The Freeman View

Stuart Freedman

admin — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:00:19 +0000

British photojournalist Stuart Freedman was born in Hackney, East London in 1967 and has been a photographer since 1991. It was in his final year at Sheffield University that he became obsessed with the potential of the storytelling photograph. Since then, as a member of FSP Gamma, Network and now Panos Pictures, he has practiced photojournalism, and writing, in locations from Albania to Afghanistan and from former Yugoslavia to Haiti – his work published in amongst others, Life, Geo, Time, National Geographic, Der Spiegel, Newsweek and Paris Match.
He is the recipient of many awards, including Amnesty International (twice), Pictures of the Year, The World Sports Photo Award, The Royal Photographic Society and The Association of Photographers (twice). In 1998 he was selected for the World Press Masterclass and the following year for the Agfa Young Photojournalist of the Year. His work has been exhibited widely, with solo shows at Visa Pour L’Image at Perpignan, The Scoop Festival in Anjou, The Leica Gallery in Germany, The Foire du Livre (Brussels) and The Museum of Ethnography (Stockholm), among others. His work on HIV/AIDS in Rwanda and from post-conflict South of Lebanon have toured extensively internationally. In 1999 he was invited to speak on Capitol Hill, Washington, about the atrocities in Sierra Leone where his initial work on the Mutilated premiered. In 2004 he addressed the Oxford Union about the continued suffering of that country.

Slideshows and Photo Essays Part 2

admin — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:59:00 +0000

In the first part of this feature on how to execute a picture story as a slideshow, we took an overview of how the dynamics of a screen-based presentation are very different from traditional print. You might question why take print as a starting point at all. There are two reasons: first, that the print experience still fills much of our lives in the form of magazines, newspapers and books, and second, that the photo essay matured in the medium of print, with the double-page spread as the main unit and an essay being built up over a sequence of spreads.

Privileged Access, for All

admin — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:27:35 +0000

I finally got round to watching a film that had been on my list – The Cave of Forgotten Dreams by German director Werner Herzog. I missed it on release, as I was away, so just now took out the DVD. Apart from the reviews, and apart from liking Herzog’s other films, especially the manic Fitzcarraldo, The subject was for me compulsory viewing. It was the Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche, France, and its paintings, which are the oldest known anywhere, date back 30,000 years.

Simon Barber

admin — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 08:33:41 +0000

Simon Barber, one of our photography tutors at the OCA, has a special commitment to collaborative photography, and for me personally provides a fascinating contrast to the more self-absorbed method of photography that I grew up with. Indeed, Simon’s photographic career began after a very sharp change of direction from a science education — a degree in medicinal chemistry. Teaching and workshops play a central role in his work, as he describes below, and his commissioned photography includes assignments for a variety of health and social care organizations in North and Central London, such as NHS Direct, hospitals and Primary Care trusts.

Slideshows and Photo Essays Part I

admin — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:36:54 +0000

Over on the Observations page I’ve attempted something different from usual, which is to look in great detail at a well-known photo essay from Life magazine, which is the publication that developed this way of visual storytelling to its full. The purpose is practical, intended as background reading for anyone doing those parts of the photography course that involve shooting a sequence or series of pictures around a single theme. In particular, this long look at W. Eugene Smith’s Country Doctor examines the importance of layout to a photo essay, which I hope will be interesting especially to anyone doing Photography 2: Progressing with Digital Photography.

Robert Golden

admin — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:56:09 +0000

Robert Golden began his career shooting photojournalistic assignments in the USA and England, and indeed his original intention was to be purely a photojournalist. Then for reasons explained below, he turned to what on the face of it seems a polar opposite — still-life food photography. He became on of Europe’s best known food photographers, shooting at the top end of the advertising world, and inevitably in that business expanded into television commercials. He went on to direct over 850 commercials, winning numerous awards. We met a long time ago in Washington DC on a project that was neither photojournalism nor studio work, brought together by an art director friend, David Larkin, who hired both of us to photograph the National Air and Space Museum, a huge project that took many weeks. More recently, Robert has returned to documentary reportage, but making films more than shooting still images. Now that the lines are becoming blurred between the two, I thought it would be interesting to talk to someone at the top of their profession who has embraced two pairs of contrasts: photojournalism and studio shooting, also still and film. Robert’s first feature film was chosen as Best of the Festival, Edinburgh, and selected for Sundance amongst others. And he has filmed over thirty documentaries winning several awards. Presently an exhibition of photographs and films called HOME is touring the United Kingdom and he has established an on-line cinema called Objective Cinema for documentary films.

Country Doctor

admin — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 08:53:00 +0000

Case History of a Classic Profile Photo Essay

Magazine picture stories using photographs evolved during the 1930s, first in Europe, and then in the United States. Once editors understood that sequenced photographs on a double-page spread could tell a story in a different way from words alone, it became a particular way of communicating in its own right. It was Life magazine that gave it the name photo essay, and developed it to the full.

One of the classic early photo essays was Country Doctor, shot by W. Eugene Smith Smith on assignment for Life magazine in 1948. It took four weeks, longer than the editors anticipated, as was usual with this photographer. This is widely regarded as the first modern photo essay, and indeed, Smith is considered by most to have perfected the form, although of course this was in the context of Life magazine’s commitment to running picture stories. Considerable preparation went into the story, beginning with finding two things that the magazine thought important: a scenic setting and an attractive-looking person. Smith himself had no qualms about organising a story to ensure that the pictures would be strong. Smith wrote, “The majority of photographic stories require a certain amount of setting up, re-arranging and stage direction to bring pictorial and editorial coherency to pictures….it is done for the purpose of a better translation of the spirit of the actuality, it is completely ethical.”

Jesse Alexander

admin — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 12:22:29 +0000

Jesse Alexander has been working professionally with photography since 2004, after graduating from the Surrey Institute of Art & Design in Farnham (now know as the University for the Creative Arts). As well as a photographic practice, Jesse has written for several magazines, including Source and HotShoe Magazine and teaches photography within Further and Higher Education. His photographic practice is mainly concerned with landscape, but also often explores the photographic medium itself as a subject.

Vertical Landscapes

admin — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 09:16:33 +0000

There’s a new exhibition at the Shanghai Museum near the corner of People’s Square, close to where I’m staying this month, and it features a wonderful collection of Chinese scroll paintings. These are executed in brush and ink, some coloured, some monochrome. Prominent among them are what are called Shan shui (literally ‘Mountain-Water’) paintings, and these follow some very specific conventions, developed over the sixteen centuries during which this form has been painted. Although there are horizontal and squarish versions of Shan shui, vertical scrolls are the most common, and these are what interested me most as I thought about how photographers compose vertical landscapes – and how less often than horizontal.

On Imperfection

admin — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 19:18:36 +0000

One of the underlying themes in all the OCA photography courses is developing a photographic eye and a photographic way of thinking. The emphasis is firmly on this, and as a result, the technical aspects of photography and digital processing are treated as support for making imagery, not as ends in themselves. Maybe this isn’t really necessary for me to plug, but photography as taught and as talked about has a tendency to drift towards the technical, the mechanical and the hardware. There’s no mystery to this: many people simply find that hands-on procedures are easier to understand than less definite things such as composition, colour judgment and how to deal with people when you want to photograph them.