The World Photography Organisation event in NYC between 13th Oct and the 6th November will include workshops by four internationally renowned photographers from four different disciplines.

Portrait photographer Steve Pyke, Photojournalist Jez Coulson, Filmmaker Cheryl Dunn and Street Photographer Nick Turpin will each lead a group in producing a portrait of New York City over three days.

The event is hosted by The Chelsea Art Museum and more information and tickets are available here.

in-public member David Gibson will be teaching a four day workshop in Lebanon between the 8th and 11th September 2011. The workshop titled ‘Develop Your Street Photography Style’ is organised by Loryne Atoui. Contact Loryne if you’d like to be one of the 16-18 participants.

Here is clip of David speaking about his work from the in-public film in-sight.

The Best Street Photograph Ever is an experiment. I have set up a page that allows you to upload and rank Street Photographs from any Street Photographer made at any time. If enough people take part and the software works as it should, we should slowly see a distillation of the most enjoyed Street Photographs as the most popular rise to the top of the column of images and the less popular slip down the list.

Potentially we are able to compare and contrast street images from across 150 years and see how they are viewed and rated by a contemporary audience, as the rating progresses we may see trends and preferences appearing. Will the top 10 images be colour or black and white? Will they all be recent or vintage? Will they be complex or simple, humorous or tragic?

I anticipate that at the very least this process will result in a fantastic archive of Street Photographs that will be of great value to anyone wishing to understand Street Photography, be inspired and find out what has gone before.

Please help me make this work by taking part here…

The Best Street Photograph Ever

Forgotten in a drawer for 35 years, Paul Trevor’s photographs from Liverpool in the 1970′s show us a different time and a different culture both for Liverpudlians and for photographers to operate in.

Like You’ve Never Been Away is at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool until 25 September 2011

via The Guardian.

Earlier this year the London design company JohnsonBanks asked me to select 10 significant images from the Format International Photography Festival 2011, here is the piece I wrote for them.

FORMAT was established in 2004, by Louise Clements and Mike Brown, and is now one of the UK’s leading non-profit international contemporary festivals of photography and related media. The biennale programme celebrates the wealth of contemporary practice in international photography. The theme for the 2011 festival was street photography with the title of ‘Right Here, Right Now’: Exposures from the public realm. The Derby based festival which ran throughout March brought together for the first time some of the greatest names in street photography and reflected the current resurgence the approach is experiencing. Photographers converged on Derby from all over the world and included the legendary Joel Meyerowitz who acted as the festival patron. To wander the galleries was to experience the world in all its quirky variety and beauty, the images presented candid street scenes from different decades as well as from different continents. Often described as ‘the hardest challenge in photography’ street photographers work with the simplest of equipment to observe and record candid moments of magic on our everyday streets, literally making something out of nothing through the act of photography. It is my pleasure to select ten images from this years festival that highlight what is special about the street photographers approach.

01 Although primarily a photojournalist, the Magnum photographer Alex Webb has long been considered a street photographer at heart, his busy and colourful frames juxtapose numerous elements leaving your eye roaming around the picture unable to rest, discovering new details as it goes. His pictures balance carefully his subject matter, in this case Istanbul, and his own photographic virtuosity. His framing of busy street scenes, full of elements in motion is second to none.

TURKEY. Istanbul. 2005. Along the Bosporus © Alex Webb/Magnum Photos

02 Bruno Quinquet is a quiet Frenchman working in Tokyo, for the last four years he has been photographing the anonymous suits of corporate Tokyo for his Salaryman project. The candidly made images use various devices to avoid identifying the various businessmen he photographs, Bruno’s way of commenting on the increasing constraints being applied to candid portraiture and street photography.

Akabane - Nihonbbashi, from the series Salaryman Project by Bruno Quinquet

03 In 2009 Zhang Xiao left his job as a photographer at the Chongqing Morning Post to photograph the 18,000 km of China’s coastline. Xiao says the sea is ‘a place of strong emotions and rich imagery, it is the beginning of lives and dreams’. Shooting on film and hand printing in muted tones Xiao’s pictures have the feeling of aged images of the past but when one looks closer their subjects reflect the quickly changing China of today. This picture is typical of the quiet and the spiritual that pervade his beautiful images.

Coastline No 20 by Zhang Xiao

04 Glasgow born Dougie Wallace now lives in the East End of London but his pictures tend to be made on his regular travels across Europe and beyond. This image is from his series ‘Reflections on Life’ in which Dougie has photographed commuters on trams in cities including Sarajevo, Ukraine and Albania. The pictures blend beautifully the internal and external worlds, tram passengers are melded with the passing scenery and architecture. I admire his fearless approach in photographing strangers so closely through the glass.

Dougie Wallace

05 Garry Winogrand died in 1984 leaving behind nearly 300,000 unedited images and 2500 unprocessed rolls of film, most of this now held by The Centre for Creative Photography in Arizona. Shooting in New York and America during what is considered to be the ‘Golden Age’ of street photography between the late 1950′s and the 1980′s, the vast majority of Winogrands work was made in black and white.
The Format festival were able to obtain a selection of rare unseen colour images that were edited for the festival by Joel Meyerowitz. These images speak to me of a less self conscious and more naive time, a time when maybe identical twins still dressed a like.

Early Colour work (1958-1964) by Garry Winogrand ©Estate of Garry Winogrand

06 Joel Meyerowitz is a legend for many of the current generation of street photographers, he has a generosity of personality that is evident both in meeting him in person and in viewing his pictures. There is a lust for life and it’s unexpected richness that is evident in his images. He was an early pioneer of colour street photography and has championed the medium for many decades. Joel was co author of the street photography bible ‘Bystander’ that was published in 1994 and has been a huge support and influence on my own street shooting and that of my colleagues. I chose this image because it symbolises for me the energy and joy for life that Joel Meyerowitz still has now in his 70′s.

From the Car, New York State Thruway, 1974 by Joel Meyerowitz

07 In January 2010 I bought a book on a whim from a small Tokyo bookstore called ‘Citizens’, when it arrived I was delighted by my little gamble. The book contained some of the best contemporary street photography I had seen by a virtually unknown Japanese street photographer called Jun Abe. I took the liberty of scanning some of the work and posting it online which caused a huge stir as, for many, it was the first time his work had been seen outside of Japan. Over the subsequent year Jun’s work has gained a great deal of respect and the Format Festival gave him his first public exhibition in the West.

From 'Citizens' by Abe Jun

08 Between August and December 2008 Frederic Lezmi travelled between Vienna and Beirut, a journey from The West to The Orient, the resulting photographs explore where one ends and the other begins. The project was published as the striking book ‘Beyond Borders’ which unfolds to a length of 11 meters and was displayed in its entirety on the gallery wall at Format. This lovely image of a cleaning lady taken through a net curtain has always been a favourite of mine, the photographer looking from the street into a private world unseen by his subject. The outside world is reflected in the glass while she herself is reflected in the mirror she cleans, all rendered in a subtle palette of pastel colours. Frederic has elevated a simple cleaning lady into a classical thing of beauty.

From 'Beyond Borders' by Frederic Lezmi

09 The Slovakian photographer Martin Kollar is a favourite of mine from the current generation of street photographers, his quirky moments from off beat local cultural events around Eastern Europe were published in the book ‘Nothing Special’. Kollar manages to create a series of images of surreally unconnected scenes that are held beautifully together under the umbrella of his own strong personal vision, a trick that many street photographers fail to achieve. The result is that each image stands wonderfully on its own, containing its own narrative while also being one element of the whole series and book.

Martin Kollar, from the series Nothing Special

10 The in-public international street photographers group has played a significant role in promoting street photography since it’s formation in 2000, the group displayed over 60 images at the Format Festival alongside a documentary film following it’s members on the streets of New York, London, Rotterdam and Melbourne. The group has three Australian members and I have chosen to include this image from Adelaide based Narelle Autio. Many of Narelle’s images feature the beach or the Ocean and take advantage of the extraordinary Australian light, her heightened sense of colour often makes the images resemble early colour postcards.

Spotty Dog, Narelle Autio.

The Format Festival will return with a new theme in 2012 but if your appetite for street photography has been stimulated, you can see more at a number of events this year.
The Museum of London’s ‘London Street Photography’ show is on until the 4th September and The London Street Photography Festival runs between 7th and 17th July around Kings Cross.

http://www.formatfestival.com/

http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/London-Wall/Whats-on/Exhibitions-Displays/London-Street-Photography/

http://londonstreetphotographyfestival.org/

Most of you will be familiar with the extraordinary talent that was Garry Winogrand, a street photographer renowned for his portrayal of mid-20th century America who died in 1984. Winogrand has been an enormous influence on subsequent generations of street photographers and there is now, understandably, a renewed interest in his work. Winogrand is very much associated with black and white street photography but a large body of colour work does exist from the period 1958-1964 but is very difficult to locate.

Single colour street images by Winogrand have tantalisingly appeared here and there, the first picture below from 1963 was published in Bystander but the subsequent images have largely never before been published as far as I am aware. So it is with great pleasure that I am able to present them here on sevensevennine.com.

In Bystander Joel Meyerowitz says that…

“Garry also shot a lot of color, but on assignment and on trips and things like that. He didn’t see it as a major force”

When I asked Joel to elaborate a little on what Garry’s relationship with colour was, this is what he said…

“Garry was comfortable with color and didn’t have any strong feelings against it. I think he used it mainly for his commercial work as he often carried a Nikon with a long lens on it to make what he called “schmaltz” which means in Yiddish, fatty, or sentimental, or sweet, overripe…etc. For example, violinists who play at weddings usually render “schmaltzy versions of love songs.” But he also was carrying a second Leica with color in it and he loved showing slide shows of that work, once even showing it at MoMA when John did a show of Garry’s work. My guess is that since the times didn’t support color printing very easily he simply didn’t see any reason to emphasize it then. perhaps if color printing was as it is today he would have been thinking in those terms more frequently, but who knows?”

Many thanks to those who assisted me in acquiring these images, I think it is historically important that they are available to excite and influence those of us continuing to work like Garry Winogrand today.

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

copyright Garry Winogrand

A Selection of Garry Winogrand’s Colour images can be seen at The QUAD Gallery at The Format International Photography Festival in Derby until the 8th May.

This film has been posted on in-public for a couple of weeks and dates from 1981. Filmmaker Robert Gilberg followed Joel Meyerowitz and writer/curator Colin Westerbeck on the streets of Manhattan as they discussed street photography and Joel’s photographic practice. The film was never shown until now and was only rediscovered on Gilbert’s death. I’m enormously grateful to Joel for allowing us to give it an audience now.

I’m sure many of you are aware of the forthcoming FORMAT 11 International Photo Festival taking place in Derby between the 4th March and the 3rd April 2011. The theme of this years festival is Street Photography with the title ‘Right Here, Right Now: Exposures from the Public Realm’. The Street Photographers group in-public will be exhibiting over 60 prints at the Derby Art Gallery and Museum along with a documentary film I have made over the last few months. The film has taken me to the streets of London and New York whilst my second camera person Marieke De Bra has filmed in Rotterdam and Melbourne.

The aim of the film has been to show the members of in-public making their photographs on the street with no models, no posing, no flash…in fact no intervention of any kind if at all possible. In a festival with such an all encompassing view of Street Photography as FORMAT, I was very keen to use in-public’s gallery space to demonstrate the continued importance of creating a candid record of modern life and the importance of the moment at a time when literally un momentous photography is the fashion. In filming ‘in-sight’ I have used miniature HD cameras to ride along on the hotshoe of the Street Photographers camera giving an intimate view of the picture making process.

The film will be shown first at FORMAT and then perhaps online in some fashion but that has still to be discussed and agreed with all concerned, in the meantime, here is a trailer to wet your appetite and give you a sense of what’s in store.

On the 4th March I will be speaking about the ‘Inspiration of Street Photography’ at the Format Photography Conference, along with Bruce Gilden, Amy Stein, John Maloof, Michael Wolf, Yumi Goto, Sophie Howarth and others.

On the 5th March I will be doing Portfolio reviews and would love to see and discuss your own Street Photography.

It’s almost 12 months since I picked up my shiny brand new Leica M9 and wrote my first review of it here on sevensevennine . This is a brief update to that review having used the camera in earnest on the streets and in particular in the shooting of my current project The French which is completely shot on the Leica M9.

Having used Leica M series rangefinders since 1997 I am very familiar with what to expect from them and the M9 has delivered on my expectations in most ways. The camera has given me the confidence to initiate a major personal project and 1 year in, I am extremely happy with the way it has performed in the hand on the street and very much with the picture results it has produced. I have travelled with it around France and have felt comfortable using it in crowds and intimate public situations, it is as quiet and as unthreatening as its predecessors which gives me the confidence to raise it to my eye and make images in many situations I wouldn’t have with a Canon or Nikon DSLR.

The M9, a familiar friend in the hand.

In practice a digital M camera has some advantages and some disadvantages over its film forerunners, the main advantage I see is that I can leave the house with three tiny memory cards and three batteries and shoot a huge story, if I am in town and a major news event occurs I could photograph it until the following morning or beyond. Three batteries and three 16gb cards give me something like 2400 frames, which to put that in perspective would be about 66 rolls of film. The main disadvantage of the digital M9 is probably the life of the batteries and the speed with which they die without warning, this can lead to the ultimate Street Photographers nightmare where you put the camera to your eye, push the button and nothing happens. The second problem I have is that the camera may be set to be permanently ‘on’, but this setting will drain the batteries if you forget to turn it off, if you select the ‘auto off’ setting, then you find that you need to bring the camera to life before exposing a frame by gently touching the shutter release. This is not a big problem because you get used to waking the camera as part of your set up for a shot in the same way that you did to meter a shot with a film M series machine….but it can take getting used to.

The main education of the last 12 months has been in the fantastic sharp image quality from the M9 and the development that can bring to your Street Photography. Once you have seen those big detailed files on your monitor you are filled with confidence in making bigger, wider, busier pictures because you know the files can hold it. A year later I am still amazed at the picture information gathered by this little camera, the combination of high image quality and small physical size is inspiring. During my travels round France I have been taking advantage of the M9′s detailed files and standing back from the scenes I am photographing, building up the scenes, letting more and more action fill the frame because I know I can get away with it, I would have needed at least a 6×7 negative to get this amount of information on film. The M9 trounces its film forerunners for sharpness, detail and sheer information resolving power.

Contrevoz, France 2010 from 'The French'

Grenoble, France 2010 from 'The French'

Lac du Bourget, France 2010 from 'The French'

The camera has performed well in low light and even night situations where I have been able to hand hold it down to an eighth of a second reliably. Walking at night in Le Touquet in Northern France, I found a number of situations I wanted to make images of and the small M9 did a very respectable job of all three.

Le Touquet, France 2010 from 'The French'

Le Touquet, France 2010 from 'The French'

Le Touquet, France 2010 from 'The French'

If your camera of choice does one thing then it should be to instil confidence, you need to know you can rely on it to perform both physically and optically. As a companion around France so far it has been exemplary and I have always felt that I could reliably attempt to record anything I saw. The project so far has cost me quite a bit in petrol, hotels and days not working commercially, not to mention the time I have committed to it…..this would all have been wasted had I chosen the wrong camera. As it is, the work will be shown at the Eurostar Terminal at St Pancras station, the departure point for France by train, in July 2011.

I have left my most major concern about Leica’s M9 until last and that is because it doesn’t affect my work as a photographer with the machine but it is more of a concern in terms of the camera as an investment financially. The M9 is not the investment proof camera that its film predecessors were. I sold my 5 year old Leica M6′s for two thirds of the price I paid for them new but I know that is not going to be the case with my equally expensive M9 and this is for two reasons. The first is that the cameras specifications and chip will become outdated and surpassed much more quickly than the film cameras feature set did and this is a big problem for a camera that costs this much. When you buy an M9 you know the arrival of the M10 is going to decimate its value much more than the M7 did to the M6.

The second reason is that the M9 is simply not built to the high quality of its film forerunners, I have had mine for 12 months from new and with only moderate and careful use it is already losing its lettering and numbering. This has nothing to do with it being digital but it does cause more problems for a camera with so many black buttons. Who will buy a second hand M9 when you can’t tell what the buttons do because the paint has worn off?

1 year old Leica M9 backplate.

Shutter speed dial showing the paint loss.

I always justified the cost of these cameras by their quality and in many ways the M9 is a quality camera but I also justified their high price tag by the knowledge that they would hold their value and their sale would contribute to my next camera. I fear that unlike Leica’s lenses, the M9 is not going to retain its value and that is a big worry for me and for Leica. When I sold my 5 year old M6 cameras the lettering on them was still perfect and they went round the world with me. The M9 has just been around France in 1 year and it is already beginning to look unsellable because of the lettering paint loss. This problem makes the M9 a questionable purchase even for a professional photographer like myself, and its one that you could not really have imagined when you stood in the shop and bought it. You need to live with a camera to really review it accurately and that’s why I decided to add this post to my original excited review of 12 months ago.

Street Photographers have famously demonstrated over the last few years that through the internet it is possible to reach a huge public audience without relying on the patronage of those in the traditional and established system of art publishing and commercial galleries. It has been the Street Photographers and Photojournalists that have pioneered the way because they have been the two groups least supported by the system to date, the Street Photographers have never really been seen as commercial (with a few exceptions of course) and the photojournalists have slowly become uncommercial through the decline of quality print magazines.

The relationship between commerce, photography and what success in photography really means has been on my mind recently. Inevitably as a practitioner of one of those forms of photography that is subject to the greatest prejudice, I have an interest in unpacking the current state of affairs and reversing the century of momentum it has in favor of a new model.

So here is a question: Is a good photograph one that sells?

The dominant system, the one used by print and online magazines, state run and commercial galleries and the majority of photography festivals is, of course, the one that attributes value to a photograph in direct proportion to its likelihood of making the most print and book sales. Now I am not going to surprise anyone with this statement but it is important to recognise the obvious, the status quo, if we are to reveal its shortcomings and consider a new model for success in photography.

Our modern world is run by accountants and the value of most human activities is measured in dollars, pounds or euros. We all have to put a roof over our heads and feed ourselves but I would like to argue that the arts and in this discussion I am particularly focused on photography, should not be judged by their ability to raise funds because that is a distorted judgment and most importantly, it is a judgment that is made by curators, art dealers and gallery owners…..not image makers and artists. The current system works for those selling and collecting photography, those for whom photographs become commodities and investments to accrue value. It is difficult to understate how ingrained the current system is right from the beginning. Photography education, in many cases, is imbued with the notion that students are aiming for the gallery wall, visiting lecturers are largely from the art world and it is that ‘practice’ that students are encouraged to replicate and getting representation by a gallery is seen as the mark of success.

Recently many state funded galleries have let us down by abandoning their open submissions process in favour of recommendations from the commercial gallery world, others like the Tate in London have acquisitions committees to recommend whose work will be selected and of course London’s Photographers Gallery has not had an open submissions process for years. So if one is to make it into a national collection like the Tate’s whose acquisitions policy states “Potential acquisitions of contemporary art are considered by artists who have already made a significant contribution and have achieved national or international recognition” one is largely left with only the commercial gallery route in order to achieve that recognition.

The London Photographers Gallery, currently undergoing expansion, has no submissions process for new or established photographers.

The situation is now changing, we are now beginning to realise that the best and most interesting photography is no longer to be seen in our bricks and mortar galleries, like newspapers trying to compete with online news outlets, the galleries are making themselves redundant by always being behind the curve. They have also traditionally avoided collecting large areas of photographic practice, particularly work from the documentary tradition, where are the prints in national collections by Alex Webb, Trent Parke, Martin Kollar or Matt Stuart? all photographers that have made a “significant contribution and have achieved national or international recognition” but in the ‘wrong kind’ of photography.

A New Model of Success

Street Photographers are already used to creating their work divorced from the commercial art system, they don’t get grant support, they don’t get gallery shows, they don’t win awards and they have, for a long time, financed their own photography independently through a wide variety of ingenious means…and yet, despite that, it could be strongly argued that as a practice Street Photography has become one of the most admired, respected and talked about areas of photography during the last two years.

I suspect they are not even aware of it but Street Photographers have already created a new model for defining success as a photographer, a model that is completely free from commercial concerns and a model that relies not on ‘experts’ who have never lifted a camera but on the real experts, their peers. The new model is, of course, Peer Review.

It is fairly well known that the in-public Street Photographers group was one of the first to use the internet to promote their work and Street Photography itself but behind the scenes, the members of the in-public group also utilised a private forum in order to post their images for their respected peers to review and discuss. New work and ongoing projects like Jesse Marlows ‘Wounded’ book project were posted, discussed and developed in a way that many of us hadn’t experienced since we graduated from our photography degrees.

In the early days of in-public, I could log on in the evening and see new work from Trent Parke made on the streets of Sydney, striking observations from Matt Stuart or Nils Jorgensen from the pavements of London and crazy scenes of 5th Avenue’s sidewalk by Gus Powell or Melanie Einzig. The most important aspect of this international specialist peer review was that the comments all came from image makers who you respected enormously and it lead to great experimentation and innovation rather than simply reinforcing or mimicking the current fashion that would get you commercial gallery recognition.

Jesse Marlow presents new work to the in-public photographers via their private forum.

The in-public private forum is replicated on a much greater and very public way by the enormously passionate and popular Hard Core Street Photography group on the image sharing platform Flickr, here a large international community shares its work with the aim of getting an image accepted into the groups pool of photographs. It is here on Flickr that I have discovered some of the most extraordinary and inspiring Street Photographs by photographers who have never made a penny from publication or print sales, who have never been included in a solo or group show and have been completely let down by the current commercial system that determines ‘success’ as a photographer.

image by Anahita Avalos discovered through the Flickr platform

image by Anahita Avalos discovered through the Flickr platform

As Street Photographers, the neglect we have received has made us stronger, the disconnect between our work and our financial income has made us creatively independent and uncompromising. God knows many of us could adjust our work to make it more appealing to curators and collectors, make it more ‘saleable’ but that is not the destination we desire and the resulting compromise and peer disgust would be hard to take.

Let me tell you what I consider to be a photographic success from my own experience, I don’t take many good Street Photographs, which of us does? living with failure goes with the territory…but I made an image last year that I thought had the qualities I admire, it was not part of a project, so hard for curators and editors to get their head around, it was not aesthetically beautiful, so of no interest to a commercial gallery owner but when posted on the in-public private forum and Filckr’s Hard Core Street Photography group it was hailed as a special image. The opinion of my peers, dedicated Street Photographers internationally for whom I have enormous respect, mean’t far more than that of the photography director of Tate Modern or Moma ever could because these people are image makers in my field who are making some of the most exciting images of our era, they are the true ‘experts’ and their judgment is totally unsullied by wether or not my image will sell copiously in numbered editions.

Street Scene, London 2009.

I propose a new model for judging success in photography and it is one of peer review. It is crucial to establish around you a group of people whose work you respect and admire because their opinions are the only ones that can really carry meaningful weight. I am really happy if my work resonates with anybody, I am delighted if Jen Beckman or Robert Kock like my work but will it be because they like my work or because they think they could shift it in editions? If Matt Stuart, Blake Andrews, Bryan Formhals or Maciej Dakowicz likes my work, I know it is because they recognise how hard it was to make and how unique and unrepeatable it is.

In this new model, you don’t need to print your photographs the size of posters to have them considered art, you don’t need to pay to enter and win competitions and awards that are judged by image dealers and their cronies, you don’t need to queue up and pay to see ‘experts’ at folio revues….No, the route to success in this new world is simply taking the most undeniably striking photographs and allowing your community of peers to view and discuss them, they will recognise and champion the most valid work and spread it throughout the community. This is how someone like Anahita Avalos of Villahermosa, Mexico, whose pictures I have posted above, has become known, recognised and admired by the Street Photography community but remains completely unknown to the established gallery system.

This is the new Success, we just have to recognise it.