Peter Marshall | >Re-PHOTO

O I L and the second invasion of Iraq

Three letters O I L were always the key to the otherwise inexplicable invasion of Iraq. Oil, state owned, was Saddam’s greatest – almost his only – asset. The giant multinationals wanted rid of him so they could make a killing – and now they are getting their way through the Iraqi government. The first invasion was military, the second is economic. The first has been a disaster for the Iraqi people, and the second will ensure that disaster continues long-term.

Pirates in New Bond St

The tour last Saturday was a fun event – about a very serious problem. People enjoyed dressing up and it certainly helped to gain some attention from the West End crowds.

Police Apology for Photographer

The good news came today that photographer Marc Vallée, injured by police while photographing the ‘Sack Parliament’ event in Parliament Square, London on 9 October 2006, has accepted an apology and out-of-court settlement from the Metropolitan Police. You can also read some comments about the case on the NUJ site.

Police medics treat Marc after he was assaulted by police

The incident happened after a stand-off between demonstrators and police on the edge of the square facing the Houses of Parliament. This involved around 20 demonstrators who made an attempt to push through a police line, while perhaps a hundred more watched, together with a large number of media. Marc was assaulted despite very obviously being a photographer rather than a demonstrator, holding a camera, carrying a camera bag and with his NUJ press card clearly visible. Like the rest of the press present he had already been asked to show his press card, and is in any case well known to many of the police – as are the others of us who photograph such events. The attack on him was clearly an attack on a member of the press, and could have happened to any of us.

The policing on the day was entirely an over-reaction to a threat of no consequence posed by a small number of anarchists, mainly students, whose actions are largely symbolic and at most threaten minor damage to property. They might well graffiti a wall or even throw an egg or custard pie a politician, but they are in no way a serious threat.

I was stunned on arriving in Westminster that day to find more police than I’ve ever seen before (or since unless you count their plain-clothes demonstration for more pay.) I don’t know the official number, but my estimate was around a thousand.

As well as forming a line along the front of the Houses of Parliament there were more in Parliament Square and in the other streets around, who apparently stopped many of those intending to come to the demonstration, threatening them with detention under an Act brought in to prevent terrorism.

Of course I’m against terrorism. But I am opposed to the use of law to prevent the normal freedom of movement and of political protest. As too are many individual police I’ve talked to at demonstrations.

It was inevitable that a small group of demonstrators would confront the police. Their aim wasn’t to blow up Parliament but simply to block traffic by sitting down in the road in the front of the buildings.

Police line up to face demonstrators

A ritual scrum attempts to push through the police line

But the line holds

A few minutes later, the police charged the demonstrators and surrounded them, along with a large number of people who had done nothing more than stand in the square and watch. I left more or less straight away, but some other press who stayed inside were apparently not allowed to leave, being treated exactly as the demonstrators. The demonstrators were then held for several hours, with the police making occasional violent raids inside their cordon to grab individuals and take them to the waiting police vans, the others were only allowed to leave after giving police their details.

Various others around the square were also set on by police and taken inside the cordon, or in a few cases put directly into police vans. Most protested they were simply bystanders and had taken no part in the demonstration.

An incident later in the day involving gratuitous violence on a man protesting his innocence but making no attempt to resist his arrest.

Despite my press card, I was also threatened with arrest and issued a warning that I might be committing an offence under SOCPA.

The officer in charge reads the announcement that those present are being detained

Among those bundled into a police van was one man attending the event as a ‘legal observer’ in a high visibility jacket. A woman walking her bicycle across the square against the flow of traffic in the one-way system was also manhandled by police briefly before other officers rescued her.

It was a day the seriously eroded my respect for the police force. They got the intelligence severely wrong, totally misunderstanding the nature of the event. They showed a lack of control, acting with totally uncalled for violence on a number of occasions. They threatened the media – and injured one of them. You can see more of what happened in my account and pictures on My London Diary.

In any other job, those responsible would have been severely reprimanded, but I was later to hear a senior officer defending the actions of the day. It is rare to get an apology from the police, but I think almost all of us who were there deserve one, and I’m very pleased to see that Marc has received not only an apology but also a settlement.

Dan Heller on Model Releases

One writer about the business of photography I’ve mentioned previously is Dan Heller, and I’m pleased to hear about his new book, A Digital Photographer’s Guide to Model Releases coming out shortly. (And no, there is nothing that applies specifically to digital photographs in the book – just that we are all digital photographers now – or at least that’s where the publishers see the market.)
I only have one problem with Heller (style apart), which is that like many Americans he writes almost entirely with the USA in mind. But if you are an American photographer I think this is a book that should probably be on your shopping list.

I wouldn’t mention the book except for the fact that Heller provides a very generous guide on-line guide to model releases, and for most of us outside the US this will suffice. It’s a subject I’ve written about myself, but certainly not at such length and depth, although having read his piece there is nothing significant I’d want to change in my previous efforts.

Perhaps the best piece of advice in the whole piece is his “rule of thumb“, borrowed from the American military, “shoot first and ask questions later.” Although he discusses the issues from a legal point of view, his pragmatism is a strong point. You don’t need a release to take pictures, but only for fairly specific areas of usage.

Heller does look at many of the legal traps with sensible warnings about the many legal grey areas. He also appropriately mentions related problems of copyright and trademarks – with links to his feature on them.

Almost all photographers will find much to reassure them in this feature; for example he makes clear that in general exhibitions of your work, including images on a web site, even if for sale, do not require model releases, and you can always sell prints of people without a release (though with the famous there may be copyright or trademark issues.)

Heller rightly says that model releases (and the same is true of property releases) will make your pictures of people much more saleable – even for usages where a release is unnecessary. But although as he makes clear it is the responsibility of the publisher to ascertain whether a release is needed, this is something that some publishers are now attempting to push onto photographers.

Read the small print of any contract carefully and if you find any clauses that state that you indemnify the publisher against the costs of legal action arising from the use of your work, take legal advice or cross them through before signing, adding the words “as amended” with your signature. You may of course lose work this way, and at times it is impossible to avoid some liability – but as the practical risks are so low it may even be covered by your insurance. A greater risk in the small print is of course the increasing tendency to “rights grab” by publishers, and there is also advice on this on the pages at the NUJ Freelance Fees Guide. Unfortunately much stock is now handled through site on-line submission forms which preclude the use of the NUJ Delivery Notes (available to members) which include their standard photographers’ terms and conditions.

Heller does have a very interesting discussion of a problem of this nature, related to a picture of a trademarked building, the Hearst Castle, in his page on copyrights and trademarks. Again its a page well worth reading, full of good advice and pragmatism. You’ll be reassured to find, for example that you very seldom need worry about photographing logos and that you need almost never bother about building releases.

Of course there is still a gap between the actual situation and the demands of many stock agencies, particularly on-line agencies, and also commercial clients. So, if it is easy, cheap and possible to get a model release (or a property release) it makes business sense to do so, although I’ve only bothered once in the last year.

Media Attacks on Muslims

Sometimes it’s hard to make interesting images of important events. Often things just aren’t that interesting. Press photographers, at least in the UK tend to ‘set up’ a picture, but its something I always try to avoid. We don’t seem to have the clear distinction between news and features that is always made in the USA, where the kind of things that many British newspaper photographers do as a matter of course would soon get them fired.

But at least it is rather more difficult for photographers to completely fabricate stories. Or to ask other people to make up stories and phone them in to you. One of the more appalling stories to hit the UK political blogs recently is a leaked email apparently from Diana Appleyard of the Daily Mail offering £100 to anyone who wanted to phone her with “anonymous horror stories of people who have employed Eastern European staff.” I don’t know how many responded to her call, but it seems a golden opportunity for spreading nasty racist slurs – and for the Daily Mail to stoke the prejudices of its readership.

But it was the Daily Express where in 2004 NUJ members objected to the pressure being put on them to write articles denigrating gypsies, who ran the headline: “CHRISTMAS IS BANNED: IT OFFENDS MUSLIMS” (our Muslim relatives send us Christmas Cards – and expect to get them,) and much more designed to stir up and encourage anti-Islamic prejudice. And on Thursday, around 20 people picketed the Express offices on Lower Thames Street with placards asking for an end to media attacks on Muslims.

My framing cropped the placard that said “Stop Media Attacks on Muslims” but otherwise I think it was the best picture I took.

You can read more about it, and see a few of the pictures I took at the event on My London Diary, where I hope you will notice some changes to the site. It took a lot of fiddling to get the new design to work in Internet Explorer 6, which just doesn’t do some things right. It isn’t really possible to get it to work properly, and the site is best viewed in more up-to-date browsers such as Firefox, where the improved navigation really seems to help.

Back to thinking about photographing events that lack the kind of visual interest that photographers would like. I think photographers have got to sometimes admit that a particular event was not that visually interesting, and be prepared to turn in pictures that show it as it was. Setting up pictures is putting a foot on a slippery slope and we owe it to those who see our pictures not to mislead them.

One in Love

One of my photographer friends came up to see what was happening while I was taking pictures of the ‘Reclaim Love‘ party at Piccadilly Circus on Saturday and talked to me briefly before turning around and making for Oxford Street, where he was going to photograph what he called “the real world.”

In so far as the world has gone mad, of course he was right. Spending money we don’t have on goods we don’t need is what keeps our economy expanding, generating ever-increasing consumption to fuel global warming. Cheap clothes and consumer goods have proved far more effective than bread and circuses, and the new religion of the masses is a far more potent opiate than Marx’s old foe.

Of course it can’t continue for ever. Exponentially increasing consumption is not in the longer term compatible with a finite planet. As someone who has been talking about such things for 40 years – and in some ways as least living as if it mattered (though I have a fairly comfortable hair shirt) I find it heartening that a few more people now realise this too, although it may be too late to save civilisation – and certainly if it has a future it is not as we know it.

But the good news is that it might be rather better. It could be much more centred around people (though very possibly less of them) and less on profit. Events like ‘Reclaim Love’ are perhaps a small foretaste of one possible future.

Of course as well as things like this, we also need the kind of more obviously political actions – such as those I’ve photographed in London that were the subject of my show for FotoArte in Brasilia. And the kind of practical things that were also included in the example of the Manor Gardens allotments, another place were people mattered.

But there is also bad news. Although those of us in the wealthier countries cause most of the problem, our wealth also insulates us to some extent from the consequences, as too does our geography. Sea level rise and the perturbation of climate through global warming will cause more frequent and harsher catastrophes, in particular the flooding of low lying countries without the protection of expensive sea defences.

On a much more local scale, the Manor Gardens allotment holders are now sadly having great problems with their temporary accommodation on the Leyton Lammas Lands. The soil was taken there from the highly contaminated Olympic site, has been treated – which may have removed contamination, but has also removed the living elements, including worms which are vital to a healthy structure. It also appears to have been put on top of a barrier which prevents proper drainage and is currently waterlogged.

For Collectors

I’ve never been a collector of photographs although I do have a very large collection, mainly of my own work, but with a few fine pictures by other photographers, including one or two vintage prints worth fairly serious sums. But I’ve always felt that the kind of photography that interests me most was largely produced for publication in magazines and books, and that these are the things that anyone with a deep interest in the medium should collect.

Of course there are photographs that are made to be seen as objects and that suffer greatly from reproduction; the gum bichromate that usually hangs in my front room would be one example, although even framing it behind glass as I have really kills the tactile nature of the image. It’s replacement for this year, a finely printed large format 2008 calendar* with pictures from the 2005 FotoArt Festival in Bielsko-Biala can hang without protection (and also has the bonus for me that the August image is my picture taken on the riverside at Greenwich, and it feels good to be in such respected company as Pilar Albajar & Antonio Altarriba, Gunars Binde, Stefan Bremer, Shadi Ghadirian, Eikoh Hosoe, Peter Korniss, Joachim Ladefoged, Sarah Saudek, Antanas Sutkus, Lars Tunbjork and Ami Vitale.)

Greenwich, February 1982. (C) Peter Marshall
A couple of my favourite photographs on display are from gravure portfolios published years ago in an American photographic magazine. I’ve seen the originals of both, one a pigment print, and the other an albumen print, and the gravures are both better prints, though costing several thousands of pounds less. On my bookshelves are thousands of superbly printed images (along with rather more where the printing is indifferent or worse) including many colour images which are keeping considerably better than most of the high-priced vintage prints I see displayed by dealers at the shows.

Some books are of course also extremely valuable collectors items now, and the two volumes by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger on photo books have certainly helped to create a market for some of the more obscure (and sometimes deservedly so) titles around. With notable exceptions it isn’t the most interesting works that become the most collectable, but probably those that were either produced in very short runs or that failed to attract much sales at the time.

I do have a few signed copies of books, but I’d never dream of paying extra for one, although a simple signature by the artist adds significantly to the price. But except for those photographers I’ve known personally I really don’t see any point. Obviously I’m not a collector.

A couple of recent events brought these thoughts to the top of my mind. One was finding a link to an article by Paul Messier on the AIPAD site, ‘Preservation of Photographs: Handling, Storage, Display, Conservation & Retention.’ This is a short piece by one of the authorities on the subject, but probably won’t tell most photographers anything they don’t already know. My own older work is stored in conditions almost guaranteed to cause rapid deterioration – some in my loft, glacial in winter and baking in summer, and all suffering from the occasional high humidity of the damp low-lying Thames valley. Which perhaps explains my own conviction – currently heretical among conservators – that the best chances for survival of my own work are digital.

Recently as a member of the London Photographers’ Gallery I got an invitation to a ‘Collecting Photography Course‘ they are running next month. It looks an interesting programme of half a dozen events including the VIP reception for the Deutsche Borse award with champagne and canapés, as well as talks by some very knowledgeable people and visits to the V&A, Michael Hoppen Gallery and Merill Lynch. At £400 it’s a little above my budget, but if you have excess thousands or millions sitting in your Swiss bank account ready to invest in buying photography, well worth the price.

*Collectors – serious offers are invited for my two spare copies of this highly collectable 58cm x 58cm calendar!

Ultimate Street Camera?

The Sigma DP1 is finally expected to be with us in April and, with a viewfinder will have a RRP of £600 (you’ll get a penny change.) Those misguided enough to buy it without the viewfinder will save £50, but are of course likely to suffer from excessive camera shake as they try to use a camera at arms length and will end up buying it later for £85.

Actually given it has the equivalent of a 28mm lens, those of us accustomed to such things might find that we can get as accurate framing simply by holding it at our eye and imagining the viewfinder, a technique I’ve found to be rather useful with my similarly handicapped Fuji F31.

Sigma has a special site with no more information about the camera but some better pictures and a long and rather annoying flash intro – whoever thinks anyone wants to sit through silly text floating around their screen. Here’s a link that will avoid the intro and just go to the main site which is still a rather bad example of exactly how you should not use flash (and sort of makes me feel a bit sea-sick as it scrolls uncontrollably up and down – straight html does a rather better job.)

Many will also want the optional HA-11 lens hood, which takes a 46mm lens filter and adds another £20, and Sigma also list a matching external flash, AC adapter, battery charger and spare battery (the camera price includes a battery and charger, but as the battery only lasts roughly 250 pictures, keen photographers are going to need several to keep shooting for a day.) Other expenditure may include some fairly large capacity SD cards, as the RAW files are approximately 15.4Mb

The big advantage of the DP1 is its relatively large sensor, at 20.7×13.8mm a similar size to half-frame film, and roughly 10 times the imaging area of most compacts. The 2652×1768 pixels may seem low by current standards, but each of these records R, G and B making this roughly equivalent to a 14Mp Bayer array in a conventional sensor.

Foveon sensors such as this have so far not been good at above ISO 400, and the DP1 is likely to follow in this, and the highest available speed is ISO 800. It isn’t going to be a great available light camera as the lens is a relatively slow f4. However, so long as it performs well at full aperture it will be fine in normal daylight, and the use of aspherical elements is likely to help. The MTF chart in the pdf you can download looks reasonably impressive, although the -2.3% of distortion at close range seems a little high, it can always be corrected in software for the kind of subjects where it becomes important. The -1EV vignetting – also easily corrected by software – seems fine also.

Critical data missing from the spec sheet includes the shutter lag and the shot to shot time. As it can be set to manual focus, the autofocus speed isn’t too important. But assuming these are acceptable, this looks to be a good camera to carry with you, and with a weight of only 250g and a width 113.5mm, height 59.5mm and thickness of 50.3mm will sit easily in a hand held on a wrist-strap for immediate use. The 28mm lens is a good choice for general use, with the 14Mp allowing significant cropping if necessary.

Ryan McGinley’s Oscars Portfolio

The names Casey Affleck, Josh Brolin, Michael Cera, Julie Christie, Marion Cotillard, Paul Dano, Hal Holbrook, Jennifer Jason Leith, James McAvoy, Sienna Miller, Ellen Page, Seth Rogen, Amy Ryan, Jim Sturgess and Tang Wei probably include at least some familar to you. One thing they do have in common is that I’ve not photographed any of them!

They were however all photographed for the New York Times 2008 Oscars ‘Breakthrough Portfolio’ by Ryan McGinley. Despite being a photographer who became famous for his free and easy natural-looking images of his young New York friends, the shoots for these images had a full complement of assistant, stylist and various others responsible for hair, grooming and items of clothing.

On the page there is a video in which Editor Lynn Hirschberg talks about the film performances but not about the photographs as the pictures are shown, which I found just a little odd. I tried hard to see any link between what she was saying about the actor or character and the images but failed. I’m not a great film-goer, and the only film involved I’ve seen is La Vie on Rose, (billed at our local cinema as a Spanish Language film,) and although I like McGinley’s photo of Marion Cotillard, I can’t see any link between it and her performance in the film – or indeed Edith Piaf. Hirscherg suggests she needs to lose her charming French accent, but it would really be a great loss. Perhaps Americans should learn to accept that not everyone mangles the English language their way?

You can also see a short film on the page made by McGinley during the sessions in which he shot the portraits, sometimes with suggestions of rather more interesting ideas than some that emerged in the final portfolio. Another short movie by Jake Paltrow has the stars talking to camera about the actors that inspired them, perhaps looking more like themselves, though of course every time they face a camera it’s a performance.

Anonymous Protest

‘Fair game‘ isn’t fair, or a game, and it isn’t either legal or moral. Wikipedia describes it as “various aggressive policies and practices carried out by the Church of Scientology towards people and groups it perceives as its enemies.” So if you plan to protest against them, it is probably a good idea to hide your identity.

Last month, part of a Scientology video featuring Tom Cruise was posted onto YouTube, and the Church of Scientology (C0oS) successfully demanded its removal, although it and other material about them has since been reposted. The unauthorised biography of Cruise by Andrew Morton has also stirred up controversy, with its allegations – repeated on YouTube – that Cruise is ‘Number 2’ in the organisation. There are also YouTube videos which allege that the CoS had pressurised some Australian booksellers not to stock the book. CoS is also alleged to have forced YouTube to remove some other material that describes its doctrines and practices.

The Internet movement ‘Anonymous‘ emerged to oppose these CoS activities in mid January, aiming to remain anonymous to avoid retailiation under the ‘fair game’ policy. In a couple of weeks it managed to set up an international day of action with demonstrations in 50 cities in 14 countries against the CoS, including two in London.

Demonstrators work masks, many choosing the mask used in the film ‘V for Vendetta’, with some also togged up in the matching wig, hat and the rest. The ‘Anonymous’ YouTube videos also had some resemblance to the Warner Bros product, and I’m sure that at one point I heard “People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people.”

Pictures from both London demos

Stream of Consciousness

One of the more frustrating things for a writer is the problem of getting your thoughts down on paper. Particularly because most ideas seem to come when you are least prepared to record them. Sometimes when I do jump out of bed in the middle of the night, after answering natures call I feel a need to grab a sheet of paper and a pencil and put down some of the thoughts that have been running through my head. The previous post, Captioning Dreams, came from just six words scribbled in this way and fortunately for once I could read my writing.

Often things come to me when lying in bed, trying to get to sleep, and in my mind arrange themselves with a precision and clarity that just isnt there when I wake and try to put them on paper. When I was working as a teacher, all my best ideas and plans for lessons came as I was cycling to college, often about the lesson I was to deliver on my arrival but try telling that to OFSTED! (Of course their paper world only briefly intersects with real life on those rare occasions when the inspector sits in your class.)

For photographers like me, whose photography is to some extent a record of their lives and experiences (rather than those who construct things to photograph) the ideal camera would record our mental images what we see inside our heads rather than what a lens images on some light sensitive medium. Perhaps some kind of head-set that taps into our brain waves and from them reconstructs the image so it can be saved in a digital format.

At the moment, this is just a thought experiment, without any technological means to implement it, though perhaps one day it will enter the realm of the feasible, though in some ways I rather hope not, as it is all too easy to imagine the possibilities for surveillance and control that such technology could provide. But it does perhaps represent the ultimate goal of many photographers, a kind of seamless transfer of a situation that they perceive as significant into a photographic record.

When thinking about street photography and how to improve our work, we think about equipment that is responsive and becomes intuitive, and about ways that we can remove the barrier to recognising and recording. I imagine we all start by beginning to see the photographic opportunities we have missed because we were too slow to see and react to them.

There are of course specific cameras and techniques that aid us. The Leica and similar cameras were small, simple and enabled you to feel that they became a part of you. One of the pieces of advice given by Henri Cartier-Bresson was that the photographer should become so familiar with the camera that the settings for taking a picture could be made by touch alone. On a Leica you can certainly set both aperture and distance in this way, although shutter speed is trickier but then most of us probably changed it rather less often. On my M8 its actually taped on auto, but simply because I got fed up with it getting knocked onto inappropriate settings.

Working with a fixed focal length also simplified matters. You soon got to know more or less exactly where the frame edges would fall, or where you needed to stand to get the picture you wanted for your favourite 28 or 35mm or 50mm lens. Looking through the viewfinder was largely a matter of a quick check that you were pointing the lens in exactly the right direction, and something that could, if necessary, be dispensed with.

Using wide angle lenses also helps, increasing the depth of field for a given aperture and distance. Most of us relied on setting a zone of focus and always shooting from roughly the same distance – in my case usually centred on 1.8 metres.

Such techniques reduced taking a photograph to the essentials of identifying the opportunity and pressing the shutter release at the right time. The simple mechanism also meant there was little or no delay between the press and the taking of the picture.

What remained was our reaction time, the time for us to process the input and then decide to press. Working on that is tricky, and sometimes it brings up things that we might not always want to acknowledge. To be a street photographer you have to be on the street with your finger on a knife-edge, ready to react at any stimulus and your negatives tell you what stimulates you. I found that I shared much of the same obsession that Gary Winogrand, the acknowledged master of the art, made deliberately manifest in his controversial Women are Beautiful.

[Don’t miss the two Winogrand links above – the first is a great description of a workshop with him, which really does give an insight into his working methods. The second has a few pictures from the book.]

Digital photography has supplied us with an equivalent of Jack Kerouacs endless roll of paper compared to the very limited and discrete nature of film, but perhaps Virginia Woolf offers a better model for the photographer?

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[This, although perhaps not obviously so, is the second in a few pieces I promised to write about ‘candid photography’ in Candid on Candids. More later I hope.]