On Camera: Photographers at the BBC

The strip on the right-hand side of your screen

should be a good, solid black,

and the one on the left should be a clear brilliant white.

You're going to see a lot of photographs and it's important

that you should see them to the best advantage,

so don't hesitate to adjust your set.

MUSIC: Foot Tapper by The Shadows

As television rose, so photography boomed.

Professional or amateur, it seemed like everyone had a camera.

Public-spirited as always,

the BBC tried to teach us how to take better pictures.

Point the camera in the right direction and press the button.

SHUTTER CLICKS

And you've made a picture - a picture in the camera.

But the BBC has also inspired its viewers

by giving them unique access to the masters of the medium.

A view doesn't make a picture. YOU make the picture.

Try a new position.

Pioneering art programmes have created intriguing portraits

of top photographers at work.

Bring your head towards me. A bit more. Bit more.

The fashion photographer, their finger on the pulse of glamour...

Now, that's marvellous. Now, hold that.

..domineering personalities...

No, who told you to move? Go back the way you were.

..and celebrities in their own right.

Stay, stay, stay, stay.

The documentary photographer

on the hunt for those decisive moments

that define the modern world...

I'm interested in life itself.

..no matter how uncomfortable they make us.

But do you not get upset when you learn that you've upset someone?

I do. It's not my intention to upset people at all.

The portrait photographer, revealing character...

..bringing us close up to stardom and beauty.

She was always sort of golden looking, almost angelic.

And the landscape photographer,

inviting us to look again at the places around us.

I can't be happier than when I see a day like today,

with great rolling skies, and I cannot be happier.

-Lovely view, isn't it?

-Beautiful.

These treasures from the BBC's archive bring into focus

how photographers have captured our changing lives and times.

# She's not there

# Well, let me tell about the way she looks

# The way she acts and the colour of her hair... #

Look, it's like this. Here's a lamp, a girl and a camera.

Light from the lamp travels towards the girl.

Some of it bounces off and goes into the camera.

And it's this light that forms the picture.

SHUTTER CLICKS

MUSIC: Jaan Pehechaan Ho by Mohammed Rafi

For decades, fashion had been the domain of a wealthy elite.

But in the 1960s,

the explosion of British youth culture revolutionised the industry.

Suddenly, it was open to a new generation of talent.

Bring your head towards me.

A bit more, bit more.

David Hurn was one of the first

of the new breed of fashion photographers.

Directed by a young Ken Russell,

this Monitor film successfully foresaw the prominent role

of the fashion photographer in pop culture.

MUSIC: Jaan Pehechaan Ho by Mohammed Rafi

You're really producing an advertising picture,

whose sole job is to sell the clothes,

the manufacturer and the magazine.

Now, these clothes have been put, by an expert,

on a very rare kind of female

and her job is to be able to look elegant and at ease in them.

And I have to try to produce as beautiful a picture as I can,

but in such a way as to persuade people buying the magazine

that they're going to look the same.

Hurn creates a relaxed atmosphere for his shoot by throwing a party.

Although, this just being the early '60s, it's a fairly genteel one.

The Harper's Bazaar sittings are nearly always in my own studio,

which is also my home

and, as the people involved are all close friends of mine...

..everything's very informal and, to an outsider,

it would look a little bit like an afternoon tea party.

We play records and we dance and everything's very relaxed.

JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

David Hurn's minimalist informal style set the template

for what was to come.

# She walks

# Like an angel walks... #

By the middle of the decade, three plucky Brits,

known as the Black Trinity, had taken over fashion photography

and their names were synonymous with the '60s -

Bailey, Donovan and Duffy.

Brian Duffy's unorthodox methods were described by one of his models.

She seems familiar.

-I worked with Duffy quite a lot.

-Joanna...

-Duffy's great to work with cos he's sort of...

-Patsy?

You go in there and sort of three hours later,

when you've finished all the bottles of wine that are lying around...

and you've sort of talked about everything and listened

to 100 records of old war songs...

..somebody arrives with a sort of handful of clothes, you know.

Out come all the paper flowers.

And he's standing there with a camera

and you have to go on talking. And he makes you sing, you know!

He won't take the shot, and he gets bolshy.

"I'm not taking the picture unless you sing. Go on, sing!"

So, you have to sing, stand there singing in the studio. It's great.

So, all the pictures are sort of dodgy birds with teeth showing,

but they're natural.

What one's trying to do is to try and make her look beautiful.

If you don't do that, then you lose out.

And she loses out and then it's a bore.

I think there is a natural pleasure in making someone look...beautiful.

# You really got me

# You really got me... #

The camera eye is vital to this industry,

as are the men behind it -

the top photographers who deal in dreams.

Open you mouth slightly. Good.

The winsome David Bailey,

who created the famous model Jean Shrimpton

and married the famous mother Catherine Deneuve,

shows how to bring out the best in a woman

with a combination of charm and authority.

That's good. Hold it.

-SHUTTER CLICKS

-Good, good.

Make that... Let me... No, who told you to move?

Go back the way you were. Come on, back the way you were.

Good, and that flipping...hand.

Yeah, good, there.

Bailey's signature style used a stark white background.

It's kind of my way of making

everything minimal and just concentrating on the person

and getting rid of everything else.

It's just the person I want. That's the only thing I want.

I don't want anything else in. I don't want their hands.

I want very sophisticated passport pictures, really,

which are quite hard to do.

Good, angel. Yeah, and it's nearly right, if that hand was nice and...

And here's Terence Donovan.

Any resemblance to Austin Powers is entirely coincidental.

OK, hold it there.

And just, just push round. That's it.

Excellent, excellent. Now, just a little, a little... That's it.

Excellent. Just a little bit more, just a little bit more.

But what about the models, staying still,

looking pretty and being bossed around all day?

A really good model,

when you're looking back at the camera,

is completely involved in what you're doing.

It's very strange, it's very magic.

One minute they're in a very dull swimming costume

and the next minute a huge fur coat, and they change.

And sort of bring, you know, the face round a little, yeah?

Well, I mean, you know. You know exactly what I mean.

But there would have been no Black Trinity

if it weren't for Norman Parkinson,

the daddy of British fashion photography.

'The name is Parkinson. The other photographers call me The Governor.

'My life's work is a constant search for beautiful women.'

In 1967, the BBC gave Parkinson the full colour treatment,

in a film that captured his world and all its jet-setting glamour.

MUSIC: The Infant Phenomenon by Johnny Dankworth Orchestra

'You'll never see me hung about with cameras like a Christmas tree.

'But I am a photographer

'and photographers are the myth-makers of the '60s.'

The film takes us through each stage of Parkinson's process.

-Could I have your name, please?

-Suzanne Bates.

-Measurements?

-Er, 33, 24, 34.

He starts off at an agency, looking for the right model.

-I can see that you're a sort 36-cum-24-cum-35 girl.

-Yes.

'Many photographers might find what they're looking for here,

'but it's just not my day.

'So, not for the first time,

'it's out into the streets in search of the raw, the rare material.

'Just a minute.'

Do you mind if I speak to you a moment? Did you ever think of...?

-Did she ever think of being a model or not?

-I don't know.

Like a fairy godfather,

Parkinson plucks Pauline off the street

and whisks her off for a shoot,

coaching her to become the next face of the moment.

# It's the time of the season

# When love runs high... #

..the focus off her.

OK, baby.

# And let me try with pleasured hands... #

It's a silly thing to say, but give me more style.

Remember that picture I told you

that you might do with your bottom stuck out? Let me see it.

You can't stick your bottom out at all.

It's a terrible thing to say, but behave like a model.

-Stay like that, baby. Don't move.

-SHUTTER CLICKS

Parkinson made his name with work like this for Vogue,

breaking convention and shooting his models outside the studio.

Babe, put the camera on. Bang.

'While I'm working with Marisa, we're surrounded by the BBC.

'But it won't really matter if they're in my shot or not.'

Ring somebody up that you really like.

She's great down there. Do I have a film in the camera?

And one again. That's it. Stay, stay, stay.

That's it. Good. OK, we're done, we're done.

Shall we have a little hand now it's done?

-CLAPPING

-All done! Thanks a lot to you.

'We think we've captured Marisa Mell on celluloid.'

The only thing that worries me a little is the background.

-I think it's a bit too busy.

-I think it is busy.

I think it, in a way, sets the scene.

I rather like that feeling, you know.

-It's got a sort of "stop press" quality.

-Yeah.

Parkinson's improvised setup pays off.

The resulting picture has an effortless grace.

MUSIC: Time Of The Season by The Zombies

In a final flourish, the programme pairs Parkinson

with the most famous British model of the decade.

-Just adorable. Twiggy.

-Yes?

We've seen...

We've seen lots and lots of very good photographs of you.

-We've never seen you move. Would you dance for us?

-All right.

-So, dance.

# Jimmy Mack, Jimmy

# Oh, Jimmy Mack, when are you coming back?

# Jimmy Mack, Jimmy

# Oh, Jimmy Mack, when are you coming back?

# My arms are missing you

# My lips feel the same way too... #

The entire 1960s distilled into a few moments of television.

# Like I promised I'd do... #

MUSIC: Boys Don't Cry by The Cure

Fresh waves of youth culture would shift the fashion industry again

and by the early 1990s, a new photographer had emerged,

strikingly different from her male predecessors.

I'm talking to, I think,

one of the most important photographers of our generation -

certainly a person who changed, dramatically,

what we thought of as fashion photography.

Before Corinne Day, it was one thing,

and then after Corinne Day, it was a different thing.

The pictures that made Corinne Day's name appeared in The Face magazine

in 1990 and they launched the career of our most famous model, Kate Moss.

When I was modelling, the photographer...

The photographs were always about him, not the subject,

and I reversed it and that's what I did with Kate.

I captured her presence.

# I wanna be adored... #

This picture has the quality of a snapshot.

Corinne's camera responds directly to Kate Moss

and the photo looks spontaneous and natural.

I guess, when I saw Kate, I just saw myself.

She didn't like being told to look at me

when the sun was going into her eyes or to look into the camera

when the sun was going in her eyes.

She pulled such funny faces

that she looked great

and I took photographs of her moaning

and pulling silly faces and just being herself,

just trying to capture as much personality of hers I could.

MUSIC: I Wanna Be Adored by The Stone Roses

Corinne Day's pictures of Kate Moss became

a landmark in fashion photography.

They defined '90s' style.

And her approach owed much to another photographic genre.

# Adored... #

MUSIC: Sunny Afternoon by The Kinks

The 1960s were one of the great decades of documentary photography,

as magazines and the new colour supplements

competed for the best pictures.

The BBC encouraged viewers to take their own documentary images,

using some slightly scary examples.

The photojournalist composes and shoots his picture

while the action is happening.

He cannot stop the action while he makes his picture,

so he develops an instinctive reaction

which causes him to press the shutter release

at the decisive moment.

Now, in order to take these kind of pictures,

these unposed photographs,

you've got to learn how to operate your camera quickly.

It needs practice but if you practise enough,

you'll be able to raise the camera smoothly to your eye,

press the shutter release, bring it down again, just like that.

At the decisive moment, up with the camera, press release, down again.

Practise and practise until you can do it, at least as quickly as that.

MUSIC: Gnossienne No 1 by Erik Satie

The "decisive moment" is a term enshrined in photographic history.

It was coined by the man who caught these images -

a fleeting but revealing instance.

MUSIC: Gnossienne No 1 by Erik Satie

Henri Cartier-Bresson travelled the world

in search of his "decisive moments" and, in 1960, the BBC joined him.

I always have my camera, except for shaving in the morning.

It's an extension of the eye.

Photography is very much, to me, a physical pleasure,

like hunting, except that we don't kill.

I'm interested in life itself.

It's a curiosity in the human being,

it's a curiosity of what is going on in the street.

It depends how far you're willing to dig into it or to scratch.

And then you have to be as unobtrusive as possible

because, unfortunately, the camera is a very noticeable thing.

Like everybody's got a fountain pen or a watch,

everybody's got a camera nowadays.

It's so easy and, at the same time, it's so difficult.

In photography, we are passive up to a certain point,

and the world is active in front of us.

We are active only in the fraction of a second

when we press and we decide it is now.

It's just that choice which is most important.

Whereas a painter, he is active and the canvas is passive. He creates.

We don't create, except for that fraction of a second.

MUSIC: Gnossienne No 1 by Erik Satie

Cartier-Bresson moves like a ballet dancer,

pirouetting around his subjects

to find the most expressive, naturally-composed image.

And it's true photography is a mania.

You have to do it with a passion.

MUSIC: House Of The Rising Sun by The Animals

One kind of documentary photographer is a breed apart -

the war photographer.

# There is a house in New Orleans... #

No war has been so vividly documented,

so dramatically photographed as Vietnam,

and Larry Burrows has worked

harder at it than most.

For seven years, he's returned time after time

to record the events of that tragic country.

To anyone but a photojournalist,

such persistence must seem an act of madness.

He prepares for war like a soldier preparing for battle.

He's a veteran.

During the last 20 years, he's covered Cyprus, Suez,

the Congo, the Chinese-India conflict and South Vietnam.

He normally takes 50 rolls of film into the field,

one pocket for the exposed negative, another for the unexposed.

The decisive moment for Larry Burrows

is when to stand up and when to lie down.

# Down in New Orleans... #

If he lost an opportunity of making a memorable picture,

either through fear or miscalculation, he'd live with it

for the rest of the story and hate himself for having missed it.

There have been moments, yes,

when your lips go dry and you sort of lick those, yes.

And if there's anybody that does not, does not have any fear,

then he's a complete idiot.

# The only time that he's satisfied... #

Larry Burrows will spend as much as three days with a patrol

before he takes a photograph.

He wants to feel accepted, on equal terms.

He wants to share the soldiers' ordeal with them.

Only then does he feel he has the right to photograph them

in their moment of crisis.

UNCLEAR MESSAGE OVER RADIO

EXPLOSIONS

EXPLOSIONS

People that you had seen alive a few minutes ago suddenly were dead.

And you realise that it could have been you.

Photography was credited with helping end the Vietnam War,

by turning public opinion against American involvement.

But was it possible to become desensitised

by repeatedly witnessing such horrific scenes?

GUNFIRE

Throughout the mayhem, he remains obstinately humane.

Do I have the right to carry on working and leave a man suffering?

To my mind, the answer is no. You've got to help him.

GUNFIRE

But not all his work is concerned with men at war.

GUNFIRE

Well, there's the story - in fact, the last story which I did here,

which was on a little girl, a little Vietnamese girl called Tron,

and she was having a leg fitted for the first time.

And her leg was fitted and she stood up with the crutches

and he was encouraging her to let the crutches be taken away,

which he did. She held onto the bench.

She just held on with this one hand.

He said, "Come on, you don't need to do this."

And so, she gradually slid her hand off the bench.

She was holding on with one little finger, then she took it away.

And then she realised what was happening

and she was standing for the first time in many, many months.

She looked up and a big smile came on her face.

At that point, tears were running down my cheeks.

And you cannot go through these elements

without, obviously, feeling something yourself.

You cannot be mercenary in this way

because it would make you a lesser photographer.

And so often, I wonder whether it's my right to capitalise,

as I feel so often, on the grief of others.

But then I justify my own particular thoughts by feeling that,

if I can contribute a little to the understanding

of what others are going through, then there's a reason for doing it.

In 1971, two years after he recorded this interview,

Larry Burrows died when his helicopter was shot down.

Images of the war fuelled the debate

about the ethics of documentary photography.

The BBC invited the influential critic Susan Sontag

to air her concerns.

Look at this advertisement.

All but one of the group looks stunned, excited, upset.

The one who wears a different expression

is the one who holds a camera to his eye.

He seems self-possessed. He's almost smiling.

The others are passive, clearly alarmed spectators.

Having a camera has transformed

one of these people

into someone active, into a voyeur.

Only he has mastered the situation.

MUSIC: Ever Fallen In Love With Someone by Buzzcocks

By the 1990s, a new school of street photographers had arrived,

who were no longer deferential to their subjects.

New Yorker Bruce Gilden was downright in your face.

# You make me feel I'm dirt and I'm hurt... #

But by now, the photographers weren't being shown

much deference either.

On The Late Show, Martin Parr was put on the spot

about his candid documentary photographs.

Some of the images, as we've heard,

have actually upset the people involved.

Do you think it's acceptable

to focus on an individual in that way, to make a wider point,

however uncomfortable that image may be for the person in it

and for the person looking at it?

People come up to me and say, "You can't photograph me.

"I know my rights." The irony is, of course,

that their rights aren't actually there to stop me taking photographs.

You can actually take photographs

of people in public places and publish them.

So, they say they know their rights,

but the irony is that, in fact, they don't.

But they think that because they understand, perhaps,

the power of photography or the power in the media,

that they should have some input into that decision

as to whether the work gets used.

Parr had to continue defending his work for many years to come.

In fact, he became rather adept at doing it.

Inevitably, because I was angry in the '80s

about what was happening in Britain, you had to,

at the expense of individuals - and this has obviously been the point

where my critics have a good field day -

make photographs that show people in situations

where it wasn't particularly complimentary.

When you had Thatcher saying to everybody

that we were a great country and people really seemed to believe it,

this is the thing that really, sort of, would gall me,

and this is why I would look round and find places like New Brighton,

which showed quite clearly the country

wasn't the great country it was for everybody.

Viewers were able to scrutinise

Parr's working practice for themselves

when the BBC challenged him to make a documentary film,

using one of the latest lightweight digital video cameras

and pairing him with one of their producers.

Martin thought it would be good to have

one known element in the project

and so chose tourism as his subject to film.

-You're good at French, aren't you?

-LAUGHTER

Eventually, I came up with a group of ladies

who were taking a weekend trip to Paris.

They were from the former mining village

of Ystradgynlais near Swansea.

Martin's most recent exhibition is a series of pictures of food

so, at the motorway services, he was eager to get stuck into the action.

One of the things I wanted to explore was this idea

of just doing details and not having the wider situation

which you'd normally get with television filming,

but just coming right in and going for very simple visual language.

These tight shots have the kind of objective quality

that's textbook Martin Parr.

But he soon realised they couldn't capture what was really going on.

Where's that then?

Is that for us? Can we go there? Can we go there?

What you notice is the more detached, cool approach

at the beginning had been superseded by a more involved approach,

where I wasn't paying the attention to the visual shot

that I thought I would be in the first place

and I was just letting the situation flow along

and I would be filming it almost by accident.

They are beginning this afternoon

and they stop at a quarter to eight, I think.

Oh, we could have gone to that, could we?

-I think that's a private party.

-Oh...

I think, to a certain extent, I've been seduced by these ladies

and I've made quite a sweet film about them.

In fact, it's probably more sweet

than I thought it would be in the first place.

The sharp gaze of Martin Parr was clearly softened

by the ladies from South Wales,

revealing a gentler side to Britain's most acerbic photographer.

SHUTTER CLICKS

MUSIC: Foot Tapper by The Shadows

Sitting for a portrait is an awkward business.

It's hard not to feel like a bit of a lemon -

as poor Anya demonstrates for us, live on television.

There we are. Now, you should be able to see the picture now.

There is it.

There's Anya, and we're not playing games -

the picture really is upside down.

But the greatest portrait photographers have sought to achieve

something altogether more ambitious than a simple headshot.

From the earliest days of the medium,

portrait photographers have used the camera

to immortalise and, ideally, to flatter.

For actors and performers,

a career could be made or broken by the quality of a portrait.

# Stars shining bright above you... #

In the 1940s and '50s, Angus McBean was Britain's

preeminent theatrical portrait photographer.

'I suppose I was stage-struck. The theatre was an unreal world.

'It was fantasy. It was what you wished it to be.

'I used to go to The Old Vic,

'into the gods, of course,

'and somehow or other,

'I realised that what I was watching was something transcendental -

'I think that's the right word -

'and it was the acting of Laurence Olivier.

'I used to take my camera and a couple of lights

'and get Larry into the corner of the stage and take a photograph.'

# Stars fading

# But I linger on, dear... #

McBean was the photographer of choice

for the biggest names in showbusiness

and his pictures were theatrical performances in themselves.

# I'm longing to linger till dawn, dear... #

He began by experimenting with surrealism in the 1930s...

..creating elaborate photomontages in his studio.

'Strangely enough, I was born, I think, the same day as Salvador Dali

'and his work has always fascinated me, absolutely fascinated me.'

McBean combined surrealism with his commercial work

to create a unique, unearthly style of portrait.

This 1951 picture of a then unknown Audrey Hepburn

is one of his unconventional masterpieces.

McBean was the master of artifice.

He played with camera techniques and lighting

to make his sitters look like stars.

People want to look young, they want to look virile,

they want to look attractive.

You can move one light and you can make ten years' difference

to a person's appearance, and so why not do that?

Everybody wants to be flattered and, what's more,

they'd go to endless lengths to be beautiful, with their make-up,

with the lighting, with the whole illusion of the stage,

all towards making them look absolutely glorious,

so my job was to preserve this.

This portrait of Quentin Crisp is a perfect example

of McBean's careful composition and flattering lighting.

I only accidentally get below the surface.

But if the sympathy between me and the sitter is high,

then you do get under the surface in a very odd way.

What I'm looking for is the skin texture,

the planes of the face, the physical outside of people.

The fact that it's the outside of their souls

is of secondary matter, in a way.

The McBean look was widely imitated.

Throughout the 1940s and '50s,

Hollywood studios commissioned portraits of their leading actors

in a similar style.

But one photographer rejected all this artifice.

For her portraits of the stars,

she preferred a more down-to-earth approach.

The traditional Hollywood still, you know,

was to try and flatter

and titillate as much as possible.

so that in lighting,

you would light it as though you were lighting up a cigarette pack.

You would light for the eyes and the legs and, er, the breasts.

And so, each little bit became something very special.

You never get a sense of the person.

It was just that commodity that was being sold.

And in the early '50s, I was just beginning as a photographer

and I got a crack at trying to get away from that traditional look.

And I got a call from Marlene Dietrich,

asking me to come to Columbia Records,

where she was recording all those songs

that she'd made famous during the Second World War.

I walked in and the studio was very stark.

It was like a big barn, there was no lighting.

She was sitting on a stool, singing away,

and I just wanted the reality of that situation.

I didn't want to flatter her.

MUSIC: Doin' The Rounds by Humphrey Lyttelton

Eve Arnold gave the celebrity portrait a fresh modern look

and her work caught the eye of the savvy young Marilyn Monroe.

What happened was Marilyn had seen a set of pictures I'd done for Esquire

on Marlene Dietrich and she looked at me and she said,

"If you did that well with Marlene,

"could you imagine what you can do with me?"

Which I thought was quite wonderful.

And she was very clever, she was...

When she sensed a camera - cos sometimes I didn't even know

there anybody else there with a camera -

suddenly the breasts would heave up,

the back, the buttocks would jut out,

and there she was. She was the movie star.

The smile was brilliant.

She was always sort of golden looking and because...

..she had a down,

just very fine golden hairs all around on her face,

it trapped the light. It was extraordinary.

I've never seen it before.

It acted as a nimbus, so that she looked almost angelic

and it was marvellous to photograph her.

And the fun was to watch what she would do,

because you would set a situation,

you would say, "Shall we do so and so?"

And she would say, "Fine, let's go with it."

MUSIC: I Wanna Be Loved By You by Marilyn Monroe

The BBC took Eve Arnold back to the location

of her most famous portraits of Marilyn

and Eve explained what it was like to photograph her.

I'm not going to lie down - no, thank you very much!

It was always a collaboration between us.

I don't remember where I began and she ended or the other way around.

She was always having bright ideas.

It was always her session, it was never mine.

It was never the photographer's. She was in charge. She loved it.

Eve and Marilyn enjoyed a truly creative partnership

and their easygoing approach

to what had been a rather rigid style of portraiture

produced genuinely surprising and touching images.

Eve would use the techniques she developed with Marilyn

throughout her career.

Sometimes it's a great sense of excitation.

You know you've got it. It's within one frame or another.

Isabella, give me some stuff.

'They're always successful if they tell something about the subject

'that I would not have expected to be given.'

Move your arms a little. 'Cos it is a collaboration

'between you and the person you're photographing.'

MUSIC: Have A Good Time by The Brand New Heavies

# Let's all just have a good time... #

Not just a pretty face, is she?

Din-dins.

There you are.

How's our dustbin dog?

Far away from the glitz of Hollywood,

one of Britain's finest portrait photographers led the life

of a country housewife for most of the week...

..only commuting to London for a couple of days

to take her portraits for the Observer newspaper.

When did you get interested in people then?

Um...I think they were rather forced on me.

Although Jane Bown wasn't exactly a people person,

she developed a singular style

which reveals these sitters' characters.

Jane worked with minimal equipment and natural light.

In each of these photographs,

nothing distracts from the face, which almost fills the frame.

That's better. That's it, that's it.

When you go on an assignment now,

do you always know who the people are and how...?

-No.

-Do you try and find out about them?

-No, no.

'But I don't think I need... I just see their faces. I don't...

'..necessarily need to know how they tick or what they do.'

You want to come over here and sit on my lap, darling?

'I purely just see things. I don't think about people.'

That's lovely.

Do you think you get what you want?

'I go to town to get what I want.'

Yes, I need you looking this way.

'And when I feel I'm losing...

'..and not getting what I want,

'perhaps sometimes I become a bit of a bossyboots.'

Look straight at me.

On assignment for the Observer,

Jane sometimes only had a few snatched minutes to get her shot,

but years of practice taught her how to make the best of any situation.

Right, what are we doing?

-I thought I might put you down there. I don't know.

-Mm-hmm.

But I'm going to start moving... I wonder if you can squat down there.

Is it...? I don't know.

I may be wrong, you see.

-Can you squat?

-Just here?

I just want to see what the light's like.

-Very beautiful.

-Now, I notice that the whole session took 18 minutes.

Is that fairly standard?

Um, I like to think I have half an hour,

but I'm usually quicker than that, yes.

20 minutes is fine.

-Bye-bye.

-Bye-bye.

-That was quick, wasn't it?

-What a charming lady.

I thought she was very pleasant, very nice. Straight to the point.

MUSIC: Looking For Turner by Humphrey Lyttelton

In the late 1980s, Arena profiled a portrait photographer,

whose work and life were a world away

from the prim and proper Jane Bown's.

It's like you get to a place and you can do it with a flower,

you can do it with a cock,

you can do it with a portrait,

where you don't know why it's happening, but it's happening.

You've, like, somehow tapped into a space that's magic.

The leading light of the New York arts scene,

Robert Mapplethorpe was one of America's

most controversial photographers.

MUSIC: What New York Used To Be by The Kills

At the height of the AIDS crisis,

his work was openly and often explicitly gay.

Maybe it was the forbidden because I was young, you know.

That if I could get that across and make an art statement,

do it in a way that just kind of, like,

reached a certain kind of perfection,

that I would be doing something

that was uniquely my own.

Most of the time, people, photographers,

who move in that direction have a disadvantage -

I think a disadvantage - in that they're not part of it.

They're just voyeurs,

moving in on a scene

and with me, it was quite different.

They were most...

Often, I had experienced some of those experiences

that I recorded myself firsthand, without a camera.

But Mapplethorpe's notoriety was matched by his skill

and in the '80s, he became the go-to portrait photographer

for some of the biggest names in the arts.

Specially commissioned portraits

cost the sitter up to 10,000 a session.

He often uses his friends for his models.

Here, artist and musician Laurie Anderson poses

for her new record cover.

INDISTINGUISHABLE

The whole shoot of...

..of Laurie Anderson was worthwhile for those two pictures.

I like them both with the eyes open and the eyes closed.

The picture with her eyes closed captures a moment

that you're not so familiar with.

Anyway, I think I have the...

The work involved in taking pictures is deciding which image

is the right image in the end.

One of Mapplethorpe's more mischievous sitters

knowingly poked fun at his most provocative pictures.

I thought it was going to be a catastrophe and I prepared for it.

I thought I could not imagine what would go on,

but I knew it would, everything would go on,

er, if I was not prepared.

So, even though I travel light, I did take a piece of mine.

Why did you choose a large phallus?

This gave me security and I brought this big...

this big, dark kind of one.

You look, in the photo... You've got a grin on your face.

Yes, of course, because I knew what people were going to say.

But what I would like you to tell me...

I thought it was a good collaboration, right?

Because he's famous, not for his flower pictures,

but he's famous as a controversial artist.

And this photograph fitted in his, in his album.

Right?

MUSIC: Lullaby by The Cure

Another New York-based photographer has repeatedly presented us

with images of herself, although Cindy Sherman's pictures

are anything but conventional self-portraits.

Some people use a camera just straight on

and document exactly what they see, but,

but I think it's more interesting to show

what, perhaps, you might never see

and, um...um...

It's showing maybe what's in somebody's imagination.

Cindy Sherman's photographs are as distinctive

as any of Mapplethorpe's, but for very different reasons.

These portraits conjure up strange figures and menacing scenarios.

Sherman explained to the BBC how she began transforming herself

into such unnerving characters.

I always sort of retreated into my room,

whether it was my bedroom or my studio and, um,

shut everybody else out and then would turn into these other people.

I don't know why and it wasn't about how lonely I was

and I wanted a friend, I wanted to pretend I had this other friend.

It wasn't really about that, it was more, like,

changing the angles of my face to become different faces.

# In the gathering gloom... #

Sherman revealed how her transformations became

even more elaborate.

I started using some fake body parts...a long time ago.

I guess it started out with fake noses,

as just an extension of ways to make my face change.

And then, probably around this time

that I shopped for a lot of these novelty things,

I found these fake breasts and fake asses.

That's when the nudity started in with the body parts.

# Quietly he laughs... #

Sherman employs props, make-up and costumes to cinematic effect.

Her pictures look like still frames from a horror movie.

And she's constantly on the lookout for new toys.

When I'm looking for things for photographs,

it's not like a day-to-day or even project-to-project kind of search.

I don't look for things while I'm taking the pictures.

Mostly I just keep my eyes open

for anything that seems potentially weird.

A bride.

A child bride. That's... That's very nice.

Some of these are great, though.

I can dress up my little preemies in these sicko outfits.

Cindy Sherman uses portrait photography not to flatter

or document, but to express the imaginary and unconscious.

Through a photograph, you can make people believe anything,

so, um...it's not really the camera's doing,

it's really the person behind it

and figuring out ways to, um...

to...to tell lies, in a way.

When it really seems to suddenly click

is when I don't even recognise what's in the mirror.

I mean, in a way, maybe it's like possession,

but I guess that's why I don't feel like it's me,

or it's a fantasy of some hidden desire,

because it's never planned out,

it's just like, suddenly, like this apparition is there.

SHUTTER CLICKS

I was wondering around the coast of the west of Ireland the other day

and I rounded a headland

and came across this mountain in the distance.

Without thinking, I pressed the shutter release

and, as always happens with these snapshots,

the result was pretty terrible.

The BBC invited its audience to think carefully

about landscape photography.

The mountain is obscured by cloud...

Transforming scenery into a decent picture takes imagination,

technical skill and patience.

..And a few hundreds yards away, got a much better viewpoint.

I put a filter on the camera and got the clouds to stand out,

got the horizon a third of the way up from the base,

and even got a white cottage

somewhere near one of the dividing thirds of the picture.

Even the most hardened photojournalist can be seduced

by the allure of landscape.

SHUTTER CLICKS

'I want to be a photographer.

'I want my pictures to speak for themselves.

'I don't really want to be involved in political punch-ups.

'I want to take pictures of the English countryside

'without any other reason than the countryside looks beautiful.'

Don McCullin is Britain's most famous war photographer.

For him, the landscape has offered a kind of therapy.

I've seen every facet of life, so I'm much calmer now

and I'm getting a lot older

and there are good things about getting older.

You calm down, you've done it all, you've calmed down,

you've had experience and you change your opinions.

I'm thrilled now to go and walk over those fields

and do some landscape photography.

Cos, after all, if you've been to all those wars,

I take pictures to nourish my sanity.

I can't be happier than when I see a day like today,

with great rolling skies, and I cannot be happier.

And a couple of rolls of film in my camera

and I don't need anybody else.

All I need is the sky and the freedom.

The light's almost too good for me now.

I don't like this kind of light. It's boring,

so I'm going to wait for those thunderclouds to come over.

About another 15 minutes.

It's too tranquil and too peaceful.

In fact, it was two hours before there were enough black clouds

to make him really happy.

McCullin's devotion to his light meter is legendary.

Even in battle, he won't shoot without checking the exposure.

It's coming together a bit.

But landscape photography isn't just about capturing

our green and pleasant land.

MUSIC: Disorder by Joy Division

Chris Killip is drawn to the industrial North of England.

What I was interested in taking this picture is the idea of placement

as people against industry, how dominant it is on their lives.

And yet, at the same time, how the woman is quite oblivious to it.

# I've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand

# Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures... #

I tried to incorporate all the elements of the playground

but minus the children that play there.

That's taken from outside the playground,

but you're looking INTO the playground

and you can see everything it's surrounded by.

It's not pretty, but the playground isn't pretty.

People live and work in what we're calling the urban landscape

and I'm going to where this activity is taking place.

It's not something I'm inventing or creating out of my own imagination.

It's working within realism,

where the majority of people in England are living.

And this is what interests me about photographing that,

with existing conditions and in real settings.

It's a new town in the North of England.

I think it's the most awful place

and it's totally dehumanised

and surrounded by these barracks behind, which are the new housing.

Putting the people in the photograph is to try and give the idea

of what the human element is up against.

MUSIC: Flamingo by Ronnie Scott Quartet

In 1983, viewers were able to witness

one of photography's all-time greats at work.

MUSIC: Flamingo by Ronnie Scott Quartet

Ansel Adams is America's most revered photographer

and the world's leading figure in landscape photography.

An ardent conservationist, he has spent almost half of the century

exploring nature and recording its grandeur in photographs.

Born in San Francisco in 1902, Adams has never moved far away

from the sweeping landscape of his native California.

Very good..for an experiment.

Ansel Adams spoke to the BBC just a year before his death.

In this rare television interview,

he discussed his working practice and reflected on his lengthy career.

This must be your most famous picture, isn't it?

Well, it's the best-known, I guess, yeah.

It's, er, it's been rather popular.

Does it bother you that this image has become

so popular and now become a museum piece?

No, I think it's good that people like it.

I think sometimes the values could be, to an outsider, excessive.

But it's completely out of my control.

This could be seen and I just happened to see it

at an extraordinary moment.

And the picture was actually made with a leeway

of about 13...15 seconds, because the sun went off...

The crosses were illuminated from a very western sun

going along the edge of the clouds.

Would you call this a perfect picture?

No, it comes pretty close to it,

but I couldn't find an exposure meter,

so I had to rely on what I do, is the brightness of the moon,

or the luminance of the moon, as we say.

And I could have given it more exposure with a little more support

in the lower area, but I can't cry over spilt milk.

Have you taken the perfect picture yet?

No, the best picture's around the corner, like prosperity.

If Ansel Adams had a British counterpart,

it was, perhaps, Fay Godwin.

And in 1993, she gave viewers of the BBC's Countryfile

their very own masterclass.

Just a couple of miles away, Sussex meets the sea -

in photographic terms, often a forgotten piece of countryside,

but one which Fay Godwin has been developing and printing for years,

documenting, quite simply, the way it is.

OK, let's take a little look around here. What views strike you?

What would you take photos of here?

Well, I've endlessly photographed the groynes

and various kinds of sea breaks, cos I'm interested in the way

people are always trying to defend themselves from the sea.

And they also make very sculptural

and interesting patterns on the beach.

And the other thing is these land forms,

with the kind of mud flats and the moulding of the light on those

are endlessly interesting

and the colour is, of course, very beautiful -

that lovely lime green on the land.

What about the film and the choice

of whether you use colour or black and white?

Well, I like using black and white for rural landscape.

I feel it gets at the bones of the landscape better than colour.

I feel that colour is more about the outside.

It's about the clothing of the landscape

and I'm very interested in getting right at the bones.

I'm doing more and more colour work,

but it tends to be fairly close-up work,

and I use colour on the beach sometimes.

MUSIC: Forgive by Burial

One of the things I find that amateurs do is so often,

they'll think, "Wonderful view, open space," and they take a picture

of the open view and they've got really nothing when they look at it.

And I have a sort of war cry, when I teach on my workshops,

is "A view doesn't make a picture. YOU make the picture."

You have to work to make the picture. It isn't just there.

Just the sheer discipline of looking at the landscape makes you begin

to see things and see how the light affects the landscape.

MUSIC: Forgive by Burial

-Lovely view, isn't it?

-Beautiful.

One of today's leading landscape photographers is Albert Watson.

But he doesn't just photograph the land as he finds it.

Stuart, it's Albert here. Could you bring up a couple of sparklers?

Don't forget the matches.

What I'm looking for is the kind of place that fairies hide,

you know. So, I'm just going to run a test here,

with some sparklers I got, and maybe some Roman candles

and see if we can work some of that sparkle into the shots here.

There we go.

Look at these two fairies working with the lights here. OK, hold on.

-Now, just...

-SHUTTER CLICKS

So, you don't have any kind of qualms about, like,

-manipulating nature to get the shot, do you?

-Not at all.

When a painter...

If Monet's painting his Lily Pond, guess what -

those colours aren't exactly what was in the lily pond, so I mean...

It's... You're doing impressions of things. You're creating images.

Do you think it's going to go up?

What we're just adding on top here

is a little bit of, we hope, mystery,

a little bit of suggesting some magic here, which fireworks are.

FIREWORK CRACKLES

Stuart, a little bit to your left.

I'm sure there are times in the year when there is some mist

coming through here, but I'm not really able to sit here

for 365 days until that mist drifts through exactly the way I want it.

That's about 20 packs of cigarettes you had there.

Do you ever think, "What am I doing here?"

in bad weather conditions, or do you always want to go to work still?

No, I never think, "What am I doing here?"

I think, "I'm lucky to be here." So, er...

When you have a camera in your hand, you don't really,

as a photographer, you don't really...

You don't notice anything, actually. I can easily work ten hours.

I don't even need to eat anything.

So, you can just keep going, as long as you have a camera.

Take away the camera, then suddenly you feel hungry, tired,

thirsty, whatever, you know.

MUSIC: Familiar by Nils Frahm

That's my rush in doing photography.

You've somehow tapped into a space that's magic.

'Photography is an amazing business.

'It's a piece of sensitive emulsion put inside a piece of technology.

'But, in effect, that's got nothing to do with photography, in a way.

'The true arrangement is in my head. That's where my camera is.'

'Sometimes, it's a great sense of excitation. You know you've got it.

'It's within one frame or another.'

'And it's true photography is a mania.

'You have to do it with a passion.'