Enforced phone photography - b & w

click photo to enlarge
My smartphone camera isn't the best for photographing people - especially fast moving children. However, it deals reasonably well with static subjects such as architecture. The qualification to the last statement is - if it is well lit. Today's photograph shows the concrete staircase in the Switch Room, Tate Modern's £260 million extension with three gallery levels. The exterior, with its angular brick walls, window slits, great views and fascinating lighting at night is becoming well known - especially to the inhabitants of the new, glass-walled residential towers nearby who resent having spent up to £19 million for a flat only to find gallery visitors peering into their rooms.

The interior features quite a lot of new raw concrete that extends from the old raw concrete that was laid down when the building was a power station. The most arresting feature is the spiral staircase shown in today's photograph. This wasn't a particularly well lit subject and the resulting image had quite a bit of noise. But, that noise was quite amenable to cleaning up and so I thought I'd find out what the resulting image looked like when converted to black and white. Not too bad is my answer.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Staircase, Switch House, Tate Modern, London
Smartphone photograph

Photographing staircases

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Photographers seem drawn to photographing staircases in the way that painters paint bowls of fruit, and perhaps for similar reasons - it is a very three-dimensional subject depicted in two dimensions. Architects put a lot of work into staircases and over the centuries have come up with many variations, some ornate, others utilitarian. The wrongly named spiral staircase (they are almost always helicoidal) must take the prize for the most photographed design, and I've taken my share of examples of both elaborate and simple construction.

Any staircase that involves a change of direction (called in this instance a "return") gives a photographer a strong set of lines and a visual route through an image, and this must lie at the centre of its attraction as a subject. Handrails, balusters, newel posts, wall stringers, lighting etc add further elements though the most important is often people using the staircase. Today's example was taken in a relatively dark staircase at Tate Modern in London. Here I liked the contrast of the flat dark areas and the subtly shaded lighter areas as well as the line created by the lighting under the handrail and the fact that the colour palette is nearly all in the area of browns and beiges.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Staircase, Tate Modern, London
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 14mm (28mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/30 sec
ISO:6400
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Those sunflower seeds

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Over the years I've been to a few exhibitions in the old turbine hall at Tate Modern. By and large they've been "installations" that have left me cold. I'm not a fan of this kind of art, but I do think that the exponents chosen for this venue tend to be selected with an eye to provoking the wrong kind of response from the general public. And, in fairness to the organisers, they often succeed. I've blogged before about one of the pieces I saw, Rachel Whiteread's "Embankment", a collection of white, cast plastic boxes. Most of what I said about that work applies in the case of Ai Wewei's "Sunflower Seeds".

In my opinion this is a further artful work, rather than meaningful art. Anything that it says seems to me to be so slight as to be trivial - not what I want from any work. In fact it seems to be one of the all too common WYSIATI pieces of art (What You See Is All There Is). And you do have to wonder just how much meaning can be embedded in a myriad of ceramic sunflower seeds made by people other than the artist that are spread across the ground in a rectangular shape. From above it looks like gravel: from nearby it looks like what it is. There is precious little to inspire thought, wonder, revulsion, appreciation, or any of the other feelings that art can excite.

Consequently, after I'd looked at it from above I went down to see how I could possibly photograph it. I thought about filling the frame with the "seeds", but that was just as boring as the art work itself. So then I got down on my knees and looked through the camera across them to the far wall. My best shot is this one with the point of focus nearby, the rest of the seeds, the far corner walls, and people all out of focus in the distance. Not a great shot, but, given the subject matter, what's a photographer to do?

Note: The shot of the Sunflower Seeds seen from above that I link to was taken before the public were forbidden from walking on them for "health and safety reasons" (i.e. dust). Would I have felt differently about the piece if I'd been able to do what the artist intended? You decide.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 105mm
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/30
ISO: 3200
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On