Archive for the ‘photography’ Category
Protest and Progress and Paramount
Our latest Doc Hearts feature documentary with Oscar nominee Misan Harriman has now started shooting – ‘Protest and Progress’ – for Paramount+.
Directed by Doc Hearts founder Andy Mundy-Castle in the wake of his lauded ‘White Nanny, Black Child’.
It couldn’t be more timely…
The Question of ‘Work-Life’ Balance
Kate Winslet’s film ‘Lee‘ about the life of American photographer Lee Miller, which premiered at TIFF in Toronto last September, is due to arrive in cinemas and on Sky sometime this quarter or thereabouts.
The movie is based on the biographical ‘The Lives of Lee Miller‘ by her son Anthony Penrose, who I had the pleasure of meeting when it came out in 1988 and I was reviewing the book – he gave me a tour of Farley Farm in Sussex (where the Lee Miller Archives are now based, it had been Lee and Roland Penrose’s home, which then was passed on to Anthony and his late wife, who together welcomed me warmly to their cosy kitchen). Anthony later pulled various prints out of plan chests to show me. The moment I particularly remember relates to Holocaust Memorial Day which was this weekend. Lee, working as a war correspondent for Vogue, was among the first to enter Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. She felt she had to telegraph to the editor this message once she had sent back her photos: “I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE!” Anthony recounted to me that his mother had told him in relation to these pictures that the one thing she could never forget, more than the sights, was the smell.
Following the bijou ‘You Will Not Lunch In Charlotte Street Today‘ exhibition of her work which closed a week ago at the handsome TJ Boulting building in London’s Fitzrovia, I visited another Lee Miller show at Brighton Museum, ‘Lee Miller: Dressed‘ (also well worth a visit – 59-minute train from London, closes 18th Feb). It explores Lee’s life through clothes, given that Lee was a celebrated model for the likes of Vogue, becoming a fashion photographer in her own right after training with Man Ray in Paris, the clothes lens makes perfect sense. The exhibition was prompted by the recent discovery of boxes of Lee’s clothes in the attic at Farley Farm, including a number of items by top European couturiers.
A quotation caught my eye (and imagination) near the exit:
When I fired up LinkedIn this morning I noticed a post by Fanatics Live CEO Nick Bell about work-life balance, prompted in part by a video of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos on the subject. My late mentor, veteran documentarian and polymath Roger Graef, was always a brilliant help and support but work-life balance was arguably his one blind spot, he was a ferociously hard worker who rarely seemed to switch off. It’s a fascinating and nuanced issue, and my jury is still out on whether Bezos’ argument – that it’s actually a work-life circle – and Nick’s – that being happy at work makes you a better spouse and parent – is on point or has an underlying post-rationalisation. As another Jeff (Goldblum) says in another movie, ‘The Big Chill‘:
“Michael: Don’t knock rationalization! Where would we be without it? I don’t know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They’re more important than sex.
Sam: Ah, come on. Nothing’s more important than sex.
Michael: Oh yeah? Ever gone a week without a rationalization?”
I directed a film years ago about creative thinking and I remember a line from it which was broadly: “No one on their death bed ever thought ‘I wish I’d spent more time in the office’.” Perhaps the starkest factor: you can’t ever get back time with your children once it’s passed.
So I find Lee’s reflections resonant – why not be more focused on and bold with our ideas, our physical being (less time in our heads) and our love in its myriad forms (romantic, parental, familial, environmental, spiritual, for our fellow human-beings…)?
Latest photographs in the ArkAngel collection
ArkAngel has a small but perfectly formed collection of photographs and these are the latest additions. Three of these four come from Magnum photo agency which offers small signed or estate-stamped prints. The fourth is direct from the photographer (Danny Clifford) with whom I had a fascinating chat in Marlow, Buckinghamshire before the plague hit.
‘Ulysses’ is my favourite book and Marilyn is an important name in our family (and our Marilyn is blonde too). I read a concise biography of Marilyn Monroe as a teenager and was struck by her intelligence and intellectual aspirations. This image, which was on a poster in Black Gull Books, East Finchley in recent times, says body and mind, natural beauty and artistic beauty, ‘low’ culture and ‘high’, adult and child.
Eve Arnold’s grandson Michael wrote: “This image was made by Eve during her first shoot with Marilyn Monroe. Monroe had shown Eve her down-to-earth, relaxed personality as they worked together. But the photographer had yet to really witness the actress’s candour. The following is an excerpt from a passage in Eve’s book, In Retrospect, in which she recalled meeting with Marilyn a second time, in order to show her the photographs she had taken:
She met me at the door in a diaphanous black negligee. She had a hairbrush in her hand. Would I mind sitting through an interview for a European magazine—then we could talk? Almost immediately the reporter showed up. Marilyn greeted her, and while the woman had her head down, looking in her purse for notebook and pencil, Marilyn asked if she minded if she (Marilyn) brushed her hair during the interview. No, of course not. When the woman raised her head, Marilyn was brushing her pubic hair.
Due in no small part to Monroe’s laidback temperament, the two were to become close over the months that followed.”
This is the second Elliott Landy shot of Dylan in the collection. This is the first:
The collection has print 7/100 which is 50 x 35cm.
The new infrared shot is most striking of course for its colour. It derives from a Saturday Evening Post cover image assignment. Landy was just starting out but his work with The Band had impressed one of Dylan’s friends and that’s how they first connected. The connection and subsequent friendship eventually yielded an album cover (Nashville Skyline). The shot was taken outside Dylan’s home in Byrdcliffe, New York state, as was the shot with his young son, Jesse.
This shot is reminiscent of the brilliant 2019 creative documentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan story by Martin Scorsese (to give it its full title) in which Bob takes his guitar out at times in a spirit of activism and solidarity.
After giving a concert in a cotton field with folk singers Pete Seeger and Theo Bikel, Dylan played behind the office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC – pronounced “snick”). Bernice Reaon, one of the original Freedom Singers and later the lead singer of Sweet Honey in the Rock, is the woman listening intently in front of Dylan.
The Freedom Singers started in 1962 as a student quartet in Albany State College, Albany, Georgia. Their sound combined black Baptist church singing with protest songs. They were big supporters of the SNCC during the emerging civil rights movement and they played a significant role in making communal song a key means of empowering and educating audiences about civil rights issues and combatting Jim Crow segregation.
Mendy Samstein is sitting behind Dylan and talking to Willie Blue. Samstein quit his Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago to join the civil rights movement in the South as a full-time organiser for the SNCC. Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael (previously chairman of SNCC) said Samstein was “one in a million”.
Amy Winehouse was another one in a million. This July marks the 10th anniversary of her sad passing and I have been working on a documentary to mark the event.
The deliberate choice of such an early image comes down to the way this shot captures the youthful promise of Amy before other pressures intruded. It was exhibited in a church in Hampstead a couple of years ago as part of a Danny Clifford show.
Danny had a studio set up backstage at these BBC jazz awards. Amy had just come off stage after performing some songs from her debut album Frank. She was reluctant to go over to the press wall and didn’t really give them what they wanted. Danny managed to steer her into his makeshift studio after and got much more relaxed shots including this beauty. Katie Melua came over a couple of minutes later and Danny suggested taking shots of the two of them together. Katie was well up for it but Amy said: “I ain’t having a picture with her. She’s shit. She doesn’t even write her own songs.” Danny thought she was joking at first but there was no sign of that. “I’ll take that as a No then” was his retort.
The hidden beauty of the world
“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays
The same is true of street photography and Instagram at its best. And of Art in general.
VE Day Walk supplementary
These images relate to VE Day 75 – The Walk
VE Day 75 – The Walk
Comment: unicornsalmost
This Sunday, on @bbcradio3 : Unicorns, Almost – a play about the life and poetry of Keith Douglas https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000j2bn
I met a family sitting out on their front steps down the road from here, told them what I was doing and they pointed me to…
A Box update
The good & knowledgable folk at Great War Forum have teased out a few details from this one including so far:
- more than one regiment is represented – Fusiliers, RAMC, Artillery, possibly Norfolks
- there are men in hospital blues – sitting in front on the right, right end of the first row and second right in the middle row; possibly also middle right of the back row
- it might be that the civilian couple are home-owners who let their home be used as a convalescence facility