Magnum personnel

Snapshots from the three lead photographers on the course: Carl De Keyser, David Hurn and Mark Power (l to r).

Sea Life

In my quest for biodiversity in Brighton I ended up in the Aquarium today. I'm not getting very far yet with my project. It's going in various, non-compatible directions. Maybe the marine component will bring me a step further. If not it was fun to hang around in this empty Victorian contraption.

In Brighton

Time flies. I'm sorry to see that the blog has languished over the past few weeks. Yesterday I arrived in Brighton for the start of the Magnum workshop. The aim of the masterclass is to develop a personal project under guidance of three Magnum photographers (Mark Power, Carl De Keyser and veteran David Hurn, who replaces Donovan Wylie who is stuck in Baghdad). In the runup to the workshop had been fretting about which kind of project to focus on. Difficult when one has no idea about the local conditions. I decided to make use of an opportunity to weave in the photo assignment into a new scenario project for UK Government we are starting just now. The planning project looks at long-term developments in land use (up to 2060) and aims to find out what government could in the short-to-medium term to avoid having to deal with serious conflicts and constraints. So 'land use' looked like an interesting starting point. It became even more interesting when I consulted the website of the City Council and learned there was as sustainability conference that focused on Brighton's bid to become the UK's first Urban Biosphere Reserve. The 'Biosphere Reserve' is a label developed and patronised by UNESCO that has been granted to wilderness areas and national parks around the world. But so far there hasn't been a city that has claimed the label. Apparently Brighton has the ambition to become one of the forerunners here. I contacted the City Council and ecologist Matthew Thomas was helpful in pointing out useful sites to visit in the city that demonstrated Brighton's potential as a biosphere reserve. I also asked him for a number of contacts to people that are driving the project with ideas of tangible initiatives. He willingly obliged. Another useful input was a conversation I had last Saturday with Prof. Erik Swyngedouw, a Flemish planner and political scientist who is teaching at Manchester University and who has edited a collection of scholarly essays on the theme of "In the Nature of Cities" (Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism). That conversation opened a useful critical perspective on the received opposition between "rural" and "urban". These were pieces of the puzzle that created a very promising canvas for a photo assignment. I felt I could do something with this.

So yesterday morning we started with a round of introductions. A very international crowd, coming from all corners of the EU (including Finland, Poland, Crete, Romania) and beyond (Mexico, South Africa, Korea). A few photography students, a number of professionals earning their daily bread with pictures and then a surprisingly large number of people like me who are coming to the field from the periphery (including 3 lawyers and a pilot). All of them seemed seriously, honestly committed to photography.

Another surprising observation is that quite a few people are still dedicated to film. A Polish computer animator started out with digital photography but returned to film because he found digital reminded him too much of the fake worlds he was working with day in day out. There were other people that are really struggling with digital. From my point of view this is a confirmation that my own concerns are justified. (For the time being I remain dedicated to film and I have sealed this commitment by recently buying a second-hand Imacon 848 scanner).

A final observation that struck is that many people did not come with a well thought-out project. A number of people are going to focus on social themes (homelessness, autism). Nobody else thought of the Biosphere thing. Quite a few came with an open mind, declaring to be receptive to the surprises offered by the city. They were planning to wander around and see what struck their eye. That is more or less the approach I used in the Capitals project, but with that experience I am doubtful about the real merits of the approach. Today I tend to think there is need for just a bit more conceptual bones to carry the meat. In the afternoon I had the opportunity to talk for 45 minutes with Mark Power, whose "26 Different Endings" I find very seductive in its combination of rigour, simplicity and conceptual depth. The rigour and simplicity come from taking a purely formal starting point (the edges of the London A-Z atlas). But despite its simplicity the idea is generative in a photographic and conceptual sense. Photographic because walking on that "edge of the map" creates a vast space of visual opportunities. Conceptually it is interesting because it raises all kinds of questions about how we as human beings deal with mapped space, about borders and their arbitrariness, about the nature of the peri-urban. There's also an element of irony mixed in the whole setup.

Mark looked at my Capitals book. I also offered him to look at a Blurb book of holiday pictures I recently made. The Blurb book is a first experiment with the medium of printing-on-demand. In the weeks after our return from summer holidays, driving 4500 km through Italy and France, I put together a 100 page family album relying on Blurb's Booksmart application. I had around 1000 negatives to choose from and arranged a selection of them as a chronological travelogue, documenting the places we visited and the people we met. It is a varied mix of landscapes, candid portraits, and street-like pics dynamically sequenced as square full bleed pages, double page spreads, and classical 2:3 pictures in portrait and landscape mode. The book turned out to be quite attractive. The family loved it (finally I produced something that was also of and for them). The printing quality is not up to the standards of the Capitals book, but it is acceptable. So Mark looked at both books and found the travelogue more interesting than the Capitals book. He found the latter to contain very strong images, but despite the formal unity of the panoramic format, he found it wanting in deeper coherence ("it is a bit woolly at the edges"). I tend to agree with him. The graphical elements on the lefthand side of the pages he found slightly distracting (I don't agree with him). The holiday album he found unpretentious in concept but very well done, strongly sequenced in parts and very atmospheric. Both books showed potential and he surmised that I might have the qualities to succeed as a professional photographer. Although I consider it very encouraging to hear this from a Magnum member, I'd like to take it with a grain of salt. Mark Power is a conceptual photographer. He loves ideas. And he thinks the quality of ideas is going to become more important in the future to succeed as a photographer. Today there are so many people that can take wonderful pictures. The difference will be increasinly made by the ideas underlying them, the stories that go with them. This is first and foremost a tactical, "commercial" judgment. It tells something about what will be needed in the future to stand out from the crowd as a photographer. But I don't think it tells us something fundamental about photography. I continue to believe that utterly compelling pictures will continue to be made without a concept, a story or an idea in the back. And those that will be made with a story in mind will only survive if they transcend the boundaries of the narrative (take any great reportage-style photographer from the 50s or 60s: who cares what stories they were documenting? The pictures continue to haunt us but the stories have withered away). So back to Mark's assessment about my abilities: he notices that I can use a camera and that I approach my photo projects conceptually. Yes, I can cook up a good story if I'm in the mood (Hölderlin, 3o°E, the European survey) but does that make me a better photographer? I very much doubt it.

Anyway, we closed the day yesterday with a presentation by David Hurn, the veteran photographer who has been working as a photographer for 53 years and has been with Magnum since 1967 (when I was two years old). David retold his career with much candor and humour, illustrated with a series of delightful pictures. His work is in the tradition of the great humanist reportage photographers of the past decades. He reminds me most of Erwitt and Ronis. There's the humour, the empathy and a very keen compositional eye particularly when dealing with crowds or groups of people. David not only talked about the pictures but also about being in the photography business. From his talk it was clear how tactical (I won't say "commercial") he applied his craft, without betraying his principles or stylistic choices. The discussion finally turned towards the future of photography, with the pervasiveness of images, of image capturing devices, the loss of memory (we're not going to be able to rummage through our old contact sheets in 50 years time).

After the talk I went back to my hotel. I was pretty exhausted, had a headache and looked forward to my bed.

Ouch! Magnum!

Oops! Received word today that I was selected, together with 21 other photographers, for the 5-day Magnum workshop in Brighton, end of October. Quite a surprise as the selection was on portfolio only. One has to assume that lots of people put in their bid for a place on a masterclass like this. The workshop will be guided by Carl De Keyser, Donovan Wylie and Mark Power, three inspiring photographers with whom I have a real affinity. Particularly Power's work I find very much leaning towards my own tastes. His is a very disciplined approach to documentary photography. Anyway, great news and now I need to think about what project I would like to develop over these five days in Brighton and surroundings ...