Introduction

After a few hectic weeks at work and with some creative block regarding Assignment 3, I decided to take advantage of the fact that my wife was away and go to London for a few days.  My plan was to practice some street photography with my Leica M film cameras, to catch up with some friends and see some exhibitions that I’d been hoping to catch at some point.   The three exhibitions were:-

Diane Arbus – In the Beginning at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank.

Don McCullin at Tate Britain

Martin Parr – Only Human at the National Portrait Gallery

These are three well known photographers whose styles and subjects are very different from each other, so I was interested to examine the works being exhibited to gain more of an understanding of their approaches to their craft.  Here, I describe what I saw and what I have learned from seeing these collections.

Diane Arbus – In the Beginning

The first exhibition was Diane Arbus, who’s portrait work I was already familiar with and whose tragic end at the age of 48 is well documented.  This collection of photographs was curated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and adapted for the Hayward Gallery.  The importance of these photographs in the context of Arbus’ work is that they are from the very early years of her career between 1956 to 62, many of which have never been seen in the UK before.

The way the exhibition was set up was interesting to begin with.  The usual introduction abstract on the wall describes the photographs as not being a formal collection that must be seen in sequence.   Each photograph was declared to be a ‘beginning’ in its own right. In fact, the area of the Hayward is formed of a number of square pillars arranged in a grid with photographs hanging on opposite faces of each, which lends itself to not walking through the collection like a zombie conga line. The second interesting point was the complete absence of any context within Arbus’s life.  These were the beginnings of her career, not the events that led to her suicide, so unlike many retrospectives of late photographers, this exhibition stuck to Arbus working in an informative point in her photography.

Walking around the room, the first thing that struck me was the skill applied to the images.  Although early in her career, they could have easily been the result of many years experience.  Arbus’ subject matter varied almost as much as the techniques used to shoot them and I was struck by her desire to capture the moment, even if it was at the expense of good exposure, focus or outside the limits of the film she was using.  Several images have huge grain in them, which works aesthetically but belies the hard work in developing and printing that must have taken place.   In his review of the exhibition [1], Adrian Searle states that ‘Arbus seemed to arrive almost fully formed as a photographer’, a sentiment that I would echo from the impressive quality of the work over a relatively short period of 8 years.  The second thing that struck me was the use of very descriptive titles for the photographs.  Arbus was almost saying “here is exactly what this photograph is”, while inviting interpretation and development of a narrative based on everything else going on in the picture.

I found her choice of subjects compelling.  She photographed circus performers and drag artists getting ready to perform in an almost business-like fashion, showing the potential for any job to be routine.  Her street photographs capture the daily life, but also the surprise at being discovered by the camera.  Boy stepping off the curb, NYC, 1957-58 sums up Arbus’ approach to street photography.  Here we have a boy turning in surprise, but not stopping in his journey to cross the street.  Arbus captures his face and expression perfectly in highlight and the movement of his body.  The scene must have also surprised Arbus as the image isn’t really sharp anywhere in the frame.  The aesthetic of the image doesn’t need it to be, however.  When I look at this image I see the surprise, but also distraction from what is a dangerous job of crossing a New York street.  The boy is more interested in the viewer than his surroundings.

The intimacy of her street work is explored by Jeff L Rosenheim in his essay at the back of the exhibition guide.   He contrasts the classical street photographers of 20th Century: Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander etc, with Arbus’ style.  Where they hid from their subject, preferring to observe, Arbus looked for ‘the poignancy of a direct encounter’ with her subjects.

“For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.  And more complicated”, Diane Arbus

By interacting in the slightest way with the subject, as with the photograph above, Arbus shows us something about them that we could miss by simple observation.

Arbus also tackled the subject of death and dying in her early work, which is what set the tone for me throughout.  Arbus’ own tragic death at the age of 48 following a history of mental illness, makes her observations about the subject of death interesting but sad.  A series of photographs of the elderly connect back to the origins of the American way of life, e.g Uncle Sam leaning on a cot at home, NYC, 1960 where an elderly gentlemen dressed as the iconic character, waves a flag in a fairly depressing room.  The image contrasts the American ideal with the reality of 1960s New York.  In another image, Arbus shoots an elderly lady in the shower (Lady in the Shower, Coney Island, N.Y 1959).  This image in contrast to Arbus’s other portraiture is taken without the subject’s knowledge.   We get a sense of the way age takes hold of the body physically as well as a feeling of loneliness as she showers in a large, empty changing room at Coney Island.  The effect of ageing is more dramatically demonstrated by Old Woman in a Hospital Bed, NYC. 1958 where a clearly frail and sick old woman is lying unconscious in a bed on a ward.  The photograph is shot with very low contrast, which creates an almost angelic effect.  The old lady, it would seem is close to death.

When she tackled death itself, Arbus’s work takes an almost documentary style.  A couple of images show a corpse during autopsy and a disinterred saint.  The pictures themselves feel unremarkable as the subjects are striking.  It’s not to say that Arbus found only darkness in this subject.  In one image, Headstone for “Killer” at Bide a Wee Cemetery, Wantagh, NY, 1960 we have a picture of a gravestone marking the resting place of someone or something called Killer.  With this image, Arbus tells the viewer that Killer is a pet by referring to the name of the cemetery in the title.  However, there is a dark humour to the image.  Killer appears to have lived a short life, but surely its not a nickname for a child.  Even if it was, it’s unlikely that any family would use if for a headstone.  The word headstone itself has different connotations, depending on what part of the world we are in; it’s a common word for a gravestone in the US.  When I looked at this image, with the word ‘headstone’ in the title, my mind wandered around all of these possibilities and I admit to a small grin when I realised how I’d been duped.

In conclusion, I really enjoyed this exhibition as it provided an insight to the early thoughts of someone who became a very famous photographer.  It was good to formally separate the work from the tragic course of her life, but that knowledge is always there when connecting with her photographs.  I had a sense of someone who recognised and empathised with the mundane and the darkness of her subjects, but also someone who was fascinated by the life going on around her.  Her interactions with her subjects add a sense of revelation, something that I am beginning to see in my own thought process.

Don McCullin

The second exhibition was Don McCullin at Tate Britain.  I had read reviews of this exhibition as perhaps the definitive collection of his work over many years as a photographer and photojournalist.    Th exhibition comprised nearly 270 prints, ranging from McCullin’s early work in the deprived areas of London through to more recent landscapes and ancient architectures.

McCullin is best known as a press photographer who worked in the worst war zones of the second half of the 20th Century.  He famously hates the title ‘War Photographer’, likening it to being an abattoir worker [1].  While other famous photographers we fans of his work, McCullin insists to this day that his war photographs take an insignificant role in the horror scenes in front of him and that he wanted to record them as a human, rather than a professional.  This modest approach is something I admire, although like many I wonder if the effects of what he saw have created this response in order to protect him emotionally.  I recall watching Sebastião Salgado’s TED talk The Silent Drama of Photography in which he talks about photographing the genocide in Rwanda[2].  When he started to suffer with severe physical health issues, his doctor told him that witnessing  so much death was effectively killing him.  McCullin photographed similar attrocities over a greater length of time, so perhaps it’s not surprising that he build coping strategies in order to protect himself, despite always debunking the notion that he suffers from PTSD. As a side note to visiting this exhibition, I was discussing McCullin with a friend of ours who spent a large part of his career as a press photographer for a major newspaper. He showed me a portrait of McCullin that he shot for a piece many years ago. The setting was his garden and he was holding one of his cats. The portrait, which I sadly don’t have for this article, depicts the photographer at rest which is not how we think of him when viewing most of his exhibition. When my friend attended the launch of the exhibition, he presented McCullin with a print of his photograph which although he didn’t remember the shoot, appreciated nonetheless.

There were many interesting elements to the exhibition, but the first thing that I noticed was the beauty in how the images were shot.  Beauty may seem like a strange word to use when the subject is a corpse of a man with half his face missing, but looking at the images from a straight composition and light perspective, McCullin uses highlight and shadow to draw the viewer’s attention to the detail of the subject.  Choice of exposure can make or break a photograph and in McCullin’s case, I couldn’t see a single image that didn’t please from the more technical point of view.

Martin Parr

The final exhibition was (mercifully) Martin Parr’s Only Human at the National Portrait Gallery. This was a far cry from McCullin’s work as it takes a light-hearted look at society in stark contrast to the war and deprivation I’d just been looking at. Parr has always been a favourite of mine since I first encountered the chapter on him in the BBC documentary “The Genius of Photography”. Parr’s almost haphazard approach to photography came out in that programme, where he’s seen wandering around a supermarket with a camera and on-board flash gun. His subjects were just members of the public going about their business and I was startled by the fact that few of them seemed bothered by his intrusion. As a consequence of his use of hash direct flash, Parr’s style is one that almost looks like the sort of photographs that everyone took during the film era. Brightly exposed with lots of saturated colours, his famous series “The Last Resort” takes a candid view at the now-declining British seaside holiday through a series of fun images. However, when looking more closely at the photographs, we can see the darker side to human behaviour when people let their hair down. The famous images of the scramble for the buffet suspends any notion of British reserve or politeness and could almost be shot on an African plain around a pride of hungry lions. Under the fun, almost amateurish looking compositions are cleverly worked subjects that I personally find exciting. Perhaps the best examples from Only Human of Parr’s commentary on British identity were those that were set against the backdrop of Brexit. A few of my favourites can be seen below.

In the first, we see two Muslim girls behind the counter of a fish and chip shop. I found this image to be starling because here is a setting that every British person would recognise with the simple framing of two young women working. When we look at their fairly passive but welcoming expressions, we then jusxtapose with their traditional dress. For me, the sight of these women working is a fish and chip shop isn’t particularly interesting, but my second reaction is framed by the racial disharmony in Britain and picturing how some areas of society would view the image. I found this to be a depressing experience, when the initial feeling was that it was a pleasing and very British scene.

The second image is of the front of a cash and carry-style shop. The huge sign declares that they ‘Stack it High and Sell it Cheap’. A woman leaves with a trolley of goods but not even making a dent in the stack in front of the shop. This image was organised in the section of the exhibition about Brexit, which is known to stoke fear and uncertainty about what happens to our services, NHS etc. It was therefore easy for me to take the perspective that Parr is trying to say that Britain will be poorer and somehow cheapened by leaving Europe. However, I liked this image because of the observational humour of it. The lady leaving the shop is oblivious to the scale of the ‘stacking it high’ and is on her phone. Perhaps she’s telling her friends about it as though she had just discovered that such shops exist. For me, this image is a great example of a photograph that works with our own feelings about a subject to create multiple narratives.

The final image actually made me laugh during the exhibition when I saw it for the first time. Here we have a line of swimmers lining up on a jetty to jump into a frozen lake. They all look nervous and it’s as though they wanted to be anywhere but here. Again, this image was shown as part of Brexit Britain which for me comically described the feeling of uncertainty; lemmings jumping into the unknown. However, the image also had a personal connection to me as I’m also an open-water swimmer and know only too well the horror of preparing to jump into cold water.

Conclusion

This was a great visit to London as I was able to take in three very different exhibitions by very different photographers. From Arbus I learned the importance of strong connections with the subjects, which for me sets her apart from many people who have worked in street photography. Her use of movement and slower exposures in her early work created a warm and ghostly feel to her pictures, which is something I’ve not really explored to date. My images tend to be sharp and with as little grain or noise as possible, but I see the benefit of letting the subject and light speak for itself, regardless of any notions of technical perfection now that I’ve looked at Arbus’ work.

With McCullin I learned that we need to really look at what is going on when documenting something as stark or challenging as war or deprivation. McCullin’s work is factual, but sympathetic to the subjects and leaves the viewer with little doubt as to what is going on. I also learned that it’s really easy to pigeon-hole photographers because of the subjects they photograph. I hadn’t appreciated that McCullin had shot landscapes and to me they were beautiful. However, it took some effort to lift my viewpoint from the impression of McCullin as a documenter of the darker side of humanity. Finally, Parr taught me that humour in photography is something we can employ without it looking contrived or faked. I get the feeling that his work polarises people because of his use of colour and flash, but I think his use of many layers to his work is original and it inspires me to have more fun with my subject matter.

References

[1] 2015, “The Dark Landscapes of Don McCullin, Aperture Magazine, Flashback, https://aperture.org/blog/dark-landscapes-don-mccullin/

[2] 2013, “The Silent Drama of Photography”, TED video, https://www.ted.com/talks/sebastiao_salgado_the_silent_drama_of_photography?language=en

 

I started writing this after completing Assignment 2 and having my tutor feedback during our video call. Among the subjects being discussed, I raised the section that followed Exercise 3.1 – Freeze. In this section, it was suggested that a good way of making selections of photographs for a series or collection would be to produce contact sheets. Contact sheets have been used by photographers for many years and were particularly useful during the film era, when positive prints from negatives were printed in ‘contact’ with photographic paper.

In the days of film, these contact prints could be examined carefully using a magnifying glass, annotated with any changes or crops to be applied later and ultimately selected or rejected.  However, in the modern era there are tools to manage digital images in a similar way without the need to print everything. I use Adobe Lightroom, which both manages the my library of photographs and also provides editing and printing capabilities. During the conversation with my tutor, I questioned the merit of printing and reviewing contact sheets when the same could be achieved electronically.  In this essay, I look at my workflow and how I use it to select and edit photographs.

Lightroom vs Contact Sheets

I first started using Lightroom about 5 years ago when there were only a few software programs that could manage and edit photographs. Like many photographers, I am fairly lazy when it comes to editing in-camera and often end up importing many images into the computer before narrowing them down to the best shots. I frequently shoot sports events because my wife is a keen triathlete. By the time I’ve finished shooting, I’ve invariably shot 1500 photos, which I import as a complete set into Lightroom. Over the years, I’ve developed a workflow for editing and selecting the images I want to go forward into post-processing with. For 1500 images, I can mostly down-select in around an hour. Once in Lightroom, I make my edits to the photographs and then use the print functionality to produce a print that is optimised for my printer and paper. All sounds good.

However, in reviewing modern editing tools like Lightroom over contact prints, I wanted to understand how effective the paper print is and how it might influence how I shoot in future.

As well as shooting a DSLR, I also have a large collection of film cameras from the past 85 years. What this has taught me is the need to take care in what I am photographing as a roll of film is not only an expense, but is limited to a number of frames in one go. For 35mm, there are 24 or 36 exposures which is pretty comfortable for a walk or family party. However, when I shoot medium format, I am limited to 12 exposures per roll of 120 film. As opposed to my digital life, film photography pushes me to not waste my film or money by recklessly shooting anything in view.  It has also taught me about post selection once I’ve had my film developed (or in many cases, I’ve developed myself). I have been scanning the images and importing them into Lightroom, which still bypasses the contact print process. In the review of the images, I will tend to look harder at the quality of each shot rather than dismiss any with minor issue on the basis that I might have something better. I still crop, adjust contrast and remove dust (I live in a Victorian house) so the workflow is the same.

If I had been working prior to the digital era, I would have to review the negative for sharpness as I do now, but also the shadow and highlight areas to determine how much dodging and burning I would have to carry out in the print. Dodging and burning are techniques whereby the paper is exposed more or less in the shadow and highlight regions to balance the image. It can be as crude as waving a hand in front of the darkroom enlarger when the paper is being exposed. As they contact print is also the first time the image is seen as a positive (in the case of negative film), the balance of the composition can be reviewed also. Any visual debris in the frame can potentially be marked for cropping or painting out in the final print. A great example of contact printing and adjusting the decision-making that follows it is from Elliott Erwitt’s Dogs series, below:

This contact sheet shows the 12 frames from a roll of medium format film from the series.  Erwitt has marked two photographs that he wanted to work with and in the case of number 3 has drawn the approximate crop to get the best composition from the negative.   The first thing to note is how tightly he crops the frame to the dog and the lady’s feet.  The depth of field of the photograph clearly picks out the dog as the subject of the image, but the photographer was too far away to fill the frame with the subject.  The whole negative contains much more of the dog’s owner, which perhaps Erwitt believed would add to the picture.  In the end, however, he crops to make the composition simpler.  Shooting with medium format, which has much more emulsion area than 35mm, he can afford to throw away more of the negative without compromising the quality of the final print.  The final cropped print can be seen below.  The main difference now is the paper used, which has a cooler, higher contrast look to the paper in the contact print.  The contact sheet would have been retained by the photographer in order to duplicate the workflow for subsequent prints.

Lightroom actually works in a very similar way to the old technique.  The software imports an original image and then keeps records of every change made to it within the catalog.  In it’s simplest form, the workflow is:

1. Original image imported from the camera’s memory card and stored in a specific location on the computer’s hard drive.
2. The image is now present in the Lightroom catalog and can be edited using tools that are similar to analogue processing (exposure, contrast etc).  Lightroom doesn’t change the original image at any point in the process.
3. When editing is complete, the photograph can be printed directly from Lightroom or exported as a final electronic version e.g. as a jpeg.  Lightroom applies the changes to a virtual copy of the original image and creates a new file when exporting.

The process of selection is done using Collections, ‘picking/rejecting’ and ratings.  Collections are simply virtual albums which are similar to a film photographer gathering all of the developed negatives on contact sheets.  Picking and Rejecting are functions that do just that, in a similar way to drawing a border around the frame of interest (as above) or striking through with a pen.  Ratings offer a scale of 1 to 5 stars that can be used to identify favourites.

As Lightroom can make crop edits and undo them at any time, experiments with composition can be done more freely.  However should the photographer wish to compare crops, the software can create virtual copies of an image and display them next to each other with the option to discard again once the image is finalised.

Example of My Process of Selection (Updated Post Exercise 3.2: Trace)

For Exercise 3.2, I had a shot in mind using a macro lens to capture the visible motion of a guitar’s E string when picked.  The shot was illuminated using a continuous LED light source, which took some experimentation to get the placement right.  As a result, I shot 49 images with the intention of picking a single frame.

Step 1 was to add the images to their own collection.  I called this ‘Guitar’.  The virtual contact sheet of all images can be seen below as a screen grab from the Library window in Lightroom.

During the shoot, I experimented with the composition, lighting and point of focus on the string.  I also needed to test the shot by picking the string and making sure that the vibrations were captured by the slow shutter speed.  As long macro lenses are notoriously difficult to focus accurately with their very shallow depth of field, some of the shots weren’t all that sharp.  Using the ‘Reject’ function, I effectively ruled out the first 40 images because although they described my thought process, they weren’t going to be the final shot.  Lightroom greys out the images that are rejected as below:-

With 9 shots left, it was a case of settling on the composition.  The first 3 were shallow angle with just the bridge and strings but little of the fret board.  The last 6 images were the composition I was looking for.  The best of them was found to be 49. I picked 49 as my target image using the ‘Pick’ function (white flag) shown below:-

Now I could make the edits.  I liked the lighting of this shot, but there is no real colour.  I decided to convert to black and white and emphasise the strings using contrast adjustments. However, at this point I was still uncertain about the composition.  The E String was in the left third but I felt that there may be too much to distract from it with the other strings to the right hand side.  To review further, I created a virtual copy of 49 and started experimenting with crops.  N.B. I accidentally edited the original rather than the copy, but the point is that by duplicating we can see the comparison during editing; something that would have required multiple contact sheets in the days of film.

I preferred the square crop of the right hand image in terms of the number of strings but now I felt that I’d made the composition imbalanced by making it a square as the bridge is in the centre of the frame which I wasn’t happy with.  Further edits of the duplicate image led to the final version shown below which goes back to landscape but limits the distractions in the frame.

For Printing

Printing is a more complex evolution of this workflow as an image on paper never looks like an image on the screen. The main reason for this is that the screen is backlit, which means like an old transparency we are viewing the photograph with incident backlight through the image.  We can see the details, highlights and shadows with a level of precision and make adjustments for the ideal photograph; only if it were a slide in the first place.  With a print, the image is lit by incident light but instead we see what is reflected from the surface of the paper.   Now we are dependent on the properties of the paper, the light source and of the printing itself in determining how the photograph looks to the viewer.

Lightroom does a great job of predicting what the photograph will look like for a given paper and use profiles for the digital photo printer being used.  Some photo paper manufacturers like Permajet even offer a printer calibration service where they will provide a custom profile for a given printer using a given paper; eliminating any manufacturing variances in the machine.   While technically impressive, the only real way of telling how well a print is going to turn out is to make a number of versions of the photograph and place them in different positions on a wall to see them under real conditions.  A few years ago, I entered the Taylor Wessing Portrait Competition with a shot of my friend Vikki, who had recently become World Champion in her age group for endurance Duathlon (below)

For this image I printed 8 different versions on 3 different papers with adjustments of contrast and white balance.  I hung them in my office for a couple of days and revisited them regularly to see which image had the look that I had in mind for the competition.  It was important to take time over this process, something that I also found in Assignment 2 where I considered making the shots black and white.  In that case, the conclusion was that the rawness of the make-up free skin was lost in the conversion, which meant that some of the emotions were also lost.  The look I was going for was more of an honest visual than a movie poster, which is how I saw the impact of the conversion.

Conclusion

The conversation that started this piece was centred around the need for contact sheets in modern photography and how relevant it was to this course in particular if the work was predominantly digital.  It was useful to examine my workflow in more detail as with some subjects that I routinely shoot, the number of images is generally large and the process of selection has become automatic.  I’ve had to be efficient with selection, simply because of the time available.  I conclude from this that tools such as Lightroom have made the process more efficient, but the core needs of selection remain the same; methodical review, proposed edits to make the image, and maintaining the history so that another print can be made in the future.  Does focusing on the selection process change my photography?  I believe my approach has evolved through the subjects that I shoot as well as my interest in film.  The technologies may differ, but they are analogous in the intention behind the approaches.  The irony though, is that where we have to contend with hard drive storage, the contact sheets made by famous film photographers are tangible and in some cases extremely valuable.  Perhaps not all that is digital is an improvement after all.

References

[1] Image resource, “Chihuahua, New York City, 1946. © Elliot Erwitt / Magnum Photos”. https://www.featureshoot.com/2015/11/get-lost-in-the-contact-sheets-of-magnum-photographers-elliot-erwitt-martin-parr-eve-arnold-and-more/, accessed July 2019

[2] Image resource “Elliott Erwitt: Dogs”, Huxley-Parlour, https://huxleyparlour.com/elliott-erwitt-dogs/