Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

Change We See?

The Labour Party has a Flickr pool entitled Change we see, which asks people to share photographs which show the government’s achievements since they came to power.

“Upload a photo of a local hospital we’ve rebuilt, a local Sure Start centre we’ve opened or a local school we’ve invested in and, together, we can show everyone the importance of the Change We See.”

Kate Day in The Daily Telegraph rather gleefully points out that people have been uploading images that were not quite what the party had hoped for, and in particular photographers have been uploading stop and search forms provided for them by the police when they tried to photograph buildings.

When I visited the site a few minutes ago it looked like this:

Flickr

And the third item in the lower row – the long pink form – is Grant Smith‘s Stop and Search form from the City of London Police.

The first item in the top row is a picture of heavily contaminated land on which the government has overruled a local council and given permission for new homes to be built. To the right of Grant’s stop and search is Mark Thomas’s ‘Stop and Search Card‘ and to the right of that, after the couple of ‘Rage Against New Labour‘ posters under ‘Waitrose Essentials’, a spoof of one of the Met’s anti-terrorist and anti-photography posters – the caption under it reads ‘My take on the Met’s misguided, paranoia-inducing “Seems Odd” campaign.’

Perhaps you have some pictures you could upload to the pool?

Haiti – Man-Made Disaster

I’ve been wondering for a few days whether or not to write anything about Haiti. The plight of the people there has surely touched us all, and many of us have contributed towards helping them. Giving money may not be much, but for the moment it is what most of us can do, and people there need a lot of help.

Information from there of course flows across the web; in the first hours most of the first-hand broadcast reports relied on people using Skype as mobile services were down. And days later, much of the real information is coming from the web, with broadcasts lagging behind on picking up the stories about the kind of US military takeover which is holding up supplies getting to the people who need them.

The first reports came from journalists and photographers in Haiti when the quake happened, but many Haitian journalists were unable to work because of their own personal devastation – the subject of an appeal by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

After the quake, photographers flooded in to Haiti by various routes and we’ve seen many pictures – for example on the NPR site, in the Guardian (by David Levene) and the New York Times. And you can also look at work from agencies such as Panos and VII.

Magnum in contrast have a set of pictures from their files on Slate, the majority of which show it as an island paradise – especially for tourists – or take a rather romantic view of voodoo. Reality does creep in through some of the more recent work.

London-based photographer Jess Hurd decided to go because of her anger “as a human being and a journalist that this level of avoidable devastation [was] caused by an earthquake.” As she goes on to explain on her blog, Haiti has been impoverished by decades of corrupt and incompetent rule, supported by the USA and policies which have prevented positive development of the country for the people.

The earthquake was a natural event, but the disaster that it caused is largely man-made, a consequence of colonial policies that have impoverished the country and the people.

Report after report (especially outside the mass media) is telling us how the US Military insistence on taking military control of areas before food distribution occurs is stopping the supplies – which many of us have contributed to – to reaching the aid organisations and the people who so desperately need them.

Hurd describes her trip to Haiti as “the most harrowing story I have ever covered” and her pictures which are linked from her blog carry the disclaimer: Please view with caution, these images graphically depict the aftermath including decomposing bodies and a harrowing hospital operation. You can see more of her work from this and other stories at Report Digital.

Brighton Bash

Monday I took the train to Brighton, sometimes described as “London by the sea” which is pretty ludicrous as it has a very different feel to the capital. I did just glimpse the sea as the train rolled into the station – around a 45 minute journey from Clapham Junction, but that was it, as I was headed up into the hills to the north-east, a short bus ride away to Moulsecoomb Wild Park, an area of downland preserved as a park when it was bought by the Brighton and Hove Council in 1925.

I was there to photograph a protest against a weapons factory on an estate hidden behind the trees on the edge of a railway cutting. Parts from the factory there ended up in the bombs that were used in Operation Cast Lead. the 22 day Israeli attack on Gaza that killed 1417 Palestinians and had ended exactly a year earlier. This demonstration was the latest in a whole series of protests against the arms manufacturer EDO MBM/ITT organised by the Brighton-based Smash Edo campaign over around the past five years, including the Carnival Against the Arms Trade I photographed in June 2008.

What was extremely civilised was that the meeting point for the demonstration was a café, and I walked in and ordered a mug of tea to find it full of photographers. We could have had a union meeting on the spot.

Those years of demonstration have also been years of confrontation and harassment by the police although during Monday’s demonstration the police did appear to be trying to adopt a less confrontational approach in some ways – and during the several hours I was taking pictures they clearly did not want to make any arrests – though they did make five after I left.

But they were clearly also not prepared to let the protesters get the the factory to demonstrate their, blocking off the road leading to it. And although the protesters more or less surrounded the factory estate during the protest they did not manage to break through the police protecting it.

This was an event when neither the police nor many of the protesters really want to be photographed – although the organisers of the protest do want press coverage and send out press releases. The organisers suggested that those taking part wear masks as both police and press would be taking photographs, and we were, in our rather different ways. At least one police officer was using a long telephoto on a Nikon DLSR to record pictures of individuals taking part, while others were using Sony camcorders to make a record of the action.

The march stopped on the main road where the demonstrators could see a strong police road block on the road leading up to the factory. I’d gone ahead at this point intending to photograph both the police block and then the marchers coming up towards it, and had climbed up about 20 feet on the roadside bank to get a good view. Unfortunately, at this point at least three quarters of the marchers decided to try to find another route, running up the hillside a few hundred yards behind me into the woods.

So I had to run up the hill too, and it was a pretty steep climb, and I began to feel my age. There were a couple of younger photographers with me but I soon decided to take my own time rather than try and keep up with them as we climbed perhaps a hundred feet. Then I was on my own in the middle of the wood and having to choose paths, trying to work out a likely route that would intercept the way the protesters would go. Not too easy as I’d never been here before, but I decided that since there were around 250 of them that they would get pretty spread out – mostly the paths were only wide enough for a single file – and I would be bound to come across them.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
The front of the long column marching through the woods
Eventually, about seven minutes later I did, and I think I’d found a more direct route as I saw the head of the long and spread out column coming towards me. For the next ten minutes or so we wandered single file through the woods, passing quietly behind one group of police horses waiting on the edge but then we were seen by a group of police with dogs in the wood in front of us. They shouted from around 50 yards away and told us to go back or we would get bitten, and although they were too far away behind trees and bushes to get a picture I didn’t feel inclined to go closer. Although police recognise and sometimes respect a press card, police dogs don’t.

The protesters were even less keen to continue than me, and took a path away from dogs and out of the wood on the other side, where more police were waiting. For the next half hour or so, police and protesters seemed to be playing a game of some sort, with the police letting protesters through then chasing them back and finally stopping them on a path close to the factory. A couple of times the police brought in their horses to disperse the demonstrators, and the dogs were used again to threaten demonstrators who had entered a factory site next to the arms factory under a fence. There were a couple of major scrimmages, and police armed with riots shield also lent a hand. One protester was injured slightly by a baton to the head, but otherwise it was mainly a matter of pushing and shoving. Really the only thing missing was a ball.

And of course I and all the other photographers were trying to take photographs. At times there was rather a crush of photographers on some narrow paths, and tree branches really did get in the way of pictures. I did get pushed rather a lot by police, although I took care as always to keep out of the way. But a few police do sometimes seem to have a mindset that says that anyone with a camera is by definition in the way. And couple of times a police photographer gave me a fairly hefty shove so he could get a shot – where normally photographers would have respected that I was there first!

Eventually the demonstrators tired and decided it was time to go back to meet up with the rest of the protesters, and we walked back through the woods, this time accompanied by a few police officers, and down the hill to the road into Brighton.

By this time I was rather tired, and my feet were hurting. I hadn’t bargained for all the hill-climbing and off-road walking and so hadn’t worn suitable footwear. So I wasn’t pleased to find that the protesters were setting off to march back the couple of miles into Brighton, and nor were the police. A quarter of a mile down the road they tried to block the road, but chose a bad place as many of the marchers simply walked through a car park and around the block. Their second attempt wasn’t a great deal better either, and it wasn’t until the march was almost in the town centre that they did manage to stop it fairly effectively.

However it was obviously too late. The march could hardly be kept where it was blocking a major road, and once let to go on it could not be controlled in the open space of The Level and the city streets leading away from it. Issuing a Section 14 order stating it could not proceed into the city centre was surely a waste of time. As the police withdrew and came to a wider space officers rather stupidly grabbed the odd protester and others simply walked past – and eventually all had to be allowed to proceed.

I’d had enough by this time and went to the station for a train back to London and home. I think it had been an effective demonstration, getting considerable publicity in the local paper and another step in the fight to close down the arms factory. Pictures and stories – including mine front-paged on Demotix – published elsewhere helped to raise the profile of the campaign outside tle local area. You can see the pictures from the day on My London Diary.

More Culture

If you’re in a rush (as I so often seem to be) it’s dangerous to visit Lens Culture, where a new issue is now on line. There is a ten-minute interview with Roger Ballen about his work, nicely done and one of the earliest of a new video series, Lens Culture: Conversations with Photographers, though perhaps the music was just a little overdone. There is another with Simon Roberts too.

Completely new to me were the black and white portraits of kids at play by which Jim Caspar found in a contest at The Center for Fine Art Photography in Colorado that he was asked to judge. Some of Donna Pinckley‘s pictures have a quality that reminded me of Diane Arbus‘s kid with a hand grenade, (see the contacts and read more about Colin Wood, interviewed 41 years after the exposure in the San Francisco Chronicle.)

There is also a feature Chaotic Harmony: Contemporary Korean Photography, a review of the book accompanying the show of 40 contemporary Korean photographers at The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. With 13 images it gives what can only be a very partial idea of the work but may whet your appetite; if so, the book Chaotic Harmony: Contemporary Korean Photography (ISBN: 0300157533 / 0-300-15753-3, Tucker, Anne Wilkes; Sinsheimer, Karen; Koo, Bohnchang is available for around £18 including delivery from the cheaper UK suppliers.

Don’t fly out to Houston as Chaotic Harmony closed there earlier this month; but the page is still worth visiting for the audio there. Still showing in Houston is Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea continues until Feb 14th – and you can see an interesting presentation on it on their site. Chaotic Harmony will be on show at Santa Barbara from July 3 – September 19, 2010.

Too much more of interest to mention, and I have to get down to some other work. If you’ve got any time to spare don’t miss Lens Culture.

Tent City – Jason Parkinson

I first met Jason Parkinson when he was filming a demonstration outside Harmondsworth Detention Centre – one of our special prisons for immigrants – a few years ago, when he was getting a bit of harassment from the police who were refusing to believe his UK Press Card was genuine ( a too common police trick), and since then I’ve come across him filming at many of the protests I’ve covered. He’s one of those guys who manages to get in the right places to film, stands up to people and asks awkward questions, and is also an excellent film editor.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Hank Roberts on the roof at ‘Tent City’ protest
You can see his trailer for the 30-minute documentary Tent City Occupation on YouTube, where there are also links to some of the other short clips he has posted over the more than two years he has spent investigating the setting up of a privately funded City Academy in Wembley. His work has laid bare much of the shady dealing behind the story as well as showing the fight put up against the scheme, led by local teachers who realised the issues involved. This is a story that should become a national scandal and I hope that Jason’s film will make it so.

I visited the occupation on the site for the new Academy in July 2008 and here in part is what I wrote about it then:

Teachers in the London Borough of Brent are among those who have been taking to the tents in the occupation of Wembley Park Sports Ground, just a hammer throw or two from the well-known stadium. They know that the government’s program to establish City Academies has failed to deliver the promised results, and that putting one in the area will only damage the exisiting three good schools in the area. Wembley doesn’t need a new school – and if it did, handing £30 million of public – our – money over to private enterprise to run one simply crazy.

The area is also one of the more congested parts of London. More school places will mean more school runs, especially from the southern areas of Brent where there is a shortage of space. The sports ground is also used by local groups, including a nursery school, sports groups (a football practice was taking place while I was taking pictures) an three small businesses creating local employment, all of which will find it hard to find alternative venues and are likely to close.

It’s also hard to know why a political party that campaigned against the academy in the elections which got it into power in Brent should perform a sudden about-turn and not only decide it has to be done, but that even though the site won’t be ready for several years it has to start straight away in substandard accommodation. It is a change of policy that has encouraged allegations of illegality – and may be challenged in court.

Do watch the trailer – and vote for it on YouTube. You can read the whole of my account and see more pictures on My London Diary.

Céline Clanet

I was looking at Céline Clanet’s web site – her work was recently featured in The Independent – a few days ago and meant to comment about it here but it slipped my mind . What I had meant to say was that if you want snow pictures, you could look at her work rather than bother to get cold going out and taking them during the recent white winter we’ve been having here in the UK. Lapland, as her pictures show, can do it rather better.

And mainly I did take my own advice and keep indoors and keep warm, though I did take my camera when I needed to visit the local shops, and even took a slightly longer route than usual to walk there, taking a few snaps on the way. But I don’t think I’ll be posting them on line, though some may find their way to Alamy or another library when I get round to it.

Back to Céline Clanet, a freelance photographer and graphic designer who was born in Chambéry, France and lives and works in Paris, the series I find more interesting on her site are not from Lapland but the other works, Une mélodie japonaise, Un mince vernis de réalité and Leur(s) petite(s) histoire(s). Her site gives the English translations, A Japanese Melody, A Thin Layer of Reality and Their short (Hi)story(ies). But perhaps its just because I don’t like snow.

Nadav Kander on China

Nadav Kander wasn’t my choice for the 2009 Prix Pictet that he won, although I was only judging on the few pictures from his project that were then shown, along with those from the other 11 short listed photographers that were presented on Lens Culture.

But looking at his web site, (it needs Flash – use this link to avoid it messing up your browser by opening a new window – never in my opinion a good thing) where you can see 48 pictures from the winning project, Yangtze, the Long River, it would be hard not be impressed. There is also some fine work in other projects, and I enjoyed reading his biography, which starts with a picture of him wearing a bib in a high chair.

Thanks to the A Photo Student blog, I’ve just spent a very pleasant 10 minutes while drinking my morning coffee watching a video on YouTube listening to Kander talking sensitively about his pictures. Made in collaboration with the Royal College of Art in London, it gives you time to see the pictures and isn’t afraid to put up a black screen when Kander starts talking.

There aren’t any fancy effects to detract from the pictures, and though sometimes the picture fades are little slow for my taste, they go briefly to black between images with none of that annoying overlap that we had to endure in the early years of AV productions and still sometimes see on film (of course one time in a thousand it had some real point – just the other 999 that really turned me off.) It is a video at a pace that allows you to think, made about a series of images that stimulate thought and with some illuminating comments by the photographer.

Aberystwyth – Chloe Dewe Mathews

Somehow Aberystwyth seems to me to be the last place a photographer would go for an interesting story, but London-based freelance Chloe Dewe Mathews has proved me wrong with her Hasidic Holiday: The Annual trip to Aberystwyth which appeared on Burn Magazine today. Apparently around a thousand orthodox Jews have taken an annual holiday together there each August, staying in the student village for the last 20 years or more.

Obviously Mathews has succeeded in gaining the confidence of the families she has photographed and given us an insider view of a community which likes to keep itself. On her web site you you can also see another rather different story about an annual visit to the sea, when tens of thousands of European Roma make a pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in late May for the festival of their patron saint, Black Sara. Her pictures from this are rather more emotional than those from Aberystwyth, but perhaps that is not surprising given the nature of the event. But the Welsh work has a clarity of colour and a precision that appeals to me.

There are a few pictures of the Jewish holidays by a Welsh photographer (who has also produced a book on Aberystwyth), Keith Morris, on the Welsh Photolibrary site (perhaps surprisingly, apparently the only 8 images on the site featuring Jewish people.) Like the Guardian link in the above paragraph I think these are interesting simply as an illustration of the difference between competent library images and some excellent photojournalistic projects.

I think it must be around 50 years since I last visited Aberystwyth, as a small boy with my family on a coach outing from an isolated village in mid-Wales where some of us were staying one summer. It wasn’t quite like the outing in one of Dylan Thomas’s short stories, but there were some similarities. We did eventually get there, after quite a few stops on the way, and about all I can remember about the place was that it seemed cold, windy, wet and grey. But it doesn’t quite look that way in Mathews’s pictures.

A New Year for Visura

Visura Magazine has come out every two months for a year and issue 7 now out is another great one, although I did spend a couple of days wondering why I couldn’t manage to see any pictures. I’m afraid at first I just thought that although they’d sent me an e-mail they hadn’t quite got the magazine on line!

It’s a flash-based site, and if like me you like to have several browser windows open on your screen you are likely to find the same problem that I had. Their web designer has placed the ‘Enter‘ link off to the right of the screen but decided not to provide a scroll-bar. I can scroll up and down without one, but not to the right. This link will take you inside, and once you do get in, you will see it tells you to use screen resolution of at least 1440 x900 for best viewing, but unless you are you probably won’t have made it to see this advice.

Visura is “an online, invitation only publication that features personal projects chosen by artists themselves“. It doesn’t have any advertising but does have a number of media partners, including the Lucie Foundation, the NYT Lens blog and Miguel Garcia-Guzman’s Exposure Compensation blog and the Summer Show and Aftermath projects.

Issue 7 includes intriguing multiple images from Tokyo by Miguel Rio Branco, a lengthy set of pictures of the second beat generation of Larry Fink‘s youth (the sixties), when he was a pot-smoking Marxist with a Rolleiflex his daddy had given him, pictures from a strife-torn Ingushetia by Andrea Bruce, more fine black and white in Joan Liftin‘s ‘Runaway’, a superb view of the magical island of Chiloe by Brigitte Grignet, Donna Ferrato with her M6 on the streets of Tribeca. There is also a large selection of Simon Robert‘s pictures from ‘We English’. I think these images, shot on 4×5″, work better when seen as large gallery prints, but on screen many seem rather dull. Other photographers featured include Visura’s Head Copy Editor John Sevigny, Ken Van Sickle and Evan Abramson.

Darbis Murmury

Ten years ago I wrote a short piece on my experience of attending a series of workshops with Raymond Moore and Paul Hill at Hill’s ‘Photographers Place‘ in Bradbourne, Derbyshire for William Bishop’s ‘Inscape‘ magazine, accompanying a few of my pictures of the people concerned – including some of Ray.

The title ‘Darbis Murmury‘ came in part from my two-year-old son’s description of where I had gone for these weekends, but was also refers to Ray’s book, Murmurs at Every Turn as well as of course my own memories.

Ray’s comments on my own pictures were both critical and inspirational, and did much to set me off on my own route in photography. Seeing his work and his attitudes towards it and towards photography were also vital.

Today I looked for the article I wrote for Inscape and some of the pictures I had taken of people during the workshops, and found a half-finished web site I had written. Just a single page with the text more or less as it appeared in the magazine surrounded by almost 30 thumbnails linked to the pictures.

It took me a couple of hours to sort out the site and make a few corrections, but you can now see all the pictures and the text of Darbis Murmury, more or less as I wrote it and the web site ten years ago.