Magnum Photographer Dennis Stock sadly died today.

Stock started his career as an apprentice to Life magazine photographer Gjon Mili and joined Magnum in 1951. Although best known for his intimate portraits of James Dean he was also a prolific Jazz photographer taking some of the most iconic Jazz portraits in history for his book Jazz Street. in 1968 he founded the production company Visual Objectives and shot several documentaries but returned to Magnum to serve as president of Magnum’s film and new media division in 1969 and 1970. Stock generated a book or an exhibition almost every year since the 1950s.

“Art is a well-articulated manifestation of an aspect of life. I have been privileged to view much of life through my cameras, making the journey an enlightened experience. My emphasis has mainly been on affirmative reactions to human behavior and a strong attraction to the beauty in nature.”

From Magnum: His photographs have appeared in other major publications, including Paris Match and Stern. He has worked as a writer, director, and producer for television and film, and has exhibited his work at the Art Institute of Chicago; International Center of Photography, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; Schirm Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Magnum have an incredible Audio/Visual Essay of his work here and I’d really urge you to check it out.

His Magnum portfolio is here.

The British Journal of Photography’s obituary is here and they are updating it with quotes and tributes as they come in.

‘Dennis Stock was among a group of photographers that were able to define themselves through iconic sets of images,’ says Peter Hamilton, writer, curator and book publisher. ‘His images represented the essence of the 1950s cool.’

all images ©magnum

I’m really proud to be able to announce the Frontline Club’s Capturing Conflict Film Festival. The festival is something I have been working on for months and I really hope the lineup showcases a selection of the most important films about the risks journalists and filmmakers take in order to get their stories out.

The festival begins on the 7th September and the listings are below, for a more in-depth description of the films please visit the club’s main listings page here:

Tortured Truths – September 4, 7pm – book
Followed by a Q&A with Director and Producer Christine Garabedian

Russian Newspaper Murders – September 7, 7pm – book
Followed by a Q&A with Director Paul Jenkins

Death in Gaza – September 10, 7pm – book
Followed by a Q&A with Reporter Saira Shah

Unseen Gaza – September 14, 7pm – book
Followed by a Q&A with Jon Snow and Director Katherine Churcher

Somalia: Al-Qaeda’s New Haven – September 24, 7pm – book
Followed by a Q&A with Director James Brabazon

Cry Freetown – September 25, 7pm – book
Followed by a Q&A with Writer, Reporter and Cameraman Sorious Samura and Director Ron McCullagh

Mo & Me – September 28, 7pm – book
Followed by a Q&A with Salim Amin

I would be incredibly grateful if you could help us promote the film festival on your website or blog. Please use the code below to add the festival banner to your site.

I have to say I was a little apprehensive about going to a festival on my own, I envisaged myself standing in amongst thousands of people and taking to no-one for three days. Luckily my pessimism was proved wrong and I had the best festival experience I have ever had.

Pitchfork is a fairly small festival but it just gets it right in every way (I am told the only downside was the drinks queue, but I managed to avoid that). Within 10 minutes of arriving I had befriended an incredibly cool photographer from Yahoo Music called Taleen. After seeing her disappear into the photo pit for Yo La Tengo I knew I should probably get my press pass sorted, which luckily I did.

The next morning I dashed to a photography wholesalers and persuaded them to lend me a lens, which was tricky as I didn’t have the required $2000 spare on my credit card as a deposit… gulp, but they were kind and let me loose with one. Photographing a festival was one of the toughest things I have ever had to photograph. You are limited to the first three songs, and combined with ever changing light and the scrum of the other photographers, if you aren’t used to photographing fast you will be after.

Seeing bands from the photo pit was incredible, you are obviously closer than anyone else, but with a zoom lens you view the band from an almost intimate perspective. I tried to photograph everything, and although that meant missing the rest of a set, I saw many more bands than I would have done.

My partner in crime, Taleen

For some reason Taleen and I had also been given VIP passes and so we got to spend our time backstage. It was very different to what I was expecting. Obviously better toilets and free booze (although I do not recommend Sparks, alcoholic-lucozade certainly keeps you going, but you feel very strange in the morning). Taleen loved approaching people in bands and set about talking to anyone and everyone, I’m awful at remembering who people are and this worked in my favour as I didn’t become a blithering idiot. I did manage to maintain my ability to say daft things at the worst times but I think (hope) my accent allowed me to get away with it.

There were a few bands that I was more excited about getting to see so close, rather than taking their picture, and Grizzly Bear were definitely one of those. There was a brief panic when my camera ran out of battery (amateur, I know) but I had also taken my Pentax film camera and bizarrely those ended up being the photos I like the most.

Flaming Lips was certainly an experience.We knew they would be the hardest to photograph as the scrum would be the most competitive. Taleen wasn’t really up for it but I was too curious to miss it and dragged her over. The first set of photographers had been let and and there were hundreds of them squished into the few metres the photographers get. We were held back and told that everyone was only getting one song. We obviously missed the ‘one song’ that included Wayne Coyne coming out onto the stage through a backdrop of a woman with her legs open in his trademark bouncy ball and out onto the crowd. However it was a great sight to see and when we finally got in I was thankful that we only had the one song as the previously courteous photo pit had turned into a feeding frenzy with elbows being thrown left, right and centre. Although I am not a huge Flaming Lips fan, they certainly put on a show and the atmosphere they created was the perfect way to end the festival.

If you are more interested in reading about the bands than my daft experience see below:

My review for Drowned in Sound is here – Close to P4K-tion: DiS does the Pitchfork Music Festival

It was wonderful being back in Chicago, I managed to have nearly two days either side of the festival and was taken to the most amazing places to eat by my Chicago-an friend Kevin. Hopefully the line-up for Pitchfork will be as good next year and I can hotfoot it over there again.

The rest of my photos are in this fancy slideshow below:

and look, there I am….

I didn’t think that they would do Havana justice in any way and so I was fairly ambivalent when I was taking them. That attitude may have worked in my favour as they turned out to be my favourite. They seem to show a lot more of the decrepitude that the vibrancy of the colour photos seem to hide.

It’s quarter to nine and I am absolutely exhausted. My first full day in Cuba and it feels as though I have taken in a week’s worth of sights and experience. I feel like I am in a different world, and of course in many ways I am.

No less than 10 minutes after leaving the hotel this morning and I was whisked off by two local women, Betty and Isobel, who walked me round the city to see salsa bars, historical places and a lesson in Cuban culture, it’s economy, delights and downfalls and all for the price of a round of Mojitos. A bargain in my eyes.

I spent the rest of the morning walking the obvious tourist areas and parks and just tried to soak up the city as I walked around. The only downside to being 6 foot and blonde in Havana is that there is no way you could be anything but a tourist, a feeling I haven’t felt anywhere since visiting Hong Kong.

Tourism is Cuba’s main industry and this is strongly felt as you walk around turning taxi drivers, horse and carriage drivers, artists and vendors down with a huge sense of guilt knowing how much your convertible tourist peso means to them. It took a lot of strength to say no to certain people pleading for me to take them up on whatever they were offering, the main factor really being just how expensive things are in the convertible peso. Cuba is not cheap as a tourist but you really can understand why with all the trade embargoes the country is under. I allowed myself to get completely ripped off by artists on the steps of the Capital building, for an extortionate amount, purely because I really enjoyed talking to them. You really can’t help but feeling like a walking wallet but it comes with an unusual sense of empathy.

In other countries you feel happy to barter and bargain your purchases, in Cuba you feel almost cruel. This also comes with other mixed feelings. In countries such as Sierra Leone I felt happy to be persuaded into buying jewellery or carvings I may not necessarily have wanted as they were for so little money, whereas here we are talking prices above those in England and a round of mojitos or a meal can cost you more than £20 easily.

I quickly learnt to look out for crowds of Cubans piling into ice cream shops and supermarkets to buy food on the go and avoid extremely high prices. Obviously anything imported is far more expensive and it’s really an experience to try the Cuban versions of various foods, and as I had read, the food is nothing short of interesting. In the hotels and more touristy cafes the food is labelled in western terms but you really can’t predict what you are going to get no matter what you order. The fruit is delicious, and the coffee is by far the best I have ever tasted. The breakfast bar at my hotel is a very bizarre concoction of delights on offer, which as anyone who knows me well knows, is pretty much how I construct meals and so suits me beautifully. This morning I had a strange mixture of Serrano ham, fruit, quiche, pastry and a stilton-like cream cheese.

Walking around I had amassed at least 200 photos in a matter of hours with about 70 I truly liked, which isn’t a bad ratio. There is something beautiful to photograph every step you make in Havana, much to the bemusement of the locals. In the afternoon I walked down to the Malecon, an extremely long road which attracts Havana’s youth in the evenings. I walked to the Museum of the Revolution and the Museum of Art, I was very much in the mood to continue walking but couldn’t help but stop and marvel at the enormous bugs on the outside of the Art Museum.

So far my favourite aspect of Havana just has to be the run down 14th Century plazas in their various states and colours. They are just breathtaking and you can’t help but imagine what they were like when they were in prime condition.

By late afternoon the temperature had begun to get incredibly high and so I went back to the hotel to cool down. I found myself on the rooftop pool and realised I had very little idea really how to be ‘on holiday’ I haven’t travelled in a non-work capacity for years and really felt as though I should be doing something rather than sitting on a pool lounger. However, the jetlag had taken hold and I was just incapable of doing anything other than enjoying the incredible view and reading my book. It was a beautiful way to see the sunset and people watch in the streets of Havana below. After a welcome break I am ready for another mojito and can already hear the music beginning in the streets outside.

So I’m in Cuba. The flight was incredible. I have never been one to look out of the window but the light was beautiful and the sky so clear that as we crossed the Atlantic I could see ships crossing the ocean. I couldn’t help but put my iPod on and just stare out across the Atlantic. It was so vast, which slightly terrifies me but it was just incredibly beautiful. Then after a few hours suddenly there was a tiny island surrounded by a beautiful turquoise coastline, Bermuda.

I arrived in Cuba just before 6pm and it was startling to walk off the plane to an airport full of workers wearing face masks. We then all had to fill in a sanitisation form declaring we hadn’t suffered from certain symptoms. It seems Cuba is not taking any chances when it comes to Swine Flu. The other aspect of the airport that I found myself marvelling at was people standing around smoking cigars in the terminal. It truly shows how quickly we have adapted to the smoking ban in the UK.

The only way to get your hands on Cuban currency is to exchange it at the Cuban airport, it was my first experience with indifferent Cuban service but finally I got my convertible pesos and got into a taxi to take my into Havana and on to my hotel. The taxi driver delighted in putting on his special CD for my benefit. It consisted of serious 80s power ballads, the Beatles and the Eagles. It certainly was in interesting soundtrack to my first views of Cuba. Driving into Havana my eyes couldn’t help but boggle at the ranges of cars from Chevys to Ladas, we drove pass tiny cars in pieces wedged into the backs of buses. We had to stop for my taxi driver to exchange a few more of his special CDs with another cab driver. Through factories, apartment blocks and government buildings we then entered Havana and the streets full of hoards of people waiting for buses amongst incredible old and run down buildings. The taxi driver gave me a guided tour of the monuments in Spanish.

I realised that I was responding to him in a mixture of French and Italian and vowed that I would go through my Spanish phrase book as soon as I arrived at the hotel. We managed to be in fits of giggles through the mixture of his Spanish and my pigeon mix of languages and then arrived at Hotel Saratoga which stands out like a sore thumb of decadence among the other historic and shabby buildings.Across from the hotel is the capitol building, which is a carbon copy of it’s US counterpart. After a strawberry daiquiri and some very strange Cuban national television I am going to bed with my bag packed full of camera, film and maps for a day on foot into old Havana for coffee and photos. It is beautiful here and I can’t wait to hit the streets.

We went to see Why? at Cargo on Monday night. They were absolutely brilliant. I was determined to take a roll of film and so casually manoevered (gently pushed) my way to the front.

Their photographer was there, trapped by the side of the stage and in some jammy swapping I managed to get myself at the side of the stage. I’m really happy with the photos. The rest of my Why Photos are here

The print room is being shut down and the whole process is being transferred to digital so it was an amazing experience to be given free reign to roam the area and take pictures.

I took hundreds of pictures and am in the process of putting them together in a narrative form, but here are a few of them.

The rest of the photos can be viewed at my Flickr

Anyway I got some of the photo’s I’ve taken developed, the lady who developed them fiddled with them so a lot of them look slightly dark or slightly light.

We have a day full of general shots tomorrow, one interview and our final execution, which is a sad way to finish the shoot.

Here are some moments from the shoot: