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Climate Chaos

I’m getting to know the Department of Energy and Climate Change pretty well, but two demonstrations outside there in a week was perhaps a little too much. The first on Monday evening was timed to try to influence the decision that Ed Miliband has to make on the building of a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth, following the end of a public consultation.

The decision, expected in the next couple of months, will give a clear indication of whether our government is serious about climate change or has bowed to the intense lobbying and financial clout of the energy industry. We don’t need Kingsnorth, and an alternative programme of investment in wind power has long term advantages as well as avoiding “climate-wrecking dirty coal power.” Nobody seriously believes that we will get 100% carbon capture and storage – or that it would in any case be a serious long term solution; all the technical solutions exist for wind power as a major power source for the UK (and for its export potential. Perhaps even more seriously, if the plant is built it is very hard to believe it would not be used even if, as seems likely, only marginal carbon removal proved economic.

Organising the demonstration were the Climate Chaos Coalition (CCC) representing virtually all the major environmentally concerned groups in the UK, including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the Campaign Against Climate Change, as well as faith groups, aid agencies and many others – a total of over 100 organisations with a total membership of more than 11 million. There are probably few other organisations that unite the RSPB, the World Development Movement, Unison and Viva!

Christian Aid provided a choir in white surplices (and with one in a cardinal’s bright red) and tambourines which livened the proceedings considerably but the big surprise was when Ed Miliband came out of the ministry to talk to the demonstration and answer some very aggressive questioning. I took a few pictures from one side as he leaned over into the pen, shaking hands, but obviously the best place would be in front of him, in with the demonstrators. So I ran around to the back and made my way inside. It was a very crowded area, but I soon changed to a 12-24mm lens which let me work in the confined space.

I was sorry I’d only brought a single body, as it was so crowded it was hard to change lenses, and I knew Miliband would not stay long and wanted to make the most of it so anyway didn’t want to waste more time with lens changes. 12mm is really too wide to be useful and I would have liked something a little longer than 24mm, perhaps something like a 17-35mm would have been ideal. The 24-70mm just wasn’t wide enough most of the time.

Fortunately the other photographers present and the video guys didn’t follow my lead as there really wasn’t room for me let alone others there. It was yet another story that made the front page on Demotix and I also put it on Indymedia, but found no other takers. You can read the story and see rather more pictures on My London Diary.

Thursday evening I was back more or less in the same place – the pen was on the opposite side of Whitehall Place for the Vestas ‘Day of Action for Jobs and the Planet’ demonstration there organised by the Campaign Against Climate Change, with speakers including John McDonnell, MP, Darren Johnson, Green Party spokesman on trade and industry and chair of the London Assembly, trade union organisers and Mark Flowers, one of the sacked Vestas workers.

The other acid test of the Government’s seriousness over climate change is of course their reaction to the closure of Vestas Blades. Unfortunately they have completely failed rather than take the opportunity of setting up a vital UK industry in the manufacture of wind turbines that could be important both in meeting our energy needs and investing in green technology with great future opportunities for export of both electricity and plant.

Jerusalem Day March

After I’d taken this picture of a demonstrator waiting to scream insults at the AlQuds day march as it passed the pen at Piccadilly Circus, he complained loudly to a policeman about being photographed. The policeman, who had been watching me take the picture smiled at me and told him that I was perfectly within my rights to photograph people in public, adding the “Sir” at the end of his reply with more than usual ironic emphasis.

It is a curiously strongly held belief among many of the general public (perhaps mainly the less-educated) that they have some kind of right over their image when they appear (perform might be more accurate) in public, shared by some demonstrators on the extreme right and left. Fortunately the law thinks otherwise, or photography as we know it would be extremely limited. Of course there is the law about defamation, that sometimes rightly restricts how you many use an image, but in general if people are in public, unless they are in situations where they have a genuine expectation of privacy, they can be photographed, at least so long as you don’t continually harass them in a way that could be interpreted as stalking, or they are very rich and famous and can employ extremely expensive briefs to bamboozle judges.

Of course people are free to cover their faces – though the police may force them to remove masks to be photographed. And some of the English Defence League or March for England supporters did so, though not very effectively, having failed to think sufficiently in advance to bring masks.

Photographers to a person like masks. Not just because we’re fans of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, though some of us undoubtedly are (and some of Saul Steinberg) but because they make for more interesting pictures. But on those occasions when I’ve taken a decision to demonstrate – even where that meant breaking the law – I’ve always wanted to do so openly.

While the demonstrators in the pen made me feel ashamed of my fellow countrymen (and there was also one woman among the football supporters) I felt among brothers and sisters in the march itself, as it made its noisy way along Piccadilly, chanting slogans and carrying banners including “We are all Palestinians” in a display of solidarity with the Palestinian people.

The text on My London Diary is more or less the same as that I posted on the day to Demotix (where my story made the front page as fairly often) and Indymedia, but there are many more pictures.

Hanging Day at the Juggler

Yesterday we hung our show, Taken in London, at the Shoreditch Gallery, part of The Juggler, a café in Hoxton Market – which, rather confusingly is not where Hoxton Market actually takes place. The street Hoxton Market with the Juggler is just north of Old Street, behind the Holiday Inn and on foot you get to it by turning right about ten yards up Pitfield Street, then first left. It’s an open pedestrian square and a very pleasant place to sit at the tables outside the Juggler on a sunny day with a tuna mayo roll and a bottle of Budvar or a coffee. The weather was right for it yesterday, but we were too busy for sitting around, though we did pause briefly for refreshment.

The gallery has got a little smaller since I first hung a show there, the appropriately sited Café Life in 2005 – prints,paintings, drawings and photographs on that theme – with one end of the room being taken for storage, but it’s still a nice space, now basically two walls, each with enough space for around 20 double-hung 20×16″ frames, so ideal for a show by two photographers – myself and Paul Baldesare, though this time there were very few cafés in the pictures.

Hanging where you, as here you have to drill holes and screw the frames to the wall with mirror plates, is really a job that calls for three people, and we had another photographer, Dave Trainer, to lend his professional expertise (as he told us during the day, he was once covered with Picasso’s paint while hanging one of his works.) Dave showed with us last year, again at the Juggler, in our show English Carnival.

Getting forty or so pictures fixed in the right places wasn’t entirely plain sailing (the walls could be described as distinctly choppy to continue the metaphor) but eventually we were able to stick up the text and captions that I’d printed a couple of days earlier and stand back, and it didn’t look bad.

Although some of the work is shown on the exhibition web site, I’d decided that I wanted to include quite a few more recent pictures, and roughly two thirds of my pictures are now from 2009, including a couple from August.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.
Druids gather to celebrate the Spring Equinox, March 2009

Wedding die-in at Northwood Against War in Afghanistan, May 2009

The show continues until 31 Oct and the private view is on Thursday 8 Oct, 6.30-8.30pm – it would be good to meet some of you there.

Taken in London is a part of Photomonth 2009 The East London Photography Festival, and of the This Is Not A Gateway Festival 2009.

Photomonth 2009

Photomonth 2009 opens officially later this week on 1 October with a preview of Childhood from Paul Trevor‘s East Ender Archive at the Museum of Childhood (part of the V&A) just a few yards up the road from Bethnal Green tube, as well as the launch of the photomonth youth photography award.

Photomonth is the UK’s largest photography festival, with over 150 exhibitions and events in 85 venues in East London, which is perhaps why it lasts two months – until the end of November. It actually spread out rather more, as some of the shows included – such as the Amnesty’s exhibition of the winning entries by Eugene Richards, Jim Goldberg and Lefteris Pitarakis shortlisted for the 2009 Amnesty International Media Awards opened at The Human Rights Action Centre, 17-25 New Inn Yard, London, EC2A 3EA on 20 Oct and continues until 5 Nov 2009 – another show surely not to be missed.

Photomonth is a very inclusive show, with a very wide range of both genres and experience, aiming to show the diversity of contemporary photography. As well as exhibitions, here are also various events including a photofair in Spitalfields Market, an open show, portfolio reviews, a photomonth lecture, talks, debates, workshops and seminars. Details of everything on the photomonth web site.

The front page of the site also has a grid of images which can be viewed larger as a slide show. Clicking on any of the pictures loads a larger version (in a few cases too large) and moving your mouse close to the top right or left causes ‘Next’ and ‘Previous’ tabs to appear. It gives some idea of the range of work on show in the festival, with the oldest image by “William Henry” being a W H F Talbot calotype from the first years of our medium. Among other photographers who are included are Martin Parr, Yousuf Karsh and several other well known names I leave you to discover. And then there’s this picture:

And of course, Taken in London, with work by myself and Paul Baldesare, part of photomonth 2009 opens on Saturday 3 Oct at the Shoreditch Gallery in The Juggler in Hoxton Market. You’re invited to the private view on October 8th.

Artists & Illustrators and a photographer

It may be just a small picture and a hundred or so words in total, but I think I’m the only photographer featured in the October issue of ‘Artists & Illustrators‘ magazine.

They asked me if I would send one of my photos of the Thames Gateway, “an industrial site rather than greenery” and 50 words on what attracts me to photograph the city, along with a portrait of myself.

© 2003 Peter Marshall
The Channel Tunnel Rail Link construction and Fenchurch St – Grays railway looking West, Dagenham. June 2003

The image I sent them of Dagenham did have some greenery, indeed it contains a Site of Special Scientific Interest in the ditch at the left (the Gores Brook) but also has an industrial quality and shows the Channel Tunnel Rail link under construction in 2003, as well as the railway line from Fenchurch Street to Grays. If Boris hadn’t cancelled the DLR extension to Dagenham Dock last year (see London gets what it deserves. Unfortunately) that would have changed the view a little when it was built, and if common sense eventually prevails may still do so at some later date. Like quite a few from this series it was taken using the Hassleblad Xpan with the 30mm wide-angle lens using ISO 200 Fuji colour negative film.

I think I can now get similar results with digital, using the Sigma 12-24mm at around 18mm and cropping down to the same format, which results in about a 7.5 Mp image, 4256 pixels wide, which can give excellent prints up to around 20 inches wide, and certainly on the A3 or A3+ sheets on which I normally now print the Xpan files. One made with a longer focal length hangs behind me and technically it’s hard to fault.

You can see the Dagenham picture rather larger (though I think I made a slightly better scan for the magazine) along with some others images in my Thames Gateway project on the Urban Landscapes site (it is of course in the ‘Essex’ section.) You might even be able to see Canary Wharf on the horizon.

And the 50 words I sent? Well, they didn’t really relate to this picture, but to my interest in the city in general, and it was really impossible to say all I wanted to say in such a limited space. But here they are:

Involvement in grass-roots planning campaigns in Moss Side in the 60’s led me to document urban realities and processes when I went into community photography in the next decade. My first major urban project was in Hull, where a similar vast clearance was under way. Since then London’s post-industrial landscape and new developments have provided plenty of material.

The magazine also mentions a couple of my web sites and my forthcoming show with Paul Baldesare, ‘Taken in London‘.

Victims of the Arms Trade

While every other photographer was heading to Harrow a couple of weeks ago to try to photograph and expected clash between racist demonstrators and Muslims, I took the tube out to Canning Town instead. Partly because I thought there would be plenty of other photographers at Harrow and there were, but also because I wanted to make sure that someone at least was there to photograph the ‘Memorial Procession for Victims of the Arms Trade’ organised by ‘East London Against the Arms Fair’ (ELAAF) on the final day of the government-sponsored Defence Systems & Equipment International (DSEi), the world’s largest arms fair, taking place at the ExCeL centre.

ELAAF is a small group that holds regular demonstrations to oppose holding the arms fair in its local area, and I didn’t expect a huge crowd. But it was a dignified if small protest and I was pleased to be able to record it and get it some publicity on independent media sites.

More about it – and more pictures on My London Diary.

City Panoramic

I’m not quite sure what happened to me in March 2008, because I lost a web site. It was only quite a small site, with a dozen or so pictures, but I wrote it and then just forgot about it. Completely.

This morning by chance looking for another set of files I came across the folder it was in, though from the name it wasn’t obvious, but curiosity made me take a quick look and see a list of files mainly starting with 92-city, which meant nothing to me, so I double-clicked on the default.html file with them and got a surprise.

It says on the site:

These pictures were taken when I was a part of London Documentary Photographers in 1992 and were a part of a documentary project on the City of London. The ‘square mile‘ is one of the major financial centres of the world. These images were first shown at the Museum of London in 1992.

I think I was probably intending to put together a larger site including many more of my panoramic images, but since that’s unlikely to happen in the near future I decided to link them in to one of my existing sites, The Buildings of London, which is long overdue for a makeover. But you can jump directly to them here, though you may need to make your browser window wider; the images on the site are exactly twice the width of the one in this blog at 900 pixels and the site was written to fit a page around a thousand pixels or wider.

All of these images were taken on a panoramic camera with a lens that rotates through around 120 degrees during the exposure. At the time I was using a Japanese Widelux camera, but later I preferred the much cheaper Ukranian Horizon which has a considerably better viewfinder.

Although the Widelux does have a viewfinder, the most accurate indication of what you are going to take is provided by a couple of arrows on the top plate. For best results, at least with architectural subjects, you needed a tripod and a good spirit level, while the Horizon was easily usable hand-held and had a level visible in the viewfinder.

There are several different models of Horizon, but all except the oldest, which had a metal body share a similar rounded plastic body. It would be great to have a digital camera that worked in the same way, but I think very unlikely that making one would ever be financially viable. So if you want to do this kind of photography the Horizon is still a good choice, despite being clockwork and using film.

My second Horizon came direct from the Ukraine in a brown-paper parcel and was cheap -under half the price the similarly specified Horizon Perfekt sells for at Lomography. But their price does include “a 2-year warranty against manufacturer defects, a premium case, and a gorgeous panoramic book.”

You can of course take panoramas using digital cameras and image stitching, but the results have a different perspective and it can be tricky if part of your subject is moving. Another approach that gives something rather more similar to the swing-lens result is to use a semi-fisheye lens and then remap the image using a Photoshop filter such as Image Trend‘s Fisheye Hemi. You can also get some different but also interesting results with remapping using the free Panorama Tools.

You can see an interesting discussion by the author of Panorama Tools, Helmut Dersch, comparing rectilinear, fisheye and swing lens results.

Green Fayre at Aylesbury

It was a lovely warm late summer afternoon in Aylesbury, quite idyllic and with the young women from the Climate Rush in their long white Edwardian-style dress and a TV personality and a Euro MP thrown in it should have been a good photo opportunity.

But somehow it didn’t work out quite as well as I’d hoped, although a few pictures aren’t bad, and they make quite a nice set of images of the event – perhaps with a suitable soundtrack. But no really interesting single images. Perhaps there wasn’t quite enough happening, the lowish sun was a bit too harsh and flare was a problem on quite a few images.

Plenty of pictures that show the people, show the event, but lack the magic. Perhaps it was the spell of Aylesbury, which seems the kind of small town where not a lot happens (though the plums were nice.) Or perhaps I was expecting too much.

The pictures aren’t bad, just somehow it was such a nice day and I expected more.

Most of the time I was using the 24-70mm Sigma, though the above picture with Caroline Lucas sitting with a group of the Climate Rushers was taken with the 12-24mm Sigma. Really this is just a little too extreme for most things and something like a 16-35mm would be much more useful. Also having a bit of overlap in focal lengths between lenses would help to cut down on lens changes.

Lots of pictures on My London Diary .

Taken in London

You are invited to the opening of this show on Thursday 8 Oct, 6.30-8.30pm

Photographs by Paul Baldesare and Peter Marshall

Shoreditch Gallery

The Juggler, 5 Hoxton Market, London, N1 6HG
3 Oct- 31 Oct 2009, weekdays 8-6 : Sat10-4 : closed Sun

The show is a part of Photomonth 2009, the East London photography festival and the This Is Not A Gateway Festival 2009

Website: http://takeninlondon.co.uk/

London still has a claim to be the greatest city in the world and it is still the most photographed of all cities. The key area of all cities is the street, where people walk, congregate, shop and meet, and both Marshall and Baldesare come out of the tradition of street photography and concentrate on the life of ordinary people – who are often extraordinary on those streets.

For Baldesare, trade defines the city, and his work concentrates on the shopping streets – particularly Oxford St, the hub of consumerism – and markets. The people on whom he concentrates are very much surrounded by advertising hoardings, window displays and other blandishments of the consumer society. But it is the people themselves who remain important, retain their individuality and autonomy despite their sometimes overpowering surroundings. Their gestures, body language and expressions are the stuff of these images, which often show a surprising intimacy in these very public places.

Marshall‘s work looks at the city as an arena for politics, reflecting local, national or international issues on the streets of London. His ‘My London Diary’ from which these images are taken is a unique record, published on the Internet, a highly individual cross-section of political and cultural life across the capital. It is a work that owes its existence to the Internet, and an attempt to exploit some of the properties of the medium particularly in presenting the work back to those that he photographs. By May 2009 there were 40,000 images in this on-line archive.

Paul Baldesare: Woman with cigarette, Debenhams

Peter Marshall: March on the City, Oct 2008

Climate Rush on the Run

Friday was a beautiful day in London, sun and nice clouds in the sky, but with quite a breeze so it didn’t get hot. I got on my bike around 9 o’clock to cycle to Sipson to meet the Climate Rush who were camping on the Airplot there, for a “photo opportunity” at the start of their month long tour around the South West – which will take them around 250 miles on foot and horse and cart to Totnes, with many stops on the way to educate and campaign through the country. The Rushers in their white suffragette-style long dresses and red sashes were to take a trip to the perimeter fence of London’s main airport along with local residents from NoTRAG, the action group opposed to expansion of Heathrow – and in particular a third runway that would mean demolishing their homes.

As expected, there were several other photographers there, mainly from agencies and a couple people making videos, which is rather more than most small demonstrations attract. The rushers – and Tamsin Omond in particular – have gained a little of the only thing most of the media are interested in now, celebrity. Although I tend to feel it’s unhealthy to pander to the press like this, it is effective, and certainly I find them more interesting to photograph than many demonstrators. It also helps that they want to be photographed – quite a change after some (fortunately not all) Climate Campers.

Sipson is pretty rural, and the Airplot, as well as its own small allotment – raised beds of vegetables – has fruit trees around its edge, the remains of an orchard. Much of the site for Heathrow – the old Middlesex village of Heath Row – was covered with orchards, and the rest with fields of crops. Before the airport it had been one of the most productive agricultural areas of the country since cultivation began here, perhaps 5000 years ago. Add some horse, a couple of wagons, a wood fire with a kettle hanging from a hook above it, some rather ancient looking tents and young women in long white dresses and you have a scene that could come from the novels of Thomas Hardy.

‘Deeds not Words’ and ‘No Third Runway ‘are clear but…

It wasn’t a huge group that set off down Sipson Road for the mile or so to Heathrow, and at first the pictures of the ‘caravan’ on its way were perhaps a little disappointing. What made the difference for me was the light once it turned west along the northern perimeter fence (by which time some helpful police were holding traffic back.)

My behaviour, moving in close to the protesters and using a fairly wide lens with flash to balance the powerful back-lighting didn’t endear me to the couple of agency photographers. Their fixed idea was to stand on the other side of the road with a long lens and try to get pictures with aircraft visible in the background. But we were really at the wrong place in the airport for that to work, and it was in any case a cliché that didn’t appeal to me.

If you can cope with the lighting, it does give the pictures rather more interest. I don’t think I could have done this on film, certainly transparency wouldn’t have held the range, and although colour neg might theoretically handle a longer scale than digital, I wouldn’t like to try it in practise. On digital it’s pretty easy. I shot RAW of course, and this was taken at the metered setting with no correction, using aperture priority (ISO 400, 1/800 f9.) The Nikon D800 did its usual grand job at -2/3 stop to add a little to the closer figures. In Lightroom, parts of the sky needed considerable burning in and subduing of extreme highlights, and the figures also needed a little burning or dodging – it wasn’t the kind of picture I could have sat down and wired off immediately.

The agency guys had gone as soon as the procession left Heathrow, but I went back with the procession. You may not think that long white dresses are made for climbing trees.

The scrumping suffragettes were just a little disappointed, as these apples turned out to be cookers, though I’m sure they made some fine stewed apple for pudding later.

Many more pictures from the morning with the Climate Rush on My London Diary, as well as more about the Climate Rush on the Run tour.