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Less than 95 theses – Bielsko-Biala – 2005

Less than 95 theses: In June 2005 I was in Poland for the first FotoArtFestival in Bielsko-Biala where I had been invited to show my work and also to give a couple of talks. While I was there I photographed Poland’s only statue of Martin Luther, and this inspired me to write my ‘Less than 95 theses‘ on photography with which I began one of my talks.

The pictures here all come from my few days in Bielsko-Biala and will include some of the other photographers who were there. You can read a little more about the festival in the previous post – and in online my FotoArtFestival Diary from 2005.

Madames et Messieurs

English owes its prominence not only to US (and earlier UK) global economic and political domination, but to its flexibility and adaptability, which we systematically abuse.

Translation is a valiant attempt at the often impossible. Language operates at various sublevels of denotation and connotation, through allusion. It depends on shared experiences and understandings that are often very different.

Fortunately, communication happens, and it often happens most strongly across the crevasses between our languages as we struggle for understanding. We understand not from the smooth inter-meshing of gears than transmits the everyday niceties, but from the strands that stick in our teeth or the grit that lodges and may grow into a pearl. Or simply give us sore feet.

Yesterday I met an Angel

Yesterday I met an angel. Two angels to be precise, not on the head of a pin, but in Bielsko. Around 8 foot tall, dressed in white and the regulation pair of wings each, and she gave me a photograph and a feathered flower.

But Bielsko is the city of angels, because I met another one on Thursday evening. Inez, I appreciate from the depths of my heart all you have done for the festival. To borrow the words of one of my great musical heroes, “We love you madly.“

[I think the official Polish translation for that last paragraph was something like ‘Peter thanks Inez for all her work on the festival.”]

This Morning, Luther

This morning I went in search of Poland’s only statue of Martin Luther, in a small clump of trees in Plac Lutra.

This address begins for real with me nailing a few of my photographic theses to the door – fortunately rather fewer than his 95 – and saying ‘Here I stand, I can do no other‘ – at least until I’ve had a few more beers – ‘God help me, Amen.’

Less than 95 theses

First, with apologies to Gunars Binde, a lovely man with fantastical pictures to match who told us we shouldn’t write about pictures. Bullshit! But then I would say that wouldn’t I (MRDA as we say in some English circles – ‘Mandy Rice-Davies applies.’)

Good writing about photography is as rare as hen’s teeth. The problem with most writing about photography is that it is not writing about photography, refusing to confront either process or product.

Good writing is a difficult feat and I stand with awe, marvelling at the skills of people such as John Szarkowski and Robert Adams. Just occasionally – and it’s most gratifying – I receive an email from a photographer that tells me I’ve made them realise new things about their work.

Its no coincidence that the Szarkowski and Adams are both photographers as well as writers. I’ve always considered that the people who know most about our medium are the people who do it. Those who have written most cogently have all had at least a reasonable proficiency at it and a firm grounding in its traditions.

Of course there are also plenty of good photographers who have not been able to articulate in any way about the medium, and some who have talked nonsense. But in so far as photography has attracted serious criticism rather than critical indifference, there are many to whom my response is simply that they have not paid their dues.

Visual language, some say, is universal. More bullshit. No two of us looking at a picture see the same picture. Yes, there will be some common perceptions that arise from our shared cultural and sub-cultural soup, but the way that we interpret the visual is critically dependent on our culture, our history.

For a trivial example, a triangle in England is simply a triangle, while in Poland it can signify and classify a toilet. Symbols such as the cross and swastika can also differ radically in meaning, for example between Hindu, Christian and Muslim.

Bullshit 3 is truth, or at least the idea that photojournalists and documentary photographers are on a mission to uncover it. Point of view is fundamental to photography. Literally and metaphorically.

Watching people photograph the proceedings earlier, photographers on the unfamiliar end of the lens, Bevis Fusha commented that digital cameras made it hard to tell amateur from professional, we all use the same equipment now.

But it isn’t the camera that matters. Working professionally (whether as amateur or pro) come down to point of view. Deciding what you want to say (metaphor) and getting in the right place to do it (literal.) Then of course there is knowing how to hold the camera – and a little luck.

*Shadi Ghadirian talks about the problems of being a photographer in Iran*

Some months ago in one of those phone interviews where they work through a standard list of questions, a journo from and amateur photo mag came to “What is your favourite photo accessory?” I don’t think my answer, “Ten thousand miles of shoe leather” made it to print.

Truth is seldom simple. Facts look different depending where you come from. Photographers lack – and really need to lack – the Divine guidance needed for certainty. At best we have a personal integrity, an open mind and an honest vision. And make pictures that reflect the complexities of the real world.
Photography is an iceberg. Nine-tenths is underwater, hidden from view. Occasionally parts of that great mass break away and float to the surface – as when the work of Mike Disfarmer was published by Julia Scully and others.

Its instructive to think what a history or overview of photography written in the 1920s or 1930s might have looked like. We can be fairly sure that some of those who would have featured most prominently, for example, William Mortensen, author of Pictorial Lighting, 1932, Projection Control, 1934, Monster & Madonnas: A Book of Methods, 1936, The Command to Look, 1937, The Model, 1937 and more, are among those now largely relegated to footnotes, while the photographer many of us would regard as the most important of the early years of the century, Eugene Atget, would not have got a mention.

There are many photographers who are not particularly well-known whose work is of interest, and often of rather more interest than some of those who have made the history books. Fame is about being in the right place at the right time and knowing the right people.

Photography is not an American medium, nor does it belong to Dusseldorf. Much of the most interesting things that are happening in photography now take place away from these centres. Despite the efforts of historians and authors – such as Naomi Rosenblum – we still have a very long way to go in discovering twentieth century photography outside of the United States of America. (I wonder how much space Polish photography gets in her latest ‘World History’, being promoted during this festival.)

I’m ashamed to have written virtually nothing on Polish photography to date. However In my features on the web site ‘About Photography’ [1999 until 2007 when I was sacked for writing about photography] I try to show a world view of photography, for example with the series of features on photography in Central and South America. Along with the work of many others these have helped shine a little light on photography in this vibrant and active region.

In a very real sense there is no such thing as ‘a photographer’. We don’t exist in isolation. Our often fragile and fraught egos (often seen as evidence of artistic temperament) belie what we all know, that we are a part of a community. Our ideas, our pictures, build on the shoulders of others. Becoming a photographer is very much about connecting with this community. My talk is a very personal one, about some of the people – famous and relatively unknown – who have been important in my life and my photography.

This event in Bielsko-Biala is a powerful manifestation of that community, and one that has transcended our different nationalities, languages and status. The friendship, the fellowship I’ve felt here has moved me to the very bowels of my heart. But this is a community which I think is now under threat in two respects.

Photography for the media is becoming more and more a corporate business rather than an artistic endeavour. Mega-image corporations aim to monopolise image supply, cutting supermarket-style deals with photographers and image buyers, dragging down prices below that needed to sustain an individual approach.

In the fine art world, artists become increasing synthetic, predicated by the demands of the market (for example for limited editions in our essentially infinitely replicable medium.)

I am very much a grass roots person, a believer in participation as the basis of building better lives and a better society. What really matters is the ordinary and the vernacular, although when we examine them closely we find that they are very particular. We can perhaps learn far more about the real history of photography by looking at those who have not made the history books.

More pictures at FotoArtFestival Diary 2005.

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FotoArtFestival Diary – 2005

FotoArtFestival Diary: Back in June 2005 I was at the first FotoArtFestival taking place in Bielsko-Biala, Poland. This was an international festival with exhibitions featuring one photographer from each of 25 countries, including some of my post-industrial urban images from London. But the pictures in this post are some of the colour pictures I made during my visit to Poland on a compact digital camera.

I was also there to give a couple of talks. As well a presentation on my own work I also talked about the work of other photographers from the UK, including Raymond Moore, Tony Ray-Jones and some personal friends including the London-resident American John Benton-Harris, Paul Baldesare, Derek Ridgers and Mike Seaborne.

I hadn’t really anticipated the problem of translation, and although both festival organiser Inez and another translator did their best to translate my talks into Polish, it meant that the talks took more than twice as long with me having to wait between paragraphs for them to repeat my sentences in Polish.

The on-screen presentations which accompanied my talks consisted almost entirely of pictures. When I went back two years later I had prepared a presentation with key phrases and captions along with the pictures and a much shorter text for the translators. But for this occasion I had to edit my presentations on the hoof, leaving out or précising some whole sections to keep within the time allowed. But you can download the full versions (without images) online.

My talks, given in English but translated into Polish, must have gone down well, as I was invited back to speak again at the second FotoArtFestival. And John Benton-Harris was invited to show work at that, while the gallery in nearby Krakov (whose director was in my audience and who I had a long conversation with) put on a show of the work of Tony Ray-Jones.

After I returned home I published my FotoArtFestival Diary which is still on-line, with many of the pictures I took during my stay. I had a fantastic time there and it was particularly great to meet many other photographers there, including some of those whose work was also on show.

Here is an extract from that diary with more about the festival and the start of my ‘Thoughts from Bielsko‘ I wrote while there.

FotoArtFestival

The festival set out to invite the best photographers in various fields from around the world, and included some well-known names – such as Eikoh Hosoe, Ami Vitale, Boris Mikhajlov and Malick Sidibe, as well as many rising stars and a few of those no longer with us, Mario Giacomelli, Inge Morath and Robert Diament.

The 26 major shows represented work from 25 countries – just one photographer from each, with a group show of older Polish photo-reportage. It was truly an effort to be international, although concentrating on European countries, including Albania, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the Ukraine and of course the UK, as well Iran, Japan, Mali, South Africa and the USA. France and Switzerland were also represented, with a representative from Magnum and a presentation on the work of Werner Bischof.

Thoughts from Bielsko

Gatwick and Hell

I hate travelling, especially travelling by air. Endless waiting in arid lounges, surrounded by retail irrelevance, shops of pointless and unwanted items.

It’s an enforced spell of purgatory, with what must be the most infuriating announcements ever devised to punish the lost souls, “Please enjoy the facilities in the lounge” in an irritatingly banal false female voice. You realise Douglas Adams travelled this way.

Eventually we are allowed to go through the departure gate, for yet another spell of waiting until we can clamber into a bus to be driven across the apron to the waiting jet.

After take-off I try to see where we are heading. The first place I can definitely place is Canvey island on the Thames estuary where I was taking pictures a couple of months back.

Two hours later we are bumping down through the clouds and into Krakow airport. Fortunately this is so small it takes a relatively short time to collect my case and go through to meet the driver who is to drive me and another festival visitor, Marta Daho of Magnum, to Bielsko-Biala.

Life Imitates Art

Life imitates Art,

Art Imitates Nature.

Nature abhors a vacuum,

Hoovers suck.

Life? Well, sometimes it happens.

Always it happens, magic or shit.

Bielsko was brimming with magic.

I Translate

I translate

It rans late

And everything did run late, due to the tremendous enthusiasm of the audience to the presentations by all the photographers who had come to talk about their work. In a later post here I’ll post part of an introduction to my talk which I wrote in my hotel room in Bielsko-Biala, as well as some more pictures including some of the other photographers taking part in the festival. And I even did a little translating although the remnants of my ‘O Level’ French wasn’t really up to it.

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Czech Photography & Goldin

Czech Photography & Goldin: Earlier this week I visited two exhibitions in London which I think are worth seeing if you can. The first was one part of a three part show organised by the Czech Embassy, Pixels and Poetics: Sudek, Funke, and the Influence of New Technologies on the Development of Photography, and featured some classic works by Josef Sudek and Jaromír Funke.

[I’ve decided not to include photographs in this post – the links will provide plenty and there are far more on line. But the best way to see most photographs is not on-line but in books which are now readily available for the photographers I mention.]

I think I first really came across Josef Sudek (1896-1976) when Creative Camera magazine published a few of his pictures in 1973 and 1975 and it was from their Doughty Street bookshop that I bought the first monograph published outside his native country in 1978, Sudek by Sonja Bullaty, a substantial volume and finely printed in gravure. Some years later, Sonja Bullaty, the most prestigious of photography magazines, devoted two of its quarterly issues to him and I also managed to buy a fine book of his work published in Czechoslovakia – one of around 16 published in his lifetime.

Czechoslavakia only became an independent country at the end of the First World War in 1918, and from 1948-89 was under communist control. Sudek’s photographs during that time had to be smuggled out of the country by his friends, and some were shown in the USA in the late 1960s, with a retrospective at George Eastman House in 1974.

Conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1915, he was wounded and his right arm amputated. He studied photography in Prague with Karel Novák from 1922 to 1924, and his army pension and a small inheritance helped him build a career in photography. He always worked with large format cameras, sometimes with an assistant – Sonja Bullaty before she left for New York in 1947. These large cameras and his disability meant he had to work slowly and methodically which suited his style of work.

Most of his photographs were made in the city of Prague, but many inside his own studio, and he was a master of the still-life, using familiar household items – a glass of water, a loaf of bread, and egg… and controlled natural lighting.

His work is very different to mine, but I found Sudek’s panoramic images of particular interest. As Tim Parkin states in a detailed account of his life in On Landscape magazine, it was “in 1948 that a major piece slotted into place for Sudek. Two friends gave him a panoramic camera, more specifically a Kodak No. 4 Panoram. This camera took 3:1 ratio film at 12” by 4” and used a sweep lens that covered almost 120 degrees.” It was for Sudek a new way of seeing the world, and it was one that appealed to me, and led to me spending more than I could really afford – around a month’s salary – on a rather smaller Japanese swing-lens camera which had a similar angle of view, though was rather easier to use and worked with much cheaper 35mm film, though giving a much wider vertical view.

Jaromír Funke (1986 – 1945) was a very different photographer, but the two of them became friends as members of a camera club when Sudek first came into photography. They both for different reasons had strong disagreements with the more established club members over photography and were thrown out so founded their own club. This too had some resonance with me and my own experiences when with Terry King, Derek Ridgers and some other friends we formed Framework – and which I wrote about here ten years ago in the post Punk London 1977.

Funke was ten years older than Sudek but a modernist, part of a movement that was exploring new ways with photographic images across much of Europe, with photographers including Man Ray in Paris, László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus, Christian Schad, Alexander Rodchenko in Russia and others – often working without cameras. Geometry played an important part in their work, both in using unusual angles of view and in choosing subject matter, while Sudek’s work was more lyrical.

The show in the Bouda Gallery, at the Czech Centre London is a small one, but with fine works by both photographers. Sudek’s images in high quality pigment inkjet prints are superb, with great separation of the darker tones, truly luxurious, while Funke’s are more workmanlike, more concerned with ideas than the quality of their expression. It is part of a larger show, with some works on the street outside the embassy which didn’t particularly speak to me and others in the Vitrínka Gallery in Kensington Palace Gardens which I didn’t visit. But I did walk the length of Kensington Palace Gardens, a private street lined with embassies and other fine buildings, but unfortunately a street where photography is banned.

I won’t write much about the second show I visited. Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is at Gagosian in Davies Street until March 21 and has already been widely covered. It is described as “an exhibition of all 126 photographs from Nan Goldin’s genre-defining photobook The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” and there are actually more than those 126 pictures on show. The ‘Ballad’ has had a number of different manifestations over its life, beginning as slide presentations with playlists in New York clubs and has also been made into a film. I wrote about it around 20 years ago in an article no longer on-line which perhaps I’ll one day search out and republish.

Having seen the Ballad in several formulations I found this perhaps the least interesting and impressive. Presented in 4 horizontal rows it was hard to see any real sequence and there are no captions. Of course the slide shows had no captions, but did have accompanying music – and contained many more images, I think over 700 in some cases.

But both in the slide shows and the book, the images come at you one – or two as slides fade into each other – at a time, and with captions in the book.) Perhaps this show would have pleased me more it it were laid out in a single line along a very long corridor or around the walls of a larger space. That top line was too high and that bottom line too low and made it impossible to get close enough to the work to concentrate on a single image. I went home and pulled that 1986 book (republished many times later) off my shelf, sat in a comfortable chair and enjoyed it much more.

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Hayling Island Carnival – 2005

Hayling Island Carnival: On Wednesday 3rd August 2005 I went to photograph the carnival on Hayling Island with a couple of friends. I’d been there for the carnival a couple of times in earlier years, though it wasn’t really my kind of thing.

*Neptune’s court – he had plenty to keep him busy*

Two of my friends had in earlier years got money from the Arts Council to record English Carnivals and had persuaded me to go with them in earlier years and I was with one of them again in 2005.

There is an odd fascination about English carnivals, bringing out the eccentricities of the English, something that had been exploited by earlier photographers, perhaps the first being Sir Benjamin Stone (1838 – 1914), who as Wikipedia states made “an invaluable record of the folk customs and traditions of the British Isles, which influenced later photographers of note“. Notable among these, and one who inspired many before his tragic early death was Tony Ray-Jones (1941-72) and the posthumous book ‘A Day Off: An English Journal‘ published in 1974 was certainly the most influential British photographic publication of that era.

I never met Ray-Jones, who died before I was deeply involved in photography, but I did later become friends and worked with his friend, the Brooklyn-born photographer John Benton-Harris who printed much of his work, including the prints for ‘A Day Off’ and had occasionally photographed with him. And those two photographers who first took me to Canvey were ex-students and close friends of John too.

I worked with John on producing the images for what would have been his masterwork, ‘Mad Hatters – a diary of a secret people… as seen through the looking glass of – John Benton Harris‘ still unpublished, though a few of us treasure copies printed by Blurb but never made public. In mine he thanks me for my ‘Valued Technical Help‘, though we also had many discussions and arguments on the sequencing and very occasionally the selection of images, many of which I made significant improvements by some judicious dodging and burning – though always subject to his approval.

*The ladies from the Health centre were going on a booze cruise*

Actually with John virtually every discussion was a bitter argument – we were once asked to leave an event in Borough Market after a shouting match over a review I had written of a book by Homer Sykes (another of those influenced by Stone.) Sadly ‘Mad Hatters’ remains unpublished. It’s a fine body of work but a book greatly in need of an editor – something John would never tolerate.

*The Navy gets in on the act with HMS Hayling*

Back to 2005, here is the text I wrote for My London Diary about the day:

I went to Hayling Island for the carnival with Paul and Michael, and it was a nice day. Paul drove us down - it isn't too long a drive from London, really a Londoner's day out. Hayling seems full of people from London on holiday, some with second homes there, others hiring them, often from family and friends.

*A beach tableau, complete with seagull*

Despite a longer than usual hold-up at Haslemere, we arrived just in time for the official opening. Everything was happening on the day, and it started with the crowning of the Carnival Queen and her retinue, then on to the Fancy Dress.

Then came the Baby Show, after which we went down to the other end of the town, where the carnival formed up in previous years. It seemed dead there, with more housing and less shops than before, and nothing was happening. People up that end are apparently pretty fed up to lose the carnival, and we were sorry to miss another meeting with 'the King' whose playing had been a major feature of previous years.

We grabbed a meal at a restaurant and then made our way back for the Dog Show, After which it was time for the parade to form up near the sea front. There were more mermaids than you could ever imagine and everyone seemed to be having fun and I took a lot of pictures.

More pictures from Hayling Island Carnival 2005 on My London Diary.

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London’s Canal Walk: 2007

London’s Canal Walk: On Saturday 26th May 2007 I walked across London together with my wife and older son on canal towpaths from Mile End in the east to Old Oak Lane in the west, from where we made the short walk to Willesden Junction for a train towards home.

I’d walked and cycled along many shorter sections of these canals before, but this was the first time I’d done the whole roughly 12 miles in a single stretch. Most of the way we kept to the towpaths, but there are two tunnels around which we had to detour on roads, and a few places where walking along a road was more convenient than using the tow path, particularly around Little Venice.

Probably the definitive book on English canals was written by a photographer, Eric de Maré, (1910 – 2002), one of a now largely forgotten generation of British photographers, and illustrated with many of his fine photographs, as well as some by others. He was one of the finest architectural photographers of the mid-20th century and also someone whose popular Penguin book ‘Photography’ published in 1957 introduced many of us to the history, techniques and aesthetics of the medium. Others since have looked better on the coffee table but have lacked his insight.

de Maré and his first wife lived on a canal boat for some years and travelled around 600 miles along them while writing and taking the pictures for the book ‘The Canals of England’ published by Architectural Press in 1950 which remains the definitive publication on our canals, though in some obvious ways outdated. The canals – which had played an important part in the war effort – had been nationalised under the National Transport Act on 1st January 1948 and part of the book is an impassioned plea for the UK’s transport policies to be revised to update the system and make fuller use of our great canal heritage.

But of course that didn’t happen, thanks to huge road transport lobby, and instead of canals similar to some in the continent we got motorways. The canals were encouraged to bring commercial traffic to an end, and with a few isolated examples most was finished by 1970 with the canals being given over to leisure use.

Not that de Maré was against leisure use and his work actively promoted this for many of England’s narrow and more rural canals as well as making an argument based on the commercial possibilities of schemes such as the ‘Cross or Four River Scheme’ proposed earlier by a 1906 Royal Commission for wide high volume commercial canals linking Bristol, Hull, Liverpool and London with the Midlands cities of Birmingham, Nottingham and Leicester.

The book came out in a second edition in 1987 and copies of both are available reasonably priced secondhand – my copy of the first edition with a handwritten dedication from de Maré was at some point marked by a bookseller’s pencil for 6d but I think I paid just a little more. I can find no individual website showing more than a small handful of his pictures – though you can see many by searching for his images online.

It’s still interesting to walk along by the canals in London, and easy to do in smaller sections – or to add a little at either end should you want to and perhaps walk from Limehouse to Southall or Brentford. I didn’t write much about the walk in 2007, but I’ll end with what I did write back then – with the usual corrections.

On Saturday I accompanied Linda and Sam on a walk along some of London’s canals, from Mile End on the Regent’s Canal and along that to join the Grand Union Paddington Branch at ‘Little Venice’, and west on that to Willesden Junction.

When I first walked along the Regents Canal I had to climb over gates and fences to access most of it. The towpath was closed to install high voltage lines below it, but even the parts that were still theoretically open were often hard to find and gates were often locked. The public were perhaps tolerated, but not encouraged to walk along them.

Now everybody walks along them and there are those heritage direction posts and information boards that I’ve rather come to hate. And from this weekend, you no longer even theoretically need a licence to cycle the paths – though mine is still in my wallet, several years since I was last asked to show it.

Now, as walkers, the constant cycle traffic on some sections has become a nuisance. And although most cyclists obey the rules, riding carefully, ringing bells and where necessary giving way, we did have to jump for safety as one group chased madly after each other, racing with total disregard for safety.

But for the rain – the occasional shower at first, later settling in to a dense fine constant downpour, it would have been a pleasant walk.

Many more pictures on My London Diary

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Immigration, Lions, Poverty Pay & Palestine – 2015

Immigration, Lions, Poverty Pay & Palestine: Ten years ago on Friday 13th March 2015 I photographed four very different protests in London, beginning outside an immigration tribunal in Feltham, going from there to Trafalgar Square where people where protesting against ‘canned hunting’ of lions, on to Kensington Gore where cleaners were demanding a living wage at the Royal College of Art and finally to the offices of G4S on Victoria St, Westminster for a protest against the imprisonment and torture of four young Palestinian boys by Israel.

Let Ife Stay in the UK! – York House Immigration Tribunal, Feltham

Immigration, Lions, Poverty Pay & Palestine - 2015

York House where the Immigration Tribunal is based is on an industrial estate halfway between Feltham and Heathrow on the western fringes of London and protesters had not found it easy to get there. I arrived a little late and other protesters only arrived shortly before I left, with others still on their way.

The protest had been held up at the start when security at the tribunal had told the protesters they were not allowed to protest outside the offices, and had called the police. But the police had come and confirmed that not only they had the right to protest there but also that people could take photographs outside the tribunal – though of course cameras and recording equipment were not allowed inside the tribunal.

The protesters had come to demand that 2-year-old Ife, who had Down’s syndrome, and her mother should be allowed to stay at their Peckham home where she can receive essential healthcare and support and not be deported to Nigeria. They intended to stay until after the end of the tribunal hearing later in the day.

The protesters from the Revolutionary Communist Group had brought with them posters covered with the sheets of a local petition to keep Ife here with nearly a thousand signatures, as well was posters denouncing the UK’s racist immigration laws and also calling for justice for Jimmy Mubenga, killed by racist G4S deportation officers during his forced deportation flight from Britain.

Let Ife Stay in the UK!

Save Our Lions – ban Canned Hunting – Trafalgar Square

Several hundred gathered in Trafalgar Square to protest against ‘canned hunting’, where lions are bred and raised tame on farms in South Africa for rich visitors to pet, to ‘walk with lions’ and to shoot as trophy heads.

The protesters say this degrades a noble animals and threatens wild lions, which are captured for farm breeding to improve the quality of the stock.

Only very young cubs are safe to pet and young female lions are often killed once they become too large to pet as there is much less demand for female lions as hunting trophies.

After speeches and photographs on the North Terrace I was invited to go with one of the protesters to South Africa House where he stood in the entrance with a placard and poster until security told us to leave.

Save Our Lions – ban Canned Hunting

Poverty pay at the Royal College of Art – Kensington Gore

I met with protesters from the IWGB (Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain) at the Royal College of Art where they had come at lunchtime to demand that cleaners be immediately paid the London Living Wage. Previous pressure from the IWGB had led to the RCA saying it would pay the living wage from September 2015, but the cleaners needed it now, not in sixth months time.

After a noisy protest outside the college entrance in a mews just off the main road where they were joined by around 50 students in support the marched onto Kensington Gore for a more public protest on the east side of the college facing the Royal Albert Hall.

Here there were speeches and chanting and a great deal of noise from the drums and vuvuzelas before the protesters went back to continue their protest at the college entrance.

From here they moved further down the mews and to an almost enclosed yard at the rear of the college next to a dining area keeping up a barrage of noise. After keeping up their loud protest for around an hour they finished with a warning to RCA management that they would be back and keep up the protests until their demands were met.

Poverty pay at the Royal College of Art

Free the Hares boys protest at G4S – Victoria St

British multinational private security company G4S plays a key role in running jails in Israel where thousands of Palestinians are held.

Among the prisoners being held and tortured were 5 young boys from Hares in the northern West Bank of Palestine, and the Islamic Inminds Human Rights Group were protesting outside the G4S offices on Victoria St demanding their immediate release.

The boys were arrested after an Israeli illegal settler crashed into the back of an Israeli truck and they were alleged to have caused the collision by throwing stones.

That had happened two years earlier and the boys had now been held without trial for two years for the alleged crime – for which there appeared to be no evidence.

One of the five, Mohammed Mahdi Saleh Suleiman, was convicted by a military court and sentenced to 15 years in prison on the basis of a statement obtained by torture that he was not allowed to read before being forced to sign.

In 2016 the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention published its opinion on his case. They called his detention ‘discriminatory’ and ‘arbitrary’ and called for his immediate release by Israel. Israel ignores most if not all UN opinions.

Free the Hares boys protest at G4S

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Buttes Chaumont and Belleville Traversée 2008

Buttes Chaumont and Belleville Traversée: Monday 17th November 2008 was the last day of our stay in Paris where I had come with my wife for a week for me to go to Paris Photo and for the two of us to enjoy the city and the huge number of photographic shows that were taking place there. On My London Diary you can read PARIS SUPPLEMENT, my diary of our week there.

We had arrived in Paris the previous Monday and the first thing we did on arriving there was to buy our weekly tickets – then Carte Orange – for bus and metro transport across the city – incredible value for those used to UK transport prices.

Buttes Chaumont and Belleville Traversée 2008 — *Parc de Buttes Chaumont*

But that of course had finished on Sunday. And the only real way to see any city is on foot, so we decided to spend the day before our Eurostar train left for London at 17.13 taking a walk around some of our favourite places, booking out but leaving our cases in the hotel foyer to collect later.

Buttes Chaumont and Belleville Traversée 2008 Le Voltigeur on the courner of rue des Couronnes — *Le Voltigeur on the courner of rue des Couronnes*

As you will see from the pictures here we first made our way to Paris’s most fantastic park, Buttes Chaumont, a former gypsum quarry and waste tip converted into gothic fantasy, and then on to Belleville.

Earlier in our stay we had visited the Bar Floreal where I had been given a free copy of a small book produced some years earlier for a show there by Willy Ronis (1910-2009), one of my several favourite photographers of Paris, ‘la traversée de Belleville’ which describes his favourite walk around the area.

Linda was keen to use this and find exactly the scenes in his pictures, while I was more interested in making my own pictures, and had followed a quite similar route some years earlier. But it was interesting to see it through his eyes, although considerable redevelopment had changed the area since he walked it in 1990. And more since 2008.

Rather more atmospheric than my pictures is the video which Ronis appears and speaks about some of his pictures in made at the time of the show in 1990.

Unfortunately the restaurant ‘Aux Monts D’Auvergne’ at which we ate a splendid three course lunch had been replaced by another by the time we next came to Paris. After the large meal we struggled a little but did just about manage to finish the ‘Traversée’, walk back to the hotel to collect our luggage and catch our train and were back home on the outskirts of London by 8pm.

There is more detail about the day in the text on My London Diary as well as in the picture captions – and as usual many more pictures.

Buttes Chaumont / Belleville Traversée

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Sweeps Festival – Rochester, Kent – 2011

Sweeps Festival – Rochester, Kent: I’d always avoided festivals like the Dickens Festival and Sweeps Festival at Rochester. Somehow these events seemed to be synthetic rather than authentic unlike the older carnivals, some of which still take place, though there are far fewer than twenty or thirty years ago – when my local carnival petered out.

The Rochester festivals are very much recent sponsored promotions of tourism to the town and the Medway area, although the Sweeps festival claims to dates back over 400 years, when child chimney sweeps celebrated May Day, said to have been their one day off in the year, and came into town to make the most of it with a great deal of mischief and mayhem.

The free Sweeps festival was actually founded in 1981 and lasts three days – in 2024 it begins on Saturday 4th May and ends on Bank Holiday Monday, May 6th. It has managed to continue while cuts in government funding have resulted in others being abandoned. It is very different now from its supposed origins, with folk groups and Morris dancers coming from around the country to perform to thousands of visitors.

Working with my friend, photographer John Benton-Harris on book projects I had seen his pictures of the event, and in 2011 he twisted my arm to get me to accompany him to the festival. We met at London Bridge station and took the train for the roughly 75 minute journey to Rochester.

It wasn’t the happiest of days for either of us. John lost his wallet which fell out of his pocket in a café and had disappeared by the time he realised and returned to look for it, and I managed to poke myself in the eye with the slanted end of a nylon camera strap that turned out to be remarkably sharp, after which everything seen through my normal camera eye was rather a blur. I still managed to take a great many pictures.

The best part of the day for me was actually the train journeys there and back with John where we had some stimulating conversations, with both of us enjoying a good argument about photography and photographers. He had a phenomenal knowledge of photographers and photography in New York where he had grown up and known many in person – which powered the iconic 1985 Barbican show and book American Images: Photography 1945-1980 , but he failed to appreciate many of the later photographers I admired.

When I wrote briefly about the festival on My London Diary I noted that “what seems to be entirely missing are the kind of drunken orgies that used to mark the spring festival. Or perhaps I was just in the wrong place? ” For all the unusual costumes and masks somehow the festival did seem rather tame, lacking any of the kind of energy that makes Notting Hill carnival so special. But it was also very much kinder on the ears, almost entirely acoustic and never reaching the intense high horsepower decibel levels of Ladbroke Grove.

We were there on Monday 2nd May 2011, the final day of the three day festival, as I hadn’t been prepared to miss the London May Day march the previous day or the protest in Brighton on the Saturday and had thought that the final procession would be worth photographing. But as I commented “What I hadn’t realised was that relatively few of the dancers stay on for the final day, and although the procession was interesting, it was considerably smaller than I expected.”

Given the circumstances I think I managed fairly well with my pictures, but I don’t think either John or I made any pictures that would stand among our best. Following his untimely death last August his own personal website is now offline, but you can see some of his work at the Mary Evans picture library (click on the image to see more) – but nothing there from his many visits to Rochester, nor in the 2021 Huck Feature or his APAG entry. Still online are a few of his critical articles which give a good idea of his thinking on photography on his The Photo Pundit blog.

John thought highly of some of his pictures from previous Rochester festivals and included around 15 of them in the roughly 150 images in his unpublished ‘Mad Hatters – a diary of a secret people‘, a book of his pictures of the English which I helped him produce. I worked on all the pictures and gave him a great deal of advice of which he very occasionally took notice.

I resisted later attempts to go to Rochester with him for this and other festivals there, and should I go back again its likely to be on a day without the festival crowds. Rochester does seem a very interesting historic town and there are some great places to walk in the area.

More pictures on My London Diary at Rochester Sweeps Festival.

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Pancakes, A Farm & Another London – 2007

Pancakes, A Farm & Another London: My working day on Shrove Tuesday, 20th January 2007 began in Guildhall Yard in the City of London, where by permission of the Chief Commoner the Worshipful Company Of Poulters were holding their annual charity pancake races. The Poulters got their charter to regulate the sale of poultry and small game in 1368, but their pancake races are a rather more recent tradition, first run in 2005.

Music for the event came from the Worshipful Company Of Musicians (1500), time-keeping was by the Worshipful Company Of Clockmakers (1631) and a starting cannon for each of the many races was provided and fired by the Worshipful Company Of Gunmakers (1637.)

Although this is a charitable and fun event it fully demonstrates the competitive spirit at the heart of the city. More pictures on My London Diary.

From Guildhall I rushed to another pancake event on the edge of the City, the Great Spitalfields Pancake Race at the former Trumans Brewery, arriving very out of breath just in time to see the finish of the final race and to photograph some of those who had taken part in fancy dress and the prize-giving.

As I commented, “the atmosphere was considerably less restrained than in the City.” More pictures.

From there a short walk took me on a visit to Spitalfields Urban Farm, one of a number of urban farms set up in the 70s and 80s (1978 in this case) on waste land. This area had formerly been part of a railway goods depot next to the line out of Liverpool Street. It now provides an environmental education and a great deal of enjoyment to people of all ages in the local community.

I was meeting with other photographers later in the day, and still had time to stroll in a leisurely fashion through Spitalfields to Shoreditch to catch the bus, making a few photographs on the way. Back then there was relatively little graffiti on the walls around the disused Spitalfields station and Brick Lane, but now its hard to find a square inch of wall not covered with it. I was photographing in a dark alley leading through to Bishopsgate when a hooded figure strolled past me. Despite the media stereotyping of ‘hoodies’ I couldn’t feel he was in the least threatening; if anything rather more like a monk. More pictures on My London Diary.

I met a group of photographer friends for a meal at an Italian cafe in New Malden and then we went on together to Kingston Museum, where the show ‘Another London‘ including my work along with that of Paul Baldesare and Mike Seaborne was then showing. Of course it closed years ago, but the web site featuring work from it is still on-line.

As the introduction on the site states, the show features “the London of the suburbs, of its deprived areas and of its various ethnic groups” with work by myself an Paul “in the tradition of ‘street photography‘” and Mike’s panoramic urban landscapes some “using the viewpoint offered by the front seat of London buses.”

Another London

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Freedom Protests in London – 2010

Freedom Protests in London: Two protests on Saturday 23rd January, 2010 were against the increasing powers which have been given to police and misused by them to control and harass lawful actions on the street.

I’m A Photographer Not A Terrorist – Tragalgar Square

Around 1,500 photographers and supporters turned up to the I’m A Photographer Not A Terrorist rally in Trafalgar Square to protest at the increasing harassment of people taking photographs by police, and in particular their abuse of powers under the Terrorism Act.

I think those there included virtually every photographer who works in London as well as many amateurs. Almost all of us who work on the streets have been approached by police, questioned and then subjected to a search, usually under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 (S44.)

As I commented in 2010:

These stop and searches appear to have continued unabated despite a Home Office Circular in September that made it clear they should not be used to target photographers. Searches can also be carried out under Section 43 of the act, but for this officers must have reasonable grounds to suspect someone of being a terrorist. S44 stops can only be carried out in “authorised areas”, which although intended by Parliament to apply in very restricted areas for short lengths of time have been used by police – for example – to permanently to cover central London and some other areas.
I’m a Photographer Not a Terrorist

The Press Card that we carry has the text “The Association of Chief Police Officers of England Wales and Northern Ireland and the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland recognise the holder of this card as a bona-fide newsgatherer.” But despite this, one of my colleagues was the subject of roughly 30 searches in 2009.

Personally although I’ve been approached and asked why why I’m taking pictures on a number of occasions I’ve only been been subjected to a S44 stop once. Being a still photographer I tend to work fast and keep on the move and I think videographers who stay around longer have suffered more. But certainly there was a lack of cooperation from the police and I was often finding my Press Card being unrecognised by offiers. Others told me that they didn’t regard those issued through the NUJ, one of the recognised gatekeepers to the system, as being valid. And most months if not most weeks I would be threatened with arrest when taking pictures.

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of this protest was listening to a BBC News reporter, standing in the middle of a crowd of experienced journalists and giving a report in which he gave the number attending the protest as “three hundred“. It drew immediate shouts of protest from those of us standing around him and was certainly “not a good advertisement for the competence or impartiality of the BBC who appear to have a policy of playing down dissent.” It’s a policy which still seems to govern the BBC reporting of protests in the UK which are either simply ignored or very much played down.

Among the protesters was a small “Vigilance Committee with a man on stilts wearing a number of CCTV cameras accompanied by a male and female vigilance officer, who picked on individuals and questioned them, taking their fingerprints before finding them guilty and sentencing them to a choice of six years hard labour or contributing to the Vigilance Committee.”

Also present were three Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, but police and ‘heritage wardens’ largely kept away. Although this had been planned as an illegal protest taking place without the permission from the Mayor required by the bylaws, the authority had put in an application for it without any reference to the protesters.

More pictures at I’m a Photographer Not a Terrorist.

Life Is Too Short to be Controlled – St Pancras to Piccadilly Circus,

Later in the day protesters met at St Pancras for the ‘Life Is Too Short to be Controlled’ protest against the increasing control over our lives through increased police powers to stop and search, increased surveillance and controls on freedom of movement.

The protest, organised by ‘London NoBorders’ began outside St Pancras Station where the Border Authority detains migrants arriving by Eurostar and marched to Piccadilly Circus, beneath which Westminster’s CCTV HQ keeps a constant watch on the streets of London, the “City of CCTV”. Across the city there were then over 500,000 CCTV cameras watching us, installed by councils, public bodies, companies and individuals and on a typical day the average person in London will be recorded by 300 of them.

Police kept a relatively discrete watch on the event, with police vans parked out of site and even when the group marched along the busy Euston Road, holding up traffic for a few minutes not a single officer appeared. The march was well-ordered “and when an ambulance answering an emergency came along, the whole march cleared the road for it with remarkable speed. At Russell Square, one taxi driver decided to try to force his way through the marchers, but was soon stopped, with several people sitting on the bonnet of his vehicle.”

At Piccadilly Circus there was a short token road block before the protesters moved to the pavement around Eros for more speeches and some dancing. A Police Community Support Officer appeared briefly after someone climbed up and taped a Palestinian flag to Eros’s bow and tried to identify who had done this. The statue is rather fragile and could have been damaged. He soon gave up and went away and was replaced a few minutes later by a single police officer who was embarrassed by being greeted with hugs, and moved back a few yards to watch.

*“Not me officer, someone borrowed my scarf”*

The police had monitored the progress of the protest as it marched through London, both from some distance on the streets and also on CCTV. It had been peaceful and had caused only very minor disturbance. Few protests do, and the kind of heavy policing sometimes employed often means police cause more disruption that the protest, as well as sometimes provoking a response from protesters who would otherwise have protested peacefully.

More at Life Is Too Short to be Controlled.

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