Travelling Boxing Booth, Lancashire 1936 Manchester Studies Archive

Manchester Studies Archive Nicaragua in the News Japanese Photography reviewed Camera Obscura Camerawork 8 and the Political Photographer

No.16 Half Moon Photography Workshop 60p/$1.75

CAMERAWORK 1

W orkmen building the M anchester Ship Canal, 1880’s Any Old Albums ? —building a people's history

7 think there was more good deeds, as regards getting the neighbourhood’s Original Burlesque Peggy-Leg Band, ponding information-books at Manchester Studies, this a man a job, in the Vault than ever came from the children at school and at play, Whit Sunday processions, collection is, in print form, being channelled into the Rectory or from the - where you sign on - Labour charabanc outings, carnivals and pageants, show his family appropriate local public collections. And we have come to Exchange. There was more jobs got, more good deeds standing in their front doorway on the eve of the sons’ realise that it is a collection which provokes just as many done in there, in the Vault.' embarkation for the Great War, and show those same people questions as it provides answers. individually photographed amongst the trappings of respec­ We receive innumerable straightforward appeals for ardly the stuff of the historian; especially tability and material prosperity which the local studio photo­ practical assistance, for example, ‘I’m a local librarian/ coming, as it does from a man recalling his grapher felt obliged to provide. These photographs comple­ teacher/community worker intending to put on an exhibi­ experiences of the Depression in a small, mented by appropriate extracts from transcribed tape- tion comparing the community spirit in Salford now and heavily industrialized and isolated part of Manchester. The recordings, have recently been included in an exhibition that fifty years ago; have you any photographs I might be able to affirmation of the practical help to be found as a matter of toured Manchester and Salford - an exhibition which, use?’ - which we’re well equipped and glad to deal with. course amongst the camaraderie and intimacy of the male judging by the response of librarians and public alike, has Apart from this, the one question that the existence, useful­ preserve at the local pub, and the denial of the efficacy of gone some way towards provoking a serious evaluation of the ness and ensured growth of the collection has answered is those agencies established to ‘assist those in need’, are the historical content of the family photograph album. that of the cynic: ‘But why go around begging people to let sort of notions that often crop up in conversation with people The photographs too are preserved, and permanently you have their old photographs, photographs that they them­ who were directly affected by the catastrophes of the available to anyone who wishes to use them. At present, they selves have dismissed to lie in an old biscuit tin under the Thirties. What may surprise, perhaps, is that this man’s constitute one of nearly nine hundred deposits in a collec­ stairs? What’s the point, whom does it help? Photographs memories of the home, childhood, school, work and leisure, tion totalling some fourteen thousand photographs. The can’t tell me much, they can’t provide the information that a as well as unemployment and poverty - in fact, of all the collection differs from the usual local history collecuon in its book, a scholarly work written by an expert, an historian routine and extraordinary in his life in that neighbourhood - emphasis on the human rather than the topographical. Its trained in the appropriate methodologies, statistical are preserved on tape, and are kept in the name of ‘history’. definitive and unique feature is the visual documentation of approaches and objectivity can provide.’ Thankfully, judg­ And so are those of many of his contemporaries and of their the individual and communal life of the working people of ing by the service we are increasingly being called on to children. Manchester and the North-West and the subject matter is provide for writers of history, this sort of attitude is on the This man has also kept a number of photographs taken in mainly families, families which make up the overwhelming wane with the realization that photographs give, by the his district during the early decades of the century; photo­ and, in most ways, historically by-passed proportion of the immediacy with which they communicate and by their graphs that, for instance, show local men setting off with population of the region. Whilst being systematically universal accessibility an extra, legitimate, dimension to the whippets to hunt rats and hares on a Sunday morning, show indexed and gathered in files of contact-prints and corres­ subject.

If you have any comments to make or articles, letters or prints you would like to contribute we would be glad to hear from you. Please make sure it reaches us as soon as possible.

is designed to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, views and information on photography SUBSCRIBE TO CAMERAWORK: A subscription to the magazine contributes TWICE as much and other forms of communication. By exploring the application, scope and content of photo­ to our income as a sale through a shop! graphy, we intend to demystify the process. We see this as part of the struggle to learn, to describe UK ABROAD ABROAD and to share experiences and so contribute to the process by which we grow in capacity and power (surface) (air) to control our lives. Full subscription* £6.50 £7.50 £10.50 Full subscription (student)* £5.00 £6.00 £9.00 This issue of Camerawork, November 1979, was produced by the Publishing Project, Half Moon Institutional Subscription* £12.00 £13.00 £17.00 Photography Workshop, 119 Roman Road, London E2. 01-980 8798. Printed by Expression Cam eraw ork only £4.50 £5.50 £8.00 * Printers Ltd, London N l. This includes posters and invitations for our exhibitions People who worked on this issue of Camerawork were Santiago Castrillon, Mike Goldwater, Liz To subscribe send remittance (abroad - STERLING DRAFT drawn on London please) to: Mackie, Jenny Matthews, Richard Platt, Shirley Read (co-ordinator), Siddhiratna, Mike Swift. H.M .P.W ., 119-121 Roman Road, L o n d o n E2 OQN. Tel: 01-980 8798. Distribution: Keith Cavanagh. (ISSN 0308 1676) 9 CAMERAWORK

But the sort of feeling that has been commonly voiced, and which manifests itself in a distilled, change, or even complete disintegration, of long- and doubtless school-induced form, is the initial established neighbourhoods. It is in these reactions of many of the people to whom we go circumstances, when the compulsory purchase for photographs: ‘What? You don’t want to see orders have been served, and with change of me donkey-stoning the front-step, or setting off family home and transfer of small business as an eight-year old on a Band of Hope picnic. premises imminent and widespread, that many You’d much rather see this one of the old King of the most evocative and informative of records visiting Manchester.’ However, pictures of are lost - particularly photograph albums and informal, communally organised festivals, like the hordes of glass-slides and negatives accu­ street parties to celebrate a coronation, tell a mulated by long-gone local photographers, great deal about the neighbourhood life of past which are only to be found left behind in cellars generations and can contain a wealth of detail. At and sheds. the same time a snap of a renowned national Ironically, the destructive process of the figure can provide the same sort of detailed property developer and local council provide the information. For instance, A.J. Balfour opportunity for what, so far, has proved to be electioneering at Manchester City’s football one of the most successful methods of retrieving ground is also interesting for what it shows of the material. The residential area at the heart of composition, appearance and segregation of a Manchester’s Trafford Park industrial estate is 1900 football crowd, spectators in the standing now half-way demolished and will have vanished enclosure being exhorted by posters to ‘Beware within two years. The area was once, simply of Pickpockets’. because its location demanded it, a near self- But photographs of events and personalities, h sufficient community, a cluster of some seven whether they be local or national, whether taken hundred houses, built at the turn of the century m as ‘model dwellings’, for the ‘hands’ at the by someone in the crowd or a professional Studio group, Blackpool photographer, only tell half the story: the half nearby giant engineering and manufacturing that has always monopolised history and the works. The people there considered themselves attention of the historian. to be from Trafford Park and Trafford Park The reasons for a photograph of the King alone, rather than from Manchester or Stretford taking precedence, even today, over importance or whatever boundaries officialdom constructed and interest invested in a family collection, and around them. They were isolated and their over a photograph of the children playing in the isolation gave them a fierce love for their home- street, spring directly from the notion that place. history and documentation should be concerned As a result of an extensive programme of door- with the oustanding and extraordinary. Simi­ to-door leafleting, appeals in the local press and larly, studio portraits are seen as being more talks to the Community Centre, Senior Citizens publicly presentable than the comparative spon­ Club and the like, we managed to amass some taneity of a group taken in the backyard; just as seven hundred photographs, a variety of docu­ the formal, officially prescribed sort of record, ments and thirty hours of tape-recorded the filled-out form, is considered more valuable personal reminiscence. Our work, the ‘profes­ than the bits of paper, (the shopping lists, bills, sional’ interest of outsiders who previously knew scribbled messages) - generated during the little or nothing about Trafford Park, gave course of an ordinary ‘uneventful’ day. people the chance to talk frankly and spon­ Traditionally, because public libraries and taneously about their lives and their district and, record offices saw their purpose as the accu­ furthermore, about their contribution to the mulation and storage of the documents detailing development of their community. This exercise administrative and executive transactions, the released a strong interest in the social, economic, range of documentation they held reflected a political and religious forces at work on their rather narrow spectrum of interest - the day to parents’ generation and their own. As a result we day functioning of public bodies, official organi­ put on an exhibition of the photographs and w recollections because we felt it right to return to zations, large business and commercial institu­ tions and so on. This was all very well if one was the people of Trafford Park collectively, what solely interested in the impersonal and distant they had given independently of one another over a relatively long period of time. The exhibi­ goings-on of our civic representatives and indus­ Bowlers on the green of the Spread Eagle Hotel, Turton Bottoms 1880’s/90’< trial concerns. But what if you wanted first­ tion was free, and in an easily accessible loca- hand evidence of life, of all sorts of life, in your booked to show at thirteen venues - as opposed to the four we originally own street or neighbourhood? What if you intended. This exhibition has also, as we wanted to know how the residents felt about expected, stimulated people to offer over two their physical environment and how it worked hundred further photographs. The Trafford on them, and what if you wanted to know from Park exhibition is just one of several currently on the residents themselves, and not from the pen show in the Greater Manchester area. In or camera or paintbrush or whatever of some addition, exhibitions of local interest are peculiarly gifted, impartial, outside observer? currently on display in a hospital waiting room, What if you wanted to know, for instance, about school, a library and a shopping centre. the organisation and workings of the credit There are, given a reasonable standard of con­ system in corner shops during the 1920’s? Or dition and content, the photographs that about the forms of illicit backstreet gambling demand inclusion in any exhibition: the striking, that proliferated during the years of the Depres­ the unique, the well-made. But exhibitions can sion? What if you wanted evidence of the never truly reflect the ‘average’ individual collec­ feelings and attitudes, as manifested in letters tion of photographs that make up each deposit. and diaries, of the people involved? And what if To generalize, if you talk about the ‘average your curiosity could not be satisfied by written family collection’, then what you might find is or printed evidence, but required visual sub­ any number of family portraits, many taken in stantiation, the sort of corroboration that only a the studio, a few school photographs and others photograph might be able to provide? of organized groups and formal gatherings, and The Manchester Studies Archive Rescue then one or two oddments, depending on the scheme was established, with the co-operation of interests and vocations of the family. There are, local libraries and archivists, to combat the scant obviously, exceptions: one lady, a keen and regard shown towards these documents: the active member of her church’s Mothers’ Union, documents produced and accumulated by had masses of professionally photographed working people during the routine course of church events because she had volunteered to act their lives. Almost immediately it became as the local retailer for the photographer. apparent that, if a family had kept any records of Another man had over a hundred prints of work its forebears, photographs would predominate. in progress, in 1901, on a particularly large Perhaps the physical act of tearing or burning industrial site; he had them because his wife’s the image of a relative one remembers, or has great uncle had worked in the Clerk of Works’ heard talked fondly of, repulses some. Perhaps, Office on site and, being a good company man if faced with the choice of discarding a bundle of and enthusiastic photographer, had taken the documents and letters or a collection of photo­ photographs for his own pleasure and future graphs the former will go because its content reference. However, nearly all family collections cannot immediately satisfy passing curiosity. contain something unexpected or unusual, Whatever; though the photograph is far and whether it be an interior shot of a shop or factory away the domestic document that most regularly or a candid snap on the beach at Blackpool. crops up and, though our efforts have subse­ Whilst we want exhibitions to reflect the range quently taken a bias toward their rescue, we of photographs we have, and they do, insofar as cannot afford to assume that families would stop the pictures are always grouped thematically - throwing out old photographs - and the danger series on work, leisure, school, church, cele­ of complacency is consistently emphasized. An brations, holidays and so on - a proportional oft-repeated lament we hear runs along the lines representation of the different sorts of photo­ of, ‘If I’d only known about your work six graphs within the whole collection would, if not months ago then I’d have kept the suitcaseful we dull the exhibition, render it less likely to had; but we were moving house and they took up stimulate and provoke. This is not to belittle the so much space . . .’ bulk of the standard family collection. A series of We are working against time. Though not family portraits provides a fascinating record of exclusively, we tend to concentrate our efforts the oustanding moments that household on retrieving material produced before World experienced - a pictorial census of births, War II, simply because it is the records of those marriages and deaths. It also providesevidence of generations that are in immediate danger of loss the internal squabbles (why Aunt and Uncle or destruction. Similarly, the need for this sort of aren’t on this one at Granny’s wake when they’re work assumes added urgency with the rapid on every previous one), evidence of who was CAMERAWORK 3 entrusted with the responsibility of taking the tion and thus, hopefully, go some way towards photograph, thus forfeiting their presence on the remedying the imbalance in the source material finished product, and evidence of more blatant historians rely on. Secondly (perhaps more expressions of the family image - its social importantly) to provide, especially through free, standing and togetherness (as manifested in easily accessible public exhibitions of locally- clothing, stance and location). Consequently we retrieved material, a stimulus for the people of are not at all selective when offered photographs, qj Manchester and the North West to actively all are copies and are indexed. We cannot fore­ realise the extent of their individual and collec­ tell, and we would not wish to determine, what tive contribution to the development of the others will find of interest. region, and for them to continue the sort of work School photographs taken during the period we have begun. In the long term the production from 1900 to the 1930’s may, for instance, of books containing photographs and remini­ looked at en masse and a first glance, appear to scences will provide what, in many instances, be nothing more than picture upon picture of will be the sole testimony to once thriving, now what could well be the same carefully arranged rapidly disappearing, small neighbourhoods. rows of happy and conscientious scholars. But they bear witness not only to the specialisations David Russell and the of certain photographers, but also to certain trends within their craft. For instance: moves Manchester Studies team between outdoor and indoor shots, attempts to represent constructive and enjoyable classroom activity by the careful positioning on desks of the tools and materials of the schoolchild, and the Manchester Studies is an oral history and archive short-lived vogue for elaborate physical compo­ rescue project started in 1974/5 and based at sitions on May Day and school-play photo­ Manchester Polytechnic. It is one oj the main centres graphs. They also chronicle the changes in class­ in this country to use oral history as a tool oj historical room furniture, not least the demise of the once Dep * research and a method oj recovering the past oj those ubiquitous aspidistra. sections of our society whose history has been largely However, the school photograph, like the Bicycle Repair Shop, Todmorden, Yorks ignored. family photograph, can, if too heavily empha­ As well as the work described above Manchester sized, deaden an exhibition with its uniform those dark times thank goodness’, on the other. the number of studios, the number and type of Studies runs projects which include the following: content and composition. Exceptionally, when However, our work is above all else a practical retail outlets, the prosperity and the specialisms The Cotton Industry Records Project which in an an exhibition results from an area survey, as with exercise in retrieval; our success or failure, in our of individual photographers. We can tell that effort to preserve a record of life among the Lanca­ Trafford Park, school photographs, in parti­ own eyes especially, depends on the amount of there were a number of intinerant photographers shire mill workers has interviewed and sought out cular, can exert an attraction. Many people photographs and other documents, that we get who, it would appear, humped their cameras up photographs and documents from elderly workers. will recognize themselves, often in a photograph in and return to the community by passing them and down streets and photographed whomever This project has produced a teaching pack for they haven’t seen for thirty, forty or fifty years, into the public collection. Having said that, was about to position themselves in mock- schools. The Jewish History Project has located and it will act as an introduction, a way in, to the constantly working with such a large and varied informal representations of casual street activity. over 1,000 photographs recording the migration from rest of the exhibits. collection does give rise to particular, personal We have been told, during the course of tape- Eastern Europen in the late nineteenth century and The purpose and nature of exhibitions raises predilection. And these preferences are un­ recorded interviews, that photographers turned the life of Jewish immigrants in Manchester. A the question of selection, which in turn provokes doubtedly reflected in the exhibitions which up on spec at carnivals, Whit Walks and similar record of the Black community in Manchester is the question of how far our work, or rather our are, after everything else, exercises in publicity communal events, took so many photographs, being built up with the help of the Manchester Black presentation of the results of our work, can put a - the only means we have of reaching, at first and then used local people as their retailing Women’s Co-operative. The Film Archive (funded particular gloss on the past. For instance, the hand, a wide audience of potential donors. agents. Interviewees have also talked about by Granada TV, North West Arts and Greater photographs can perhaps distort what actually Whilst we do not see ourselves as interpreters photography clubs in their place of work - you Manchester Council) is working to establish a home happened, and we don’t know what’s going on, or critics of the vast store of original material we paid so much per week, and then waited for your for regional archive film and a base for the study of or has gone on, out of camera-shot. Our peculiar have at our disposal, it is becoming increasingly turn to take the annual late Friday afternoon trip the history offilm making and the film industry in the subjectivity also influences the sort of photo­ apparent that work needs to be done on the to the studio. North West. graphs we show and thus the reactions of the whole method of operation of the local photo­ Given the time and the opportunity, we will At present Manchester Studies Unit employs audience. The pictures we select for public con­ grapher. From the ornately designed advertise­ turn to this sort of work which will enhance the thirty researchers but when its Manpower Services sumption might give substance to the perennial ments backing portraits, and from the minimum usefulness and give more sense to the collection. Commission grant ends in December 1979 the staff myths of'Those were the days; ah, happy times’, of information (‘Printed by . . . Sold by . . .’) As things now stand we see our purpose as being will be severely cut back and the whole project on the one hand, or ‘We’ve come a long way from carried by the photo-postcards, we can guess at twofold. Firstly, to augment the public collec­ threatened unless alternative funding can be found.

Workers at the Russian Petrograd Boot Company, Trafford Park, Manchester during the First World War CAMERAWORK “ 124 : MICRBftlUa'' ' ' Ml'HTLfcHtt they are used. Photographers caption their ...... photos but newspapers, again using speed as an excuse, insist on having final rights over them, UHFUHIEII THEIR using them the way they want. .. uic IB5I STR0R6H0L0- T°M V 1 SOBOZH'5 EI8 HUNDREDS BCS05S “KEEP IT SIMPLE” * c „c rUFRRILLftS WWCHED TO +El BUNKER THt CRP1TBI*. HUNDREDS OF GUERR1LL«^ The demand is for simple, direct and easily read NewsNICARAGUA photographers are constrained by the those grunts would run around during a fight when photos which will catch the reader’s attention, , » » > ™ ‘ , T “ ,TH0UT ,E S ,5 1 M * ’ THE18 hbrch hhs H politics of the newspapers or magazines that use they knew that there was a television crew nearby; for newspapers will rarely use more than one M . , HEEE TEE» » « 8 ' 8LS " T ,HE their work and the ideology that these papers they were actually making war movies in their photo of an event that day, and it will often be serve and propagate. For the bourgeois press heads, doing little guts-and-glory leatherneck tap cropped for the page layout and downgraded s5 THEV ENTERED news consists largely of shock, horror and dances underfire, getting their pimples shot off for during printing. War images thus tend to fall UE„ I NT 0 HIS RRIVHTE » * » LflV drama. The newspaper acts as a spotlight on the the networks . . . We’d all seen too many movies, into a limited range of readily understandable world’s disasters, moving on as the spectacle stayed too long in Television City, years of media categories - conflict, joy, grief, uniforms, subsides...... * « " « - 1"15’ glut had made certain connections difficult.’ suffering, death, children and physical Until hit by an earthquake in 1972, Nicaragua (Michael Herr, Dispatches) destruction. FLR0 8EH1ND 1HE" »E5lK | was virtually unheard of. As a news story the From the newspaper’s point of view the more KITH TOOTHPASTE revolution was around for nearly two years, but “WE WANTED IT YESTERDAY” visually stunning a picture is the better, but only achieved any prominence when the The fact that news has to be as instantaneous as Nicaragua is an example of a conflict that did not Sandinistas showed signs of success. Since July The raw material of a news story comes possible influences the way a photographer produce the sort of iconic images that people 20th, when Somoza fled, Nicaragua has received works, trying to produce a product which will be remember from Vietnam. Fortunately events as copy over the teleprinter and pictures scant news coverage in the major daily papers saleable to a particular audience at a particular are not always that spectacular, but it is the job of arrive over the wire or via a press whilst the left press has moved on to the next time. Since Vietnam brought war into the sitting the photographer at best to make the news agency. The function of the newspaper stage in the revolutionary scenario - Nicaragua room, photographers have been competing with exciting. If that is not possible straightforward Reconstructs. electronic news gathering equipment. is to take this raw material, fashion it, visual information is good enough, so for weeks In order to use the picture on time the news the news coverage of Nicaragua alternated refine it and reduce it to a finished “DON’T GET INVOLVED” photographer on foreign assignment often has to between pictures of guerillas and pictures of product that goes on sale. Long before Regardless of personal politics and commit­ completely relinquish control after framing, soldiers. ment, a news photographer working outside the the pictures reach the newspaper and focusing and pressing the button, letting an If a news event is featured daily over a tew left-wing agencies has to adopt the neutral agency develop, print and select pictures. considerable period of time, it becomes a are selected and manipulated to fit the standpoint of his or her agency. An International Again, time prevents the photographer con­ problem to find a new twist and original news story, however, the photographer Press Card is a passport to all sorts of situations tacting all the newspaper and magazines with pictures. The Pope’s visit to Ireland gave where the photographer’s role is that of an is aware of having to work within a syndication rights from that agency to find out photographers a new opportunity there, just as observer, detached from events, recording how the photos will be used, and often never Bianca Jagger became a new angle for those whole series of constraints to sell the rather than interpreting. This distancing is most even sees them in print. covering Nicaragua - even the Guardian saw fit pictures and work accordingly. clear in the way a news photographer tries to Even a photographer wiring his own pictures to print her picture before that of the new cover both sides ot a war as long as personal to a newspaper will have no control over how government on July 20th. Originally we intended to run a safety is not at risk. No one else is able to take up picture story on Nicaragua and such an ambivalent position. contacted Alon Reininger, a photo­ “IF IT’S IN THE PAPER IT MUST BE grapher working for a New York photo TRUE” agency. Contact. The picture editor The role of news photos is not to inform but chose what he thought the London rather confirm ideology - to reproduce a view agency should have, and we selected ot the world that the reader will recognise, to prove what’s happening and what stance the from there. We soon found that where­ reader should take towards it. Nevertheless the as a documentary photographer would photos themselves are often ambiguous, and it is be expected to produce photographs the captioning that determines the way that they are interpreted. Since news photographs are that reinforced each other so that the seen as evidence of an event and thus the ‘truth’, culminative effect was an ‘insight’ into captioning tends to be read as fact rather than a Nicaragua at a particular period in its particular point of view. history, the work of a news photo­ News photographers have to corroborate the news story and provide an objective record of grapher is very different. Here the what the reporter is saying. No one believed that emphasis is on providing one self- Che Guevara was dead until a picture of him in contained, simple, direct picture. We his coffin was published. Nicaragua equals war, and so the media need pictures of soldiers, therefore decided to use the photo­ guerrillas and damage. graphs as a basis for commenting on the The camera is also capable of faking evidence production and use of news photo­ though, and the participants in any struggle are obviously aware of the power of the media, and graphs. We have also recontextualised will use it to further their cause. It is almost On a slope near Lake Managua, where several bodies were discovered, Nicaraguans search for family. There them with information on the recent possible to imagine a battle being refought were reports that the bodies were of young men shot by the Guardia. events in Nicaragua to counteract the because the cameras were not in the right place. Latin American papers are generally sensationalist and display a constant barrage of corpses. Recently the fragmented view provided by the daily Such performance for the camera reached an taboo on publishing pictures of dead bodies in the British Press appears to have been lifted. The pictures are obscene level in Vietnam:" You don t know what a press. nearly always of foreign situations, the distancing adds a layer of unreality and enables the picture to be read media freak is until you’ve seen the way a few of more in terms of formal composition and less in terms of emotional response.

Residents coming out of hiding after the battle in which the National Guard retook the town of Masaya from A family reunited with a released political prisoner outside Managua's Central Police Station on the day of the Sandinista forces. Somoza’s departure from Nicaragua. One of the great dangers of news coverage is an identification of the event with the location. vehicles? These are not pictures of Nicaragua as a social and political entity, but they are likely to be How many people have a mental picture of Northern Ireland comprised of soldiers, hooded men and burning identified as such.

CHRONOLOGY Nicaragua. after indiscriminate aerial bombardment. Nicaragua. OAS Human Rights Commission 1978 August - Sandinistas storm National Palace Thousands of civilians fleeing from National publishes report strongly condemning Somoza January - Assassination of Pedro Joaquin taking over 1,000 hostages including members of Guard atrocities seek refuge in Honduras and regime. Chamorro, editor of the opposition La Prensa government: Somoza accedes to demands for Costa Rica. Death toll estimated at over 5,000. 1979 and leader of UDEL, results in two week general ransom and release of political prisoners. FAO October - Organisation of American States strike called by business community. January - National Patriotic Front (FPN) launches general strike. Popular uprising in (OAS) sends international team to mediate formed following failure of mediation talks. February - Indian slum of Monimbo in Masaya Matagalp. between FAO and Somoza. March - FSLN announces unification of their rises up in first popular insurrection against September - FSLN launches attacks, November — IMF loan to Nicaragua refused Somoza. three factions under joint command. supported by popular insurrection, in because of US objections. Members of FAO, April - FSLN launches major offensive in north May - Broad Opposition Front (FAO) formed. Chinandega, Masaya, Esteli, Leon and including Los Doce, walk out of mediation talks. ot country temporarily occupying Esteli. July - Members of Los Doce return openly to Diriamba. All towns retaken by National Guard Costa Rica breaks diplomatic relations with May - Leaders of FAO and FPN detained. CAMERAWORK

AFTER THE NEWS ... same photographers, for pictures. Because of the ended up immaculately printed between the labour brought about by the cut and thrust Once the dramatic news is over the market for constraints with which s/he was originally soft-porn covers of Photo magazine, a position newspaper world, which demands today’s pictures will be very different. Special interest working, the news photographer is unlikely to infinitely worse than fuzzy newsprint fated to pictures today. It would be useful for the rest of journals and magazines will have more space, have produced an in-depth photo story. If such a wrap up chips. us if they had the commitment, over and above higher quality reproduction and longer dead­ story did exist then the outlets for it, in Britain at New’s photographers are in a powerful their job, to find alternative ways of producing lines. However, unless they despatched a photo­ least, are extremely limited - colour magazines position, they see what the media dilute and and using the ‘rest’ of the news. grapher at the time of the event they will still be wedged between consumer overkill. Susan distort. They are, however, cut off from the relying on the same agencies, and therefore the Meiselas’ powerful colour pictures of Nicaragua power to control their pictures by a division of Jenny Matthews

Sandinistas point American M-16 and Israeli Galil automatic weapons at a poster of Anastasio Somoza Garcia. Given all the forces influencing the production of news pictures, the staged picture can be very

valuable - viz. Bert Hardy's photo of a soldier offering a dying comrade a drink, a photo only possible because Hardy asked the soldier to do it, and had to give him his canteen. The moment is false but the photographer would argue that it refers to other moments that did exist when a photographer wasn't around. The mock bayoneting of Somoza is FSLN commando members and supporters celebrating their victory in the streets of Managua. not such a good example of a created incident Two reference pictures to remind us of who's who. The picture of the guerrillas, although posed in ‘good faith’ by the subjects to express the jubilation of victory, could be because it brings up the problem of the photographer interpreted by the right as the chaos of young upstart extremists. The two photos reveal the youth of both sides, although neither picture can by itself set such youth in the as theatrical agent, stagemanaging events, and the context of Latin American society where children and young people are an essential economic force. viewer might well become suspicious of the ‘truth’ of other photos.

AFTER SOMOZA: SOCIALISM OR REFORM? All wars come to an end. All too often, this also means the end of press coverage. As long as there was military conflict between Somoza and the Nicaraguan people, the international press was content to turn its eyes towards a previously neglected country. But since July 19, no attempt has been made to understand the implications of the FSLN victory. Once again, Nicaragua is not considered ‘newsworthy’. Violent death may remain useable - the British press covered the poisoning of Sandinista guards by counter-revolutionaries and an explo­ sion in Chinandega killing thirteen people - w'hile broader political developments are dis­ missed by editors despite the flow of material from their correspondents and the agencies. Even during the war, a BBC story about Somoza’s imminent resignation was omitted in favour of a long interview about the quality of food in the British Club in El Salvador after the withdrawal of Britain’s ambassador. The Sandinista victory in itself guaranteed no more than an end to dictatorship, and it is clear to anyone visiting Nicaragua since July that many conflicting forces are shaping the ideo­ logical definition of the revolution. Of all the media caricatures which emerged from the Nica­ raguan war, none was more misleading than the conventional portrayal of Somoza as psycho­ path. To describe him as cruel, greedy and corrupt is certainly true as far as it goes, but it misses the point. With overthrow a certainty, Somoza cold-bloodedly set about levelling Nicaragua’s major cities and pillaging the remnants of the national economy. The results u'ere clear: to impose the need for national unity in reconstructing the country, allowing the FSLN minimum room for manoeuvre and Guardia soldiers patrolling the city after recapturing it from the Sandinistas. obscuring the class nature of the struggle. The composition of the Government of National Reconstruction was certainly a master­ All Photographs by Alon Reininger/Colorific piece of diplomacy by the FSLN, but within a ►

IMF agrees US $66m. loan to Somoza govern­ passes resolution calling for Somoza’s resigna­ iManagua encircled but hold back final assault. government. Members of provisional govern­ ment. FSLN launches all-out ‘final offensive’ tion. Battle for Managua ends in FSLN Somoza fails in attempt to enlist military support ment fly into Leon from Costa Rica. National taking Jinotega in the north and entering withdrawal following heavy bombing. Civilian of fellow Central American dictators. Foreign Guard in disarray; many surrender; fleeing country from Costa Rica. refugees put at over 150,000, hundreds dead. By ministers from Andean Pact countries meet pro­ deserters hijack Red Cross plane. Urcuyo flees June - General strike called by FSLN. Heavy the end of June Sandinistas hold over 20 cities visional government. Provisional government country’ after only 48 hours as President. fighting throughout country. Sandinistas take including Diriamba and Masaya. Intense diplo­ names cabinet. 100 senior National Guard Sandinistas enter Managua. Provisional Chinandega, Matagalpa and Leon. Esteli falls. matic activity by US. officers removed from active service. Somoza government members arrive in Managua on 20th Opposition sets up provisional Government of July - Sandinistas take Jinotepe. Battle for resigns on 17th July and flies to Miami, naming July to tumultuous welcome. National Reconstruction. Ecuador, Mexico, Rivas continues. National Guard counter­ leader of Congress, Francisco Urcuyo, as interim Peru, Brazil and Panama break diplomatic rela­ offensive against Masaya halted. US continues President. Fighting flares up again when Urcuyo from Nicaragua, Dictatorship and Revolution, tions with Nicaragua. Special OAS meeting efforts to find political solution. FSLN have refuses to hand over power to provisional available from PO Box 134, London NW1. 75p CAMERAWORK CAMERAWORK ------/ ------very restricted range of options. The economy tions in their own traditional backyard. The the coup, they are delighted by the prospect of apan is a country of extremes; it is a had to be regenerated and thousands rescued comical sabre-rattling of the mock invasion of further popular discontent in the area being con­ society of many contradictions. As often from starvation and this meant the appoint­ Guantanamo and the creation of a Caribbean tained by the new Salvadorean colonels, who will as a characteristic peculiar to Japan or ment of experienced ministers to create that ‘task-force’ are one facet of a new regional avoid the worst excesses of a Romero or a possessing a quality we might call familiar ‘climate of confidence’ which attracts strategy. The other is shown by US support for Somoza while doing little to alter fundamental ‘Japanese’ is defined, that definition is massive foreign aid, while in no way being the overthrow of General Romero in El Salvador. power structures. As for tampering with the J contradicted or denied. The land of harmonious sympathetic to the socialist transformation of Whether or not the States directly engineered internal affairs of Nicaragua, this may now be aesthetic, refined sensibility and sympathy with Nicaragua. While some key political appoint­ done more plausibly through the amenable the natural elements and seasonal cycles, is also ments have gone to Sandinista leaders (Tomas democracies of Central America and the Andean the land of devastation, photo-chemical smog Borge as Interior Minister, Jaime Wheelock in Pact. and mercury poisoning - with a history of charge of Agrarian Reform), the economy is This analysis is very much concerned with unprecedented destruction of the environment. handled by technocrats, capitalists and social superstructural politics, but the visitor has only There is a tension between the survival of the democrats from the old anti-Somoza private to step out of the Hotel Intercontinental in traditional life and a futurist explosion. sector. This uneasy marriage of interests is Managua, now the seat of government, to realise Colossal forces have accelerated the develop­ reflected in the five-person Junta, where the that the Nicaraguan people, armed and ment of Japan during the Sixties, and as we enter Social Democrat Sergio Ramirez holds the pre­ organised, hold the real key to the country’s the Eighties in Western Europe, we are alarm­ carious ‘moderate’ role between two future. Slogans are everywhere: ‘Organisation ingly ignorant of Japan. Western commentators, FSLN/MPU militants and two representatives and more organisation’; ‘Power to the workers such as Herman Kahn, a futurologist at the of conservative business interests. The under­ and the peasants’; ‘The people armed are the Hudson Institution,1 have suggested that by the standable chaos of the first few weeks has given guarantee of the revolution’. These phrases are end of the 1980’s Japan will have entered a ‘post­ way to a new and more disturbing administra­ not arbitrarily imposed from above. They industrial stage’. Its role as a financial tive paralysis: who makes the decisions in the express a principle which has been shown to superpower will give it super political or military new Nicaragua? The FSLN nine-man direc­ work in practice, and the five organs which pow'er, and the focus of international affairs will torate or government ministers? Meanwhile, the provide Sandinista strength locally - the Trade shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific. massive concentration of capital in the hands of Union Central; the Association of Nicaraguan The post-war Japanese development offers Somoza, and the dominant state sector created Women; the Sandinista Youth; the Defence not only an economic challenge to the West, but by the expropriation of 51% of all cultivatable Committes; and the Association of Rural a great challenge to the Japanese people. The land and 180 industrial enterprises is often cited Workers - also give the basis for popular power. Japanese identity has become confused. There is as a strong basis for socialist change. But the Even if the people do not yet use overtly Marxist very clear evidence that the Seventies was a contradiction is that anti-Somoza landowners vocabulary, their political maturity and strength decade in which many Japanese expressed a and businessmen can sleep easy in the of organisation are the firmest guarantee of a desire to reassert elements of traditional life, knowledge that the state has neither the imme­ socialist future in Nicaragua. questioning the benefits of the ‘economic diate wish nor the administrative capacity to miracle’. There is also a post-war generation not attack their economic power. George Black yet born when the Emperor was divine for The ‘loss’ of Nicaragua was a major humilia­ which Japanese tradition is a myth. This gener­ tion for the consistently inept policies of the A family mourning a dead Sandinista fighter in George Black is a member of the Nicaragua ation grew up under American occupation, and USA, but it will take more than the overthrow of Chinandega Hospital. Co-ordinating Committee and can be contacted at have lived in the densest urban environments. Somoza to frustrate American geopolitical ambi­ 20/21 Compton Terrace, London N l Japan is a volatile society caught by the tensions of identity crisis and direction. From l(h- I ' r« ft of) time to time the tension explodes with great fero­ iJ j c Y f city, such as the student riots of the late Sixties, 4 T b the seige of Tokyo University in 1968 and 1969 by the Zengakuren, and the continued struggle r on the runways of Narita Airport. It is hard to reconcile that image of Japan in conflict, with the image of Japan as the centre of Zen Buddhism - where sportsmen, politicians and film stars do zazen meditation before important occasions, where the temple continues to be a great social institution, not a museum. Like the traditional spontaneity of sumi-e brush and ink painting, photography has imme­ diacy, a quality most attractive to Japanese sensi­ bility. Photography in Japan has. become a medium which can suggest the tensions, contra­ dictions, serenity and violence of a nation subject to transition on an enormous scale. In the mid-Seventies the Japanese have been producing about 5 million 35mm cameras per year. In such a competitive society, the photo­ grapher can achieve superstar status quite beyond that of photographers who might be household names in Britain. Kishin Shinoyema, the most popular of the younger generation of Guardia soldiers in a makeshift brothel in Masaya. photographers, appears not only on TV commercials and in the columns of the fan maga­ Victorious Sandinista, Managua Unforlunalely the sorts of photographs that a newspaper photographer is pressured to take end up perpetuating zines, but also on fifty foot high advertising ‘Woman fighter' has become a powerful image for a stereotyped view o f a particular country or area. Nicaragua has been no exception. Brothel pictures are hoardings in the centre of Tokyo. As a weapon in the left, and a useful variation on the theme of acceptable as long as they are Third World women, right at the bottom of the exploitation ladder. Since the late a high-powered marketing campaign, the photo­ soldier/guerilla for the press in general. A whole 1960's the Revolutionary has been an acceptable media figure, again as long as it’s suitably distanced by being grapher can receive high rewards under the media fantasy has emerged around the female m Latin America (i.e. fa r away). It’s a romantic image, not quite the terrorism the press fears on its own generous sponsorship of the manufacturers. revolutionary. doorstep. Despite initial superstitions and taboos about the medium, photography is now in the main­ stream of Japanese culture; in typical fashion it both confirms and denies a traditional aesthetic. At times it appears imitative of Western trends, and at times it is foreign and bizarre. It was not until 1974 that the first major exhibition of Japanese photography was held in the West, at the Museum of Modem Art in New York. Then in 1977 the ‘Neue Fotographie aus Japan’ show was held in Graz. This August, at last, a Japanese show reached London. It was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art under the sponsorship of Canon cameras. Although the recent exhibition was called ‘Japanese Photography Today and its Origins’, suggesting a broad historical context, it actually revealed very little about Japan. Much deeper analysis and presentation was missing and it is needed to penetrate the glaring contradictions in Japanese society. Of all the photographers in the Canon Exhibition, Eikoh Hosoe is probably the most significant. Through an enormous body of work he has produced images that touch the core of the Japanese tradition. However, he does not operate like an archaeologist exploring the remains of a past culture. He uses the streets of urban Japan in the same way that he uses the rice fields. Two of his important series have a specific historical setting, but they are also timeless. He is confirming the vitality of the tradition. A figure crouches high on the tall wooden fence, on which the rice straw is hung to dry. He stares across the plain, brooding and, we are told by the photographer, Eikoh Hosoe, he is pos­ sessed by the spirit of Kamaitachi. This key image w'as selected by the ICA to be blown up

FSLN guerilla takes a bath in Somoza's bathtub in his 'bunker' headquarters. and hung at the entrance to the exhibition. It is graphs. Western cult of the body, very familiar with Shinoyama’s early work on tattoos was also part of a long sequence of nearly forty photo­ Hosoe has followed Kamaitachi with another European prose, and lived in rococo, baroque exhibited. It is a link with Ukiyo-o, the Floating graphs by Hosoe that are mythical, rooted in long and as yet unfinished series called Simon: surroundings. But at the same time, he World of Edo; tattoo designs are based on this. tradition and highly pertinent to contemporary A Private Landscape. It follows in close chrono­ vigorously practised the traditional samurai code His enormous work, The Japanese House, was Japan. logical succession since it is based on the days and took the discipline to its extreme conclusion. exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1976. He also Hosoe has said, ‘the images of this story do not shortly after the surrender in 1945. Thirty years Public response to his suicide was one of produced great portraiture work of Kabuki need much commentary: I would like the specta­ later another model as a ‘catalyst’, he has set the dismissal, and accusations of posturing and actors and a series on Mishima, two weeks before tors to use their own imagination.’ Nonetheless series against the landscape around Tokyo, fanaticism, although Kawabata, the Nobel Prize the writer’s death. His diversity is staggering and the background to these pictures is of enormous through which he wandered as an adolescent. winner, said that Japan has a writer of Mishima’s accounts for some of his great commercial significance. Although the series is now ten Simon has a long, angular body. His face is calibre only once every five hundred years. The success. years old, the photographs are a sequence set in made up. He wears a woman’s kimono. His Japanese were embarrassed; Mishima reminded n the greatest manufacturing/consumer Hosoe’s memory of 1944, and as such, they form mask is that of a pierrot who mourns amongst the them of truths which had been neatly obscured society in the world, one would expect the most explicit starting point to modern market stalls, lies spreadeagled in the grass on under the canopy of Americanisation. advertising to be slick. Bishin Jummonji, a Japanese photography. Hosoe uses the language the outskirts of the city like a broken doll, smiles Hosoe used Mishima for an extraordinary former assistant of Shinoyama, has pro­ and metaphor of dream, myth and dance to like some Myshkin figure amongst the children, series of photographs, Ordeal by Roses. These duced commercial colour work for Hitachi explore the fertile folk imagination of village life, dances around the fortune teller’s tent and howls were originally taken in 1963 and republished in Ithat is both bizarre and hilarious - a series of adolescent sexual awareness and the confronta­ on the streetcorner. Hosoe has said that the 1971, the year of Mishima’s death. Hosoe and frozen moments in which the models are literally caught in mid-air. The social and cultural alienation of the younger photographers in Tokyo or Osaka is common to the frustrations expressed in London, New York and the cities of the West. Ayako Senda, has focused on the desolation of broken televisions, rusting cars and trampled toys on the vast refuse dump in Tokyo Bay. Kiyotaka Takauchi says, ‘The system; a monster . . . drags people into the endless gulf, like an avalanche. We live in an enormous hyper­ modern town and we live a prefabricated life. Food in tins, walks in tins, little tins of houses. Our culture is tinned culture. To all appearances I am a sane man, but my mind is sick.’3 Maybe he will find a cure, if, like Hosoe, he turns to the roots of his culture, before it vanishes altogether. The very title of the Canon show, Japanese Photography Today and its Origins, suggests that we should have a broad perspective on modern Japan, and the forces at work in that society. In fact the spectators will probably leave that exhibition with an image of the country that is more confused than when they entered. It is not enough to place a hundred photographs, taken over a period of more than a hundred years, side by side in a small room and claim that it describes the origin of photography in a tion of this physical, exuberant life with the life model Simon will eventually vanish and the final Mishima defined the coexistence of the savage country as complex as Japan. The show is an of the streets of modern, urban Japan. Signifi­ half of the series will be empty landscapes. and the lyrical in Japanese photography. attempt to define Japanese photography, as if it cantly, the ICA show begins and ends with There are desolate images. They coincide with Recognising the power of Mishima’s state­ started at point A with the first cameras and Hosoe. an almost indescribable desolation of that ments, it is still difficult to accept that at the end moved through a logical development to point B, In 1944 American bombers fire-bombed period, 1945 the critical date. It is the beginning of the Seventies the traditional Japan, for which where there is the dubious title, ‘Eight Masters every city in Japan except for Kyoto. The old of a new Japan; not only is photography radically Mishima died, can ever reemerge as anything of the Twentieth Century’. These photographs capital was mercifully preserved because of its different before and after 1945, but for many other than an anachronism. In the historical need explicit translation and context. What is so cultural heritage. In a single night raid on Japanese, 1945 must have seemed like the end of section of the Canon show, the samurai are por­ significant about this exhibition is that it tells Tokyo more bombs were dropped than in the the world. When the Emperor addressed the trayed with a sad dignity in the 1860’s, less than you so little about Japan. entire London blitz. Nearly all wooden nation for the first time on radio on August 15, ten years after Commodore Perry’s famous The absence of the work of documentary buildings - urban Japan - was in ashes. Hosoe 1945, following the second atomic explosion at intrusion in the ‘Black Ships’ in 1853. These photographers such as Tomatsu is curious; was then twelve years old and was evacuated to Nagasaki, he broadcast that, ‘to preserve the pictures are the last visual testimony to a vanish­ Tomatsu and Hamaguchi’s statements are very the country village where his mother had been tradition of the Yamato race, the people had to ing age, comparable to Curtis’ work amongst the explicit. There is also an absence of the older brought up. The farmers’ children thought the endure the unendurable and suffer what is American Indians. generation of post-war photographers such as city kids different; they were pale and emaciated unsufferable’. A defeated army prowled the Since the pre-war period is diplomatically Ishimoto, Iwamiya or the non-documentary from lack of food. Hosoe’s wartime adolescence ruins of the capital, many committed suicide, safe, the exhibition included pictures such as work of Ken Domon. They have a very clear was spent in comparative solitude as an outsider and an alien army entered and bartered trinkets. ‘The Hanging of the Korean Revolutionaries’ in aesthetic. They have produced landscape work, and spectator amongst the robust farming In the wake of defeat and the collapse of the 1919, and pictures of prisoners in the Sino- framed in such a way that it is definable as families. It was then that he learned the story of nationalist ideal came the purges, the trials, and Japanese war in 1938, in which Japanese troops ‘Japanese’, with clear links with the Japanese Kamaitachi. the dismantling of state Shinto. Not only were committed appalling atrocities. visual tradition. The exhibition almost ignored ‘ Kamaitachi is an invisible weasel with industry and the economy shattered, but the There have been a number of fine Japanese any post-war landscape work. These conspi­ very sharp teeth like a sickle. But nobody has myth of an inviolable history was also shattered. war photographers since 1945, several of whom cuous absences are perhaps understandable ever seen him. Nobody knows when or where he The Canon show most diplomatically avoids died in Vietnam. Two Vietnam pictures were when you realise that many photographers are appears. Only that he attacks men in the fields. I the period. One wonders if this period was docu­ included in the exhibition, one by the Pulitzer receiving sponsorship from Nikon or Pentax, had a complex feeling however, that I should mented by the military or if the trauma of the prize winner Kyoichi Sawada. Japan was a spec­ and cannot be exhibited in the Canon show for never hate the land where my mother was born surrender and the occupation was too devastat­ tator in the Vietnamese conflict. However, there •contractual reasons. and raised and if I hated it I would hate my own ing to record. There is only one photograph of are many conflicts within Japan, which have Prejudices and misconceptions about Japan mother.’2 the occupation; it is from five years later, 1950. been consistently recorded by Japanese docu­ survive in the West from the pre-war and war­ Hosoe’s explanation of Kamaitachi is almost a A large sign hangs from the high wire fence of an mentary photographers, such as: Hamaguchi’s time years. The Japanese are anxious to project a premonition of the terrible, unknown weapon American zone in Hbiya, the centre of Tokyo. In work at Narita; Tomatsu’s work on the streets of new image if they are going to establish stronger that would strike the following year at great letters and small Japanese characters it Shinjuku in 1969 or in Okinawa where the commercial ties with Western Europe. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then all Japanese proclaims ‘Dead End’. Hosoe has entered the American presence had been the scene of violent Japanese economy, though strong, is still very values were turned inside out. Patriotism and period through a private landscape thirty years controversy. Neither photographer had work vulnerable. In any relationship between the love of the Emperor had been taken to incon­ later. exhibited in this show, though Tomatsu is the West and Japan, there are certain taboos over the ceivable limits during 1944 and 1945. The he Canon catalogue carefully states most celebrated photographer in Japan. events of 1945. Much of post-war Japanese conflict was between love of the mother country ‘. . . with an Emperor forced offi­ Hamaguchi’s work will soon be shown at the history is about the loss of a traditional identity and the divine Emperor and the knowledge of cially to deny his divine preroga­ Half Moon Photography Workshop. and reaction against the terms of the surrender the fact that Japan could not win the war; tives, Japan saw a New Constitution The arrival of the first Leica in the Thirties and American Occupation of 1945. If those areas surrender was unprecedented, and the proclaimed, education reformed enabled realist documentary work, recording are to be explored in the interests of diplomacy, traditional ethical course would be mass suicide. T and land reforms initiated in a transformationthe conflict of the pre-war years, and the then the context of both Hosoe’s work and that An adolescent imagination might well conjure that was to be termed “Americanisation” . Thus suppression of the unions in the wave of nation­ of the younger generation will be lost. demons at such a time. reformed under Allied control and fitted into an alism that accompanied the expansionist foreign The pre-war nationalist, militarist image of The photographic manufacturing boom American-orientated economic system, Japan policy. A Marxist photo cooperative was estab­ Japan in the West has been replaced by a post­ enabling Japan to be a great exporter of cameras was able from the early fifties on, after American lished by Kimura, and produced work in sharp war image of an expansionist, economic has also flooded the domestic market with occupation ended in 1952, to set about its own contrast to the imitative and fashionably cubist monster. The Japanese are anxious to rectify camera equipment. This is also the case with economic reconstruction, which was to blossom or constructivist work of Nakayama and his this. However, the Canon show serves to exagge­ electrical goods. The Japanese urban home, forth in the sixties.’3 The Sixties were indeed a colleagues. rate those elements of Japan which remain alien though modest by Western standards due to lack boom period for Japan, economically and crea­ The post-war period represented by this and bizarre to the Western spectator, the spec­ of space and a sympathy for uncluttered sim­ tively, but within the pattern of sweeping exhibition is clearly divided into two genera­ tator who leaves the exhibition no clearer as to plicity, often has more than one colour television Americanisation, were the seeds of a crisis of tions: a generation whose references are deep in what lies behind the mask and what is the real and an assortment of electrical equipment and identity which has been clearly demonstrated by Japanese tradition, or are seeking to discover Japan. cameras. the Seventies. and reassert those references, and a new, Hosoe has used a dancer, Tatsumi Jijitaka, to In 1971 Japan was stunned by the public younger generation whose work has no sense of Mark Holborn portray the figures possessed by Kamaitachi. seppuku (hara kiri) of the most celebrated specific location. Shoji Ueda, now in his late References: Hosoe has managed to create a vision from Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima. His death is sixties, has mixed the surreal with the Japanese (1) Herman Kahn, The Emerging Japanese memory; it is the realisation of a personal image well documented, but its significance as a logical sense of space, which marks traditional design. Superstate (Andre Deutsch: 1971. Pelican carried in his imagination for twenty-five years, conclusion to his cycle of four novels, The Sea of He photographs in a country which is claustro­ Books: 1973). despite any historical interpretation. Fertility, is still not understood. Minutes before phobic due to the density of its population and (2) Eikoh Hosoe & Yukio Mishima, Creative The idea of a narrative series is common in he died, in his speech to the assembled troops of the intensive cultivation and habitation of its Camera International Year Book 1978 Japan, since photographers are often working in the Ground Self Defense Force at their H.Q. in non-mountainous areas. Tsuchida, Ikko (Coo Press Ltd. London: 1978. Distributed book form on a specific theme, rather than for Tokyo, Mishima accused them of being ‘drunk Narahara and Shinoyama, though much by Gordon Fraser: London). exposure in an exhibition. Despite the recogni­ with prosperity’. younger, have produced work which explores (3) Catalogue Japanese Photography Today tion of photography as mainstream culture, Mishima epitomised the conflict of the time. Japanese roots. In his series Zokushin: The and its Origins (Grafts Edizioni d’Arte: ironically, there are relatively few Japanese He was a complex and seemingly contradictory Race of Gods on Earth, Tsuchida has followed Bologna, Italy: 1979. Distributed by museums or galleries that are exhibiting photo­ personality. He was obsessed with the classical the Shinto spirit, with its origins in prehistory. Travelling Light). » CAME] The principle of the camera obscura has been known for hundreds of years and was first recorded, by Arabian scholars, in the tenth century A.D. They found that by making a hole in the wall of a darkened room they could form an image of the world outside on the wall opposite the hole. The picture was upside down and the wrong way round. They used the idea to view eclipses, since looking To most people, the processes of photography are as mysterious as the directly at the sun would have damaged their eyes. Half Moon Photography Workshop publicity stalls at local festivals, people seei The image formed in this way is very dim and making the hole were discouraged from doing it themselves because it seemed full of tec bigger, though it increased the brightness, also made the picture provoke interest in taking photographs was to use the charm and fascination ol unsharp. By the sixteenth century camerae obscurae were in use We built a steel framework cube, six foot square at the base and six foot s which had a lens instead of a pinhole. These gave a sharp, bright inner liner. A lens was set into one wall. Our camera image. the lens threw a clear, inverted, reversed Since then, the device has seen much use by artists and painters as a means of recording accurate perspective drawings. The But we wanted to go further, to take and print a photograph. Producing a blacl instruments used shrank from room-sized down to the size of a large This is time-consuming and, for beginners, confusing. Event! modern studio camera. In the Science Museum there is an example a positive image processable in conventional developer. This made it po said to have belonged to Sir Joshua Reynolds. It is in the form of a positive prints - all inside our black bo: book, which opens to make a camera obscura. The whole thing was presented very much as a game, an enterU Obviously, you don’t climb inside; the image in a device like this process was made clear - it lost its mystery but retained its magic. At the ( is thrown onto either a ground glass screen, from which the picture amongst the crowd attracted to our black box. As the camera obscura/darkn can be traced, or onto a panel on which a piece of paper can be laid to making photographs in a more engaged way than is possible by merely tal copy the image. i i _ Before the advent of closed circuit TV, a firm in Glasgow used to Thei'|M39& .is formed on tine back De produce camerae obscurae in large numbers for viewing industrial wall, upside -down & wron^ way found processes. Sadly, the bottom has now fallen out of this market. There are, however, a number of camerae obscurae still in operation, and open to the public. Of these, the largest and most well known is the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh. This is in the castle grounds, and has a moving mirror and lens in a high turret, which can be pointed at any part of the city. The image is thrown onto a table, where it can be viewed by as many as thirty people. Unfortunately, the tower is only open half the year, and even in that period, it is frequently closed because of the mist that often enshrouds the castle. There are other camerae obscurae in Dumfries Museum, at the Clifton Observatory, Bristol, and in Douglas, Isle of Man. There seems to be very little literature available about camerae obscurae: most of the information in print is a brief mention in books about optics. The real enthusiasts in the field seem to be astronomers (in their time off) perhaps because of their involvement with lenses: the larger a camera obscura is, the longer is the focal length of the lens that it requires. Our device was a baby compared with the one in Edinburgh. For the larger instruments, it seems to be impractical to buy lenses off the peg, and the rule is Grind-It- Yourself. DO IT YERSELF If you wish to repeat our experiences with camerae obscurae, then you should know what you’re letting yourself in for. This is a very rough guide, since there are so many variables involved. The cost depends to a large extent upon what you intend to do with the camera obscura once you’ve built it. Our criteria were walkinitude, portability (and therefore demountability) and waterproofness. These requirements dictated the size and design of the finished machine. t>!9 ^ lPs t o thejram We wanted to use it as a way of explaining photography to people ^ e t in <>out Wibn d big in a simple, accurate and explicit manner. This dictated that we had cotton ba to use something that could be walked into, so it had to be at least six feet high. We wanted to have an operator and two or three spectators inside at one time, which dictated the other dimensions. We needed to be able to take it round in a minivan, or at least, on the roof rack, which restricted the bulk and weight of the materials. Since it had to be erected quite quickly, it seemed sensible to use Dexion steel framing, which bolts together like Meccano, and can there's, a table inside the .camera Obscura be assembled by anybody over 5’ 10”. But you could use, for With dishes oy chemicals on it. example, a timber frame, and a double layer of black polythene. You could use a potting shed, a V.W. van, or a roadmender’s hut. We considered using a discarded 6’ diameter fibreglass orange at VWORK

one stage! As long as it doesn’t let the light in, almost anything will do. The choice of skin and inner liner was more difficult. Some people felt that the outer shell should be made of something solid, so we used hardboard. However, since hardboard is flexible, and are magical. But it need not be this way at all. When we were running changes shape when wet, each panel had to be bolted to the frame in sd to find something magical in the very idea of creating an image. However, they about six places, which meant we had to use a total of 100 bolts for aical mysteries way beyond their reach. So we decided that the best way to the whole apparatus. Light still got in around the edges. It all looked the process to show that the basic principles were simple, accessible and exciting, very tatty, and had to be covered in polythene sheet when it rained. inches high, with a pitched roof, a black PVC cover and a black cotton Furthermore, it took an age to put up and take down, and weighed l)scura instantly demonstrated how an image is formed: several hundredweight. mage onto the inside back wall of the box. Eventually we decided to get a black nylon reinforced PVC cover made specially to fit. This ended up by being the largest expense of and white positive picture usually requires the taking of an intermediate negative, all, but it did make the whole scheme a practical proposition. The lly, Kodak gave us a box of Kodaprove paper, which provides cover folded up for transport, and was only a fraction of the weight sible to take portrait photographs on 12 x 10 paper and develop them into of the hardboard. Just as important, it was waterproof, as for most and all within the space of five minutes. of the time it was used out-of-doors. nment. But it was also educational and informative. The photographic lobetown Festival in Bethnal Green we took thirty portraits of people from >m tours around the area, our hope is that more and more people will be drawn into ing about the process or demonstrating the use of conventional cameras. don* #l 5bee| Framework There's a black PVC cover chat 90es oven the Frame, the whole apparatus but I, haven't shewn it on is about eign^t the drawing.This photo » % i the rain starts. Siddhiratna For an inner liner, we bought cotton blackout fabric from Mermaid Fashions. Since it was an end of roll remnant, it was very The Lenb it» a one diopter cheap, and it’s possible that you will have to pay more than we did. ciose-up lens. It forms.d. You could use black polythene, but it’s hard to sew, and it is life sixe V a g e of anything airtight: it doesn’t breathe in the way the way that cotton fabric does. J§x ^eet away J Second hand components are obviously cheaper than new ones. The used Dexion we bought was about 30% cheaper than new. We used a new lens, but there are some airforce surplus lenses available (though these are often not cheap). Some parts are hard to price: we made the lens board in a college workshop, and all it cost us was a bag of woodscrews, but to have it made for you would cost considerably more than this. One interesting possibility which we didn’t try, and wouldn’t involve actually building a room, would be to revert to the early ideas for a camera obscura, and to build a lens into the wall of a room. You could do this by blacking out the windows of a small You stand over room, and fitting a lens into one of them to throw an image onto the is lined here to have wall opposite. A man called Daniel Schwenter went one better, and 16cK \jour picture fitted the lens into a revolving ball which turned within the shutter. tahen.You need This gave a changing view of the world outside. The following list, then, is an account of what we spent to make to keep s>ti\\ for our camera obscura, and isn’t necessarily what you’d have to pay: the whole of the 1 Diopter close up lens £ 11.00 five to ten $eoonq Dexion frame, nut & bolts 48.00 Oexposure,so its Fabric for inner bag: 24 yards at 90p/yd 36” wide 21.60 drawing & tex t actually better to 2 six foot zips 1.00 Sit down. Lorry cover, made to measure 90.00 by Richard Ptett Various odd bits 5.00 TOTAL = £176.60 These are two of the pictures we took with the Camera Obscura. They’re both This doesn’t include the cost of photographic materials: we were greatly reduced, they were originally given a box of paper by Kodak, and bought a variety of other 12” x 10” . The one on the far left, with materials. It wouldn’t be very helpful to print these expenses, as it’s its negative, (centre) were taken usually possible to get hold of cheap materials from one source or on conventional bromide paper. The sensitivity of this paper allowed us another. Furthemore, it would be quite feasible to produce, for to stop down, and to use quite a example, life-size full length colour portraits, if there were short exposure for the pictures. sufficient funds available. The result is relatively clear and well defined. Sources of materials: The picture on Dexion (new and 2nd hand): Angel Storage Equipment, 4 Angel the right was taken on direct positive House, Pentonville Road, London N1 paper, which is much less Fabric: Mermaid Fabrics, 364 Mare Street, London E8 sensitive to light. We had to use Tarpaulin cover: G. H. Morrison (Tarpaulins) Ltd, Bugsby Way, the lens at full aperture (less depth of field and poorer London SE7 definition) and a long exposure. The two pictures illustrate clearly the way that techno­ Zips: Zips can be obtained, made to any size and length, from Aero logical advances in photography affect the type of image zips, but it’s cheaper to buy a sleeping bag zip off the peg. produced. The long exposure of the picture on the right Sefton M. W. (Concord Fastener Industries) 134 Curtain has forced a rigid pose on the sitter, and the softness of the image imparts a slightly unreal quality. The left hand Road, London WC2. picture is quite different, the formality isn’t there, and the Lenses: We bought our lens from a regular photographic dealer, but sharpness of the picture gives a more modem feel to it. these two shops often stock Air Force reconnaissance lenses. Harringay Photographic, 435 Green Lane, London N4 A. W. Young, 251 High Road, London N15 10 CAMERAWORK

We are reproducing an article by Bob Long which is graphs. This interest seems to revolve around overtly sexist images are used, it seems delibe­ tion is primarily concerned with \'o 8’s [Lewisham an amended and edited version of the thesis he wrote several main themes: rately, to sell and illustrate. The most issue] use of photography, since the edition is an in his final term as a student at the Photo Arts Course (1) The community photogapher and the use of remarkable of these is used with an interview intentionally political one it will be difficult to at the Polytechnic of Central London. photography within community projects. with Mark Edwards and the Viva article. comment meaningfully without involving those poli­ While some members of the Camerawork group This also involved the development of an The reason for these incredible contradictions tical matters.’ agree with all or part of what he has to say - and alternative technology and a belief in photo­ of purpose has to be found, I believe, in the - British Journal of Photography, 27 January others disagree - we all feel it to be a useful article. graphy as a non-specialist occupation. people who formed the collective and in their 1978 It is important that the left analyses and debates its (2) The demystification and analysis of photog­ political disparity. In the summer of 1977, two The issue can broadly be split into three main own practice as well as that of the right. raphy was prominent in the ‘aims’ of the areas: Tom Picton will make a reply in the next issue of (1) The photographs. Some of which are with Camerawork. articles, but most on full page spreads with short captions. Practice and theory (2) Text. Articles giving a description of the Practice is always produced as the result of National Front, a personal view by Tom theory. When photo-zombies like Bailey and Picton, John Tyndall’s speech to his National Cartier-Bresson coyly claim that they ‘just take Front membership and a description (I avoid pictures’ or ‘the decisive moment presents itself the word ‘analysis’ here) of the use of photo­ they refer to an ‘intuition’. Intuition, often held graphs by the media in its coverage of the up as some kind of mystical visitation of inspira­ riot. tion is, quite simply, unconscious theory. So, we (3) Text. A series of interviews with eight all produce photographs from our photo-theory; photographers whose photographs make up only, sometimes it is conscious and sometimes the bulk of the issue. much of it is not consciously considered. Surely no matter what area of photography we work The Articles within, we aspire to a greater success - and the The speeches by Tyndall (leader of the National way to be more successful is to be more conscious Front) to the membership at Lewisham is of what we are doing: more calculating. For published naked - without analysis or criticism. academics, theory is practice, for me theory has It assumes that the readership is ideologically in to be for practice. a position to reject the speech as tactical Nazi Like thousands of other people, I am com­ rhetoric, which is perhaps a fair assumption mitted to an area of activity, the hopeful result of except that the article below, ‘Fascism and the which is the destruction of the capitalist system National Front’ assumes a very different ideo­ and the institution of a democratic regime con­ logical position. Within the terms of dominant trolled by the people who produce the wealth - ideology Tyndall’s speech often involved rather than those who play with it. My particular ‘sensible’ sounding comments. skill is as a photographer, and if photography has 'Now, I regret, as we all regret this afternoon, the any real use within that general political activity, inconvenience and the upset that has been caused to then that is the photography I would seek to use. many ordinary people in Lewisham as a result of this However, much of this article depends upon a week’s developments, and a a result of what has gone retrospective view of my own experience in on today. Now, I think that most of you would agree fumbling through an attempt at political who have read your newspapers this week, there has practice. I will try very hard to avoid the been a deliberate attempt by the gutter press [cheers] common fault of using theory simply as a means to depict the National Front as some kind of threat to of justifying a method of practice which is the ordinary law-abiding folk of Lewisham. But in actually chosen for totally different reasons to fact we are the people who have come here to protect the noble motivations pontificated. Intellectuals the ordinary law-abiding British . . . [cheers]. ’ whose practice is the production of theory often - Tyndall to N.F. at Lewisham correctly refuse to impose neat solutions and usually attempt to pose the relevant questions. A quick phone call to any anti-racist organisa­ However, as primarily a photo-practitioner, I tion would have produced a pile of evidence, have to put my theory to work and must, there­ some of it originally collected by Special Branch fore, seek answers which are working methods. which would prove this kind of ‘reasonable’ These working methods must never settle , ,„,rch. l.c-Utam . 1.1™ >’• 1,77 rhetoric purely strategic and very deliberate. complacently but, with constant challenge, Some years ago Tyndall, in correspondence with hopefully progress towards a practice in a dialec­ the USA Nazi Party, put forward this strategy of tical relationship with theory. reasonable, law abiding patriotic rhetoric LEWISHAM: because he believed overt Nazism was unfortu­ nately unpalatable in Britain. However, 1. THE POLITICAL Camerawork assumes that the reader will realise PHOTOGRAPHER What are you the strategy of the rhetoric, assuming it will ‘What strikes me in Marxist analysis is that it is enjoy the humorous irony intended by the juxta­ always an issue of “class struggle’’, but there is a position on the same page of a photograph and word in this expression to which less attention has taking pictures for? quote from Hitler. It is difficult not to enjoy this been paid, it is to “struggle’’. Here again one must be humour, but is it so apparent? Or, as I believe, more precise. The greatest of the Alarxists beginning does it depend on the reader being already with Marx have insisted on military problems (the critical of the National Front? army as slate apparatus, armed insurrection, revolu­ Half Moon Photography Workshop As I have already said, it is a fair assumption tionary war). But when they speak of class struggle that Camerawork readers are already committed as the general outcome of history they are chiefly anti-racists, but the article below - ‘Fascism worried about knowing what class is, where it is and the National Front’ - presumes, it seems, a situated, who it encompasses, but never what, in CAyJ* new audience altogether: the dominant ideology concrete terms, the struggle is.’ Camerawork 8 and the Political Photogr victim - the ‘general public’. - Michel Foucault ‘In recent months the question has been raised members of the group who had been responsible whether or not the Front is a fascist organisation or Camerawork group, and within the first few' issues for writing and collecting many of the more poli­ just a militant form of the Monday Club. Whilst it The first issue of Camerawork appeared in genuinely analytical articles were published. tically concerned and properly analytical may well be the case that many people become February 1976 with the lead article, ‘The Politics (3) The ‘concerned photographer’ phenomena articles, were expelled from the group. The attracted to the Front for it xenophobia, racism and of Photography’ by Jo Spence. For the first time received its coverage particularly with an greater workshop - those outside the immediate opposition to the Common Market, they are, regard­ for many years, politics was placed on the agenda interview of Mark Edwards discussing the collective - split into twro camps. There were less of what they think, joining and supporting a of the photographic press in Britain. The photo personal strife of objectifying 'Starving those who supported the expelled members and fascist party.’ press is divided into one large and two small Indians’when nobody will buy your pictures those who were satisfied with the explanation The writer then proceeds to argue as if to groups: amateur, professional and creative. The anymore unless they come complete with a given by the remaining workshop. The argu­ Conservatives that the National Front are not amateur press, Amateur Photographer, Photo frame. ments from both sides were published in the really ‘patriotic’ because they have often Technique etc, concentrate largely on photog­ (4) There was a more general ‘photographic’ photographic press, letters were sent to work­ produced written and verbal condemnations of raphy as consumer leisure - with equipment interest in reviewing exhibitions and new shop members and the issue became the subject Winston Churchill. reviews, heavy advertising and ‘tips’ on how to books by prominent superstars. of a lengthy industrial tribunal' for unfair dis­ 'The following quote from the article shows the produce yet more boring sunsets or how to (5) An emphasis on photojournalism with inter­ missal. Basically, it seems, the workshop main­ real “patriotism” of the Front. “The speeches of persuade your neighbour’s daughter to strip off views and articles on such subjects as Don tained it had expelled the two members because Churchill in the early thirties are as remarkable as for your camera. The professional magazines, McCuIlin and an interview with Viva - the it found them difficult to work with and the two they are alarming. For already he is pointing to the the British Journal of Photography, for photo reportage collective. expelled members’ supporters considered the dangers of a revived Germany even before Hitler example, show availability of equipment, heavy (6) The attempts at theorising a social use of decision a political one in that the two were the became Chancellor. ” ’ advertising and legal instructions in the evasion photography within a broader political situa­ ones most interested in the journal being a So that on one page we have two or perhaps of tax as a self employed licenced bandit. The tion than the ‘community’, such as an inter­ genuinely analytical and political publication, to three assumed audiences. British Journal also likes to publish ‘art’ photo­ view with Bob Golden. which the remaining workshop reacted through­ The next full page carries an article by Tom graphs in the centre for working professionals to The eclectic nature of these themes quite fre­ out. Picton which is actually a very well researched giggle at, and comment on the days when grain quently produced a contradictory juxtaposition. description of the coverage the bourgeois media was outlawed and photographs sharp. Apart In a publication committed to the demystifica­ Lewisham Camerawork gave to the day’s events, and concludes with a from this, there is the occasional modernist tion of the ‘photographer’ it is not unusual to After the split within the workshop the first lament for the days of ‘real reporting’ - of truth:- photo magazine such as Creative Camera, read enobling articles on the ‘great’ photo­ issue of Camerawork was a special issue devoted 'Anyone seriously wanting to know what happened which is used mainly as a kind of poetic mastur- graphers, such as the (non) interview with Bill to one subject - the Lewisham race riot of in Lewisham on August 13 1977 would not find out batory aid for self confessed aesthetes. Brandt and Ralph Gibson. A glance at almost August 1977 - and the issue came to be known by reading those papers.' Camerawork in this consumer hobbyist, pro­ any issue of Camerawork displays the disparity as Lewisham Camerawork. Many workshop The extreme bias of the bourgeois owned and fessional thief and art chaos, was received like a of purpose of the collective. For example, issue members, myself included, heaved a sigh of controlled media should never be taken for breath of fresh air by photographers interested No 3 has as a cover a beautiful photograph of a relief. At a glance, it seemed, not only had granted, but all we are given is evidence of the in the proper analysis and social use of photog­ circus clown; and inside it has a Victor Burgin Camerawork remained political, but it had bias. There is no attempt at a real analysis, below raphy. It was, however, made up, right from the beginner’s guide to photo-semiology, an inter­ maintained a commitment to analysis by asking the surface, of the paper coverage involving a start, of a group of people whose interests were view with art photographer Ralph Gibson, Bob on its front page, ‘What are you taking pictures posing of the questions as to why the press quite diverse, except for an interest in photog­ Golden on his use of photography as a socialist for?’ The photographic press and the Guardian behaved in the way that they did, just as, raphy and the genuine desire to create a journal and the pinhole camera article. In a magazine reviewed the issue and all agreed it was political throughout the issue, there is no question as to and situation for an alternative use of photo­ which had several resident active feminists, ‘Although the journal as a photographic publica­ why the police, the NF and the anti-racists CAMERAWORK 11 behaved in the particular ways that they did. arms. This is a photograph that could be cast as a offices. What matters is the fact that several artist customarily signs and dates a work. This Why, for example, did the press unanimously monument, but it could be argued that inclusion thousand committed anti-racists were able to leads us to view again the use of photographs in declare editorially their loathing for the National serves to display Camerawork’s acknowledge­ buy and keep an ideology-reinforcing record of the issue. Every photograph has a caption. Very Front - but believed nevertheless that they had ment that police were actually injured, and their struggle against Nazism. However, if the often this caption simply places the photograph every' right within our ‘democracy’ to meet and placed within the surrounding context of the issue were intended to be simply a ‘morale geographically, e.g. ‘Lewisham High Street. . . discuss and propagate their own beliefs? Any­ issue does nothing to emphasise the point. How­ booster’, and to reinforce the ideology of the Left Mike Abrahams’ and ‘New Cross Rd . . . Chris body who attempted to stop them were ever, the actual context of the issue is, as it points it would have had to be a very different issue, Steele-Perkins’, and sometimes its purpose is to hooligans - red thugs - who ought to go back to out in its text, within the mass of injured police and more significantly it could have been distri­ anchor meaning into extremely polysemic Russia where they belong. Yet the press will propaganda of the media. Why did they publish buted in a totally different way. If, for example, images. ‘Clifton Rise, Anti Racist (L) fends off refuse to give platform to organisations like the this photograph? (Do we smell ‘balance’ here it were distributed with the Socialist Worker it attack from NF supporters . . . Peter Marlow’. IRA, and in effect have condoned vicious perhaps?) would have been guaranteed a minimum of By giving the photograph a place (geographi­ assaults by prison officers and police on IRA So it seems that Lewisham Camerawork was 30,000 sales to committed anti-racists alone. cally) and by identifying the ‘offenders’, a notion prisoners and suspects. not simply a heavily biased and crude propa­ of the photographs as evidence is maintained. ganda piece supporting the activities of the anti­ Lewisham Cameraworks’ Real Function However, all the captions give the names of the The Photographers racists at Lewisham, with its proposed audience Camerawork sells, it seems to me, to an area of photographers. So that the meaning produced is About a third of the issue is taken up by a series those anti-racists. The police and the fascists people made up of photographers, teachers, not only ‘this is a photograph taken at Clifton of anecdotes, recorded in interviews with the enjoy too much positivism for that. Nor can it be community workers, aesthetes, lecturers, Rise of an anti-racist fending off an attack from photographers involved in producing the a balancing act aimed at the general public, to students, left wing art activists and people an NF supporter,’ but THIS IS THE WORK published photographs. The headline asks, give a different picture of Lewisham sympa­ interested in photography as media and media OF A PHOTOGRAPHER CALLED PETER ‘What are you taking pictures for?’ The question thetic towards the anti-racists. Within dominant generally. MARLOW. is left suspended and unchallenged, except ideology terms, very dubious characters are The centre pages of the issue lends a clue to superficially with replies like 'for such and such a shown victoriously burning a Union Jack, and the peculiar use of photography throughout {Ulus Photography - used or shown? left-wing joumar, or 'for any publication that will the anti-racists are sometimes shown to fit, in 17). The front page of the Daily Mail, August 15 Walter Benjamin once remarked, in criticism of pay’. Again there is no question as to why or how the terms of the bourgeois press, its glib expres­ 1977, is reproduced, and next to it is an edited the new style of photographic documentary these journals used the photographs and no sion that ‘both extreme Left and extreme Right version of the page displaying quite successfully which flourished in Germany in the Twenties, challenge to the photo-prostitutes such as are as bad as each other’. Neither can it pretend the particular use of language and visual codes that: Homer Sykes who, when asked: ‘What do you to attempt to be the unbiased ‘truth’ of an event, used by the Daily Mail to produce its meaning. '... it becomes more and more subtle, more and more hope to do with these pictures in the long run?’ with the lead article proclaiming the journal’s What is peculiar here is that instead of simply modem and the result is that it can no longer photo­ answered, ‘I hope they sell and sell and sell’, and position in regard to the National Front. reproducing the newspaper cover with the graph a run-down apartment house or a pile of later explains his own interest in the National What Lewisham Camerawork actually is has unwanted text and imagery pointed out, a hand­ manure without transfiguring it. Not to speak of the Front. to be considered regardless of what it is intended written and drawn version appears which actually fact that it would be impossible to say anything about 'I thought that if there is an election it will be an to be. Animal Farm is taught in most schools and makes the point of the juxtaposition less a dam or a cable factory except this: the world is asset if you had made contact with the National within that context understood by most people emphatic. It is, at first, difficult to imagine why beautiful. . . It has even succeeded in making misery Front, who are obviously going to go places, whether as a political satire, aimed against the principles it was done in this way since I am sure it would itself an object of pleasure, by treating it stylishly and you like it or not. They may not move forward very of communism, not more specifically a warning have been simple and visually more successful to with technical perfection. For the "new objectivity” much, but it’s an ongoing situation, right. So its good of the possible development of a Stalinism within use a printed version. However, the words it is the economic function of photography to bring to to have got in there and made contact and to have communism - which is what, I would argue, it the masses elements which they could not previously photographed the people. ’ enjoy - spring, movie stars, foreign countries - by The anecdotes are a set of day-in-the-life rewording them according to current fashion; it is the stories of young photojournalists either struggl­ political function of photography to renew the world ing to sell their photographs or working for alter­ as it actually is from within, in other words, native media. Some of them have lost all know­ according to the current fashion.’ ledge or control of the pictures they took. Camerawork’s function has always been not ‘Camerawork: "Do you think they made good use only to fill a vacuum in the photo-press for the of the pictures in Paris Match?” critical analysis of photography, but it has Chris Steele-Perkins: “/ think so,yes. Not having tended to fill another vacuum in creating a small read the article fully you know, I ’m not to sure what space for the photojournalist. The large ‘respec­ line they actually took on it.” ’ table’ outlets for the picture story such as Picture The stories are sometimes a guide to budding Post, Life etc have died and yet hundreds of riot photographers, with references to equip­ young photographers are still weaned on the ment and how to perform, where to be F.S.A., Cartier Bresson, Bill Brandt, Don positioned etc. Like many of the photographs McCullen etc. They practise photo-reportage at and articles the anecdotes are at the level of the college, and one college actually specialises in superficial, lack genuine analysis and are left photojournalism (Newport). Yet the only publi­ ideologically naked to be clothed by the ideology cations we have in this country who will use a of the reader without challenge to that ideology. series of photographs including a variety of subjects are the Sunday Supplements. There are The Photographs several photojournalists, such as Chris Steele- At first glance the motivation for the use of the Perkins who manage to survive within that area, photographs with their captions is seemingly but very often survive by working for foreign obvious. The national press were extremely journals and are frequently subsidised by the biased against the anti-racists’ activity at Arts Council and part-time teaching. So we have Lewisham and sympathetic towards the police a strange phenomenon of hundreds of aspiring force (‘caught in the middle’), and also in a more photojournalists and no real market for their complex way towards the National Front. In product. The Half Moon Photography order to reinforce their beliefs that a gang of CAMERAWORK Spages Workshop have created a small market for the violent hooligans attacked the police, photo­ picture story, not only in Camerawork (the issue graphs were used showing injured police and following Lewisham was devoted to the picture weapons found, etc. Lewisham Camerawork story - but perhaps more effectively in its set itself the task, therefore, of showing photo­ travelling exhibitions, nearly all of which are graphs which the bourgeois media would not - picture stories on laminated panels. The national After the Battle of U-wisham. of police being violent and racist and even of a question of vital importance press declared in their editorials their abhorence police throwing stones. The National Front are of the National Front, as did Camerawork, but shown being violent and looking thuggish. The NOW WHO WILL whilst the bourgeois media squirmed for ‘free British Journal of Photography saw the whole speech’, implicit in Lewisham Camerawork was issue as a crude propaganda piece to ‘show the a demand for ‘fair’ photographic representation. other side’s point of view’, and made an editorial DEFEND HIM? However, this whimper in the consumer attack on Camerawork on those grounds. DEFEND wilderness for a revival of photojournalism (B.J.P. 27.1.78). propagates a use of the photograph which is But is the issue such a crude piece of obvious fundamentally different from the original use of propaganda? Its leader declares Camerawork’s photographs with text in the ‘good old days’ of position in regard to the National Front, but a picture magazines. The Farm Security Admini­ closer look at the photographs reveals a strange stration photographs may now be expensive art and perhaps naive liberalism. One picture shows objects in the Museum of Modern Art in New a group of very unferocious National Front York, but originally they were published in members in retreat with concerned looks on the countless journals and magazines without notice faces of the fascists and the police. One police­ of being incredible art photographs. They were man has a reassuring hand on the shoulder of a presented as propaganda for the aspirations of fascist. Another picture shows the police helping the liberal humanist ideology which pervaded an anti-racist from a fascist attack. And what is it the New Deal social reforms in America. Cartier- the fascists are protecting? Union Jacks! In some Bresson’s early photographs did not first appear photographs the anti-racists look positively in the Hayward Gallery with one line captions, violent and on the attack. nor were Lewis Hine’s photographs of working ( AMfcRAWORK-S pages We depend on the short captions to let us children first shown at the Regent Street know who the ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ are ‘Derek Boshier 1977’ and the appearance later of building of the P.C.L. The images were used supposed to be. The police are very often shown was intended to be. So in this sense Animal the juxtaposition in the Air Gallery sometime not shown as they are now. In other words, the in a very positive and even courageous light. Farm is anti-communist, (not inherently), but after the event lead us to the reason that it was picture story had a context which although it was In a culture historically obsessed with mili­ its meaning to most people is that communism handwritten. It is a WORK OF ART. How very often a political disgrace, it at least formed a tarism, in books, comics, magazines, films and breeds corruption. could Derek Boshier claim he had produced an pseudo context. With this new photoreportage, TV, the well-ordered ranks of uniformed men The Lewisham issue of Camerawork is a artifact if it had been merely printed (‘technical’ which wanders around without a context and (the thin blue line) and the charge into action programme of an event for all participants and not ‘artistic’)? Anybody could have produced it without analysis, the images are immediately (charge of the blue brigade) of the police create a supporters of the police, the National Front and and where would be the presence of the Artist in dehistoricised. All they can then do, without spectacle difficult to reject. With Camera­ the anti-racists. It is like at a football match the edited version of a newspaper’s front cover? even a token period of use, is to take a relegated work’s self righteous condemnation of the bour­ where the same programme serves both sets of The presence of the artist here is the litde place within art photography. This is the new geois press’ obsession with showing injuries supporters. As an issue, after several reprints, it squiggles in the lines and the personal hand­ place for documentary photography - the suffered by the police, it is incredible to see a sold over 10,000 copies whereas other issues of writing of the artist. Why should we need to gallery, the expensive monograph, the Arts photograph which any national would have been Camerawork sell around 5-6,000. It has been know the name of the producer and what is more Council’s ‘British Image’, Camerawork and a happy to publish. Here the police are seen as war argued that it does not matter that the National incredible, why should ‘1977’ be even Half Moon touring exhibition. heroes. One of them who is injured is dragged Front were able to so easily obtain the issue and mentioned when both the event and the issue In concluding The Work of Art in the Age of through the chaos by his concerned comrades at display the photographs in some of their branch happened in 1977? Except for the fact that an Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin CAMERAWORK

makes a vital distinction between the activities of seems to have impregnated the whole contents of the graph is horrible, but isn’t it a beautiful photo­ Safety ‘politicising art’ and ‘making politics aesthetic’. Supplement. Only that dimension - aesthetic graph.’ John Fowles in The Aristos expresses The situations represented are always ‘worse’ With its earlier issues Camerawork attempted contemplation, luxury, the spectacle of consumption, disgust at what he calls ‘visuals’ (a nuance of the than our own. Viewing the pictures is like being an ideological analysis of photography and its images of the “good life” - has been authenti­ intellectual which he believes has developed in a warm bed in a shack during a blizzard where uses in Western capitalist society, with the cated: and these values have been imprinted over the since the War), who, when confronted with the we can hear the blizzard beating against the articles by such people as Jo Spence, Terry whole magazine. Thus, as Benjamin observes, the photograph of a crowd being machine gunned by walls, but we take pleasure in our own warmth Dennet, Victor Burgin and John Tagg. It occa­ function photography serves here is to “renew the police, ‘sees only a brilliant news photograph’. and safety. sionally pointed to potential methods of political world as it is from within . . . according to the current The ‘disavowal’ theory applied to photo- ‘What does it matter after all if order is a little practice with the Bob Golden interview and the fashion!” ’ Stuart Hall,The Social Eyeof Picture brutal or a little blind if it allows us to live cheaply? community arts and alternative technology Post Here we are in our turn rid of a prejudice which cost debate. In other words it was, in part at least, us dearly, too dearly, which costs us too much in working within the concept of ‘politicising art’. scruples, in revolt, in fights and in solitude.’ Lewisham Camerawork ‘rendered politics LEWISHAM - Roland Barthes aesthetic’! The difference between an issue of When an emaciated child appears next to a Creative Camera and Lewisham Camerawork A personal view hi-fi advertisement in the Observer Supple­ is simply that Camerawork exclusively dis­ ment we can consume it visually and enjoy being played photographs of an overtly political reminded by the advertisement of how ‘cheaply’ phenomena. And like Creative Camera it cele­ we can live. brated the work of its individual artists. Hundreds of people had cameras at Lewisham, Lost Experience and it is peculiar for a publication previously In the West we live such an ‘artificial’ life, committed to an enlarged practice that they devoid of dangers from nature which is under chose to show the work of a few established control. With our electric lights, running hot photographers. water and penicillin, perhaps we crave the It is not an accident that the National Front stimuli of old when danger and extremes were a march in uniformed ranks under a mass of feature of everyday experience. And this Union Jacks, or that the German Nazi’s had capitalist society, that would package air if it impressive uniforms and visually incredible were possible and sell it back to us, has made rallies. Fascism presents itself as a spectacle for sympathy and moral outrage a commodity - a public admiration, and although it would be consumer item - to be sold and bought by us ridiculous to imply that Camerawork is fascist, under the control of the same market forces as a the activity of making politics a gratuitous tube of toothpaste. aesthetic pleasure is a vital tool of fascist growth. The Lewisham issue of Camerawork Self Fantasy appeared overtly and aggressively political, and Perhaps when we look at the horror image we yet finally it simply relegated a political event to enjoy the fantasy of a self-image of the ‘sensi­ an object for visual enjoyment. But the point is tive’ person who cares about these things or, if that it appeared so obviously political because rgued that any the fantasy develops, we enjoy the image of our­ that is what it was intended to do. To all those selves as people working towards a change, and, sceptics who tended to believe that the reasons the images serve to confirm our nobleness in for the dismissal of Jo Spence and Terry Dennet that activity. were a reaction to their continual emphasis on the politics of photography, it declared with a Links with Sexuality scream: ‘LOOK AT THIS ISSUE. THIS Victor Burgin has pointed out in lectures the PROVES WE ARE STILL AS POLITICAL incredible (but only when you think about it) AS EVER, IF NOT MORE SO.’ juxtaposition within a Penthouse Photo World And many of us were fooled. magazine of masturbatory aid shots of naked In reviewing the Lewisham issue Race Today women surrounding a ‘Pictorial History of commented: Decapitation’. Perhaps, as he tentatively ‘The interviews with the photographers merely suggested, the response for having both is promote their individual careers and show us, once actually sexual, or at least sexual in that the again, how easy it is for professionals to dip a liberal decapitation images serve to increase the eroti­ toe into the swirling waters of radical activity and cism of the fantasy stimulated by the images of fool themselves, and us, into believing they had women, in a relation similar to that of the image taken a plunge.’ of a starving Biafran juxtaposed with a hi-fi advertisement. 2. THE POLITICAL Photography allows us to stare, as private PHOTOGRAPHER voyeurs, at subjects we would often avoid con­ It is very easy to sit back as a comfortable purist fronting directly, or simply subjects we do not and hurl self-righteous moral abuse at other have the opportunity to view. Diane Arbus is people’s forms of practice, but the reasons for refreshingly honest by admitting that her Camerawork’s declaration of political intent are function was as a public voyeur - an agent to complex and involve most practitioners of serve our scopofilia (enjoyment of looking). The most acclaimed area of this scopofilia has beauty photography who believe their photography has, CAMERAWORK-8 page or ought to have, a political effect - including graphs has at least, in its connections to Freud’s and suffering in a perverted, but inseparable myself. To understand this I have to first discuss The fact that on a Sunday morning we are able theory about dreams, a basis within scientific relationship. It is only several months since several methods of practice and ideas. to sit with bacon and eggs on our plates whilst research. Also, the transference from dreams to beautiful Cartier-Bresson images of, amongst leafing through a colour supplement full of photographs need not be so difficult - since it other things, starving Indians appeared in the Horror Pictures images of starving people, without so much as can be argued that photographs are always Hayward - totally dehistoricised, depoliticised One method of practice that pervades political flinching between mouthfuls, is a common received at the level of fantasy. and therefore aestheticised. practice at many different levels is concerned experience that is fascinating. What happens And I would argue that even ‘medical’ photo­ with showing people the horrors of capitalism. psychologically when we view an image is not However, the disavowal theory, I believe, graphs, taken outside of the seductive genre of Very often we are confronted with images in only the most interesting area of aesthetic suggests too negative a reaction to the photo­ the ‘decisive moment’, hold a sinister attraction. publications and on TV ranging in extremes research, it is potentially the most progressive. graph which is enjoyed and, unlike the dream, is from housing conditions in East Glasgow or Don McCullin often expresses his wish to show almost always a voluntary act and usually purchased. To employ what is perhaps a The Concerned Photographer working conditions in a mill, factory or mine, to the Western world the suffering in other parts of A number of years ago two volumes of a book fragile analogy, I find it incredible that starving people in the third world. This practice the world as if we would rise up and change it all. entitled The Concerned Photographer people (myself included) flock to fair grounds seems to be based on the belief that ‘if only But we simply turn the page for the hi-fi appeared. The belief held, it seems, that a group where they pay money for rides on the Big people knew what was happening’, and it is an advertisement. If we could understand what of photographers who often made grief, horror Dipper and Wild Mouse and other ‘frightening’ assumption with some validity that information is happened psychologically when we viewed a and poverty their subject matter, were rides. They are buying the sensation of fear, and a excluded within society and its inclusion will picture, then the possibilities for attacking ‘concerned’, and by showing us the pictures we good fair ground ride is judged on its capacity to have an ‘effect’. However, the response to these dominant ideology and stimulating social beha­ too would be ‘concerned’. But if ‘concern’ terrify. When we buy the horror pictures in the information pictures, when they are shown, is viour through media would be enormous. John implies involvement, then they have done supplements - are we not buying the sensation extremely complex. Very often it is true that they Berger has suggested that the reason we accept nothing except entertain us. Rather than of horror which, like the fair ground sensation, is are presented within such a context as to depoli- the images of horror without a positively mani­ challenge the ideology responsible for the horror enjoyable because finally it is SAFE? The Big ticise their response, but a more sinister reaction fested reaction is that they serve simply to in a peculiar way, they actually reinforce it. Dipper is going to ‘scare us to death’, but never is involved. remind us of our political impotence in dealing ‘To instill into the Established Order the literally. ‘There, a variety of subjects, many of the greatest with the situation. complacent portrayal of its drawbacks has nowa­ social and political urgency, captured and repro­ Viewing horror pictures is always actually safe days become a paradoxical, but incontravertable duced with astonishing technical virtuosity, are ‘But the reader who has been arrested by the because our actual economic existence as a means of exulting it. Here is the pattern of this new nevertheless systematically transformed, by the photograph may tend to feel this discontinuity as his capitalist society, which is to blame for what is style demonstration _ take the established value social values which impregnante the exposition, into own personal moral inadequacy. And as soon as this often represented in the photograph, is never which you want to restore or develop, and first objects of consumption. Such a rhetoric regularly happens even his sense of shock is dispersed; his own challenged. It is never challenged perhaps lavishly displays its pettiness, the injustices it pro­ displaces the interest of the reader from the social to moral inadequacy may not shock him as much as the because first of all, the real ‘blame’ is never duces, the vexations to which it gives rise, and the aesthetic dimension: it reifies and aestheticizes crimes being committed in the war. Either he shrugs considered in the accompanying text and also, as plunge it into its “natural imperfection”, then at the every topic. It integrates discordant and contradic­ off this sense of inadequacy as being only too is sometimes suggested, the actual mode of last moment, save it in spite of or rather by the heavy tory human material within the activity of familiar, or else he thinks of performing a kind of representation of the photograph (naturalism) curse of its blemishes.’ pleasurable contemplation. The latent message of the penance - of which the purist example would be enforces the ‘nothing we can do about it’ - Roland Barthes Supplement pictorial layout is: “the world is beauti­ make a contribution to OXFAM or UNICEF.’ response to the image; so that what is taken The last photograph in Lewisham Camera­ ful”. I think this is what critics mean when they say John Berger, Horror Pictures comfort in is not only the beauty of the image in work (page 12) can be understood as a positive that the Colour Supplements are the creatures of their This notion has some validity but a more sub­ terms of composition etc, but the mode of repre­ pointer of a way forward: ‘united we stand . . .’ lush advertising. It is not only that advertising layout stantial idea can be found in Freud’s notion of sentation itself which incapacitates the viewer. etc. It can also be understood as the classic dominates the disposition of all its contents, sub­ disavowal in dreams as it has been applied (in We can enjoy the horror at leisure, even as liberal statement: ‘It will all be OK in the end - ordinating both text and other kinds of photographs lectures) by Victor Burgin to the response to this leisure, because there is nothing we can do about basically the order of things is fine, if a little - though that is true. It is not only that the economic kind of photograph. This idea, as I understand it. diseased by the growth of a Nazi movement.’ function of the Supplement - to draw expensive it, suggests that we look at a photograph of a ‘One inoculates the public with a contingent evil to advertising revenue to the paper - is manifest every­ starving Biafran, for example, and in rejecting I do not pretend to know why we should enjoy prevent or cure an essential one. To rebel against the where in its aesthetic - though that, too, is true. It is what the photograph, in realist terms, repre­ the sensation of viewing horror pictures, but I inhumanity of the Established Order and its values that the latent content of the advertisements - “the sents, we take comfort in its form. In other will tabulate here some other possible, though according to this way of thinking, is an illness which world is beautiful”, “the world is a commodity” - words, we look and say to ourselves ‘this photo- extremely fragile ideas. is common, natural, forgiveable. One must not CAMERAWORK collide with it head on, but rather exorcise it like a notion that ‘Art’ is High Culture, Bill Brandt, rarely acknowledged. In the 19th century artists read, or designed to be read, by the European possession! The patient is made to give a representa­ Cartier-Bresson, etc. The problem of were paid by the bourgeoisie and their function, guest workers it uses and represents, has been tion oj his or her revolt and this revolt disappears all community artists therefore is to adopt the with bourgeois realism, was to reflect the largely ignored. It is considered as an object the more surely since once at a distance and the object missionary position in culturally converting the ideology and cultural aspirations of the 19th within a contextual vacuum, but its actual oj a gaze, the Established Order is no longer any­ ‘poor underprivileged’ working class in order to century bourgeoisie. Hence the thousands of oil context is the students, intellectuals and other thing, but a Manichae compound and therejore accept the established criteria for ‘Art’ - a kind paintings, representing their notion of the middle class liberals who were self righteously inevitable, one which wins on both counts and is of ‘Art’ meals on wheels. ‘noble’ existence: the romance, the highly mora­ enraged about the treatment of guest workers in therejore beneficial. ’ Also, the word ‘community’ is never lising allegorical paintings, the paintings of Europe. John Berger received a collective pat on - Roland Barthes considered. I have worked in community arts for people in their expensive clothes surrounded by the back for being such a nice concerned It is often seen by dissidents viewing society several years and I am not sure what ‘commu­ their estates and belongings. All of this Socialist. However, one group of people are for­ that information - ‘the new medium’ - and its nity’ actually means. It seems that tacitly a reinforced a belief in gentility, a love of gotten in this - the guest workers John Berger control, function in a negative way by omitting definition is accepted which rings of an aging romanticised nature, and above all, ownership. used in order to gain his pat on the back. areas of ‘truth’ or ‘reality’. This is partly true; hippy notion-ignoring the economic circum­ Today, except for a small area of the art world There is a new genre of modernist photography how many photographs of soldiers torturing stances of society and pretending that ‘there’s no which remains within the expensive gallery - the ‘political photograph’ - which, because it civilians in Northern Ireland do we see? But as such thing as class’. market, much of photography and other forms involves the occasional cloth cap, dirty-faced Barthes suggests the process is actually much I must agree with the comment made by of representation (especially TV) represent the miner or snotty-nosed kid, must be considered more positive. Capitalism depends on a Derek Bishton and Brian Homer who wrote in new ruling ideology partly nationalised in the political. As Judith Williamson pointed out controlled dissent, on displaying the problems of the first issue of Ten-8. form of the BBC and the Arts Council. This recently in a ‘Feminist and Photography’ the system. Self-criticism, the awareness of ‘Community photography is good at making ruling ideology is liberal humanist and its mode lecture, people are running around ripping contradictions, are enobled within themselves as personal statements, it seems, and has not really of representation is still bourgeois realist. ‘ideology’ off the backs of the working class and virtues, as is a subscription to New Interna­ come to terms with the structural weakness of collec­ Recently John Tagg, in a lecture at the ICA, leaving them nothing in return. tionalist and copies of Minemata, Vietnam Inc, tive statements in a wider context oj political change. questioned the validity of the practice of photo­ Also, the political photographer is a person Is Anyone Taking any Notice? and Concerned This is the real challenge which has yet to be faced.’ graphing the working class, because working who has to eat and pay electricity bills and is, Photographer on the show-shelf in the living One possible area of photographic work class people were ‘unimpressed’ by having therefore, often protective (if sometimes shyly) room amongst the Habitat furniture, pile carpets within the community is within the notion of the images of themselves reflected back at them. about his or her profession. It is difficult to and drinks cupboard. ‘One is aware . . . ’. worker-photographer which has a history in This seems to be a general assumption within declare that photography can be practised by Camerawork, like the national newspapers it Britain, Germany, Japan and the USA. It progressive art theory, that there is this group of anybody, and then claim a fee as a specialist. so self-righteously attacked, chose to show involves workers representing their own crude realists w'hose activity involves reflecting Camerawork with its history of belief in the Lewisham as a series of dramatic moments of situation, rather than allowing trade journals and social conditions back onto the people who demystification of photography (anybody can do violence. By using such naked and beautiful national media, through the employment of pro­ suffer them. it), and community photography, (everyone photographs, without any considered relation­ fessionals, to build a particular ideological What is interesting is that it just does not should do it), is constantly put into the position ship between text and image, it avoids analysis of picture which is damaging to workers as a class. happen. When photographers spend years of enobling the professionalism and artistry of the event. There is no ‘head-on’ collision with How to become properly active within this photographing inside factories and mills and the the photographs it uses in its magazine and the the economic and social situation that has area and manage to avoid delivering the true Half Moon and Side galleries have their touring Half Moon exhibitions. fascism lurking always - waiting for the socio- faith missionary position and its consequent exhibitions who is the audience? When the However, it would be of absolutely no use historic conjuncture within which to breed. power relations, is an enormous problem, Observer produces a picture story of East whatsoever to make these frustrated and Fascism is seen as some kind of a wart on the face which, if surmounted, could lead to one of the Glasgow’s squalor who is the readership? seemingly self-righteous screams at ‘political’ of society when it is a wart on a leper. Camera­ most progressive uses possible of photography. photographers, without trying to understand the work declares its liberal opposition to the wart by reasons for the situation. using beautiful photographs and ignores the festering leprosy - as do most attempts by the Self Images Concerned Photographer liberal syndrome. We all wear culturally visible and psycho­ For Camerawork the end of fascism is the logically motivated uniforms determined by the beautiful photograph of a black person holding social expectations of our personal situation. We the hand of a white person. If the photograph is are all expected to live in a certain way, to ‘live up boring or, more specifically, has no place in the to’ an image. In Oscar Wilde’s time it was rela­ hierarchy of fashionable visual genre, then edit it tively easy to be an artist, to be the deviant that out for anything more dramatic - more society expects the artist to be. consumable. Until the 1950’s appearing deviant was a simple matter of dressing strangely and living in Arts Council - a generally non-conformist way. Today eccen­ Capitalist Patronage tricity, or, perhaps, more precisely, consumer Socialists have expressed incredulity at the Arts deviancy (i.e. trendiness) is the order of the day. Council which is state financed yet often The artist looks around for some area of deviancy finances projects which are presently anti­ in a struggle to create a socially and personally capitalist. I think this phenomenon can best be acceptable image, and discovers the real area of understood within the ideas already expressed deviancy that is still recognised as such - above using Roland Barthes’s quotes. However,I deviancy of the political dissident. If you want to would add that I do not believe that the Arts genuinely stand outside of the moronised Council would be so seemingly liberalistic if this society, to be seen as the social rebel, sensitive so-called radical criticism was actually radically and thinking person, the eccentric intellectual - effective. you become a political artist. The myth of ‘free speech’ in this country, whereby any person can stand up in front of 20 Work Ethic bemused tourists at Hyde Park corner and spout ‘ The view oj the artist as deviant, reinforced by anything (under the ever present ‘Big Brother’ certain aspects oj “romantic” ideology and bohemia- eye of a policeman), is dependent on the fact that nism, gives the artist a status which is set apart. the enormous bulk of information and ideas are While on the one hand this position is underwritten within the ideological control of dominant with awe and mystique jor the superior talent and ideology. The capitalist system has a monopoly sensitivity o) the artist, it may also be seen in some­ on truth. In other words, as long as the Sun sells what derogatory terms, because the role orientation is 6 million copies a day, it is granted that Socialist at odds with the utilitarian and Calvinist inspired Worker can be allowed to sell 30,000 copies per view oj work which dominates our society, that is week. that work is good jor its own sake, not as a pleasure One of the built-in failsafe devices for this in itself, but as something to be endured which yet system is state patronage. Camerawork, like bestows virtue and grace on the Worker. many Arts Council backed ‘political’ groups - Janet Woollacott, Social Relationships in Art works within the knowledge that it can only go so Not only does the artist fulfill his or her far. Decisions are constantly made by these fantasy of deviancy by becoming a political groups, knowing that if they do such and such a artist, but in being so can feel and proclaim that thing their finances would be under threat; and their art is WORK. The thousands of aspiring their decision not to is always rationalised by the and existing modernist painters and photo­ explanation that they are more effective by their graphers who mass produce their beautiful continuing existence than by blowing it all in a objects are, except for a few exceptions of one-off job. successes who entertain other modernists, I’m not suggesting that all of these groups simply left with a pile of objects collecting dust. commit immediate financial suicide by being The political painter or photographer, however, properly radical, but I feel that at least they usually sets out quite correctly with a purpose, ought to be aware that their own gnawing no matter how fragile - a purpose nevertheless consciousness of their financial fragility is the - and can convince him or herself that he/she is final censor and control, and that perhaps the actually WORKING. very fact of their continuing financial support from the state is one possible measure of their Working class life is simply not represented to Fantasy Rules radicalism. Recently, during the General The Social Context of the the working class at all or at least only in an Again I have produced the mumble of self- Election circus, anarchists were wearing badges Political Photographer extremely negative and petit-bourgeois way (e.g. righteousness (or worse perhaps even ‘reaction’) saying: ‘If Parliament could change anything it No matter how adamantly we declare our ‘Coronation Street’). In photography, it is dis­ at the state of the political photography scene. would be illegal.’ atheism to the world, it is fundamental to played for the gaze of middle class liberals. What But what is important is that I am not suggesting Marxist belief that being is socially constructed, is actually damaging in this process is that some that the fantasy of deviancy and the total self- Community Photography and, therefore, release from the cultural con­ of us delude ourselves into believing that we are image fantasy we produce somehow has to be The original paper from which this article was struction of consciousness cannot be achieved being ‘political’. As people, political photo­ exorcised because it is retrogressive. The fantasy taken contained 2,000 words about the problems overnight. Any person (especially a man) who graphers exist within their own world of other is inevitable. involved in photo community work. They have has consciously attempted to exorcise sexism political photographers, activists, intellectuals ‘Roles are crucially important to the develop­ been cut in order to make the article the size knows the long and difficult struggle involved. and critics, and it seems that the criteria for the ment oj an individual’s selj image. A view oj self wanted by Camerawork and because the Also, it is easy to declare intellectually a non­ politicalness of their work comes from within and its distinctive characteristics is partly moulded ‘Community Photography’ area of the paper was idealism and propose the argument of materia­ their own social world. by the role playing activities oj the individual. Roles the weakest, in that it is a subject which demands lism, but to live it is more problematic. A Seventh Man, by John Berger, is seen as are simply structured positions in society to which a properly researched and detailed analysis. The political photographer has to exist both being a good and properly progressive piece of certain sets oj expectations are attached. We all play However, I would like to make several points economically and as part of a particular social political usage of image and text, but, like a various roles from son, daughter, father, mother, to enter the growing ‘community debate’. The world, and that existence determines a large part modernist painting, it is being judged within worker, traveller, lover and soon.’ ‘Community Arts’ movement is infested with the of his or her behaviour, though it seems it is itself as a context. The fact that the book was not - Janet Woollacott So that there is nothing actually ‘wrong’ with cannot be simply seen in one place, at one the adoption of a self image of deviancy as the is essentially a collective contract which one must ing glibly to ‘hold the country to ransom’, and historical moment - or cannot be seen and accept in its entirety if one wishes to communicate. political photographer, since fantasy is the order therefore cannot be photographed at all. Brecht my photograph works with a kind of irony with of the day. If a fantasy must be chosen and culti­ Moreover, this social product is autonomous, like a the words on work conditions. What is interest­ commented that a photograph of the Krupp game with its own rules, for it can be handled only vated, then it makes sense to choose the most works cannot show the economic forces it repre­ ing is that they are interchangeable as images to rational, because if Marxism has anything it is its after a period of learning contractual values (in part sents. Moreover, Marxists also believe funda­ produce the same meanings (try swopping my logicality. arbitrary, or, more exactly, unmotivated) that it image for the Investors Review image, but keep mentally that there is nothing ‘natural’ about the resists the modifications coming from a single indivi­ However, the fantasy is pretentious, and I world. the original words in their place). Recuperation dual, and is consequently a social institution. believe ‘wrong’, when it remains, like a ‘To realise that the social order is not a natural is theft of meaning, and a lack of consciousness modernist photograph, intercontextualised of the ease of recuperation and control of without ever, in the smallest way, changing the meaning by context, is the equivalent of leaving state of things and minds. the car keys in the ignition of an unattended car. This argument of ‘context’ begs the question­ The Representation Cup Final - ing of assumptions made in describing or simply Realism v Anti Realism labelling certain modes of representation by Many practitioners of ‘political photography’ are considering their crudely formal aspects and not intellectually involved in the theoretical dis­ ignoring context. In other words, can the same cussion surrounding the problematic of political photograph which is labelled ‘realist’ because of art practice. Most are simply not able to afford its appearance, be used in a context which makes the luxury of time that it takes to familiarise and S'Etuir its understanding realist? And yet deliberately think through the problems involved. Those placed in a different context it actually attacks that are privileged with the time, in higher the realism that surrounds it. education etc, are often confused (like myself) Also, how can John Berger be labelled by the opposing academic hegemonies imposed Socialist Realist - with all its Stalinist deroga­ by leading intellectuals. tory connotations by critics - who look only at Through all the names and quotes and counter his product, which often has the appearance of names and counter quotes, it seems to me there Socialist Realism, but lacks its context? Socialist is one major debate within political art theory - Realism was a content inversion of the bourgeois the mode of representation to be employed and, realism of the 19th century in that it simply within this, one fundamental dichotomy - placed the worker in the place of the landowner realism versus anti-realism. or general as hero in Art. However, these images Having already stated the inseparability of were intended and distributed for workers’ con­ theory and practice, whether conscious or un­ sumption whereas Berger’s Seventh Man, for conscious, the real problem arises at this level of example, is not the workers reflected to the theory. You can accept as a revelation the workers, but the workers deflected to the bour­ concepts proposed by anti-realists, but as soon as geoisie - in other words, liberal humanist you pick up a camera you are lost. If you finally bourgeois realism, which is such, finally, manage to produce a product which, at the level because of its context. of production, is anti-realist, and you believe in propagating that product, a glance at the distri­ The Specific Photographer bution prospects and again you are lost. The problematic of context is increased with the The rationale of the most coherent area of awareness of what is, for me, a new argument anti-realism, which involves the study of which John Tagg presented recently at the ICA semiotics, is almost flawless. Very briefly and in his discussion of ‘The Regime of Truth’. This model resolutions for notion asks, who has the power to be believed? - crudely, as I understand it, it goes something union branches and like this: tenants' associations. who owns the truth? A statistic can be taken Then we hit the road. from the same source and published in Socialist Photography depends on a system of perspec­ W e slogged around the tive (optical perspective) developed during the whole borough, generally Worker and the Daily Express - yet, if read in in the pouring rain. Socialist Worker by a Daily Express reader, it Renaissance and reinforced by the accelerating Someone at Watneys growth of capitalism. It is not a coincidence that laughingly told us that we would be disbelieved. 1rrnr-----it fnr n -lHfl------Michel Foucault believes that this power over capitalism developed Renaissance perspective, Socialist Worker since, as a system, it puts the viewer in the truth is not such a negative process based on - Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology position of being the viewer as a single person - order, and thus beyond all change, but is made by omission, but positive and dependent on a an ‘individual’ no longer responsible to Galleries, books, magazines, newspapers, complex interrelation of an infinite number of people and can be changed by them. The politically pamphlets, TV, cinema are all more or less, in community. Church or feudal lords, but only to dissident photographer however is involved in an institutions and mechanisms. He declares the varying degrees, ‘voluntarily’ viewed and if a need for a new kind of intellectual who, within him or herself as a free roaming ‘individual’, and apparent paradox, that of seeking to penetrate totally new typography is used then people quite analysis, understands this situation and uses it — free to exploit (steal from) society without appearances with an instrument designed specifi­ simply turn over, don’t view or don’t read. a ‘specific intellectual’. To me, this proposal conscience. Now a minute part of society cally to record appearances and appearances alone.’ ‘The means used to overcome reality are more seems to be the most rational and effective controls all society economically, socially and - Victor Burgin, ‘Art Common Sense and Photo­ humdrum than reality itself. To escape boredom and method of practice available at present. There is through the hegemony, ideologically. It is graphy’ Camerawork 3 avoid effort is incompatible. They seek novelty, but no grand strategy, no single way forward to argued, and I would agree, that the way out of Realism has been around for some time, as has the strain and boredom associated with actual work radicalise art practice - each situation points to a this situation is for the largest and economically capitalism, and has consequently become lead to the avoidance of effort in leisure time. That specific practice using a calculated mode of the productive unit of our society, the working comfortably familiar. It is not only difficult to means boredom again.’ representation — calculated for maximum read James Joyce’s Finnegans’ Wake, it is -Adorno, 1945 effectiveness, dependent on what is considered to uncomfortable. This kind of discomfort can best Language, as a social institution, changes by use be the effect desired. be experienced in film when we want a narrative and consent over a period of time. There are many examples of existing specific and feel cheated sometimes when what is In concluding this brief and crude overview of photographers when Socialist Worker, the presented does not fit the ‘normal’ pattern of realism it is important to point out that some Morning Star, Socialist Challenge, Newsline, starting with ‘Once upon a time . . . ’ and ending advocates of realism make the distinction, with etc published photographs of workers outside with ‘and they all lived happily ever after’. which I would agree, between ‘realism’ and factories, with fists in the air, defiant on strike. ‘ The harmonic cornerstone of each hit - the ‘naturalism’. Naturalism declares that the When copies of the paper are sold to those and beginning and the end of each part - must beat out photographer is ‘the fly on the wall’, totally other workers, their ideology and their struggle the standard scheme. Complications have no conse­ uninvolved in the subject of representation and is reinforced and recognised. quence — regardless of what aberrations occur, the therefore represents an objective truth. A critical However I feel that much of the discussion, hit will lead back to the familiar experience and realism on the other hand states that whereas both verbal and literal, of the possible effects of nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced. The there is no objective reality, in order to describe certain kinds of work are sometimes based on composition hears for the listener. This is how this room, I have to assume the existence of this unchallenged and unresearched assumptions as to popular music divests the listener of his spontaneity. ’ desk. What it therefore represents is a reality as how people, especially the working class, would - Adorno, 1945 understood by the presenter. Also when an anti­ react to these practices. I have already mentioned, as It is not the ‘familiar’ that leads to change - it realist position is argued I find that sometimes an example, the assumption that workers are is the familiar that must be changed by the implicit within the argument is a paradoxical unimpressed by images of themselves, yet we unfamiliar and by the analysis of the familiar by Silkscreen print Ken Sprague quest for a real truth beyond objectivity. To say usually accept that the 19th century bourgeoisie the viewer. Realism depends on the familiar. ‘the point is it doesn’t exist’ surely makes the revelled in the images of themselves that they class, to understand itself as a class and collectively ‘point’ the truth or the reality we should seek. within that class consciousness, take control of Realism financed. If somebody were to publish a photo essay on the readers of Camerawork, I would be what rationally belongs to them: their products, The understanding of the visual codes of a Context their lives and the decisions that control them. quite eager to see, and perhaps buy, a copy. photograph is the result of a learned process. Despite the constant labouring of the point that a However, to a certain extent we must imagine a Renaissance or optical perspective imposes Anthropological experiments with newly photograph is a meaningless object - a collec­ the ideology of irresponsible individualism by proposed audience’s reaction and we constantly discovered South American societies have shown tion of shapes and shades - when considered do. When a group puts together a piece of work imposing a singular view on the image. Other that they are not immediately able to read without a context (including as context the perspective systems have existed and do exist. it is common to hear comments like, ‘No, we’d Polaroid photographs of themselves. There is ‘readers’ head - ideology), there remains a belief better not do that or people might think .. .’ etc. Chinese, Medieval and Cubist systems of per­ nothing ‘natural’ about representation in optical in some kind of intrinsic meaning within the But we must be critical of those assumptions spective, are examples. How then, it is argued, perspective. It has to be learned by us in child­ image. At a general level the photograph can can any radical use of photography be since it is easy to build an entire rationale on a hood. If we were to be locked in a room for some always be considered ‘political’ no matter where very shaky premise. progressive when it is actually antagonistic to a time with only Cubist images, the chances are we it is presented and under what circumstances. collectivism in ideology? would understand Cubist representation. But surely intentionally political work by Conclusions The photograph, to a certain extent, is Realism is the visual language presently in political photographers aspires to change or believed to be a representation of reality by most So what of a method of practice? Some time ago I common use and attempts to go totally outside of produce a shift in the solid position of dominant was looking for a football team to give my people. The photograph therefore imposes a it are often rejected, particularly by the vast ideology. Photographs of the working class in naturalism on the subject. By that the photo­ undying loyalty to — will I be an aggressive majority of people who have had no cultural the Half Moon Gallery or Camerawork are realist or a smug anti-realist? Now I am graph declares ‘this is how things are’, or, in access to more progressive modes. Those political in that they represent an interrelation of interested in selecting the best players (methods) Barthes’s words, ‘this is what happened and attempts, if ever intended for use within a people, money and power, but what do they from each team to hopefully produce a more how’, and prohibits any psychologically pro­ general audience, ignore the mechanisms of actually do? gressive process on the part of the viewer with its effective practice. Our interest and enjoyment of language. The pictures on page 13 all show photo­ electric fence of its seductive ‘obviousness’ and the image must be questioned and analysed in ‘A language is therefore, so to speak, language graphs of miners which have been used for ‘natural’ representation of situations. such a way that political effectivity is the only minus speech: it is at the same time a social institution totally different purposes. They have all been Marxists argue that the real forces and mecha­ criteria for selection and distribution. There is and a system of values. As a social institution, it is by chosen to work best with the words and within no single noble strategy - no grand plan for nisms that maintain society economically, no means an act, and it is not subject to any pre­ their context. The film advertisement shows socially and ideologically are not to be seen since representation - only lots of modes and methods meditation. It is the social part of language, the indi­ good clean colour reproduction, the Investors they exist in a complex interrelationship that for different institutions, situations and effects. vidual cannot by himself either create or modify it; it Review cover shows fat happy miners threaten­ We must constantly ask ourselves, ‘What are CAMERAWORK you taking pictures for?’ and, ‘what are we ’What appals me is those cloudy images which Several people have been very helpful to me at finally interested in?’ - reinforcing the image of befogged our minds as we marched together behind a college and in the production of this paper. I would ourselves as revolutionaries within our tight little banner, or stamped on the floor behind closed doors. like to thank them here. They are Victor Burgin, social world, or taking a real part in the struggle In those moments of exhilaration in which we lost Colin Sparks, Jo Spence and John Tagg. The to destroy this undemocratic, moronising, our sense of solitude, we thought we were to some original full paper from which this article is taken is alienating and extremely violent capitalist degree making history, contributing our little grain to on file at the Camerawork office and can be read system. The rituals, fantasies and self-justified the sands of time - whereas in fact we were using the there by arrangement. limitations which surround social being must be small change of our fantasies to pay for our total lack rationalised in such a way as to produce a of history (our only connection with it!). Again, it is practice which is not only effective within the all too easy to mistake a psychodrama for a fragment general political situation, but one that becomes of an epic.’ acceptable within our own social world. If there Regis Debray, Prison Writings is no risk involved, if our financial backing or jobs are not constantly under threat, then we ourselves cannot represent a threat. In some Bob Long parts of the world socialists are not so concerned with such trivia - they have their lives at stake.

educational nature being defused. pictures are still being used. Moral: Don’t let the Re the article on fees for freelancers. bastards grind you down! It is interesting to note how much time, argu­ David Hoffman ment and law has been put into the relationship between clients and photographers, yet both The editors would welcome further letters on the Letters. have tended to ignore the third party in the issues raised in this letter and in the article in Dear Camerawork, able to stimulate a lot of discussion in the area of photographic process - the subject. Clients Camerawork 15 on fees for freelance photographers. I would like to make a few comments about your the dynamics of the product. If this all sounds a need photographers, photographers need last issue Community Photography. bit complicated, I think the problems were well clients, and they both need subjects. Some­ One of the problems,brought out by several of illustrated by a walk around the The Three times the subject and client are the same person I Information . . . the contributors^running a community photo­ Perspectives on Photography exhibition at the e.g., portrait and wedding photographs, but in graphy project is the ease with which the Hayward Gallery. The thing that stood out most advertising and journalistic photography they CAMERAWORK READERS’ demands of administration, funding, respond­ strongly for me was that photographs which, are not. The subject’s part of the contract is that MEETING ing to immediate short-term needs, etc, can at considered on their own, would have been he or she is privileged to be deemed worthy of the Camerawork held its first readers’ meeting on times push careful thinking about the overall thought neither technically very competent, nor photographer’s and magazine’s attention. Docu­ Sunday 9th September at the Whitechapel Art direction and methods of the project into the aesthetically pleasing, can be combined with mentary photographers often do pay something Gallery. An encouraging 21 people dragged background. Unfortunately, I think that your other images and text to create a stimulating and to their subjects but rarely I expect do these themselves out on a Sunday afternoon, and the issue of Camerawork fell into the same trap. persuasive display. And vice versa: beautiful, match the rates paid to professional models. discussions and debate were friendly, heated and I feel that if Camerawork was attempting to well-produced images can be wasted if the Whenever I have been interviewed on tele­ lengthy. make a survey of community photographic dynamics of a display, and the questions vision I have automatically been paid a fee. Are The magazine came under fire for having no practice, it would need to have some fairly outlined are not taken into consideration. there any such guidelines among stills photo­ overall sense of direction, and the editorial group explicit system of analysis, both on a photo­ Having said all this, I would like to say how glad | graphers? It would also be interesting to see what agreed that it represented a range of opinions. graphic and a political level. You make state­ I was that Camerawork devoted a whole issue to ‘fees’ are paid to subjects of documentary/ Concrete suggestions for future articles ments, both negative and positive, about community photography, and hope that this will journalistic photographers and whether there is included: a critical compendium of books on community photography which, unexplained initiate a continuing discussion on the subject in any correleation to the class and income bracket practical photography; confrontations between and unillustrated, are mystifying: ‘Community future issues. of the subject. Do the photographers think that left photographic theorists and feminists; some photography can be shown to be reformist; Yours sincerely, giving token prints is enough? critical assessment of the current school of another panacea for the dispossessed ...’ Philip Wolmuth If thought is going to be given to the power photographic theory; analysis of the hackneyed Certainly, but when? When does it stop being North Paddington Community Darkroom relationship between photographer and client I use of photographs in most of the left press; and reformist and start being: ‘... a battle to take the think that it is essential that the least powerful analysis of social documentary photography. It mystery out of a simple craft; to make a cultural Dear Camerawork, people involved should be considered too. The was also suggested that giving advance notice of tool for everybody ...’ And what about the Having just read issue 14 and found the subject usually has the least understanding of the areas and topics to be covered in future issues effectiveness or otherwise of the many ways this Northern Ireland photos and commentary most photographic and editorial process and the least would enable readers to contribute more effec­ tool can be used? ‘... we believe that the camera interesting, you’ll forgive me if I appear control over it. At least the photographer has tively. can be used as a revolutionary instrument’. pedantic. However in the interests of accuracy, I some face to face contact with the picture editor Ideas in circulation at the moment include: How? What sort of revolution are you looking comment on page 9, column 2, third line down. even if he or she doesn’t consider the opinions of analysis of the media and advertising; the use of fo r? What is the political position (or positions) As something of a railway freak, I recall closure the photographer. photographic images of and in the third world; of the Camerawork collective? And how does it of the Derry via Omagh line taking place in 1965 Paul Carter feminist photography; analysis of the effective­ relate to the various (and I am sure they are and not in the 1950’s; of course the line from ness of documentary photography; and work on various) stances taken by workers and Belfast via Coleraine remains in spite of an Dear Camerawork, photomontage, historical and modern and participants in the different community photo­ apparent determination in the past to denude The fat cats of publishing have never been slow practical advice. The letters section, which we graphy projects around the country? Ignoring N.I. of its railways! to take advantage of the isolation of freelancers. were planning to revive by force if necessary, has politics when discussing community Yours faithfully, Nor are they slow to turn this to their profit. in fact taken off, and we hope this trend will photography/art/work results in confusion, not John Ball Here follows a cautionary tale. continue. neutrality. When You and Your Camera was launched, The design of Camerawork was criticised by So there are two general areas of discussion Dear Camerawork, the publishers offered a standard contract for some for being too staid. It was suggested that which I would like to see Camerawork explore in A few comments re the'disabled’ article in CW15: repro fees which, while offering fairly poor rates articles should be given more varied treatment, more detail. To put them simply, they are the It was very important that those particular things for UK rights, offered good rates for USA and more thought given to the politics of design and political context in which the projects are about both exhibitions were said. I fully the rest of world. Many photographers accepted the choice of cover pictures, and even such wild working, and the ways in which photography sympathise with Graham’s sentiments about this, feeling that while they would not receive innovations as using words and graphics within can be used in this context in an effective and Being Disabled. But constraints like the nature much to begin with, later when the magazine the picture area. (We were suprised to realize ‘progressive’ (for want of a better word) manner. of the funders (including IBM and Canon) and was more widely distributed the higher world that no one had noticed our transgression into One of the confusions in the last issue was that around the relationship of the Gallery to the rates would compensate for the low UK rates. the picture area in the Ireland issue.) It was also whilst Paul Carter described the distinguishing University, the local authority and others, as After some twenty issues - and long before suggested that alternative designs and debates feature of community photographic practice as well as the political commitment and under­ any foreign distribution - the magazine (a about design should be included in Camera­ being the sharing of skills (thus distinguishing it j standing of the editorial group, made the kind of subsidiary of the immensely rich Marshall- work. This is, in fact, something we have from ‘alternative photo-journalism’ ‘community j exhibition Graham wanted to see impossible. As | Cavendish group) - claimed poverty and considered in the past, and we hope to do a documentary’, etc), three of the nine projects he acknowledges in many ways, it is still a radical contacted photographers saying they had had to feature on the politics of layout in a future issue. described later in the issue fell squarely into this exhibition. introduce a new rates agreement, and that no For us, the meeting was a really useful way to second category, containing no element of skill­ Something that worries me a little is that in work would be used unless this agreement was find out what at least some of you think about sharing. Secondly, the issue demonstrated the trying to tackle some of the questions he (and I) signed. The new rates were a lot lower than the the magazine. We would welcome more wide range of activities encompassed within even would like to go into, is it possiole to keep the old, about half on average. This means the feedback from those of you who couldn’t get to Paul Carter’s strict delimitation of ‘community strength o f‘Being Disabled’ (i.e. the personal­ original low UK rate is now even lower and the this meeting. We are always glad to receive out­ photography’, and this wide range made the ness of it)? It is easy for the people depicted to foreign rates that should have compensated for lines of articles, pictures, letters and other introductory comments of the Camerawork fade into pawns and points of someone’s argu­ this are also reduced and below the minima contributions. We will hold future readers’ collective even more confusing. ment, no matter how sympathetic the exhibition mentioned in Camerawork 15 in some cases. meetings, some outside London. If you would As Paul Carter pointed out, the sharing of organisers are. As soon as you move away from Undoubtedly this was a deliberate and pre­ like to hold one in your area, please get in touch. skills in itself is not necessarily always a pro­ the particular lives of particular people to look at meditated move. With a 'part work the first gressive thing: it depends on whom you share the factors affecting them you can get important twenty issues are very important. Most people LEGAL CHANGE FOR THE VISUAL them with, how you do it, and to what end. It is perspectives, but lose individual differences and who are still buying at issue 20 will carry on ARTS? the WHY and HOW of skill-sharing that is a needs in the generalisations. This is little buying to the end of the series no matter how Artlaw Services Ltd, who provide a legal service central issue. But skill-sharing by itself is not different from how the needs of the individual badly the quality drops. So the publishers put for artists and photographers, are organising a enough. It is essential that ways of reading image are lost in the maze of generalised rules of Social their best pictures and articles into the first few national conference to discuss legal reform for content are explained and understood by those Services departments, for example. True, con­ copies. They are then in a position where the the Visual Arts. Topics to be discussed will who acquire the technical skills of photography. centration on personality and individuals can quality of the publication is hardly relevant to include: income tax, VAT, National Insurance And this is another point at which a political lead to a humanitarian cover-up of the political, sales, and they can proceed to screw their and Social Security, copyright, charities, resale analysis is essential: media images must be social and economic factors, but using these as contributors with impunity. The publishers royalties, public exhibition payments and moral understood for what they are, and one’s own starting points can lead to a very generalised and have also introduced a new payment system rights. images must be understood if they are to be even sentimentalised view of the working designed to prevent a photographer from The conference will be held at the Whitechapel effectively used. masses. Loving ‘the people’ is relatively easy. knowing when his pictures have been used and Art Gallery on the 4th and 5th, January 1980. Another useful distinction made by Paul Loving a person not so easy. increasing the delay in payment to many For a brochure, contact Janet Tod at Artlaw Carter with reference to community It may be politically correct for Camerawork months. Services Ltd, 358 Strand, WC2. Tel: 01-240 photography is that between process and to be critical o f‘Being Disabled’, but can wheel­ The publishers also slipped in, as if casually, 0610 product. Looking at the range of activities chair users make full use of your facilities which 'trade book rights at 33%’ - in essence this described in the last issue, it seems as though their tax money has helped pay for? would allow them to use a quarter-page picture INK LINKS (small left publishers) are publish­ different projects place different emphasis on There is an error. Being Disabled was not in any book, at any time, for ever and ever for as ing a photographic Year Book of events in these two things. For me, community photo­ shown at the Photographic Gallery. Right from little as £5!!! Britain and N. Ireland (Sept 1st 1979 - Aug. graphy becomes significant in its own right the start it was conceived as an exhibition which A number of photographers, threatened with 31st 1980). If you have any photos you would when there is a complete integration of the two. should be used in libraries, waiting areas, public loss of work, have signed these new rip off like to submit, or want to discuss the project I would hope that Camerawork, whose buildings and at conferences etc. Putting it in a agreements, others are standing by their old further, ring Ink Links on 01-267 0661 or the primary concern is with photography, would be ‘gallery’ would increase the possibility of its contracts and calling the publisher’s bluff. Their designer, An Dekker on 01 -986 5861. HMPW T ouring Shows

Four new laminated exhibitions are now available for hire: ‘Brick Lane 1978’ by Paul Trevor, ‘Lost at School’ by George Plemper, ‘Coming and Going’ by Barry Lewis and ‘Bethnal Green 1949-52’ by Nigel Henderson. For details of cost and availability contact Nicky Hughes at HMPW. Telephone: 01-980 8798 Bethnal Green Postcards

A set of six postcards (150mm x 120mm) taken from ‘Bethnal Green 1949-52’ is now available price 70 pence (incl p&p) from HMPW, 119 Roman Road, London E2 0QN.

The H.M.P.W. acknowledges the financial assistance of the Arts Council of Great Britain