Film SLR Camera For Sale

Pentax MZ7 with 28-80mm lens - full working order and in good condition.

Complete with case and UV Filter and instructions.

See Stuart Deering in Design and Technology at Long Road for more details.

Or email sdeering@longroad.ac.uk

Taking photographs in a public place

An interesting short film about the legality of taking photographs on the streets in the UK. There's a nice interaction between the photographer and a couple of Police Community Support Officers in Central London.

Fens Through A Lens Competition

In the summer of the 2008, a group of Long Road photography students and staff visited Lakenheath Fen in Suffolk for a workshop with award-winning wildlife photographer Chris Gomersall.

During the workshop, students got to explore the fen and gain valuable advice from Chris Gomersall on how to approach photographing wildlife.


The resulting images were entered in the Fens Through A Lens competition and all the entries can be seen on the Long Road Photography Flickr site.

One of our current year 13 students, Rachel Abraham won first prize in the 16-19 age category.
Rachel's prize winning image (left)











Rachel Abraham and her photograph at the
Museum of Zoology exhibition (right)






An exhibition of the prize winning entries is currnetly on display at the Musum of Zoology in Cambridge until 31st October 2008.
The exhibition will then tour various venues across the Fens.

For more information:
www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/museum/What%27s%20New. htm

The competition was sponsored by the Museum of Zoology, Cambride, RSPB and The Wildlife Trusts.

Absolute must for those interested in Fashion Photography!!!
Friday Night Late at the Victoria and Albert Museum - Friday 26th September 6.30pm to 10pm

Get Close Up and personal with leading fashion photographers and stylists and explore the world of fashion photography. Watch live photo shoots, listen to leading image makers Warren Du Preez & Nick Thornton Jones, Paolo Roversi and Tim Walker talk about their work. Street fashion blogger Face Hunter will be scouting for the best personal style and agencies and fashion magazines will be checking out your photography portfolios.

For info click here.

Marilyn on Long Island (New York) Reading James Joyce's Ulysses" by Eve Arnold (1955)

Magnum's Eve Arnold: It's all about Eve

Magnum is celebrating its original leading lady. Hannah Duguid puts Eve Arnold's adventurous life into focus.There is a photograph of Marilyn Monroe, taken in 1955, in which she is reading a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses, and she is seemingly quite absorbed in the book and unaware of the camera. She still looks like a sexpot and her only visible clothing is a black and white bikini top, but she isn't turning it on for the camera – and she doesn't even appear to be knowingly turning it off, either. She looks natural, relaxed and unselfconscious.

The photograph was taken by Eve Arnold, who photographed Monroe over a period of 10 years, until the actress's death in 1962. They met when they were both young women, just starting their careers, when Monroe was a gauche and naive starlet – not the superstar she would later become. Arnold herself was a neophyte photographer, still unproven in a world dominated by men.

More than photographer and subject, the two became friends and built up a level of trust that gave Monroe the confidence to reveal herself to the camera. And more: on one occasion, during an interview, Monroe began to brush her pubic hair.

Arnold's ability to get close to people, to capture their character in those chance moments, really defined her as a photographer. She was the first female member to join Magnum in New York in 1951, which put her alongside the greats of that era: Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson. During her career, she photographed Hollywood stars and Joe McCarthy, Francis Bacon and Isabella Rossellini. She went to Inner Mongolia and photographed political prisoners in Soviet Russia. She turned on Andy Warhol's camera for him as he filmed his first feature, Harlot, although she admitted to being turned off by his attitude and his desperation to become a star.

She was almost entirely self-taught, other than a six-week photography course in New York, during which the instructor said to her: "You do not need class assignments." She learnt by experience, setting herself assignments in Harlem where she photographed fashion shows at a time when white people didn't often go there. And particularly not tiny young women like Arnold, who was only 4ft 10in tall.

The photographer Elliott Erwitt knew her during these early years. "I suspect it was harder for her but I never considered her a female photographer. She had a way of getting on with people, the mighty and the modest, in a way that was quite extraordinary. Photographers often keep a distance [from their subjects] but she didn't. She became part of the lives of many of the people she photographed.

"Maybe her size had something to do with the way she worked with people. She was a tiny, unaggressive kind of person who you wanted to pick up and be nice to," Erwitt says. "Although that was the surface. She had steel and integrity and a work ethic."

Arnold was able to deal with and photograph some of the trickiest stars of post-war Hollywood: Joan Crawford, Monroe and Marlene Dietrich. She was the first photographer to snap movie stars and movie sets as reportage, as the portrait in action, rather than the usual set up studio shots, which masked the personalities of the stars. She captured those moments when a face is unguarded and character revealed. Being one of the few female photographers could be an advantage. She was able to be part of the intimacy of the dressing room and beauty regimes with none of the awkwardness of a male photographer. And actresses seemed unusually willing to bare themselves to her.

When she photographed Crawford for the first time, the actress arrived with her two adored miniature poodles. As she passed the dogs to her secretary, she kissed each dog on the mouth and then kissed Arnold full on the mouth. She stripped off all her clothes and insisted that Arnold photograph her naked. Aware that Crawford had been drinking, Arnold reluctantly took the photographs knowing that Crawford, who was now over 50, would not be happy with the images of her body. Later, Arnold discreetly returned the negatives to Crawford and they were never seen.

With Arnold, her lens might be insightful and revealing but she was never cruel to her subjects – even if they were cruel to one another. Crawford, perhaps jealous of Monroe's youth and celebrity, described her thus to Arnold: "She didn't wear a girdle – her ass was hanging out. She is a disgrace to the industry."

Arnold made her name photographing stars, but became frustrated with the female angle and yearned for more serious political subjects. She persuaded Capa to let her photograph Senator McCarthy. It was 1954, during his time on the House Committee of Un-American activities. She described him as repellent and said that she attempted to capture the ugliness of the whole process in the faces of McCarthy and his henchmen. It was not an easy shoot, which is reflected in these pictures: they seem to lack the insight of her Hollywood work, although they are historically interesting.

One of the people that Arnold never did attempt to charm was George Lincoln Rockwell, who was head of the American Nazi Party in 1961. As she raised her camera to photograph him, he hissed at her: "I'll make a bar of soap out of you." She hissed back at him: "As long as it's not a lampshade."

She did not put her camera down and continued to photograph him at the National Convention of Black Muslims in Washington. He appears cold, sharp and uptight, with legs crossed and arms folded defensively across his chest. The darkness of his character is made plain by the large swastika band wrapped around his bicep.

Rockwell was listening to a speech by Malcolm X – the Nazis and Black Muslims had formed an alliance – and this was the real reason Arnold was there. She had been following Malcolm X for a year and had managed to charm him to the extent that he took her out to dinner in Harlem. Her photographs of Malcolm X continue to define his image – they are part of his legacy. Thirty years later, a young black photographer approached Arnold and said: "Thank you for making him look like a dude."

Arnold is now in her nineties and still lives in London, which has been her home for the past 40 years. She has had an extraordinary life, a woman born into poverty in Philadelphia in 1913, one of nine children, the offspring of Russian immigrants. Like in the movies, photography was a way out, an escape from the grind, and she hit it at a good time, just as reportage photography was entering its heyday.

"We were doing things that were more interesting than things being done today," says Erwitt. "We did big essays and we went to countries for a long time. They were golden times." And it was perhaps time that made all the difference. Arnold was able to spend time with her subjects and photograph them over years as they changed and grew up and, in Monroe's case, as they began to fall apart.

As Arnold wrote in a memoir, In Retrospect: "If the photographer has forged a relationship which permits an atmosphere in which the subject feels relaxed and safe, there is an intimacy that allows the person being photographed to be uninhibited and to reveal unknown aspects of herself."

Article from The Independent, 3rd September 2008

Portraits by Eve Arnold at Magnum London Print Room, 63 Gee Street, London EC1 (020-7490 1771), 18 September to 31 November.

Welcome!

Just a quick hello to all the new AS Photography students joining Long Road this week. We hope you enjoy the subject and get to take some fantastic images during the course.

You should check the blog regularly for cool links to other photographers, exhibitions, competitions and loads of other useful stuff (including homework reminders!).

Also welcome back to our A2 Photography students who deserve congratulations on their fantastic AS results - good to have you all back and looking forward to seeing the images you have all taken over the summer.
Don't forget A2 Personal Study draft deadline is first lesson back for the week beginning 8th September!!

The Long Road Photography Team

Dan Boulton in print again!!!

Once again our esteemed colleague at Long Road has his work published in Document skate mag, and the free giveaway version (Plus1).

Alison Jackson talk:
A Surpising Look at Celebrity

By making photographs that seem to show our favorite celebs (Diana, Elton John) doing what we really, secretly, want to see them doing, Alison Jackson explores our desire to get personal with celebs. Contains graphic images.


Video from www.ted.com
Alison Jackson Biography

Recognizing the deep-seated need of the world public to see the Queen mum seated at the toilet, Elton John getting a colonic, and Keith Richards ironing his knickers, Alison Jackson set out to create the images that we really want paparazzi to capture. Armed with cheap photographic equipment, celebrity look-alikes, and a canny sense of what we think people are doing when we're not looking, she creates images that are equal parts belly laughs and pure scandal.

Jackson's newest book, Alison Jackson: Confidential features over 300 of her images in outrageous succession. She is also the auteur behind the popular BBC series "Double Take," which focuses on the (fake) outrageous behavior of dozens of popular British political, entertainment, and sports figures. Her biggest frustration is the penchant of her doppelgangers' real life subjects to take on behavior more outrageous than her photographs.

"She fearlessly tugs away at the curtain that separates what we assume we know and what we really know about our icons and movers-and-shakers, and the result is stunning"

Sharon Steel, The Phoenix

Get your travel photos on the cover of a Lonely Planet Encounter guide!

Enter your iconic snaps of London, Paris, Barcelona or Istanbul for a chance to win. Winners will also get an incredible trip from Intrepid Travel and much much more…

You have until 8th September to enter to get searching through your images now!

For more details click here.

Photography connects us with the world
David Griffin, photography director of the National Geographic talk.

The photo director for National Geographic, David Griffin knows the power of photography to connect us to our world. In a talk filled with glorious images, he talks about how we all use photos to tell our stories.

Video from www.ted.com

Behind the scenes at the Olympics

Seen enough images of Michael Phelps to last you a last time .... seen enough of Team GB raising medals (although well done folks for all your outstanding performances!).

Anyway check out the work of Kevin German, a US photojournalist who has camped out behind the scenes in Beijing. He has some incredible shots on his blog - Wandering Light.
















Images by Kevin German

Nick Knight Takes Aim at Fashion Racism
To view video click here.

Having addressed the tricky, tricksy and often veiled subject of body size hand-in-hand with the equally inflammatory subject of feminism in his first Political Fashion film, Nick Knight now chooses to tackle the outright taboo subject of racism in the fashion industry. Despite increasing diversity throughout contemporary society, is is undoubtedly true that black models feature in fashion far less than their white counterpoints. Nick's film not only questions this, but as a fashion 'insider' takes the industry to task over one of the last arenas where racism is apparently a tacitly-accepted fact of life.

Juergen Teller - Fashion shoot in W Magazine

For images of Tilda Swinton among others.











For more info on Juergen Teller there is a detailed article in The New York Magazine.








Vater and Sohn, Bubenreuth, Germany, 2005.

(Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York )

Migrant Mother, The Library of Congress, and PBS.

(Taken from Shoot the Blog - August 18 2008)

digital file from original nitrate neg


I feel compelled to post some versions of Dorothea Lange's famous "Migrant Mother" image. This was one of the pictures that resonated with me during my very first photo class at RISD a gazillion years ago; I chose Lange to profile in my requisite slide presentation, and have been fascinated by the FSA photographers ever since.

A few folks have alerted me to the PBS film on this topic that's airing tonight, and the related article in the Times: "Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the F.S.A./O.W.I. Photographers" shows how the small Farm Security Administration's New Deal project to document poverty turned into a visual anthology of thousands of images of American life in the 1930s and early '40s."

Sounds unmissable.

One of the thing I like so much about the FSA works is that they're public domain; they show an incredible cross-section of America, and they belong to all Americans. It seems downright patriotic to me.

Something I've been meaning to do forever is to order a "Migrant Mother" print. It's amazing how easy and inexpensive this is to do. I also went searching in the Library of Congress' online vaults, and I found out some interesting things about the print. They provide three versions (you can also download very high-res files and print them yourself). The version up above is the original nitrate negative for "Migrant Mother". It was retouched in the 1930s to erase the thumb holding a tent pole in lower right hand corner. The file print made before the thumb was retouched can be seen in copy negative (second image below).

There's also some more information about the people in the image:

"Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California"



digital file from print


digital file from b&w film copy neg. of unretouched fileprint showing thumb in right corner


It's pretty unbelievable how easy it is to order a print-- printed by a real person no less-- from the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog.

Here's the pricing structure. Looks like I'll be getting an 11"x14" fiber print (since it's from a nitrate neg) for $78.00. Pretty good deal, I'd say.







Check out more available imagery-- you'll be owning a piece of (beautiful) history for nearly nothing.

Well-Travelled Photographer, Recording and then Returning
by Caroline Brothers
(published in The New York Times, 11 August 2008)
Richard Harbus for The International Herald Tribune

Susan Meiselas in front of some of her photographs.

ARLES, France — Susan Meiselas is looking a bit shaken. She has just heard that her trip to Guinea, scheduled to start the next day, has been canceled; her driver there has been assaulted and is fleeing the country. She is working with Human Rights Watch photographing child domestic workers, and clearly someone didn’t like it.

Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

A widow at a mass grave in Iraqi Kurdistan; Ms. Meiselas devoted an extensive project to the Kurds and their history.

Her assignment was meant as a sequel to her photographs of Indonesian maids in Singapore last year. “It’s a strange thing to have your knapsack filled with film and cameras and be stopped on track,” she said.

She was in this southern French city to help commemorate the 60th anniversary of Magnum, the photographers’ agency she joined at 26. Some of her work, which covers a range that includes war in Nicaragua and sadomasochism in New York, is on display alongside that of her Magnum colleagues at the city’s annual photographic festival, Les Rencontres d’Arles.

One of just 6 women among 52 active photographers at the agency, which was founded by Robert Capa, George Rodger, David Seymour and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ms. Meiselas is known for her searing photographs of conflict.

She is also constantly questioning what photography can do as the technological and economic landscape that surrounds it radically shifts.

Ms. Meiselas’s work was spotted by the Magnum photographer Gilles Peress in 1976. She had just completed her first in-depth project — black-and-white shots of carnival strippers in New England — and taken the pictures to Harper’s magazine.

It declined to publish them but assigned her to photograph women at the Democratic National Convention. Mr. Peress, whom Ms. Meiselas met on that job, took her portfolio to Magnum, which invited her to join the same year.

Magnum at that time, she said, was “a very potent place” where photographers were being dispatched to faraway assignments. Being exposed to that gave her a new sense of her own possibilities as a photographer.

“Before Magnum, I’m not sure I would have imagined myself going places I didn’t belong,” she said. Shortly afterward, she headed for Nicaragua and El Salvador, whose civil wars were to absorb her for more than a decade.

“I was hard-core; it was hard to get me to leave that region,” she said during a speech at the World Press Photo awards in Amsterdam in April. “I didn’t go to Peru or Haiti or South Africa, I just stayed in El Salvador.”

They were formative years in several ways: remaining in one place over a long period made her conscious of the narrative structure of time, and in Nicaragua a sense of what she would try to do throughout her career as a photographer crystallized.

“Staying in Nicaragua, I started to see pictures in the present as they would be perceived in the future as the past,” she said. “That was an incredibly powerful and important recognition for me. People were making history.”

While a reporter can hear about and compress elements of an evolving situation into an article, the challenge for Ms. Meiselas was to become attuned to those fine shifts so as to capture them on film. But doing so also raised some hard issues and conferred a feeling of powerlessness with which she still seems to be grappling.

“Part of what happens if you stay and take pictures is that you feel you will protect people just by standing there,” she said. “But you can’t stand there that long, and you can’t protect them.”

Taking photographs, she once said in an interview with Nicaraguan television, “is sometimes the least you can do.”

Much of what drives Ms. Meiselas’s work is a desire to step back through the looking glass to find the people she once photographed, to forge connections and return their pictures to them.

“We take pictures away and we don’t bring them back,” she said. “That became a central quest for me — relinking, revisiting, the repatriation of work: it’s become a kind of motif in my thinking.”

The notion of moving in circles is now central to her work, but in a way, she has long been doing it. She laments the demise of the Polaroid camera because it allowed her to give a photograph, on the spot, to people who did not have cameras of their own.

In a project involving the Kurds, she sought to restore a collective memory to a dispossessed people, spending several years searching for photographs that were scanned into an online archive of Kurdish history, “akaKurdistan” (akakurdistan.com).

Grappling with memories: that was her goal when she returned to Nicaragua in 2004 for the 25th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution. She took mural-size prints of some of her pictures and displayed them in the places where the shots had originally been taken.

Her war photograph of a mauled body — showing just a backbone in a pair of jeans — was returned to a lonely hillside and erected there as a kind of memorial. Another work, which depicts graffiti scribbled on a pink wall, asking, “Where is Norman Gonzales: the government has to answer,” reaches beyond Nicaragua to recall all of Latin America’s disappeared.

Ms. Meiselas of course has regrets: assignments that didn’t materialize; not making it to Bosnia or Somalia. “Doors open, and doors close, and they are not revolving ones always,” she said.

Still, she has not shied from taking risks. Barred entry to the carnival strippers’ tents, Ms. Meiselas befriended the strippers themselves until they invited her in; she was eventually persuaded to get up onstage in a raincoat and try it herself. “I couldn’t handle it,” she said.

Years later she pushed herself to photograph Pandora’s Box, a sadomasochism club in New York. “It was the absolute edge of voyeurism,” she said. “I had to get right to that edge.”

For her it was as much about violence as voyeurism; it recalled the interrogation cells of the wars she had covered, and the voluntary infliction of pain gave her nightmares.

“To be in a small room with two people with an agreement that one of them imposes violence on the other — it was so surprising how many people seek pain, who like to give it and get it, and I had to confront that,” she said. “I want to understand it. I need to be there to know.”

An exhibition featuring her Pandora’s Box photographs is at the Cohen Amador Gallery in Manhattan through Sept. 8.

Ms. Meiselas’s attempts to step back into the pictures she took decades ago seem not just a way of giving fragments of history back to its protagonists, but also something more personal: a way of understanding her own place in time.

“I come out of a documentary tradition,” she said. “We all cross history, and whichever ones we cross shape us as we shape them.”

She cannot yet say whether her photographs of domestic workers for Human Rights Watch will develop into another obsession.

“They are very vulnerable, they are just very vulnerable,” she said of the girls, some as young as 7, co-opted from Asia and Africa into the worldwide economy of caretaking. “It’s a sort of migration, and the thing that’s startling is that they are not getting any education.”

You have the feeling that she is standing there with her camera anyway, trying to protect them.

“Magnum Photos” is at the Magasin Électrique, S.N.C.F. rail yards, Arles, France, through Sept. 16. Susan Meiselas’s photographs of Indonesian domestic workers can be viewed at Magnum in Motion, at magnumphotos.com. “Susan Meiselas: Pandora’s Box” is at the Cohen Amador Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, Manhattan, through Sept. 8; (212) 759-6740.

The Girl in the Window
by Lane DeGregory and Melissa Lyttle




Photo by Melissa Lyttle
An amazing set of images telling an incredible story - documentary at its best!
http://www.tampabay.com/specials/2008/reports/danielle/












Photo by Melissa Lyttle

Photowalk in Cambridge on Saturday 23rd August 2008

This is a bit of plug for a new book on Lightroom 2 but there are some very good prizes at stake as well. Also a chance to meet other local photographers and talk with like-minded souls!

You must register to take part as only 50 places on the Cambridge walk.

More details here: http://www.photoshopuser.com/photowalk/city/cambridge.html

How to be a photographer
Video by Chase Jarvis - American commerical photographer.

For a real insight into the life of professional photographer check out this video where Chase Jarvis shows ALL images taken for five shoots (video has great music as well!) The pauses are on the possible final edit choices from the shoots.



For more of Chase this is a longer video (55mins) but full of interesting inside info and tips on how to be a professional photographer.


For shorter clips check out Chase's blog:
http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog

Check out a new photo documentary magazine online.
Vewd Magazine

Vewd is a documentary photography magazine continuing the tradition of storytelling through a visual medium.

Photographs of instruments of torture by Joakim Eneroth
artandphotographs gallery, London
until 29th August 2008

Probably not one for the faint-hearted, but pretty important nevertheless. When released from a Chinese prison in 1992 after 33 years of captivity, Palden Gyatso, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, fled to India. After his release, the Chinese authorities monitored his every step, and he feared a new arrest. With the help, he escaped over the Himalayas. With him he smuggled a bag of instruments that were used to torture prisoners in order to show the world what was going on behind the Chinese prison walls.

In 2005, Swedish photographer Joakim Eneroth travelled to India to meet with Palden Gyatso. The resulting images bear cold testimony to the continuing practice of torture not only in China, but throughout the world. More: http://www.artandphotographs.com/

From the Series Country Girls by Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp
Cockroach Diary & other stories by Anna Fox
Impressions Gallery, Bradford
until 7 September 2008

Cockroach Diary and other stories brings together works spanning twenty-five years that convey a compelling sense of both the ordinary and the bizarre in British life. This major exhibition is the first survey show by Anna Fox, one of the most significant photographers to emerge from the new wave of British colour documentary of the 1980s. For more see http://www.impressions-gallery.com/exhibitions/exhibition.php?id=20

Manchester Mega Photo by Aidan O'Rourke
Urbis, Manchester
4 July - December

This giant photo-collage of Manchester city centre is the largest panoramic photo-collage of the city ever made, measuring 10 feet high by 27 feet wide (3 x 8.3 metres) and consists over 285 single overlapping prints. Taken from the top of the Beetham Tower whilst under construction, the photo-collage covers an area of over 150 square miles, stretching as far as the Pennines.

More: http://www.aidan.co.uk/article_manchester-mega-photo.htm

The winners for the 2008 have been announced - click here for details.
Winning entries can be seen at Kew Gardens, London until September 2008.

2009 Entry now open.
Closing date 31st January 2009.
Entry fee payable.
For more details: http://www.igpoty.com

Win up to £1000
Open to all UK photographers
Closing date: 1st October 2008
Images MUST be shot on Fujifilm - for the film purists still out there!

For more info: http://www.fujifilmdistinctions.co.uk

The Sixities: Photographs by Robert Altman
at Idea Generation Gallery, 11 Chance Street, London E2
Monday to Friday 12pm - 6pm
Sundays Noon - 4pm
First Thursdays: Open to 8pm
Tube: Liverpool Street or Old Street
Entrance free.

Image by Robert Altman

The exhibition brings together 60 of the most powerful images from Altman’s extensive portfolio. As one of the lead Rolling Stone photographers in the magazine’s heyday of the late sixties and early seventies, Altman’s exquisitely candid shots capture the luminaries of every sphere of influence – from politics and music through to the everyday revolutionaries and children of free love – and creates an extraordinary photographic journey through the historic moments of political; social and cultural revolution that have come to define ‘The Sixties’.

Current exhibition at Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art
39a Canonbury Square
London N1 2AN







Frozen in Time consists of over fifty extraordinary vintage photographs and multi-plate panoramas from the Fondazione Sella in Biella. Together they demonstrate not only Sella’s skills as a mountaineer but also his ability to give a real sense of the immensity and beauty of his subjects.

Frozen in Time: The Mountain Photography of Vittorio Sella runs from 25 June to 14 September 2008

Fashion in the Mirror Self Reflection in Fashion
18th July - 14 September 2008
The Photographers Gallery, Great Newport Street, London
Entrance free

Image by William Klein


The exhibition will feature work by leading international photographers;
Mario Testino (Peru, b. 1954); Richard Avedon (US, 1923 – 2004); Nick Knight (UK, b.1958); Juergen Teller (Germany, b. 1964); Steven Klein (US, b. 1962); Bert Stern (US, b. 1929; Steven Meisel (US, b. 1954); Helmut Newton (Germany, 1920 – 2004); Irving Penn (US, b. 1917); Norman Parkinson (UK, 1913 – 1990), Terence Donovan (UK, 1936 – 1996), Melvin Sokolsky (US, b.1933), Tim Walker (UK, b.1970), Bob Richardson (US, 1928 – 2005), Grégoire Alexandre (France, b.1972), William Klein (US, b.1928), Harri Peccinotti (UK, b.1938), Jonathan de Villiers (UK, b.1968), and Saul Leiter (US, b.1923); John Rawlings ( US, 1912 – 1970); and Inez van Lamsweerde (The Netherlands, b. 1963) & Vinoodh Matadin (The Netherlands, b. 1961).

The secret diary of Mario Testino: What the world's most glamorous photographer saw
He is one of the best-known photographers on the planet, turning models into superstars and criss-crossing continents to shoot princesses, pop stars and Hollywood players. So just what is the secret of Mario Testino's A-list allure? In an exclusive three-week diary, he takes us behind the scenes of his glamorous life
Sunday, 6 July 2008















Kate at mine, London 2006 by Mario Testino















Stephanie with horse, New York 2007 by Mario Testino

Lindsay floating, Los Angeles 2007 by Mario Testino

Amber in Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro 1997 by Mario Testino

May 29
Fly into Düsseldorf to control the printing of an exhibition I'm having at Phillips de Pury Gallery in London this summer. Grieger is the only lab in Europe that specialises in large-format printing. You walk in and you see the work of Andreas Gursky and all the other German artists that I adore. I had to stand on top of a ladder to see them because they are so big; it's impossible to hold them up.
The exhibition includes pictures from all aspects of my career (left). But I try to keep the royal clients out of it. When I did the Diana exhibition I asked her kids, Prince William and Prince Harry, to come see it before it opened. I've been very careful with those pictures. A lot of people could have sold them everywhere and made money. But as much as it's very exciting to tap into their lives, I am just a photographer who happened to photograph her for one day. I have no right over those images. I am very close to my mother and I would hate anyone to do whatever they wanted with her photograph.
[Prince] Charles and his kids have an amazing relationship. I noticed this when I first did their Christmas card, and I exploited it – the way children always tease their parents. I kept saying, "Harry, William – go and tease your dad," and he was, like, "Mario! You're supposed to be on my side!"
I adore every step of the English. I like Prince Charles as much as the street cleaner. I don't make distinctions on rank. I love those [London] Tube ladies who say "Ta-ra, love!" I used to think, "How great that they know me." Then I realised they say "Ta-ra love!" to every single person who goes by.
June 1
Off to Berlin for the launch of an issue of German Vogue. I was asked to edit a whole issue, and photographed it all myself. The only thing they imposed on me was a theme: sex. That was not an unknown subject for me. My all-time inspiration is Helmut Newton, a German, who happened to be born a day after me – though not the same year. We are both Scorpios and people often say to me, "Scorpios are very sexual". Maybe they're right, because sex does recur in my work. I grew up in Peru in a very conventional Catholic upbringing, so sex was a taboo. But at the same time it was the 1960s; the sexual revolution. So I'm a contradiction. I came to London when I was 21, arriving in 1976 – the hottest summer in history. I was amazed so many people were naked. I would go to parties and they were all naked! I'm a South American and South Americans do grow up in their bathing suits. From the age of 14 I spent most of my summer holidays in Brazil in a bathing suit. They wear the smallest suits you've ever seen. I still wear my Speedos when I'm there. I don't look that good, but if you wear something else you look like a freak.
German Vogue throws a party for me – a dinner for 200 at my favourite restaurant in Berlin, the Grill Royal. Everybody from the German scene comes: [supermodel] Nadja Auermann, [artist] Jonathan Meese, [designer] Wolfgang Joop to museum curators to musicians. It's a really happening scene.
I did the cover of German Vogue (above) with Claudia Schiffer because, to me, she's the all-time German export. At the start of her career she was portrayed as a Bridget Bardot remake; she was this young girl who was so innocent she went everywhere with her mother. But now she's got her children, she's a woman. I wanted to portray that new confidence.
I also photographed this new girl, Toni Garrn. She's 16 and may be the new Claudia Schiffer. She was also picked up by Calvin Klein, but when I saw their campaign I thought it looked... I thought you didn't really get her. A lot of campaigns transform the girl into what the designer wants. But when I met her I was so taken with her I was, like, "Oh my God, Toni!" So for this issue I wanted all the girls to have a starring role. It was about them, not the designer. That's why I put all their names [as the headlines to the fashion stories].
June 2
Location-scouting for my shoot with Keira Knightley (below) for the September cover story of American Vogue. The idea is that Keira comes to be inspired by the Berlin arts scene. Instead of galleries, I did it around artists' studios: people such as Daniel Richter, Thomas Schütte, Andreas Hofer, Thomas Zipp, Thomas Helbig. They all made themselves available and the contrast between Keira and them was quite interesting. She'd never heard of any of them! It's funny how little the art world crosses over with the film world. I'm really lucky because I have access to all these different worlds: the art world due to my curiosity, the film and fashion worlds due to my business, society and royalty due to the requests I have for work. I feel very privileged.
June 3-June 5
Three-day shoot with Keira. We move around everywhere; all over Berlin. At the same time I'm doing photos for my new book on the arts scene. So I'm multi-tasking!
June 7-June 8
Shooting in LA for an issue of V Man I'm editing. The theme is "extreme". I've tried to do it around the extremes of how a male gets perceived today, in the sense that there is ambiguity: sometimes the butcher a man is, the queenier he can be. And sometimes the most feminine men can be the most masculine. I'm influenced by so many different things, though. That's good if you're in the fashion business. Because things change so much. You can't say "I like colour" because the day after tomorrow black and white is in and you're out. And I don't want to be out. I need to work. It's my livelihood. So I'm adaptable.
Most of my work is for American Vogue. I shoot for it almost every issue. This is a magazine that sells 1.2m copies and is probably read by 3m. Its reach is so wide you have to be quite easily understood. Whereas British Vogue's aesthetics are different. You can't give them work that's too bland. It's got to have a certain humour; a certain fun. And my photography is always about finding the common ground. Me, I'm a democrat. I like to believe that of the 10 people at a shoot, from the manicurist to the hairdresser to the make-up artist to the model... if everybody likes something I get the idea that by the time the photos come out everybody will like it. If only three people like it then by the time it gets to the press, the same percentage will like it: a very small number.
A lot of people look at photographers in awe. But a really talented photographer is able to listen and capture what people are telling them. Some people are so closed they don't want to hear any opinions. They have people behind them thinking, "That looks hideous". But those people don't air their opinions, then they go home and go, "Well, I earned my living. But it was so bad." I choose to work with people who will share their opinions truthfully. Because I've had it in the past when people tell me, "Oh, it's amazing." And I'm saying to myself, "It's hideous. What are you thinking?"
June 9
Fly to San Pedro to do the Michael Kors campaign with Carmen Kass. I've been working with them for six years. I love commercial work. I found that, in the 1990s, advertising ' campaigns became more exciting than editorial. When I started doing Gucci with Tom Ford he pushed me to new heights. He was, like, "I've seen you do better than that. Don't get worried because it's a campaign." Before we were restricted because of the concerns around the world: you can't have nudity in some countries; a man cannot be touching a woman... there were lots of different things. He really changed things [with overtly sexual advertising].
It's so foggy that twice the plane tries to land and can't. That's nerve-wracking when you are the photographer; not because it's dangerous but because the moment you accept a job, the responsibility is on you; if the photograph is not delivered, the only name that lingers is yours. That has its pros and cons. Pros in the sense that you can be at a shoot and an idea can come from the secretary or manicurist and you can benefit from it: when people remember the image, they don't know the manicurist gave you the idea. But it happens the same way when things don't go right. Anyway, the plane lands and we do the pictures. And Michael was very happy with the campaign.
I'm usually responsible for the casting. I've reached the point in my career where all my clients rely on me being very involved in the process. Some photographers work under the guidance of the art director: they will sell the idea to the client and then book the photographer. My relationship is different because I mostly work directly with the clients.
And I love casting. I have my agency, who do research for me now and send me who they think I might like. I used to do it all myself, but there are so many models now I would never finish. It's the young models who really dictate what is happening in fashion. We all try to be fashionable, but fashion is for the young – the fashion world is not about working for senior citizens. That's what keeps photographers fresh, the idea that we find what's happening at the moment.
I find a lot of the best young girls come from [British model agency] Select. Every season for Burberry [Testino has shot the British fashion house's influential campaigns since 1998] I look to see who's new. Who is coming with something? When I noticed Agyness Deyn [who joined the Burberry campaign in 2007 with much fanfare, though has been dropped for the current push] she was this 17-year-old girl. I said "I really like her." I started working with her when I was doing a "teenager issue" for British Vogue. Because the Burberry campaign is about the youth of England, I have to change the cast to make sure it doesn't get boring. And Agyness is someone that the press have picked up on such a lot. These days the media is much stronger [at promoting people].
But I will still work with Agyness. I just did something with her in New York for a big issue of American Vogue, which comes out this month. It was with the cast of Hair. It was hysterical because that cast are so crazy and she's, like, the minimalist. Her look is so British. It's so stylish, my God! And it's totally her thing. I mean, it's her who inspires the stylist! Kate Moss has that amazing quality with her style as well.
I have a historic thing with British models. I have Kate, Jacquetta Wheeler – I started her – Lily Cole, Stella Tennant, Karen Elson, Erin O'Connor, Jodie Kidd, Sophie Dahl... British girls are the best for style. It's interesting because when I started in England, I formed part of the English pack. There's a generation of people in the fashion business who move from city to city: in the 1980s we were all in New York, then we were all in Paris. But wherever I go it's not like I want to be hanging out with the French or Italians! I hang out with the English. I'm not English, but I am in that creative way.
June 10-June 14
Three days off. We've just finished for the [fashion] season and you have to work every day because twice a year everybody wants to shoot on the same day and everybody needs the pictures on the same day, because of magazine deadlines. It's just work, work, work, work, work. Then you explode. So I have a small place in Los Angeles because I found I couldn't stand the hotels anymore. I lived in the Chateau Marmont [Hotel] for 17 years and I just couldn't take it any more. You need somewhere at least where you get up in the night to go to the toilet and you know where you're going. I hate hitting my head on walls.
When I take time off, I visit art galleries. I'm in awe of the freedom artists have. A fashion photographer has to produce a minimum of five pictures a day. There's no "Oh, I didn't like it, so I can't give it to you." The pages have been reserved, the money spent, so you have to produce. Also I do studio visits because I love to meet the artists. I once had dinner with Sadie Coles, Richard Prince and Elle McPherson (above) and Elle said something to me that really stuck. She said, "I never buy anything without meeting the artist." And I was, like, "My God, you have a luxurious time because lately I'm finding there's such demand that if you're not quick, it's sold."
Sadie was the person who got me collecting art. She's the guru. She criticised me a lot for what I was buying at one point: "What the fuck are you buying? Have you not got eyes?"
I also party a little bit. I like going out and meeting the young scene in each city. I'm 53 and I ain't getting any younger. Most of my savvy comes from the younger people. I'm lucky because what is happening to me now is that all the kids of my friends are now in their twenties so they can show me what's happening. And today there is an unbelievable openness between parents and children. I grew up in the generation where people would never open up to their kids: my mother and her sisters, when they were with us kids, they would speak back to front so we wouldn't understand. Whereas today, a dad can hang out with the kids and it's great.
Plus, I'm deprived of my family in the sense that my mother and sisters live in Peru or America, so these kids [of my friends] have become like my family. If I were to have an accident, they would be the ones picking me up from the floor. But one of them did say to me the other day, "You fool, Mario. You're old." I realised it was a joke. But I did almost kill him on the spot.
June 18
New York to shoot the cover for V Man. A young actor called Chase Crawford – he's, like, the heartthrob of the moment. It's much more unusual for me to photograph guys. I find women are more exciting because you can play with the fashion. With men, there are more restrictions.
June 19
London for Karaoke With The Stars, an event organised by Bella Freud for the [refugee] children of Palestine. It's amazing. Lou Reed is there, Bryan Ferry, Sharleen Spiteri, Lulu... and Gwyneth Paltrow sings. She does "Killing Me Softly" by The Fugees. It's beautiful. She's one of the people I am most attached to outside of business. Her and Demi Moore. When everybody's sung and all the stars have left and I stay to have a drink, who am I with? All the kids of my friends, of course. Bryan [Ferry]'s son, Daphne Guinness's son...
June 20
I leave today for Ibiza. I was a big party person until I hit 45. Then I started to think I looked like the bouncer. I love partying, but I have to limit myself to private parties now. My mother always says to me, "Your life is full of airports!" But I want to hit the beach and sit in the sun. I come from the period where people get properly tanned.
Mario Testino: Obsessed By You, to 26 July, Phillips de Pury Gallery, London SW1, 020-7318 4023

Long Road 10 exhibiting as part of Cambridge Open Studios

Visit us at Long Road Sixth Form College, Long Road, Cambridge CB2 8PX.
Saturday 5th July
Sunday 6th July
Saturday 12th July
Sunday 13th July
Opening Times: 11am - 6pm

Recent article from The Times on Mario Testino plus new exhibition of his work in London during July 2008.

Mario Testino: a portrait of celebrity

What is it about the fashion photographer that makes him the go-to guy for Kate, Madonna, Diana et al?





Kate Moss by Mario Testino


Here's Mario Testino in the arts pages of The Times. But is the world's highest-paid fashion photographer an artist? “Of course! How can you not be when you have to come up with ideas every day?” says Testino through thick Latin vowels, a little umbraged and still languid from a flight from the States, where he's wrapped up a lucrative Michael Corrs advertising campaign, a photo story for American Vogue and something edgier in a magazine called V where he most recently shot the supermodel Stephanie Seymour sitting on the lavatory but made her look better than normal people will ever hope to look in their lives. Commerce, he says, excites him - but so what? “Fine artists sell their pieces for £1 million so they're also commercial. I think you can use your art to create desire and sell.”
Even peeing can be aspirational if Testino is at the other end of the camera and top models, pop singers, royalty and actresses trust him to create that “brave” new look crucial to any beautiful woman's long-term survival in the public eye. It was at his suggestion that Diana, Princess of Wales, had her hair straightened for those seminal pictures; that the model Agness Deyn peroxided and chopped hers off (Testino denies having dumped her from the Burberry campaign: “It wasn't a vendetta or cancelling or killing! I use people then I don't use them then I bring them back”); and that Claudia Schiffer stripped off - for the first time - for the cover of German Vogue's “sex” issue, which Testino guest-edited.
Testino, who says he is repelled by ugliness, is the king of rehabilitating career makeovers. He started off shooting models but has branched out to shooting “real people and [trying] to make them look like models”.
He is just back from New York and on his way to a holiday in Ibiza - a brief chink in a self-imposed schedule where sleep is snatched on trans-Atlantic flights (“A glass of red wine and I'm out”). Weekends are non-existent. He has a boyfriend but nowhere he calls home: “I don't really live anywhere.” Where, then, does he put his stuff? “It's a good question this, because my stuff has become nothing! My stuff is my Acne jeans, some Dior sneakers and some shoes and navy blue socks, navy blue shirts from Versace, navy blue jumpers from Prada. And my jacket.”
This is a preppy get-up that reflects not just the expensive lifestyle that he promotes in his photographs but his conservative nature. He abhors vulgarity and has no time for people he considers to be second-rate: “I've never understood Heidi Klum's success. I've never worked with her. What has she got? She's blonde. What else?”
He refused to play himself in the Sex and the City film because it would have been naff, he says. He's never watched the show.
His London studio is undergoing a revamp, so instead we are upstairs in a private members' bar in Notting Hill.Testino looks healthy at 53, a little jowly, tall, debonair, steely - which is surprising given how the internet is peppered with photographs of him grinning broadly at parties with his arm around just about anyone. He can be trivial but he is not camp and, as anybody who has ever been photographed by him will tell you, “disarmingly open”. On the subject of his mother: “I'm very lucky, because she has never cared about the sexual preference of her children.” Raised a Roman Catholic, “I am not a believer in what the Church preaches. I don't go to Mass or anything. But I have a belief. Because most people I know who don't believe, whenever there's a real problem they all of a sudden believe. And I am wary of that, saying, ‘I don't believe', and the aircraft is falling and I'm like, ‘Oh God, please save me'.”
After hundreds of Vanity Fair goddesses, umpteen Versace campaigns, the cover of Madonna's Ray of Light album, most of the time what Testino attempts he succeeds in. There is, however, one notable exception: Margaret Thatcher, whom he photographed for British Vogue's July issue and who seems to have been transformed by his lens into a snarling Tussaud's exhibit, her wrinkles smoothed by post-production chicanery.
Testino says: “I think it was a successful picture in that it was a document and it was a moment of history. I don't think it was a successful picture in the same way as the Diana pictures, where I managed to bring out something in [Diana] that we hadn't seen.”
Thatcher's age made things difficult, he says, because 82-year-olds tend to be immune to self-reinvention. But one suspects that Testino's rampant visual optimism didn't sit so well with his subject matter. “Avedon was a fabulous photographer for catching an off moment,” he says. “They didn't necessarily look beautiful, they might look melancholic or they might look scared.” Testino, by contrast, simply wants “to make people look good”.
When Testino first came to London from his native Peru in the late 1970s, he was “a bit of a pest” in the eyes of the Vogue fashionistas, who would refer to him as “that man from South America” who hung about their offices. Testino had fled degrees in economics, law and international relations, which he found boring. A glum job as a waiter taught him some lessons about human psychology. “It was interesting being looked down on,” he says. “The tackiest people always treat other people badly.”
He says that his family is middle-class but this seems like an understatement when he reveals that his father liked to fly the family (Testino has five siblings) to New York in business class. As a young man, Testino knew that “I needed and wanted to earn a living. I didn't want to wait for an hour for a bus after leaving a nightclub - I wanted a taxi”.
His heart was set on fashion photography but “I realised that all the fashion photographers in London had to do a lot of mixed jobs - they could get a Vogue assignment but they also had to do the Littlewoods catalogue and that wasn't what I wanted to do.”
Persistence, happenstance, charm and talent combined to set him on the right path. He met and photographed Lucinda Chambers, now the fashion director of British Vogue, before either of them had jobs and knew Carine Roitfeld long before she became editor of French Vogue. In the 1980s he was still under Vogue's radar, shooting bizarre photographs for Harpers & Queen (like the pop music videos of the time they contained strong, often irrelevant, narratives). It was the 1990s before he hit his stride thanks to collaborations with Tom Ford and Roitfeld. His success, he says, liberated him to be more experimental - the Gucci campaign in which Carmen Kass had a G shaved into her pubic hair was Testino's.
But is he an artist? His private art collection is coveted by Charles Saatchi. But although the art crowd is happy for him to turn up at their parties, they're less happy counting him as one of their own. One art-world insider described Testino to me as a celebrity portraitist who “takes pictures of pretty girls”. Perhaps this is connected to Testino's conservatism and his allergy to ugliness.
“I don't like a tormented photograph,” he says, adding that his photographs are not shallow, but subtly draw the viewer in. “Something attracts you in them but the attraction isn't because she has a pot on her head or tonnes of make-up and weird clothes and weird everything.”
He is irked by the notion that his charm makes his photographs: “Many people when I started didn't believe I was a good fashion photographer and probably they still think that. A lot of fashion photographers will do the same sort of image for many years; it's easier to be successful if you do that. If you want to do movement, colour, black and white, men, women, studio outdoors, daylight, no light, flash - that's me.”
His photographs promote conspicuous consumption, he works for big conglomerates and he doesn't want to give up work because it would mean an end to his glamorous lifestyle. He's an admirer of Thatcher: “I don't know whether everything she did was right but I think she helped the country as such.”
Any other politicians he wants to photograph? “No, not really, because they come and go.” But so do models. “Yes, I know, but they're beautiful, they have to come and go. They're only perfect for a certain time in their lives.”
If they're lucky Testino's magic camera will intervene.

Article by Sophie Marsh in The Times, Monday 30th June 2008.

Mario Testino: Obsessed By You is at Phillips de Pury, Howick Place, London SW1, July 3-26 (www.phillipsdepury.com; 020-7318 4010)

On the Shoulders of Giants by Howard Guest Photographic Portraits from the University of Cambridge
at Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Until 28th September 2008 Entrance free

Howard Guest’s privileged access to a wide range of people and places illuminates many areas of University life and work that have previously remained unseen by many, providing a rare glimpse of locations that are not generally accessible to the public.

On the Shoulders of Giants is the Museum’s first exhibition dedicated solely to photography, and acts as a unique visual record of the modern University of Cambridge.

The exhibition is accompanied by a special publication which will be available from the Museum’s Courtyard Shop, a virtual exhibition and a podcast.

For more details and the podcast click here.

Mr Graham Appleby by Howard Guest