My Own Work | >Re-PHOTO

Bielsko-Biala

You have just missed one of the world’s best photo festivals (although the exhibitions remain open until Sunday.) I’m not actually sure I should tell you about it, because it was already standing room only for at least one session, and part of what makes it so great is it’s manageable size. If you all come for the next one it may not be the same!

I first heard of Bielsko-Biala when I was invited to show work at the first FotoArtFestival there in 2005. I hate to travel. I’ve even refused jobs on the grounds that I couldn’t get there on a Zone 1-6 London Travelcard. Before then I hadn’t been on an airliner since I was about 15 – and then only on a tour of the workshops at London Heathrow where my eldest brother then worked (and I suspect it was a DC-3.) I started taking my ‘carbon footprint’ (not that we called it that then) and energy use seriously in the late 1960’s, when I was “a friend of the earth before the earth had friends” or at least before the organisation was set up here in the UK.

Two names made me decide to bend my principles sufficiently to make the trip to Poland as well as sending work there. I wanted to meet Eikoh Hosoe and Ami Vitale.

Gunars Binde, Eikoh Hosoe, Ami Vitale and Peter Marshall. Photo by Jutka Kovacs

I also wrote about many of the other fine photographers I met there, including Stefan Bremer Gunars Binde, Sarah Saudek, Pilar Alabajar, Shadi Ghadirian, Lars Tunbjork, Bevis Fusha, Ali Borovali, Obie Oberholzer and Vasil Stanko for ‘About Photography‘, and although those features are no longer on line there, you can find them on the ‘Wayback Machine‘ along with those about photographers unable to come to Bielsko, such as Joachim Ladefoged and Boris Mikhailov, and Mario Giacomelli, who of course died in 2000. One curious feature of many of the pages on the Wayback machine is that my photograph is replaced by that of the current guide.

This year’s FotoArtFestival also brought a range of stars to Bielsko-Biala, including Sarah Moon, Misha Gordin and the author of one of the best-known histories of photography, Naomi Rosenblum. The outstanding show for me was Walter Rosenblum‘s ‘Message from the Heart‘ and I had the privilege of visiting it together with Naomi and his daughter, the film-maker Nina Rosenblum. A screening of her film about her father was another highlight, despite some technical problems. I was there to give a presentation, which included some of my own work as well as images by John Benton-Harris and others who have photographed on the streets of England.
At the moment I’m still exhausted from my trip there and the journey home, and still writing up my memories and processing the images I took there on my highly pocketable Fuji Finepix F31fd. Even though these are only jpegs, it is still worthwhile importing them into Lightroom and adjusting as if they were raw files. The difference can be astonishing, and it somehow seems to result in less degradation than similar processing in Photoshop or other image-processing software.

The F31fd may not be as good as the Nikon D200, but it is considerably easier to carry! And if a pink phone was good enough for Eikoh, then I think I can manage with it for things like this.

Eikoh Hosoe photographing in Alcatraz, Bielsko, Poland

Much more later!

Peter Marshall

Equiano

Olaudah Equiano (1745-97) was certainly a remarkable man, and one whose name deserves to be remembered this year along with William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and the others who helped to bring about the end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. His life was an incredible story both of adventure and of a man who managed to work his way out of slavery and become a successful businessman and best-selling author. Although born Olaudah Equiano, he was renamed Gustavus Vassa (after a Swedish noble) by the British naval captain who bought him in 1757, and used that name for the rest of his life.

Equiano took part in many adventures and various schemes including those to resettle Africans in Sierra Leone, and also formed ‘The Sons of Africa’, probably the first organised black political group in England, who campaigned against slavery through meetings, letters and articles, as well as being active in the English radical left.

But Equiano is also a great mystery. Despite the best-selling autobiography that did much to promote the abolitionist cause, there is still considerable doubt about the actual place and circumstances of his birth. And although his death made the newspapers at the time, there is no record of where he was buried, and little seems to be known about the details of what happened to his estate. His English wife, Susan Cullen, died in 1795, and his elder daughter a few months after him in 1897 , but when his only surviving daughter, Johanna Vassa, reached the age of 21, she inherited the large sum for the time of £950. His will is in the National Archives.

Equiano disappeared without trace, and for many years his contribution to the movement was also largely forgotten, but in recent years much research and several books have brought his memory back to life. Joanna Vassa (as she is more normally known) lived until 1857, marrying Congregational minister Henry Bromley in her early twenties.

People gather around the grave of Joanna Vasser as Arthur Torrington talks.

Arthur Torrington OBE, the secretary of the Equiano Society told us much of the story of the man and his daughter as he led a short conducted walk to her grave which was re-discovered in Abney Park Cemetery in 2005 in a badly damaged and overgrown state. It has now been cleaned and restored and parts of the inscription can be made out. Joanna, her husband and the second wife he married after her death were all buried in the same grave. There is no record known of any children from the marriage.

JOANNA, HENRY BROMLEY and VASSA can clearly be read on the gravestone, though some other words are vague.

More pictures on My London Diary

North London Against Gun and Knife Crime

I hope that most north Londoners are against gun and knife crime, but relatively few turned up to express this at the march starting from Clapton Pond at noon on Sunday, but this is just the start of a campaign by Communities Against Gun and Knife Crime, and one in which I can only hope they will have some success.

Clapton Pond is a location curiously missing from modern maps – not marked on any of my several street atlases or the Ordnance Survey, but popular on the fronts of buses, and you can hardly miss the pond as you walk, ride or drive past.

It’s probably safest not to stop, as this is Hackney’s notorious “murder mile” along the Upper and Lower Clapton Road. Drug-related crime rose to levels in 2002 that led one of the senior consultant surgeons from nearby Homerton Hospital to go and study techniques used to treat stabbings and shootings in South Africa’s most dangerous township, Soweto – where statistically the crime rate was lower. In 2006 it was reported as having a murder on average every two weeks.

Chimes nightclub, a few yards from the start of the march, was forced to close following a murder outside – the last of a number of incidents there – in Jan 2006

Unlike the similar march in the London Borough of Brent, in north-west London, this does not appear to receive support from the local authority (it covers two, starting in Hackney and finishing in Haringay) or from the Metropolitan Police, although they were of course on hand for traffic control.

Marchers prepare to move off

The march was organised by CAGK, Communities Against Gun and Knife Crime, one of whose members has had one relative shot and two stabbed. Less than a hundred marchers started on the march from Clapton Pond, but by the time it had reached its destination for a rally at Tottenham Green, I’m told the numbers had more than doubled (I had left to photograph elsewhere.)

I hope they get more support for the meeting later this week, and gain support for their positive policies to cut down crime – in particular providing activities, education and real jobs that provide hope and a future away from crime for youth in the area.

The march starts.

More pictures

Peter Marshall

Stop the War, Allow the Demo

This year Britain’s members of parliament were welcomed back from their summer hols by a demo organised by ‘Stop the War’ and CND. In a masterfully inept move, the Met police, doubtless pushed by Downing St, brought out and dusted off legislation passed in 1838 against the Chartists, then seen to be threatening civilisation as the rich and powerful enjoyed it.

Nothing could have boosted the demonstrators more than a ban on marching, and the numbers who turned up in Trafalgar Square for the rally would have made a ban impossible to implement short of mass arrests and Burma-style draconian measures.

An hour or so before the rally, the police/government had to back down, giving the demonstrators permission to march as far as Bridge Street, just short of Parliament Square.

In the end the had to back down further, allowing the marchers bit by bit access to Parliament Square and eventually at least some were allowed to go to their final goal and lobby their members of parliament. Some of the police were obviously rattled by this climb-down and took it out rather by harassing the photographers, trying to prevent them from photographing the march as it moved down Whitehall, and I was almost knocked flying by a firm shove as I was walking backwards, camera to eye. Another officer put out an arm to stop me and apologised.

Police then kept the marchers penned up around the square, either in Parliament Street or in front of Brian Haw’s pitch in the square itself, and some conflicts seemed more or less inevitable, and few were surprised when there was a sit-down in the middle of the traffic junction that police were trying hard to keep open.

Frustrated marchers sit down in the middle of the traffic junction

Sensible policing would have taken the march through the area as quickly as possible, stopping the traffic for the march to pass, and moving it on to College Green or Victoria Gardens, where the organisers might have made some further speeches before an orderly dispersal. Trouble-makers would then have been relatively isolated and much simpler to police.

A popular sentiment!

The event dragged on a long time, and the sky began to get very gloomy and threaten rain. I’d photographed the sit-down, but nothing else seemed to be happening. So I – and some of the other photographers – decided it was probably time to go home.

No sooner had we left the scene than the police sprang into action, forcibly removing the demonstrators from the roadway. Many moved onto the square itself, pushing down and piling up the barriers that were erected to prevent access to it some weeks ago. I missed taking pictures of this, but you can’t be everywhere all the time.

The event was at least handled a little better than ‘Sack Parliament‘ that met returning MPs last year. Then one of my colleagues was hospitalised by the police (he is taking them to court) and there were many more arrests, even though there were relatively few demonstrators.

Many more pictures of course on ‘My London Diary‘

Peter Marshall

Bethnal Green Blues

We had a fine day for our book-related walk around Bethnal Green and a good audience. Our meeting point was, for various reasons, the Museum of Childhood, which features in two of my pictures in Cathy’s book (The Romance of Bethnal Green (ISBN 9781901992748), Cathy Ross, 2007). One shows the sculpture which was in the space at the front of the museum for many years, and I was surprised to find it now inside, at the rear of the cafe area, and given a white coating (perhaps so the ice-cream won’t show), and the other features some of the panels on the outside of the building about agriculture.

Bethnal Green, (C) Peter Marshall, 1986

So I chose to talk here instead about perhaps one of the most significant changes to the geography of London in the past 50 years, the small card rectangle of the Travelcard. My father lived in the London area for the first 70 or so years of his life, but probably never visited Bethnal Green, and the convoluted journey I’d made that morning on the way to the Museum would, before its introduction have involved me queuing to buy two train tickets and paying separate fares to 4 bus conductors. The Travelcard (and slightly later the Capitalcard), introduced by the Greater London Council led by Ken Livingstone in 1981, was a revolution in travelling across London.

It made a significant change in my photography. Previously I’d photographed Hull, a much more compact city, walking almost everywhere with just the occasional bus journey back to base from the city centre (a fairly massive project from which a gross of pictures were shown as ‘Still Occupied, A View of Hull‘ at the Ferens Art Gallery in 1983.)

Before the Travelcard, my work in London – with a few exceptions – had been limited to very specific areas, largely within walking distance of Waterloo or London Bridge, as well as pictures taken on visits to tourist attractions and other specific trips. The Travelcard opened up the whole of London in a new way – and among the areas I visited in a fairly systematic coverage of the capital was Bethnal Green.

Bethnal Green (C) Peter Marshall, 1993

Arnold Circus, Bethnal Green (C) Peter Marshall, 1986

Arnold Circus, shown above, was one of the places our walk took us, though it has come up in the world considerably since 1986. The first major slum clearance scheme from the London County Council, it was built due to the urging of the local vicar, Rev Osborne Jay, in 1890. Charles Booth’s great survey had marked ‘Friar’s Mount’, better known as the ‘Old Nichol’, as London’s worst slum. Jay also brought the writer Arthur Morrison to the area, and his ‘A Child of the Jago‘, published as the demolitions were taking place gives a horrifyingly real picture of the old area, and its people. Those who lived in the Old Nichol of course got no benefit from its clearance, simply being evicted and having to fend for themselves, decanted into the slums of surrounding areas, the new flats being let by the council to the ‘industrious poor.’

Around the corner at the new Rich Mix Cultural Centre lay the great disappointment of my day. Earlier, standing opposite the former site of ‘Camerawork’ I’d talked about the great days of the ‘Half Moon Photography Workshop’ based in Aldgate, and the magazine, ‘Camerawork’, the early issues of which – before it sank into theory-laden senescence – helped vitalise British photography, and of two very different important photographers associated with it I had known, Jo Spence and Paul Trevor. And I’d promised that people would be able to see why I think of Paul as one of the most important British photographers of the 1970s when we arrived at Rich Mix, although I had yet to visit the show myself.

Unfortunately we couldn’t. This is what we found:

Installation view: Paul Trevor’s work on display at Rich Mix (see note)

Images projected at a slight angle onto a wall mostly in fairly bright light from the large window area at the front of the building, pale and washed out. Of course they would look better at night, although the air vent will still hide the upper left part of the image . But more , but even then they all suffered from a curious squashing effect, presumably due to some digital reprocessing to make the images fit the format of the projector, but resulting in figures that looked like caricatures.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone could do something this badly. This is a show that has been well advertised and is in many respects the major event of the East London Photomonth. But it seemed to have been presented with less care than most people would take over showing their holiday snaps. (See note below)
Peter Marshall

What we saw at Rich Mix was not the real show, which we should have seen when we went and sat down on the sofa downstairs. We sat down and had a little rest there (it had been a long walk) but there was nothing to see. I’d actually walked down the stairs expecting to see more, and was surprised to find nothing there. It just hadn’t occurred to me that a gallery would switch an exhibition off during opening hours.

A Busy Weekend

I’m about to set off for another busy day on the streets of London, although this one is a little different, as this afternoon I’m in Bethnal Green not to take photographs but to lead a tour with the author of ‘The Romance of Bethnal Green‘ (ISBN 9781901992748), Cathy Ross. Its a book I’m proud to have my name on the cover too, “with photographs by Peter Marshall“, and as well as providing 16 of my own images, I also worked on the pictures from local history and other sources, several of which were terribly printed and required considerable rescue in Photoshop.

Of course I do hope to take a few pictures here and there, and more tomorrow – as usual. But last weekend, as you can see in My London Diary, was a particularly busy one. Last Saturday I took part in the London march, part of the Global Day of Action on Burma, and was particularly pleased to get pictures of some of the monks in front of the Houses of Parliament.

I left the monks after they had tied ribbons to the gates of Downing St, to photograph a walk organised by Yaa Asantewaa and Carnival Village to commemorate 200 years since the abolition of the slave trade – and illustrate some of our history since then, a part of this year’s Black History Festival, before returning to Trafalgar Square for the end of the Burma rally.

Sunday saw me photographing both the annual Al Quds (Jerusalem) Day march, and also a counter-demonstration by those who see it as an event entirely designed to bolster the cruelty of the hard-line Islamic regime in Iran. I think the truth is a little more complex, and various groups participate in the event for different motives, although of course the event was founded by the Ayotollah and is supported financially by Iranian government-backed agencies.

That there are sickening abuses of human rights in Iran under the name of Islamic law is too beyond doubt.

And then on Monday I was back in London taking pictures again of the ‘banned’ ‘Stop the War’ demonstration. But more about that when I get back from today’s work.

Urban Mutations

Listening to Sam Appleby talking about his series of night images of Crawley, one of the post-war war new towns, brought many resonances.

The presentation was the initial meeting of ‘Urban Mutations‘, a group initiated by Appleby and 3 others who have just completed an urban studies course. It took place in the Angel pub in Rotherhithe, a stone’s throw from the genesis of another gang of four (in Limehouse), but perhaps significantly south of the river. The first floor room, close to Cherry Gardens pier, looks out over the Thames, with views of Tower Bridge, the City and, in the other direction, the towers of Canary Wharf.

One image I couldn’t resist on my way to the Angel (its roof is visible at centre right.) Cherry Gardens pier, Rotherhithe and Canary Wharf; the figure caught in the centre appears caged in the centre of the gate.

My urban studies were of a more guerilla nature, starting on the streets of Manchester, walking through the cramped Victorian terraces of Hulme, learning to drive around their flattened acres of rubble, interviewing in the instant system-built slums (now in turn demolished.) Neighbourhood politics in Moss Side, including what I think was the first real exercise in public participation in the UK, “planning for real” with people modelling their own future (years later when the council knocked down what they went ahead with at the time, the next generation replacement bore an uncanny resemblance.)

From their I went to Leicester, sitting at the feet (literally, as there were usually more students than chairs) of Jim Halloran, one of the pioneers of Media Studies, as well as learning photography, and filming and editing hour after hour of live closed circuit TV.

My first job after Leicester was in a new town, Bracknell. The Development Corporation provided a large new flat at a decent rent – including enough space to set up my first darkroom, as well as an empty shop in the local shopping centre a few yards away dedicated to community purposes, where a few of us met regularly as a community photography group. I started to take photographs for the theatre group based in the local arts centre, and help in the hire darkrooms there, as well as setting up a photography course in the local comprehensive where I was teaching.

In many ways, Bracknell wasn’t a bad place to live, and much of the criticism of new towns in general is unfair and ill-informed – and is usually made from the perspective of Hampstead rather than Dagenham or the St Helier Estate or North Peckham.

Although Bracknell seldom inspired me, since then I’ve taken many urban landscape images, with shows on Hull, London and Paris. Some of these – together with work by a number of other photographers – appear on the urban landscape web site I run with Mike Seaborne.

Appleby’s view of Crawley was shown in print form at the Photographers’ Gallery in 1990 (it had started life as a tape-slide presentation.) At the time I found it an interesting set of pictures accompanied by the kind of theoretical baggage that fortunately seemed to bear little relation to what the photographer was actually doing.

It came at a time when theory had become all in many photographic courses, and it was de rigeur for gallery respectability to have a jargon-infested statement and presentation. As many shows were almost entirely composed of this, often with minimal, tedious, bland or even incomptent photographic content, Appleby’s work stood out.

There is a long history of night photography, stemming from the early days of the dry plate, with photographers such as Paul Martin in London and Jessie Tarbox Beals and Alfred Stieglitz in America, and continuing – for example in London in the 1930s – with books such as John Morrison & Howard Burdekin’s ‘London Night‘ (1934) and Francis Sandwith’s ‘London By Night‘ (ca 1935). One of the more influential books of the 1980s was ‘Summer Nights‘ by Robert Adams (1985) – this year at Rhubarb Rhubarb in Birmingham at least 3 of the roughly 30 portfolios I reviewed were clearly influenced by it.

Of course these photographers had worked in black and white, but in the 1970s we had started to see colour becoming respectable – even trendy – in fine art photography. Guys like Shore, Eggleston, Meyerowitz and the rest were shooting day and night and (among other concerns) exploring the peculiar colour response of films under different lighting conditions. Often the kind of peculiar effects of mixed lighting, of neon, tungsten and dusk skyglow.

Appleby’s images from Crawley very much explore the kind of alienating effect of typcial colour-deficient street lighting, notably the almost monochromatic sodium yellow (shifted more towards red in some images, either by dye characteristics or differential reciprocity of particular emulsions) and also the ghastly green peak of mercury vapour.

The images broke the photographic taboos of the amateur hobby press in this respect, as well as in their deliberate use of the tilted frame, a sometimes over-mannered bow in the direction of Rodchenko’s soviet modernism. Winogrand was of course at the time upsetting some by his tilted viewpoint, but in his images the framing follows a certain compositional logic based on the subject. In Appleby’s pictures it sometimes works in a similar way, but in others seems a deliberately upsetting device which didn’t always seem to suceed.

I was sorry to have to leave in the middle of the evening, and miss the further discussion by the group about urban issues. I look forward to further events.

Facebook

My London Diary now has a Facebook group. Some of you reading this will know a lot better than me what this means. Having held out for some time, I’ve now set up a Facebook account, and any readers of this Blog who are also on Facebook are invited to become one of my ‘Friend’s.’

I don’t have many friends on the site at the moment. Most of those who I’m friends with in real life don’t seem to have ‘Facebook’ accounts. But if you read this blog, you might find it easier to comment or talk about the work here or on My London Diary on Facebook – so become a friend and join the My London Diary group.

Peter Marshall

petermarshall@cix.co.uk

Muslims remember Ali in London

Shia Muslims regard Ali (Ali Ibn Abi Talib) as second in importance only to Muhammad in their faith, as the first Imam. He grew up in the prophet’s household and when the prophet made public his divine inspiration, the nine-year old Ali was the first male to express his belief and become a Muslim. Later he married Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima.

On the death of Muhammad, Muslims disagreed about who should succeed him. Some believed that his successor should only be chosen by God, whose will was made known through his prophet, Muhammad, who they felt had made clear that Ali should be his successor. Others felt that the decision should come from the Muslim community, and they chose Muhammad’s second in command, Abu Bakr to be the first Caliph.
Ali later became fourth Caliph, after Abu Bakr and his two successors had died, but the arguments continued (and many of the facts are still disputed.) Muslims were split over his succession, and this led to the first Islamic civil war and formed the basis of the split between Shia and Sunni. After 4 years as Caliph, he was assassinated, struck on the head with a poisoned sword while at prayer, and dying several days later.

All Muslims venerate him as a great religious thinker, and his wisdom has also impressed many non-Muslims. His rule as Caliph has often been cited as an example of a model Islamic ruler.

The annual public remembrance of his martyrdom in London is highly intense and emotional, including considerable wailing and beating of breasts. Before this was a long session of reading, of prayers and and increasing The men stand in rows and throw their arms into the air together, bringing them down with considerable force, sometimes producing bleeding. It’s an impressive spectacle of religious devotion, but tricky to capture in a still image.

The women mourn in a separate block, and their observance is considerably more restrained, although the devotion still shows in their faces as they move their hands in time with the men.

The image I liked most came earlier in the proceedings, when the coffin was brought out and everyone rushed to touch it – at first the men, then the women came as well.

But it was the delight on the face of this young girl, lifted up high in the air, that moved me most.

More pictures on My London Diary.

City People

If you are at a loose end in London tomorrow night (Thursday October 4) why not come along to The Juggler in Hoxton Market, where the London Arts Cafe show ‘City People‘ has its opening (it continues until October 26.) Curating a show is one way to make sure you get your pictures included, and four of mine are on the wall.

I decided to show four pictures taken in the same place, Parliament Square. In 2005, our New Labour government decided that Brian Haw’s ongoing demonstration looked rather untidy and embarassing in Parliament Square, it was a continual and unwelcome reminder of the great blunders they had made over the Iraq invasion. So they decided to add a bit to the ‘Serious Organised Crime and Police‘ bill that was going through at the time. But rather than a clause that directly said “Sod off, Brian” they brought in a blanket need for demonstrations in a wide area around Parliament needed to give 7 days notice and get permission from the police.

Unfortunately, the 2005 SOCPA act ended up causing rather more trouble than it was worth. It didn’t shift Brian, at first because careless drafting meant it didn’t apply to him, and then, even when a judge was found to say it did (because they had meant it to), the police found that his protest was still allowed, as the law made an exception for individual demonstrators (although the police could impose some conditions to restrict them.) Then comedian Mark Thomas came up with the brilliant idea of mass lone demonstrations (and one day there were over 2000 such events in the area.) Perhaps his best one was a demonstration against the wasting of police time.

So Parliament Square has ended up being a much more important focus of dissent, including at times – usually in the middle of the night – some rather nasty attacks by police (and off-duty police in plain clothes) on Brian Haw and others. Unfortunately I’ve not been around to record these, but I have photographed many other events there in recent years, including these 4 in the show:

The Space Hijackers challenge MPs to a cricket match (May 1. 2005)

Police v Anarchists, Sack Parliament, Oct 10, 2006

Brian Haw: “Find Your Courage; Share Your Vision; Change Your World” (Dan Wilkins)

No Trident Replacement. March 14, 2007

There is one other photographer in the show, Paul Baldesare, along with various paintings and drawings, providing an interesting mixture of methods and viewpoints.

Borough Market, Paul Baldsare.

My pictures have ended up being rather more topical than I expected. Tony Benn, President of ‘Stop the War’ wrote to the Home Secretary on Monday following the announcement of a ban on the proposed march from a rally in Trafalgar Square to the Houses of Parliament on Monday October 8 under the 1839 Sessional Orders legislation. Benn states that he and others intend to defy the order by marching along Whitehall to lobby members of Parliament and call for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. I hope to be there again taking pictures.

Peter Marshall