Small Aperture » Opinions and Rants

Banning photographers from photography events

Haje Jan Kamps — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 10:51:26 +0000

If you’ve ever been to the UK (or, indeed, anywhere in Europe), you know that football (as we like to call soccer over here, since it’s played with your feet and all that) is a pretty big deal. The sports sections thrive on covering the sport, it’s all over the news, and the fans lap it all up.

One football club decided they wanted to let only a single photography company take photos at their matches (presumably in return for a lot of money), effectively banning all other media outlets from sending their own photographers. Needless to say, it caused a bit of a stink.

The Plymouth Herald (relevant because the game was Plymouth versus Southampton – the latter being the photography-banning jokesters) resorted to reporting on the story using hand-drawn cartoons instead of actual photographs.

The Sun newspaper, which I normally despise on principle for being a load of mind-numbing populist hogwash, ran the rather witty “Opposition 0, Plymouth 1″ headline, and then proceeded to report on the game without mentioning the ‘opposition’ team name once.

I have a feeling Southampton FC will overturn their daft move pretty soon…

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Pictures at an exhibition

Daniela Bowker — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 19:10:42 +0000

You’re going to think that I’m obsessed with photographers’ rights and am heading up a mission—with a camera in one hand, a light sabre in the other, and Flickr as my shield—to defend the average photographer and prove that cameras won’t irreparably damage anyone’s souls. But please, indulge me this post and then I’ll return to the scheduled programme of camera releases and software updates. (For a while, anyway.)

I follow A Don’s Life, the blog written by Cambridge classicist Mary Beard. Yes, she can be rabidly controversial, but she’s also amusing and thought-provoking and I recommend her musings for your weekly edification. And earlier this week she raised the issue of taking photos in museums. Obviously my ears pricked up.

The book that started it all

Specifically, Beard was ranting about the fee she was charged to include a photograph taken at the Acropolis Museum in Athens in the reprint of her book, Parthenon. Her husband had taken the photo, the museum wanted €400, and the print run for the book is only 7,500. But that wasn’t what really caught my attention. It was that shortly after her husband had visited, the museum had imposed a complete ban on photography, whether you were professional, amateur, or seven years old.

What was that all about? It’s not as if anyone needs to contact the spirit of Pheidias to ask his permission; the dude died around 430 BCE. What’s left of the Parthenon has survived nearly 2,500 years, numerous invasions, use as a munitions store, an explosion, being dismantled and shipped to London, and a current tug-of-war between the British Museum and the Acropolis Museum. A few photos are not going to hurt it now.

Intrigued, I wondered about the photography policies of some of the other big museums across the globe. And when I say big museums, I mean those housing artefacts that are regarded as national treasures, whose original makers are generally long dead, and sometimes have slightly dodgy provenances to boot. These are institutions ostensibly run for the cultural betterment of society. Letting visitors take a few snaps shouldn’t be a big deal.

Not in a museum, but old enough to be

So off I toddled and checked out what the British Museum in London, the Met in New York, the Louvre in Paris, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Uffizi in Florence, the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and the National Museum of Australia in Canberra had to say.

I was pleasantly surprised: one banned photography outright (the Rijksmuseum), one demanded a permit (the Hermitage), two didn’t make it obvious from their websites (the Uffizi and the Israel Museum) and the rest had a fairly standard approach. No flashes, no tripods, not in the special exhibitions, and personal use only. If you want to use them commercially, speak with them first and they’ll see what they can do.

What’s so hard about that?

I suppose that we just have to hope that they don’t make the arbitrary distinction that anyone using a dSLR is a professional.

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When is a camera a professional camera?

Daniela Bowker — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 23:10:33 +0000

I’ve just come home from a great weekend of music, poetry, and theatre at the Latitude music festival. There were heaps of cameras floating around Henham Park, from 8 year olds with disposable ones that you can buy in Boots for a few pounds to Nikon D3Ss toted by the press, via mobile phones and all shades of compact camera. But if you were an ordinary paying member of the public, you weren’t allowed to bring in a dSLR.

You see the powers-that-be at Festival Republic—organisers of Latitude and several other big name festivals—had deemed dSLRs as ‘professional’, and that makes them forbidden. If you want the exact text from the website, it’s this: ‘Cameras are normally permitted for personal use. Cameras with detachable telephoto lenses will not be allowed through the three arena entrances. Professional cameras and video/audio equipment are strictly prohibited. Live video/audio recordings made without the permission of the artiste/promoter are prohibited.’

It got me thinking: what exactly is Festival Republic’s logic here?

It seems as if Festival Republic want to protect their professional interests by preventing the commercial sale of images from the festival. In order to do that, they’ve felt that they’ve had to draw a line in the sand regarding what constitutes ‘professional’ equipment. Their distinction is a dSLR camera. I can understand that, to a certain degree: their security personnel can’t be expected to know a zoom from a prime lens or a Canon 1D from a Nikon D3000, so it’s easiest to say dSLRs aren’t allowed. But in many respects, they are doing themselves a huge disservice.

For a start, have they checked out the zoom capabilities on a high-end compact camera? Or even on a lower-end camera, for that matter. Yeah, they have pretty impressive specs.

So this camera would be allowed.

Have they considered that using a dSLR is going to cause less disturbance to performers than common-or-garden variety cameras because the flash doesn’t need to fire to produce an image in low-light settings?

Plenty of compact cameras are able to shoot videos. In fact, I saw a good number of people doing that over the weekend, despite it being prohibited.

This one takes video, but that's still okay.

There are plenty of people out there using dSLR cameras because that’s what they prefer to use. They’re not professional and they don’t even hope to become professional. Their cameras are for personal use. Find a better distinction; realise that a dSLR camera doesn’t make someone a professional, and a professional doesn’t always use a dSLR.

I wonder what would happen if someone tried to use a manual SLR?

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Coherency in photo exhibits

Daniela Bowker — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 11:12:29 +0000

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to write a review of a photographic exhibition. I wasn’t especially concerned by which exhibition, more that I wanted to look at an exhibition holistically: as a collection of photographs that had been brought together with a specific aim or purpose. I wanted to consider what I thought worked, what didn’t, and what could be done better. Ultimately, I wanted to be able to say if I thought that the exhibition had achieved its aim, or if it had made me feel something.

When I was on holiday – exploring Flemish cathedrals and drinking Trappist beer – I spent an afternoon at the Antwerpen FotoMuseum, or FoMu. Amongst its other exhibitions, it was displaying a collection of photographs taken by Belgian photographers in the inter-war years.

The potential for the exhibition was sweeping. Its introduction said how: ‘…the period between the two world wars was a time of sweeping social changes. Developments in photography reflect this,’ as well as mentioning the ‘fierce conflict’ that arose between traditionalist and modernist photographers. I was looking forward to an exhibition of contrasts and of conflicts, a series of photographs that illustrated progress in photography and changes in society. I looked back on an exhibition that disappointed me and didn’t live up to its potential.

What I saw was an interesting selection of photographs – portraits and landscapes, street scenes and still lifes, abstracts and studies – that had been beautifully framed, some of which were unusual and some thought-provoking, but I felt as if there was nothing more to the exhibition than a group of pictures taken between 1918 and 1939. There was no sense of cohesion, no aim, no signal emotion aroused by the images. If there was an objective to the exhibition, I couldn’t tell you what it was, and in my case it certainly didn’t accomplish it.

Organisation

Perhaps the most obvious way to arrange the collection would have been chronologically, which would have charted the devastated landscape, shredded society, and ruptured economy of 1918 that rose, grew, and progressed through the 20s and 30s to women’s suffrage, the jazz age, and technological accomplishment, before collapsing into the abyss of the totalitarian invasion in 1939. But it wasn’t chronological. I wasn’t able to see social change and innovation depicted in a series of photographs.

It’s possible that a curator would prefer to move away from the obvious, perhaps instead exploring the photographs thematically. The vast range of pictures available could have been arranged according to any principle you might imagine, and within those principles it would have been so easy to compare the traditionalists with the modernists and enjoy the artistic conflict of the time. Portraits, landscapes, and still lifes; studies in light and shade, texture, and natural phenomena; contrasts of mundane and usual. Instead, I found myself looking at a pair of beautiful studies of light and shade – chess pieces in shade and a woman’s hand holding a coffee cup – that had been flanked inexplicably by a street scene and an uninspiring still life. A series of three nudes were hung between a picture of a child doing arithmetic and a woman rowing on a lake. Whatever feelings those nudes might have aroused were superbly stifled by the pictures adjacent to them.

Tucked around a corner, as the exhibition reached its close, were two beautiful abstract portraits: a pair of eyes and a hand resting on a book. How effective could it have been to pair these with more traditional portraits? A sort of compare and contrast exercise, if you like. Instead, I very nearly missed them. It was only because I took a second turn around the gallery that I found them. I’m sorry if someone else should have missed these gems.

The art of showing less

FoMu had an opportunity to present something beautiful here; something unusual and enlightening that displayed some searing pictures. Instead, I felt as if the exhibition curator was so overwhelmed by the possibilities to present the pictures that he flung them at the walls and hung them where they stuck. Rather than leave the exhibition feeling as if I’d enjoyed a journey through the Belgian photographic psyche, I felt a sense of discordance. I didn’t know what the angle of the exhibition was and I had no lever into it. All the same, I’m glad that I went, and there’s a picture of some piercing eyes that I’ll not forget in a hurry.

Pictures have a wonderful ability to inspire, be it awe, surprise, amusement, social enlightenment, even historical insight. Let them do that.

Photography in Belgium Between the Wars,

FotoMuseum.be / FotoMuseum, Waalse Kaai 47, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium

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The scourge of paid photo competitions

Haje Jan Kamps — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:33:34 +0000

As I keep a relatively high profile photography blog which has written about photography competitions in the past (including the inspiredly-named ‘How to win photography competitions‘, which, if you haven’t read it, is worth a peek, if I may say so myself, and I may, because, well, this is my website, and I happen to quite like promoting my own articles in ridiculously long run-on sentences in parantheses when I really ought to be writing about completely different things, like the actual topic of this article, and I hope that you might in time forgive me for wasting your time with this aside), I frequently get approached to help people judge their photography competitions.

Recently, however, I’ve received a series of e-mails (no fewer than six in the past few months!) asking if I would pretty please judge their paid-for-contests. The idea is that aspiring photographers pay an entry fee (anything from $10 per photo via a $500 site membership to a $100 per photo fee structure). They then get entered into a photography contest, and the best photo wins.

Personally, I think paid-for photography competitions are absolute shite. Why? Well, for one thing, there are plenty of free photography competitions out there – witness the site ran by my good friend Will (of Earthshots fame), and there’s no way that you should be paying silly money to enter a competition.

Goldmines for the organisers

Okay, so this photo has nothing to do with this article, but how do you illustrate something like this anyway? Click on it for my recent gallery of photos from Vietnam.

Look at the math – at some of these competitions, they charge $100 per photo entered (!) and offer prize values of about $10,000. I imagine the ‘values’ are retail values, which means that they can pick them up for cheaper, either as gray imports, or via discount retailers, for about $8,000 or so. That means to break even, they have to get only 80 entries into the competition. Of course, to get enough people entering, they need to get a lot of photographers to enter. And how do they do that? By approaching high-profile bloggers to be competition judges, in the hope that the judges will blog, tweet, and promote their competitions for free.

Where it gets really sinister, however, is that several of the people who have contacted me recently, have also offered me a commission for each person entering the competition – so in effect, they’re not even trying to be sneaky about it: They just want to make a craptonne of money, and are willing to give the judges money (!) based on how many people they manage to get involved in the competitions. Most recently, they said they would “like to offer you $10-$20 per every person signing up through your link. $10 for the first 5 participants, and if you bring more than 5, we will pay you $20 per each participant including the first 5″

Only 50% spent on prizes

Next, they made the mistake of apologising for the low kick-back – and revealing how much money they are making off these competitions: “I know that [$10-20] doesn’t sound much with the entry fee being a $100, though please bare [sic] in mind that 50% out of it will go to prizes.”.

So the business model is like this: Profit = Entrants * $100 * 40%. So 100 entries into the competition is a $4000 clean profit, $1000 paid back as commissions, and $5000 spent on prizes. With numbers like these, no wonder these paid-for competition sites are popping up all over the place.

So there we have it. The honourable, exciting activity of photography competitions reduced to a simple, affiliate-driven business model. Is it just me, or is that bloody appalling?