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Police and Photographers

One of my colleagues, Marc Vallée, has a piece in the Guardian today, The Met’s attack on photographers which examines the advice issued today by the Metropolitan police service (MPS) to the public and the media on photography in public places.

It raises a number of important questions about such advice, and in particular of how sections 44 and 43 of the Terrorism Act 2000 apply to “protected journalistic material” where it is not at all clear that the police have the legal power to “view digital images contained in mobile telephones or cameras” that the advice claims.

The advice given by the MPS is that section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act 2008 (referrred to by the MPS as 58a of the 2000 Act) which makes it an offence to photograph police where a reasonable suspicion can be demonstrated that the information was of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism should not be used to “arrest people photographing police officers in the course of normal policing activities, including protest.”

Which would be good news, except that there are, as Marc mentions, at least two well-authenticated cases where it has been so used, including one by a photographer I know who was covering the attempted eviction of a London squat – with absolutely no terrorist connections.

As Marc says “Professional photographers such as myself view it as part of an ongoing campaign to create a hostile environment for photography in the public sphere.” It’s something I first wrote about on ‘My London Diary’ almost five years ago – here is my exact text from October 2004 – all then in lower case. I’ve picked out the key parts in bold:

on the friday, critical mass were out on their bikes, together with rising tide and other environmental protestors. on a ‘london underwater 2050 tour of the g8 climate criminals‘. starting under waterloo bridge, they went on tour, visiting the london offices of several climate change villains, including petrol giants exxon mobil and bp and the canadian government, ending up outside the national portrait gallery, site of the annual bp-sponsored portrait award.
more pictures

it was a generally good-natured event, with an international samba band. from the top of a tourist bus an american voice asked the bill what was on. as he floundered to reply, the woman i was talking to suggested “hey it’s a fluffy takeover!”

most of the police were good-natured and cooperative throughout, but there were some ineffectual attempts to block the path of the demonstrators. by standing in the road the police blocked traffic, while the demonstrators simply walked around them.

worrying was the deliberate police use of photography as intimidation, with the police photographer going out of his way to confront demonstrators, aided by two other officers.

i worry because i think it is an attempt to attack civil liberties, but also because such behaviour makes all photographers suspect. i can only work effectively if i gain the trust and cooperation of those whose pictures i take. perhaps it helps that photography is one of the activities that also arouses suspicion and intimidation by the police.

as i walked away at the end of the demonstration, this team ran 50 yards down the road and caught up with me, one calling”excuse me, sir” and tapping on my shoulder. i turned to face him, and found myself looking into the lens of the police photographer, who took my picture as his colleague started to question me about who i was taking pictures for. it seemed clear and deliberate harassment, intended to intimidate a photographer acting entirely lawfully, photographing on the public highway.

This was the first time I was aware of being deliberately targeted by the police because I was a photographer, but it was the first of many times – and if we seriously believe that the police are now destroying all those images that they have collected over the years, there will be several thousands of pictures of me being deleted from hard disks and databases.

Another key moment for me came in April 2006, outside Harmondsworth Immigration Detention Centre, where I watched from a raised bank as a group of demonstrators were kettled by the police and a colleague showed his Press card. Officers told him that they didn’t believe it was a real press card, and he called to the 3 photographers watching from the bank to show ours to confirm.

Fortunately one of the other photographers rushed to do so, as I’d noticed as I came out that day that mine had expired at the end of the previous month!

Since then I’ve also been told by officers that my now current press card isn’t a real press card, though more often they tell me they just don’t care if I’m press.

What is particularly regrettable about the MPS statement is that it fails to refer to the published guidelines for MPS staff and photographers that were agreed between the Met and the BPPA, CIoJ and the NUJ and later approved by ACPO, although some aspects of this are summarised.

One key paragraph is missing:

“Members of the media have a duty to report from the scene of many of the incidents we have to deal with. We should actively help them carry out their responsibilities provided they do no interfere with ours.“

Juggernauts in London

This was the view I got clinging to the side of a crossing light on a centre of the road refuge near Green Park station as the three chariots were pulled up Piccadilly in this year’s Sri Jagannatha Rathayatra Festival. This is the first chariot, the other two are hidden behind it in this picture.

I’m not quite sure why – perhaps it was the effect of heat on my brain – I’d decided to photograph the event with minimum depth of field, working with both lenses I had wide open for almost all the time. This is actually a un-cropped full-frame (FX) image made with a Sigma 55-200 mm DC lens designed for use on DX format only, and shows hardly any vignetting or loss of sharpness – even when wide open at this focal length. Of course wide open isn’t very wide – f5.6 at this end of the range, and this for me was part of it’s attraction when I bought it a few years ago, as it makes for a very compact and light lens – and it was very cheap. I don’t shoot a great deal a long focal lengths, but I’m happy to carry a 350 g lens for the few occasions that I need it.

At the 55mm end – where the lens is f4 – there is some actual image cut-off, not visible in the D700 viewfinder but showing in the slightly larger image on the back of the camera. You can see it on this picture of Jaganattha taken from the same lamp-post:

This cut-off is caused by the rather effective cylindrical lens hood – as I found later by using the lens without it (although there is also some partial vignetting – which can be dealt with in Lightroom. I’m thinking at the moment about taking a few mm off that hood with a hacksaw or perhaps ‘petalling’ it with a file, but can’t work out exactly how much it needs to be.

Sharpness does seem surprising good to the edges and corners, although possibly a test chart would reveal weaknesses. But the glasses on the woman in white at the right edge are acceptably sharp, though her ear is a little soft! Of course depth of field – and flatness of field also come into play. The railings and moulding on the balcony at top right actually get noticeably sharper towards the corner of the picture when viewed at 1:1.

It would certainly be useable on the FX format for many purposes – such as portraits – though might be a little lacking for say architectural work or landscape (though I did go on to try it on these later in the day.)

I was surprised at these results – other DX lenses that I have show some very noticeable cut-off – with the Nikon 18-200 at almost all focal lengths. That doesn’t mean that this lens can’t be used on the D700, but it does restrict you to the DX format on the camera, with image files back to the 6Mp that we were used to on cameras such as the D100 – and just a little limiting on image quality. Given that the Sigma is also a better performer at least at the longer end, unless I need the full range of the 18-200, there is now no contest.

The D700 has a feature that will automatically crop the results from Nikon DX lenses if you set it to Auto crop. It’s perhaps good news that this doesn’t work for older Sigma lenses, so I can leave it set for when I feel a need for the 10.5mm fisheye, but don’t need to turn it off when I use the Sigma 55-200 DC.

Although many of the pictures from the event were taken from that same spot above ground as the whole procession passed, I did also photograph more conventionally. For that I was using another Sigma lens, the new HSM 24-70 f2.8 – and working at f2.8. More about this lens at a later date.

Nearby Café & Family Pictures

Nearby Café

A D Coleman opened his Nearby Café web site along with a regular web newsletter, C: the Speed of Light in 1995, the same year as I put my first site, ‘Family Pictures‘ on line. I’ve always enjoyed reading Coleman’s writing about photography, although of course I haven’t always agreed with everything that he says, but he is one of very few people to write intelligently about our medium. So I’ve made a habit of dropping in to the site occasionally to see if there is anything new on line.

Coleman have now changed from writing a newsletter On the Front Burner as a part of that site to producing a blog – written like this one using WordPress. It’s called Photocritic International, a title to which he has a better claim than most, and its one I’ll be following regularly. In fact there are at least two posts he’s already made that I want to write about when I have a little more time.

Family Pictures

My own first site – Family Pictures – still looks almost exactly the same as it did in 1995, though minor changes have been made as browsers and html have evolved to keep it more or less in its original state, and then it was hosted on a free site in the USA. The scans, re-made early in 1996, slightly larger than the originals, look primitive by today’s standards with an odd dotty sparkle on most of them, possibly because they were from prints made on a Pearl photographic paper.

The pictures were already old work when I put them on line, taken between 1976 and 1982, and one of them shows a baby of six months or so who helped me work out how to write the site and put it on line in 1995. He now writes web sites as a part of his work.

One day I’ll perhaps go back and look at the work again – there are some pictures I know I should have included – and perhaps one or two I’d want to leave out, and I wince when I look at these scans. But for me it’s a little reminder of how much things have changed over the years, both personally and with the web – and how it has changed my own life.

Climate Rush – Palm Oil

One of the many not-so-bright ideas that entrepreneurs have come up with to combat climate change is biofuels. Of course there is some scientific basis in this – growing biomass takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and when you use the stuff you’ve grown as fuel it simply returns it, with no net increase. So, on the face of it, biofuels would appear to be carbon neutral.

But of course that’s simplistic, failing to take note of the actual inputs into the process, such as the work involved in tilling the ground, harvesting and processing the crops, producing any chemicals used in growing, pumping water, transporting materials and so on. So while it may be carbon neutral as a part of a local subsistence economy (like bonfires in my back garden) once it becomes part of a global manufacturing process it certainly isn’t.

Even more simplistic is the failure when thinking about biofuel production to take into account the effects of setting up such an industry on the ecology and communities where the industry is established. There isn’t empty land going spare anywhere on the planet that could be used.

If you want to make a fortune out of biofuels, first you convince governments in the west that they are a good thing. This isn’t as hard as it ought to be, because too many are clutching at any straw(!) that seems to be a technical fix for the climate that is better short-term than taking effective action. So we have an EU directive that says governments have to increase the amount of biofuel use.

Next you find a warm country with a corrupt government and large areas that could be suitably productive – perhaps at the moment covered by tropical rainforest, which is of course doing an important bit for the climate, but nothing for your profits. A little promise of profits to those in government for making lax laws that allow you to steal land from its traditional users with a minimum of compensation (which of course nobody is going to bother to enforce you to provide) and you are in business.

A business that means grubbing up and probably wastefully burning forests to plant your monoculture biofuel crop, destroying species and habitat, forcing the inhabitants to scraping a living in marginal areas. Taking over land that once grew crops to feed local people- but will now be dedicated to keeping the cars of the rich world running.

One country where biofuel production is having disastrous effects is Indonesia. Species such as the Sumatra tiger and the orangutan are disappearing fast and the people who used to live in areas taken over for agrofuels have lost their ancestral lands and their livelihood.

So the Climate Rush came to Mayfair, some dressed as usual as suffragettes, one as an orangutan – and quite a few smaller orangutans came as well – to protest outside the hotel where a gala dinner for delegates at the World Agri Invest Congress was taking place. The protesters brought there own jazz band to hold their own ‘Gala Dinner and Dance‘ in the street outside.

For most of the evening it was a well-behaved protest and police too were on their best behaviour, even when the protesters insisted on dancing on the road rather than in the pen the police had provided. It wouldn’t have been a Climate Rush without an attempt to charge the doorway of the hotel, but although there was a little pushing and shoving, things didn’t really get greatly out of hand.

Back in the ’60s, a friend of mine was in court following a demonstration, charged with grievous bodily harm for having hit a policeman. At some point in his cross-examination he was asked about the level of violence at the time, and replied that it seemed to him rather similar to that in a game of rugby. At which the judge sat up straight, turned towards him and and said “Ah, so you play rugger do you?” and we all realised he was going to be acquitted.

But last Wednesday I took my eye off the ball for a few seconds, and when the ‘rush’ started I was ten yards behind and couldn’t quite make it in front of the rushers, although I was moving considerably faster. It had been a longish event and I’d lost concentration – and should have spotted the signs – and have set my camera to a higher ISO as the light was fading slightly. I did get some pictures, but too many were blurred, and I went home thinking I could have done better.

Oh yes, Michael Jackson came along as well – pictures and more on the event on My London Diary.

Support the SOAS 9

The Home Office Building in Marsham St in Westminster is perhaps the only government building in London from the past 50 years of any real architectural interest – quite a contrast from the boring blandness of those blocks on Victoria St or the terribly twee pipes of Portcullis House. It’s also a building that creates its own environment, and on hot days the water and the grass make it some kind of an oasis in Central London.

The light too is often luxurious, a kind of glow combined with the dappled sunlight that produce such a sheer pleasure that I sometimes find it hard to concentrate on making images.

It’s hard perhaps to reconcile this meliorating atmosphere surrounding the building with the inhumane starkness of some of the actions decided on inside, in particular over the hounding of migrants in this country and the decisions that are made and the evasion of justice that occurs, allowing – if not organising – pre-dawn raids in which doors are kicked down, people rounded up, forced onto planes and sent back, often to countries they have fled because of persecution, and where they may well face imprisonment, torture and even death.

Of course in theory this doesn’t happen, but too often it does in practice, with too many politicians and officials who just don’t care – or are frankly racist in their assumptions and actions.

It’s a building no one with a conscience can look at without feeling shame, and embodying the strange and awful paradox that those who are responsible for making and applying the laws often choose to ignore and short-cut them.

Cleaners at SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, are largely migrants from Latin America. Lime most places, SOAS outsources its cleaning to save money. And as is always the case this means that these cleaners are employed under conditions SOAS would not contemplate for its own staff. Outsourcing is only ever cheaper because the workers are exploited; it’s a tighter screw which gives them less for doing more, adds a profit for the shareholders and delivers the contract at a price that an ethical organisation couldn’t match. If we ever get a socialist government in this country its a practice they would make illegal – just as we’ve outlawed practices like sending children up chimneys.

Recently, cleaners in London have been getting organised, with the help of the trade unions and others, and demanding a living wage. The cleaners at SOAS had just achieved that, and in retaliation the contract firm employing them brought in the Immigration Police, kitted up in riot gear, to a meeting of cleaning staff at 6.30 am one morning.

The cleaners were detained and questioned without being allowed trade union or legal representation. Not surprisingly there were some who were not carrying papers stating they had a right to work here. Some may have been in this country legally but under our draconian legislation caught by the law that denies them the right to work. None of them were doing anything harmful, all of them were doing useful work, doing a cleaning job with unsociable hours and low pay that no British worker wants to do.

Nine were arrested and taken to Immigration Detention Centres – prisons for people who have not been convicted of any crime. Most of the nine have already been forcibly put on flights back to their native countries, although it is possible that some had a right to remain here, and some have all their friends and families here.

This demonstration was another of those occasions when I felt ashamed of my country and its lack of humanity. But at the same time proud that there are people like those at this demonstration who are fighting for human rights and such campaigning does sometimes bring results.

One of the speakers was a civil servant and trade unionist, who asked us not to blame the civil servants who are just doing their job. Its tough, but if your job demands that you are racist or unfair, then you should fight and take the consequences (in the Civil Service probably a transfer of another department.) Its a lesson the twentieth century should have taught us.

You can see the pictures on My London Diary.

Honduras Coup – London Protest

I rushed out shortly after writing about how a series of staged images had won Paris Match’s student photography contest to photograph an “emergency picket” opposite the Honduras Embassy in London against the recent coup and expulsion from the country of President Mel (Manuel Zelaya.)

When I arrived at the scene, a few minutes after the protest had been meant to start (thanks to the Bakerloo line coming to a complete standstill after a train failure at Baker St) there were perhaps 50 people standing around, mainly in small groups talking to each other. A few did have placards, but you could hardly call it a demonstration. There was one other photographer there, someone I’ve known for a few years, whose work appears regularly in the left press, and occasionally more widely, and we too talked briefly, before I went off to say hi to a few of the demonstrators I recognised and take one or two pictures.

Five minutes later we were still waiting for something to happen, and the other photographer said to me “This is no use” (or rather words to that effect) “let’s get these guys organised” and shouted for the protesters to all come to our end of the pen and start doing something. And despite my principles I did a little encouraging too and soon we had at least a slightly more interesting event to photograph.

But I suppose you could call it “faked” or “staged”, although once they were started off, they did exactly what they had come to do, demonstrating their opposition and making a noise about it. And probably they would eventually have got round to doing something very similar in time without the intervention.

I didn’t take any great pictures – you can see some of the others and read more about the protest on My London Diary. Three of the 15 pictures there were taken before the photographers got the event started.

Olympic Photography Paranoia

It’s nice to know that someone at the British Journal of Photography reads Amateur Photographer (interestingly the word ‘Amateur’ in the masthead of their web pages has now shrunk to about 2 point size) and it was a ‘tweet’ from ‘1854’, that obscurely named BJP blog (of course I know why, but that doesn’t make it any less obscure) that sent me to the AP feature posted yesterday, Photographers a ‘security’ risk, warn 2012 Olympic chiefs. Not the snappiest of headlines (sorry!)

Like many of us, Dr Patrick Green is taking photographs around the Olympic site as it develops (I started in 1983, but that’s another story.) And he was trying out his new Olympus E-30 DSLR at Dorset Place, just off the Leyton Rd on the east boundary of the site a couple of weeks ago around 4pm on Sunday 14 June.

His picture in the AP shows a security guard standing next to a secuirty barrier witht he Olympic site in the background. Dr Green says he was told that that photography was forbidden and one of the guards “threatened to call more security who he said ‘would come with dogs’.”

Dr Green apparently got to see a “security manager” who told him that his pictures posed a ‘security risk’ – terrorists might use the images to plot an attack if they were posted on the internet. And while an ODA spokeswoman stated “Filming and photography of the site from public highways and areas around the Olympic Park is permitted,” she also made it clear that anyone appearing to take a particular interest in security operations was likely to be talked to by the security guards.

While this event appears to be yet another example of paranoia about photography – and yet another skirmish in that long-running battle between security men and photographers, so far I’ve yet to have a real problem with security in taking hundreds if not thousands of pictures since the blue fence went up around the Olympic site. One of the men putting up that fence did ask me why I was taking pictures – and so I told him, and although I don’t think he could be described as satisfied, that was the end of the matter. Other times I’ve seen security men looking at me and my gear, but so far I’ve not been asked about my pictures. And once or twice people from the ODA I’ve met have even been friendly.

I don’t think I’ve photographed in Dorset Place, a short street with not much of a view, though I have taken pictures from the next street off Leyton Road, Thornham Grove, and this is from just down the road:

These buildings are mainly for the shopping centre. Here’s one taken last Saturday from half a mile or so away looking towards the Olympic stadium. I’ll put a few more on My London Diary later.

Jacko RIP

Although I can’t claim a High Court judge’s knowledge of Michael Jackson, he was never more than a vague figure to me, and I find today’s hype ridiculous. The 20th century produced plenty of musical geniuses – Charlie Parker would be my nomination for the No 1 spot – with Jackson not even in the running so far as I’m concerned. With music videos and MTV culture Jackson seems more a symptom of the breakdown of our civilisation than anything positive.

Not that I personally wished him any harm. I had a great deal of sympathy for the way he was hounded by the press, and certainly wouldn’t wish a heart attack on anyone – having been fortunate enough to recover from one.

But he was one of the very few celebrities I’ve photographed – it happened by accident, as I was on my way to photograph a demonstration against the use of sweated labour – ‘Give Nike A Red Card’ – at Oxford Circus in June 2002, saw a TV crew running, and followed them.

Fans were demonstrating against Sony failing to support Jackson’s latest record, and I took a few pictures of them – and eventually put a couple on what was then my new web site, My London Diary – halfway down this page. I hung on taking pictures for a bit and then an open-top bus appeared and the fans broke out from behind the barriers and surged around it. Jackson appeared with a large placard, ‘Sony is Phoney’ and a puppet, and pretended he was going to climb down into the sea of fans.

I was shooting with a Leica and probably my normal 35mm lens, rather more interested in the fans’ responses than Jackson himself who appears rather small on the few images I took (and I’ve cropped the two above for the web so he is more visible.)

And when I got the the end of the roll it didn’t seem worth loading another – so I went off to photograph ‘No Sweat’, who after their demo at Oxford Circus set off kicking a football and marching down Oxford St.

It was an interesting day and ended with what was I think the first of a number of curious encounters I’ve had with the Met. After I’d followed the demonstrators to somewhere opposite Selfridges – and by then the police had pushed them onto the pavement – an officer came up to me and very politely said – with a curious little smirk “I think you’ve taken enough pictures now, don’t you Sir?”

Kew Bridge Occupation Continues

On Saturday 6 June, a group of activists occupied a site next to Kew Bridge that had been empty for more than 20 years, intending to develop it as a community resource. The action was very much inspired by the 1996 ‘The Land is Ours’ action in Wandsworth, where a site owned by Guinness was occupied for five and a half months before the eviction.

Land is a scarce resource, particularly in urban areas, and land rights campaigners argue that it should be used for the good of all, not simply for the profits of landowners. Local communities should have a much greater role in planning, and where owners fail to live up to their obligations to use land responsibly they should lose their rights. Legally UK local autorities have quite extensive powers to “remedy the condition of land”, including the issue of notices under Section 215 of the Town and Country Planning Act, 1990 and compulsory purchase, but seldom make use of them.

The site at Kew Bridge has been derelict for over 20 years, being simply used by its owners as an appreciating asset as land prices have risen. LB Hounslow has failed to take effective action. A year or two ago the current owners submitted a very extensive mixed development for planning permission which was rejected and are making a further submission which Hounslow are in process of approving. It seems astonishing that while the rejected proposal included affordable housing, there is none at all in the latest proposal. However the current fall in housing prices probably makes imminent development unlikely even if permission is granted.

The site appears to have been left to grow wild by its owners, with some dumping of materials in parts of it. The large fence around its perimeter creates an empty eyesore in an extremely desirable and visible riverside site, next to Kew Bridge, part of London’s South Circular Road. The site is also a few yards from a railway station and on several bus routes, and not far from the Great West Road and M4.

The occupiers intend to use the site productively, growing vegetables and providing workshops and meeting spaces for the local community. Local people have brought materials for building and plants and helped in clearing the site and constructing some simple buildings on it. The site welcomes visitors warmly but wants to be a good neighbour and has banned amplified music and enforces a strict policy against alcohol or drugs on the site.

Last weekend the Eco Village/Brentford Community Garden had a solstice open weekend with activities including face painting, music, picnic area and childrens workshops, and I dropped in at the end of the day to take some pictures. Already the site has been considerably improved.

More pictures from the Kew Bridge Eco Village on My London Diary

Tamils March for the Release of Captives

Organisers the British Tamil Formum estimate that 100,000 Tamils marched through London today from Hyde Park to Temple Place, calling for justice in Sri Lanka and a separate Tamil state there. The march was led by a group of ‘detainees’ in a barbed wire prison camp to dramatise the terrible conditions of civilians held in internment camps and demanded their immediate release as well as full UN access to the camps.

Some also carried photographs of their relatives who have been killed or who have disappeared and demanded that the Sri Lankan government and army be tried for war crimes, as well as calling for economic sanctions, an arms embargo and the suspensiotn of Sri Lanka from the Commonwealth.

Some in the demonstration carried black flags, but many showed their support for the banned LTTE (Tamil Tigers) with flags and t-shirts.

The march was certainly more than 2 km long, as when I was with the head of it in Trafalgar Square a police officer I was standing beside received a message saying that it was still coming out of Park Lane. The front was moving slowly (it isn’t easy to walk with a concentration camp) and the people behind were generally fairly tightly packed across the whole eastbound carriageway of Picadilly and down Lower Regent St, so I think that the BBC figure of 20,000 was probably a considerable under-estimate. By the time I went home just after 4pm, crowds were still streaming past onto the Victoria Embankment.

More pictures on My London Diary.