Peter Marlow, one of the most enterprising and successful British news photographers, was born in 1952. Marlow joined the Sygma agency in Paris in 1976. Assignments in Lebanon and Northern Ireland in the 1970s brought Marlow wide distinction as an international photojournalist. He joined Magnum in 1981 and became a full member in 1986.
I have just spent an hour and a half with a saw and many plastic rubbish bags clearing up the family Christmas tree at home in London. Not my favorite job, as my children, safely out of the way at school, think we have same tree, called "Charlie", each year. "Charlie" gets collected after Christmas and sent to Scotland to be re planted, so each year it has to come back bigger, and this year, at three metres plus, it was almost impossible to transport it up the stairs!
It is also at this time of year that the area I live in in London is dotted with abandoned trees simply dumped on the street to be collected and re-cycled by the local council. In 2005 I made a short collection of pictures of this phenomenon, which is I am sure repeated all over the world.
I hope my children don't read the Magnum Blog!
My first direct experience of Magnum was on June 24 1982, when I turned up in Paris for my first photographer's meeting, (once a year all the members get together, alternating between New York, Paris and London to decide policy for the year ahead, and look at new portfolios presented to the group). I had been voted as a Nominee, the summer before, on the first rung of the Magnum membership ladder.
Round the table were some most well known photojournalists of the twentieth century, but on the table was basically a carpet of Leicas and other assorted cameras, and as the meeting went on people began photographing each other.
I felt more than uneasy when I finally had the nerve to join in, but it is something that I have done ever since at subsequent meetings over the years. Rene Burri has traditionally been the one to shoot a group portrait each year, an event that is always full of fun as Rene tries to dash into the shot as the delayed action setting ticks away.
I was always rather frustrated by the lighting conditions, which are normally difficult, and in my first meeting as President in London 1991, I set up two large film lights across the large table determined that this was going to be the best-lit Magnum meeting ever. It all went well until on the third day Philip Jones Griffiths started fiddling with one of the lighting stands and it came crashing down fusing the whole system.
The pictures here were all taken this year in June 2007, at Milk Studios in New York, and were my way of passing some of the time during four days of intensive and sometimes difficult discussions. They are all shot on real film, using a 6x6 Mamiya camera, and with the occasional help of a chair for the camera to rest on for long exposures.
Over the years I often get to airports very early so I can take pictures, and with time to kill recently at Tesla Airport, Belgrade I took a walk to the somewhat decaying, but highly atmospheric Soviet-era Aircraft Museum next door. I was interested to see how it dealt with the Balkan War and was not disappointed. There were exhibitions of parts of shot-down aircraft, from WW2 but also from more recent history; an F16 tailplane, a canopy and a pilot’s personal effects on the ejector seat of a B117.
I visited Belgrade, Serbia, for a small exhibition of my landscapes and a workshop with Serbian photojournalists. I always like to find out first who is in the audience and asked who still shoots with film, out of about sixty people only one hand went up! Not surprising in a city with no E6 lab only one place to process C41.
During the workshop we had very limited time so I proposed a very simple project on ‘Hands’. I used Canon 5D and went with the group, to the park and market place near the gallery, and for an hour we all had great fun in the sun finding hands to photograph.
I was first in Serbia on a family holiday with my twin brother Chris, and my father, I remember it well, it was the first time I had got drunk, with a cheap bottle of the local wine, and a shop that did not mind selling it to two ten year olds.
