Don McCullin "Looking for England"

Love feeling a connection to this man....
He's a lifelong photographer, as am I, as are most of us on RFF.

Makes me both proud for that association yet at the same time humble as I struggle to work at an always higher level, looking to him as an example.


Thank you for this inspiring video, Melancholy.
 
Keep mind that he's shooting on a Canon d5 mk something during most of the movie (Ie he's fine with digital).
 
peterm1 said:
This is what quite a few dedicated film shooters claim to think. But I think its really only a rationalization for them continuing to shoot film. (Although they do not need to rationalize or justify it - if they like doing it, keep doing it).
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Of course film photography can lie but there seems to me to be a more direct connection between a photographic negative and reality as we perceive it, possibly because faking a negative is a great deal more difficult than cutting and pasting in Photoshop.

The truth is that (a) most people don't take picture elements out or put them in - or have the skill to do so for that matter. (b) in any event doing this really only matters in some situations - if you are recording something which explicitly or implicitly requires the image to be an accurate representation of real life then it matters. If you are making a shot which is explicitly an artistic interpretation and do not pretend its any more than this who cares?

I tweak images in post all the time. I change tonal values to brighten or darken, I change saturation to increase or reduce it, I add vignettes to focus attention where I want it and I will not infrequently add texture overlays. I am perfectly upfront in saying this is how a given final image has been arrived at. Mostly it's obvious that changes have been made in post anyway and what's more, some of these changes might well have been made by analogue film shooters too. Just using different processing techniques and tools.
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I prefer photographs that don't appear to have had any tweaking. For me, those 'obvious' changes in post diminish a photograph's connection to reality and hence its authority. Of course if you just want make pretty pictures, it's fine.
 
Love the English humor starting at @3:17 (he's at the Glyndebourne Opera Festival)

"...This camera is called a medium format. It gives you a bigger negative, so therefore you're going to get better quality, but it's slower, of course... ..but it, somehow is the kind of camera you should use here, really. Jus cos it's a little bit more dignified than just having a 35 mil camera and sneaking up on people, like, as if you're going to kind'of assassinate them or something." :):):)
 
Interesting, thanks for the link. I saw an exhibition of his work a few years ago in Arles, for sure he's a great photographer
robert
 
lawrence said:
Of course film photography can lie but there seems to me to be a more direct connection between a photographic negative and reality as we perceive it, possibly because faking a negative is a great deal more difficult than cutting and pasting in Photoshop.


I prefer photographs that don't appear to have had any tweaking. For me, those 'obvious' changes in post diminish a photograph's connection to reality and hence its authority. Of course if you just want make pretty pictures, it's fine.
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Which of course is your right no one would deny you that. There are at least a couple of philosophical approaches to photography as see it. One is the reportage/documentary approach. Many people practice this approach which for many purists, in principle abhors any changes to the image to get the final image. For obvious reasons perhaps.

But it is not always so clear cut.

I recall something of a controversy several years ago when a photographer was awarded a prize by National Geographic for a stunning shot for, if memory serves me correctly, a shot of a group of people on the banks of a river in a developing country with stunning golden hour lighting (though I seem to recall the image being in black and white or low saturation due to the subdued lighting). A solo piece of trash (paper I seem to recall) was way over out at the edge of the photo and this automatically drew the eye to it because it was a blob of white in a sea of dark shadow. Without a doubt it distracted from the image to some extent.

The photographer removed it before submitting his shot and made the image indisputably better from an artistic perspective - though it was irrelevant from a documentary one. No other changes were made. When this was found out his award was removed, not because he took the trash out of the image but because of how he did it. He cloned it out in Photoshop but would have been allowed to keep the award had he chosen instead to crop the image to exclude it or applied a dark vignette to hide it. Such techniques were deemed to be OK had he used them seemingly because they emulated analogue darkroom techniques of image manipulation which were permitted by the rules of the contest. OK I have no great problem with that - these were the rules of that contest and the photographer knew or should have known of them. But (and here is my main point) they are not the rules of life.

I would make two further points about this.

First there there can be a fine line between what is documentary and what is art. Was Ansel Adams a documentarist or an artist? I would say the latter because he spent hours in a darkroom perfecting prints often making many versions of an image before he arrived at one he preferred. It also follows that a documentary image can be art - the best ones often are.

The second point is do not rush to denigrate artists or the artististic approach as being somehow inferior to documentarists. Van Gogh was an artist. So was Monet. So was Picasso. But no one can say they were documentary painters who represented life in a realistic manner. And the same could be said for many photographers - my personal hero was Saul Leiter many of who's images deliberately distorted reality in a beautiful painterly way. The entire point of their work was that they each adopted various styles which carefully and deliberately eschewed a more realist /documentary approach.

I can't claim to be a Van Gogh, a Monet, a Picasso or a Leiter for that matter. But yes, I like pretty pictures. :) And yes I will even admit to sometimes going over the edge in editing my images and often regret it later - I do not mind my editing being obvious but much prefer it when they are only a little obvious. Getting the balance is not always easy - though sometimes I go the other way in processing and give my images "the full Monte" just for the hell of it, or as an experiment. :)

EDIT: I found a link to the article I referred to. The photographer's name was Harry Fisch, the river was in India almost certainly the Ganges in or near Varanasi (which I thought to be the case) and the offending object was not a piece of paper it was a piece of plastic. Not too bad recollection after almost 7 years. https://petapixel.com/2013/01/10/cr...hotog-has-winning-nat-geo-contest-photo-dqed/
 
“read contest rules carefully”

nothing to do w overcooked overfiltered or cloned images. he just did not follow the rules.

And of course has nothing to do with Don McCullin’s incredible photographic legacy.
 
Don McCullin "Looking for England"

filmtwit said:
I'm suprised that he's not working with gloves when he's printing
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If you use gloves you don't that enduring fixer scent on your fingers,
the one that that forever reminds you "I am a photographer"... :)

Great documentary on a great photographer and a great person!

Chris
 
Thank you, Peter. You put it very well.

I can remember using a Sharpie pen to remove intrusive trash from my 4x5 transparencies and Spotone to remove the same from B&W prints. I've used bleach to remove or lighten areas and burning to darken and reduce distracting bright areas on prints. Today I use a clone brush and digital dodging and burning tools to do the same thing. I don't consider myself as being dishonest when I do this. And I certainly don't condemn photojournalists who do the same thing.

I respect McCullen, he is one of photography's greats. But he sorta goes off the rails when he makes a blanket condemnation of all digital photography as a "totally lying experience" simply because someone can manipulate the image. We have always been able to manipulate images. It is the integrity and the honesty of the individual photographer that should be held up to scrutiny, not the tools and methods involved.
 
Dogman said:
Thank you, Peter. You put it very well.

I can remember using a Sharpie pen to remove intrusive trash from my 4x5 transparencies and Spotone to remove the same from B&W prints. I've used bleach to remove or lighten areas and burning to darken and reduce distracting bright areas on prints. Today I use a clone brush and digital dodging and burning tools to do the same thing. I don't consider myself as being dishonest when I do this. And I certainly don't condemn photojournalists who do the same thing.

I respect McCullen, he is one of photography's greats. But he sorta goes off the rails when he makes a blanket condemnation of all digital photography as a "totally lying experience" simply because someone can manipulate the image. We have always been able to manipulate images. It is the integrity and the honesty of the individual photographer that should be held up to scrutiny, not the tools and methods involved.
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In the context of the fact that Don McCullin uses both film and digital, I don't think he made a "blanket condemnation" of digital. Obviously, he doesn't use it as a "totally lying" tool, himself, but he is concerned about the fact that it is easier to do so with digital.


- Murray
 
Peter Wijninga said:
His introduction to digital photography. He is obviously fascinated by it. In the second clip he's at work in Calcutta and raving about the capabilities of his Canon 5D's:
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Especially when you consider that he used Nikon's for most of his time as news photographer
 
Having said what I said about McCullin's apparent negativity towards digital imagery (though I understand he himself was a convert to it, so he can't really be too negative - at least when he does it himself) I can honestly say that I really love some of his images which qualify, in my view, in the words of another poster, as "pretty pictures". As well as being excellent documentary photos. Like these ones for example which I think are captivating.

WEST-HARTLEPOOL.jpg


image-2-from-michael-dyer-.jpg


And this video of "great photographers" is interesting with samples from a wide range of photographers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CleRW-xXsJI

I should add that I am also very drawn to the images of Bill Brandt who is often thought of as a documentary photographer but he was also an artist who made many beautiful images. In fact according to art critic Sebastian Smee, Brandt professed to being "unconcerned with reflecting 'truth' ". He was instead in search of beauty. Something which shows through in many images he made. Though the truth in his images shone through as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtsIns9HO3E
 
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