If you are interested in learning more about long-exposure photography this is a fantastic and extensive lesson to get you started.

We have all seen beautiful landscape photos with smooth-as-glass water or the light trails from a car’s tail lights and headlights. Well, you can also eliminate people and cars in a usually busy area by leaving your exposure on for several minutes.  

You will need an ND filter if you are shooting during the day. An ND filter (neutral density) filter is like sunglasses for your camera. There are different shades of darkness depending on the amount of light and what effect you are wanting to create. The prices range from low to pretty high depending on the brand. There is some math involved to get the proper shutter speed time, but if you’re like me and you don’t want to do the math, there are a couple of apps that do the math for you, such as Lee Stopper and Nisi. 

A tripod is required if you want the main subject to be in focus. There is so much creativity to be had in long-exposure photography, and you can make your photos stand out by getting creative with effects or removing people and cars from a normally busy area, like mentioned above. You can also create incredible lighting effects or “paint’ with your own lights,such as a flashlight or colored LED lights, like this famous TikToker.

You can create long exposure at night without an ND filter as well. Get out and experiment. You can get really creative with long-exposure photography, and it’s not a typical photo that anyone can take.

This was taken in 1981 at a Berni Inn steakhouse in Harrow, London. I think it’s a Beefeater now. These people had just walked in out of the rain. They were a bit wary of me, but stood there for a few seconds and I was able to grab one frame before they disappeared. It was for the magazine New Society, founded in the early 1960s to document society in ways understandable to general readers, avoiding jargon – a mirror of its stablemate, New Scientist. The art editors had almost complete freedom to commission and choose pictures.

The brief was to find the lower middle class, to accompany an article about this growing demographic. But the problem was that nobody wanted to admit to being lower middle class. There was no pride in it, like there was in being working class. People just looked baffled when I approached them, so I started to gloss over that part and simply said I was shooting for a magazine feature about how people lived in north London.

I was mostly doing editorial work at that time after producing work for an exhibition on Welsh seaside towns in the late 1970s, which proved traumatic. The gallery director who commissioned it left and their replacement absolutely hated what I was doing. He said it was too depressing, was worried his funding would be cut and attempted to bury it by showing amateur photographers’ work alongside mine. Then the pictures went unseen for 40 years. The experience was so bad that I didn’t do another gallery project for decades. But the shots resurfaced in 2021 thanks to an exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate.

When you’re taking pictures, you’ve got to be pretty alive at that moment. I was asking everybody’s permission because I was using a Rolleiflex and a flash with a big, heavy power pack. There’s an old saying about using flashes: they’re like taking a revolver to the opera – they’re quite conspicuous! I much prefer to blend in, which means you get a different kind of shot. But if you hang around, you can usually get people to ignore the camera and carry on with what they’re doing. I got several quite interesting pictures of some teenagers who were probably underage drinkers sitting in the bar that night, too. None of these images made it into the magazine – they used one I took at a nearby garden centre instead.

But they’re finally on display in a new show of my analogue work up to 1990 – the year Photoshop was released. I was self taught and started photography when I was 14. There’s quite a lot of pre-digital artwork in the show as well as photographs in a photomontage style that I used in political satire for Private Eye and the New Statesman. It was all done in the darkroom, using cut-out pieces of red paper to build up a jigsaw of an image. I learned how to retouch it and airbrush – words that are now more familiar from Photoshop and digital retouching, but they are exact equivalents of what I used to do in the darkroom, including burning and dodging, too. There were just a handful of people doing it in London in the 1970s and 80s. It was a very creative period and a lot of the time you were chosen because of your political attitude – except at Private Eye, where you had to be funny as well. They didn’t care if the work was well done. They went to a great deal of trouble to make it look as though the mag was pasted up on a kitchen table.

When I did my fine art degree, a lot of the tutors were very suspicious of me. They would come around and say: “Yeah, that’s quite interesting, Mike, but why aren’t you doing something more worthy, like painting?” I fought back as much as I could, and there were a few lecturers who supported me, but it was an uphill struggle. Fortunately, my degree show was seen by a curator who offered me an exhibition. And then some of the work got into the V&A, where it remains.

I think a lot of photographers who worked for New Society did some of their best work for it. They were using Magnum photographers, Martin Parr – and many of the pictures, like this one, stand up on their own, without an explanation. They transcend the need to illustrate an article. They show a different view of Britain in that era.

Being There: Photographs 1968-1990 by Michael Bennett is at the Coningsby Gallery, London, until 7 October

Michael Bennett’s CV

Born: Sevenoaks, Kent, 1954
Trained: Leeds Polytechnic, Fine Art
Influences: “Diane Arbus, August Sander, André Kertész, JH Lartigue, Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, W Eugene Smith, Elliott Erwitt, Margaret Bourke-White”
High point: “Photographing the Beatles’ producer Sir George Martin”
Low point: “Travelling up in the lift alone with Rupert Murdoch in the old Times building”
Top tip: “The route to fulfilment, originality and happiness lies in looking at other people’s work as little as possible”

Sarah Meister ’94

Naima Green

Meister has championed photographers in her roles at MoMA and Aperture

In 1966, Ernest Cole, a Black man from South Africa, smuggled his photographs of life under the country’s system of apartheid with him when he left for the U.S. The next year he published some of those images in House of Bondage, now regarded as one of the most important photobooks of the 20th century. Cole went on to photograph in New York, a handful of other U.S. cities, and the American rural South, though little of that work was ever shown. 

Sarah Meister ’94, then a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, in 2019 shepherded MoMA’s purchase of 38 of the photographs Cole made in South Africa and the U.S. A selection of those works is now on view at the museum.

In Cole’s South African photography, Meister says, “He conveys an acute awareness of what the horrors and injustices and indignities of that system meant.” In Cole’s New York work, she adds, “You sense his curiosity as a witness to a spectacle. He looked as an attentive observer at arguably less brutal but still deeply divided culture that he was increasingly becoming a part of. His work helps you understand the overt and subtle forms of discrimination in each of these cultures better.”

Cole’s works were one of the last major acquisitions Meister made for MoMA. In 2021, she was tapped as the executive director at Aperture, a nonprofit publisher devoted to photography.

At the time she moved to Aperture, she had been in conversation with MoMA’s publication department on reissuing House of Bondage and doing a book of Cole’s work from the U.S. Meister was able to bring those projects with her to Aperture, which republished House of Bondage last year and is preparing to issue Ernest Cole: The True America, a book featuring the U.S. work.

Cole is just one of the photographers whose work Meister has championed in her career. A course on the history of photography with professor and MoMA curator Peter Bunnell sparked her interest in the field, and after graduating from Princeton she started as an intern at MoMA in the photography department. 

Meister rose through the ranks at the New York museum and was promoted to curator in 2009. She organized shows on a range of figures from Dorothea Lange, famous for her work in the Great Depression, to a group of amateur photographers in São Paulo in the middle of the 20th century, the subject of the last show Meister did before moving to Aperture. She also recorded a series of lectures for the course Seeing Through Photographs, which MoMA launched on Coursera in 2017.

Now Meister leads Aperture, where she oversees a staff of 40. Started by Lange, Ansel Adams, and Minor White as a quarterly magazine in 1952, the institution continues to play a major role in the world of photography. The art form has always been “at the center of the conversation” there, Meister says, “whereas at MoMA the medium often found itself in the shadow of painting and sculpture.”

In addition to its quarterly magazine, Aperture publishes books of photography such as those by Cole. It also organizes exhibitions — including several at the Princeton University Art Museum’s gallery on Hulfish Street — and gives awards to emerging artists. 

“I believe that photography makes a difference in our world like little else,” Meister says, “and when you allow yourself to focus on it, you open up possibilities for grappling with the world around us.”