Guest Post 33: Dennis Low on the Gian Butturini/Martin Parr Controversy (c)

[Toward the end of September 2021 I received an email from one Dr. Dennis Low, a London-based photographer and researcher on the niche subject of historic zoo photography.

Dr. Low contacted me because I serve on the advisory board of the European Society for the History of Photography (ESHPh), with which he found himself in contention over an article recently published in its semiannual journal, PhotoResearcher. Dr. Low had drafted an extensive response thereto, which the ESHPh had refused to publish. Given my connection to the organization, he asked, how would I suggest he proceed?

I concluded that I could best serve the interests of Dr. Low, the ESHPh, and “the discourse” on photography by making space available here at Photocritic International for him to present his argument in full. (Click here to download a PDF of the original article to which he responds.)

Due to its length, I have divided Dr. Low’s paper into installments. Part 3 appears below. Click here for Part 1, here for Part 2, here for part 4, and here for part 5. When the series concludes, a PDF download of his complete article will become available. — A.D.C.]

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A Reply to Moritz Neumüller’s ‘”A Stone Thrown At My Head”:

London by Gian Butturini — A Reception History, 1969-2021′ (c)

by Dennis Low

… If the campaign against Gian Butterini’s book London and Martin Parr could be handed over, so, too, could the machinery of that campaign. In 2019, Paul Halliday was an active participant in the small protest outside London’s National Portrait Gallery, briefly referred to by Moritz Neumüller in his article about the debacle (2021, p.153). ‘The people we spoke to outside the @NPGLondon were appalled’^[1], wrote Halliday, whom Michiel Kruijt has also revealed as the filmographer for an accompanying video.^[2]

Only later, would Halliday recast himself, from a member of a family outing with his daughter Mercedes Baptiste Halliday and his partner, Roxanne Baptiste (Mercedes’ mother), into a third-party witness: ‘I saw the protest outside the #NationalGallery led by young #BlackWomen’^[3]; ‘I saw how @LTHdebate was ignored, then belittled for challenging what she and her friends knew to be wrong’^[4].

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As we begin to see here, already, in these quotations, the “Less Than Human Debate” (@LTHDebate) account on Twitter would also undergo a metaphorical transfer of ownership. Having begun life as a collective ‘we’, Twitter’s @LTHDebate account soon became interchangeable with Mercedes herself, right up until the present: ‘When people talk about “photographic history”, this will be there’, wrote Halliday, ‘Write your account Ben[jamin Chesterton]. I’m writing mine. @LTHdebate will write hers’^[5]; and, more recently, ‘I’ve been approached by Moritz [Neumüller] for an interview along with @LTHdebate’^[6].

Interestingly, both users on Twitter and the press at large seemed at least partially aware that everything was not what it seemed regarding the Mercedes narrative. American photography journalist, Andrew Molitor, called out @LTHDebate as a ‘sock puppet account’^[7] on no less than two occasions, only to receive, from Halliday and @LTHDebate, clumsily worded responses. ‘So,’ writes Halliday, ‘the @LTHdebate that you describe as a “sock-puppet account” was set up by a young #Black woman’^[8]. Similar wording, and a tell-tale first-person singular seem to betray the true identity of @LTHDebate: ‘As I previously said, this account isn’t run by Paul [Halliday], he is just supporting it, as a number of other people are. This account was set up by a young black woman’^[9].

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Some journalists took up the Mercedes narrative unknowingly and in good faith. Writing for The Art Newspaper, Tom Seymour reported: ‘Mercedes Baptiste Halliday, from London, who is currently a student at University College London, drove an 18-month protest against the book and Parr’s involvement, which led to the prominent photographer stepping down from the Bristol Photo Festival this week’^[10]; ‘Mercedes Baptiste Halliday, from Clapham, London, who is currently studying anthropology at University College London, has driven an 18-month protest against a photography book credited as being by Parr and which he promoted for a sustained length of time’^[11].

On Twitter, too, Seymour would lend his support to the Mercedes narrative, tweeting, ‘I told her personally and will say publicly that Mercedes should be proud of herself for raising these concerns’^[12]. By September, Seymour was turning to Mercedes’ father for an expert opinion on his own campaign:

“Pandora’s box has been opened,” says Paul Halliday, a photography lecturer at Goldsmiths University of London. “It’s a moment of crisis for photography’s status quo […] A lot of lecturers have been very upset by recent events and are increasingly uncomfortable with how these so-called masters have been traditionally taught,” Halliday says […]^[13]

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Seymour and Andy Day were important components in initiating and sustaining the Mercedes narrative. But while they were wittingly or unwittingly disseminating it, other parts of the press seemed wary. Referring to the protest at the National Portrait Gallery, Lanre Bakare, writing for the Guardian, chose not to mention any of the protestors by name.^[14] Halliday was incensed: ‘This makes disturbing reading. The @guardian article erases the activism of young #BlackWomen who campaign against racism in #BritishPhotography’^[15].

So, too, was his partner, Roxanne Baptiste (‘Surely the @guardian can at least make an attempt to interview the campaigners @LTHdebate they did the work. Don’t take their voice!’), and the @LTHDebate account: ‘@LTHdebate was set up by young black women fed up with the presentation of racial stereotypes within British Photography. @Lanre_Bakare @Guardian this was a wasted opportunity to talk to young black people about why #BlackLivesMatter’^[16].

Conversely, any journalist who attempted to highlight Halliday’s paternal relationship to Mercedes quickly drew ire: ‘Even those who criticise this trend are mobbed’, wrote Manick Govinda for Spiked, ‘Paul Halliday – the father of principal protester Mercedes, and an MA course leader at Goldsmiths – accused me on Twitter of being a ‘brown racist enabler’. He has denounced others for their associations with Parr.’^[17]

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Michiel Kruijt’s long article for the Dutch newspaper, de Volkskrant, is a masterly piece of detective work when it comes to recuperating Halliday’s carefully hidden involvement in the matter, but it only served to confirm what academics, industry insiders, and other interested parties closer to the ground seemed to already know.^[18]

The beginning of the new university year in September 2020 saw a litany of high-profile public complaints levied, not at the undergraduate student, Mercedes Baptiste Halliday, but at her father, Paul Halliday, lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. At the time of writing, the ensuing investigation by Goldsmiths’ senior management is in its tenth month. [Note: Seventeenth month as of the date of this publication. — Ed.]

If there is any residual doubt as to whom the campaign against Butturini belonged, it is put to rest by Halliday’s more recent tweets: ‘I, along with 3 other people […] challenged a book juxtaposing a Black woman with a gorilla’^[19] he writes; ‘Yes, I was ‘Spiked’ when I challenged a publication that juxtaposed an elderly Black woman with a gorilla’^[20].

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Neumüller was aware of most, if not all, of the political machinations and backstage personal politics that I’ve described here, but they are, for the most part, actively suppressed in his account. Early on in his article he writes, ‘To my regret, Dennis Low did not release his interview for publication’ (p.138). An important passage, relating to the public complaints made against Halliday, had been carefully redacted from the transcript of my interview and this, as I explained to the editors of PhotoResearcher, was the reason I had been unable to release it for publication. [See the Author’s Note prefacing Part 1 of this essay for details. — Ed.]

In minimising Halliday’s involvement in the campaign against Butturini, Neumüller is able to re-authorise the very same Mercedes narrative that even social media and the press had begun to question and shy away from. Even if Butturini’s detractors lacked an argument to support their allegations, at least, in Mercedes, they had the shape of something: an emotive, against-the-odds story that was easy to get behind; a ‘young, black woman’ protagonist who, coming of age on her eighteenth birthday, might, conceivably, have just a pinch of Jen Reid’s zeitgeist heroism.^[21]

The Mercedes narrative legitimised Butturini’s detractors, and kept them respectable. On paper, it superficially resembled a clear, ideological position, fuelled by a defiance of racial injustice. In actuality, it was a subterfuge, a mere foil – albeit one cut from noble principles – to hide the pettiest and basest of motives: the green-eyed monster of professional jealousy.

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Paul Halliday, by any measure, cuts a strange figure. His career seemed to begin promisingly enough. By his own account, he had, by the age of 17, become ‘the youngest tutor in ILEA (Inner London Education Authority)’^[22]. He was commissioned by Channel 4 for Steven Lawrence: Living with the Bunker (1994), a documentary that was warmly received.^[23] He taught at Croydon College; was ‘invited to become a visiting Fellow in the Centre for Urban and Community Research’^[24] at Goldsmiths; and would take up a position, at Goldsmiths, as programme convenor for the MA Photography and Urban Cultures degree.

In 2007, he became a director of Photofusion, then one of the UK’s most prestigious photography charities, which enjoyed long-standing National Portfolio of Arts Organisations (NPO) status at Arts Council England. Up until that point, it was a career of which any mid-career academic/photographer would have been justifiably proud.

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It is difficult to pinpoint precisely what faltered for Halliday. Perhaps it was the decline of Photofusion. Halliday’s directorship oversaw the collapse of that charity’s revenue, which fell from approximately £600k in 2007 to £100k in 2015. In 2014, Arts Council England announced there would be no more funding for Photofusion, which had received funds, annually, for 30 years. Halliday stepped down from his directorship in 2015, just weeks after that funding formally came to an end. (With Photofusion no longer the portfolio concern it once was, British photography would, it seemed, need to lean on a new charity, the Martin Parr Foundation, founded in 2014.) [“Charity” is the UK equivalent of the U.S. “non-profit.” — Ed.

Yet, for all the institutional troubles at Photofusion, a booming interest in street photography, which had quietly gathered momentum since Nick Turpin’s founding of the in-Public collective in 2000, seemed to offer new opportunities for Halliday. 2011 saw in the launch of the inaugural and highly successful London Street Photography Festival (LSPF) which, in addition to representing many members of the in-Public collective, also invited Martin Parr to participate. Parr not only contributed to the festival but went on to select images from that festival to show at the prestigious Les Recontres d’Arles photo festival the following year and, in doing so, helped revitalise interest in contemporary street photography.

Either the LSPF festival or the Arles show might have been high-profile exhibition opportunities for Halliday except, however, he was not part of LSPF and, therefore, not available for Parr’s selection for Arles. On the opening night of the LSPF festival, marked by the opening of an exciting exhibition of women street photographers at Photofusion, Halliday staged his own, non-festival event at Whitechapel Gallery, in which he discussed his own street photography of London, an extended project which he called Urban Detours.^[25]

Urban Detours was, even by 2011, already old work. Describing it for London Independent Photography magazine in 2006, Halliday wrote: ‘This summer will see the completion of a twenty-year photography project focusing on London’s streets and public places. I decided to initiate the project whilst completing the London College of Printing (now the London College of Communication) diploma in photojournalism in 1986’^[26].

Its exact dates frantically oscillate thereafter, perhaps in an attempt to appear current and, therefore, relevant. Helen Thomas and Jamilah Ahmed’s Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory (2008) noted that Halliday was ‘currently completing a 12-year photographic and film project focusing on street cultures in London’[27]. Five years later, in 2013, when Halliday’s partner, Roxanne Baptiste, interviewed him for his own <www.critiqueofstreetphotography.org> website, the project had elongated back to 20 years, encompassing ‘images of places in London that were also shown in the Channel 4 documentary `Living With The Bunker’ which you directed in 1994’^[28]. In an interview for <PersonalWork.Online> in 2020, confusingly titled ‘Paul Halliday, Course Leader Goldsmiths MA Photography & Urban Cultures, on why he’s spending 20 years photographing London’, the project snaps back to a twenty-year one with the original dates, ‘launched at a Tate Modern conference in 2006’^[29].

Without doubt, Urban Detours was, and continues to be, Halliday’s magnum opus. It was the sole content of <www.paulhalliday.org> which ran from circa 2007 to 2018, and the principal focus, too, of the recently defunct <www.critiqueofstreetphotography.org>. Tragically, for Halliday, no-one has ever seemed much interested. Recently, the newest iteration of Halliday’s twenty-year project has been an extended YouTube presentation which, at the time of writing, had received 182 hits, 2 likes, and 4 dislikes.^[30]

Critical indifference to his Urban Detours project seems to have spurred Halliday into action. In 2012 he founded his own Urban Photo Fest^[31] and an academically minded International Association of Visual Urbanists^[32], clearly in competition to the London Street Photography Festival and the in-Public collective from which he’d been excluded the previous year. But still the critical indifference and exclusion rankled.

In late 2011, the Museum of London – a stakeholder in LSPF – published London Street Photography, 1860-2010, edited by their Senior Curator of Photographs, Mike Seaborne, and Anna Sparham. in-Public’s founder, Nick Turpin, and Parr were both invited to contribute but Halliday was not. His response was the aforementioned <www.critiqueofstreetphotography.org>, a personal website for which his partner, Roxanne Baptiste, interviewed him. The interview, approximately 7,000 words in length, is vitriolic, resentful, and uneasily grandiose in its claims.

Unchecked, Halliday convolutedly asserts that his Stephen Lawrence documentary ‘made history as the first Channel 4 film about a London street photographer to reach a mass audience’. And, of Seaborne’s book, he says:

[A]ny publication that purports to give a history of street photography in London, by definition would have needed to make reference to the work of Marketa Luskacova, Rut [Blees Luxemburg], Mark [Power] and myself. I don’t say that as an egotistical thing; rather, I say it as a statement of fact. ^[33]

Luskačová and Luxemburg would be quickly mobilised, too, to take a pot shot at Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren’s highly successful book Street Photography Now (2010), which had also featured Parr and Turpin but not Halliday. For Halliday, their exclusion – which, as we have seen, was also a proxy for his own exclusion – quickly became a smoking gun for the publication’s ‘‘mate-ology’ […] in the section labouring under the title ‘Reclaiming the Streets’, Halliday told his partner, ‘a disproportionate number of those were from In-Public’^[34]. …

(Part 1 I 2 I 3 I 4 I 5)

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Notes:

^[1] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/PaulTHalliday/status/1133135558098788352 [Accessed 11 Jun. 2021].

^[2] M. Kruijt. (2020). Martin Parr, Icon of British Photography, in Disgrace After Being Accused of Racism. [online] de Volkskrant. Available at: https://www.volkskrant.nl/cultuur-media/martin-parr-icon-of-british-photography-in-disgrace-after-being-accused-of-racism~ba5a826c/ [Accessed 11 Jun. 2021].

^[3] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/PaulTHalliday/status/1282704019341955078 [Accessed 11 Jun. 2021].‌

^[4] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/PaulTHalliday/status/1288039287359971329 [Accessed 11 Jun. 2021].

^[5] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/PaulTHalliday/status/1288849077585797123 [Accessed 11 Jun. 2021].

^[6] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/PaulTHalliday/status/1343976635842879496 [Accessed 11 Jun. 2021].

^[7] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/amolitor99/status/1134171620061302784 [Accessed 11 Jun. 2021].

Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/amolitor99/status/1141471572789567488 [Accessed 11 Jun. 2021].

^[8] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/amolitor99/status/1134171620061302784/retweets/with_comments [Accessed 11 Jun. 2021].

^[9] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/LTHdebate/status/1141842389406867456 [Accessed 11 Jun. 2021].

^[10] T. Seymour. (2020). ‘Martin Parr’s resignation from photo festival sparks “cancel culture” debate.’ [online] Theartnewspaper.com. Available at: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/martin-parr-s-festival-abdication-sparks-cancel-culture-debate [Accessed 12 Jun. 2021].

^[11] T. Seymour. (2020). Martin Parr steps down as artistic director of Bristol Photo Festival after student’s anti-racism campaign. [online] Theartnewspaper.com Available at: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/martin-parr-stood-down-from-bristol-photo-festival-after-student-anti-racism-campaign [Accessed 12 Jun. 2021].

^[12] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/TomSeymour/status/1285637076298485764 [Accessed 12 Jun. 2021].

^[13] T. Seymour. (2020). Photo finish? Dubious practices in the firing line. The Art Newspaper, September 2020 [print edition].

^[14] L. Bakare. (2020). UK photography body removes image “playing to racist stereotypes.” [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jul/02/uk-photography-body-removes-image-playing-to-racist-stereotypes [Accessed 11 Jun. 2021].

^[15] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/PaulTHalliday/status/1278765518854504454 [Accessed 11 Jun. 2021].

^[16] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/LTHdebate/status/1278760828469235713 [Accessed 13 Jun. 2021].

^[17] M. Govinda. (2020). The cancellation of Martin Parr. [online] Spiked-online.com. Available at: https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/07/27/the-cancellation-of-martin-parr/ [Accessed 11 Jun. 2021].

^[18] M. Kruijt. (2020). Martin Parr, Icon of British Photography, in Disgrace After Being Accused of Racism. [online] de Volkskrant. Available at: https://www.volkskrant.nl/cultuur-media/martin-parr-icon-of-british-photography-in-disgrace-after-being-accused-of-racism~ba5a826c/ [Accessed 11 Jun. 2021].

^[19] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/PaulTHalliday/status/1326330205514960896 [Accessed 11 Jun. 2021].

^[20] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/PaulTHalliday/status/1378425346048024578 [Accessed 12 Jun. 2021].

^[21] A. Bland. (2020). Edward Colston statue replaced by sculpture of Black Lives Matter protester Jen Reid. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/15/edward-colston-statue-replaced-by-sculpture-of-black-lives-matter-protester [Accessed 13 Jun. 2021].

^[22] Archive.org. (2016). Critique of Street Photography – Interview with Paul Halliday. [online] Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20180830210013/http://critiqueofstreetphotography.org/interview.html [Accessed 13 Jun. 2021].

[23] E. Gibb. (1994). The List: 4 Nov 1994 (Issue 240). [online] Available at: https://archive.list.co.uk/the-list/1994-11-04/85/. [Accessed 7 Jul. 2021].

^[24] Archive.org. (2016). Critique of Street Photography – Interview with Paul Halliday. [online] Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20190209215528/http://www.critiqueofstreetphotography.org/interview.html [Accessed 13 Jun. 2021].

^[25] Flickr. (2020). Flickr, Paul Halliday and Photographing Society. Flickr, 3 Oct. 2020. [online] Available at: https://www.flickr.com/groups/instruction36/discuss/72157626775888175/. [Accessed 13 Jun. 2021].

^[26] P. Halliday, P. Kilsby, B. Keane, B. and J. Rhodes, (2006). [online] London Independent Photography. Available at: https://www.londonphotography.org.uk/magazine/pdf/2006_Summer.pdf. [Accessed 7 Jul. 2021].

[27] H. Thomas and J. Ahmed, eds. (2008). Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, p.ix.

^[28] Archive.org. (2016). Critique of Street Photography – Interview with Paul Halliday. [online] Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20190209215528/http://www.critiqueofstreetphotography.org/interview.html [Accessed 13 Jun. 2021].

^[29] Personal Work. (2020). Paul Halliday, Course Leader Goldsmiths MA Photography & Urban Cultures, on why he’s spending 20 years photographing London. – Personal Work. [online] Available at: https://personalwork.online/paul-halliday-course-leader-goldsmiths-ma-photogrpahy-urban-cultures-on-why-hes-spending-20-years-photographing-london/ [Accessed 13 Jun. 2021].

^[30] Chitr Sanstha (2020). Dekho Paul T Halliday Full talk presented by Chitr Sanstha. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAQtN63vwj4 [Accessed 20 Jun. 2021].

^[31] Archive.org. (2011). [online] Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20121203055940/http://urbanphotofest.org/home/ [Accessed 7 Jul. 2021].

^[32] International Association of Visual Urbanists. (2017). [online] Available at: https://iavu.org/index.html [Accessed 7 Jul. 2021].

^[33] Archive.org. (2016). Critique of Street Photography – Interview with Paul Halliday. [online] Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20190209215528/http://www.critiqueofstreetphotography.org/interview.html [Accessed 13 Jun. 2021].

^[34] Archive.org. (2016). Critique of Street Photography – Interview with Paul Halliday. [online] Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20190209215528/http://www.critiqueofstreetphotography.org/interview.html [Accessed 13 Jun. 2021].

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© Copyright 2021 by Dennis Low. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions, other usages, and questions, please contact the author: dennis(at)takemetothekittens(dot)com.