For the critics Man Ray’s best work was his photography, especially his nudes and portraits. In 1975 Graham Harrison asked the ageing surrealist if he could take a portrait of his own but was only allowed a long-shot across a gallery. The result was an image Harrison felt uneasy about, until recently. Admire Man Ray’s art – Cadeau, A l’heur de l’observatoir – les amoureaux and Object to be Destroyed – if you like, but for me there’s nothing quite like Ray’s photography, especially his nudes and his portraits. Ray was an American with a French spirit. His images are sensuous and romantic and have a lightness of touch. Moving to New York was the making of Ray’s friend Marcel Duchamp. Moving to Paris...
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  On catching the end of William Klein + Daido Moriyama at Tate Modern and Everything Was Moving Photography from the 60s and 70s at the Barbican, Graham Harrison concludes William Klien + Shomei Tomatsu would have been a more challenging pairing for the major Tate Modern show. “We were starving and they threw us chocolate and chewing gum. That was America.” So the ‘godfather’ of modern Japanese photography, Shomei Tomatsu who died on 14 December, tells us at Everything Was Moving Photography from the 60s and 70s at the Barbican (until Sunday). Tomatsu continues “Since then I have been obsessed with occupation.” There are strong images of the American occupation of Okinawa following Japan’s surrender that brought an end to the Second World...
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A photograph of three generations of Harrisons taken in 1914 prompts a look at my father’s family who may have lived in Oxfordshire for a very long time. Let’s start with the gentleman with the beard, that’s Nathaniel Harrison my great grandfather, an Oxford man. Town not gown. I can see my father in Nathaniel’s face as he looks out at us from the past, with his wife Maria Francis by his side and his eldest son, my grandfather in the boater, Nathaniel William and his family on his right. Born in 1836, Nathaniel with the beard worked as a rent collector and clerk, then a coal merchant and finally a chiropodist. He lived with his wife Maria Francis in Pembroke Street, Cowley where...
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Inspired by the life of Sir Richard Burton, The Collector of Worlds has an offering with a single flame on its cover, and it is the burning of a notebook in a fire which begins a story about the Victorian explorer who believed that truth is only found by being true to oneself. Iliya Troyanov’s prize-winning bestseller The Collector of Worlds, the UK edition of which has my photograph of an offering being placed on the River Ganges as a cover, begins with the death of its protagonist, the formidable Victorian scholar and explorer, Sir Richard Burton. Through the flames of a bonfire, into which the dead explorer’s notebook is thrown, Troyanov takes us back in time to meet Burton as a young cadet...
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The most well known films produced by the Kodak Corporation, which may shortly be filing for bankruptcy, like Tri-X, Kodachrome and my much loved Ektachrome 64, gave photographers a wonderful, if limited, pallet palette with which to express themselves. Digital photography, on the other hand, effectively has no such constraints making it much harder to pin the medium in the mind and be creative – to really run with digital. Well, that’s what I was getting at on the BBC World Service last night. Yes, digital photography has yet to be mastered. Someone will do it, but who? I also failed to mention how Kodak’s problems today echo their reluctance to radically update their products throughout the 1970s and 80s. It was only the...
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Kofi Annan, the seventh Secretary General of the United Nations and joint winner with the UN of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize, photographed in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, 17 September 2011. The previous day Annan has spoken at the Oxford Analytics Conference on Restoring Global Trust and Confidence. The grandson of tribal chiefs from Kumasi, Ghana, Annan was considered by Democrat Richard Holbrooke, “the best secretary general in the history of the United Nations,” but Annan’s view that the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq was illegal as it did not conform to the UN charter, means he is seen less favourably by Republican poilticians in the United States. During his Oxford speech Annan spoke of the need for multilateral cooperation rather than confrontation. “From Tahir Square...
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An exhibition of photographs taken by Graham Harrison that was first shown at the British Museum in 1989, opens in Scotland on September 12th, thanks to the efforts of an enterprising lecturer from Edinburgh University. In May 1989 a line of posters went up on the railings in front of the British Museum in London to advertise what may have been the first photographic exhibition ever held at the museum. Called Living Buddhism A Photographic Portrait, the exhibition accompanied the publication by the museum of Living Buddhism, a hardback book that described in words and pictures the living culture of a world religion. Living Buddhism A Photographic Portrait remained on show, within the roll of a prayer mat of the Oxus Treasure, on the museum’s...
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The demise of Kodachrome colour transparency film in 2009 attracted considerable media attention. Less well publicised has been the gradual withdrawal by the Kodak corporation of its Ektachrome transparency film range which was aimed firmly at the professional market when introduced as a sheet film in 1947. Ektachrome did not require the complex processing that Kodachrome demanded, and the film boasted, in a number of products, a high enough ASA (or ISO) rating to alert photographers shooting in the mid-C20th to the possibilities of low light colour photography for the first time. High Speed Ektachrome, the earliest Ektachrome manufactured in 35 mm format, was, at 160 ASA, the fastest colour film available in 1959. Ektachrome 400, introduced in 1978, was the fastest transparency film of...
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