News today that the administrators of Ilford Imaging have cut almost half the jobs at the company, reducing the UK workforce to around 400. The move is intended to make the Cheshire-based business more attractive to would-be purchasers.
A couple of years ago I calculated that at any one time there were as many people studying photography in UK colleges as there were folk working in the industry. If you assume that a good proportion of these students hoped to follow a career in photography, then this would not have been a statistic they would want to be appraised of.
The situation had arisen because new courses attracted additional funding for colleges and bums on seats meant more money – particularly with overseas students who pay much higher tuition fees.
Worrying news then that, despite this year’s A Level results being bigger and better than ever, as of today there are still 410 courses countrywide with vacant places. And this despite a full week of the clearing process that finds places for students whose results didn’t live up to the conditional offers they had in advance.
Clearly the process is self-perpetuating. The steady increase in the number of courses is to ensure that there are enough graduates to teach on the steadily increasing number of courses. They sure as heck aren’t going to be working as photographers after college.
Camden's Chalcot school caters for the needs of young students aged 11-16, who have a variety of emotional, social and behavioural difficulties. In March 2003, a number of the pupils came together with reportage photographer Robert Goldstein as part of a vocational training programme. Most of the photos here were taken with a £15 auto-focus camera or an auto-focus Nikon.
The project was designed to get pupils to visit areas of London they were unfamiliar with, and photograph things with a fresh perspective. The image above of Olafur Eliasson's installation at the Tate Modern, the Weather Project, was photographed by Blue, who is 14 years old.
The photos form an exhibition, Chalcot's Eyes, on show at Gallery 27, 27 Cork Street, London W1, from August 30 - September 4. More images at The Guardian's website.
Spot the difference: it's a brief lesson in digital colour management. Left, yesterday's Indie, on the right, good old Ag magazine's current issue. It's not all the paper's fault, the featured book's publisher is culpable too: not for the first time were we sent digital files separated for duotone printing and, as you can see, they need a bit of adjustment before reproducing in cmyk. Not long ago, a famous image of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara appeared in The Independent in bright orange (for the same reason), and bearing in mind my last meeting with the photographer, René Burri, (when Burri nearly clocked me with his M6 for jumping in front of him in the wine queue, Arles Rencontres 1989), I'd be looking over my shoulder. But photographer Andrew Shaylor is not at all as scary as the subjects of his new book and will no doubt be grateful for the plug: 'Hells Angels Motorcycle Club', Merrell ISBN 1-85894-243-8. However, a little technical training at the nation's 'serious' papers wouldn't go amiss.
To illustrate a piece on today's GCSE exam results London's Evening Standard newspaper has come up with this gem of an image. So that's where I went wrong 35 years ago: couldn't tick the boxes on (a) Young female (b) Blonde (c) Pretty. No wonder the country (and its picture desks) are going down the pan.
Yes, this is the very window out of which much gazing goes on while Ag magazine takes shape every three months. As Ag is a quarterly journal of photographic art & practice, items of high topicality such as new products and services, exhibition listings, photography in the media and timely opinion and comment aren't really part of its agenda. And that's where this weblog comes in.
While the quarterly journal will continue to bring readers intriguing portfolios illuminated by critical writing from renowned authors, and practical features from expert practitioners, beautifully designed and reproduced, this Agenda weblog fills in the gaps.
We intend to bring you news, opinion and imagery from the world of photography on a daily basis - time and lifestyle permitting. And if you have your own photo website email us the URL and we'll start to build a list.
And that's the end of the commercial.
Ilford Imaging has been placed into administration following a steep decline in global demand for black and white films and papers this year. What began as a steady shrinking of the market – down 11% between 2001-3 – has become a crisis for the company with a reported further fall in demand of more than 25% already this year.
Ilford is probably the UK’s oldest photo brand still in production. The company was founded in 1879, just 40 years after the announcement of the negative/positive process. The picture above is of Ilford’s factory, the Britannia Works Company (as it was then known) in Ilford, Essex, in 1888. It is taken from an article by Martin Reed charting the history of b&w printing papers that appeared in Ag10.
The company led the way in developing resin-coated b&w papers that greatly speeded up print processing and then introduced high quality variable contrast papers, Multigrade. A long history in monochrome film technology was capped with XP1 (now XP2), a chromogenic emulsion capable of development in standard C-41 colour chemistry and with a variable speed rating of up to ISO1600. Based on colour negative film technology, it was practically grainless, with the image being formed from minute dye clouds instead of particles of silver.
It is to be hoped that the administrators will succeed in finding a home for the business. Ilford is a significant part of photography’s history and although inevitably its traditional products are far from a growth business, they remain far too good to go the way of all things.
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