One of the first photography books I was given as a teenager was Don McCullin’s autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour (Jonathan Cape, 1990). It was powerful reading and certainly made a huge impression on me at a time when I was just beginning to explore the medium for myself. After a career spanning 50 years McCullin documented every major conflict in his adult lifetime up until the Falklands war. During this period, he also continued to document the dramas, injustices and eccentricities of his own country – England. Work which was published a couple of years ago, Don McCullin In England (Jonathan Cape, 2007).
“So much of my war reporting had involved watching national identities take shape that I began to ask myself who I was. What were the English and what did they represent? What for that matter did I represent? ” (McCullin, 1990).
Finally, a major exhibition of the work has just opened at the National Media Museum and runs until the 27th September 2009.
It’s described as “a dark, often uncomfortable vision of a divided nation where the gulf between rich and poor remains as defined as ever. However, McCullin balances his anger at social injustice with great humanity, compassion, lyricism and occasional humour.”
The NMM have set up a pretty extensive website around the exhibition with video interviews and links to McCullin’s work. It’s certainly worth having a look at. In the meantime, here are a few of the pictures from the exhibition, alongside some quotes from McCullin (taken from the NMM website):
“I was just an amateur, feeling my way with no real knowledge of what I was doing. At the same time I had found a direction… In the next four years I started learning what photography was all about and gaining a broader picture of the world than I’d ever had in Finsbury Park, where it all began.” (Don McCullin,1994)
“I stopped wandering when I reached Bradford, where I found a microcosm of the dark satanic legacy that we had inherited from Britain’s industrial heyday … I was met everywhere by warm and courteous people … In Bradford I experienced a new freedom, wandering through the quiet dilapidated streets where, for the first time in years, I encountered a great deal of hospitality and the welcome absence of violence. I discovered here a city, a living city, and in so doing I rediscovered myself – not always a comfortable process.” (Don McCullin,1994)
“For six weeks in the winter of 1969 I appeared at dawn on the streets of Whitechapel in London’s East End … Communication was difficult at the best of times, for I was dealing with alcoholics and schizophrenics who were sometimes violent and dangerous … Stealing pictures of these people with a long lens was not my style. I wanted to be close to them, to feel their plight and to convey the emotion of contact with them. I wanted their trust and to become their voice.” (Don McCullin,1994)
“We are not as class conscious as we used to be but there is still that barrier there… It’s a tricky place this country, even though it’s changed during the years from Thatcher to Blair. But if you’re a photographer, you can exploit some of those unpleasant and tricky sides to it… It’s tricky this country but I like that because it’s a challenge.” (Don McCullin, 2009)
“I can’t describe how I feel when I’ve had a good day photographing people, having met and talked to them and had their co-operation. It’s as if somebody’s given me an enormous present; I go home as if I’ve got a full belly.” (Don McCullin, 1979)
“I’m probably the only person in England who’s anxious for the winter. As soon as the leaves of autumn start falling from the trees, I become reactivated, the opposite of a hibernating animal. I know that I’ve got four long months of darkness, wind and cold to exercise my masochism. The English landscape’s known for its Constable summers but I’m obsessed with photographing it in the dead of winter, at its hardest … I love the winter – not the climate, but the struggle, its abrasiveness, the nakedness of the landscape.” (Don McCullin, 1979)
Don McCullin reviews his career with John Tusa on BBC Radio 3 here
(August 2002).
Observer interview covering his career, with great detail on his early years here
(August 2005).
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It’s 8pm and I’m currently sat in my office writing the final text for We English, while outside I can hear the Chanctonbury Ring Morris Men performing on the street. You may remember from my previous blog post, it was nearly a year to the day when Sarah, Jemima and I left Brighton on our grand tour of England in the Talbot Swift motorhome to the sound of the Chanctonbury boys singing us off!
Watch them perform one of their numbers –
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The first sneak preview of work from We English will be on display at the New York Photo Festival during May.
A selection of four photographs will be exhibited in a group show curated by Jon Levy, publisher of Foto 8, entitled ‘Home For Good’. The exhibition will also feature the work of Lorraine Gruppe, Tim Hetherington, Chris Killip, Venetia Dearden, Seba Kurtis, Louie Palu, and David Gray.
As Levy writes “Home for Good will explore the idea that storytelling begins at home. We will be employing documentary photography in its many forms – the family album, first day cover, film stills, portraits, magazine layouts and even as the basis for fiction – as the most potent method of transmission. The exhibition explores the ways that photographs have been, and continue to be, used to connect people with issues, emotions, and events. The photographers chosen to represent this theme and the formats they have employed embody the wide range of tools and ideas photography uses in its dual purpose of communicating public fact and personal feeling. If it succeeds, the show will allow a space for contemplating some of the issues we face collectively, before you head back, safely, we hope, to wherever you call home.”
“The work on show is art by its best definitions, and the photographers have been chosen both for the subjects that they take on and their ability to address their inquiries through strong photography. The work in Home For Good examines the tensions between being ‘at home’- your homeland, your new home, or in your own skin, and what it means to be far away from home, a migrant, a soldier, when home becomes a distant object. How is ‘home’ imagined? War destablizes the idea of home, putting it to contest, making it abstract, putting it at risk. ”
The Festival runs from 13th – 17th May at various venues around New York’s DUMBO district. You can find more information here.
Additional exhibitions are curated by William A.Ewing, Jody Quon and Chris Boot (who is publishing We English).
I’ve just been informed that a 75th anniversary edition of JB Priestley’s classic book, ‘English Journey’ is to be published by Great Northern Books in July 2009.
The book will feature archive and contemporary images of the places visited by Priestley on his journey, an original unabridged version of Priestley’s text, which was first published in 1934, alongside an introduction by Tom Priestley (JBP’s son) and an essay on the social, political and literary legacy of the book by Lee Hanson. It will also contain essays on Priestley and specific locations featured in the book by Margaret Drabble, Nina Bawden, Roy Hattersley, Alan Plater, William Woodruff, Dr John Baxendale and Beryl Bainbridge.
English Journey will be featured at the London Festival of Literature, The Purcell Room, Southbank Centre on Friday 10 July, at which Tom Priestley and Margaret Drabble will speak about, and answer questions on, Priestley’s legacy.
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The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, has again been talking about English national identity (see my previous post).
Speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival last week Sentamu called for a new sense of English national identity – with the help of flags, football and patriotic songs, such as 3 Lions by the comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner. He said the England football team and the cross of St George could play a crucial part in solving the nation’s identity crisis by uniting people of all races and ages. He also floated the possibility that St George’s Day should become a bank holiday.
Concluding his Oxford lecture, Sentamu said: “Englishness is back on the agenda. One of the consequences of attacks by so-called home grown terrorists has been to ask the question of what it means to be English? Can there be a narrative, an identity we can all share, flexible enough to recognise the new aspects of England whilst remaining authentic enough to proudly name and recognise its own history?
“Where there is no awareness of identity, there is a vacuum to be filled. Dissatisfaction with one’s heritage creates an opening for extremist ideologies. Whether it be the terror of salafi jihadism or the insidious institutional racism of the British National Party, there are those who stand ready to fill the vacuum with a sanitised identity and twisted vision if the silent majority hold back from forging a new identity.”
You can read more about his speech in The Observer here.
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“What one man saw, heard, thought and felt on a journey through England†J B Priestly, quoted in English Journey
I was pleased to hear from another British photographer, John Angerson, who is heading out on the road documenting England. Angerson is following in the footsteps of J.B. Priestley who wrote English Journey, a celebrated account of his travels through rural and industrial England in the 1930s. 2009 marks the 75th anniversary of its publication.
Angerson says his project will “highlight– as Priestley did – industry, migration, shifting communities, and citizenship, questions that were as relevant in the 1930s as they are now. Priestley’s English Journey is an example of an individual’s perception of place, and how a place is determined by the particular viewpoint from which it is observed. This is relevant to what we know about the nature of photography. Photographs are subjective- documentary photography can only ever be about the photographer’s perceptions of places, and people they encounter.”
It was Nobel Prize-winning American author, William Faulkner who said it first: Kill your darlings.
The term is used by authors to describe how you should cut to the chase and have the courage to get rid of the elements that you love so much yourself, but that don’t really add anything to the whole – or, even worse, actually weaken it.
So this weekend, with the help of Chris Boot, I attempted to kill my darlings. I’ve now got the edit down to 54 pictures (from about 90 in my last post). It was a painful but valuable experience having created, in my opinion, a stronger book.
ps. It’s also the title of a track by the Swedish band Tony Clifton. Watch their video here-
“These poor villages,
This meagre nature,
Long-suffering land,
Land of the Russian people!”
– Fedor Tiutchev
“The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him.
If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also omit to paint that which he sees before him.â€
– Caspar David Friedrich, quoted in Romanticism and Art.
The theme of Romanticism has come up several times in the past couple of months; I was recently interviewed by photographer Wendy Pye who was researching her MA dissertation on the links between Romanticism and its influence on twenty first century photography, while a couple of blogs have commented on my work with reference to beauty (see American Suburb X and Ben Huff’s blog). Regular readers of the blog will also have spotted references in my post about Peter Bialobrzeski’s book Heimat – note the obvious reference to Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea and Bialobrzeski’s photograph Heimat 34.
Romanticism is an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe. The movement stressed strong emotion as a course of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and awe, especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities. It was Romantic artists who first asserted the supreme importance of landscape – prior to that it had been subordinate to historical paintings (Titian or Poussin’s principal theme had been nature not man). While the great 17th Dutch painters had been engrossed in the simple depiction of a locality, known as naturalism, it was in Scandanavia (notably in Copenhagen) and Germany that attempts were first made to infuse landscape painting with a sense of the spiritual. Interestingly, the movement took root around the same time as the invention of photography.
While Romanticism can tip easily into parody and melodrama, at its finest, romantic art is overwhelming, beautiful and uplifting. Just think of paintings by JMW Turner, such as this one-
Snow Storm: Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps, JMW Turner (1812)
Writing in the catalogue which accompanied the exhibition Damaged Romanticism, A Mirror of Modern Emotion at The Art Museum of the University of Houston USA (September 2008), Terrie Sultan asserts that “photographers are taking up the Romantic spirit, querying their ability to portray an objective truth and wanting to create images that are open to the interpretation of the viewer.” And Pye notes how several landscape, pictorial and documentary photographers (for example, Nicholas Hughes, Ori Gersht and Elina Brotherus) have adopted romantic styles in some of their work.
In relation to my own work, I certainly wouldn’t deny that I’m an emotive photographer whose images include romantic (with a small r) overtones – elements of intuition, imagination and feeling. To be precise, I would say that I’m more interested in notions of beauty, and what constitutes beauty, rather than specifically applying motifs in my photographs that are linked to Romanticism. Of course, admitting such can be dangerous to your career! Producing romantic, or at least beautiful imagery, is often viewed as profoundly uncool and nostalgic rather than contemporary.
The trouble with beauty is that tastes and standards of what is beautiful vary so much. Take Russia, for instance. In the early 1800s, Russians commonly accepted the European judgement that their land lacked aesthetic value (as a result, Russian landscape painters tended to travel to Italy, where they learnt to capture the brilliant light, or study at the academies of Germany and France). This view of the Russian landscape changed with the outpouring of literary and artistic creativity that followed the century’s political upheavel and artists turned to their native land and revealed the power of gray skies, vast open fields, and simple birch forests.
Mast-Tree Grove, Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin (1898)
In 19th century Russia there was move towards greater naturalism with artists enhancing the idea of Russian beauty and grandeur. The movement was led by artists like Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin (1832-1898) who was famous for his scrupulously detailed canvases depicting the Russian countryside, its impenetrable forests and enormous skies; artists like Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi (pronounced Quind-gee, 1842-1910) whose paintings are characterised by their panoramic sweep, the simplification and stylisation of natural forms; and Isaak Ilich Levitan (1860-1900), who painted ‘mood landscapes’, in which he established an overall atmospheric unity.
“The articulation of a specifically Russian landscape in art and literature contributed to the construction of Russian national identity. This process entailed learning both to view Russia without European aesthetic filters and to love the very features of Russian land and nature that seemed impoverished by comparison with European landscape conventions. ‘Proud foreign eyes’, so important in the late eighteenth-century approaches to Russian landscape imagery, would cease to hold authority by the end of the nineteenth. At the turn of the twentieth century, Russia’s ‘meager nature’ and ‘humble barrenness’ were no longer dull and tedious for Russian viewers, but highly valued, even a ‘blessing’. The meagre, humble, barren and suffering land gave birth to the special strengths, endurance, and soul of the ‘Russian people’. ‘This meager nature’ thus became a font of national celebration. Russian’s came to embrace their land’s modest beauty.”
(On this point, it’s worth noting that one of Romanticism’s key ideas and most enduring legacies is the assertion of nationalism, which became a central theme of Romantic art and political philosophy).
In relation to We English, which was partly inspired by both Turner and another Romantic British artist, Constable, the work is no doubt rooted in the consciousness of my own attachment to England and is at times an unashamedly lyrical rendering of every day landscapes.
The British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, famously announced that ‘There is no such thing as society’ (October 31, 1987), a quote which has been borrowed for the title of a relatively recent publication about British photography. No Such Thing As Society: Photography in Britiain, 1967-1987 by David Alan Mellor (Hayward Publishing, London, 2008), draws from the collections of the Arts Council and the British Council to give an appraisal of these two turbulent decades.
Book cover featuring photograph by Daniel Meadows
The early 1970s saw the emergence of new and independent approaches to documentary photography which focused on social realism. The leading exponent, Tony Ray-Jones, captured the comedies of social class and the absurdities of human behaviour within the constraints of British culture. The human costs of de-industrialisation and globalisation were the great central themes of the documentary photographers active in the North of England in the late 70s and 80s. The social disasters captured in Chris Killip’s work extended into the darkly coloured, claustrophobic interiors of DHSS offices photographed by Paul Graham, and Martin Parr’s lividly coloured documents of holiday makers in New Brighton, Liverpool. By the end of the 80s, the status of photography within the artistic context had been established. Motifs of intense political dissatisfaction spread across the urban vistas of Ian Dobbie, while more conventional forms of photo-journalism of urban conflict in the North of Ireland and the streets of South London were employed by Philip Jones-Griffith and Paul Graham.
No Such Thing As Society has been curated by David Alan Mellor, Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex. He has written and curated extensively on aspects of post-war British art and photography, including Antonioni’s Blow-Up, London 1966 (2006), Liliane Lijn, Works, 1958-1980 (2005), Interpreting Lucian Freud (2003), and The Art of Robyn Denny (2002).
Having shot 1500 photographs, and scanned an edit of 250, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to cull that down to a final edit for the book. After poring over a set of 6×4″ mini-lab prints, with several intense debates with some trusted friends (and my most trusted editor, my wife), I’ve gone from this-
To this-
Then on Monday it was off to see my publisher, Chris Boot, to finalise the edit and work on ordering and layouts. A process that was helped enormously by Chris’ perceptive eye and lack of sentimentality towards the photographs.
And here’s the (nearly) final selection of 80 plates-
The photographs are now being laid-out by the wonderful boys at Fuel, the designers behind Motherland, and other publications like the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encylopedia’s, several of Juergen Teller’s books, and catalogues for Jake and Dinos Chapman and Tracy Emin. Using print-outs from their design, we’ll then no doubt make some final tweeks to ordering and agree on the exact number of plates. Next it will be on to the text and introductory essay, but more on that later.
On the subject of editing, there’s a Q&A with Paul Graham over on PDN Online, where he discusses the influence of American photography on his photographs, why the “documentary†label misses the mark in describing his work and how he goes about editing for his books (although I must say his answer to the latter left me slightly confused). Read the interview here.
