Capturing the Smoke (2012)

Beat Girl with Kitten 1960

Exhibition Review from the October 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another London – International Photographers Capture City Life 1930-1980 – Tate Britain

The 180 photographs in the Another London exhibition are selected from the collection of 1,400 photographs of the Eric and Louise Franck London Collection. The 41 photographers in the exhibition were all from abroad, visiting London as tourists, or as part of their employment, or were refugees from Nazism and eventually settled permanently in Britain. The photographs are evidence of a rich tapestry of life in ‘The Smoke’ during the twentieth century.

‘Class’ is a significant factor portrayed in these photographs from Brandt’s Housewife – Bethnal Green 1937 and Suschitzky’s East End Street 1934 to the series of photographs of the working class in Brick Lane, Spitalfields 1976-78 by Luskacova.  People in the Knave of Clubs Pub, Club Row 1976 is revealing in its depiction of East Enders sense of camaraderie although at first glance the photograph could be from the 1930s. The various changes in capitalism in Britain in the intervening 40 years had done little to change the economic status of working class in the East End.

Photographers also captured the ruling class at work and play in Hoppe’s 1937 London Stock Exchange – Typical Young Businessman to the military in The Queen’s Guards 1960 by Erwitt. The photograph of the 1959 Queen Charlotte’s Ball by Cartier-Bresson is of the Débutante’s Ball where daughters of the Aristocracy ‘came out’ at the end of the ‘Season’. ‘Debs’ were presented to the Queen at Buckingham Palace right up to 1958 when it was deemed an archaic social practice. The ‘Debs Ball’ ended in 1997 but since 2009 has been re-established for the daughters of wealthy capitalists as well as the Aristocracy.

Brandt’s Housewife – Bethnal Green 1937

Erwitt’s photographs of British Railways Logo on Train and Male Passengers in 1st Class Compartment (1950’s) highlight the fact that although the railway was nationalised in 1948 BR still operated a ‘class system’ of compartments for first, second and third class passengers. Third Class was abolished in 1956, and second class was only re-designated as Standard Class in 1985.

There is an evocative photograph by Willy Ronis of Gaston Berlemont’s Pub, The French House, Soho 1955 which reeks of tobacco smoke, booze and bohemianism (well-known poets/artists and drinkers Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, Francis Bacon, and Malcolm Lowry frequented the hostelry). The iconic photograph of the Beat Girl with Kitten 1960 by Bruce Davidson conjures up the mysteries and delights of youth on the cusp of adventure at the beginning of the ‘swinging sixties’.

Neil Kenlock’s photographs of the Afro-Caribbean community illuminate a radical political side to the black British experience: Demo Brixton Library 1972 shows placards stating ‘All Police are Pigs’ and ‘Off the Pigs’ while the 1970 Black Panther School Bags portrays just that.

Davidson’s Conductress 1960 epitomises the period covered in the exhibition. This world of the sounds of ‘slam door’ trains, Solari departure boards at rail stations, Routemaster buses, and Gibson ticket machines is gone forever.

Steve Clayton

Mixed Media: Ansel Adams (2013)

The Mixed Media Column from the June 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ansel Adams: Photography from the Mountains to the Sea

The Ansel Adams exhibition, Photography from the Mountains to the Sea, was recently at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London. Adams’s photographic modernism was an attempt to create ‘extraction’ in photography, as opposed to the impossibility of applying painterly ‘abstract impressionism.’ Adams used f/64 focal lengths, small aperture settings, in order to give great depth of field, sharpness and clarity and pioneered a zone system for translating perceived light into specific densities on negatives and paper. The foreboding mountains, river and sky are menacing in his 1942 The Tetons and the Snake River. He was a believer in unfiltered visualization in the sense of Blake’s ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite.’

Adams was influenced by Emerson and his social responsibility to humanity and nature, and also Edward Carpenter’s Towards Democracy which advocated the pursuit of beauty in life and art. Adams wrote ‘I believe in beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate.’ His landscapes are a form of worship, a pantheism like Spinoza’s ‘deus sive nature’ which led to his advocacy of wilderness preservation and environmentalism. His 1937 Clearing Winter Storm depicts Spinozist perception ‘sub specie aeternitatis.’ Adams is close to Wordsworth in his sonnet The World Is Too Much with Us which critiques the industrial revolution and materialism which places humanity out of tune with nature.

Adams’s ‘creative photography’ is Wordsworth’s ‘poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ His rock-pool photographs such as 1960 Rocks and Limpets, and 1969 Sea Anemones are ‘cleansed perception’ like Wordsworth’s ‘the earth, and every common sight/to me did seem/Apparelled in celestial light.’ Adams’s 1962 Stream, Sea and Clouds evoke the Wordsworth line of ‘a sense sublime/of something far more deeply interfused’ or in Adams’ own words ‘I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail and I had within the grasp of consciousness a transcendental experience.’

Adams photographed US President Carter in 1979 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980. As befits a transcendental artist his photograph of The Tetons and the Snake River was included on the golden record on the NASA Voyager spacecraft in 1977. In a 1983 interview in Playboy magazine, shortly before his death, Adams was outspoken in his opposition to the Reagan presidency.

Ansel Adams: ‘I know that I am one with beauty and that my comrades are one. Let our souls be mountain. Let our spirits be stars. Let our hearts be worlds.’

Steve Clayton

Spanish miners (2014)

Book Review from the July 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Resistencia Minera, photographs by Javier Bauluz and Marcos Martinez. The Durham Miners’ Association, 2012, 56 pages, £20.

This exquisite photographic volume by Javier Bauluz and Marcos Martinez is supported by the Spanish Miners’ Solidarity Committee UK, the NUM, the Durham Miners’ Association, the National Justice for Mineworkers Campaign and the anti-fascist organisation Hope not Hate. These organisations, working closely together during the 2012 strike in Spain, collected and sent €33,400 to the Spanish miners’ unions in solidarity with the striking miners and their families.

On 30 May 2012, Spanish miners’ unions called an indefinite strike to force the country’s government to negotiate over an immediate 63 percent cut in aid to the coal industry. The photographic booklet documents the 65 days of the strike by the 9,000 miners in Asturias, Leon and Aragon. The Spanish state deployed the Guardia Civil to the coal mining valleys of Asturias where on a daily basis they used tear gas, baton charges, and rubber bullets against striking coalminers, who resorted to using stones, nuts, bolts, slingshots and fireworks issued from home-made rocket launchers. The photographs portray the roadblocks, pitched battles in pit villages, rallies, demonstrations, the march on Madrid which is all reminiscent of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike in Britain. John Cunningham of the Spanish Miners Solidarity Committee wrote that the ‘NUM owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Spanish trade unions and particularly the miners for their solidarity and financial support in 1984-85.’ In 2012 a Spanish coal miner said ‘this is not the first time miners have fought for all workers.’

We look forward to the day when the Spanish coalminers inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword ‘Abolicion del sistema de salarios’ .

Steve Clayton

Exhibition Review: Portraying a Nation – Germany 1919–1933 (2017)

Exhibition Review from the October 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Weimar Republic, from Germany’s defeat in the First World War to Hitler’s capture of power: a time of economic crisis, hyperinflation, massive unemployment, cultural innovation, increasing nationalism and repression. An exhibition at Tate Liverpool, on until the middle of October, attempts to capture some of these dramatic developments by exhibiting the work of photographer August Sander and painter Otto Dix.

Sander (1876–1964) is represented by photos from his project ‘People of the 20th Century’. In one sense these are straightforward depictions of people who are looking into the camera; they are nearly all anonymous and described in terms of their work (e.g. farmer, doctor, blacksmith). There are photos of blind people and others who are in some way ‘excluded’ from society, such as those with learning difficulties. As the years pass, there are photos of Nazis in uniform and, from 1938, of ‘victims of persecution’. In 1934 Sander’s son Erich was arrested and imprisoned for political activity; he died in prison in 1944. A few photos of political prisoners, taken by Erich, are included.

In 1936 the Nazi authorities had the plates of one of Sanders’ books destroyed and copies removed. A similar fate applied to the work of Dix (1891–1969), who had paintings confiscated and displayed in the exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’ from 1937 (though in truth it did not take much to be categorised in this way). Dix had fought in the First World War, and some of his depictions of fighting and the The Seven Deadly Sins’ (not included in this exhibition), which contains a caricature of Hitler embodying greed (or perhaps envy), is fairly easy to read nowadays, but Hitler’s moustache was only added after the war, so it was originally not so clear-cut.

trenches are extremely powerful. He painted some of the many women who had been widowed by the war, also prostitutes, beggars and the rich. Dix refused any political allegiance, and concentrated instead on showing what was going on around him, but, as with Sander, this was inevitably too much for the totalitarian regime he had to live under. His 1937 painting ‘

A photo of Dix by Sander links the two, but they are already connected in the visitor’s mind by their honest representation of a Germany that was on a path of suffering, from one traumatic war to another.

Paul Bennett

War Exposures (2018)

Book Review from the February 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

'The Vest Pocket Kodak & the First World War.' By Jon Cooksey (Ammonite £7.99)

The first war photograph dates from 1846, and there were further photos of the Crimean War and the American Civil War. But the technology was cumbersome, and the scenes often had to be staged. Then in 1912 Kodak produced a smaller portable camera, the Vest Pocket Kodak or VPK (‘vest’ being American for ‘waistcoat’). This became extremely popular, including among those in the armed forces in the First World War. Never one to miss a marketing trick, the company advertised it as ‘The Soldier’s Kodak’.

Soldiers photographed scenes from the trenches and of actual fighting with their VPKs, but of course it was never going to be an uncontroversial or straightforward activity. The first action shot published, in November 1914, was doctored with a bursting shell added to increase the apparent danger to soldiers who were under shrapnel fire. In June 1915, a private from the Liverpool Scottish Regiment photographed soldiers advancing on a captured German trench near Ypres. When it was published the following month, an image of a German soldier (lying apparently dead) replaced that of a dead or wounded British soldier.

The Christmas Day truce of 1914 was depicted in some blurred photos of soldiers from both sides chatting and exchanging cigarettes. This did not go down well with the powers that be, as it made the Germans look human, and a limited ban on cameras was extended in March 1915 to cover all operational theatres, though it was not enforced as strictly as it might have been.

Cooksey also includes a photo (of unknown date and location) of ‘what appears to be the summary execution of a suspected spy by two British army officers with service revolvers.’ 

Paul Bennett

Exhibition Review: 'No Man’s Land - Women’s Photography and the First World War' (2018)

Exhibition Review from the January 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

The simple view of the First World War in gender terms is that men did the fighting while women, who were not allowed to fight, took many of their places on the ‘Home Front’. But an exhibition ‘No Man’s Land: Women’s Photography and the First World War’, seen at the Impressions Gallery in Bradford, shows that this is only part of the story. The Bradford exhibition closed at the end of December, but will be touring this year and next to Bristol, Leigh and Bishop Auckland.

The work of three women photographers during and shortly after the war is featured. Florence Farmborough was working as a governess in Russia when the war broke out. She volunteered for the Red Cross and was assigned to a mobile military unit of the Russian army; her photos are among the few of the Eastern Front taken by a woman. Olive Edis was the first officially-commissioned British woman photographer sent to a war zone, in Northern France and Flanders, though this was only in 1919. Mairi Chisholm set up a first-aid post in Flanders and took many photos throughout the war using a small snapshot camera.

All three depicted women who were employed in war zones, mainly as nurses, but also in other roles, such as ambulance drivers and welders. They variously showed men and women relaxing behind the lines, playing on swings, for instance. There are no photos of combat, but there are a number showing corpses and ruined buildings; as Chisholm noted, ‘One sees the most hideous sights imaginable, men with their jaws blown off, arms and legs mutilated’.

There are in addition photos by three contemporary women photographers. The most powerful of these are by Chloe Dewe Mathews, showing locations where WW1 Belgian, British and French soldiers were shot (or imprisoned prior to being shot) for cowardice or desertion; in many cases they were in reality suffering from shell shock. The photos are taken in the same season as the original events and at the same time of day. The scenes are bleak and extremely moving.    

Paul Bennett

Exhibition Review: Strange and Familiar (2017)

"Glasgow" by Raymond Depardon.

Exhibition Review from the April 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Outsiders can sometimes provide a fresh look at a time or place, observing things that those who live there fail to notice or consider too obvious for comment. Such ideas are behind the exhibition ‘Strange but Familiar’, currently on at Manchester Art Gallery, which shows the work of a number of international photographers who have depicted Britain (though there are no photos of Manchester).

The photos included cover a period of almost eighty years. The earliest are by Henri Cartier-Bresson, of patriotic crowds at the coronation of George VI in 1937, complemented by some of Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee in 1977; these indeed focus on the spectators rather than the official celebrations. Many of the photographers whose work is exhibited adopted a left-wing position, and provide a kind of documentary record of people’s lives.

Edith Tudor-Hart (originally from Austria) photographed appalling living conditions from the 1930s, while Candida Höfer shows depressing Liverpool scenes from 1968. More overtly political photos include those of demos against nuclear weapons from 1961 and the Vietnam war from 1969, and of parades and bombs in Northern Ireland, from 1968–9.

As times changed, the depictions of rundown streets give way to the ‘swinging sixties’, with joints and skimpier clothes. But decaying council estates and tower blocks from the 1980s show how some things change very little. Jim Dow’s shots of corner shops from 1980 to 1994 emphasise how few of these now remain, while Bruce Gilden’s striking large photos of three unhealthy faces from West Bromwich in 2014, each of which occupies virtually the whole frame, are a stark reminder of the effects capitalism can have. Raymond Depardon was commissioned by the Sunday Times to photograph Glasgow in 1980, but the results, of a city in decline, were too bleak to publish: sometimes the capitalist media cannot accept an accurate picture of the society they support.     

Paul Bennett

Exhibition Review: 'Grafters' (2016)

Exhibition Review from the April 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The development of photography followed hard on the heels of the Industrial Revolution, but depicting workers and industry was not a simple matter. These and related issues are pursued in an exhibition at the People’s History Museum in Manchester which runs until August.

Some of the earliest photos of working people were taken in studios so they could be collected by the comfortably off, but the subjects in these probably did not see the developed portraits. Other workers encountered cameras at the hands of the police who, from 1865, took photos of convicts with their crimes listed (frequently larceny and sleeping rough).

From the 1870s onwards, workers were often included in photos of factories, in order to emphasise the size of the machines they were working on. Photos of groups of workers, which had originated in group photos of soldiers, became common from the 1880s, and were especially popular in the First World War, to show the women workers who had taken over while the men were off fighting. As cameras became cheaper, workers were able to document their own lives and surroundings. In the ‘Soviet Union’, photos were intended to make workers look heroic, and something along similar lines happened in the West during the Second World War.

There are many excellent photos here, over a range of dates, for instance of pit brow lasses in Wigan from 1865, of the massive labour involved in constructing the Manchester Ship Canal, and of a depressing smoke-enveloped Bradford from the 1940s. The last Lancashire miners are depicted in 1989, as is the last shift at a deep mine, from Kellingley in Yorkshire in 2015. There is even one of a football match between the police and official miners’ pickets, from 1985 in Derby. Many of the recent photos were taken by the exhibition’s curator, Ian Beesley.

It’s a stimulating display, showing how even something as apparently unproblematic as photographing members of the working class reveals underlying issues and power relationships.

Paul Bennett

Mixed Media: Dennis Hopper (2015)

The Mixed Media Column from the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Four hundred black and white photographs taken between 1961 and 1967 by film director and actor Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) went on show last year at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. These photographs haven't seen the light of day since his first ever photography show in Fort Worth, Texas in 1970. Hopper used a 28 mm lens Nikon camera, and later said 'I didn't crop my photos. They are full frame natural light.' He turned to photography in the 1960s 'because the reality of the things going on around me was more interesting than the fantasies of the world I worked in.'

Hopper's photographs capture the Counter Culture and other historical, social and political events during the sixties. He carried his camera with him everywhere around his neck during this period.

The Sixties Counter Culture was inspired by Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, Wilhelm Reich, Norman O Brown's Life Against Death, Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, and Alan Watts' The Joyous Cosmology. Foucault described the era as a 'surge of libido modulated by the class struggle.' Hopper reminisced that 'it was an incredible moment. There was practically a revolution going on to stop the Vietnam war', and that 'I've always been political... I was with Martin Luther King and at the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. I was a hippie. I was probably as Left as you could get without being a Communist.'

Hopper is critically acclaimed for his direction of such films as Easy Rider, The Last Movie, and Out of the Blue, and outstanding acting in films like Tracks, The American Friend, and Blue Velvet.

He was trained in Stanislavski Method acting at the LeeStrasberg Actors School. Hopper got his directing start as second unit director on the LSD film The Trip.

His 1964 photograph The Trip is a psychedelic all-seeing eye of God with a homunculus in a Stetson. Hopper photographed the Human Be-In in San Francisco in January 1967 and photographs from this include Timothy Leary, Love-In, Hippies,Flower Children,andHippie Girl Dancing. He formed a close friendship with beat poet Michael McClure at this time. Hopper would later say 'We're a new kind of human being. We're taking on more freedom and more risk. In a spiritual way, we may be the most creative generation in the last nineteen centuries.'

He photographed the Hells Angels, outlaw motorcyclists who became notorious with the filmThe Wild Angels, and publications of Hunter S Thompson's Hells Angels, and Freewheelin' Frank by Frank Reynolds and Michael McClure. The exhibition includes Hells Angels San Pedro, Hells Angel Girl, and Bruce Dern as Hells Angel from the 1966film The Wild Angels.

The defining moment of the Civil Rights movement: the 54 mile march of 4,000 people from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama led by Martin Luther King in 1965 was captured by Hopper. He later recalled that 'Marlon Brando got me involved in the march.'

He photographed the street life of Harlem and Los Angeles. His 1961 Double Standard is a quintessentially LA image complete with convertible top and traffic. Seamstress, All Night Diner, Downtown LA, Working Man, Homeless guy & belongings in pram demonstrates Hopper's humane view of those on the margins of society subject to poverty and hard work. Hopper said 'I saw myself as a political artist at the time, or rather as one aiming to express social protest.'

Hopper's photography is influenced by Aaron Siskind, Robert Capa, and Cartier-Bresson. He is in the American tradition of photographers like Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks who were employed by the 'New Deal' Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and '40s. This was a rural rehabilitation programme to improve the lives of share-croppers, tenants, poor farmers, and included a program to purchase submarginal land and resettle farmers in group farms which was an experiment in collectivising agriculture. Hopper's photographs can be compared to Robert Frank's record of life on the road in The Americans (1958).

In the 1980s Hopper became a Republican; 'I read Thomas Jefferson, the idea of having less government, more individual freedom, is something that I liked' but in 2008 he supported Barack Obama saying his reason for not voting Republican was the selection of Sarah Palin as the Vice Presidential candidate.

Hopper's politics are essentially philosophical individualist anarchism drawing on Thomas Jefferson's belief that people needed to be vigilant against any laws that 'violates the rights of the individual' and 'that government is best which governs least.' He is also in the tradition of Emerson's 'Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well ... Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience', and Thoreau's 'action from principle', and 'government is best which governs not at all' in Civil Disobedience. Both Gandhi, and Martin Luther King cite the huge influence of Thoreau's essay.

Ed Ruscha concluded 'Like me, Dennis's art grows out of alienation. Dennis always responded to city anxiety, graffiti, etchings on walls, expressing the frustrations of urban life.'

Steve Clayton