Cindy Sherman is one of the world’s leading artists – for 30 years, she has starred in all her photographs – and yet the more we see of her, the less recognisable she is. She’s a Hitchcock heroine, a busty Monroe, an abuse victim, a terrified centrefold, a corpse, a Caravaggio, a Botticelli, a mutilated hermaphrodite sex doll, a man in a balaclava, a surgically-enhanced Hamptons type, a cowgirl, a desperate clown, and we’ve barely started.
Shots of movies that never existed
This lively description of Cindy Sherman comes from a Guardian interview in 2011. I first came across her work in the 1977 “Complete Untitled Film Stills”. These are a series of 69 black and white photographs described in the same article as “a brilliantly novel concept – grainy shots of movies that never existed.” The pictures were shot across a range of locations including her NY studio, New York, Long Island and Arizona. They now reside in MoMA, New York. Inspired by film, TV and pop culture imagery, full of irony and depicting clichéd characters, the series challenged cultural stereotypes of women. They created an enthralling and highly ambiguous, narrative at the same time. Her talent was evident not only as a photographer, but as a highly accomplished model, make-up artist, story-teller and stylist.
As a film fan and of film noir in particular there is much to like in the film stills: the concept, the noir and horror influences, Sherman’s ability to metamorphosise and the ambiguity of her images. Like David Lynch, who channels his subconscious to produce his films, Sherman appears to be an artist who works with the unconscious and interprets her work afterwards. As she said herself , “I often don’t know what I’m going after until after it’s shot. It’s amusing how far someone can stretch my intentions and make a concept that fits their theories.” To take pictures that clearly tell a story, but not one the viewer can quite make out, is something I aspire to to, but only rarely achieve. Cindy Sherman has achieved this throughout her career – through which she has had plenty of labels applied to her work. It has been called feminist, postmodernist and post-structuralist, but her work is that of a performance artists and it is often hard to categorise.
Self portraits that are anything but
Like another of my favourite photographers Brassaï, Cindy Sherman started out as a painter, working in the super-realist style. She soon moved to photography and began using a combination of costume make-up, pose, expression and location to alter her appearance. In doing so she created images of herself that were anything but self portraits. She has described herself as anonymous in her work, and has commented that she never sees herself in her own pictures. Her performance art approach and her skilled mimicry make this a highly credible claim “I’ll see a photograph of a character and try to copy them on to my face” she once said. This is an idea that I admire, but that I also find somewhat unsettling.
Challenging to hang over the sofa
In 1980 Sherman moved from black and white to colour and from there, nervous about her success, she deliberately produced less marketable work. Admirably she described it as “making things that would challenge someone to hang it over their sofa.” She started to use mannequins as well as prosthetics in much darker and more grotesque work. I will admit to liking this far less than the Untitled Film Stills, but it needs to be considered as part of the extraordinary re-invention of both herself and her work over the years.
Central in an era of consumerism and image proliferation
The importance of Cindy Sherman’s work is well described in an article on The Art Story:
Turning the camera on herself in a game of extended role playing of fantasy Hollywood, fashion, mass advertising, and “girl-next-door” roles and poses, Sherman ultimately called her audience’s attention to the powerful machinery and make-up that lay behind the countless images circulating in an incessantly public, “plugged in” culture. Sexual desire and domination, the fashioning of self identity as mass deception, these are among the unsettling subjects lying behind Sherman’s extensive series of self-portraiture in various guises. Sherman’s work is central in the era of intense consumerism and image proliferation at the close of the 20th century.
In the era of the selfie, everyone can be their own photographer, model and stylist. To re-invent yourself completely shot-by-shot as Cindy Sherman has, and for the pictures to be so durable, is another matter altogether.
It was in the Mississippi Delta that sharecroppers first fused the rhythms and tones of Africa with the scale and instruments of American folk music to produce the blues. This new musical form was was first described by touring musician WC Handy in Memphis in 1903. By the 1920s the first blues records were being made. By the late 1920s Charley Patton had emerged from an anonymous folk tradition to become a blues superstar. He was followed in the 1930s by many more stars, most notably the hugely influential Son House and the legendary Robert Johnson (though Robert was little known in his own lifetime). The Delta blues started to move beyond the South, up the Mississippi river into the Midwest, aided in its spread by the phenomenon known as the “juke joint”. This was an informal establishment, sometimes a “shotgun shack”, that provided music, dancing, gambling, and drinking for the sharecroppers, whose lives were exceedingly hard. In the 1940s the blues evolved into electric, urban forms such as Chicago Blues, popularised by Muddy Waters, which later formed the basis of rock ‘n roll.
Highway 61
The City of Clarksdale is located in the heart of the Delta, at the intersection of Highways 61 and 49. This is the crossroads famed for Robert Johnson’s legendary Faustian pact. From Memphis it is about an hour and a half’s drive down the “Blues Highway” (Highway 61) which follows the Mississippi river for much of its route. Highway 61 is much more than a road in the US; it is second only to Route 66 as the most famous highway in American music. Many blues artists have recorded songs about this storied road; “Honeyboy” Edwards, Big Joe Williams, and Mississippi Fred McDowell amongst them. Bob Dylan said of it “Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I began. I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere, even down in to the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors … It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.” Needless to say, I was happy to take the Blues Highway to Clarksdale.
Gateway to the Blues Museum, Tunica
The Gateway to the Blues Visitors Center and Museum was my first stop. It lies directly on Highway 61 between Memphis and Clarksdale, close to Tunica’s casino area (Mississippi’s Las Vegas), and less than an hour from Memphis. The Museum is housed in a beautifully restored one-room, nineteenth century train depot, and serves as a gateway to the blues music scene across the the Mississippi Delta. It was, for me, more impressive on the outside that in, but that is no criticism – for a photographer that is often the case and it is a really iconic building. Inside there is a great collection of guitars, information on the hundred or so blues trail markers, and a good selection of blues merchandise and literature. I got talking to the staff at the museum as I was buying some merchandise (a Robert Johnson T shirt), and admitted to being an amateur musician. In fact being a musician was my first choice of career and I’ve always felt a little regret that I ‘sold out’ to pursue a more conventional job. I characterised this a little thoughtlessly, given where I was, and what I was buying there. I used the phrase ‘sold my soul to the devil’ to describe the (alleged) sell out. I’ve used the description before more than once before and received a smile as a result, but that wasn’t the case this time. Note to self – never make reference to selling your soul to the devil in the Deep South! One of the women nearly jumped out of her skin and the other looked most discomforted. I assured them that this was not literally what I did, and that it was just a figure of speech, and apologised for alarming them.
Speaking of my music, there’s a link to one of my blues tracks below. I think the song is well crafted enough, but the recording is very much demo quality at best and the lead really needs re-doing as I just went at it full tilt and lost the plot a bit – I am by no means a shredder. That said, I know I’ll never re-record it. I have too many other tunes in my head that I need to get down, some of which I wrote many years ago. I rarely get time to record, which isn’t helped by the inordinate amount of time I take to lay down a track on my old school 16 track recorder.
The Delta Blues Museum
I headed into Clarkdale itself, to the Delta Blues Museum. It is located in an old freight depot built in 1926. The area it is situated in was deserted and a quite run down, and I was convinced that I was in the wrong place until I saw the Museum’s sign. It was established in 1979 as the first museum devoted to blues and moved to its current location 20 years later. Bearded guitar ace Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top played a big role in raising funds for the museum. He was also instrumental in bringing the largest and most important exhibit to the museum – the cabin where Muddy Waters once lived on the nearby Stovall plantation. The museum covers the who’s-who of the blues very comprehensively and I wandered around it contentedly for quite some time.
Blues Alley and Robert Johnson
The Delta Blues Museum is at number 1 Blues Alley. Right across the street is the Delta Blues Cafe, which has an old Cadillac art car parked outside and a haunting, peeling mural of Robert Johnson, the most potent legend of the blues, on the side of the building.
It was at crossroads of Highways 49 and 61 in Clarksdale, where legend has it that Robert did a deal with the devil, who retuned his guitar in exchange for his soul. Formally a harmonica player and an indifferent guitarist, he returned with such a mastery of the blues that Son House and other older guitarists were incredulous. The story circulated that Robert had sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads. “Cross Road Blues” and “Me and the Devil Blues”, have both contributed to the myth of a pact with Lucifer. In the latter song, Satan visits Robert early in the morning. “Hello Satan,” sings Robert, “I believe it’s time to go.”
Graveyard Versus Crossroads
In fact Robert had met and moved in with guitar player Ike Zimmerman and his family, and Ike became his tutor. They practised together amongst the tombstones in the quiet of a local graveyard. It is quite likely that the origin of the Faustian story came from another blues musician, named Tommy Johnson (no relation). Tommy cultivated a rather dark image to help promote his act. As part of this, according to his brother, he claimed to have sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in exchange for mastery of the guitar. Robert made no such claim. Tommy lived until 1956, whereas Robert only lived until 1938 (he was 27 when died and so later became a member of the 27 club.) Almost nothing was known about Robert until much later when some serious research was done and the story attached to the more mysterious figure. When I first heard of Robert in the 1980’s there were no known photographs of him. Even today there are only two. Robert recorded just 29 songs between 1936 and ‘37. Like him, most of these tunes have attained mythic status: “Cross Road Blues,” “Love In Vain,” “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” and “Sweet Home Chicago” are all Robert’s compositions. The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and the Allman Brothers have all recorded his songs. In 1933 Robert settled in Helena, Arkansas, where he met and played with bluesmen Robert Nighthawk, Elmore James, and Howlin’ Wolf amongst others. Helena, Arkansas was only a little out of my way on the way back to Memphis, so that was my next destination.
Across The Mighty Mississippi to Helena
The light was just starting to fade as I drove down Highway 49 through Lula and crossed the Mississippi River to enter Helena, Arkansas. Now in serious decline, the town played a significant role in blues history. It flourished during the steamboat era as a river port equipped with all music, gambling and night life the locals and deckhands could want. It was also the birthplace of a major blues radio show that began broadcasting to the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta in 1941.
Ghosts of the Historic District
I visited the Delta Cultural Centre, which is well worth a visit, and then started to wander in the atmospheric historic district. I immediately came across an iconic blues marker ‘Mississippi to Helena’. The area was deserted and in many places tumbling down. I stood in front of an abandoned storefront at 119 Missouri Street which used to house a juke joint called the Kit Kat Cafe. This is one of the few places we know Robert Johnson actually played. It was crumbling, and a faded and cracking picture in the window lent it an unsettling air. I continued to wander. In places the buildings are cordoned off as their tumble down state is so unsafe. At 201 Frank Frost Street (shown here) I took a shot of a building which I later found out was featured in the documentary ‘In Search of Robert Johnson.’ It had broken windows and a large sign saying ‘NO LOITERING’. I walked, entranced by the near ghost town, until there was no more light. At that point the slightly spooky nature of Helena was greatly amplified and I returned to my vehicle in a hurry, suddenly keen to return to the bright lights of Memphis, Tennessee.
At the age of 14 I was listening to a Pirate radio station broadcasting from the North Sea when I heard a track from George Thorogood and the Destroyers. It was probably a song from from their self-titled album of 1977. George was playing furious electric slide guitar and I had never heard anything like it. The power of that sound, along with that of punk, especially the Sex Pistols, inspired me to get an electric guitar and play it hard. Guitar driven music, especially the blues, has been part of my life ever since.
Nearly forty years later I found myself in Nashville, which is only a 3 hour drive from Memphis, which in turn is close to Mississippi and the Delta, so I took the opportunity do something I had wanted to do for many years: get on the blues trail.
Sun Studio
I started at Sun Studio, Memphis, one of the most revered landmarks in blues, country, rockabilly and rock and roll. Originally the Memphis Recording Service, Sun was founded by by the equally legendary Sam Phillipsin 1950. Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, B.B. King, Jerry Lee Lewis and many others started their recording careers there. Once our tour guide arrived, the few of us that had gathered in the adjacent cafe which is the rendez-vous point for the tour, went upstairs to the museum where he told us the story of Sun – an extraordinary tale of one man’s vision and persistence. Then he took us down to the studio to finish the story. He told the tale well – with knowledge, humour and great timing. The studio itself is tiny, but it is at is was in the 1950s, right down to the original acoustic tiling. One wall is lined with guitars (including Scotty Moore’s) and there is a stack of vintage Fender amps against another. When the tour finished, I got talking to the guide (or preacher as he refers to himself) and he was kind enough to show me the interior of the minuscule control room. As I had a recording on my phone of a track dedicated to Scotty Moore I asked him if I could play it in that hallowed space and he agreed. It was a magic moment.
Beale Street
There is a shuttle that runs from Sun Studio to Beale Street, which stops close to the Gibson Factory. The factory offers a tour of Gibson’s Memphis facility, and being a guitarist who plays a Gibson ES-Les Paul made in the same factory, I was keen to see how it was created. The tour guide walked us through the factory, pausing at the various stations dedicated to the shaping, assembling and finishing the instruments and providing us insights into the process. It takes about three weeks to make one of their hollow body guitars . Sadly, the facility is moving from Beale Street at some point, though Gibson say they are committed to retaining a presence in the Memphis area. From Gibson I walked to Beale Street proper. The area was created by an entrepreneur in 1841, and by the 1860s black traveling musicians had begun to perform there. By the 1900s, Beale Street was largely African-American owned, lined with clubs, restaurants and shops and the home of W. C. Handy, known as the Father of the Blues and the creator of the “Blues on Beale Street”. It continued to be home to the blues, and between the 1920s to the 1940s, Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Memphis Minnie, B. B. King, and other blues and jazz musicians played there, contributing to what became known as Memphis Blues. B. B. King got his famous initials from his billing as there as “the Beale Street Blues Boy.”
Today Beale Street is a very much a tourist destination, but it has a unique look and feel and if you get into a bar with live music it is really special. Of the shops, easily the most interesting is the old fashioned general store A. Schwab Trading Company, established in 1876. It is housed in the oldest remaining building on Beale Street and contains the Beale Street Museum and two floors of quirky merchandise, including some hoodoo (folk magic) items. Seeking give music, I found Vince Johnson and The Plantation All Stars at the atmospheric Blues Hall Juke Joint. The picture of them was taken with a Leica Q, (f2.8, 1/100, ISO 3200). I also saw Eric Hughes (solo) at the rather oddly-located wrestling themed King Jerry Lawler’s Hall of Fame. Both were excellent.
Also on Beale Street is the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum – an exhibition by the Smithsonian Institution, which opened its doors in 2000. The museum provides a journey from the rural origins of blues and soul in the 1930s, through the explosive growth driven by Sun and Stax labels up to the 1970s. It’s worth a look, not least because it provides some insights into the lives of the black and white sharecroppers whose music so influenced blues and soul music.
Memphis BBQ
Still on Beale Street, I had lunch at the Blues City Cafe, a pint of Guinness at Silky O’Sullivan’s (you have to go to see the goats), and dinner at BB Kings Blues Club. Much of the food on Beale street is Memphis-style barbecue, which is distinct from the other US regional BBQ styles of Kansas City, Texas and Carolina. Memphis-style barbecue is usually pork ribs slow cooked in a pit prepared either “dry” or “wet”. I had no idea what this meant before coming to Southern US. The difference was explained to me at a visit to the One & Only BBQ. “Dry” ribs are covered with a dry rub and eaten without sauce, whilst “wet” ribs are covered with sauce throughout cooking. Half wet, half dry is usually an option, and is what I tried. Portions are huge and the sides include devilled eggs, black-eyed peas and slaw mac-n-cheese. There are many starter options, but I particularly enjoyed the Polish Kielbasa sausage – which was smoked, dusted in dry rub and grilled and served as part of a sausage and cheese platter – a Memphis tradition. Being a tourist location, you’ll inevitably eat better off Beale Street than on it, but the location and live music more than make up for it.
Room 306 of The Lorraine Motel
The story of the blues, and of the South, is closely entwined with the story of black Americans and their struggle for equal rights, so it no is surprise that the National Civil Rights Museum is located in Memphis. In fact, the location is that of the assassination of Martin Luther King at The Lorraine Motel. Dr King was staying at the motel in April 1968 when he came to Memphis to support a strike. He was standing on the balcony of room 306 when he was fatally shot. The room has been preserved exactly as it was during his stay, a wreath hangs from the balcony and two white cars from that era – a 1959 Dodge and a 1968 Cadillac are parked in front of the motel. The picture of them and room 306 was again taken with a Leica Q (f8, 1/200, ISO 200). The air of regret and respect from visitors is tangible as you stand in front of room. The Motel is now the home of the Museum which guides visitors through five hundred years of history, from early slave resistance to the protests of the civil-rights movement. It is a very worthwhile visit. Reading about the motel afterwards, I learned that it has a strong connection to the blues as black musicians would stay at there while they were recording in Memphis, due to its long standing status as a safe haven for black visitors to Memphis.
The Blues Hall of Fame
Only two minutes walk from the National Civil Rights Museum is the Blues Hall of Fame. Initially this was not a physical building, but a listing, started in 1980 by the Blues Foundation. Many of my favourite blues artists were inducted in that first year, including Lightnin’ Hopkin, Son House, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Robert Johnson, B.B. King, Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker. The Memphis museum opened in 2015, and pays tribute to the 400 or so inductees. There are several galleries with interactive touchscreen displays for visitors to listen to music, watch videos, and read stories of the members of the Hall of Fame, and each gallery houses some memorabilia.
Graceland
No visit to Memphis is complete without a trip to Graceland. From the perspective of any musical journey, Elvis’s fusion of blues and country into rockabilly was a unique achievement. It also laid the foundations for rock and roll. The visit completed the circle from my start point on the blues trail at Sun Studio. That was where owner, Sam Phillips, who in 1954 was looking for a white singer with a black blues feel, put Elvis, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black together. This resulted in their first single, a cover of blues singer Arthur Crudup’s 1949 blues standard “That’s All Right Mama”. The song was recorded with just the trio playing, without drums. The single sold around 20,000 copies, which was not enough to chart nationally, but it reached number 4 in the local Memphis charts and Elvis, Scotty and Bill were on their way. Graceland is about 9 miles from Downtown Memphis, close to the Mississippi border. It is preserved as it was appointed and decorated last, in the mid 1970s. That was when Elvis transformed the Southern Colonial mansion into a Rock n Roll palace. Accordingly, it is fabulously over the top. The Jungle Room has green shag pile carpet not only underfoot…but on the ceiling. The TV Room, with its mirrored ceiling and multiple TV screens, was apparently inspired by a comment from the President at the time who watched multiple televisions at once. The Pool Room has some 350 yards of fabric covering the walls and ceiling. It is hugely opulent, which is in strong contrast to the next part of the blues trail which took me deep into Mississippi and across the river into Arkansas.
I first came across Fan Ho’s work in a podcast from Ted Forbes‘ The Art of Photography. Some photographer’s work gives me an immediate jolt the first time I see it. Fan Ho’s photography, like that of Brassaï and William Klein, to name just a couple of others, gave me that same instant reaction. His painterly use of smoke, mist, light and shadow combined with incredible, often geometric, composition is breathtaking. An blog post on Kept Light refers to some Ho’s photographs of boats on the water as being “reminiscent of Turner’s paintings with light emanating from the work.”
His mastery of street photography has led to him being referred to as the ‘Henri Cartier-Bresson of the East,’ but I much prefer his nickname ‘the Great Master’. The influence of the European composition tradition is clearly present, but his vision is unique. Transplanted to the East, his unique blend of light and geometry that somehow combines drama with serenity has made him one of the world’s greatest photographers. As Abigail Cain put it in an article on Artsy at the time of his time of his death in 2016:
The serene and contemplative nature of Ho’s work is particularly remarkable considering the tumultuous state of Hong Kong during his most prolific decades. The artist and his family were among the many hundreds of thousands of refugees that flowed into the city in the 1950s, fleeing the reignited Nationalist-Communist Civil War that was ravaging mainland China. Between 1945 and 1951, the city’s population more than doubled. However, Ho’s photographs reveal nothing of that chaotic historical context; instead, they present timeless scenes of life in Hong Kong. The marriage of old and new—a traditional Chinese sailing vessel bobbing alongside a battleship in the harbor, a wooden rickshaw being pulled across steel train tracks—was a consistent feature of his work, as was a fascination with the natural geometry of urban alleyways and markets. And now, when the city ranks among the most densely populated locations in the world, Ho’s reflective photographs offer an experience unattainable anywhere else—solitude on a Hong Kong street
In a similar vein, Laurence Miller, a Manhattan gallery owner, described Fan Ho’s photographs as “like direct descendants of the Bauhaus, yet they were made in Hong Kong. They were abstract and humanistic at the same time.”
Street Photography
Fan Ho was born in Shanghai in 1931, and emigrated with his family to Hong Kong in 1948.He took up photography at a very young age and adopted the Rolleiflex he would use for the rest of his career at the age of 14. Living in the Central neighbourhood of Hong Kong, he was in the perfect position to document street life, though at a time when studio photography was far more common than street photography. An article I found at a site called the Red List (the link is no longer valid) describes what Fan Ho found and captured in the Hong Kong in the late 1940s and early 1950s:
The centre of a chaotic atmosphere, the city had received the thousands of refugees of Japan’s invasion and thus was marked by despair, poverty and tumult. Yet, the photographer managed to capture an almost empty city, concentrating on individual subjects and scenes whose theatricality were enhanced by his dramatic use of light, shadow and smoke within geometric compositions – no wonder one of his series was entitled Living Theatre. With his black and white images, Fan Ho illustrated a nostalgic and melancholic cinematic Hong Kong where traces of modern life and issues disappeared behind traditional lifestyles as if reality had been erased: ‘I liked to concentrate and simplify the world in black and white, it was more suitable to my nature. I could express my emotions more freely, they were more fully under my control, [and the results were] surreal and semi-abstract. I liked this distance: not too close, not too far away…’ With his reclusive photographs, Fan Ho offered a seductive fantasy to Hong Kong’s inhabitants, that of loneliness.
Fan Ho’s creative process required a great deal of patience, no least because Hong Kong was and remains one of the most densely populated places on earth, but also to get all the other elements he needed to be in place. He described how he worked to the Independent in 2014:
At the beginning you must find the ideal location. Then you must be patient to find the right subject that arouses your interest, even if it’s just a cat . You must have the precise moment to catch the spirit, the essence, the soul of the person… If you don’t have the exact moment, you have to wait for the right feeling. It’s real creative work because you have to have the feeling inside.
Ho was critically acclaimed: a fellow of the most prestigious photographic societies, he was named one of the “Top Ten Photographers of the World” by the Photographic Society of America between 1958 and 1965. He was also an Honorary Member of the Photographic Societies of many countries around the world. He simultaneously pursued a career in film, starting out with the Shaw Brothers and later becoming a film director. Ho died in 2016, in San Jose, California at the age of 84. His images of Hong Kong remain the most iconic images of the city and his photography continues to be on show in major museums around the world.
Brassaï is one of those photographers whose work had an immediate and profound effect on me. His dreamlike nocturnal street photography and sharply observed portraits of life after dark provide a unique set of images that is as close to a time slip into 1930s Paris as most of us will ever encounter.
Paris de Nuit
His most famous work (Paris de nuit, 1933 and Voluptés de Paris 1935) opened up a dark realm that had only been captured by painters before. He was not the first to shoot at night – Alfred Stieglitz amongst others had worked at night previously, but he was the first to produce a substantial body of work. After Paris by Night, other photographers took to sustained nocturnal photography – Bill Brandt captured London in the late 1930s (it was Brassaï’s publisher who commissioned Brandt night time work) and Weegee did the same in New York in the 1940s.
“Night does not show things, it suggests them. It disturbs and surprises us with its strangeness.”
As a self-taught pioneer of night photography in his adopted home of Paris (he was a Hungarian émigré), Brassaï faced the relatively new photographic challenges of working at night, equipped as he was with a Voigtlander 6.5 x 9cm camera, slow f4.5 lens and a wooden tripod. His atmospheric landscape shots needed long exposures and were subjected to excessive contrast from street lights. Ingeniously, he used the varying lengths of his smokes, inevitably including a Gauloise, to time his exposures. He also carried copies of his work to explain his late night activities to local law enforcement. An article on Imaging Resource describes his technique:
Using his training as a painter, Brassaï framed his shots so that small areas of light pierced large areas of blacks and shadows. Light reflected in wet streets and diffused by fog, would define shapes within the dark. This contrast gave his printed images richness and depth and he called these prints his “little boxes of night.”
Ground-breaking though his night photography was, Brassaï had a wide palette. His work ranges from surgically precise photojournalism to avant garde dreamscapes. He combined the eye of an expert people watcher with a painterly ability to shade and tone his work with beautifully diffused light. A polymath, he was a journalist, artist and sculpturer as well as a master photographer. He cited Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as an influence and was friends with Dali, Picasso and Matisse.
Curiously, Brassaï started out with a dim view of photography, comparing it unfavourably to the art he originally pursued, but it became a requirement of his journalistic assignments, and having seen the beauty of Paris at night he became determined to capture it – defining night photography in the process. He was influenced by his friend and fellow Hungarian André Kertész, a pioneer of photojournalism, of whom Henri Cartier-Bresson said: “Each time Andre Kertész’s shutter clicks, I feel his heart beating.”
A walk on the wild side
Brassaï’s walks in the Montparnasse district of Paris brought him into contact with a night time cast of prostitutes, street toughs, lamp lighters, transvestites and pleasure seekers. He is most famous for the ground-breaking and gritty images he captured of those night folk. In his own words: “Night does not show things, it suggests them. It disturbs and surprises us with its strangeness.” As he was well connected, Brassaï’s work also includes images of high society, including ballet, opera, artists (including Picasso) and the intelligentsia. Consequently his work documents 1930’s Paris from the most marginalised to high society. A New York Times Article published in 1984, the year he died, captured perhaps the most celebrated aspect of his unique vision:
A Transylvanian transplanted to Paris, he managed in the 1930’s to capture aspects of French life that had never before submitted themselves to the camera, and to do so with a directness and vigour that is a hallmark of greatness in the medium. No doubt as a émigré he saw Paris more acutely than most of its natives, but he also was able to penetrate its darker demimonde because of a relentless passion for the forbidden and deep sympathy with the outcast.
Brassaï, like William Klein and Fan Ho (all hugely influential) was an outsider in the environment he chose to shoot in and that contributes, as noted above, to his unique perspective. Although most famous for night photography and Parisians of the night, Brassaï’s work is multi-faceted. Beyond his night time shooting he used the soft, diffuse light of fog and the muted tones of rainy days to capture the essence of Paris and its inhabitants just as beautifully in daylight. He was also a connoisseur of graffiti. Day or night, high society or underground, documentary or pictorial, Brassaï’s eye captured it all.
Today’s Las Vegas is very different to how it was in its formative years, when it grew to provide gambling and other adult entertainment to dam construction workers partially funded by Mafia investment. The influence of organised crime in the city lasted well into the 1980’s so it’s still relatively easy to meet people who remember the days when the mob ran the city.
On my last trip I met a couple of them – a barman and a taxi driver. The taxi driver had a business card that described him as ‘driver and lifetime Las Vegas resident’. He described how he and his mother had both worked for mob-run casinos and lamented the decline in standards and increases in petty crime in the city since the mob had lost control. Back in the day, he maintained, the city was cleaner, safer and generally a better place to live.
After asking a few questions, this apparently utopian picture unravelled into a much darker reality. He admitted that now and again those living on the edge of the city might find find a human body part “sometimes a femur, sometimes a skull” brought home from a desert burial by their pet dog. I was horrified by this and commented that, to me, that was too a high price to pay for a tidier looking city! Unsurprisingly he was unmoved and adamant that those deaths were not a real issue. His argument was that ‘everyone’ knew that if you were stupid enough to steal from the mafia you would be killed, and only those that did so ended up in shallow graves in the desert. I remained unconvinced, but it was really interesting to meet someone who had seen Las Vegas in its mob days, and to be misty-eyed about a past many consider awful.
Before we parted, he told me about the mob museum (Formally know as ‘The National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement’ which is well worth a visit and also has an excellent blog.
A .38 revolver, a wad of hundreds and a small bag of white powder
Curiously enough on the same trip I also met a barman, who I’ll call Michael, with even more direct experience of the same era. He told me a couple of stories about legendary mobster Anthony Spilotro, who was portrayed in the Martin Scorsese movie Casino as Nicky Santoro and played with terrifying menace by Joe Pesci.
Michael was sitting next to Tony Spilotro on the other side of the bar where he was working as he was off-duty. There had been talk in the city about a serious falling out between Spilotro and his fellow mobsters, and to avoid getting caught up in potentially lethal action, Michael slid down a couple of bar stools saying ‘I hope you don’t mind Tony, I just don’t want to catch a bullet’. Spilotro laughed, but two days later he was dead and buried in a cornfield. In the movie he was buried still breathing, but that is unlikely; later mob testimony revealed he was beaten to death in a basement and moved to the burial site afterwards.
On another occasion Michael was asked to retrieve and return Tony Spilotro’s wife’s purse (or handbag in British English) from the bar he was working in, which is where she had left it. He couldn’t resist taking a peek at the contents. Inside the handbag was a .38 snub nose revolver, a huge wad of hundred dollar bills and a small bag of white powder…
Spilotro’s story is an interesting one: he came into contact with organised crime at an early age as his parents ran a Chicago restaurant that was adopted by the mob. He became a “made” man in the 1960s and was sent to act as the mob representative in Las Vegas in the 1970s. He founded a burglary operation, known as the Hole in the Wall Gang with his brother; it was their unsubtle entry methods that earned them the gang nickname. Unfortunately for Spilotro this overtly criminal behaviour led to him being blacklisted by the casinos, which compromised his official mob representative role. This did not sit well with his bosses and associates. In January 1986, at a high level mob the problem of Spilotro and Las Vegas was debated and the agreed conclusion was to ‘hit him’.
Downtown Las Vegas
On that trip I spent most of my spare time in Old (Downtown) Las Vegas, which for me is by far the most interesting part of the city; it is full of characters and rather gritty in comparison to the glitzy experience of The Strip, which personally I don’t care for much.
You can find the pictures from this and my other trips at the Las Vegas gallery on this site. There is also an earlier blog on Las Vegas. The accompanying picture for this post was shot with my Leica Q at f1.8, 1/5000 of a second with -0.6 EV, using the electronic shutter. The leaf shutter on the Leica Q is virtually silent and will go to 1/2000s after which the electronic shutter takes over on the way to a maximum 1/16000s – making the Leica’s fast aperture usable even in bright conditions.
What I like about this shot is the strong full-length shadow, the inclusion of the big Fremont street neon signs in the background and the gentleman’s white jacket, hat and shoes which contrasts nicely with the dark tones that dominate the shot. The Leica Q’s incredible sharpness on the subject compared to the background helps make that contrast even stronger.
“In Japan, the dragon is a good guy, not a bad guy.” This was the comment of our guide in Kyoto on a trip across Japan, where we had several memorable encounters with Japanese dragons.
Magnificent Japanese dragon on a fusama door at Kennin-Ji, Kyoto
Benevolent, auspicious, just, a bringer of good fortune and wealth, the Japanese dragon (Ryū), like its Chinese ancestor, is an ancient mythical creature that is very different from its malevolent, treasure-hoarding Western equivalent.
The Japanese dragon, (龍), holds a special place in Japanese culture, mythology, and symbolism. Its origins can be traced back to ancient Chinese influences, yet the Japanese dragon has evolved into a unique entity over the centuries.
The Origin of the Japanese Dragon
The concept of the dragon in Japan has its roots in Chinese mythology, where dragons were revered as powerful, celestial beings associated with rain, water, and the emperor’s authority. The adoption of Chinese cultural elements, including the dragon, occurred during Japan’s early interactions with the continent, notably through the spread of Buddhism and the importation of Chinese art and literature. This exchange laid the foundation for the integration of the dragon into Japanese folklore.
Symbolism and Cultural Significance
In Japanese culture, the dragon has been deeply embedded with symbolic meanings. Unlike Western dragons, often portrayed as malevolent creatures, the Japanese dragon is generally considered benevolent and is associated with auspicious qualities. The dragon is a symbol of strength, wisdom, and good fortune.
Japanese folklore and mythology are rich with dragon tales. One of the most famous is the legend of Yamata no Orochi, an eight-headed and eight-tailed dragon defeated by the storm god Susanoo, a myth found in the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) and the Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan), ancient Japanese historical texts.
The dragon’s association with water is evident in its role as a guardian of bodies of water, such as rivers and seas. Additionally, dragons are often linked to agricultural prosperity, as they are believed to bring rain and ensure bountiful harvests.
In Japanese art and iconography, the dragon is a common motif. It is frequently depicted in various forms, from traditional ink paintings to elaborate woodblock prints. The imagery of dragons can be found on clothing, ceramics, and architectural elements, symbolising protection and auspiciousness.
Appearance
Like many mythological creatures, it is a composite beast and has the head of a camel, the eyes of a hare, the antlers of a deer, the neck of a snake, the scales of a carp, the paws of a tiger and the claws of an eagle.
Encounters with Dragons
Goddess and Dragon, Tokyo
Our first dragon encounter was in Shinjuku, Tokyo, a name that refers to both one of the 23 city wards in the metropolis and more commonly to the large entertainment, business and shopping area around Shinjuku Station – the world’s busiest railway station. Painted on a wall behind a statue of a female deity playing a lyre lurked a fabulous white dragon on a black background surrounded by stylised swirls, it looked like some great, nameless tattoo artist had decided to take their artwork to a much grander scale. I was mesmerised and spent some time shooting the combination of the statue and the dragon mural with my Leica Q whilst my companions retired to a nearby bar.
A long history
The Asian dragon’s origin predates written history, but had achieved its present form of a long, scaled serpentine body, small horns, long whiskers, bushy brows, clawed feet and sharp teeth by the 9th Century, by which time it was part of Buddhist mythology as a protector of the Buddha and Buddhist law. These traditions were adopted by the Japanese and the character for dragon (龍) is much used in temple names. Dragon carvings also adorn many temple structures and most Japanese Zen temples have a dragon painted on the ceiling of their dharma halls, often painted inside a circle in the centre of the ceiling.
The Dragons of Kyoto
Twin dragons in the dharma hall of Kennin-Ji, Kyoto
At the Zen temple of Kennin-Ji, in the Gion district of Kyoto, we had two dragon encounters in rapid succession. The first was an incredible dragon painting on a sliding fusuma door, which is shown at the top this post. The horns are larger than normal, the whiskers are so long they look almost like tentacles, and the dragon appears to be swimming through time and space; peering at us with us eyes that give a hint of otherworldly vision and knowledge.
The second was the vast painting of Twin Dragons that covers the entire ceiling of the Hattou (dharma hall) of Kennin-Ji, the oldest temple in Kyoto. Kennin-Ji was founded in 1202, though the earliest surviving structure the is the Chokushimon (Imperial Messenger or Arrow Gate) that is dated to from the Kamakura Period of 1185-1333. I was comptely mesmerised by the image.
This building still bears the scars from the Onin War that reduced much of Kyoto to ashes during the 15th century in the form of arrow marks. The dharma hall that houses the Twin Dragons was constructed later, in 1765. The dragons themselves were painted in ink on paper by Koizumi Junsaku (1924 – 2012),a noted painter and pottery artist, between 2000 and 2002, and installed in 2002 to mark the 800th anniversary of the founding of the temple. The dragons cover 175 square meters rather than occupying the usual circle in the centre of the ceiling. This was at the bidding of the abbot of Kennin-ji who requested that the artist make dragons “rampage across the ceiling”. They rampage in spectacular fashion and I spent a good while admiring them. A bought a copy of the painting and it is now framed and up on the wall at my home in Oxfordshire.
In modern Japan, Zen temples and Shinto shrines often stock their garden ponds with carp, which grow to great size in a spectacular range of colors. Keeping them is partially inspired by Koi-no-Takinobori, the Japanese name for a Chinese legend of a carp that became a dragon after swimming up a waterfall. We saw many incredible Koi in Tokyo and Kyoto, but I will not count them as dragons.
A Water Spirit
Dragon at the Hakone Jinja, at the foot of Mount Hakone
Unlike the Western dragon which is essentially a winged fire-breathing lizard, and a creature of the earth, the Japanese dragon is a wingless (but sky dwelling) water spirit.
At the Hakone Shrine (Hakone Jinja), at the foot of Mount Hakone and along the shores of the lake Ashinoko, our dragon encounter was at a Shinto shrine dedicated to the deity Ryujin (龍神). I had to be dragged away from this magnificent spectacle by my friends – it was so striking.
Ryujin is associated with rain, good catches for fishermen, and with agriculture. According to the Encyclopedia of Shinto ‘The dragon kami is connected with agriculture because of its characteristic as a water kami. Prayers for rain were performed at rivers, swamps, ponds, and deep pools which were regarded as the abodes of the ryūjin.’ At the shrine is an extraordinary Chōzuya (purification basin), where holy water spouts from each of the nine dragon’s heads. It was the dragon highlight of the trip. Four dragon encounters is not a large number, but they were of the highest quality and I will never forget them.
More on Japan
You can find the best images from our trip in the Japan Gallery and an account of our travels in this blog: 10 Days in Japan.
Between 13th and 23rd May 2017, I travelled across Japan with a small group of friends on a trip organised by Trailfinders. I have wanted to go for more than a decade and my expectations were sky high, and I am happy to say I wasn’t disappointed. I wasn’t sure what lenses to take with me, so I took both my Leica Q and the Nikon Df with 20mm, 35mm and 85mm fast primes. I ending up using the Leica Q (28mm) and the Nikon Df with the 85mm fitted almost exclusively, both slung across my chest in readiness. You can see the gallery here. This was our itinerary:
Day 1 – Arrival in Tokyo
We flew from London to Tokyo on British Airways. Given the time difference we arrived with time to spare on our first day, which gave us the opportunity to explore the area around the excellent Park Hotel in Shiodome, our base in the metropolis. Shiodome is close to the Ginza District, the upmarket shopping area of Tokyo, so had a short walk around the area and a lunchtime beer at the Ginza Lion Beer Hall with an accompaniment of delicious hoho-niku (tuna cheeks). We noticed the displays of plastic food (sampuru) outside the beer hall, which seem to be ubiquitous in Japan. None of us had slept well on the flight and our rooms had not been ready on arrival, so we headed back to the hotel to clean up and rest. On the way back we came across Hakuhninkan Toy Park, which introduced us to the mad world of Japanese toys and collectables. That evening we ate at Tsukada Nojo which was most notable for moromi-miso; a chunky condiment made from miso served with raw vegetables, of which we could not get enough.
Day 2 – Tokyo
On our first full day in Tokyo we were accompanied by our guide Akiko, who was very knowledgable and helpful. We headed for the Meiji Shrine (Meiji Jingū), in Shibuya, a Shinto shrine dedicated to the Emperor Meiji and his wife. Entering through an enormous Torii gate (made from a 1,500 year old tree) we passed into a large forested area which covers 175 acres and consists of around 120,000 trees of 365 different species from all over Japan. It is both tranquil and beautiful. There is also a huge decorative display of sake barrels (kazaridaru) in the grounds, which relates to the offering of sake every year to the deities at Meiji Jingu Shrine. As we walked though the three Torii gates, Akiko told us that we should not walk through the centre line of the gate. This is called the Sei-Chu and is the area designated for the enshrined gods to pass through.
Being British and in need of a restorative cup of tea we stopped at a Cat Cafe located near the entrance to the Shrine. Japan holds the record for the most cat cafés in the world, with as many as 39 in Tokyo. I took a bit of a risk entering the place – I am asthmatic and allergic to cats, which is not a great combination, but observed the rather bizarre spectacle without consequences.
Next was Takeshita Street or Takeshita-dōri, a shopping street in Harajuku, which was packed with fashion concious teenagers, followed by Omotesandō, an upmarket tree-lined avenue, once the official approach to Meiji-jingū. These days it is a fashionable and architecturally notable shopping strip.
After a spot of excellent sushi we moved on to Sensō-ji, an ancient Buddhist temple located in Asakusa. The temple is dedicated to Guanyin, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, and is one of the most widely visited spiritual sites in the world. We approached it though the spectacular Thunder Gate, and a walk down the wonderful Nakamise Shopping Street. I found a gorgeous picture of the Thunder Gate in one of the stalls, which I was keen to buy, but the price tag was far out of reach as it was an original. Prints will, the vendor, told me be available in about 30 years. Not far from the temple we came across a small park with the most spectacular collection of koi we had ever seen.
We moved on to Kappabashi, or Kitchen Town and visited the Kamata knife shop. I enjoy cooking, and love Japanese steel, so I purchased a very beautiful chef’s knife made by Ryusen.
We returned to the hotel via a cruise of the Sumida river and ate in the hotel, quite worn out.
Day 3 – Tokyo
The Tsukuji fish market is the biggest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world and is located within walking distance of Shiodome, between the Sumida River and Ginza. Visiting it involves making a choice of either arriving at 3 AM to queue to see the tuna market open at 5 AM, or arriving by 10 AM to see market wind down. We chose the latter. The market handles more than 400 different types of seafood (many of which look like nothing on earth) and the place is a whirr of activity – most notably the ‘Turret Trucks’, which are extremely hazardous to the unwary. Whilst we missed the tuna market, we did see tuna being carved with extremely long knives, variously called called oroshi-hōchō, maguro-bōchō, or hanchō-hōchō.
We took the tube to Shibuya Crossing, considered a must see for many visitors, and located outside the Hachiko exit of Shibuya Station. This exit is named after a famous dog, whose statue has become a popular meeting place. Shibuya Crossing effectively is a crossing point at the meeting of five roads in one of the busiest parts of the most populous city in the world, and the spectacle of up to 1,000 people crossing the road concurrently is quite astonishing.
I was keen to visit a guitar shop in Japan, particularly as Fender Japan are noted for being quite innovative. G’Club, Shibuya did not disappoint and I purchased a low cost, light weight Japan-only Fender Telecaster that plays extremely well.
That evening we took in Akihabar (or Electic Town), which is famous for its many electronics shops, its otaku (diehard fan) culture, and many anime/managa shops before exploring East Shinjuku/Kabukichu, in all its neon splendour. It is a red light district and supposed to be somewhat edgy, but we were so mesmerised by the neon lights, if there was any menace there it passed us by. We were not tempted to enter any of the establishments that beckoned us.
I came across the work of William Klein when browsing though photography books in a book shop. It didn’t take many turns of the pages for me to decide to buy the book (Photofile, Thomas & Hudson) and learn more about the man and his photography. I found his raw, ironic, high contrast and grainy street photography vibrant, often strange and compelling.
The anti-photograph
William Klein came to the notice of the world in the 1960s after he was talent spotted by the art director of Vogue who saw an exhibition of his early abstract work and offered him a job on the spot. Klein had studied painting in Paris but was untrained as a photographer and considered himself an an outsider – lacking any respect for the photographic technique he didn’t possess. In later years he ascribed this to a contrarian instinct: “Having little technical background, I became a photographer. Adopting a machine, I do my utmost to make it malfunction. For me, to make a photograph is to make an anti-photograph.”
Fashion photography is traditionally highly polished, and his untutored, highly dynamic and ironic approach was revolutionary. Vogue subsequently financed a street photography project in New York where Klein, encountering culture shock after his time in Paris – which he feared would soon wear off – went “in search of the rawest snapshot, the zero degree of photography”. To get there he employed “A technique of no taboos: blur, grain, contrast, cockeyed framing, accidents, whatever happens…” and adopted the role of “a make-believe ethnographer”.
Life is good…
The resulting book ‘Life is Good and Good For You in New York’ (1955) became a prize winning route to celebrity, though no American publisher was willing to publish it (and didn’t for 40 years), considering it unflattering to the point of being anti-American. Instead it was first published in Paris, Klein’s adopted home. He followed up with books on Rome, Moscow and Tokyo all in the same inimitable, rebellious style. Despite his success he became restless and turned to film making. His first film was Broadway by Jazz, described here in an article in the Financial Times in 2012:
Broadway by Light is often described as the “first pop film”, and to watch it now is still an exhilarating 11-minute roller-coaster ride through the neon of Broadway and Times Square. Klein invented his own kind of visual jazz – violent, vulgar, seductive and beautiful, with a soundtrack to match. The camera moves ceaselessly in and out of the alphabet of signs as the bulbs bloom and fade into abstract blobs of pure colour: Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Rock Hudson, The New York Times. Fascination. Continuous till 4am. Orson Welles said it was the first film in which “colour was necessary”.
Klein only returned to photography in the 1980s, where his pioneering role was recognised. Since then he has won many more awards and become known for his graphic design work, which applies bold slashes of paint to the enlarged contact sheets he had marked up in pencil years before.
The Street style of William Klein
In his street photography William Klein likes to get into the thick of things; filling the frame with the chaos of the city. He mixes and moves with his subjects, embracing a wide lens for close up shots and motion blur in a way no one has before. As he said: “sometimes, I’d take shots without aiming, just to see what happened, I’d rush into crowds – bang! bang! I liked the idea of luck and taking a chance. Other times I’d frame a composition I saw and plant myself somewhere, longing for some accident to happen.” An article in the Independent in 1998 sums up his approach:
In Klein’s New York people press themselves up against the lens, dancing around the photographer, pulling faces, pretending to shoot each other, or the photographer, with toy guns. It is the kind of photography that is impossible to do today: people are no longer delighted to be snapped in the street, do not dance or horse around in Harlem on Easter Sunday for a photographer. They were intrigued by this white guy with his beautiful French wife.
His preference for the wide angle lens came from the “contradictions and confusion” that it revealed, and enabled him to include many subjects in his innovative composition. Of the blur he said: “If you look carefully at life, you see blur. Shake your hand. Blur is part of life“. His prints use extreme contrast and grain complete the visceral effect. The combined effect is perfect for street photography, as this post in Streethunters from 2015 describes:
Perfection. We all strive for it when it comes to photography. Perfect exposure. Composition. Tack-sharp images. But, street photography isn’t about perfection. At it’s core, street photography is about capturing life. And life is far from perfect. William Klein, in his own way, mastered imperfection within street photography and became a trailblazer.
Klein’s maverick work has an immediate impact but is difficult to interpret. This is apparently by design. In what has become my favourite William Klein quote he said: “My photographs are the fragments of a shapeless cry that tries to say who knows what… What would please me most is to make photographs as incomprehensible as life.” Or maybe not as, in an interview in 2013, when asked which is the most gratifying medium he chose film on the basis that “people don’t know how to read photographs. There isn’t this dialogue….What you put in a photograph is not always perceived by the other people who look at them as what you wanted to say. There isn’t a culture of photography. You learn about music appreciation at schools or go to museums, but I found that generally people don’t study photography. There are a lot of things that can be said in photographs but people don’t relate to them.”
Many photographers have been inspired as much by his attitude as his photographs, which is why you will see so many William Klein quotes in posts and articles about his life and work. More artist than photojournalist, his lack of respect for the established order, his raw technique and the way he interacts with his subjects make him one of photography’s great sources of inspiration.
Wet plate photography was not easy. The wet-plate collodion process used between the 1850s and 1880s uses a solution of gun-cotton in ether and alcohol and requires the entire photographic process including coating the plate, exposing and developing it to be completed within fifteen minutes.
These and other challenges faced by early photographers were brought home to me by the a BBC documentary ‘Britain in Focus’, produced in partnership with the National Media Museum and presented by Eamonn McCabe. The first episode covered the earliest period of Photography in Britain – from polymath inventor Henry Fox Talbot in the 1840s to Peter Henry Emerson in the last years of the nineteenth century. The program surveyed some of the greatest pioneers of early photography in their most famous locations: Fox Talbot in Lacock Abbey, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson in Newhaven, Roger Fenton in the Crimea, Julia Margaret Cameron at Little Holland House, Robert Howlett in the Isle of Dogs and Peter Henry Emerson in the Norfolk Broads.
Roger Fenton
I was familiar with the work of most of the photographers in the program, with the exception of Roger Fenton. I was hugely impressed by his images and a little research showed him to be an extremely important photographer. Born into a wealthy banking family in 1819, he studied law at Oxford and painting in Paris before he took up photography, learning the early Calotype process developed by Fox Talbot. Fenton was a founder member of the Photographic Society (later the Royal Photographic Society), the first official photographer of the British Museum and quite possibly the world’s first officially appointed war photographer, photographing the Crimean War in the first systematic coverage of a conflict in 1855.
Roger Fenton’s Wagon
Wet Plate Photography in The Crimean war
Fenton’s connections led to his commission by the British government to photograph the Crimean war – a conflict that pitted the Russian Empire against a somewhat unlikely alliance of Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia. He took a photographic assistant, a servant and a large horse-drawn van converted from a merchant’s wine wagon to carry his cumbersome large format wet plate photographic equipment (see image, right). The wagon offered a good target for Turkish artillery and Fenton also suffered from the high temperatures, broken ribs and cholera. Nevertheless, and despite the long exposures and rapid processing required, he was able to capture 350 images, most of which were later exhibited across Britain and displayed to the British and French royal families.
Fenton was a technically accomplished photographer and his large format images from Crimea are striking. They consist mainly of posed portraits and scenes and landscapes of battle sites including the iconic The Valley of the Shadow of Death. Though he saw plenty of horrors during the conflict, he did not record any with his camera, most likely because his government patrons wanted the images that could be used as part of a campaign to counter reports of wide spread military incompetence in a war that was unpopular with both the press and the public.
The depth of field made possible by the large format, together with marvellous tone and composition make Roger Fenton’s work quite extraordinary. In addition to his war photography he shot royal portraits, architecture, landscapes (such as those of Bolton Abbey covered in the documentary) and still life. He regarded photography as both art and business and abandoned it entirely in 1863 to return to law when he saw its status was diminished to a craft – illustrated by the 1862 International Exhibition’s placement of photography in the section reserved for instruments and machinery. He died only a few years later in 1869.
Large format film photography
Large format film images, particularly those created using wet-plate photography, have a unique look that can not be reproduced with 35mm cameras – the shot of Roger Fenton’s wagon clearly shows this. However, the supporting image in this post is an homage to it. The shot of the ruined manor at Hampton Gay (which burned down in 1887) is a long exposure (40 second exposure at f13 using a black glass ND filter) shot in windy conditions. It is sepia toned and I added some grain and lens falloff in post production. I’ve shot the manor with a few medium format cameras (6X6 and 4.5) but at some point I’d love to shoot it with a large format, preferably glass plate, camera.
Brill Windmill at dusk, with one of the dexter herd on the skyline
Brill windmill is well known to photographers all over Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire; the hill-top site is also a popular spot for walkers, cyclists and picnickers. To reach the village of Brill requires a climb up a steep hill about 4 miles from Long Crendon and 7 miles from Bicester. At 190 metres above sea level, it’s the highest vantage point for miles around and provides excellent views over the Vale of Aylesbury below. Brill windmill and the the undulating rough ground where the clay was once worked make it a unique spot. On a windy day it’s an ideal location for long exposure shooting and sunsets from Brill Hill make for a popular spectacle. You can find a gallery of my black and white pictures of Brill here.
Brill – A Rich History
Edward the Confessor had a hunting-lodge adjacent to it; Henry II. kept his court here in 1160, attended by Becket, and again in 1162; King John spent his Christmas here in 1205; Henry III. held his court here in 1224; and Sir G. Gerard, under Charles I., placed a force here in 1642, and repelled an attack by Hampden. The parish comprises 2,600 acres. Real property, £5,873. Pop., 1,432. Houses, 324. The property is much subdivided. The manor was given by the Conqueror to Nigel the huntsman, and has descended from him to Sir T. D. Aubrey, Bart. Stone is quarried; yellow ochre is found; and clay has been worked into pottery here since the time of the Romans, but ceases to be in request. A chalybeate spring in the immediate neighbourhood of the village has some medicinal repute; and a hotel stands adjacent to it for the accommodation of visitors. A grove near the village is probably a relic of Bernwood forest.
Brill Windmill and undulating ground of the Common
Brill Landscape
“There are fine exhilarating, panoramic views out from the hills. Several large farms are situated on prominent areas of the steep hillsides one of the most notable is Chilton Park. The common land, unimproved grassland and other patches of rough ground add to the sense of a landscape with strong historic associations, which has been left relatively unchanged for centuries.” This fine description of the landscape around Brill is from the Aylesbury Vale Landscape Character Assessment, but the views are so good, it barely does the place justice.
Village Origins
The combination of its hilltop location, good soil and the presence of springs have made Brill an attractive location from the earliest times and it has been occupied since the Iron Age. Even the origin of the name of the village is ancient as it includes both the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic words for hill (Bre-hyll). Surviving Celtic place names are less common in the South of England than they are further North. In the reign of Edward the Confessor the village was known as Bruhella.
Brill Windmill (Film, Nikon F6)
Clay, Pottery and Bricks
Brill is best known for its old post-mill and the clay pits that were dug for the production of pottery and Brill bricks. The clay pits were in use from Roman times until the last bricks were produced in the 1920s, which is also when the windmill closed as a business. Many of the older houses in the village are built of Brill bricks, as are Thame Grammar School and Waddesdon Manor.
Royal Manor
Brill was a Royal Manor of the kings of Wessex in the Anglo-Saxon period as it lay in the heart of the royal forest of Bernwood. There was a Royal Hunting Lodge there, sometimes referred to as a Royal Palace. Edward the Confessor, Henry II and Henry III stayed there in the 12-13th centuries.
The Civil War and the Battle of Brill
The Royal Lodge at Woodstock became a palace under Henry II, who spent time here with his mistress, Rosamund Clifford, after which Brill became less important; by 1337 it had ceased to be a Royal Manor. It is possible there was a castle at Brill as a map of 1591 has “Castell Hill” marked but this is apparently the only evidence of such a fortification.
Medieval Brill
By the middle of the 13th century Brill had a market and annual fair, but it did not develop into a town, possibly due to competition from the larger markets of Aylesbury or Long Crendon. Brill’s principal industry was pottery which was sold at markets in Oxford surrounding areas. Brick and tile making took over from pottery after the medieval period.
Brill saw action during the English Civil War. A royalist force occupied the village as part of a defensive ring of the city of Oxford where Charles had consolidated his forces. There was an abortive Parliamentarian attack by the Parliamentary commander-in-chief of Buckinghamshire Colonel Goodwin in January 1643 (known as the Battle of Brill). Shortly afterwards Brill was replaced by nearby Boarstall as a garrison and Royalist troops left the following year.
Rear view of Brill windmill (Leica Q)
The Spa at Dorton
Nearly two hundred years later the proprietor of the nearby Dorton estate, Mr Ricketts, attempted to turn Brill into a spa town. The mineral spring at Dorton was renowned for its curative qualities and Ricketts opened the spa in 1830. A Grand Fête was held in 1837 and for a short while the resort was fashionable. It consisted of a classical spa building with pump room and baths set in an ornamental pleasure ground. This was reached from an associated hotel in Brill – the Spa Hotel. The drive between the two survives as a public footpath. Tunbridge Wells and Leamington Spa secured Royal patronage for their Spas whilst the rather remote Dorton/Brill business dwindled and closed in the late nineteenth century. The Spa Hotel was pulled down after it sustained damage from a German doodle-bug in World War II.
Brill Tramway
In 1868 the Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway was completed and the Duke of Buckingham built a light railway to provide freight access by rail to his estates. An extension to Brill known as the Brill Tramway gave access to a brickworks there, which was followed by passenger facilities in 1872. The Metropolitan Railway took over the line in 1896 and the branch line survived until 1935
A good deal of old Brill survives today; 54 of the village’s buildings are currently listed. The earliest of these is All Saints Church, originally a private chapel whose earliest features date from the 12th century.
Brill Windmill
The rectory manor of Brill had a mill in 1086. This mill would have been water or animal driven as windmills appeared a century or so later. The post mill, which could be turned into the wind is named after the large upright post which the mill’s main structure is balanced on, enabling the mill is to rotate to face the direction of the wind. The high ground at Brill is an ideal location for a post mill. According to the History of the County of Buckingham “a windmill was built here of timber from Bernwood Forest, probably on the site on which John de Moleyns, about 1345, constructed another with oaks felled in his demesne woods.”
Brill windmill in its current form has been dendro dated to 1686 and survived as a working business until 1924 when it finally closed. A roofed wall, or roundhouse, was built around the bottom part of the post in 1864. It was removed in the 1930s in poor condition and rebuilt in 1950 using bricks from a kiln that had been demolished when the last of Brill’s many brick and tile yards closed. It was last restored again in 2009. The mill was purchased by Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher in 1929 to save it from destruction, and was maintained by trustees until taken over by Buckingham County Council in 1947.
A second post-mill once stood on Brill Common. Parson’s Mill was built in 1634 and stood on the opposite side of the road to the current mill. It was struck by lightning in 1905 and demolished soon afterwards.
One of the Dexter herd at rest (2020)
The Community Herd
There is a small community herd of Dexter cattle that conservation graze the common in small temporary paddocks. These are moved at intervals to avoid overgrazing. I was interested to learn that Dexters are the smallest native breed of cattle in the British Isles and are both docile and hardy. Being so small, they have no trouble at all with the steep slopes of the common. You can track where they are being grazed at the community herd website.
Visiting Brill Windmill
Brill is located near the A41 at South Hills, Brill, Aylesbury HP18 9TQ. From the North and Bicester, take the B4011, leaving the B road on a tight right-hand turn. Follow the narrow road (watch out for cyclists) and the windmill will be on your right. From the South and Thame take the B4011. There is are a couple of exits that lead to Brill. If you end up in the village centre, head for Windmill Street. The windmill will be on the left as you exit Windmill Street. There is a small car park next to the windmill.
To go inside the windmill you need to go at specified times during which the windmill is opened up by volunteers, which is managed by volunteers. The windmill is open for these visits on Sunday afternoons, 2-5pm from Easter to September. Tickets costs £3 for adults and £1 for children. More details can be found and out of hours visits arranged by visiting the Brill Windmill website.
There is a circular walk that starts by the windmill and descends the hill to walk towards Ludgershall, Piddington and Boarstall.
If you can’t get to Brill there is some drone footage on YouTube from 2015 and 2021 that provides good aerial vie of the windmill and the common.
Pubs Near Brill Windmill
There are two pubs in Brill. The Pheasant is located next door at 39 Windmill Street, HP18 9TG and offers outside seating with views of the windmill. The Pointer is in the village centre at 27 Church Street HP18 9RT and is supplied by their own butchers, which is just next door. A little further out is the The Chandos Arms at 8 The Turnpike, HP189QB in nearby Oakley.
Brill Dog Walking
Brill common is popular with dog walkers and both The Pheasant and The Pointer are dog friendly.
People, Books and TV References
There are several notable people as well as books and TV related to the village, the most interesting of which I’ve included here:
Ordnance Survey map 1833, showing Brill and surrounding area
J. R. R. Tolkien used the name and various other features of Brill as the basis for the village of Bree in The Lord of the Rings.
Edward Lear, best known for “The Owl and the Pussy-cat” refers to Brill in More Nonsense Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, etc.
The Great Train Robbers hid at the remote Leatherslade Farm on Brill’s boundary with the village of Oakley In 1963.
Martyr Thomas Belson was born in the village circa 1560. He was found guilty of assisting Roman Catholic priests, and was executed in Oxford in 1589.
Sir John Betjeman rejoiced that the long arm of ‘Metro-land’ was halted before impinging on “the remote hilltop village of Brill”
More of Brill Windmill
Today Brill windmill is one of the oldest and best preserved in Britain. The steps that extend up to the doors at the rear of the mill are a very popular spot for group photos, whilst small children love to run around the roundhouse. I’ve enjoyed many a great picnic at Brill with my daughters, both of whom are as fond of the place as I am.
I have been taking photographs around Brill for some years with film and digital cameras, sometimes making use of specialist tilt-shift lenses and taking long exposures taken with a dark filter on a tripod. You can view a gallery of my black and white pictures of Brill here.
Beyond Caravaggiowas the name of a Caravaggio inspired exhibition at the National Gallery exhibition in 2016 that examined the influence of one of art’s true originals, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610). Whilst the exhibition focused on his influence via the Caravaggisti and later painters, Caravaggio’s influence reaches well into to the present day; his use of everyday subjects and of dramatic lighting are cited as an influence on directors like Scorsese and Tarantino, photographers such as Nan Goldin and David LaChapelle and contemporary artists like Jenny Saville and Mat Collishaw.
For me, Caravaggio is a source of inspiration, directly through his work and indirectly through those he has influenced. One of the most important to me of those he has he influenced is Cindy Sherman, who is the subject of another exhibition inspired article on this site: Cindy Sherman – Star of the Films That Never Were. Sherman much admired Caravaggio’s ability to convey psychological depth in his subjects. She felt that “the interplay of light and shadow in his paintings resonates with the complex layers of identity that I seek to explore in my photographs.”
A Real Baroque and Roller
Caravaggio lived a short, turbulent life that was celebrated and notorious in equal measure. He was orphaned to the plague as a boy of six. At 11 he apprenticed in Milan but left in haste after wounding a police officer. At 21 he moved to Rome and gained fame with the success of his first public commissions, but he was regularly in court and jailed on several occasions. He was known for his drinking and whoring as well his brawling. His powerful supporters helped smooth things over with the authorities but there was only so much they could do to contain a man overflowing with violence. According to the German art historian Joachim von Sandrart (1606–88) Caravaggio spend his time in Rome “in the company of his young friends, mostly brash, swaggering fellows—painters and swordsmen—who lived by the motto nec spe, nec metu, ‘without hope, without fear.’” He was, as Time Out once noted, a real Baroque and Roller.
In 1606 he had a death sentence pronounced against him by the Pope after he killed a well known pimp in a knife fight. He spent the rest of his life on the run in fear of his life in Malta, Naples and Sicily. He slept in this clothes and always had his dagger to hand. His art, unsurprisingly, became darker and he was horribly mutilated by his enemies when they caught up with him in Naples in 1609. It is likely that they inflicted a sfregio (facial wound), as a visible sign of revenge. He died, still on the run, in 1610 aged 38.
Extreme Chiaroscuro
Strongly contrasting light in Barcelona
Caravaggio’s technique is both distinctive and innovative. He is most famous for his dramatic use of light, an extreme variant of chiaroscuro, using dark shadows to produce strong contrasts between light and dark with an incredible tonal range. With this he captured form and added drama to his scenes in a way that no one before him had accomplished. The scenes he painted were spot lit from above; he once had a run in with a landlord for breaking a ceiling to let in light. It is so modern looking that David Hockney has referred to it as ‘Hollywood lighting’. There are claims by Italian researchers that his chiaroscuro is based on a form of photographic technique – the suggestion is that Caravaggio projecting the image of his subjects onto canvas using a lens and mirror and that he treated the canvas with a light-sensitive substance made from crushed fireflies, in order to fix the image. This hypothesis remains unproven.
A new kind of naturalism
Caravaggio combined dramatic lighting with a new kind of naturalism – painting people from the streets directly from life, and with incredible levels of often dirty hyper-realism created without drawing beforehand. He populated biblical scenes with prostitutes, beggars and thieves, bringing the sacred and the gutter together as he did so and polarising opinion. He also applied the same level of detail and realism to objects as to the people in his paintings. Great emphasis can be seen in the still life on the table in front of Christ at the ‘The Supper at Emmaus’ (1601), for example. It was this combination of dramatic lighting and realism that created the dramatic pictorial and narrative power he became renowned for.
My Favourite Caravaggio
The Taking of Christ is my favourite work by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio . Painted at the height of his fame, The Taking of Christ is a high contrast, dramatic treatment of the biblical story of betrayal. It is set in the dark space of the garden of Gethsemane, lit by the moon and by a lantern held by a figure who peers in from the edge of the scene. This is Caravaggio himself. The painting offers a flash bulb moment of three soldiers in black contemporary armour, their faces largely hidden, who have come with Judas to seize Christ – one of them grasping his throat with a mailed fist. The brutality of the soldiers is in contrast with the calm and meek Christ, who offers no resistance, whilst St. John the Evangelist flees in anguish. It is dense, mysterious and incredibly dramatic.
Favourites From His Followers
The London Beyond Caravaggio exhibition offered many delights from the Caravaggisti and later followers, but two works stood out for me. The first was Christ displaying his Wounds by Giovanni Antonio Galli (nicknamed Lo Spadarino because his father was a sword smith). This painting is as hyper real is it is strange. A pale Jesus, lit by light that appears to come from nowhere, and naked except for his shroud, holds the wound on this side apart with hands holed by nails. He makes direct eye contact with us with an expression that is full of accusation.
The second is the The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew by Jusepe de Ribera. Saint Bartholomew’s executioner sharpens his knife in preparation of the flaying his about to perform – the knife and steel forming a symbolic cross. Bartholomew stretches out his arms to heaven, creating a powerful diagonal, his face lit by grace as well as light. The executioner’s expression is inscrutable, which makes the painting more disturbing.
Caravaggio’s Influence on Photography
Caravaggio’s influence on photography is evident in the works of photographers who sought to capture the same sense of drama and realism seen in his paintings. Another photographer I admire, Bill Brandt, known for the drama black-and-white images, acknowledged Caravaggio’s impact on his work, describing his use of light and shadow as “a revelation.” I feel exactly the same way.
Caravaggio’s influence on photography is not limited to his technique; his illumination of the gritty realities of life influenced photographers like Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin, who sought to capture the raw and unfiltered aspects of how we live.
Caravaggio and Film
Those who make moving pictures have also found inspiration in Caravaggio’s work. Filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino have both acknowledged Caravaggio’s influence. Scorsese, in particular, has frequently cited the painter’s use of light and shadow as a significant influence on his cinematography, saying, “Caravaggio’s paintings have a cinematic quality; they tell a story through visuals, and I’ve always been drawn to that narrative power.”
Caravaggio’s influence is not confined to directors; production designers and cinematographers also draw inspiration from his compositions. The interplay between light and shadow in Caravaggio’s paintings finds its counterpart in the carefully crafted lighting of films, creating a visual language that conveys emotion and enhances the story.
Caravaggio Around The World
Caravaggio’s masterpieces are dispersed throughout the world’s most renowned art institutions. Here’s a short list, including some the names of the most notable works: The Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy (Medusa); The Vatican Museums Pinacoteca, Vatican City (The Supper at Emmaus); The Borghese Gallery, Rome (David with the Head of Goliath); The Louvre, Paris (Death of the Virgin); The National Gallery, London (Supper at Emmaus – another version); The Metropolitan Museum, New York (The Musicians) and The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (Judith Beheading Holofernes). I’d like to see them all.
The recent exhibition Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph at the Science Museum in London which ended on September 11th 2016 was described as ‘magical to behold’ by Time Outand ‘ground-breaking’ by The Times. I found it extremely enjoyable as it told the story of the pioneers of early photography very capably as well as displaying a great body of their work.
Central to the story of early photography is William Henry Fox Talbot, who was born in February 1800. He attended Cambridge University in 1817 and went onto become a gentleman scientist, inventor, Egyptologist, member of parliament, mathematician, astronomer, archaeologist and transcriber of Chaldean cuneiform texts as well as a pioneer of photography.
It was a struggle with his sketchbook that put him on the road to photography: in 1833 at Lake Como in Italy, he found it difficult to capture the scenery adequately by sketching it with the aid of a Camera Lucida (an instrument used by draftsmen at the time which uses a prism to direct rays of light onto paper producing an image and from which a drawing can be made.) This started him on the journey of discovery with light-sensitive paper to automate the process that he was to pursue at his home in Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire.
Science, silver and sunlight
Investigations with silver nitrate and sunlight actually go back as far as Angelo Sala (1576-1637). Johann Heinrich Schulze (1687-1744) was the first to create photograms (a process that does not require a camera) with paper masks and Talbot would have been well aware of the work of Thomas Wedgwood (1771-1805) and Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) who also worked on photograms of leaves and other objects. These could not adequately fixed and faded quickly. Talbot built on this work, experimenting with plants and lace on paper coated with silver nitrate and fixing the images with salt to produce sciagraphs – drawings of shadows.
Talbot created the first negative in 1835, which minimized exposure time considerably compared to previous methods. He had help from his friend Sir John Herschel (1792-1871), one of the leading British scientists of the time, and another formidable polymath, who was an astronomer, mathematician, chemist, inventor and experimental photographer. It was Herschel who solved the problem of ‘fixing’ pictures (used by both Talbot and Daguerre) and was also the first to use the terms ‘photography’ and ‘negative’.
Inventors and pioneers
There is some debate as to is the inventor of photography or even who was the most influential of the pioneers. France can claim Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833), inventor of a process known as heliography, who used a Camera Obscura to record an image of his country estate in 1826 via an eight-hour exposure. Better known is Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, (1787-1851), a former architect and artist who collaborated with Niépce, and who had used the Camera Obscura to assist with his paintings in his earlier career. He developed the Daguerrotype process after Niépce‘s death – a process based on light-sensitive, silver-plated copper, unique in the family of photographic process, in that the image is produced on metal directly without an intervening negative. Hippolyte Bayard (1801-1887) also holds a claim as the developer of the direct positive process and the first in the world to hold a photo exhibition. Bayard’s story embodies the struggle for recognition and adds a human dimension in the midst of all the science on show at the museum. It also serves up one of the most interesting images of the exhibition. Bayard was persuaded to postpone announcing his new positive process to the French Academy of Sciences by a friend of Daguerre, which cost him the recognition he deserved, and led him to create the first staged (or faked) photograph entitled, Self Portrait as a Drowned Man, which was on show at the Science Museum exhibition. The image portrays the photographer as a corpse, and M. Bayard wrote a fake suicide note on the back:
“The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you. As far as I know this indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with his discovery. The Government which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life….! … He has been at the morgue for several days, and no-one has recognised or claimed him. Ladies and gentlemen, you’d better pass along for fear of offending your sense of smell, for as you can observe, the face and hands of the gentleman are beginning to decay.”
Las Vegas is undoubtedly one of the stranger places in the USA. Its sheer scale, the juxtaposition of replicas of famous landmarks, the relentless 24 hour gambling and the fantasy element of the place all contribute to that strangeness. It is also hard for me to get over it’s origins, summarised here by history.com:
A desert metropolis built on gambling, vice and other forms of entertainment…the city was founded by ranchers and railroad workers but quickly found that its greatest asset was not its springs but its casinos. Las Vegas’s embrace of Old West-style freedoms—gambling and prostitution—provided a perfect home for East Coast organized crime. Beginning in the 1940s, money from drugs and racketeering built casinos and was laundered within them. Visitors came to partake in what the casinos offered: low-cost luxury and the thrill of fantasies fulfilled.
The chain of events that led to Mafia involvement in the development of the city is straightforward enough. The state of Nevada legalized gambling in 1931, but no one paid attention until after World War II, when the Mafia, in the form of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, saw business potential. Siegel opened the showcase 105 room Flamingo Hotel and Casino in December 1946 and whilst he paid the ultimate price for skimming from Mafia operations the Flamingo was successful under Lansky and other crime families moved in. Properties such as the 1,000 room Stardust, the Desert Inn, and the Riviera followed. In 1959 the Revolution in Cuba removed President Batista, who had been in league with Lansky, and with him the gambling concessions he had made to the mafia. It also made Havana a no go destination for many high rollers who re-routed to Las Vegas, accelerating its development. Today a significant proportion of the largest hotels in the world are on situated the Strip.
Downtown
Downtown Las Vegas, the original site of the town and gambling district of Las Vegas, centres on Fremont Street. It has had significant investment of late but still appears to be the poor relation to The Strip, or offers a more vintage experience, depending on your perspective. On one trip I had breakfast with a fellow photographer before heading out to Fremont Street and we discussed our approaches to photography. Fred is an out-and-out street photographer; his interest is in people, pure and simple and he has a practised technique to get in close and yet not be noticed. I work differently as I am very interested in the relationship between the background and people in the frame. I suppose that makes me more of a travel photographer; I want to capture something of the spirit of place wherever I am at the time. In the shot here I wanted to combine the large ‘Gambling’ sign with the women dressed as show girls. For this shot I used a circular polariser, which required an ISO setting of 2,500 for f8, but the boost in contrast was worth it. The noise the Leica Q produces is relatively filmic and if it appears excessive I apply Topaz DeNoise. The other shots from my various trips to the desert metropolis are in the Las Vegas gallery.
When a friend of mine purchased a Sony RX1 in 2016 I thought it was way to much to spend on a compact camera. At £2,700 this was no trivial purchase and so I looked closely at cheaper options: the Fujifilm X100T and Olympus OMD 5 Mk II. Both of these cameras have retro looks and plenty of external controls, which personally I prefer and were far less expensive than the Sony. The Leica Q was not on my list.
Temptation
Then I read started to read reviews of the Leica Q. Pocket-Lint described it as “the best fixed-lens full-frame compact ever made” but it was Craig Mod‘s blog that really got me thinking. It was a six month field test in Asia and was one of the positive and compelling reviews I have ever read of a camera.
“Make no mistake: The Q is a surgical, professional machine. It pairs best-of-class modern technology (superb autofocus, an astounding electronic view finder, workable isos up to and beyond 10,000, a fast processor, beefy sensor) with a minimalist interface packed into a small body, all swaddled in the iconic industrial design for which Leica has become famous. The result is one of the least obtrusive, most single-minded image-capturing devices I’ve laid hands on.”
“If the gf1 so many years ago set in motion an entirely new genre of camera with micro four-thirds, the Q epitomizes it. If the iPhone is the perfect every person’s mirrorless, then the Q is some specialist miracle. It should not exist. It is one of those unicorn-like consumer products that so nails nearly every aspect of its being — from industrial to software design, from interface to output — that you can’t help but wonder how it clawed its way from the r&d lab. Out of the meetings. Away from the committees. How did it manage to maintain such clarity in its point of view?”
I believe that in hindsight… the Leica Q will be seen as one of the greatest fixed-prime-lens travel photography kits of all time.”
After reading that review I realised I wanted a Leica Q quite badly – but at close to £3,000 could I justify the purchase?
A demanding specification
Thinking through what I really wanted out of a large sensor compact I came up with a fairly demanding specification:
Large sensor (full frame if possible, but no smaller than APS-C)
Silent shutter operation
Usable at high ISO
A sharp, fast lens preferably with image stabilisation
Fast autofocus
Effective viewfinder
Good handling/ergonomics
Durable magnesium alloy construction
Weather proof
Good battery life
Decent burst performance
Value for money
The Leica Q has all this nailed except for weather sealing. That said, Craig Mod’s review indicated it was pretty tough:
“Over these last six months, the Q joined me while on assignment in South Korea, trekking across Myanmar, hiking the mountains of Shikoku, and spending a few freezing nights on Mt. Kōya. It was used in searing heat, 100% humidity, covered in sweat amid rice fields beneath a relentless sun…. The Q is small but substantial. Solid. It becomes an effortless all-day companion. Strapped across my chest, it was banged sideways against rocks, motorcycles, stone walls, metal water bottles, farmers, cats. It captured everything thrown at it and into it.”
Purchasing The Leica Q
I attended the Photography Show and after testing some of Nikon’s newest gear, went to the Leica stand to see if I could get my hands on one. There was one to hand and it didn’t take me long to decide that I really wanted one. The lens was astonishingly sharp, the build quality was rock solid and the camera was a joy to handle. The good people at Leica told me that the London Camera Company had six Qs on their stand to sell at the show, so I went and promptly bought one – the alternative being a lengthy waiting list. I wondered whether I would suffer buyer’s remorse afterwards – at £2,900 the Q is by far the most expensive camera purchase I had ever made.
Q Results
My experience with the Q, and its successor the Q2, has really been an extension of my first touch of the camera – it is a delight to use. It took me quite a while to get over how sharp the f1.7 lens is – I believe it is the sharpest lens I own. What I also found is that the camera can be remote controlled from my iPhone, which has permitted some street shots that I would not have got otherwise and that I could compose in high contrast black and white whilst simultaneously shooting in raw.
The shot of the boats in Folkestone harbour is straight from the camera. The image at top is of some objects for sale in Deal Market as was shot at f1.7 focusing on the statuette at the back of the table and shows the almost 3D effect a fast, very sharp lens can produce. Here is my summary of how the Q met my requirements:
Value for money – Leica’s 28mm f/1.4 retails at £3,900 with the f/2 costing £2,700. £2,900 for a full frame camera plus an f1.7 lens suddenly seems quite reasonable
Fast burst performance – 10 fps burst
Good battery life – 300 shots (Leica/CIPA tests) which is decent
Weather proof – sadly the Leica Q is not weather sealed
Durable magnesium alloy construction – a milled aluminium top and base plates and a magnesium alloy body provide an unrivalled quality feel
Good handling/ergonomics – The camera is built in Germany, the home of the Leica M. There is a good thumb grip on the back, and the optional grip is excellent. The controls are well laid out with an excellent tactile feel to them.
Effective viewfinder – The Q’s viewfinder is electronic rather than optical, but it does a pretty good job of mimicking an the optical EVF with its high resolution EVF, which at (3.68 megapixel resolution is the highest currently available.
Fast autofocus – The Leica Q is the first full-frame Leica to incorporate an autofocus system. It has a 49-point system with multi, 1-point, tracking, face-detection and touch AF.
A sharp, fast lens preferably with image stabilisation – f1.7, 5 axis stabilisation
Usable at high ISO – up to 6,400 in my estimation with film like grain
Silent shutter operation – leaf shutter for close to silent operation (1/2000s)
Large sensor – 24 megapixel full frame sensor with no optical low-pass filter for improved detail and tone mapping
And here are some of the extra’s I didn’t expect.
Remote control from iPhone via the Leica Q App
Rapid transfer of images of to iPhone via the Leica Q App
Ability to shoot wide open in bright conditions due to the electronic shutter (1/16000s)
Excellent monochrome setting, which allows high contrast mono JPEGS to be captured along with full colour RAW images
The Outstanding macro mode with 17cm minimum focus distance, activated from the control ring on the lens. The distance markings on the lens change to a new set of macro markings in a way that really exemplifies engineering excellence.
The aperture is controlled by a ring situated at the front of the lens (as with any M lens) and is astonishingly pleasing to handle and use
Excellent bokeh, especially for a relatively wide angle lens
The lens hood is incredibly solid and attractive – it is similar to the M’s Summarit 35mm
For a compact camera the Leica Q is quite substantial – it is not, by any means a pocket camera at 130 x 80 x 93mm and 640g. The purchase price is the same, but more so – it is very substantial! However, it is the best camera I have ever owned, and for me, an important step forward in camera development. I am shooting more and shooting differently – in street photography the 28mm makes you get in close (like Robert Capa and William Klein) and that means I am shooting better with the Leica Q and that is worth a lot to me.
Postscript – The Q2 and Back to Film
My Q was stolen in London – somehow thieves hooked the camera bag out from under the table where I had put it in a London pub. I I was sad about it as it had been all over the world with me – as described in Around the World With a Leica Q. The upside is the Q2 had just become available and I upgraded, giving me both weather proofing and the ability to crop in a little more, because of the larger sensor.
During lockdown I got back into film photography. I wasn’t sure about rangefinders so I started out with a low cost option – a Yashica GSN, which is a great way to get started. Finding that I got on with the Yashica well, I saved for a M6 TTL which I have enjoyed shooting with ever since. I have not switched from Nikon for a removable lens system as the cost of the many lenses I use is prohibitive, so the Q2 is the only digital Leica I own, but for street, travel and general purpose photography it remains my go to camera. so is the Leica worth it? With the built in Summilux the Q2 offers, I say it is.
Before I went back to film with a Nikon F3 in 2016, my previous film camera was a Canon IXUS, from the late ’90s – a point and shoot compact which took APS film. My photos from that time date from before I actively studied photography and the shots aren’t the best. My APS films were developed on standard machines, not the specialist ones they had been designed for, which further compromised the results. So my journey with film photography journey really started with the Nikon F3..
A Fortunate Find
Whilst staying with friends in Stockholm in 2016, I came across an Aladdin’s cave of a camera shop, which had a number of film cameras for sale, including Kodak Instamatics, Rolleiflex TLRs and Nikon SLRs, including several Nikon F3 models, some fitted with external motor drives.
The Nikon F3 model I picked out showed signs of wear and had a hole in the bottom of the body (which I later discovered was due to a missing motor drive coupling cover) but I was quite taken with it and bought it on impulse.
An Early Model
This was my first Nikon film SLR. A bit of research revealed that the F3, the successor to the legendary Nikon F (also reviewed on this site) and F2, was the last of the manual-focus, pro 35mm SLR cameras. It was introduced in 1980 and stayed in production until 2001, despite being superseded by the autofocus F4 in 1988.
That’s a long run – especially as according to the MIR site, work on the F3 started back in 1974, barely three years after the debut of the Nikon F2! The formal design process started in 1977 and a prototype was ready by late 1978, which is when NASA came knocking for an automatic exposure control camera for the Space Shuttle.
A check on the serial number showed my F3 was an early model from 1981, not the more common HP (High Eyepoint) variant introduced in 1982. The HP model is identical to its predecessor except for the finder (DE-3), which allowed those wearing glasses a better view of the entire frame. This became standard on the F3, which became known as the F3HP.
Finder Tradeofs
I don’t wear glasses when shooting, preferring to use a diopter, and in this case that’s an advantage, as the trade off the HP model makes to make the whole viewfinder visible from slightly further back is fractionally lower magnification. The F3 is also slightly lighter than the HP variant as the finder HP finder weighs a little more, though the HP finder has slightly improved rubber sealing. Unless you wear glasses, there isn’t much in it.
Five Finders
The F3 has five finders (all interchangeable) to choose from: eye-level (DE-2), eye-level HP (DE-3) waist-level (DW-3), sport (DA-2), and high-magnification (DW-4). The F3 also offered a right-angle viewing attachment (DR-3) and an Eyepiece Magnifier (DG-2). I’ve stuck with the DE-2 my F3 came with.
F3 Exotics
Beyond models based on finder variants there are several more exotic models of the F3. The best known, is the F3/T titanium model, which not much lighter than the regular F3 but quite desirable.
There was also a ruggedised F3P Press/Professional model, the F3 AF autofocus model and the weighty F3H F3 High Speed, a motorised speed demon that could shoot at 13 frames per second.
The autofocus Nikon F3 AF, which became available in 1983 with 2 autofocus lenses, was Nikon’s first entry in the world of AF technology. The Nikon F-501 arrived in 1986, and the Nikon F4 in 1988.
The F3 Electronics Controversy
Unlike its predecessors, which had always been entirely mechanical, the F3 uses an electronically controlled shutter which requires batteries. Electronic shutters and dependence on battery power for anything more than a light meter was initially resisted amongst Nikon professional shooters. Their initial response was to remain loyal to their fully mechanical F2s and eschew the F3.
This controversy apparently continued for years and may still continue. As one blogger wryly commented as recently as 2019: “I mean, what could possibly go wrong in attempting a dispassionate, objective analysis of two excellent SLRs made by Nikon? Oh…right…we are dealing with two groups of people: 1) those that believe that the SLR reached perfection in 1971 and everything since is an abomination against the laws of nature, aka “Knights of the Order of F2″ (referred to henceforth as KOTOOF2), and 2) everyone else.”
The fears of Nikon pros at launch turned out to be unfounded as the F3 was demonstrated itself to be just as bulletproof as as the F and F2. Nikon was committed to increasing reliability – as an example the F3’s shutter was designed to last an incredible 150K actuations, increased from 100K for the F and F2. However, to give photographers more confidence in the new technology Nikon built in a backup mechanical shutter into the F3 that operates at 1/60 sec.
In practice, the F3’s batteries last a very long time (compared to my Leica M6 TTL for example) and the tiny LR44s are easy to carry as spares. I also have an F2 with a Photomic head, and it is excellent, but my F3 gets used more.
The F3’s Horizontal Shutter
Another issue that the professionals weren’t keen on was the slow flash sync speed. The F3 has a horizontal travel shutter which, given the 3:2 aspect ratio of film, takes longer to operate than a vertical travel shutter. The 1/80 second maximum sync speed was the same as that of the F2, but well below the semi pro models (FA, FM2, FE2) with vertical travel shutters, which offered 1/250 second. The F3 was the last of the Nikon Pro cameras with a horizontal shutter – the F4’s went the other way.
Longevity versus Mechanical Cameras
Over time electronic components can be the Achilles heel of older film cameras and initially I thought the Nikon F3’s LCD which displays the shutter speed might be a weak spot. The display in the viewfinder, the Aperture Direct Readout (ADR), is just a display window so is not subject to deterioration, but LCDs don’t always age well. They can become harder to read over time and eventually stop working entirely. Nikon predicted they would only last about seven years or so with pro usage! 35 years after leaving the factory my well used F3’s LCD is holding up perfectly well. The F3’s manual controls also mean that the camera can still be used without the LCD display, although not with automation.
The last point to consider in the electronic vs mechanical Nikon stakes are that electronic shutters usually maintain their accuracy over time better than mechanical shutters.
F3 Surprises
One surprise to me about the F3 was that it was styled by an Italian design legend: Giorgetto Giugiaro, the man who styled the Ferrari 250 GT Bertone, the Aston Martin DB4 GT Bertone, and much else.
Another surprise was that there were Space Shuttle versions of the F3. These had large magazine backs of different capacities and various other modifications for use in space. It wasn’t the first Nikon in space however, as modified Fs were used aboard Apollo 15 and Skylab.
Upgrades and Repairs
Before I could shoot with my new purchase I needed to get it serviced and replace the missing motor drive coupling cover. Reading a little more, I learned that my camera was fitted with an unusual focusing screen, a plain matte screen which lacked the usual split image rangefinder spot.
The F3 is highly modular. It’s 5 interchangeable viewfinders could be paired with 15 interchangeable focusing screens. These vary from the standard central split-image microprism rangefinder screen to those for very specific use cases such as close ups, astro and architectural photography.
Mine was fitted with a Type D, which is used for close ups and with long lenses. I called Greys of Westminster and ordered the more usual Type K type rangefinder screen, a new coupling cover and a -2 diopter.
It’s easy enough to remove the F3’s finder to change the screen. Sliding the grooved buttons on each side of the finder back towards the eye piece releases the front of the finder which can then be lifted out and removed.
All that remained was to take the body into my local camera shop, imagex, who sent it away for a much needed service, at a very reasonable cost of £69.
Adjusting to the F3
It wasn’t difficult to get used to the controls of the F3. They are simple and the dials on the top plate of were familiar looking, as I was shooting with the retro styled digital Nikon Df at the time, and the F3 only offers aperture-priority automation and manual operation.
I did fire the shutter accidently with the backup mechanical release lever (‘what does this lever do? doh!’) to the right of the lens beneath the ‘exposure memory lock’ button (AE-L on modern cameras).
LCD Display
The LCD shutter speed window in the finder isn’t especially bright and can be hard to read at times. There is button to light it up but its exceptionally hard to press and gives so little additional light that its not worth the effort. I actually prefer the needle matching system of the FM3A, FE and FE2, though that is even harder to read in low light.
80/20 Centre Weighting
An adjustment I thought I might need to make was to get used to the heavily centre-weighted metering system, apparently a request from Nikon Pros looking for greater precision. Metering is TTL and reads the light over the whole focusing screen, but nearly all (80%) of metering sensitivity is set to the central 12mm, whilst the rest of the screen gets the remaining 20%.
Nikon accomplished this weighting in an unusual way; by putting thousands of tiny little pinholes in the reflex mirror. These allow exactly 8% of the light to pass through the mirror and onto a metering cell. This didn’t make it’s way into subsequent models; the F4 reverted to 60/40. weighting.
In practice the heavy centre weighting can be useful, and certainly hasn’t presented a problem, even when I forgot about it, but that maybe because I shoot with very forgiving black and white negative film.
The F3 was the first in the F series to put the meter in the camera body. Previous models, which had the meter in the prism, featured 60/40 centre-weighted metering. This is also the case with the last of Nikon’s film cameras, the rather wonderful FM3A.
One little control that isn’t at all obvious is the Multiple Exposure Lever on the far right of the top plate. This enables you re-cock the shutter without advancing the film.
First Outing with the Nikon F3
Once the camera was back from service I bought some Ilford HP5 400 film and headed for the Victoria and Albert Museum, where I shot some of the statues in various galleries, whilst I also visited the excellent Paul Strand photographic exhibition. Initially I kept looking at the back of the camera to see what I had shot, only to be greeted by cardboard film type insert on the camera back. My first keeper is shown above – I really liked the grain and the tone of film and I was hooked.
From the Nikon F3 Onwards…and Backwards
Since I bought the F3 I have acquired several other Nikon film cameras, including the mighty F6 and the hybrid mechanical/electronic marvel that is the FM3A, all of which you can read about in detail on this site from the preceding links.
I’ve also gone back to the start of the F series with a late F from 1970 and an F2 from 1975, both of which are excellent cameras. I particularly like the way you can see rangefinder DNA in the F’s baseplate, which evolved from the Nikon SP rangefinder. The prototype for the F was built on an SP model, adding the distinctive mirror box and pentaprism of the SLR, and a new lens mount, the F mount. The letter F comes from re-F-lex.
A scene from the Faroe Islands, shot with the Nikon F3
Though some of my photographer friends love the later Nikon F4 and F5, I have never taken to either of them – preferring either the earlier F, F2 or F3 manual focus cameras or the final F6 model.
I’ve taken the Nikon F3 with me when I’ve travelled, including some fairly harsh environments like the Faroe Islands, and it performed very well. I thought about taking my FM2n on that trip, as it is lighter, but the more rugged F3 inspired more confidence.
The Go Anywhere F3
The Nikon F3 remains one of favourite manual Nikon film cameras. Unlike other more expensive classics, such as Leica M6 or Nikon FM3A, which most photographers (including me) fret about in use, my F3 presents no worries at all. It is extremely rugged, affordable to service (or replace), and easy to use.
I bought it slightly beaten up and it’s so tough I am comfortable taking it anywhere. I have 50mm and 28mm (Voigtländer) pancake lenses to keep the form factor to a minimum – the F3 and both pancake lenses easily fit into a small camera bag. It is versatile: the shutter is fast (up to 1/2000 second), and though I haven’t needed them to date, there is a PC connection (though a flash requires an adaptor), and it will take a standard cable release. It takes great pictures. What more could you ask for?
The exact date of the foundation of the city of Oxford is uncertain, but the place is ancient.
It was probably first laid out in the 890s by Aethelred, ealdorman of Mercia, or by his successor Aethelflaed ‘The Lady of the Mercians’. Sited on an important crossing point across the Thames, which formed the frontier between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia, Oxford started as a ford for oxen (Oxenaforda) long before it had an urban identity.
A religious community also preceded the town. It grew up after the death of the Mercian Princess Frideswide in 727. Her church was destroyed in the St Brice’s Day massacre, a priory was built in its place and dedicated to her as St Fridewide’s Priory. This would eventually become Oxford’s Cathedral, where her shrine remains.
Saxon Oxford
Oxford first appears in a document in c.900 in a list of fortified Saxon towns called the Burghal Hidage, and was mentioned in the shortly afterwards in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 912. The Saxon streets of Oxford intersected at a place later known as Carfax – probably meaning four forks, from the latin quadrifurcus. The oldest standing building, the Saxon tower of St Michael at the Northgate, was built in 1040
The Normans
The castle is Norman. After the death of the knight who built it, it was used by Royalty from time to time. The most notable of these visits was from Empress Matilda, who lived in the oldest surviving structure, the Tower of St. George, during the civil war known as the Anarchy. The Norman invasion was hard on the town. The Domesday book recorded that half of the town’s had been laid waste in 1086, but it also recorded the right of the town’s Freemen to graze animals in Port Meadow free of charge – a right still exercised today.
By the middle of the 11th Century Oxford was one of he more important provincial towns, on a par with Lincoln and and Winchester, and Royal councils were occasionally held in the town.
The University
There is no clear date for the foundation of the University, but there is evidence of teaching in 1096. It grew rapidly from 1167 when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris. The city was well established as an academic centre by the 13th century with University, Balliol, and Merton Colleges all founded during that century.
Town and Gown
Academic life in Oxford was characterised by murder in the stories of ’90s TV detective Inspector Morse, and this violence in academia was foreshadowed by a turbulent relationship between Oxford’s town people and students. The most notorious incident occurred in 1354 in the Swyndlestock Tavern (a bank today), when two students took issue with the innkeeper about the quality of his wine. This dispute quickly escalated into an armed conflict that lasted three days and resulted in around 90 deaths. Despite incidents like this and regular scholastic riots, by the mid 14th century the University was well established enough for Edward III to pay tribute to it for both its contribution to learning and the services to the state of Oxford graduates. Several colleges were founded every century and there are now 39 in total.
Reversals
Oxford’s growth was inevitably accompanied by some reversals. In the 12th century a fire burned the city to the ground and the black death of the 14th century reduced the population heavily; as did the sweating sickness epidemic of the 16th century. The university benefited from these depopulations by buying up vacant property and continuing to grow its estates.
Arrival of Industry
In the late 18th century Oxford connected to Coventry and the Thames, and in the mid In 1844, the Great Western Railway linked Oxford with London. The city became more industrial when the automotive industry was established in nearby Cowley by William Morris, who built the Morris Garage in Longwall street in 1910. The need for more space bought a move to a factory 1913 at Cowley and mass production followed, resulting in Cowley expanding into a large industrial centre. Despite its canal and railway links, the city had remained a tight knit , conservative and academic town, with the the university press the only large-scale employer. The car industry transformed Oxford into one of the major industrial cities of southern England, though happily the architectural gems of the old city have been well preserved, also being spared the devastation meted out to so many other cities during World War II.
The sights of Oxford
As you might expect from such a historic city, there are numerous sights to be enjoyed in Oxford, which particularly photogenic, though it is often very crowded, especially in the summer. Here are my top ten:
The cobbled Radcliffe Square containing the iconic Radcliffe Camera (part of the Bodleian Library), and surrounded by the ancient trio of Brasenose College, All Souls College and the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, with its excellent view from the top of the tower.
The old pubs of the city, including the Kings Arms (1607), near Radcliffe Square; the Eagle and Child, frequented by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and located on St Giles; the old coaching inn of the Lamb and Flag, also on St Giles; the 13th century Turf Tavern, and the Bear, one of the oldest of all, with its wood panels and collection of 4,500 ties.
The Covered Market, which opened in 1774 and contains a fantastic selection of fresh produce, cafes and boutique stalls.
Bohemian Jericho, which contains Freud, one of the most notable cocktail bars in the city, located behind the ancient looking Greek columns of St Paul’s Church on Walton Street and the excellent Indian cuisine of the Standard, also on the same street.
The Sheldonian Theatre, designed by Christopher Wren for the University with its busts of the Philosophers or Emperors.
Christ Church Meadow which borders the Rivers Cherwell and Isis (the local name for the Thames) which is ideal for a stroll. The buildings of Oxford’s largest college are also very beautiful, though even busier now with visitors since the filming of the Harry Potter films. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland were also inspired and written there. The Tom Tower is one of the most imposing sights – the upper part of the tower was which was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, who had himself been a student at the college.
The eclectic collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum, founded by Lieutenant-General Augustus Pitt Rivers, an anthropologist who collected more than 20,000 objects from around the British Empire.
The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, on Beaumont Street, which was the world’s first university museum, and will content the culturally curious for several hours at a time.
The ethnically diverse restaurants, shops and people of Cowley Road, with its annual carnival. This started in 2000 and now attracts crowds of up to 45,000 people, with live music and food stalls outside the many restaurants.
The ancient grazing land of Port Meadow and the nearby pub The Trout, located on the banks of the Thames.
I lived in Oxford in the late ’80s and early ’90s, moving up from Deal in Kent, my home town. Initially I rented a room in a crumbling gothic mansion in Norham Gardens, where I taught English to foreign students. It was post graduate house populated by academics including a semiotician, several mathematicians and a philosopher. I was asked to show my rather less distinguished Degree certificate to the landlady before I was able to move in. Later, as Academic Representative for a German language school, I lived in a damp basement flat in Iffley Road – which gave me the opportunity to get to know the nearby Cowley Road. During that time I came to be very fond of the City of Oxford and have lived in the county ever since.
I have been photographing the Radcliffe Camera for over 20 years, but the image included in this post is the first one I actually feel does it any justice. It was taken on a wet, cold evening in January 2014 when hardly anyone was around and the sky was full of drama. I took the shot with an old school 24mm ƒ/2.8D prime lens originally designed for film cameras mounted on a Nikon D600 (a troublesome body I intend to trade in for a D500 at some point). The Cowley Road Festival shot were both taken on a Nikon Df with an AF-S 24-120mm ƒ/4 lens.
Black and white images often possess a timeless quality that is more difficult to achieve with colour images. This is largely because colour provides more visual clues as to when a photograph was taken.
Variance in the colours themselves can sometimes suggest a specific era – the difference between the colour renditions of the 1970s for example, and today are often clearly discernible; this is due to differences in colour processing, which have changed significantly over time.
Printed colour images may also be subject to varying degrees of instability as they age, which is also helpful in dating them.
The Advance of Colour Film
The first permanent colour photograph was taken in the 1860s using the colour separation, a method which required shooting three separate black and white photos using three different coloured filters. These were then projected together to create a colour image.
By the first decade of the twentieth century colour separation using the Autochrome process which used millions of tiny colour filters made of potato starch spread over the surface of a plate of glass was available.
In the 1930s multi-layered colour film was developed, the first of which was Kodachrome. The 1960s saw the development of instant photographs by Polaroid, and in the 1970s the C-41 chromogenic colour negative process replaced the C-22 process that Kodak had introduced in the 1950s. For more on the history of photographic processes, see the article on this site ‘From Chemistry to Computation’
It was not until the 1970’s that colour photography became the form of photography. Monochrome photography continued but in niche markets such as fine art.
The Advent of Digital
With the advent of digital photography the clues provided by film have disappeared, but colour is also an element of fashion which inevitably gives a better sense of when the picture was taken. Regardless of changes in fashion, colour provides a level of detail absent from black and white pictures – there is just less information for us to process, making a picture more difficult to date. This is helpful in many genres of photography but is especially so for travel, street and portrait photography. Whilst we know the approximate date we took our pictures, if when these photos were taken is difficult to discern, it seems to imbue them with additional value. Why this should be a virtue is largely attributable to the notion of the ‘classic’ – something long-standing that does not date with age. Synonyms of the word classic give us a clue to the value implied by the term: simple, elegant, understated, uncluttered, restrained, time-honoured, timeless, ageless, abiding, enduring and immortal. Portrait photographer Anne Geddes made the point well when she said: “The best images are the ones that retain their strength and impact over the years, regardless of the number of times they are viewed.”
Photographing souls
Another aspect of timelessness, although more subjective, is that many photographers consider black and white photography promotes a stronger emotional connection with people. Canadian photographer Ted Grant’s quote on this is well known: “When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls!“
Souls being more durable and important than clothes (to all but the fashion industry!) this quality naturally creates a more timeless photograph.
The Weight of History
Another factor is that because black and white photography preceded colour, many of the pioneers of photography from Adams to Weston including many pioneering women, shot in black and white . Monochrome images were dominant beyond photography’s formative years – leading the way for the first 120 years or so of photography’s history. This resulted in a huge number of iconic black and white images and creates a significant pedigree and a degree of nostalgia for what is now a genre rather than a technology.
The accompanying photo is of Newcastle based photographer Irena Childers and was shot in Garth Park, Bicester, as part of a camera club shoot. It is a digital shot but it strikes me that the picture could have been taken at any time between from 1950 and the present day. This only became apparent when I performed the mono conversion with Silver Efex. The colour version just didn’t have the same timeless quality…
When a photograph is converted to mono and the colour removed, what remains is tone. Tone is in fact one of the reasons black and white photography has continued to be popular after the advent of colour. It was the tonal quality of Paul Strand’s work that inspired landscape legend Ansel Adams to make a career change from classical pianist/hobby photographer as a hobby to full time professional. It was the“full, luminous shadows and strong high values, in which subtle passages of tone were preserved” in Strand’s photography that Adam’s found so compelling.
Tonal Range
Tonal range refers to the range and distribution of tones in an image from the darkest to the lightest values. An image with a wide tonal range will include very dark (black) and very light (white) elements, whereas as one with a narrow tonal range will be limited to a more restricted area and will have less contrast. Lighting conditions have a great impact on tonal range. On a misty day in Oxford, UK the difference in brightness between the lightest part and the darkest parts of the scene will be relatively insignificant, but under the harsh light of the mid day sun in Arizona the range will be much greater. Extremes such as that aside, images with a wide tonal range tend have both greater contrast and greater appearance of drama and depth. A narrower tonal range makes the image look flatter, though this may be by design. Tonal range is influenced by the amount of and quality of light (harsh or soft) and the reflectance of the subject. The addition of a polarising filter, something I use extensively, improves contrast and can thus help expand the tonal range. Tonal range is different from dynamic range which refers to the ability of the camera’s sensor to capture shadow detail from the darkest values and highlight detail from the brightest values in the same shot. Dynamic range is maximised in RAW format which records all the image data the sensor is capable of recording, and is one of the main reasons this format is used. Tonal range is the number of tones an image has has to describe the dynamic range.
Tonal Contrast
Tonal contrast is created when light tones and dark tones are adjacent to one another – it has the effect of directing the viewers attention to the contrasting area and is the basis of the success of many black and white images. It is an essential element of composition, but is not as well known as other compositional rules such as leading lines, the rule of thirds, framing, and diagonals.
A tonal curve is typically applied to the image by the camera by default as the image data from the photo sites is linear (the values are directly proportional to the light received), whereas human vision is non-linear. The process is known as (tone curve correction aka gamma correction) and makes the pictures look right to the human eye on a screen display. This process generally lightens the midtones. This default tonal curve can be adjusted in the curves tool of RAW conversion programs (such as the ageing but excellent Aperture, which I still use). The Aperture user manual describes the use of the Curves tool quite well:
“You use the Curves adjustment controls when you want to manually set the tonal values of the shadows, midtones, and highlights in an image using a tonal curve. Unlike the Levels adjustment controls, the Curves controls do not reapportion the luminance values in the image by constraining the white and black points. Instead, you use the Curves controls to precisely remap the position of the midtones relative to the white and black points. Because the human eye’s perception of light is logarithmic rather than incremental, a curve is necessary to distribute the luminance values across all tonal ranges in an image in a way that matches how the eye perceives light in nature.”
Applying a Tone Curve
Applying an S-shaped curve to the data, which is initially shown as a straight line, applies a steep curve in the mid tones, which increases contrast and give the image greater impact. A correctly exposed film image has an inherently more S shaped tone curve than a digital image, and film, being based on a chemical process, and therefore essentially analogue, also creates a smoother continuum of tones than digital cameras. This difference diminishes with every generation of sensor. As much as I care about tone, the advantages of the digital dark room, for me at least, vastly outweigh any disadvantages of digital photography. Let’s take the example of dodging (applying reduced exposure locally) and burning (applying additional exposure locally), both of which are important techniques to modify tone. To quote Ansel Adams once again: “dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.” Both are fiendishly difficult to master with film to the level Adams used, and far simpler with image editing programs such as PhotoShop. It is worth noting that some photographers also consider that dodging and burning can give a more natural impression than adjusting the tonal curve. I use both techniques.
The Black and White Advantage
Here are some of the advantages that the various attributes of tone confer over colour:
With only tones to work with, black and white forces the photographer to pay closer attention to composition – which is in itself an advantage.
The simplicity of a race of tones makes the subject easier to focus on, which is one of the reasons so many street photographers eschew colour.
Simplicity can be enhanced by discarding extraneous detail more easily in monochrome images. I often burn out distracting detail in dark areas to further simplify the image.
Editing a photo converted to black and white provides a much greater opportunity to redistribute the light to create finely graduated tones, which can make architecture and sculpture both more three dimensional and more beautiful.
In portraiture, skin tones are evened out.
Graphical elements and patterns are more evident.
Abstract images are stronger.
Textures often appear to have more depth.
Black and white photography is more effective in low contrast situations, such as under heavy cloud
My example of tone from Flash of Darkness is the Colossus of Constantine in the Courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori of the Musei Capitolini (Capitoline Museums) on the Capitoline Hill in Rome. The statue, built c. 312-315 AD is truly immense and once stood at around 40 feet high. I have experimented with many different versions of this image, from low key to high key and with varying tone curves and application of dodge and burn. The image I prefer however is the one on this page which is fairly neutral, with only a slight increase in contrast; it seems to be the most effective at describing the shading of the marble forms and the subtle changes in the tones of the painted plasterwork.
We have had colour photography since the 1930s and the invention of Kodachrome, though it took until the 1970s for it become the norm. So why has black and white photography persisted?
Perhaps the most obvious difference between colour and b&w photography is that unlike their colour equivalents, black and white images are not direct renditions of their subjects. By omitting colour and substituting shades of grey, black and white photography presents an abstract and therefore less realistic image. This takes us into the representational world of art, where the artist tries to portray what is perceived and interpreted with the mind rather than what is seen directly by the eye. Both the artist and the photographer are working with a 3D subject in a 2D medium and this is where black and white photograph has an advantage over a colour rendition – black and white excels at tone; which describes the darkness or lightness of a particular area of an image. This is important as tone is essential to convey the illusion of form – or how the subject looks in three dimensions. Black and white draws more attention to the shadows and lines that depict form and gives a better illusion of depth. This is one of the reasons that black and white is often an effective medium for both landscapes and architectural shots as it can emphasise the shapes and forms within the scene. The case for black and white is even stronger with a side lit photo where light intensity varies across the person or object and the scene is subject to strong shadows. This is one of the reasons why I am fond of film noir which uses a lot of side lighting, shadow and contrast as opposed to the the more evenly exposed lighting of mainstream Hollywood.
On to my example, which is a shot of the columnar and iconic Marina City Towers on Chicago’s Riverfront, designed by architect Bertrand Goldberg. This is one of Chicago’s most notable buildings and was designated a city landmark in 2015. I was much taken with this 65-storey building complex, the tallest residential concrete building in the world at the time of completion in 1964, and known locally as the ‘corn cobs’, as I was driven to my hotel in a taxi. At the time I thought it was the world’s most elegant car park, but actually only the lower 19 floors are used for parking, whilst the upper floors contain apartments, restaurants and a concert hall. The towers were used as a back drop for a chase scene in Steve McQueen’s 1980 film ‘The Hunter’ . In his last film appearance, McQueen played a bounty hunter who is himself being pursued by a psychotic killer and chases a fugitive up the parking ramp in one of the towers before the car he is pursuing skids off the edge into the Chicago River.
I shot the towers from several locations, including the river, whilst on an architectural tour of the city, and eventually captured this image, which I felt depicted the organic form of the building best – the contrast between the light edges of the circular elements and the dark background, together with the sweeping curves of the tower in the foreground, draw the eye and help describe its form. It was shot in the morning, and, as usual, I used a circular polariser to darken the sky and increased the contrast between the building and its background. I took the shot with a Nikon Df with a ‘walk around’ 28-300 lens at ISO 200/45mm/f11/1/250 sec. The towers have a constantly changing pattern of light and shadow over the course of the day and are an ideal subject for black and white photography as well as a great piece of architecture. I was much taken with Chicago, which I visited for the first time in 2015 – it is undoubtedly one of the finest cities for modern architecture in the world and I am keen to return to capture more of it, but my enduring memory of my first visit is those iconic, sci-fi columns of Marina City.
Blues Alley and Robert Johnson
Across The Mighty Mississippi to Helena
Beale Street
Room 306 of The Lorraine Motel
Origins
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It’s been a while…
The cobbled Radcliffe Square containing the iconic 
We have had colour photography since the 1930s and the invention of