Reaching the peaks - literally and figuratively

So last week I had an afternoon off and went to London for the launch of the new Norton Shakespeare. It's 3500 pages long and 7.3cm thick (3 inches). In case that's not enough, there's an awful lot more online: more variants, facsimiles, renditions of the various songs). The overall editor is Stephen Greenblatt, the eminence grise of New Historicism, a mode of analysis that I find fascinating though with some reservations. To do extreme violence to its subtlety, it holds that texts should be examined alongside almost any kind of other contemporary texts from shopping lists to diaries, because they'll all feature in some way the cultural and social anxieties which can be found in the texts (even if they're detected through their studied absence).

I'd received a desk inspection copy of the Norton volume and received an invitation, so I decided to go along. I'd be an idiot to miss a lecture by one of the world's greatest living Renaissance scholars. Besides, I could sneak off to the Shard  - that monument to speculative plutocracy - and fulfil my ambition of doing some photography from Europe's highest tower.

Both experiences were fun, but also a bit disappointing. The Shard first, as it doesn't matter in any meaningful way. I'm no architect, but I do think that if I'd built the highest photography spot in Europe, overlooking one of the world's greatest cities, I might just have spent a little extra on non-reflective glass. Just a suggestion. Anyway, I bought a Day and Night ticket for £35, allowing me up the monstrosity in the early afternoon and again at night (Greenblatt was speaking at sunset).

The view is just astonishing - the flat geography of the London region is laid out in front of you and you can see the weather changing from miles away. From this height (much like a tower in Jacksonville, I was informed by a fellow visitor) you can see the city as a system: transport, topography and infrastructure, rather than as a habitat. It was a bit of a dull day so the light wasn't great but the place still looked good. Click these to enlarge, and the rest of the photos are here.

A patch of sun

The open bit at the top of the Shard

Sun over IKEA

Decorative strip reflected on the windows

The Globe Theatre from the Shard

St. Paul's from outside the Globe

Perhaps my favourite picture of all

The night-time shots are a bit clichéd perhaps, but still stunning – mostly for the amount of light pollution.

As to the Greenblatt event, it was fun but a bit of a missed opportunity. Beforehand I had a pint of beer and a piece of cake in the theatre as a Shakespearian homage – I'm sure you'll remember these lines from Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night (apologies for the weird formatting - Blogger won't let me fix it):

Out o' tune, sir: ye lie. Art any more than a
steward? Dost thou think, because thou art
virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

Thou'rt a scholar; let us therefore eat and drink.
Marian, I say! a stoup of wine!

Then it was on to free prosecco surrounded by the most eminent Shakespeareans in the world and their impossibly hip PhD students (all of whom appeared to be auditioning for the role of Fey Quirky Belle and Sebastian LP Cover Star).

I knew I was in trouble when Greenblatt asked for a show of hands from those who had like him edited Shakespeare for publication. A veritable forest went up - I haven't edited so much as a limerick. Anyway, Greenblatt was very funny ('why is my edition 3500 pages long? Because you physically can't make books any bigger') and informative about the volume, as was Gordon McMullan, the other editor present. But what didn't happen was a full-on reflection from his critical perspective of the demands and purposes of editing, or anything like it. 30 minutes between the two and it was back to the fizz. Entertaining enough, but rather more lightweight than I'd expected.

Fencing photography on a budget

I'm desperate to tell you about brilliant author Eimear Mcbride's visit to the university, but I haven't time yet to edit all the photos and video - a few more days.

Instead, I wanted to show you a few of my favourite photos from last weekend's British Junior and Cadet British championships: all weapons, age groups from U14 to U20s. As usual I wandered around with my camera when duties allowed. There are a lot of people taking pictures (some of them on iPhones and iPads, which won't come out well) so I thought I'd give a few hints about how to get some decent shots. (Click on all these to enlarge, and see the whole set here).

Fencing halls are the bane of the photographer. The pistes on which the fencers perform are very close together. The fencers and referees very disobligingly move up and down, while other fencers, coaches and parents get in the way. The photographer can't get as close as s/he would like, and the angles are hard. It's OK if you can afford a massively fast long lens, but I haven't got £4000 spare, and anyway, people would be walking in front of you all the time.

Shall we dance?

The lighting is always, always terrible in sports halls: artificial and low. Add to that the incredible speed of the action and things get hard. Autofocus struggles to find the piece of the action you want amidst all the movement, so you're always struggling with the tension between getting enough light for a visible photo and missing the action. A full-frame camera and very fast professional lens will do it for you, but for the rest of us there's a trade-off.

My camera is an ageing Nikon D7000 - very good when new but not a full-frame, so it doesn't have a high-end sensor (which is what really matters, not megapixels). Under most conditions, it's pretty good but sports photography is hard - if you have a D3 or D4 you're thinking of replacing, let me know). For fencing, I use an incredibly cheap but brilliant lens: the f/1.8 50mm, which I think cost me £80. Another £150 would get me an f/1.2 which is very tempting, but for now this will do. 50mm lenses are incredibly sharp - the quality is superb because there are no moving parts, just lots of glass. The drawback is the fixed width: you can't focus in and out. Instead, you have to move until you've framed the shot you like, or be prepared to crop heavily. The strength is the aperture: you get loads of light with a 1.8 so you can up the speed and ISO settings. For fencing, I have it set on 1/1000th of a second, ISO 800. Never, ever leave your camera on automatic.

How to choose your shot: watch your fencers. See where on the piste they like to mix it up and focus on it. Then switch autofocus off: if you don't you'll miss the shot you want while it hunts for perfect focus.

The curse of autofocus: what would have been a great shot ruined because the focus settled on the background

Then wait for the fencers to move into your shot. As you can see from my photos, 1.8 gives you an incredibly narrow depth of field: there's a central point of absolute focus and a lot of the shot is out of focus. It's a lovely effect, but not one I'd choose all the time - it's one of the things which would be solved by investing the price of a used car on a lens (if you'd like to buy me one, get in touch).

What should you look for? Go for the badly-behaved and/or technically deficient fencers, especially at foil or epee. The best fencers are calm, controlled and undramatic. A slight movement at the right moment gets results with the minimum of fuss. But that's rubbish for photography. What you want is great big moments of acrobatic, balletic skill. Thankfully, lots of British fencers rely on athleticism rather than brains or timing: lots of their coaches will be looking at these photos and wincing!

Another victory

Note the score: he then lost 15-14

An armourer, viewed from above

Defeat

Defeat and consolation

Disgusted with herself

Hit scored, but disgraceful technique

I like the symmetry here: hits, score, position.

It's hard to get a sense of movement in a still photo, though it can be done. I didn't have a monopod or tripod with me this time, but if I had, I'd have played with slow speeds and pans to capture movement. There are two types of shot I particularly like: the moments when blades bend when landing on an opponent or are parried, which require high-speed and luck, and the moment a fencer celebrates or despairs: when fencers have their masks on it's hard to convey personality but the seconds after a match ends are good for this.

I didn't take too many shots of defeat this weekend: the fencers are young and probably wouldn't appreciate it, though one mother framed a shot I took of her daughter on her knees in front of the victor as an aide-memoire to never let it happen again!

In some age groups the size difference is enormous

The final tip: digital cameras are great. I couldn't imagine using film: every shot costing money with no guarantee that you got it right. With digital you can fire off 50 shots in 10 seconds, knowing that you'll keep only one or two of them. What a luxury.

Awesome! Destruction pornography and the loss of empathy

You might know that one of my hobbies is photography: landscapes, architecture, fencing and occasionally events I'm at. While I've never photographed serious disorder or destruction, I can really feel the pull for the photographer.

Today, I've been writing a lecture on Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, a novel which alternates between the documentary and the mythic as it attempts to explain the mass misery of the Dustbowl and the suffering of one fictional family within the fleeing mass, the Joads. I'm thinking aloud about the tensions between the novel form and wider society, about didacticism, naturalism, propaganda, proletarian fiction and bourgeois form etc. etc. I'm illustrating the lecture with a series of pictures from the Dustbowl, particularly those of Dorothea Lange, whose most famous image is a kind of Okie Madonna:

Is this photograph exploitative? It looks posed, to evoke the traditional Christian Madonna and Child, building in all sorts of cultural expectations about gendered expectations, motherhood and maternal emotions. It's a didactic picture to some extent: perhaps we're meant to feel outrage at these people's condition even while we admire her fortitude and beauty.

These images make me think too of the very popular trend for what I call destruction porn. You know the kind of thing: evocative pictures of wrecked buildings or even cities. They seemed to start with the destruction of Chernobyl, then Detroit and were popularised by urban explorers breaking into abandoned hospitals, cinemas and factories (I've done a little of this myself) and all share an aesthetic.

Detroit

The lighting is low and natural. Wrecked machines feature strongly, while an abandoned toy or dusty medical implement lies in the foreground.

Chernobyl

That Chernobyl one is pretty much the money shot of the urban destruction photographer: a gas mask for an apocalyptic thrill, a child's shoe for added pathos. (That shot, by the way, is from totallycoolpix.com, which tells you all you need to know about the moral sensibility of its photographer and fans). Damian the unscrupulous war reporter in Drop the Dead Donkey always carried around a broken teddy bear and a 'blood-stained plimsoll' for this very purpose.



These pictures are always urban, perhaps because the photographers and viewers get a little frisson from the sense that Western Industrialism isn't – as we were promised – Progress, inevitable and one-way.

Im starting to think there's something entirely decadent about this kind of thing - the idea of taking the photographer's tour of derelict Detroit fills me with horror. It feels like a tour round Bedlam or a colonial trip to the Reservation. Why not just hang about in a funeral parlour or A+E snapping the dead and wounded for Instagram? It's not even difficult photography. Decent SLR, no flash, tripod, prime lens, long exposure and narrow aperture. As to composition: lazy and clichéd. Gerard Manley Hopkins got it right:

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more.

Which leads me to the latest twist on this vampiric art. I've been following the reports of Kiev's rebellion through the newspapers and social media. I read the Guardian, which has a particularly brilliant picture editor. There's always something to make me gasp or admire the skill of the photographer. Today's images from Ukraine were no different.

It's hard to photograph this kind of scene. Once you've seen one riot, you've seen them all, though the architecture and the rebels' knowing medievalism (a full size ballista!) helps them stand out for the cameras. It's also dangerous, obviously. To take 'good' photographs and not be killed in the protest is astonishing.

But. The Guardian has a photo-gallery up of these and similar images and I'm not convinced that they're offered as evidence of an awful, awful event. They seem to be offered as a spectacle, something technically stupendous (the composition!) and begging for comparison with so many other apocalyptic: in Baudrillardian terms, the spectacle has replaced the event, which can't be so neatly captured.

But the Guardian isn't what most bothers me. On Twitter, these and many other images are being passed round without any reference to what's actually happening in the Maidan. Instead, 'before and after' shots are offered to emphasise the sheer scale of destruction: this isn't empathy or political support. The images which are circulating are those which most resemble video games, particularly the 'Cursed Earth' ones in which heavily-armoured players fight off radioactive mutants or aliens. They also resemble John Martin's massive Victorian canvases:

Pandemonium

The Eruption of Vesuvius

Martin's work perhaps had the effect of making his viewers consider their own hubris and folly, but mostly what paintings like this do is aestheticise suffering and play on the viewer's knowledge of what's about to happen, which those in the pictures lack. I find this utterly smug, decadent and pretty repulsive. 

Fallout 4 deliberately mimics a well-known Chernobyl shot here, reducing a massive catastrophe to a violent Bildungsroman with an evocative backdrop:

while Resistance is merely one of many which sets ultimate battles between humans or humans and aliens in a ravaged urban backdrop reminiscent of Homs or Kiev:

Which is all a very longwinded way of saying that the kinds of images circulated today, and the comments people are making, disturb me. They aren't empathetic. They seem informed by the scale of destruction and the aesthetics of the image rather than what's signified: a classic state of Baudrillardian hyper-reality, fuelled by video games, but also by the propaganda of states which encourage 'shock and awe' while simultaneously promoting the idea that war is as clinical and harmless as playing a video game.

As for those in Maidan Square? Great pics, guys! Good luck with whatever it is you're after! See you!

Update: moronically, I'd completely forgotten until reminded by @qui_oui that Susan Sontag has already considered all this in her book about photography, Regarding the Pain of Others in which she attacks the way news photography fuels a consumerist appetite for destruction shorn of compassion or empathy. Every new atrocity is simply food for our jaded appetites. Yes, we need to know about the horrors of the world, but what are we doing with this knowledge other than marvelling at the images? Much as I object to the Guardian's photo-gallery, Sontag objects to the glossy magazine presentation, shorn of intermediating, interpreting words.