Martin Parr

It was an honour to be photographed by Martin Parr a few months back as part of the pop-up portrait studio sessions at the Martin Parr Foundation. Here's one of the prints we bought and some behind the scenes action.

Helen Levitt

Some of my favourite Helen Levitt photographs taken on the streets of New York City in the early 1970's.

Paul Fusco

On June 8th 1968 Look magazine photographer Paul Fusco travelled on the train carrying Bobby Kennedy's body from his funeral in New York City to Washington D.C, for burial in Arlington Cemetery. Fusco took around 1000 photos on the trip as hundreds of people lined the tracks to pay their last respects. His images of white and African Americans standing side by side to honor a politician who had done so much for civil rights and racial equality are incredibly moving and amazingly all but two remained unpublished for thirty years.

Watching Dawn Porter's meticulously crafted Netflix doc Bobby Kennedy For President made me realize how little I knew about JFK's younger brother, whose assassination was almost as shocking as that of his elder, more famous sibling.

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Jackie 

Abraham Zapruder

Garry Winogrand

For his book The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand Geoff Dyer has selected 100 photographs by Winogrand and written a page long essay about each one. It's a simple but extremely effective format that Dyer borrows from Atget by John Szarkowski.

Dyer's essays are the perfect accompaniment to the photos that they dissect; playful, irreverent and full of interesting observations. They force the reader to fully engage with each image and study it's details, something it's so easy not to do when flicking through a book of photographs.

Martin Parr Foundation

I'm very pleased that the Martin Parr Foundation has found a new home right on my doorstep. Based at the Paintworks in South Bristol the foundation will showcase work from British and Irish photographers. Here's Parr's manifesto for the foundation:  

‘Post-war British documentary photography continues to be underappreciated and I wanted to make a small contribution to rectify this. The Martin Parr Foundation will support and preserve the legacy of photographers who made, and continue to make, important work focused on the British Isles.’

It's currently showing Black Country Stories, a Parr commission that focuses on the borough of Sandwell in Birmingham, looking at the way the area has been revitalized by the many immigrant groups that have moved to the area alongside shots of people who still make a living from traditional
Black Country industry.

William Eggleston

I finally got to see some of the most accomplished work by my favourite photographer in the flesh last week when I visited William Eggleston's Portrait show at The National Portrait Gallery including his famous shot of a girl with a brownie camera lying in the grass (Marcia Hare in Memphis, Tennessee 1975). Catch it while you can, it's on until Sunday 23rd October.

Jason Shulman

 

Duel, 1971

 

Citizen Kane, 1941

 

Fantasia, 1940

Jason Shulman wasn't expecting much when he set up his camera, pointed it at a screen and left the shutter open for the entire length of a film but the results are fascinating.

AnotherMag// The Art of Condensing Whole Movies into Single Photographs

Richard Billingham

Richard Billingham has returned to the subject of the 1996 book that made his name - 'Ray's A Laugh', his unflinching document of growing up in a tower block in Birmingham with an alcoholic dad and an obese chain smoking mum.

Richard has recreated the flat in intricate detail and cast actors to play his parents in 'Ray & Liz', a feature film based on his childhood. He has shot and edited one third of the film and is raising money through kickstarter to finish the project.

Ray & Liz// Kickstarter Campaign

Ray & Liz// Excerpt

Charles H. Traub

Images from 'Lunchtime' by Charles H. Traub, a collection of portraits he took of passers by on the streets of New York and Chicago between 1977 and 1980 whilst on his lunch hour.

Chris Dorley-Brown

Love these photos from Chris Dorley-Brown's book 'Drivers in the 1980's', all taken in a gridlocked Hackney on Weds 20th May 1987, the day that Rolls Royce was privatised by Thatcher's government causing traffic chaos in the east end.

Roar

These extraordinary photos were taken in 1971 by LIFE photographer Michael Rougier documenting the time that Tippi Hedren, her husband Noel Marshall and daughter Melanie Griffith, just 19 at the time, lived with a pet lion called Neil.

Living with a lion was research for what became Roar - the most dangerous film ever made. Shot over 11 years with around 150 wild animals the film cost an estimated $17 Million and made just $2 Million in return.

70 members of cast and crew were injured during the shoot. DOP Jan De Bont (who went on to direct Speed) had his scalp lifted by a lion and required 220 stitches. Hedren was bitten in the neck, Griffith received 50 stitches for a facial wound and Marshall, who also Directed and Produced the film, was attacked so many times he was eventually diagnosed with gangrene.

1971// Living with a Lion

Nick Turpin

Love this series of photos by Nick Turpin of commuters on an early morning bus in the winter.

Nick Turpin// Through a Glass Darkly

Colourized Photos

We are so used to seeing the past documented in black & white that seeing it in colour gives it a hyper real feel and makes it look more like a film set than real life.

53 Colourized Black & White Photos

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

At the beginning of the 20th century Russian Tsar Nicholas II commissioned chemist Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky to document his vast empire in detail. Prokudin-Gorsky created extremely rich images using a pioneering technique whereby he took three black and white photographs taken with red, green and blue filters and then produced a full colour composite image with distinctive overlapping borders.

An American Odyssey

I love these pictures taken from the new Taschen book An American Odyssey; a collection of photochroms and phostint postcards produced in colour by the Detroit Photographic Company between 1888 and 1924. The colour tinting process and the fact that we are not used to seeing images from this time in anything other than black & white gives them a surreal, almost hyper-real quality.