How do you summarise a year with photography alone? Ken Mainardis of Getty Images has chosen a selection of the best pictures taken by his photographers and explains in his own words how they sum up 2017 to him.
Article from BBC News
All images subject to copyright.
The National Portrait Gallery’s Eggleston show raised many issues — about the history of photography, the nature of portraiture and so much more — that it was a natural choice to be our photography exhibition of the year, says Eliza Williams
What makes for an exhibition of the year? The work must be of the highest quality, of course, but the show should also have that elusive aspect, the mysterious something that stays with you long after you’ve left the gallery space. In the case of a historical show, we would also expect to learn something new about the work, and discover a different perspective on the artist.
William Eggleston Portraits, held at the National Portrait Gallery in London from July 21 until October 23, achieved all these elements. Its reviews were ecstatic from the off. “Momentous, trivial, marvellous,” said Adrian Searle in the Guardian, finishing his review by saying simply, “What a great show.” “Devastatingly brilliant,” wrote Louisa Buck in the Telegraph, while Karen Wright in the Independent proclaimed it “confirms his importance”.
Many critics talked of the images lingering with them, and of the complexity held within what are seemingly straightforward shots. “Time and again, Eggleston shows us that a picture of a person is never a simple thing,” said Chris Waywell in Time Out, while Wright continues in the Independent: “Photography can capture a moment, and Eggleston does not just chronicle events but delivers images that are ambiguous, allowing many possible interpretations.”
Eggleston is not known as a portraitist, and in fact this is the first ever show to concentrate on this aspect of his work. It worked brilliantly, perhaps due to the general excellence of his photography, but also because, within a fairly small show of around only 100 images, curator Philip Prodger was able to bring forth all the themes and questions that have followed Eggleston b throughout his career – some of them doggedly – and examine them in a new light.
For Prodger, Eggleston’s work raises questions over the very nature of what makes a portrait. “Eggleston’s photography strikes some as ambivalent and impersonal, insufficiently humane to qualify as ‘portraiture’,” he writes in the exhibition catalogue. “This in itself is interesting, for it makes us look uncomfortably at some of the presumptions on which portrait practice is built. Photographic portraiture gravitates towards likeness – looking at a clear, head-and-shoulders photograph of a person with a known biography at an intimate distance is meant to reveal something about them, to provide insight. It is a romantic idea, ultimately: to look into the eyes of a sitter so that we might peer into their soul. Yet who is to say that at that moment, in that place, from that distance, at that angle, a photograph tells us anything at all about what drives a person, what shapes them, how they think? Or whether such things even matter. Eggleston is the antidote to such over-reaching conceits.”
The show features photographs stretching back to the 1960s and its subjects are a mix of family members and friends – some of whom are famous figures – as well as strangers that Eggleston shot on the street. His works are usually displayed without titles and descriptions though Prodger persuaded him to forego this habit for the NPG show, and, where known, identities are revealed, as well as often considerable context.
We are taken into Eggleston’s childhood, via photographs of the family’s help, who became surrogate parents to him while his parents were away. Intriguing characters abound in his later pictures too, framed by Eggleston in a way that speaks always of a wider, unknown narrative. It’s easy to see why he’s been so influential on filmmakers. Writing in the catalogue, director Sofia Coppola sums it up thus: “So many people take those simple snapshots of life, but there’s something about Eggleston that no-one can match. So many of his images I’ve seen over the years stay with me, like a pastel memory from another time.”
Some of the real stories revealed in the show surpass any that could be invented, however. TC Boring, an “eccentric dentist” that Eggleston knew, is shown standing naked in a bright red room, its walls scrawled with text. It turns out this is the room where Eggleston’s famous ‘red ceiling’ image, which focuses on a light fitting, was taken, but the caption also explains Boring’s later fate, which was to be murdered, with his house set on fire.
Other captions are downright gossipy. One painterly photo of two young women on a sofa turns out to be of Eggleston’s cousin Lesa Aldridge and her friend Karen Chatham. According to the caption, Aldridge was comforting her friend who had been rejected by the singer Alex Chilton of Box Tops/Big Star fame, who was also a neighbour of Eggleston (and appears in another portrait in the show). It went on to say that Aldridge then took up with Chilton herself and that their rocky relationship inspired many of his songs.
Beside another image, of Eggleston’s girlfriend Leigh Haizlip in tears, we find the caption speculating on the cause, and wondering if it was down to the photographer himself. There’s a risk that these kinds of ponderings and insights could distract from the photographs, or, perhaps worse, fix them in a certain time and place. But Eggleston’s work, by its sheer force, always rises above the trivialities, making them enjoyable to discover rather than interfering with the work.
In an interview with Prodger from 2015, which is included in the catalogue, Eggleston’s belief in his work as being beyond a specific setting is clear. “I do not a bit call myself a documentary photographer because I do not feel associated with people and their problems every day. I’m not [the photo agency] Magnum.”
“So many people take those simple snapshots of life, but there’s something about Eggleston that no-one can match,” Sofia Coppola
The same interview reveals Eggleston’s shooting style, which is quick and anonymous: “You know, it happens so fast, they don’t even know it.” One of the criticisms that has been levelled at him over the years is that his work is just throwaway snapshots. As Adrian Searle points out in his Guardian review, this accusation seems patently ridiculous now. “Eggleston’s photography has been derided for its ordinariness, for its compositional blankness, even for its use of colour. This now seems absurd.”
For what ‘snapshots’ they are, if anyone insists on still calling them so. In a world that is now saturated with imagery, where many of us share our photos daily, if not hourly, it is impossible not to be struck by just how keen and clear Eggleston’s eye is. “For most people, ‘just taking the picture’ would result in tedious clichés,” writes Sarah Kent in theartsdesk.com, “but Eggleston has an uncanny knack of spotting those sublime moments when random elements cohere to make the ordinary seem strange or beautiful.”
The other controversy most associated with Eggleston is his use of colour. Alongside contemporaries including Joel Meyerowitz and Stephen Shore, Eggleston pioneered the use of colour in art photography, and caused outrage in 1976 with a show of colour works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which was cited by the New York Times at the time as “the most hated show of the year”.
Like the complaints about snapshots, the idea of colour photography being so shocking seems quaint nowadays. The show at the NPG tracks Eggleston’s journey from black and white through to using colour, and contains many works created using the complex ‘dye transfer’ process that he famously favoured. Originally used for commercial purposes due to the exceptional depth of colour that it produces, Eggleston spotted the potential of dye transfer in art photography and the works produced here using it truly sing.
Eggleston’s work in many ways tracks the progress of our acceptance of photography, in all its varied forms, as art. And while the old complaints about his work are revisited here – they have to be, for historical purposes if nothing else – it feels that what shines out is his status as an ‘artist’, not a ‘photographer’.
“Duchamp demonstrated how a thing can be thought of as something other than what it appears to be,” writes Prodger in his catalogue essay. “Eggleston took this a step further, by showing that the camera, with its unparalleled capacity to record information in exacting detail, does not have to be used for representational purposes, nor do photographs have to be taken at face value.”
Near the end of the 2015 interview in the catalogue, Prodger and Eggleston muse on how people react to exhibitions, and the lack of control that artists and curators have over this. “In terms of exhibitions, I’ve come to appreciate that people enter them with different levels of information and they get different things out of them,” says Prodger. “Some people will see your show, and they’ll say, ‘There are some interesting, pretty pictures’, and leave it at that.”
“You know, I compare it to this,” replies Eggleston. “Different people have different reactions to certain drugs. One will kill one person while another person has the same drug and they feel better.”
In this instance, with this show, it seems clear that the Eggleston medicine worked for the good.
Article from Creative Review
Untypical Girls traces the history of women in punk and indie music, and features rare and brilliant documentary photography of bands stretching from 1977 to 1993. We talk to the book’s author, Sam Knee, about his love of this era of music and why it is important to remember the women of the scene.
Untypical Girls is a celebration of women in punk and indie, looking back over 16 years, from 1977-1993, and featuring hundreds of images of the key players in Britain and the US.
The book features famous names, from Siouxie Sioux to Ari Up, Kim Gordon to Courtney Love, as well as lesser-known bands and female indie music fans. It documents the way that the UK and US interacted via punk, and also follows author Sam Knee’s own journey through music, as a fan and regular gig-goer.
“The UK and US have constantly fed off each other musically and stylistically since punk’s first wave,” says Knee. “[The book] also follows my life’s path as I spent the 80s going to indie gigs in London, fully immersed in the scene here but always obsessed by the American underground, which led me to then relocate to San Francisco in 1990 as the whole Riot Grrrl phenomena was blowing up.”
Untypical Girls’ 16-year timeline tracks the development of the female indie scene, and comes to a close in 1993, when Knee felt the scene was fizzling out. “The vibrancy of the scenes was winding down,” says Knee of why the book ends at that point. “A lot of the groups so vital in the 80s had broken up or were fading into repetition. Riot Grrrl had peaked. Groups were selling out to majors and so on. It was a time of change. I feel like punk’s thread had constantly evolved from ’77 right through to ’93 where the last gasps were heard.”
In researching the images for the book, Knee went direct to the bands that he’d liked from the scene. “I made a list of all the girl bands I liked, or bands with female members, then set about locating unseen shots of them. I really enjoy picture researching more than anything, so for me I loved watching the book gradually fall together. Over time I accumulated over 1,000 indie girl shots, so making the final edit was the hardest thing.” The book also features interviews with some of the musicians, including Debsey Wykes of Dolly Mixture and Julie Cafritz of Pussy Galore.
While Untypical Girls features some bands which had a mixed line up of men and women, Knee decided to focus just on the women, resulting in a book that demonstrates the vibrancy and importance of the female music scene. This is an area that is often woefully under-reported, at least within the mainstream music press.
“I think they did [get recognition] within the underground scenes and press but not by the mainstream music press,” says Knee, “who in their Luddite rock-ist outlook perceived girl groups as a novelty, not the serious musician workmanship that was only achieved by males. Back then the weekly music press had a huge influence on any band’s success, and often blinkered, middle-aged male journalists governed these groups’ destinies.”
Punk girls
concert / dance
HB Woodlawn program 1981
Arlington VA
The book is a joyous reminder of the attitude and individuality of the women’s indie music movement (even though a definite ‘look’ can be discerned). Knee hopes this may inspire generations to come, even his own daughters.
“I’m a father of two young girls and feel immense worry for them as they grow up into this manufactured, conservative, dross society where everyone looks the same in branded sportswear or Topshop type chain junk, and individuality is out of vogue,” he says.
“I hope the book will be something they can look at and see that they don’t have to be like everyone else, they can wear and say whatever they like and not feel this state of oppressive uniformity which shadows the world we live in today. I’m also selfishly hoping they’ll seek out and rediscover the indie scene and take me to gigs when I’m in my 60s!”
Untypical Girls: Styles and Sounds of the Transatlantic Indie Revolution by Sam Knee is published by Cicada Books, priced £19.95; cicadabooks.co.uk. Sam Knee can be found on Instagram @sceneinbetween
East End article taken from the wonderful Spitalfields Life. Original post can be found here
In 1981, when Phil Maxwell got a job in the East End and moved to London from Liverpool, he found himself living in a council flat in Pauline House at the end of Hanbury St where he lives to this day. “In Liverpool, they told me, ‘You won’t find people in London as friendly, they don’t have the Scouse humour.”” explained Phil, recalling his arrival in East London, “But when I moved here I found that Scouse humor and East End humour are almost the same, produced by similar forces. Just as in Liverpool, you have the river, the dockers, strong trade unions, a history of unemployment and seasonal work – humour developed out of hardship, people were able to laugh at their own demise. The East End was a small world and a wonderful place in those days. The area was a desert, so much corrugated iron, so many bombed out buildings, and many old Jewish people with a great sense of humour.”
As a teenager, Phil ran away from home in Coventry to Euston, “I stayed two nights at St Anne’s Centre in Soho and I fell in love with the place.” he told me, disclosing the origin of his affection for London.Although he spent his childhood making cameras out of boxes and created a darkroom in his bedroom, Phil’s aspirations were not encouraged at his secondary modern school,”You were basically taught you were useless and you’d be lucky if you got a job in factory,” he admitted regretfully. But it was in Liverpool where he had his first job, as a teacher of religious instruction, that Phil began to take pictures seriously. As he explained, “I was a great admirer of Bill Brandt, Humphrey Spender and Henri Cartier Bresson, and passionate to record the lives of ordinary people.” Living independently for the first time and escaping his catholic upbringing, Phil also came out amongst the teachers at his school and to some of the pupils whose parents he met on the gay scene at this time, which meant that he could no longer continue teaching. “I wasn’t going to be put in a situation where I was forced to be secretive about my sexuality.” he confided to me.
In London, Phil’s work as a media resources officer, preparing visual material for schools, allowed him an income and the time to pursue the photography that was his central concern. At once, he dedicated himself to documenting the lives of working people in the East End, commencing a lifetime’s project that thirty years later has led to the creation of an unparalleled archive of work, both in street photography and as a record of the popular antifascist political movements in London.
“I was obsessed with photography but I never thought I’d be able to make a living. And ultimately I was very lucky, because although I freelanced for some magazines, I never got a job on a major publication – which means that I kept all my negatives. And now I find that I am unique among photographers of my generation because I have complete ownership of my work. In the end, my lack of self-esteem worked to my advantage because it gave me freedom. I’ve found a way of working independently without having the integrity of my work undermined.”, outlined Phil, looking back without regrets upon the evolution of his singular career as a photographer.
The fluent pictures you see here, which serve as an introductory glimpse of his vast archive, are amongst the first Phil took in Spitalfields and the vicinity, after he arrived from Liverpool in 1981. This was the place as he found it – where he discovered his creative and personal freedom – the location which he has photographed ceaselessly throughout the intervening years and continues to photograph today. As well as recording the changes in the neighbourhood, these pictures capture many remarkable personalities that Phil knew personally. Phil’s involvement with his subjects means that he is never merely taking pictures, he is always recording life happening. Every single image is another frame in an ongoing drama, with the same people and places recurring over three decades. For this reason, Phil’s pictures have never contained anonymous faces in the street, because for him these were all the people he lived among every day.
Describing the couple stepping out of Whitechapel Station in the second photo below, Phil explained they lived in the flat below him and, once the wife died, her husband enjoyed the freedom to do all the things he was not allowed to do while she was alive. In the few years that he lived on after his wife’s death, Phil regularly steered him home drunk and left him sleeping in a chair. The demonstrators with bicycles in a lower photo were gathered in Brick Lane in support of Afia Begum, a Bengali woman who was threatened with deportation after her husband died in a fire in 1982.
It is this affectionate yet unsentimental relationship with his subjects that gives Phil Maxwell’s photographs their special quality. As Phil admitted open-heartedly, “I would be nowhere without these people, they are my constant inspiration. I always have a camera in my pocket and whenever I go out I always see something I have never seen before. I love the different cultures and histories that are on the doorstep. Wherever I travel in the world, I always come back and find a little of it here. I’ve always said I couldn’t live anywhere else – such a mixture of class, race, cultures, and aspirations and it’s all here in one go.”
Photographs copyright © Phil Maxwell