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Devon/Dorset Holiday Snaps

Not London, but its convenient to post my holiday snaps in My London Diary, and there were some London connections. We were staying just a few miles from Lyme Regis, and one of its more famous sons was Thomas Coram, the founder of the Foundling Hospital in London’s Coram’s Fields, and there is a window for him in the parish church.

But for most people Lyme Regis means fossils and possibly (largely thanks to the French Lieutenant’s Woman) The Cobb, a slightly odd shaped harbour wall. We did go looking for fossils – and found quite a few small ammonites – but none were really worth photographing, and the rocks they were on were either far too large to move or too crumbly to keep, though we did take a couple of lumps back to show the friends we were sharing an ex-hotel in the middle of nowhere with.

The slope is handy to allow the waves to run back off, though the sea was pretty flat when we were there, and most of the time there were quite a few people walking along it.

The only really good fossils we saw were in shops and the museum – and the museum also has quite a few interesting local photographs, including some taken by Roger Mayne (1929-2014), best known for his work on children playing in Southam St and elsewhere in North Kensington between 1956 and 1961. When I met him he complained that people never realised he had ever taken anything but these pictures, but looking at the work on his own web site these pictures do seem to me to stand out.

In 1974 he moved together with his wife, playwright Ann Jellicoe to Lyme Regis, where she developed the idea of community plays and became, along with John Fowles, co-curator of the Lyme Regis Museum for some years – and later both Jellicoe and Mayne were patrons of the Town Mill, rescued by volunteer efforts over ten years from dereliction to become both a working watermill and to house various artisanal businesses. You can see a couple of Mayne’s images of Lyme in the Landscapes section of his web site.

If you look at the pictures in Devon/Dorset Holiday you will find that we did quite a lot of walking – not least because where we were staying was a little over three miles from Lyme and further from anywhere else, and although we were close to a bus stop, the first bus into Lyme came at 10.59 and the last bus back was timetabled for 16.59, though it was always late when we took it.

So I was very pleased to be carrying a couple of Fuji cameras rather than my more usual Nikons. I was going to take just one camera, the Fuji X-T1, but in the end decided the Fuji X-E1 was so light and petite that I might just as well take that along as well to save me having to change lenses so much. I took three lenses, the Fuji 18-55mm zoom and 14mm, and the Samyang 8mm fisheye, which at f2.8 was a stop faster than the others. All three lenses are fully usable wide open, though like all lenses they improve a little a stop or two down, and both bodies performed well.

Its actually an advantage that the 8mm is a manual lens, as you hardly ever need to focus. Both the click-stopped aperture ring and the focus ring are commendably firm, and even clumsy fingers like mine seldom knock them from position. Set the lens at infinity and f5.6 and you never need to touch it again. I did miss the level indicators of the Nikon D800E when using this lens, as any up/down tilt in the camera gives you a curved horizon, and while the unusual projection used by this lens is better when using the images uncorrected, correction software doesn’t quite work as well with them. Its a lens I love using, and as you can see I probably used it too much!

I have two problems with the 14mm, though optically it is fine. Firstly it is quite easy to shift from manual to autofocus mode or vice-versa by pushing the focus ring – great when you want to, but can be disastrous if done by accident and not noticed. Of course you should notice, as the viewfinder shows quite clearly when you have autofocus by giving a green square outline. But if you get absorbed in making pictures you can miss this.

More annoying is the very loose aperture ring, turning with only a slight detent on every 1/3 stop. Not so bad if you set the aperture manually, but if you set it to A, that slight touch takes it to f22, which is a disaster. Of course a 14mm lens should not have an f22 setting in any case – far too much diffraction – and it would be better limited to f16.

The 18-55mm has no real problems that I’ve noticed. As with most zooms these days the performance is more or less on a par with fixed focal lengths. I sometimes turned off the optical image stabilisation by accident when changing lenses, but most of the time it makes little difference in any case.

The X-T1 viewfinder is amazingly good and I only notice it is electronic when there is a slight delay moving to an area with very different light intensity. I’ve fitted the accessory larger eye-cup, which perhaps makes it a little better when wearing spectacles, as I now need to.

For the kind of holiday photography I was doing the only real problem with both cameras was battery life. I needed to carry at least one spare battery for each body and to charge both the spare and the one from the camera every night. On at least one fairly long day I had to change the battery in the X-T1 twice. It would doubtless have helped if I kept turning the cameras off after taking a picture, but with Nikons you don’t need to. I can only remember once this year I’ve had to change a Nikon battery I put in the camera fully charged before leaving home before I got back to put it in the charger again. And Fuji batteries seem to take longer to charge too. It’s a problem you can live with, but annoying.

I’m also having a problem with the combined dial on the left of the top-plate of the X-T1, which alters the ISO. You have to press down the centre to change the ISO, which is fine, but this dial is now very stiff, and usually turns the lower surrounding mode dial with it – the lock button unlocks the ISO but seems to lock the ISO to this. Unless I remember to check and return the mode setting I find myself taking a panorama or bracketing when I want a single shot.

Devon/Dorset Holiday

Continue reading Devon/Dorset Holiday Snaps

Russet Landscapes

Tuesday night I was at the opening of WE ARE THE LANDSCAPE at The Russet in Hackney, and it seemed to be well-appreciated by those present. The Russet describes itself as a ‘restaurant, cafe and creative space‘ which ‘ is part of the Hackney Downs Studios family: a centre for creativity and collaboration in East London.’

Certainly the cakes on sale there looked delicious (but probably quite unsuitable for diabetics). The site was converted from an old print works, and the venue still has something of the feeling of an old industrial interior, though with some comfortable seating rather like a loft apartment furnished from the better stuff people’s parents were throwing out. If you are into local, fresh, seasonal, artisanal and artistic this is a place for you. Here are the details:

THE RUSSET 07733444421 17 Amhurst Terrace, E8 2BT

10 Sep – 05 Nov Mon-Sun 9am-10pm

Paul Walsh – Kajsa Johansson – Dominik Gigler – Arnau Oriol – Susan Andrews – David Boulogne – Alessandra Chilà – Chris Dorley-Brown – Peter Marshall – Mike Seaborne – David George

The show is a part of

photomonth – The East London photography festival

For obvious reasons being one of those involved I’m not going to write a review of the show, which was curated by David Boulogne and Tendai Thomas Davies. But I was pleased to read this, posted by David on the show’s Facebook page this morning:

First review “Well curated and executed exhibition. The work on itself is a proof of a clear vision, commitment and passion. The result , a compelling piece of art-filled with cultural, socio-economic and historical weight – 10/10“

You can also read some short texts about the eleven photographers who have work in the show on the 2012pics blog. I’d not met Tendai who organises the gallery space at The Russet before, but I find we share a taste in music, and I’m listening to some Archie Shepp he linked to as I write.

But what I can do is to post the five pictures of mine in this show here. They are already on-line along with many others on my London Photos site, which is now two books out of date, and they come from London Dérives, a series of almost two hundred images on-line and are among the 73 pictures from this included in the book/PDF available from Blurb.

All five pictures were taken in 1979, and all at locations within a fairly short walk of The Russet.

In the book description on Blurb is the following – including a quotation from the French situationist Guy Debord, best known for his ‘Society of the Spectacle‘, influential on many of us involved (if peripherally in Manchester rather than Paris) in the student protests of the sixties, though this comes from another work, and is a fresh translation for my book. The single short passage there – longer than this below, but still only a couple of hundred words – took several days of agonising and consultation with French speakers as well as the expert services of the ‘in house’ translator I married back in those times. Here it is:

London Dérives
ISBN 978-1-909363-08-3

“People well know that there are gloomy quarters and others that are pleasant. But they generally convince themselves that the smart streets give a sense of pleasure and that the poor streets depress, without any nuance. In fact, the the variety of possible combinations of ambiances, like the solution of chemical substances into an infinite number of mixtures leads to feelings as different and as complex as arise from any other form of spectacle. “

Pictures from numerous walks “without goal” through London in the mid 1970s and early 1980s which aimed to capture some of the nuances of that city.

Continue reading Russet Landscapes

Rotherhithe & Surrey Docks

Surrey Docks entrance, Rotherhithe St, 1984

It’s always exciting when I get the first copy of a printed book of my photographs delivered, and I ripped open the parcel and was pleased to find that as usual Blurb had made a decent job of ‘Rotherhithe & Surrey Docks: 1975-85‘, the fourth in my series on London Docklands.

Of course I’d seen it all before, when I’d spent days scanning and retouching the images, and then selecting and putting them in some kind of order (not an easy task) and designing and preparing the book using InDesign. Being the fourth in the series, much of the design had already been done for the previous volumes, though there are some minor tweaks. And, no matter how many times you check, there are always some minor errors that you miss., though in this case nothing that I feel really needs a reprint to correct.

The printing of the black and white images is as usual good, though not perfect, and certainly not as good as with the PDF version, which I recommend. As with my other recent works, this book is published as a digital version, ISBN 978-1-909363-12-0, downloadable from Blurb, with the print version available for those who would like a convenient hard-copy of the PDF. You can also view the whole book in the preview on the Blurb page. The PDF costs £4.99 and a printed copy will currently cost £31 plus postage. Incidentally buying the PDF also gives you a licence to print out a single copy of any (or all!) of the 90 or so pages of the book, though to print the whole book at comparable quality to the print version on my home printer would cost me around £70.

The scans for the book were mainly made with a Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro scanner – one of the best film scanners ever made, particularly when fitted with a purpose made light diffuser and specially machined holders to ensure flatness across the whole negative. Some of the scans needed considerable retouching in Photoshop, mainly because of some insect infestation of the negatives, but also in some cases because of uneven development. The scans were converted to high-quality CMYK files using Photoshop, and saved with the Blurb supplied ICC profile. Black and white images tend to be printed slightly off-neutral and the images were given a slightly warm tone which I’ve always preferred for my work.

The printed copy I have is a good match to my originals (and the PDF), though prints are always a little duller, but seem very close to neutral. But as this is ‘print on demand’ there can be small copy to copy differences. I use Blurb’s premium lustre paper which prints black and white better than the standard, and the print quality is quite acceptable. Of course it doesn’t match the superb quality of the duotones and tritones of some photographic books, but is generally good enough.

When I first cycled through the area in 1976 I didn’t stop to take many pictures, but then you could walk down the ventilation shafts to go under the river in the Rotherhithe tunnel. By the time I took the photograph at the top of this post in 1984 they were locked, presumably to discourage people using the crossing, though you can still walk or cycle through the tunnel from the vehicle entrances although at some risk to your health.

Later I went back on foot, walking over the footbridge across the entrance to South Dock, next to which was then the Surrey Docks Farm, one of several ‘city farms’ across London. I took several pictures of a young girl on a bicycle as she went across the lock gates to the farm. Some years later on another visit to the area I was mystified, as both the farm and the footbridge had moved to different locations in the area.

In 1984 I spent a couple of days wandering the area and taking pictures, including a little to my surprise a wharf still handling timber, which used to be the main business in the Surrey Docks, where there were once large ponds in which it was stored, as well as huge open timber sheds, some of which were still around, standing empty. Some of the timber would then be taken on barges up Bow Creek to timber yards on the Lea Navigation to be sawn up.

The redevelopment of the area had been started by the London Borough of Southwark and the Greater London Council, but progress had been slow, partly because they were kept short of money. The Conservatives once Mrs Thatcher had come to power saw docklands as a great opportunity for developers (and many Conservatives were developers or invested in them) to make money and set up the London Docklands Development Corporation 1n 1981 to speed up the regeneration and pour public subsidies into private pockets.

While the results have not been entirely disastrous for the area, the developments have not served the people who were living in the area as well as they might.

Continue reading Rotherhithe & Surrey Docks

Fair Pay Now!

It’s always hard to estimate the numbers taking part in large marches, and this was certainly a large march, with perhaps around 15,000 being a reasonable estimate. At the start, as people gathered outside Broadcasting House – fast becoming a popular starting point for protests as more and more groups get tired of the way that the BBC ignores or marginalises most UK protests, it was certainly very difficult to move around for the crowd in the road and to find the space needed between camera and subject. Most of the pictures from before the start of the march were taken around the edges of the packed crowd, and as usual I was looking for things that would tell the story, as well as meeting people that I knew.

Sometimes the two things came together, as in the picture of Jasmin Stone and her daughter and others from Focus E15 Mums in front of Broadcasting House – and there are other faces in some other pictures that regular visitors to My London Diary will recognise.

Another view of Broadcasting House, where reporters were careful not to really notice what was happening outside

But there were many here who are not regular protesters – and some told me this was their first protest march, and others that they seldom take part in such things. A number of trade unions had called a one day strike, and groups like the teachers are so fed up with being ‘Goved’ that they had turned out in force for the march, though I was surprised that only the NUT were supporting it.

‘Education – cuts never heal’ – ‘Guck Fove’

I always find the large balloons that some unions like to take on their marches are a problem to photograph,so high that they are difficult to connect with the people on the ground. Designed to be visible from a distance, they aren’t ideal for photographers like me who like to work close, where even with a wide-angle they are hard to include. The NUT Scissors with their message ‘Education – cuts never heal’ are rather more interesting,and I was pleased to be able to combine them with a strong message about Mr Gove, who shortly afterwards lost his job, not because of the havoc he has wreaked destroying what system there is in our education, but because of his silly squabbles with Teresa May.

There was just so much to photograph while the march was forming up, and it was so crowded that although I’d been keeping an eye on my watch, I actually just missed the start of the march, which I’d intended to photograph with Broadcasting House in the background. But by the time I made it back to the start, they had started very punctually and already moved a couple of hundred yards down the road. It isn’t a great picture, but it does show the flags (and balloons) of some of the main unions involved, GMB (just), NUT, Unite, PCS and Unison. There is also what seems to be a Portuguese flag (and I think I know who would have been carrying it) but more important to me in framing the picture, on top of Broadcasting House, the Union Jack.

This was a fairly short march, only a little over a mile to Trafalgar Square, but marches usually go fairly slowly. I waited until the end had gone past me close to Oxford Circus, around a quarter mile from the start (it took 50 minutes), then rushed along the route to the end, only stopping a couple of times to take more pictures and arriving before most of the marchers more or less as the rally was starting.

Workers from the Ritzy cinema in Brixton who are striking for the London living wage

As well as photographing the speakers, there were also people in the crowd to photograph, including those responding to the speeches in the picture at the top of this post. I managed to photograph the Ritzy strikers in front of one of the lions just before too many other photographers arrived and started walking in front of them.

The London Fire Brigade Union banner, standing against the plinth of Nelson’s column to one side behind the speakers made a splendid backdrop for the FBU leader Matt Wrack, although it was perhaps less appropriate for some of the other speakers. I was also careful to frame so as to get the message on his FBU t-shirt ‘We rescue people, not banks – Stop the cuts‘, the first part of which is a quotation from Spanish fire-fighters when asked to assist in the eviction of people unable to keep up with their mortgage payments.

I was also pleased to see and photograph Mark Serwotka of PCS who I knew had been ill, but was certainly in fiery form at this event. It wasn’t until almost two months later that we all heard how great his health problems are, and how remarkable he has been in coping with them.

More pictures from the march and rally at Public Service Workers Strike for Fair Pay.
Continue reading Fair Pay Now!

Save Our Surgeries

I left the ‘Housing for All‘ march at East Ham station and took the District Line to Aldgate East, in the neighbouring borough of Tower Hamlets. Like Newham, this also has a directly elected mayor, but a very different character. For a couple of years Lutfur Rahman was the leader of the Labour council here, but was replaced by the party when he became controversial over media allegations about his links to the Islamic Forum of Europe, a group with an important place in the Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets. IFE supporters say it works actively to oppose extremist groups, while the right-wing press accuses it of extremism.

After much infighting among various groups in the Labour party Rahman was finally elected by Tower Hamlets Labour Party as their candidate for the first elected mayoral elections by a large majority. But the Labour National Executive Committee removed him, replacing him by the man who got the least votes of the three candidates, a decision that, along with the published account of what actually happened in the meeting, puts the party in a very bad light.

Rahman considered legal action to get reinstated, but then decided to stand as an independent candidate instead and got elected – and this year elected again for a second term. But his ‘Tower Hamlets First‘ party are a minority on the council, with around half of all councillors still being Labour. A great deal of ill-feeling still appears to exist between at least some of the Labour group and the Mayor, with non-cooperation and allegations of malpractice being fed liberally to the media, most of which have been only too pleased to report and distort it.

To an outsider, Rahman appears despite the problems to have done a very good job as mayor and to be very open to the people of Tower Hamlets – and indeed to put them first. He has turned up at several events I’ve photographed (and sent along others with his apologies and a message of support when unable to come personally) and seems to have supported projects across the many communities in the borough. I’ve not known another mayor who is as visible and accessible to local people and wish other mayors were more like him at least in this respect.

Like most people in Tower Hamlets the Mayor is greatly concerned to the threat to the surgeries in the area (and in other deprived areas) of the withdrawal of the support they currently get because of the extra needs of the area. They fear these will be unable to continue, and will be replaced by cut-price services run by large health companies and providing only a low level of health care. The date chosen for the Save our Surgeries rally and march was the 66th anniversary of the founding of the NHS.

Of course the Mayor was just one of a number of speakers, including the local Labour MP, Rushanara Ali as well as doctors and other health professionals and a patient. I tried to photograph them all, but it mainly their audience that attracted me, very much a reflection of one of London’s multicultural boroughs. The placard too is one of the more decorative I’ve photographed, though rather less graphic than most, and reflects something of the diversity of the area, with its small island of business wealth at Canary Wharf, old buildings and the recent mosque, though it does rather lack the bustle of its streets.

It is perhaps a reminder that when taking photographs we too need to be aware we are creating representations, and we need to be aware of the message that our pictures convey, not just of who or what we see as the subject of our photograph. At the end of the march as it went past the old Royal London Hospital building were an elderly couple, walking slowly and with some obvious difficulty. I took several pictures, including the one above, including some showing their faces, taking care not to disturb them, but this is the one I chose to use. At first I wondered why I had deliberately chosen to include that disturbing red light which to me looks like a distorted mouth sliming its way across the rear of the car so prominently in the frame. But now I’ve grown to rather like it, though I’m not entirely sure why.
Continue reading Save Our Surgeries

Housing for All March

Focus E15 Mums began almost a year ago as a campaign by a group of young mothers living in a hostel in Stratford to fight eviction when Newham Council cut the hostel’s funding. They started a weekly protest stall and made their fight to stay in the area a very public one, asking questions at meetings and staging protests, some of which have featured here before.

Their campaign has meant that so far they have managed to stay in London, close to families, support services and jobs, when Newham was trying to move them out to Birmingham or Hastings or anywhere rather than Newham. It isn’t that there is no housing available in Newham, at the centre of one of the largest areas of regeneration in the country, with new blocks of flats appearing every time I go there and of course huge developments on the former Olympic site. Not to mention the many vacant properties on the Carpenters Estate close to the centre of Stratford. More that these young women are not the right kind of people for Newham’s new vision; to put it simply they just are not rich enough.

Newham is of course a Labour-run council. Entirely. All of the 60 councillors now in office are from the Labour party. Unusually it also has a directly elected mayor, Robin Wales, Leader of Newham Council from 1995 to 2002 and Mayor since then, elected for a fourth term in May this year. You might think that this should mean a council that cares for the poor and the disadvantaged in the community, but it appears you might be sadly wrong.

One of the placards being carried in the protest had a picture of Sir Robin on it, along with the text ‘Olympic Legacy = Evictions and Social Cleansing – Robin the Poor – Robin Wales Mayor of Newham’. His policies are built around the ideas of ‘resilience’, which seems to mean helping those who help themselves, rather than any care or concern for those who are weak or who face problems they are unable to deal with. To me they seem to have abandoned the key ideas of the Labour movement, and would readily fit with those of the Chamber of Commerce and the Conservative Party.

I was disappointed not to get a better picture with that placard, and it wasn’t for want of trying. Perhaps I was mistaken, but just occasionally at protests there do seem to be people who go to considerable effort to evade the camera.

Four members of the Counihan family came with the Brent Housing Action banner

Of course there were many people at the protest who were happy – if not keen – to be photographed and many that I knew from other events. I’ve photographed the Counihan family who started a campaign about their own housing problem with the London Borough of Brent – and who like the Focus Mums have gone on to campaign over housing on behalf of others in their own ‘Housing for All’ campaign, Brent Housing Action.

It was also good to see another friend I’ve photographed on various occasions, Tamsin Omond, who was handing out leaflets for a protest against the expansion of London City Airport, also in east London as well as carrying a placard in the protest. Some of the events I photographed her and the other Climate Rush activists at 5 years ago were against the building of a third runway at Heathrow – and it now looks increasingly as if we will be protesting there again before too long.

Climate Rushers and local residents lead the ‘NO THIRD RUNWAY’ procession at the Heathrow perimeter fence
I had to leave the ‘Housing for All’ march as it passed East Ham Station as I wanted to photograph another event. You can read my report on the march and see more pictures at Focus E15 March for Decent Housing.

Continue reading Housing for All March

Epping Forest

Should you be in the London area and feel a need for some exercise on Sunday September 14 you might consider heading to Epping Forest for the annual Epping Forest Centenary Walk organised by the the Friends of Epping Forest from Manor Park station to Epping.

The walk starts off across Wanstead Flats

The route was devised in 1978 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Epping Forest Act, 1878, which placed responsibility for the forest in the hands of the City of London, giving them the powers to take on the landowners who were then rapidly putting up fences around their properties. Although the City haven’t always seemed to have the best interests of the forest at heart, and various governments have interfered negatively (most recently during the London 2012 Olympics where they twisted the City’s arm to allow a temporary police building on Wanstead Flats) they managed to roll back some of the encroachment and have preserved pretty well all but the southern tip “for the recreation and enjoyment of the people.”

The advantage of going on the organised walk is that you meet people and there “will be ample stops and pauses when short explanatory talks will be given on the Forest and its management and history in furtherance of the Walk’s objective to promote the appreciation and knowledge of this priceless Open Public Space!” You also won’t get lost, which is rather easy to do on some sections of the walk.

Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge at Chingford is worth a visit

There are timings given on the site linked above for those unable to walk the full 15 or 16 miles. But if you want to take pictures, it is probably better to walk it on your own, or with a small group of friends or family as I did in 2009, though it has taken me 5 years to put the pictures on the web – at Epping Forest Centenary Walk.

And of course you could split the rather long 16 mile route (and longer when you get lost or wander off to take photographs) into several sections. Something I’d heartily recommend as I was more than shattered by the time we reached Epping station for the journey home. I was calling it Effing Forest by the time we finished.

Pole Hill at Chingford is a little under a mile from the route

It would make two rather nice walks, splitting the route at Chingford. You could even make a short detour to some interesting parts nearby – such as Pole Hill, which has a pole, or rather an obelisk which was erected by an astronomer royal on the Greenwich Meridian so he could line up his telescope from the Royal observatory and make sure it was pointing due north. Some time later they decided to move the meridian a few yards, though I suppose if the telescope was still in the same place it didn’t really matter.

There are many seriously old trees in the forest, but also some open space – forests are not just trees
Continue reading Epping Forest

Notting Hill – better weather in 2009

I’ve now put more of my pictures from Notting Hill Carnival in 2009 on-line in Notting Hill – Children’s Day on My London Diary.

Though as you will see there, they are not all of children, though I have concentrated rather more on those of children in selecting images to put on the web.

But carnival is a great event for people of all ages.

I took a great many pictures that day, almost 1500 in around 4 hours in Notting Hill, which works out at around one every ten seconds, though I’ve put less than 50 on the web. They probably include most of the better images I made, though I didn’t go back and look through all of them to make the selection, just the 200 or so I’d developed from the RAW into jpegs at the time.

There may be a few images that I missed when I did that initial edit, but I doubt if there would be anything truly stunning. With digital I ruin far fewer images than I used to on film, but I doubt if I make any more good ones either. So while I still have almost every negative I ever took, it perhaps makes more sense to be at least a little selective about which digital files to keep.

Another forty-something pictures of Notting Hill – Children’s Day from 2009 now (at last) on My London Diary.

Continue reading Notting Hill – better weather in 2009

How Not to Write About Women Artists

When I taught photography, many of our best students were women. Perhaps over the years there were half a dozen who I thought really had potential as photographers, but I can only recall having that same feeling about one male student. As it happens he is the only one who has gone on to become really successful as a photographer, though others who passed through our classes with less obvious photographic talent have made a living behind a camera. As Eric Barker puts in in his Time article on careers, “Persistence trumps talent”. Or perhaps it is rather harder for people who have a definite personal vision find to produce work that fits the dimmer perception of others.

Many of the contemporary photographers whose work I admire are women. I’ve never thought to check what percentage, but certainly many come to mind, not because they are women but because of their work. Where perhaps in the first hundred of so years of the history of photography women were notable exceptions – because of wider societal restrictions and conventions – this is no longer the case. And some of those exceptions were truly notable – including such examples as Julia Margaret Cameron, Berenice Abbott and Dorothea Lange. Wikipedia has an interesting list.

When I was teaching and when I was writing about the medium for a living I wrote about and used examples from the work of many women photographers, some well-known, others less so. Many of our students were inspired by the work of Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, Jo Spence, Fay Godwin and others – as well as that of male photographers.

I wrote as well about others who I felt deserved to be better-known – such as Nelly’s and Grete Stern (neither well-served on the web) and about a few others who were well-known but whose work I could not relate to or felt rather lacking in photographic interest. Although I mainly wrote about things I liked, I was running a site which I felt had to provide at least basic information across the whole range of things photographic (though I drew a line at so-called “glamour”.) But there were a few women photographers whose reputation seemed to me more connected with feminist politics than artistic production, though this was and is dangerous territory for male comment and I largely restricted myself to giving the facts and links rather than opinions in their cases.

It was a link to an article posted by Alan Griffiths of Luminous Lint that started me thinking about “women photographers” again. In Hyperallergic, Alex Heimbach (a freelance writer and graduate student at NYU) reviews a recent book with the title ‘Women Photographers from Julia Margaret Cameron to Cindy Sherman‘ under the heading How Not to Write About Women Artists.

The photographers – who are arranged alphabetically, itself a curious choice, begin chronologically with Anna Atkins, who, while an important figure in the history of photography, was probably not a photographer. Her Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, its first installment published in 1843, is considered to be the first photographically illustrated book, using the cyanotype process invented the previous year by her friend Sir John Herschel and the photogenic drawing technique she had learnt from another friend, a Mr Talbot. Quite likely she had learnt his calotype process from him as well, and may have been the first woman photographer, but no evidence of this remains. The Wikipedia article on her provides a rare link to a piece I wrote about her work in 2005, rather a flashback for me.

Among the 55 photographers in the book by Boris Friedewald listed on the contents page (which you can view on the ‘Look Inside!’ page at the Amazon link above) are around 40 that I have at some time or other written about, one I know personally, half a dozen I’ve not heard of and a similar number who I feel certainly don’t deserve inclusion. There are quite a few – including Atkins who perhaps fall outside the remit of the title, the others being from post-Sherman generations. You can also see the pages on Berenice Abbott and Eve Arnold in the preview.

But the article by Heimbach has some more serious criticisms. As she writes; “it’s impossible to imagine an equivalent book titled Men Photographers: From Eugène Atget to Jeff Wall.” And while projects like these ideally “serve to illuminate lesser-known artists, who may have been discounted because of their gender (or race or sexual orientation or class)“, too often as seems to be the case with this book “their thoughtlessness generally renders them pointless at best and misogynistic at worst.”

Nina (left) and Naomi Rosenblum with pictures by Walter Rosenblum, 2007, Peter Marshall

There is more to her argument than this, and the article is worth careful reading, and she contrasts its approach with that of Naomi Rosenblum‘s A History of Women Photographers, (incidentally first published by Abbeville Press in 1994, rather than 2010), a book I used, together with Rosenblum‘s A World History of Photography in my teaching.) As Heimbach says “Rosenblum’s book aims not only to highlight the work of female photographers, but also to dig into what their gender means for their lives and careers. Rosenblum offers not just a who but a why.”

Independent living at risk

Sophie Partridge, John Kelly and others party outside the Dept of Work & Pensions

Some of the people that I photograph amaze me in various ways, and among the more amazing are many of those who take part in the protests organised by DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) who have regularly shown others how to organise effective and powerful protests against unfair attempts by the government to cut welfare benefits.

They have been hit much harder by various cuts in services; many have suffered from the work capability tests – tests that were designed to be unfair and were then poorly administered largely by unqualified staff pressured by a company which had been given financial incentives to fail as many as possible.

Paula Peters speaking at the DWP

But although ATOS’s failings have received some media attention (largely thanks to DPAC’s protests) this is only a small part of what DPAC rightly describes as “a national scandal”, which they accuse mainstream media of failing to report.

They say:

“the media owes a duty to the wider public to give way to propaganda and needs to out this scandal for what it is.

1 million delayed assessments/decisions, 1.7 million appeals & 1.3 million put through the sanction regime is a collective 4 million exposed to some degree of benefit decision related chaos. How can 4 million people locked in government backed chaos not be a national chaos? “

You can read the details on their web site, and it is hard to disagree with their conclusions about the suffering and chaos caused “by DWP incompetence and IDS arrogance.”

Nadia tells her story with the aid of her computer – and a BSL signer relays it

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Iain Duncan Smith thought the disabled would be an easy target, unable to stand up for themselves, but how wrong he has been proved to be. Hard too not to be convinced that there has been something of an unwritten conspiracy between the newspapers and mass media and government to play down or ignore the problems that government policies are causing – and because Labour too see a need to reform the welfare system they have avoided the duty of any opposition, although a few individual politicians have stood up for the poor and disabled. Media owners and governments share various interests, are closely intertwined in various ways, depend on each other.

It isn’t because journalists have not exposed the facts, written the stories and taken the pictures, but that those who control the media have decided they are “not news”, and mainly they only get published in personal blogs and fringe publications. The BBC has lost much of its reputation for independent reporting – at least of UK events – because it seems now to be more concerned about cosying up to government to avoid losing the licence fee than speaking truth to power.

Penny Pepper reads some of her work

This protest – a tea-party on US Independence Day -was about the ending of the Independent Living Fund, which gives those who desperately need it the extra care which enables them to live in and contribute to the community. You can read more about it in an article in The Guardian, one of the few papers that has sometimes shown an interest. But this and other stories about what is happening to so many of the poor and disabled, affecting altogether many more of the people of this country than the four million should regularly be making headlines across the media. Instead we get huge stories about wacky politicians, faded performers, unknown celebrities, footballers and their wives and the rest of the largely salacious nonsense. Even across the BBC and the so-called ‘quality press’.

Photographically there were few problems for me. It was a very crowded situation, and at times very difficult to move – even the few inches needed to frame as I would like. At times I was shoulder to shoulder with a BBC cameraman (not working for the news) and that restricted my view and I had sometimes to use a longer focal length than I would have liked to avoid his lens blocking part of the picture or a large woolly covered microphone (a ‘deadcat’) wandering into shot. Doubtless too I got in his way, but in the confined space we had to work together, and did so with no real problems.

In tight situations, the 16-35mm is a great lens to have, though just occasionally the 16mm fullframe fisheye is better. But here I didn’t really have that option when I wanted to use it, both because the guy with the TV camera would have occupied too much of one side of the frame, but for a much simpler reason – there just wasn’t the space to get into my camera bag and to change a lens, we were so squashed together.

I hung around at the end of the official end of the protest at the DWP because I knew something else was likely to happen, having been given a hint by one of the organisers. I didn’t know what this would be, but wasn’t surprised when around half of the protesters decided to block nearby Victoria St – the busiest road nearby.

At the front of a queue of traffic held up by the protesters in front of Westminster Abbey was a number 88 bus, headed for Clapham Common. At last I thought, the message is getting through to the “man on the Clapham omnibus”. I’d thought too that the direct action might involve Westminster Abbey, who had called in police to turn away DPAC protesters the previous Saturday.

The protest did however take the police by surprise and it was a few minutes before they arrived and started to divert traffic away. At one point they got protesters to clear a path though one of the two carriageways for an ambulance – but it never arrived, though I think it more likely that it had been diverted than that this was police subterfuge.

You can read more about the protest and see the rest of my pictures at Independent Living Tea party

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