHuK4G9HKKA/s1600/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG016.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="904" data-original-width="1128" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh64bvXGgr9XujsbPInRjo3h3AyoRigvrpBUn7_h7Dd8cklUDV0ySK7xtW3NIkvRoWwggLUMp8VnIRnesqgV9NNwv7pGxGPIibtuIlbCe0vixxyooedojxuUA0zx7RKIxh2qHuK4G9HKKA/s320/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG016.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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9. An England football fan celebrates in Trafalgar Square, London. October 2001</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqpTeNCD7r02jCyDGPdamGYhJsYYhlhfLIhVpUfYzJAwA-PjBejvCjClGRde5-kIAmPgSVd4Pyb8DOQWhLgznSzHYbGjnSb7TyWtWF3BxAOaC66zZ1YSorf3qXTw8JA6vVaaAXhHOHOmA/s1600/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG139.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="912" data-original-width="1134" height="257" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqpTeNCD7r02jCyDGPdamGYhJsYYhlhfLIhVpUfYzJAwA-PjBejvCjClGRde5-kIAmPgSVd4Pyb8DOQWhLgznSzHYbGjnSb7TyWtWF3BxAOaC66zZ1YSorf3qXTw8JA6vVaaAXhHOHOmA/s320/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG139.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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10. A woman dressed for Ladies' Day at Royal Ascot sat in a bus stop shelter opposite the racecourse. June 2001</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZzBcj0D8ZCSNTi_jSD50KeExQXEtg9zKSYkZy1z-Ryv-q0-IJQKZmPLgB3ZsZRXgysE3PGzSSb7PJ_-QIpJ2JDmv7AObxnl0tSQHmXkTh4jaHjWmbzKML4OXWAGy_wPt-yMgMCATAX9c/s1600/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="905" data-original-width="908" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZzBcj0D8ZCSNTi_jSD50KeExQXEtg9zKSYkZy1z-Ryv-q0-IJQKZmPLgB3ZsZRXgysE3PGzSSb7PJ_-QIpJ2JDmv7AObxnl0tSQHmXkTh4jaHjWmbzKML4OXWAGy_wPt-yMgMCATAX9c/s320/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG008.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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11. A guest at a wedding reception in a St Ives rugby club downs alcohol using a deep-sea diver themed beer bong. May 2001</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9Vupq2Oj993gcnPQVYM4R_SO21dlJQ3mz4gA1B2sEfwdauKuqzAF2HLEx60gNaDQAfzL1ZxAe37rJxY7Y_gqUxXNQaxbtTq9jhxxjk3UjNgYl9hTy1eRFI4ZYzuqv1HVO4GIArWR24sU/s1600/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG035.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="896" data-original-width="1134" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9Vupq2Oj993gcnPQVYM4R_SO21dlJQ3mz4gA1B2sEfwdauKuqzAF2HLEx60gNaDQAfzL1ZxAe37rJxY7Y_gqUxXNQaxbtTq9jhxxjk3UjNgYl9hTy1eRFI4ZYzuqv1HVO4GIArWR24sU/s320/DENCH_A%2526E_FINAL_JPEG035.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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12. A woman lies on the grass next to the queue for the ladies’ toilet at the Henley Royal Regatta. July 2001</div>
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<span style="color: magenta;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">£550 </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: magenta;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(includes shipping )</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">This is my selection. If you don't see your personal favorite, let me know and I can swap them in: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">petermdench@gmail.com</span></div>
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<span style="color: magenta;"><span style="font-size: small;">Payment via <a href="https://www.paypal.me/PDench">PayPal.Me</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">All images ©Peter Dench 2018 </span></div>
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Peter Denchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17967390667590954437noreply@blogger.com1