Roger Mayne -street photographer

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1956, photographer, Robert Doisneau, roger mayne, street photographer, Victoria and Albert Museum, Willy Ronis

Having explored the work of Doisneau and Ronis , I thought I should tackle a British ‘street’ photographer –Roger Mayne.

Some of the quotes have been taken from the Victoria and Albert museum website

Roger Mayne

I will try and let Roger speak for himself:

I started photography quite early but it wasn’t, in retrospect, very serious. I can’t remember when I first became interested in photography, but I didn’t have much of a background. There were no Picture Post magazines in my family and I wasn’t even allowed comics as a child. So I started photographing landscapes because I like mountains. I can’t explain why I like mountains living in Cambridge, which is in a flat county, and I can’t really say how I first began to be interested in photography. I think photography probably found me.

Text adapted from spoken dialogue (V&A)

“Just after I came to London I began to take a few photographs of children.”

cricket addison place. 1957

‘Photography involves two main distortions – the simplification into black and white, and the seizing of an instant in time. It is this particular mixture of reality and unreality, and the photographer’s power to select, that makes it possible for photography to be an art. Whether it is good art depends on the power and the truth of the artist’s statement.’
Roger Mayne, 1960, quoted in the comprehensive monograph
Roger Mayne Photographs (Jonathan Cape, 2001)

Screaming Child 1956

“My reason for photographing the poor streets is that I love them, and the life on them (I am here concerned with what I see: for the moment it is irrelevant that most of these houses have no baths, and that their structure is endangered by disrepair). Empty, the streets have their own kind of beauty, a kind of decaying splendour, and always great atmosphere — whether romantic, on a hazy winter day, or listless when the summer is hot; sometimes it is forbidding; or it may be warm and friendly on a sunny spring weekend when the street is swarming with children playing, and adults walking through or standing gossiping.

Goalie, Brindley Road, off Harrow Road.1956

I remember my excitement when I turned a corner into Southam Street, a street I have returned to again and again… I think an artist must work intuitively, and let his attitudes be reflected by the kinds of things he likes or finds pictorial. Attitudes will be reflected because an artist is a kind of person who is deeply interested in people, and the forces that work in our society. This implies a humanist art, but not necessarily an interest in ‘politics’.”

 The other kind of photography that I began to become aware of was photography with people and there was a lot of talk in photographic magazines about the then newly-formed Magnum group.  (V%A)

Street Cricket, Clarendon Cresent.1957

“My intention is to be a fine artist, but I think that it is the nature of the medium of photography that one has to start with what photography does, which is to take records of things. So I think you take a record and if, for various reasons, everything comes together, then the record will raise itself to a work of art.”

Boys on a Lorry, Cowcaddens, Glasgow.1957

“I went to South London and I saw, in the distance, a bombed building with a lot of children playing in it, so I thought that might be an interesting subject. So I walked towards this building and when the children saw somebody with a camera they immediately stopped this fascinating thing, whatever they were doing which intrigued me, so they all came out and wanted their photograph. You used to get this cry, ‘please take my photo Mister’.”

children-in-bombed-building-bermondsey.1954

“In the series I’ve taken them the way they wanted to. They went back into the building and started playing very much as they had before and I think this is quite a lesson to be learnt. One shouldn’t be afraid of wasting a few shots on often very dreary mug-shots just to get yourself an entry into the situation, because they’ll soon forget about you and get on with what they’re doing.” (V&A)

Boy on a Bombsite, Waverley Walk, Harrow Road area.1957

Although now more than fifty years old the Southam Street photographs have become an indelible part of how people perceive Roger Mayne as a photographer. They are in many ways a noose around his neck. “In a sense I put it round my own neck” says Roger. “What happened was – I’ve always been an inveterate maker of albums – so I made an album of Southam Street, because it was the most prolific. I tended to have favourite streets. Southam Street had the most photographs, so I made an album of it. Then I had 56 pages given to me in a magazine so I condensed the photographs to fit the 56 pages. It went to about 1500 copies. When the V&A exhibition came up, a similar situation happened. I re-edited the Southam Street and of course by doing that I drew all this attention, and I just saddled myself since with Southam Street. Some of the people photographed came to the V&A opening. The Evening Standard did a feature on the street of ‘Roger Mayne’s exhibition’ and they were interested to hear comments from some of the people who lived on the street. They got some – in fact quite a lot. Then The Sunday Times did a feature before the exhibition and some of the families photographed called me and came to the opening.”

Boys smoking 1956

Footballer and shadow.1956

“When I came to London I endlessly went to galleries – I soaked myself in visual art, cinema as well – I got it into my system. You almost feel that the moment is significant without knowing necessarily why. Terry Frost says ‘If you know before you look then you cannot see for knowing’. It’s not an intellectual process. It is not simply capturing a moment. It is what is in front of me – it is a formal shape. If the formal shape is interesting, it makes the photograph possible to look at again and again and again. A lot of news photography for instance – what is in front of the camera – it can be tough, it can be sensational, interesting, all sorts of things, but it lacks a compositional element.”

two-boys-with-snowballs.1955

 I turn the corner and I find this wonderful street which was Southam Street, which was the street where I was to take probably the most of all photographs of streets.  (V%A)

Girl on the Steps, St Stephen’s Gardens, 1957

Most photographs of children I try and take unawares.There was this girl, this very beautiful girl, sitting on these steps, but I simply didn’t seem to be able to take her unawares. She insisted on looking at me. In fact she looked at me so persistently that I was forced to take the photograph the way she wanted. In fact it did turn out one of my best-known photographs.   (V&A)

snowballs-east-end.1955

 I have been labelled as a photojournalist but I’m not happy about this. I had to earn my living, so I do think of myself as earning my living on the fringes of photojournalism, but I do think of myself as a fine artist. My intention is to be a fine artist, but I think that it is the nature of the medium of photography that one has to start with what photography does, which is to take records of things. So I think you take a record and if, for various reasons, everything comes together, then the record will raise itself to a work of art.  (V&A)

kensal-road-girl-doing-a-handstand-1957

cricket-addison-place-north-kensington-1957

conkers-addison-place-north-kensington-1957

David Hockney – is photography art?

Tags

art, collage, david hockney, jfk turner, painting, Photography, seeing

Beverly Hills Housewife

Would a camera have recorded this scene differently? If so, what is the difference?

David Hockney has been exploring the relationship between painting and photography…

I’ve finally figured out what’s wrong with photography. It’s a one-eyed man looking through a little ‘ole. Now, how much reality can there be in that? – David Hockney

There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don’t mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops. – David Hockney

One of the things I’m doing in Yorkshire is finding out how difficult it is to learn not to see like cameras, which has had such an effect on us. The camera sees everything at once. We don’t. There’s a hierarchy. Why do I pick out that thing as opposed to that thing or that thing? – David Hockney

Without images how would I know what you see? I don’t know what you see. I’ll never know, but these flat images are the only things that connect up between us. – David Hockney

I made a photograph of a garden in Kyoto, the Zen garden, which is a rectangle. But a photograph taken from any one point will not show, well it shows a rectangle, but not with ninety degree angles.

Zen Garden

But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years.

David Hockney

But the moment you use an ordinary camera, you are not seeing the picture, remember, meaning, you had to remember what you’ve taken. Now you could see it of course, with a digital thing, but remember in 1982 you couldn’t.

David Hockney

Pre-historic museum

Perhaps ‘seeing’ is important for all artists whether using painting or photography as a medium of recording and expressing…

When is the present? When did the past end and the present occur, and when does the future start? Ordinary photography has one way of seeing only, which is fixed, as if there is kind of an objective reality, which simply cannot be. Picasso…knew that every time you look there’s something different. There is so much there but we´re not seeing it, that’s the problem. – David Hockney

Television is becoming a collage – there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different.

David Hockney

Now that is something worth thinking about – everyone sees something different….

You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era.

David Hockney

It adds fuel to his belief that painting can do things photography can’t, even when it comes to telling the truth about war. Everyone used to assume photographs of war were “true” in a way photography can’t be. But Hockney argues that the digital age has made such a conception of photography obsolete. You can change any image now in any way you want. He once saw what a famous LA photographer’s portrait of Elton John looked like before it was retouched. The difference, he says, was “hilarious”. And now everyone can do this.

“My sister, who is just a bit older than me, she’s a retired district nurse, she’s just gone mad with the digital camera and computer – move anything about; she doesn’t worry about whether it’s authentic or stuff like that – she’s just making pictures.”

Although Hockney may disparage the simplicity of taking photos he should admit that since Niepce in early 182o’s brought photography into reality that photography has influenced painting  and equally painting influenced the range of possibilities within photographic art.

Niepce 1826 -view from his window (8 hour exposure)

jfkturner in his blog ‘The Delights of Seeing‘ (Photorealism and the Relationship Between Photography and Painting) explores the close but turbulent rapport  between photography and painting.

He writes:

The invention of a device that could allow anybody to record the world in perfect detail would revolutionize how we see ourselves, how we communicate and how we make art. Without Photography Modern art, film and the Internet would not exist – or at least not as we know them.

In my opinion the announcement of a device that could capture the world in perfect detail forced painters to question the nature of painting, ask what an image was and what the nature of art is. As a result paintings changed – creating images that could not be created by a camera. Eventually artists questioned the act of painting and many moved towards other ways of working – for example performance and conceptual art.

and then a last quote from Hockney himself:

He argued that for the past 500 years, artists in the West have used optics and lenses in their work, thereby presenting the world in photographic terms. The invention of photography as we know it, says Hockney, was only the invention of chemicals; the optical lens has been around for hundreds of years. The “invention of photography,” he tells me, “was the invention of the fixative to fix an image.”

Hockney seems to have an antipathy to this “chemical” photography, which he claims has assumed visual control, which equals power. “If you think of it, until the 19th century, one of the main purveyors of images was the church,” he says. “They decided that Christianity needed images, so they provided images, and in doing so the church had social control for a long time. But in the 19th century, they began to lose that control.”

“With the invention of photography, the power for social control simply moved with the image makers to what we call the media. Social control in the 20th century came through the media. That’s now disintegrating, and in a way the power of the media is therefore being diminished, and it’s spreading to anyone who wants it.”

“We’ve gotten to the point where we think the camera can capture anything at all,” “Well, it can’t really. The camera can’t compete with painting at all. The paintings are much more vivid about the place than photographs are.”

What do you think? Has photography influenced painting?