Photographing People and Places with Ron Frampton at Dillington House

I decided to do a workshop at Dillington House in Somerset with Ron Frampton since it corresponded with the subject of this People and Place module. Ron is an extremely accomplished photographer (he has a Fenton medal from the RPS) who photographs the people and the landscape of the area in which he lives which is just south of the Blackdowns; I live on the north side of the Blackdowns, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

The course dealt with three disciplines; portrait, architecture and landscape. Ron gave us notes for all these, a page of salient points for each discipline. The nuts and bolts of photography! I find them necessary; if one wants to break the rules in the interests of creativity, it helps if one knows the rules first.

Ron's guidance helps one to achieve a pleasing image as can be seen in the image below.

Marion : model !

In making this Black and White image, I used a digital camera (Canon 5D mark 11) with RAW capture and a profile I have made for the camera with the relevant ISO. After processing the colour image in Lightroom, I applied the black and white mode and used the colour filtration to emphasise the different tones, in particular that of the model's skin. Finally, using Levels in Photoshop, I gave the image a final tweak and a slightly warm tone.

A black and white image : a lot of work was done to present a pleasing array of tones
and make sure there was detail in the darker background.

Ron asked us to sign a form to say that we would not use photographs of the models in anyway without first seeking permission; this was a good reality check. Although we did have to pay for the models, we did not pay enough to grant us public use.

However, during the first session I did some modelling and after requesting use of a photo of Marion, Ron with Marion's consent granted me limited usage as well as a short private session with the model in which I photographed her against the Ham stone of the Dillington buildings. This resulted in the following image that is a composite of two photographs, the other one being of a toilet roll; the two have been blended and some filtration applied.

I call this Lulu; constructed for an OCA competition

Someone commented that this image has "narrative possibilities"; I agree but at this point do not wish to suggest what those narratives might be! It was partially inspired by Magritte and pre-visualised to a certain extent.

We also photographed another model, Brendan Bruelan, a young man in his early thirties who is about to set out as a professional photographer. The agreement signed during the workshop prevents me from using any of these on my blog

In the afternoon, we photographed the models running past with the house in the background; one really needed to get the exposure right as well as pre-focusing.

Ron's workshop was very much about getting down to the basics of photography and tripods were in use all the time which certainly helps to create sharper images. In these days of higher ISO speeds and Image Stabilised lenses, tripods are often forgotten and quality suffers. We also used manual focus and I switched off the Image Stabilisation as it can interfere with the image; Live View in which one can blow up a certain area of the image certainly helps a lot with focusing. An electronic cable release was further used to avoid camera shake.

On the sunday morning, we went out to photograph a church nearby. The mid-morning light was streaming in from one side rather than from behind us which gave added texture to the building. There was however a Yew tree to the left side, the tones of which might well present a problem particularly in black and white; Ron however reckoned there was enough light on it to prevent this happening. Ron advised us to focus on the nettles in the foreground which was an interesting suggestion ... it aimed to avoid blurry vegetation in the foreground!

country church in colour

country church in black and white

the black and white image with less orange filtration

Ron suggested we bracket our shots and that digital, owing to the tendency of highlights to blow out, might be best slightly under-exposed. This is a debatable point since other photographers suggest that exposing for the highlights is the right way to go as the highlights contain more information that lower tones! Of course, one needs to be careful not to loose any values but even with a few "blinkies" on the LCD screen, values can be contained owing to the larger colour space available in processing (for Lightroom this is a form of ProPhoto RGB).

Photographing inside the church was possible and on Ron's suggestion I made the following image ...

However, it became clear that it was not possible to contain all the values or tones in a single image owing to the wide range in contrast between darker objects in the church and the bright light shining through the windows! Making a series of different exposures and then blending them in HDR seemed necessary ...

This made it possible to record all the tones yet a lot of work needed doing to create the final image and a colour version just seemed too difficult. It would have been better if I had focused on the windows rather than on the prone statue as the window detail is the main centre of interest in this image.

I made a final image of a large oak that stands below the church ...

Oak Tree : processing of this image worked to emphasise the blue - green contrast

This image also became the setting for the group photo that I made with a timed release
having just enough time to make it from the camera to the group!
 

A close up of the group in black and white !

THERE IS SUCH A THING AS A FREE LUNCH : OCA DAY IN LONDON

OCA tutor, Jose Navarro, meets OCA students

OCA visit to the London Street Photography Exhibition and the Deutshe Borse Prize 2011 exhibition (Friday April 15'th)

After a train journey that arrived ¾ of an hour late and cost a sum I do not wish to think about, I find my way to the Museum of London to meet Jose and other OCA students; by the time I arrive they are already in the exhibition and I find Jose watching Behind The Lens, a video about contemporary street photography.

This is a very informative video and features four photographers who expand on what this particular medium means to them.

The exhibition itself is in one large room and laid out chronologically with various sections. The first is  the early days when photography was largely restricted to imaging the static (1860 – 1889) as emulsions were not able to capture movement, making cameras dependent on slow shutter speeds; even in portraiture, this could present problems.

A particularly interesting feature of the exhibition is small screens implanted in the walls showing videos, the earliest of which revealed film footage from the late nineteenth century. It was fascinating to see what a street scene looked like in London at this time with horse drawn carts being the major form of transport on the busy roads across which pedestrians had to make their way perilously by dodging traffic. It hinted at times no less frenetic than our own; in fact, crossing a street in London these days must be much safer and more relaxed.

Even in the bygone days when black and white was the only medium, one was struck by the amount of detail that could be recorded. This is often greater than in colour photography which has less latitude in terms of tone owing to the larger dynamic range possible with black and white film when exposed and developed appropriately.

A photo of a woman walking in Hyde Park (1895) reminded me of an image by Lartigue. This image may have been selected because of this correspondence.

1930-1945 was a section that covered the war years but there was no real record of that conflict here. Instead, the images were of the spirited life to be found on the streets at that time while the accompanying video showed cheeky children who seemed intent on getting into the films that were being made by ogling at the camera; this appeared to be incidental to the making of the films that seemed to be concerned with simply documenting the streets of that time.

On the final wall of the exhibition, a quote in large lettering informed one that “Street Photography is photography in it’s simplest form.”

I met Jose and another student examining a large colour panoramic image. Would it look different in black and white? If the photographer had been working in black and white then might he not have made a different kind of image? In fact, the colour in the photo is largely monotone with a touch of blue and a great deal of red; the red dominates the image and helps to add a certain excitement to the street scene in which people pass by in a crowded rush.

My reactions to the exhibition centre around the surprisingly revealing video as well as the way in which the photographs record different stages in the development of photography with earlier images harking back to a time when photography was more innocent, a novelty for many, to a time when many seem to be suspicious of it and we live in an age of visual saturation in which are lives are greatly influenced by imagery.

I cannot help but wonder whether this change in the nature of photography also reflects a more general change in the way we now see the world.

Jose mentions that there is a lot of humour in the exhibition; I realize this is something that I have missed. In fact, I need to visit again because so much of my time was spent watching the video rather than looking at the photographs on display.

Jon Gay was a photographer from the early to middle part of the last century who used large cameras to make his street photographs; the contemporary photographer, Simon Roberts, works in a similar way as his Election Project shows. Both photographers although about half a century apart used large cameras on vehicles as a way to capture street scenes, the higher elevation allowing more of the street to be photographed.

With the arrival of the Leica camera and faster emulsions, photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson paved the way for a new kind of photography in which the ephemeral could be captured sometimes in an artistic way. The gestalt of photography changed.

Alex Webb is a notable street photographer who uses colour.

Jose orders lunch !

Jose invites us all to lunch! IT IS A FREE LUNCH ! A general round of appreciation for Gareth of the OCA for arranging this.

A few of the students exchange their experiences of being challenged while photographing in public places particularly train stations. Unknown to us (at least certainly to me) one student present actually works as a train driver!! Our experiences seem to be similar, being told we are not allowed to photograph when in fact, there are no rules in place to prohibit us merely the angst of those working in the stations. Network Rail for instance not only allows photography in their stations, they even welcome it, at least that is what someone told me when I asked for permission.

With a preponderance of black and white images in the exhibition, the topic of making black and white images came up for discussion. One used to be able to purchase (possibly one still can) small monocles that when looked through rendered the scene in black and white; nowadays, one can use the live screen on the back of a camera to compose in black and white. There is also a method to take a photograph as a black and white JPEG while simultaneously recording a RAW which would retain the colour information.

Do black and white filters, such as an orange for darkening the sky, have any use today? Possibly if they help to retain certain values that might not be otherwise retained (for instance yellow to retain some cloud details) but since the recording sensors are all colour, one wonders if such filters would have any effect at all in the recording of detail. The Black and White adjustment layer in Photoshop can be applied in post-processing to achieve the effects that black and white filters make possible.

Black and White has a nostalgic appeal.

Filters for colour photography are still used; notably, gradient and polarizing filters.

entrance to the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize 2011

After lunch, we took the tube to Baker Street and Ambika P3, a temporary gallery that is home to the Photographers Gallery while their main building is being renovated. Here, we saw the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize 2011, a shortlist of four photographers whose work is considered for making the best contribution to photography in the last year. While the London Street Photography exhibition was as much about the history of London as photography, the emphasis here was very much on some of the best work in photography at the current time.

The exhibition is housed in a large warehouse rather than a smart city centre building and one is at first struck by Thomas Demand’s giant sized photograph of an organ (musical not fleshy!?) which he apparently destroyed after photographing. The point is that this makes the print unique as it is the only record of that particular image. I like this because most large printed photographs are not of such fine quality yet it seems to be printed on some kind of art paper that gives a rather flat quality to the work. Clive W mentions that it plays on a rather obvious photographic quality; I find that it would be better if it made the metal of the organ look like metal rather than some other less reflective material. A shinier kind of printing paper might not work though since it would be too reflective of its’ surroundings.

Most of us seem to be impressed by Jim Goldberg’s presentation since it does give such a powerful message to his documentary work. There is a bank of four, foot level video-screens that show a variety of subjects such as school children playing and singing while an elderly man stares intently at the lens for awhile. Another encouraging aspect to his work, is the way he is obviously making contact with his subjects who are co-operating with him, evident in the images of men who bare the wounds they have suffered after being tortured. As a Magnum photographer, Goldberg might be an obvious choice for the winner and yet his established authority in photography might work against his brilliant work.

Our group meet up in front of a wall on which there is a mosaic of photographs by Goldberg and we exchange views on the subject. What, if anything, lies behind the way they have been positioned on the wall? Has the positioning been motivated by size since the two largest images have been hung to the sides while the next to largest have been hung in between these in a fairly orderly manner with the smallest ones being fitted around these. Perhaps the positioning is a result of content with coherent links and yet this is not obvious. Perhaps the largely chaotic array is there to mirror the themes represented of modernity, rooted-ness and loneliness to name a few.

Clive is quite dismissive of Goldberg seeing him as an American cultural imperialist, taking advantage of the poor to present a pleasant form of entertainment. He comments ...


"Why print the Polaroid negs with their borders, or have the large image as a patchwork of sheets, or the kaleidoscopic hang, or the crumpled enprint balanced on a frame; that struck me as particularly arch.
It seemed to me that these were elements of playful entertainment which struck a discord with the serious subject matter; as if to make it more palatable for the audience.
It’s a personal opinion, I’m not being didactic. It’s up to everyone to make their own reading. Those were my reservations."

Jose and Virginia with others enjoy a final cup of tea at the Deutsche Borse exhibition

I wonder if these images are really about poverty. Facing Demand’s large print is another large print by Goldberg though this one is done on poor quality paper of which 36 pieces are used to make up the one image of a man standing with a dead goat in the middle of a huge rubbish tip. We are told the goat is rancid though I wonder whether the photographer knew that or is just assuming it to be so. Has the man just picked up the goat from the rubbish or is he carrying it? I am beginning to see Clive’s point of view.

The two other photographers, Roe Etheridge and Elad Lassry, are in an adjoining room and are both more art orientated; I would like to have spent more time here but do not. Neither do I get to see the video that is showing about the exhibition.

I am struck by some of Roe Etheridge’s photos of women that have a classic film star look to them although they are apparently ordinary people even if they do happen to be models. Lassry’s photo-shopped four eyed male is subtly done.

One student is provoked by a couple of fuzzy green tomatoes.

Jose comments on the way a magazine page has been used instead of a print.


Eventually it is time to make my way to the station and say goodbye. The end of another enjoyable OCA student day in which I have had the chance to interact with other students and learn something about the nature of photography through discussion with a couple of OCA tutors. 

response to assignment 5

another day at the Taj Mahal

A tour agent tries to snare a Nigerian tourist

It was my eighth visit to the Taj Mahal. While this may seem to be an obsessive preoccupation, each time I visit I try to find new photos to make often with some kind of brief in mind.

On this occasion, I decided to try manual exposure. It was mid-morning (10 a.m) when I arrived and so the sun was quite high in the sky and there were not to be much change in the brightness of the light. After awhile, I decreased the exposure by a third of a stop while I found that areas of complete shadow required an increase in two stops of exposure.

I could not increase the exposure here because of the mausoleum in the background

too intimate an image perhaps? it was good to get a bit of audience participation
and although it might appear otherwise, this photograph was not posed for!

At the suggestion of another photographer, Raghu Rai, who has done a book on the Taj Mahal and has visited many times, I sat in one place and photographed from there only. This was an interesting exercise and allowed me to capture passer-bys with the Taj Mahal in the background. Being in the shade cast by a minaret also made it more comfortable than walking around in the sun.

One thing I might have done is to use fill flash to lighten up shadow areas while I was out in the light.

From Back Home (exhibition at the National Media Museum in Bradford, Yorkshire)

FROM BACK HOME

An exhibition of photographs by Anders Petersen and JH Engstrom at the National Media Museum in Bradford, Yorkshire.

I attach this rather shoddy looking photograph of the Cadbury's factory taken from the train as it exemplifies the kind of loosely constructed image that appears in the Back From Home exhibition; the colour castes over the image come from reflections in the train window.

I came to this exhibition misinformed, thinking it was about landscape and hence was surprised perhaps disappointed to find it was more about place and people, nevertheless a fitting subject for someone presently engaged in the OCA People and Place module. The photograph used to advertise the exhibition was of a fleeting horse with a house in the background; this image suggested romanticism yet the subject matter was generally much more down to earth than that. At first, the banality of the photography struck me since much of the imagery was concerned with hedonistic activity that might well be considered life but not necessarily what everyone would consider life. I felt I was being challenged by these images, being made aware of my comfort zone; this made it worthwhile making the long journey up from the south since I came as a student, ready to learn.

This body of work has been described as being concerned with “experience, memory and the human condition.” It is the result of a seven year collaboration between the two photographers about an area in Central West Sweden called Varmland where they had both spent their formative years. The work is described as “an intense voyage of discovery into both the place and the people that shaped them.”

The first series of photographs I looked at were by JH Engstrom in which he uses a camera with flash to photograph people, resulting in dark studio like backgrounds. Some of these images are in colour, those of the more elderly people in black and white; the young are often photographed full body length while the elderly are more likely to be pictured with head and shoulders. Many of these images are of couples embracing.

There are other images that are more general views that include house interiors, chickens by their hutch, and landscapes often from an aerial perspective. Some large frames contain a collection of photographs collaged together. Engstrom writes of this work …

These images pay homage

To the people and landscapes that are my origins.

I return to something my body and emotions recognise.

The other part of this exhibition shows Anders Peterson’s work. His images are also mostly of people with backgrounds that say something but not much about the area under consideration. There is not much sense of composition in these images, they are beyond formalism; the subject matter is much more important. Anders Petersen writes of this work that it contains “little hard memories of sad and lonely times” yet there is more to these words that appear on the exhibition wall for he continues by saying “there is also a streak of warm confidence”. He also writes that “my memories can never be destroyed, because they no longer end in themselves.”

This exhibition suffers perhaps because it was not arranged by the photographers themselves; a more formal rather than de-constructivist hand has been at work. This exhibition comes “from a well-established tradition of stream-of-consciousness, diaristic photography. Born out of existential thinking … less objective photography.”

The free brochure accompanying the exhibition also states that this collection of photographs “elegantly demonstrates the power of photography to be intimate and personal, while accessible to the viewer” while “images are affectionate, sometimes brutal and sometimes funny” evoking “contradictory, yet complementary emotions” that make this exhibition noteworthy.

The next part of the day was a CONVERSATION BETWEEN JH ENGSTROM AND GREG HOBSON: in other words, one of the contributing photographers and the exhibition curator. The other photographer Anders Petersen had been advised not to travel to Bradford on the advice of his doctor; this was a little disappointing since he was the older of the two photographers and the mentor of the younger Engstrom.

JH Engstrom photographer at the National Media Museum

Engstrom sat in pensive pose as he listened to Hobson talking; the session began with Hobson asking Engstrom questions.

How did Engstrom find his way into photography? He does not find this an easy question to answer and yet his reply is interesting. As a young boy of ten, he was taken to Paris where he lived with his family for a couple of years or so. Everyday he had to make his way across town to attend the Swedish School and during this somewhat complicated journey, he witnessed many scenes of life some of which included violence; this had a tremendous impact on him. Later, the camera helped him to formulate such experiences and he has received a formal photographic education. He moved back to Paris and met someone who made him aware that photography is an interesting medium through which a living can be made. He begged the well-known fashion photographer Mario Testino for a job, telling him that he admired his work when in fact he had never seen it! However, he found he was not really attracted to fashion photography and preferred taking film to the lab for processing since it allowed him time to read on the metro. There is a need to be serious about one’s work (connected with it rather than half-hearted). He came into contact with Anders Petersen who eventually accepted him as a student when Engstrom became desperate; they became close, not just teacher and student but also like father and son. He then did a photo-book called Shelter about a place for homeless people; this was made in a the classic documentary tradition and the book proved to be a success, winning a photographic book of the year award in Sweden.

Engstrom is exploring the subject through the subject. Photography is a language and ultimately the photograph, although it contains imagery is just a piece of paper.

Hobson remarked that when people come and show him their portfolios, he often advises them not to mix colour with black and white photography yet he notices that Engstrom has done this during his exhibition. Engstrom answers directly by saying, “You gave them bad advice!”

Engstrom is still largely an analogue, black and white photographer, who also uses large format cameras as well as throwaway cameras in some cases!

Peoples response to the camera has changed hence some of the old approaches do not work.

Engstrom uses darkroom techique such as that of overexposing prints.

Photography is about everything except reality; there is a dreamy, imaginary feel to Engstrom’s work and also a graphic quality.

We see a slide show of Engstrom’s work that is centred around his wife, her pregnancy, their son … only at the end are we shown that this was a Ceasarean birth which suddenly brings together what at first seemed like a disconnected group of images. The images might seem shallow, poorly constructed but they are about life and one cannot argue with that.

There then follows a film about Anders Petersen, the absent photographer, and we enter into his hedonistic world in which he seems to be smoking and drinking himself slowly to death. Petersen talks of his love of connecting with others and that this is the premise for photography. In the film, Engstrom advises him to take care of himself and it ends on a positive note by saying that Petersen has given up his 2 boxes of cigarettes a day habit and is now producing some of his best work.

Engstrom now accepted questions from the audience. Gareth Dent of the Open College of the Arts asked why there were so many young people in his photographs of the Varmland; Engstrom replied that this was probably because he grew up there and was young there.

The concept of place can be very personal as well as empirical, ethnographic, when the emphasis is on the place being documented.

OCA tutor, Alan Whetton, who remarked after I took this photograph, that it was "uncalled for"! Possibly it was but its' a nice photo to attach to my blog and helps 

put a human face to the OCA.

The next and final part of the day was the meeting with other students from the OCA including Gareth Dent, OCA CEO, and Alan Whetton, a photographic tutor with whom I had had a short chat before the session with Engstrom. Alan mentioned that there were a lot of difficult images in the exhibition and the slide show that were not easy to resonate with.

One saw the hard life of the artist being portrayed. Possibly the melancholy of Swedish life, a country that is said to have the highest suicide rate in the world.

I said that I felt that both these photographers were more artists than photographers, a statement that Gareth asked me to justify. At the time I could not and I also felt that it might steer the discussion away from the general topic of the photographers and the exhibition. In hindsight, I can write that both the photographers seemed to be shooting with a disregard for the basics of photography (composition, depth of field etc) and by so-doing were making works of art rather than documents; generally speaking, photography is concerned with both document and art and when one deviates from either by going to an extreme, for instance photographing bacteria through a microscope would be another extreme, one starts to loose the essence of photography although images of bacteria might be both colourful and contain designs. As a student, I do not want to be drawn too far in either direction except on a temporary basis as my work might cease to become relevant and suffer from self indulgence.

Gareth thinks that I have found a certain area of photography and am happy with that. He is right and yet I attend such days with the OCA because I do want to see the wider implications of photography which I see as sharing ground with art but in danger of being swallowed up by art and hence loosing its’ uniquesness as an expressive medium. This is not as eccentric a view as might be presumed as Roland Barthes, many of course question his view of photography, mentions at the end of his book that photography is wild and art threatens to tame it.

Alan Whetton praises the work of Engstrom and Petersen as being honest and intimate.

Gareth notes that Engstrom looked very uncomfortable during the discussion and asks me for a photograph to show that!

His photography is mostly about himself, his search.

As Alan Whetton talks, the OCA group listens

Alan comments that when he goes out to photograph, he has a plan, an objective. With Fay Godwin, everything was calculated since apart from taking great care with her compositions, often waiting around till the light was right, while she also used Ordanance Survey maps!

The approach of Petersen and Engstrom is much more spontaneous and yet there is a plan with Petersen who deliberately draws his subjects out exuding a public persona with bravado to match in order to make his images.

What did I gain from seeing this exhibition? Probably a much better understanding of an approach to photography that often strikes me as banal yet worthwhile since it does show something of life and may prove to be an interesting document of our time.

There is however, as others comment, nothing here to uplift one. One senses darkness and negativity not only in the images but also in the photographers.

Could work like this be made in the UK!?

The photographers know their subject very well and have produced it well. I can not help but wonder how accurate a document it is though of the Varmland and what the reactions of people who live there might be to such an exhibition. Is it really about the Varmland or something else!?

Alan mentions that he is re-photographing some of the places that Fay Godwin photographed while in Bradford and it is interesting to see how much some places have changed and how little other places have.

At the end of the visit, I revisit the exhibition with Gareth and another student. Gareth wonders whether these photographs differ much from the kind of images millions of people put on their Facebook pages. I reckon they differ quite a lot because when one examines them one sees they are well constructed for the most part in spite of their initial amateurish appearance; they are of course also framed prints and not merely images.

A lot of the people portrayed in Petersen’s seminal book Café Lehmitz are pictured as being close but are not intimate; there is a kind of friction here.

REFLECTIONS ON THE WORK OF RAGHU RAI

I first met Raghu Rai over 15 years ago when I went to his office at a newspaper he was working for at the time. He looked through some of my photos I had brought him, made some comments and we talked. He wanted to know what number an ordinary skylight filter was as he was planning on changing to one of these, after using a warm-up filter for his work. I knew the answer was a 1A and told him, reflecting upon the fact that I knew more than an accomplished photographer although it mattered little; it was a stark reminder that photography was not about facts or knowledge but seeing. At that moment, I could not see very well and wondered what made Raghu Rai such a renowned photographer other than the fact that he was an established one.

With the launch of an exhibition of Ragu Rai’s in England, I find myself with a gifted copy of the exhibition catalogue that I am going to give to the Open College of the Arts. Before I do so, it seems sensible to reflect upon it. The cover is of a sadhu (holy man) looking straight into the camera with a hypnotic stare. It is not one of Raghu’s most sensitive photographs but it is attention grabbing and hence makes a good book cover; the subject of the photograph also contains a collection of people yet most are not connected with the photographer.

The catalogue contains an introduction by Niru Ratnam entitled Public Space in Raghu Rai’s Photography. A closer examination of this seems pertinent to my OCA course as well as helping me to understand what Raghu Rai’s work is about. The following text is from Niru Ratnam …

“..outdoor space in India, revealing something particular and complex about the relationship between the public sphere and the private sphere in India.”

“…public sphere of India significantly different  … dissolves the easy distinction between public and private.”

“… striking ways in which Rai portrays public space – and to tease out how this is significantly different to Western modernist photographers and other Magnum photographers.”

“ … Rai captures the ordered chaos of public space in India. A profusion of activities takes place but on closer inspection this plenitude is almost choreographed by an unseen hand.” (These comments are made about an older photograph from 1964 called Traffic at Chawri Bazaar, Delhi).

“If we fast-forward forty years to Rai’s recent work, “A Bazaar, Old Delhi” (2006) it becomes clear that the street is still a shared space.”

“In this “three-speed” image (there are three different layers to this photograph visible in a sleeping man, traffic passing and shops in the background), Rai seems to convey the heterogeneity of activity going on.”

“… we can’t simply use terms such as “public space” and “private space” from a Eurocentric perspective.”

“The public spaces that Rai investigates seems to be more layered and more multi-valent …”

“… the large-scale communal religious ritual is a common feature that takes place that takes place within the Indian landscape and that Rai has returned to photographing over the years.”

“… a distinction between the individual and the crowd; a suggestion that in these public  displays of group identity, the individual can break away for time apart if they should so wish.”

“The men sit and wait but somehow by doing this they seem communally joined. They do not seem like the atomized individual that is such a popular trope in Western Modernism.”

“Whilst in the West the religious ritual is almost wholly imagined inside public buildings such as the church or the cathedral, Rai’s work shows that Indian religious ritual is rooted in the landscape.”

“… the idea of public space acting as a stage is present in all of these works .. “

“The idea of stage is heightened by the way Rai captures individuals going about activities that co-opt outdoor public space for some sort of individual or communal function.”

“In a series of recent works made in 2010 Rai has taken this idea of the stage one step further by asking subjects to stand in front of painted backdrops.”

“What is Rai suggesting here? I think that this series suggests that it is impossible to demarcate the boundary between the “real” and the “staged” in documentary photography; the click of a camera produces the stage whether the subjects of the photograph know it or not.”

“… makes us question what exactly is public and what exactly is private; and what is the nature of these everyday acts that we stage in public spaces fr the benefit of ourselves and for the benefit of others.”

Having faithfully recorded some of Niru Ratnam’s comments in an attempt to better understand Raghu Rai’s work, I feel I can also note the way I understand Rai’s work after having looked at it over the years. Firstly, I see it as very informative of a country, India, which is often liked by the outside world but not very well understood. Its’ not just that Raghu Rai’s photographs are extremely well constructed and composed in a way that may delight the eye, their subject matter is also fascinating and meanings at first not apparent might be discovered later. For me then, the appeal of his work is more than just the excellent photography for his images are as much documents as works of art.

more about the Taylor Wessing Portrait Photography prize

I come across this piece of news ... it makes me reflect further on the day I attended at the NPG recently!!

London's National Portrait Gallery has found itself in an embarrassing situation involving one of the judges for its prestigious annual Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize who, it was recently discovered, is in an intimate relationship with one of the prize winners. The fact only came to light after the couple appeared at the awards ceremony with their young baby.

Harry Borden, an award-winning portrait photographer himself, was chosen back in August 2010 as one of the six judges to determine the four recipients of the coveted prize. By the time the award ceremony was held in November, it was clear that fourth-prize winner Abbie Trayler-Smith was the mother of Borden's child. "It was only at that moment, on that night, that I realized that we should investigate," Sandy Nairne, director of the NGP, told ArtsDesk.com.

The National Portrait Gallery's annual Photographic Portrait Prize draws thousands of applicants each year, serving as a standard by which to judge the leaders in contemporary portrait photography. There are four winners each year and this year's top prize and the accompanying £12,000 went to David Chancellor for his captivating image of a modern-day Diana-esque teenage deer-hunter.

After the revelation of the apparent conflict of interest, an investigation of Borden's actions was conducted by an independent committee and it was determined that Trayler-Smith's prize would not be confiscated, although the kerfuffle has lead the NPG to lay out guidelines for subsequent years, dictating that judges be briefed about declaring conflicts of interest immediately.

Nairne said that Borden told him he did not know that Trayler-Smith had entered the competition when he was asked to judge. Also, since the competition is judged anonymously and the work is reviewed without the names attached, Borden insists that he did not violate any rules.

One might argue, however, that it it would be extremely strange if the subject of the competition never came up over the dinner table, and that it is also unlikely that Borden would not recognize her photograph of an obese teenager from her series entitled "Childhood Obesity." "Obviously it's none of my business to comment on their relationship," stated Nairne diplomatically — although, clearly, Borden himself should have commented so as to avoid the embarassment.