“British photo-journalist Alixandra Fazzina has distinguished herself as one of the leading humanitarian reporters of our generation. For over a decade she has tirelessly rooted out stories and documented the plight of the uprooted through distinctive and moving photo reportages, with the sole aim of raising awareness of those forced to flee their homes because of conflict, violence and misery.” UNHCR

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjLwTl9ZEH4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auQeEuxGu6Q
Siobhan Bradshaw is an emerging British art photographer, perhaps better know at present for her stage portraits of leading international artists appearing at London’s Jazz Cafe music venue. She exhibited successfully at We Are Cuts, in London’s Soho, at the beginning of 2010. Her work attracted the attention of veteran British jazz and music photographer, David Redfern, head of BAPLA (the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies). Simon Towler interviewed her for NewPhotoDigest in Regent’s Park, London.

>> NPD: I’m talking to Siobhan Bradshaw

You are the photographer at the Jazz Cafe.

So, this year, what have you been doing?
You had a show in London?

>> SB: Yeah, at Cuts, in Soho.
And that went really well.

>> NPD: And that was portraits from the Jazz Cafe?

>> SB: Yes.

>> NPD: And did you sell well?

>> SB: Yes.
I exhibited Maceo Parker, Mica Paris, Mos Def,
I did some small black-and-whites downstairs.
Noel McKoy, Reuben Wilson, Meshell.
Cuts is in a new place now,
it used to be on Frith Street.
I’m sure people are more familiar with it than they realize,
Cos it was quite an integral part of Soho,
and lots of what was happening in the kind of early 90s
and throughout the 90s.
I’m sure lots of cool people got their hair cut there.
And it was always a really lively atmosphere to go and visit
like, to hang out there, you’d always hear really interesting conversations, and em…
>> NPD: And it’s a pretty cool place, there’re quite a few well-known…
>> SB: It’s a cool place, and the people are really [pause] nice.
>> NPD: It’s quite a big part of the London scene really.
>> SB: Yeah.
>> NPD: And it’s a hairdressers!
>> SB: And it’s doing really well selling art…
>> NPD: Yeah!
>> SB: …starting with mine! Well, not actually, there was someone before me.
But, yeah, it’s doing really well, the last few shows they’ve done.
>> NPD: Who did you get turning up at the Private View,
anyone we’d know?
>> SB: Oh, yeah, David Redfern…
>> NPD: Yeh.
>> SB: [pause] …and, em, all my friends.

>> NPD: So what else have you been doing?

>> SB: I’ve been working on a large piece.
I want to do, like, a large frieze of my work,
keeping the same format as the work that’s up in the Jazz Cafe
mounting it onto die bond [pause]
with it being about fifteen feet long.

I’m putting some stuff using this idea up,
I’m going to be doing it in a window, somewhere in the West End,
you will hear shortly.
And I’m going to be doing a commission as well.

>> NPD: And you’ve got something going to Japan too?
>> SB: Yeah.
>> NPD: Tell us about that.
>> SB: It’s for DJ Ichikawa, he has a band, and, em… [pause]
He’s been a DJ for about twenty years, in House music
and he has a bar, I think it’s in Kyoto, and it’s very nice
I’ve seen photographs of it,
and he’s going to put my work up in there as an exhibition.
>> NPD: And you were doing DJ slideshows as well, weren’t you?
>> SB: Yeah, I was working, I did something once a month at Sequence
but that stopped after six months.
>> NPD: OK, so you’re not doing any more of that?
>> SB: No.
>> NPD: And you stopped shooting film recently?
>> SB: No. I’m still shooting film.
>> NPD: But you went digital?
>> SB: Yeah, I went digital, but I’m still shooting film, black and white.
>> NPD: So what digital camera did you go for?
>> SB: D700.
>> NPD: And your film camera was your?…
>> SB: F3.
>> NPD: F3. Which you’re very fond of.
OK. And how did you find the transition?
>> SB: Well, for a long time I was just pointing and shooting really, and that was good
but then there comes a point where you can’t do any more
and understanding all the camera can do is quite a lot to take on
when I’m not really a “manual” type of person –
I look at a manual and I almost drop it –
but if you show me how to do something I get it straight away.
So now I’m reading the manual, and it’s an amazing camera, it can do amazing things.
For music photography you cannot really be relying on film any more,
I mean, it just doesn’t make any kind of sense,
and once you’ve switched over to digital, you’re pretty much going to stay with digital.
But like I said, I’m still shooting black and white film as well. And it’s nice,
you’ve got the best of both worlds.
>> NPD: Apart from earning a living, your art is your main thing, isn’t it?
>> SB: Yeah.
>> NPD: What sort of stuff do you shoot for art photos?
>> SB: Well, I’ve been shooting “the city” for easily over a decade now
cos I used to live in Soho, that’s where my work really started
when I started using cameras and I stopped painting and drawing.
And while I’m in the city, I think I will always photograph the city.
I find it really rich in its symbolism.
I’m not so interested in the people, photographing the people,
but the spaces that they inhabit, and like the empty spaces at night,
that still fascinates me. But it’s changed a lot, it’s much more dangerous now,
you’re not so safe walking around at five in the morning just shooting in really desolate places,
it’s much more dangerous.
>> NPD: Your two main stomping grounds of the past decades have been London’s Soho and Camden Town?
>> SB: Well any city, any city I would visit I would photograph,
so I have L.A., New York [pause] anywhere I went. The city in general fascinated me.
>> NPD: And you shot Quentin Crisp in New York?
>> SB: Yeah. He was actually my first portrait.
>> NPD: So how did the Quentin Crisp session come about?
>> SB: I phoned him up! His name was in the directory!
I always kind of admired his live-as-you-wish lifestyle, you know?

He chose how he wanted to be and he was it, and I liked that, I kind of respect that.
>> NPD: So where did you do the session?
>> SB: In his cafe that he used. I can’t remember the name of it,
but he was a regular fixture in this cafe.
>> NPD: That’s one of your favourite portraits, isn’t it?
>> SB: Well, the interesting thing about doing portraits is…
He was a professional portrait. I mean, the man knew what he was giving.
He was composing, he was giving you… he knew exactly what he was doing.
That was amazing in itself, just to watch him do his thing.
>> NPD: You’ve never tried to sell that one, that’s right isn’t it?
>> SB: No. But I’ve got lots of people I think in my portfolio that probably…
[pause]
maybe not quite the same as Quentin Crisp, but in their own way, equally as magnificent.
>> NPD: Who else have you got good stories from your shoots with?
>> SB: I think that probably most of the portraits that I’ve taken,
most of the musicians that I’ve photographed are really interesting people, and…
I couldn’t tell you on the spot, but you know, the snippets of conversation that you have
often stay with you for a long time, [pause]
and especially as you’re strangers. I mean obviously you get to know them as time goes on
but initially you’re strangers.
>> NPD: You got a great shot of Ginger Baker once.
>> SB: That was my most scary shot.
Usually I have a nice thing going on, but that one was pretty scary.
>> NPD: Tell us about that.
>> SB: Well I was allowed one shot. The door opened. There he was.
And he wasn’t very happy that I was there to do the shot.
>> NPD: Did you get your one shot?
>> SB: I took four. [laughs]
>> NPD: And how many of them were good?
>> SB: All of them! [laughs]
>> NPD: What light?

>> SB: Well, it was quite awkward lighting where I took it, but it was fine,
it was on the D700. –But my film came out nice too.

>> NPD: And so what’s the future?
>> SB: The world? [laughs] I really want to go to Berlin, Paris, and America and New York.
>> NPD: And you’re not represented, are you?
>> SB: No.
>> NPD: And you don’t have a gallerist?
>> SB: No.
>> NPD: And you’re looking for one?
>> SB: Yes.
>> NPD: How hard are you looking?
>> SB: At the moment I’m not looking so hard. But I will be.
>> NPD: If there are any gallerists watching, what do you want them to know about Siobhan Bradshaw?
>> SB: I want to put together the different subjects that I’ve been doing,
I think they work quite cinematically. I’m really interested in not only exhibiting them as photographs
but also making them into films, and putting music with them, and yeah, moving over a little bit into sort of cinema.
>> NPD: And you went back to St. Martins recently for more education?
>> SB: Yeah, to learn more about Photography, because I studied Fine Art before.
>> NPD: Where did you do Fine Art?
>> SB: At St. Martins.
>> NPD: And you’re moving on from that, you’re learning commercial studio practice soon?
>> SB: I wouldn’t say “commercial”. But yeah, I’m interested in doing portraits.
The person that always said “I would never do people!” is now doing people.
>> NPD: So you’re going to do musician portraits?
>> SB: Yeah. I think that I have to have some kind of rapport with the people that I’m photographing,
So it makes sense that I would do photographs of musicians, artists, dancers,
Cos I find them interesting.
>> NPD: So Siobhan Bradshaw, resident photographer at London’s famous Jazz Cafe,
long-time face in London’s Camden Town and Soho, thank you very much.
>> SB: Thank you.
>> NPD: Was it a nice day here in Regent’s Park?
>> SB: It’s beautiful.
>> NPD: That’s lovely. Thank you very much, Siobhan.

Spinning roulette wheel photographed by Conor Ogle from London, UK.

How do you make a name for yourself in an over-subscribed profession like photography, where perfection is often just a minimum criterion for entry?

Well — as much as who you know, who and what you photograph — luck and accident seem to play a large part. Photography writer Simon Towler takes a look at the lucky strokes that have helped some photographers make their names.

Let death lend a hand

Annie Liebovitz was already the top photographer on Rolling Stone by the time she photographed John and Yoko for the magazine — just hours before Lennon was shot dead. One of those photographs was used on the cover of the next issue, and it became iconic. Liebovitz has been one of the world’s most famous photographers ever since.

Mario Testino was already an established London photographer when Diana, Princess of Wales sat to him — shortly before her death in a car crash. Afterwards, Testino’s portraits of Diana were widely published, and he became a top name in world photography.

The prolific Irish photographer, Fr. Browne, launched his career after he realized some photographs he had taken on a ship might be of interest to the public. The Titanic Album of Fr. Browne included portraits of many people that were to be their last. They perished soon after in the notorious ship wreck.

The public profile of a relatively little-known photographer, J.H. Lartigue, who had been discovered only recently, was raised when images from his first MoMA exhibition were published in Time magazine’s best-selling issue ever: the one that reported the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. (Lartigue had landed the MoMA exhibition through a chance meeting with an agent.)

Jones Griffith’s work was relatively little-published till he managed to capture paparazzi shots of Kennedy’s widow, Jackie, on holiday with a male friend in Cambodia.

Philip Jones Griffiths had already been accepted into the prestigious Magnum agency when he started covering the Vietnam War in 1966. But his work was relatively little-published until he managed to capture paparazzi shots of Jackie Kennedy on holiday with a male friend in Cambodia. With his earnings from these he was able to support his war photography, and went on to publish his photo book Vietnam Inc.

Alberto Korda‘s iconic image of Che Guevara was taken in 1960, but at that time his paper rejected it. It remained unknown until Guevara’s death in 1967, when a journalist Korda had given the print to published it as a poster. Being the author of that Che shot helped gain Korda worldwide recognition for the rest of his worthy archive.

(Interestingly, the names of photographers who captured images of Guevara’s corpse are not well remembered. Those pictures were taken at a photo opportunity layed on by his killers. In them, the executed guerilla revolutionary looks reminiscent of Christ taken down from the cross.)

Get discovered (dead or alive)

Eugène Atget died in relative obscurity in 1927. He had earned his living from his little business of taking reference photographs for artists and illustrators to base their work on. His studio had been in Montparnasse in Paris, not far from that of his contemporary, Man Ray. Berenice Abbott became aware of Atget while she was working as Man Ray’s assistant. When Atget died, she bought much of his work. And by 1968 she had promoted it sufficiently to get the Museum of Modern Art in New York to start exhibiting and publicizing it. Since then Atget’s work-a-day reference photographs have been recognized as great art, and Atget as a master of photography.

Seydou Keita had been one of Mali’s most successful social photographers. He was retired and had no reputation, either outside Mali or as an art photographer, when a French art dealer traced him in 1991. The dealer had seen anonymous portraits from Keita’s studio shown by chance in an exhibition of African art in New York. After he identified and located Keita, solo exhibitions were organized around the world. A handful of dealers ably created a market for the work. The old photographer received a great boost to his wealth before he died, as well as recognition for his talent.

Shock tactics

Shock is trickier to contrive than you might expect. Many images intended to shock have gone unnoticed. On the other hand, some of the most successful shock-shots have been intended as pretty innocent fireworks, but went off like suitcase nukes.

Who would have expected Avedon‘s Natasia Kinski and the snake to have such an effect? Or Annie Liebovitz’s Demi Moore pregnant or Cindy Crawford shaving KD Lang? How about Patrick Demarchelier’s Janet Jackson topless with her husband’s hands covering her breasts? Or Toscani‘s Black woman breast-feeding a white baby for Benetton? The key to why these images had as much effect as they did is that they were published in the mainstream, as mainstream images.

“Turned out she was 14 at the time. Her photographer was arrested”

Also in the mainstream was the 1980 album cover for Malcolm McLaren’s newly manufactured band Bow Wow Wow. The cover was a clever, competent and innocent reshoot of Manet’s Déjeuner Sur l’Herbe, with the band’s lead singer standing in for Manet’s nude. When she turned out to have been just fourteen at the time of the shoot the young unknown who made the image was arrested. British music photographer Andy Earl has never looked back since.

Beautiful people

It can help to know, meet or be the right people. Anton Corbijn’s early career as a music photographer included photographing obscure Irish indie band U2. Astrid Kirchherr’s archive includes a portfolio of work of an unknown British rock group called The Beatles. Patrick Lichfield was a first cousin once removed of Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. And Anthony Armstrong Jones married the Queen’s sister and became Snowdon. Mary McCartney is the daughter of Paul and Linda, and sister of fashion designer Stella McCartney. Photographers Bunny Yeager, Lee Miller, Corinne Day, Ellen von Unwerth, Helena Christensen, Rie Rasmussen, Zoe Wiseman and Nigel Barker were all photo models.

Heinrich Hoffmann was one of Germany’s highest earning photographers. He had started as an assistant in his father’s humble photographic shop but went on to earn royalties from reproductions of his images on postage stamps and state portraits. This came about largely through his friendship with then head of state, Adolf Hitler. (Hitler also had a relationship with, and ultimately married, Hoffmann’s studio assistant, Eva Braun.)

But it doesn’t always work. Prince William’s girlfriend Kate Middleton has become a celebrated style icon, but her reported desire to emerge as an art photographer hasn’t been fulfilled. She’s been introduced to the family snapper, Mario Testino, but rumours that she’s assisted or taken lessons from him have been denied. So far, some of the most widely seen work by the lady tipped as the future Queen of the United Kingdom has been product photography for her family’s Internet business.

Buy your own work

Why not by-pass the whole starting-out, up-and-coming-new-young-photographer phase? Become horizontally integrated: start your own fashion magazine and commission photography from yourself! British fashion and advertising photographer, Rankin, kicked off his career by dropping out of his photography course at the London College of Communications and co-founding Dazed and Confused magazine.

Exceptional Success

What we’re examining here is exceptional success. Success itself is exceptional; exceptional success, even more so. It must have exceptional causes. Luck and accident play their part. But, to some extent, you make your own luck. Most of the photographers we’ve looked at had some success before they got their big lucky break. They were already lucky. They were exceptionally good at the art and craft of photography. They had habits that tended to put them in the right place at the right time, connected to the right people. It paid off.

Willard Van Dyke’s beautifully crafted 1948 documentary about “The Photographer”, featuring Edward Weston. This was to be the year Weston made his last photograph. For the remaining ten years of his life he struggled with Parkinson’s disease.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4aE2f07ON4

Doug McBride interviews music photographer Robert Knight for behindthehype.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpi1YvP3TZ4

Robert Knight was fortunate enough to build relationships with rock gods like Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and Led Zeppelin. In the interview for the new documentary about his life, Rock Prophecies, he discuss some of his moments with these larger-than-life musicians.

“Man Ray developed a few simple rules. He set the lighting before the clients arrived, to reduce session times to a minimum. He recommended that clients shouldn’t smile. He asked them to close their eyes, and then open them suddenly. Sometimes, to relax his ‘patients’ — as he called them — he would give them a prop to hold, so that their expression became serene and profound. The background was usually sober: hessian, chequer-board designs, plain white or grey background paper, on which he played with shadows. Sometimes he featured an object too. He took only a few shots, never more than twelve. He set up his camera at least three metres from the subject, to avoid distorting the face. He cropped his prints carefully. If necessary, he retouched the photos to correct any defects, adding a few pencil strokes to refine a face, or a hip. He didn’t like taking his equipment out of the studio, but he did so sometimes. He knew how to capture in the setting for his subjects some significant details of their personality. Even in his early New York portraits Man Ray understood that what makes a good photograph is the play of contrasts. It could be two faces, or even three; a silhouette and it’s shadow; the light and dark of an outfit; a face and a mask. It’s a lesson drawn from chess. As he put it, ‘The opposition between a white and a black square is fundamentally beautiful’. There are always two, almost equal, parts in a Man Ray portrait. Hands and faces are distributed symettrically. His fashion photos demonstrate his mastery of such contrasts.

Another type of contrast is called ‘solarization’. Man Ray said he discovered this technique by chance, accidentally switching on a light while developing a film. Maybe. In any case, it’s an effect that fitted wonderfully with the development of his aesthetic. Solarization accentuates the contours and intensifies the whites by inverting the values between the whites and the blacks. With this method photography becomes like drawing. The bodies appear to be outlined with a pencil, a sublime pencil which transforms matter, while a mysterious inner light radiates from the subjects. ‘The Primacy of Matter Over Thought’: this title is a manifesto proclaiming solarization as a sort of photo-chemical miracle.” –Jean-Paul Fargier

Documentary on Man Ray by Jean-Paul Fargier. YouTube video in seven parts. This documentary includes treatment of Man Ray’s commercial and editorial portraits, and fashion photography, and the techniques he brought to these.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

“Man Ray’s commercial success was due to the fact that he put as much care and research into commissioned work as he did into his so-called art photography. Whatever the objective of a commission he took the opportunity to explore his effects. In fact, he used fashion to further his art. Every material has its own lighting; each model is modeled in her own shadow. Although most of the sumptuous decors were dictated by clients, he took great liberties in how he used them. Every line has its own staging. The sophistication of the lighting emphasises the opulence of the clothes. He understood how one shape rhymes with another. He used friend’s artwork — here a Brancusi, here a Giacometti — or his own work, to introduce subtle harmonics. The decor amplifies the sophistication of the poses, which flatter the gowns: straight lines against curves; Chinese ink on rough paper. The painter’s hand guides the hand of the photographer: these touch-ups are the touch of Man Ray. Thanks to income from his fashion work, his portraits of rich Americans and his photos for advertising, Man Ray was never short of money.” –Jean-Paul Fargier

“I am so grateful that I have the capacity and the ability to make a living, support my family — which is the definition of being a man for my generation — support my studios, support my special projects, by doing advertising.” –Richard Avedon ( http://www.richardavedon.com/ )

“Avedon was the first person to come into photography as a fashion photographer, as a commercial photographer, and then, in a sense, declare himself an artist. And that was not well received. And he declared himself an artist quite vociferously. He didn’t get all shy about it and say ‘O please accept me’. He said ‘Here I am, get out of the way!’. And it goes on till this day. People excoriate him for his ego and for his own self-agrandizement or self-selling. And if he hadn’t done that we might still not know about him. He wouldn’t be getting the museum shows, because that isn’t something people would have come to him to ask him to do. The nature of the photographic world was just simply too tense and too boundaried for that sort of thing.” –Owen Edwards, critic

Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light. On YouTube in nine parts:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

“Rankin Exposed” a documentary profiling British fashion, advertising and editorial photographer Rankin. YouTube video in four parts.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

“I guess the editors noticed that I had a sense for clothes and it’s very hard to find professional photographers that are into clothes. A lot of them are photographers, and the editor will come and create a style and the photographer will shoot it.” – Mario Testino

Mario Testino Revealed: a CNN Revealed profile of London-based international fashion photographer, Mario Testino (http://www.mariotestino.com/). YouTube video in three parts:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

“In 1962 Jacques Henri Lartigue, was travelling across America by Greyhound bus with his wife, Florette. With him he carried two albums of photographs that Florette had been repairing, to while-away the journey. In a chance encounter with a photographic agent at the end of the trip, these family snaps he’d taken as a child were uncovered. For Lartigue, this changed everything. Within a year he had his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”

Publicity for Lartigue’s photographs was boosted by a chance event: “The asassaination of J.F.K was so shocking that the world’s leading photo magazine, Life, shelved most of its November stories to cover the tragedy. But they kept a story on the newly dicovered French photographer, Jaques Henri Lartigue.”

‘The world got to know about Jaques Henri Lartigue, and I think it was probably one of the biggest selling copies of Life ever.’

“Lartigue was soon rubbing shoulders with some of the greatest names in photography. Fashion photographers like Hiro, Avedon and Bailey were inspired by the freshness, innocence and movement in his work.”

“At the age of 70, when most people have already retired, Lartigue began work as a professional photographer for fashion magazines like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue.”

J.H. Lartigue: The Boy Who Never Grew Up: documentary in four parts on YouTube:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

“This film is about my husband, Helmut Newton. A few years ago I offered Helmut a video camera for Christmas. But he refused it. So I started using it myself. I looked through the lens and I knew exactly what I was going to do with it: film Helmut at work. This film represents extracts of certain assignments he worked on during this time.” – June Newton (writer and director of “Helmut by June”)

YouTube video in five parts:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

“Diane Arbus was my mother.
[...]
In July 1971 my mother committed suicide and shortly after that Marvin Israel, a very close friend of hers, and I felt that we wanted to do a book of her work together. So we began collecting not just the pictures but whatever material we could find. In 1970 she had given a class in Westbeth, which was where she lived. And we found out that one of the students in that class was a Japanese photographer named Nikko Nakahara who admired Diane’s work enormously. The problem was that he barely spoke any English at all, so what he had done was to go to the classes and bring along a tape recorder to record everything that was said so that afterwards he could go home and see if he could try and understand it. So he leant us those tapes. The tapes were of very poor quality, so we asked Mary Claire Costello, who was a friend of Diane’s, to read Diane’s words over glimpses of her photographs.” — Doon Arbus.

A half-hour documentary on Diane Arbus, posted on YouTube in four parts. Made in 1972 after her death that year.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Review some of her work here: Diane Arbus: the photographic work

Annie Liebovitz profile: YouTube video in six parts

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

A half-hour TV interview profiling fine-art photographer and printer, Ansel Adams. YouTube video in four parts.

“The thing that excites me is that in not too many years we’re going to have an entirely new medium of expression: the electonic image. I’ve seen what can happen to a print reproduced by the laser scanner and how that is enhanced, and that’s just the beginning. I’ve also seen some magnificent electonic images direct – direct electrical images, not pictures of pictures – and I know the potentials are there, I know it’s going to be wonderful.” – Ansel Adams

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

A documentary about Henri Cartier-Bresson. The photographer talks us through the photos in his albums, intercut with commentary from notables including Norman Mailer. On YouTube in ten parts:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10

Cartier-Bresson featured in The Genius of Photography