St Julian's Community Cafe Launch

On 22nd November, I had the pleasure of photographing the launch of a much needed Community Cafe at St Julian's Church in St. Albans. ststephenandstjulian.org.  The Mayor, Eileen Harris and Archdeacon Jonathan Smith cut the ribbon to declare the cafe officially open.  The cafe has free wi-fi  and very reasonably priced food.  Here are a selection of the photos.

The Ethics of Photo Manipulation

As photographers we all see the artistic advantage of using such a tool such as Photoshop; however, where do we draw the line and when does such a tool become misleading?

Manipulation of images is nothing new, it’s been going on since the invention of photography.  One of the oldest cases in point are the images that became known as the,  “Cottingley Fairies.”

Around 1917 a set of five images were taken by 16 year old Elsie Wright and her 10 year old cousin, Frances Griffith in order to prove the existence of fairies at Cottingley Beck where they had been banned from playing.   The photographs caused much debate and Elsie eventually admitted that they had been faked using cardboard cutouts from a book.  Frances, however, insisted that the final of the five images was genuine.

Personally, I think a photograph becomes misleading when the intention of the photographer is to make you think something fake is real, therefore, I would say the Cottingley Fairies images were misleading.  At that time photography was fairly new and many believed if there was a photograph, then it must be genuine, and I’m sure the girls were clever enough to exploit this.   However, having read a bit more about the young photographers, I learnt that Elsie was quite an artist, and once implied that she had photographed her thoughts.  Perhaps, in her mind, she was creating a piece of art and if it also got her out of trouble at the same time, then so be it.   

So how about photo manipulation in today’s digital world?   I recently read an article about a manipulated image of Lady Gaga on the front cover of Vogue, which immediately reminded me of the cartoon character,  “Jessica Rabbit” from the film, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.   Let’s put the three photos together, the front cover, the actual Lady Gaga and Jessica Rabbit. 

The similarities are striking.  Of course, nowadays, we are more sceptical of photographs, and it could have been an artistic decision by Vogue to manipulate the image, but my worry is how many self-critical teenagers believe this body shape is real? How many of them go on to have low self-esteem, eating disorders and/or an obsession with cosmetic surgery.  I’m not the only one to be concerned about this.   An All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image was established in 2011 and on the point of digital manipulation the Royal College of Physicians said it was, “damaging “ and that,  “retouching is part of the unrealistic nature of images which has become a malignant process”.

To me, changing someone’s body shape seems wrong and I think the magazines should have a duty of care to its’ readers. Why not be more creative with the camera instead?  If the manipulation makes the person unrecognisable, it may just as well be a cartoon character, which would be more obvious to the viewer. 

To end on a humorous note, the photo below was manipulated, not by me though! 

Dorothea Lange - The People's Photographer

Dorothea Lange was one one of the great documentary photographers of all time; She said of herself that she lived a very, “visual life.”

She was born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn in 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey.   Two pivotal events in her life were to provide her with a deep understanding of suffering which she was later able to turn to her advantage.   At age seven she contracted polio, leaving her with a limp and at age twelve her father left home never to return.  She took on her mother’s maiden name and refused to speak of him again.  Her decision to take up photography first surfaced during the long walks after school to meet her mother from her job as a librarian in Manhatten.  

She studied photography at Columbia University, New York, and was taught by Clarence H White, one of the pioneers of Fine Art Photography.   She became informally apprenticed to, famous portrait photographer, Arnold Genthe under whom she learnt how to understand and connect with her subject, believing this to be the artistic part of photography.     In 1918 she moved to San Francisco to set up a successful portrait studio and soon after married a well-known painter, Maynard Dixon, with whom she had two sons.  

In 1930, as the Great Depression began, Dorothea took her camera to the street and turned her attention to the unemployed and homeless.  This got her noticed by The Farm Security Administration (a government relief agency) who offered her a job.   In 1935 she divorced Dixon and married the Economist Paul Schuster Taylor who educated her in social and political matters.  Together, they made a great team, documenting the plight of the desperate; Taylor gathered the data and Dorothea took the photos.  The result was a report called, “An American Exodus” which they subtitled, “A Record of Human Erosion”, and in it they wrote, “We have let them speak to you face to face”.

Her most iconic image is that of the “Migrant Mother”, a portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, a desperate mother of seven, living in a pea picker’s camp in Nipomo, California.   Within days of the image being published the camp received 20,000 pounds worth of food from the federal government.    The photograph came to symbolize that entire era of American history.

In 1941 she gave up her Guggenheim Fellowship award for excellence in photography to highlight the treatment of American Japanese families being evacuated from their homes to prison camps after the attack on Pearl Harbour, a procedure she deeply opposed. 

In 1944 she worked with, famous landscape photographer,  Ansel Adams on a feature for Fortune Magazine documenting the Kaiser shipyard in Richmond.

In 1952 she co founded the photographic magazine, Aperture. 

Dorothea believed her eye to be the camera lens.  In the last few years of her life she suffered ill health and as a friend sat beside her bed one day, she said, “I’ve just photographed you”.   She died of Esophageal Cancer in 1965 aged 70.