Martin Parr on the sofa with...

Harlequin565 said:
I'm guessing you caught the Ffoton interview with him?
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I enjoyed that. Parr is a slippery customer when interviewed/questioned, but Emyr Young teased out a few fresh insights.
 
Ed Sutton said:
I enjoyed that. Parr is a slippery customer when interviewed/questioned, but Emyr Young teased out a few fresh insights.
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I know. He gave Ben Smith a rough time and so I was expecting similar here. However I found the whole thing both funny and insightful. Thought it was a top job to be honest. Found the Birkinhead/Last Resort anecdotes to be very interesting indeed. One of the few podcasts I've listened to more than once and will probably listen to again.
 
Not impressed with him or Martin Parr suggesting you could count those working in colour on one hand at that time 70's/80's. I do assume that they meant colour printing from film.

I was colour printing at that time as was a work colleague. I later became aware of another individual at a local camera club who was also printing in colour; so that is 3 in a small town that I knew of. Multiplied across the country it must have been thousands. For inspiration, I find several members of my Club provide good inspiration and, between them, they cover many genres and styles.

Dave
 
Dave Canon said:
Not impressed with him or Martin Parr suggesting you could count those working in colour on one hand at that time 70's/80's.
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The colour reference is to documentary photographers.
 
Dave Canon said:
Not impressed with him or Martin Parr suggesting you could count those working in colour on one hand at that time 70's/80's. I do assume that they meant colour printing from film.

I was colour printing at that time as was a work colleague. I later became aware of another individual at a local camera club who was also printing in colour; so that is 3 in a small town that I knew of. Multiplied across the country it must have been thousands. For inspiration, I find several members of my Club provide good inspiration and, between them, they cover many genres and styles.

Dave
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In those days the perceived wisdom was that you had to shoot black and white to be a 'serious' photographer, and colour photos weren't seen as proper 'art'. Fortunately, that situation changed with the likes of Stephen Shore, et al. and the trend gradually make it across the Atlantic to the UK.
 
I'll be watching that one again. Probably more than once.

Didn't notice any reference to colour photography. But then Killip was noted for using 5x4 black and white.
 
sirch said:
I thought that was one of the best so far of those sofa sessions
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Agreed. I’ve been a fan of his work for a while, but I’m into any black and white documentary generally. Very much enjoyed his Last Ships work, as well as In Flagrante. Didn’t realise he was terminally ill until I read of his death a few weeks back.
 
Mr Badger said:
In those days the perceived wisdom was that you had to shoot black and white to be a 'serious' photographer, and colour photos weren't seen as proper 'art'. Fortunately, that situation changed with the likes of Stephen Shore, et al. and the trend gradually make it across the Atlantic to the UK.
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Not for amateur photographers who started using colour anyway. It was B&W when I first stared dark room work in the early 70's but we did not need trends from the US to start using colour. The key was that colour chemicals became readily available.

Dave
 
Dave Canon said:
Not for amateur photographers who started using colour anyway. It was B&W when I first stared dark room work in the early 70's but we did not need trends from the US to start using colour. The key was that colour chemicals became readily available.

Dave
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Yes, but the point is that for documentary / fine art photographers, the market wasn’t there for colour, even thought the ability to make and process it was. Must admit that, like Dave, I missed the reference to colour in the video as well.
 
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Dave Canon said:
Not for amateur photographers who started using colour anyway.
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Yes, but they weren't making reference to amateur photographers, they were talking about professional photography, and in particular, documentary style stuff (which used to go under the rather broad title of 'photojournalism'). It was nothing to do with the availability of chemicals, it was as a result of a rather 'old fashioned'' attitude that it had to be black and white to be taken seriously. So they were quite correct to reference that, whether you liked it or not.
 
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However, you interpret what they were saying, they seemed to be out of touch. You seem to be telling me that professional photographers were "old fashioned" and did not keep up with technology. I doubt whether that was true for all professionals but certainly was for those two.

Dave
 
Dave Canon said:
However, you interpret what they were saying, they seemed to be out of touch.
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Maybe this might be of interest to you, which is about an exhibition Martin Parr curated on colour photography in the 1970's and earlier

www.popphoto.com

A Conversation with Martin Parr

In a new exhibition he curated, Parr reassesses the influence of early European color photographers.
www.popphoto.com www.popphoto.com

The fist line starts

"Most fans of contemporary photography know Martin Parr for his high-saturation color photos..."
 
Dave Canon said:
However, you interpret what they were saying, they seemed to be out of touch. You seem to be telling me that professional photographers were "old fashioned" and did not keep up with technology. I doubt whether that was true for all professionals but certainly was for those two.

Dave
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I think you've got the wrong end of the stick entirely. It was nothing to do with keeping up with technology, it was to do with what was critically accepted in those days. If you read the link that Graham posted then you'll hopefully understand what I was referring to - colour not being treated critically as a 'serious' professional photojournalism/documentary medium until around the mid-1970s. (y)
 
Mr Badger said:
it was to do with what was critically accepted in those days.
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I think it was entirely to do with the cost. I was working in newspapers and magazines from 1968 onwards. In those days, colour was fantastically expensive: you could produce a mono printed 64 page magazine for about 30% of the cost of 60 pages mono and 4 pages (1 sheet) four-colour. Certain types of magazine could make back the 60% because they could pick up the advertising colour to cover the editorial but most couldn't.

The weekend newspapers ran the "colour supplements" by sending out the magazine parts to non-union, foreign printers - much to the anger of the print unions. Eventually, the general (non publishing) printers found work for bigger four-colour machines that could handle the leisurely deadlines of magazines and the price started to drop. The colour supplements came back on shore while Thatcher and Eddie Shah came along at the same time. That led to the publishing explosion of the 1980s and suddenly, colour was the norm.
 
Mr Badger said:
I think you've got the wrong end of the stick entirely. It was nothing to do with keeping up with technology, it was to do with what was critically accepted in those days. If you read the link that Graham posted then you'll hopefully understand what I was referring to - colour not being treated critically as a 'serious' professional photojournalism/documentary medium until around the mid-1970s. (y)
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Yes, this isn't about wedding shots, coffee table books or lifestyle magazines, but the sort of photography you might find on the walls of a gallery or in the pages of a serious monograph. There were exceptions of course (like Ernst Haas or, unknown at the time for his colour work, Saul Leiter) but it wasn't until people like William Eggleston started using colour that the art world began to take it seriously, though not without resistance. Quite a few of the great mid-century photographers found colour distracting or vulgar. For photojournalism there were other considerations - many of the places where this work was likely to be reproduced were printing only in black and white. A newspaper colour supplement was just that - all the other pages were monochrome.
 
Dave Canon said:
However, you interpret what they were saying, they seemed to be out of touch. You seem to be telling me that professional photographers were "old fashioned" and did not keep up with technology. I doubt whether that was true for all professionals but certainly was for those two.
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Can you point out where in the video the use of colour was mentioned, please?
 
My personal opinion is many photographers who regard it as ‘crap’ are viewing them as photographs with all their technical faults, rather than ‘art’. I don’t like them as photographs, sadly I’ve never bought into the art speak of ‘juxtaposition’ and ‘symbolisim’ despite going to college to do art and design.....
 
AndrewFlannigan said:
I think it was entirely to do with the cost. I was working in newspapers and magazines from 1968 onwards. In those days, colour was fantastically expensive: you could produce a mono printed 64 page magazine for about 30% of the cost of 60 pages mono and 4 pages (1 sheet) four-colour. Certain types of magazine could make back the 60% because they could pick up the advertising colour to cover the editorial but most couldn't.

The weekend newspapers ran the "colour supplements" by sending out the magazine parts to non-union, foreign printers - much to the anger of the print unions. Eventually, the general (non publishing) printers found work for bigger four-colour machines that could handle the leisurely deadlines of magazines and the price started to drop. The colour supplements came back on shore while Thatcher and Eddie Shah came along at the same time. That led to the publishing explosion of the 1980s and suddenly, colour was the norm.
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While the cost was likely to be a major consideration for newspaper publication, it's not really what I was meaning. It was the fact that colour was apparently frowned upon until around the mid 70s, as some people seemed to believe that only the 'stern and serious' tones of black and white could do true justice to the documentary genera.

As for the colour supplements of the 70s, I remember them well. My Dad would regularly go to the newsagent on a Sunday morning to get 'the papers'; this would include the Sunday Times, The Observer, The Sunday Express and The News of The World (now if that wasn't fairly balanced reading [for the time] then I don't know what was... bearing in mind that, as far as I'm aware, the Morning Star wasn't available on a Sunday! ;)).

As a youngster I'd spend part of my Sunday looking through the Times and Observer colour supplements; in those days it was something of a novelty to see colour photos 'telling the news' in print. There were some fantastic photos in, and on the front covers of, those supplements, which included work by Sir Don McCullin and his contemporaries... and I doubt anyone could argue that the colour work by photographers like that wasn't 'serious' documentary photography.
 
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Mr Badger said:
I doubt anyone could argue that the colour work by photographers like that wasn't 'serious' documentary photography.
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According to his own book, Nomad, David Douglas Duncan was making colour reportage photographs in the 1950s but finding it difficult to place them with the few magazines that were prepared to run colour. Walther Benser seems to have had more luck in Germany, possibly because the German magazine industry embraced four-colour printing earlier and more rapidly than other countries.
 
Ed Sutton said:
Ian Weldon. More interesting than I expected.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2j3Us-0XPI
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So he's an artist shooting weddings as art, but the galleries think he's just shooting weddings and see him as he sees other people who shoot weddings. Oh the irony. The personal politics of this interview are interesting too, because he appears to aspire to be like MP and to be part of the same club.

I can see why wedding photographers might be resistant to his ideas - they'll be thinking "how will this help me to make money, keep my business afloat" rather than whether their photography is documentary or not. It was interesting to see his site, and as he makes plain there he's not a wedding photographer, although he does take pictures at people's weddings for money. Most of the pictures he's showing there are funny in various ways, and I wonder whether the choice is unconscious or a deliberate attempt to encourage people to think they'll get a lot of funny wedding pictures if they hire him? In the other sections he's certainly an able documentary photographer, with a good eye and sense of timing.

This was an interesting one, certainly, but I just wish once again that the 'artist' wouldn't see themselves as superior to those they see as being non-artists.
 
ancient_mariner said:
So he's an artist shooting weddings as art, but the galleries think he's just shooting weddings and see him as he sees other people who shoot weddings. Oh the irony. The personal politics of this interview are interesting too, because he appears to aspire to be like MP and to be part of the same club.

I can see why wedding photographers might be resistant to his ideas - they'll be thinking "how will this help me to make money, keep my business afloat" rather than whether their photography is documentary or not. It was interesting to see his site, and as he makes plain there he's not a wedding photographer, although he does take pictures at people's weddings for money. Most of the pictures he's showing there are funny in various ways, and I wonder whether the choice is unconscious or a deliberate attempt to encourage people to think they'll get a lot of funny wedding pictures if they hire him? In the other sections he's certainly an able documentary photographer, with a good eye and sense of timing.

This was an interesting one, certainly, but I just wish once again that the 'artist' wouldn't see themselves as superior to those they see as being non-artists.
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My hackles always start to rise when people start talking about their 'practice'. It's a clear sign that they have been sucked into the art world. :D
 
ancient_mariner said:
I can see why wedding photographers might be resistant to his ideas - they'll be thinking "how will this help me to make money, keep my business afloat"
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35 -40 years ago, when my wife and I had a part time wedding photography business, We only offered a single album option. This had "formal" pictures as 10x 8 prints inter leaved with pages of two up "informal" pictures as 7x5 prints. I took traditional wedding poses on roll film and my wife (plus a few from me) would take candid images throughout the day on 35mm. The album (which was still only around 40 images) was put together to try and tell the story of the day.

We were more expensive than the local competition, but when visiting people's homes to do the sales pitch, it was the informal pictures in the sample albums that sealed the deal and convinced couples to pay our prices.

No one we visited ever wanted to give up the formal photographs, but when viewing proofs with couples, it was aways the informal pictures they were most excited about.

But, and I found this with portraits as well, where we had a similar approach (except I took all the pictures), it was always a formal picture that ended up enlarged and mounted on the wall, even though I tried to persuade customers to chose the picture they liked the best.
 
I hadn't come across him before but I like what I have seen of his work, as Toni said he does have a good sense of timing. I also like the idea of subverting such an entrenched photographic genre.
 
ancient_mariner said:
This was an interesting one, certainly, but I just wish once again that the 'artist' wouldn't see themselves as superior to those they see as being non-artists.
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I get the feeling it's about creating a USP to sell oneself as something unusual. Some people want to be discovered because they genuinely want people to see their art, but (IMO) the vast majority want to be discovered for likes, popularity and ultimately, money. There is nothing wrong with that per se, but when people pretend they're doing it for "artistic" or other non-commercial means, I get turned off to what I see as the inherent fakery in their work. I know lots of wedding photographers who offer similar documentary style work to this - hell I've done it at friends weddings. And yes - the friends often prefer those candid, humorous images over the formal ones.

Monetisation of photography has changed dramatically with the digital age. Digital cameras have lowered the barrier of entry, and social media (Facebook, Instagram & YouTube in particular) has hugely increased people's ability to market themselves. All the big YouTubers are expert marketeers - that's why they are big. In my opinion, this guy has just found a different niche. I'm sure he'll do very well out of it (esp with a Martin Parr exhibition), but I don't think he's doing anything new. I just think other wedding photographers aren't [perhaps?] pushing that niche.

I only managed 8 minutes of the video before finding something else to do... [/controversy]
 
Parr will shoot weddings for those who can afford him. Is Weldon just offering a budget option? :)

For me there is the question of what haven't we been shown? Is the selection shown in an art context all of what the wedding customers receive, or are the less 'edgy' pictures omitted? Also is the art audience demonstrating ignorance of current wedding photography 'practice' by seeing this work as disruptive?

TBH I found the photographs of less interest than what Weldon had to say about his journey as a photographer discovering that photography is a big and complex 'thing' with an interesting and broad history.
 
ancient_mariner said:
but I just wish once again that the 'artist' wouldn't see themselves as superior to those they see as being non-artists
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I wish people would stop generalizing about "artists" ;) I'm sure many are riddled with self doubt and insecurity.

As Ian says, I think it is about creating a market. If people want to charge premium prices buyers have to believe they are getting a premium product produced to the highest standard by the "best" people.
 
Harlequin565 said:
All the big YouTubers are expert marketeers - that's why they are big. In my opinion, this guy has just found a different niche.
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Like all of his kind, he's a salesman first and foremost. :tumbleweed:
 
sirch said:
I wish people would stop generalizing about "artists" ;) I'm sure many are riddled with self doubt and insecurity.

As Ian says, I think it is about creating a market. If people want to charge premium prices buyers have to believe they are getting a premium product produced to the highest standard by the "best" people.
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I'm sure many do, but my comment was specifically about him, the 'artist'.
 
sirch said:
I wish people would stop generalizing about "artists" ;) I'm sure many are riddled with self doubt and insecurity.
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They'll be the ones starving in garrets. :giggle:

sirch said:
As Ian says, I think it is about creating a market. If people want to charge premium prices buyers have to believe they are getting a premium product produced to the highest standard by the "best" people.
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Did anyone else listen to David Yarrow on the Small Voice podcast?
 
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