The book of the show.

Click the picture for Amazon US. I get no click-through payment.

‘Another London’ ran at the Tate in London July 27 – September 6, 2012 and the book will be available in the US March 5, 2013, though you can order it from Amazon UK now.

It is excellent.

This book is especially poignant to me as it roughly ends – 1970, there’s little content after that – with where I started taking London street snaps (1971 – 1977) before immigrating to the US. My point is that every street snapper should be doing this sort of work. Why? Because even my 1977 efforts are now instant history, impossibly dated in the light of the great changes London has seen in the past 35 years. As the rate of change accelerates, a street snap taken in any major city today will be history ten years hence.

You can download a free PDF of my book, Street Smarts, by clicking the picture below.

Click the picture to download my book.

City surroundings and architecture have never been more ephemeral and every good street photographer has something akin to a duty to document that which he sees around him, for it will be gone before he knows it. And he needs to do this before the world is taken over by Starbucks, McDonald’s and Apple stores.

Book review.

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This came along as a welcome gift to my photography book library. When it comes to the bad boy British photographers of the Swinging Sixties, the names you hear most often are Donovan, Duffy and Bailey. But a fourth, with a claim to having been there, is Terry O’Neill, whose pictures of the famous and near-famous are reproduced here.

In a typically well written essay introducing the book, A. A. Gill (who did sterling writing in the Sunday Times before the Dirty Digger came along) summarizes it nicely. Fame, he writes, is haute couture whereas Celebrity is ready to wear.

Some of these pictures leave me cold because given the natural beauty of their subjects it’s quite literally true to say that anyone could do it. I mean, can you imagine taking an ugly picture of Catherine Zeta-Jones, for example? Heck, even if you were a complete klutz, she wouldn’t let you.

But there are others which get through and show insights to the subjects’ characters that are quite fascinating, with perhaps the best being the cover picture, above. There’s a fine one of Roger Daltrey trying to act the land baron and not quite succeeding. It’s tough when, as Pete Townshend once described him, you are just ‘a sheet metal worker from Shepherd’s Bush’. One more poignant is of Tom Jones back in his Welsh coal town, ridiculously overdressed with a huge Rolls Royce. Sad. I wonder if he was in on the cruel joke? One even more moving is of an old Marlene Dietrich (German, yes, but the sheer number of GIs she slept with testifies that she was on our side), emerging from the side curtains onto the stage like a chrysalis becoming a butterfly. A pretty old and past-it butterfly, in her case, but extra points for trying. Another well observed one is of Faye Dunaway, O’Neill’s spouse at the time, on the morning after winning the Oscar, replete with silk gown and Beverly Hills Hotel pool. (Dunaway was a Celebrity; Bailey went one better, marrying Catherine Deneuve who was, and remains, Famous).

It’s a fun book, a confection which occasionally gets you thinking. Was O’Neill a great photographer. No. The fame of his subjects rubs off, but too rarely does his work show the sort of insight common to the terrible trio mentioned above.

There’s a video of O’Neill sounding disillusioned and preaching how digital is not ‘real photography’ which you can see, in lieu of watching the kettle boil, by clicking below. (Refresh your browser window if it’s not visible below):

Photographer to the Stars.

On the cover – Joan Crawford and Franchot Tone. Click the image.

George Hurrell’s star shone brightest when the Hollywood studio system was in full flow. Stars may not have made the extraordinary compensation packages of today and, indeed, their long term contracts pretty much made them indentured servants to the studio bosses, but they had regular work and who would argue that today’s movies are better?

I was reminded of this splendid book when setting up the lights for our son’s tenth birthday session, and surprised to find I had never mentioned it here. The boom light used on the hair is pure Hurrell, and you will see its effect in almost every picture in the book. I have had this book in my collection for years and it’s still in print, though my Scottish gene reminds me that I almost certainly bought it at a remaindered price.

Highly recommended not just for Hurrell’s tremendous skill with lighting – and we are talking large plate cameras here – but also because of the many memorable images of stars of the golden age of Hollywood. My favourite is Loretta Young – a face of quite exceptional beauty.

The placement of the subject under the boom light is critical with the relatively small light sources used today. Hurrell used enormous light boxes which gave off a broad soft beam, making placement of the subject easier. With small strobes, if your subject is as much as an inch or two too far back the face will wash out into a ghastly death mask. I make things easier for Winston by marking the placement of his toes on the ground with tape, once the right position is determined. The cover photograph, above, interestingly uses the single boom light only, to superb effect.