Pride in 2002: Back in 2002 Pride was still in black and white, or at least the pictures I posted on My London Diary were, as were those I took to the picture library I was then working with. They still only worked with black and white prints and colour transparencies and I was working with colour negative.
It would have been possible for me to convert those colour negatives into transparencies, but it wasn’t worth the time and expense in the hope of possible sales to do so.
For my personal use and to exhibit work I could make colour prints – and I had crammed a colour processor into my darkroom so could feed the exposed Fuji paper in at one end, shut the lid and let the machine do the rest before I took the print to the print washer.
I had a smart colour enlarger with a linked probe that at least almost got the necessary filtration somewhere close, though I always ran at least one test strip – and often 2 or 3 – before making the final print. Making prints was a rather tedious business working in near total darkness with just a very, very dim sodium light.
The way forward was obviously to scan negative film to provide digital files, but in 2002 the equipment I had was fairly primitive and the scans I produced in 2002 looked rather poor, which is probably why I only posted the black and white images on My London Diary at the time. Scanning the black and white 10×8″ press prints gave rather better results.
Back then I only wrote two short paragraphs about the event in My London Diary – and here they are in full (with the usual corrections):
July started for me with the annual Pride march. This year it was probably the smallest I’ve attended, and was a rather sad event compared to previous years.
It was enlivened a little by some visitors from Brazil, but the whole thing seems to be more of a commercial event now. Much less fun and joy.
For this post I’ve revisited some of those 2002 scans and improved them significantly with the aid of some smart sharpening and other minor adjustments to post here. You can click on these colour images to see them larger.
Most of the colour images are of the same subjects as I took in black and white, and at least for some I still prefer them in black and white. But generally I think the event is best seen in colour.
Hizb ut-Tahrir, Spain and Copyright: on Sunday 31 May 2009 I photographed a march by Hizb ut-Tahrir against attacks by Pakistan army on Taliban militants in Swat and then went to the ‘Taste of Spain’ festival in Regent Street, which led me to think and write about the copyright position over reproductions of works of art.
As I pointed out then, if works of art are out of copyright because of their age – now because the artist died over 70 years ago – then any reproduction of them “intended to be a faithful 2D representation” lack “the the artistic intent necessary for copyright to exist and so is also in the public domain.“
Picasso died in 1973 so his work will remain copyright until 2043
I wrote in 2009:
However copyright lawyers in the employ of many museums and photographic agencies who make money selling or licencing art reproductions take a rather different view of intellectual property law.
A judgement in the UK Court of Appeal in 2023 clarified the situation as far as the UK is concerned, confirming that photographs of two dimensional artworks which are out of copyright are indeed also in the public domain, and that museums and collections etc can no longer use copyright to restrict the circulation of images or make any charge for doing so.
Hizb ut-Tahrir protest US War in Pakistan – US Embassy – Pakistan High Commission
Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK in January 2024 after it organised protests which supported Hamas following their October 7th attack on Israel. I had been concerned about their activities since I first photographed them over 20 years earlier.
They marched from the US Embassy to the Pakistan High Commission in protest against the attacks by the Pakistan army on Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan militants who had taken control of parts of the Swat Valley. They called this an “American War”, blaming them on American pressure on the Pakistan government and called for an immediate end to attacks by Muslims on Muslims.
I ended my report on the protest with a long criticism of Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain calling on them to “have a proper respect for human rights, including the rights of women, although an Islamic interpretation of this may well differ in some respects from a Western one. It’s very hard not to agree with Hizb ut-Tahrir when it talks about the corrupt regimes currently leading Muslim countries, but it would also be welcome to see them standing against repression – and in particular the repression of women – that is currently practised in places including Swat and states such as Iran.”
The most impressive part of the ‘Taste of Spain’ festival in Regent Street was the display of large photographs of pictures from the Prado in Madrid which largely attracted attention because of the female nudity in some of the works (and it’s a shame that Ruskin had apparently not studied this work in detail before his wedding night, which might then have been less of a shock to his system.)
Quite a few people posed in front of it to have their picture taken – but by their friends rather than by me, but I and other photographers took advantage of this.
Vietnam – Who Took The Picture? Whenever you think or talk with anyone about the US war against the people of Vietnam back in the sixties and seventies the one image that is in everyone’s mind is of a nine-year-old girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, running naked down a road screaming after a napalm attack on her village by the South Vietnam Air Force following misleading US intelligence. She saved her life by stripping off her burning clothing and running but was badly burnt. And the photographer who made this iconic image also saved her life.
Although this image is in the public domain in the USA because of it’s date of publication, I think it is still in copyright in the UK, so I won’t post it here. If you need to look at it again it is widely on the web, including on Wikipedia. It’s title is ‘The Terror of War‘, though it is better known simply as ‘Napalm Girl’.
The picture was taken by and credited to a young Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut (Huynh Công Út) working for Associated Press, the US not-for-profit news agency based in New York, and Ut took the 8 films he had shot that day into AP’s Saigon agency – after he had rushed her to hospital – where the film was processed. This image stood out immediately but the AP staff were reluctant to send it to New York because of its full-frontal nudity. They called agency director Horst Fass back into the office and he saw the power and news value of the image and transmitted it to New York demanding they publish it despite the nudity. They did and it won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and the 1973 World Press Photo of the Year.
As so often in covering events, Ut was not the only photographer at the scene, but his image was the most visceral and Fass who was a noted photographer and fighter for the right of photographers to be credited saw that Ut’s name was attached to the picture – and AP had very careful procedures to ensure that pictures were accurately credited. So we can be sure that this picture was the picture taken by Ut.
And we all were convinced until a rival agency, VII led by its co-founder Gary Knight, working largely on the stories of a disgruntled former AP employee challenged this a few years ago and set up a two-year investigation which culminated in the film “The Stringer” released this year. This argues that the picture was actually taken by another, much less well known, Vietnamese photographer, Nguyen Thanh Nghe, who also took his film from that day into AP.
The film puts forward some evidence – enough to convince some reviewers – but I think few actual photographers who have read the truly comprehensive report of the investigation by AP into circumstances will be left with any real doubt that the published picture was by Ut.
Of course many of those who could have given relevant evidence are now dead, and film negatives contain little of the evidence that would be available from digital metadata, though AP did conduct extensive testing of the two negatives that remain from the film. The only people who denied them access to evidence were the film makers, who demanded AP sign a non-disclosure agreement which would have prevented AP from disclosing anything it found – which would have defeated the purpose of the investigation. And both “Nguyen Thanh Nghe, who says he took the photo, and former AP photo editor Carl Robinson, who claims he was ordered to change the credit” declined to be interviewed, instead providing written statements.
The AP investigation which took more than a year points out a number of lies, deliberate misrepresentations, omissions and errors in the film and points to the failures of a report commissioned for “The Stringer” on material still available from the day’s events from the commercial company INDEX which has also so far failed to work with AP. AP carried out a similar but more comprehensive study with significantly different conclusions and shows that the film makes use of “a flawed graphic 3D render of the scene.“
As so much of the relevant evidence has disapppeared, AP are very circumspect in their conclusions. They conclude that Nick Ut could have taken the picture but there are some questions which it is impossible to be sure about largely because of the passage of time.
They say that they cannot now prove conclusively that Nick Ut took the photo, but the “no proof has been found that Nguyen took the picture” and also that there were other photographers who were in a position to have taken it.
And they conclude:
We applied AP’s photo standards to guide us to an outcome. AP’s standards say “a challenged credit would be removed only if definitive evidence … showed that the person who claimed to have taken the photo did not.”
All available evidence analyzed by AP does not clear that bar. Thus, the photo will remain attributed to Ut.
Some photographers have been very much clearer – including some of those who were invloved and gave evidence to AP and it seems almost certain that the accusations made in the film are both untrue and slanderous and that Ut took the picture used by AP which won him the Pulitzer.
I wasn’t in Vietnam and have no connection with either AP or VII or any of the photographers involved. But often I see published pictures of events or places I have photographed and cannot always decide if they are my work or that of another photographer. Particularly on Facebook, where most weeks I come across several of my pictures appearing without any attribution. I have to go back to my files to make sure if a picture is really mine or if someone else has taken a very similar picture. But usually when I have a suspicion a picture could be mine it is.
It seems to me quite likely that Nguyen took a similar but less powerful image on the roll that he claims went in to the AP office. He says AP paid him for bringing the picture in – something they often did even for pictures they could not use, though the records from the office show no record of any payment – and gave him back a print of his picture – but that later his wife threw that away. As the negatives no longer exist we cannot compare his picture with that by Ut. If his wife had kept that print I feel sure we would not now be having this controversy.
Ut deserves a grovelling apology and compensation from the film makers for questioning his integrity – as do many of the others involved. Of course they won’t get it.
Hanging on my living room wall (and there are copies on walls and at least one mug elsewhere) is a picture I made of a sculpture of a lion at Chatsworth. Years after taking it I opened a book by Fay Godwin – a photographer whose work I admired and who I knew personally – and found that very same lion staring out at me.
It’s part of the nature of photography that photographers can make very similar images to each other – and sometimes very minor differences or even chance can make one a masterpiece and another an also-ran – though in this case I think we both did pretty well. Her picture was taken from a position that must have been within an inch of where I had held the camera eight years earlier. Even though we were not there at the same time we saw the scene in the same way. More about this in my post Fay Godwin – Land Revisited.
Just Shares, Riverside & No to the Crook, the Toff, The Fascist or Cop: Friday 2nd May 2008 was the day the results came out for the election for London Mayor and it turned out to be a sad day for London. Earlier I’d covered a protest calling on the City of London to move away from its unjust economic prcarices and then gone to an exhibition and walked along the riverside while I waited for the mayoral declaration, though it came after I had given up and left for home
Just Shares Take On The Bank – Royal Exchange, Bank
Other speakers listen as Ann Pettifor speaksat Royal Exchange. Larry Elliott at right.
‘Just Share’, “a coalition of churches and development agencies seeking to engage with the City of London on issues of global economic injustice” and to “address the widening gap between rich and poor in the global economy” based at St Mary-le-Bow church in Cheapside had organised a protest in the heart of the City, in front of the Royal Exchange and at the side of the Bank of England.
I don’t think anyone at the Bank was listening to Ann Pettifor, Guardian economist Larry Elliott or the others as they spoke on the steps of the Royal Exchange, or took seriously the seminar later by Pettifor in one of Hawksmoor’s finest churches, St Mary Woolnoth, where former slave captain John Newton, writer of ‘Amazing Grace‘, preached his last 28 years.
She argued that current global debt-based financial systems are unsustainable and that structural change is necessary which gives proper regard to actual production, and the rediscovery of the insights of earlier Christian (and of course Muslim) traditions.
After visiting an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank next to Waterloo Bridge I walked slowly along the riverside and took a few pictures.
I was on my way to London’s City Hall, then close to Tower Bridge, owned by the government of Kuwait. In 2021 City Hall moved to a GLA-owned property in Newham, some miles to the east. The results of the London Mayoral Election were expected to be announced there in the early evening.
No to the Crook, the Toff, The Fascist or Cop -City Hall, Southwark
I sat on a wall close to City Hall reading John Updike’s novel ‘Terrorist’ which is perhaps why I attracted quite so much attention from a Metropolitan police FIT team (Forward Intelligence Team) photographer who took a number of photographs of me sitting there. I don’t object to being photographed, but was a little surprised when later I put in a Freedom of Information request to find the Met claimed they had no pictures of me, despite having photographed me working at many protests.
Protesters from various anarchist groups including Class War had come to City Hall to wait for the new London Mayor to be announced, though they were clear that they were against all the candidates – who they described as the Crook, the Toff, The Fascist and the Cop (there were six others also standing including Green Party candidate Sian Berry who got more votes than “the fascist” BNP candidate.
The protesters were allowed to protest in front of City Hall for around 35 minutes until Fitwatch went into action to frustrate the FIT teams (who could really use a little more intelligence) enclosing one of them in their banner.
Police called up their waiting reinforcements and the TSG arrived four minutles later and began to push the demonstrators, along with some bystanders, mainly tourists, towards the waiting pen which had been set up a short distance away.
One French woman was bemused. “But why are they just letting themselves be pushed” she asked me as I took photographs. “Because this is England and not France” I replied.
I watched as police told a man leaning peacefully on the river wall watching that he had to move as he was “obstructing the highway“. Clearly he wasn’t (though the police were) and he refused to move. They dragged him from the wall, claimed he was struggling (visibly he wasn’t), handcuffed him and led him away to one of the over 40 police vans parked nearby.
I showed my press card and for once was allowed through the police line obstructing the riverside path and made my way to a public balcony overlooking the area. “Cannier protesters had moved away faster, and were able to display their banner” for a couple of minutes but as I arrived they saw the police coming after them and made a run for a nearby pub.
“The police obviously couldn’t be bothered to chase them, and contented themselves with moving the innocent public away from the balcony, and after a short time, also moving the press.” I joined the protesters in the pub for a drink before leaving for home.
By the time I arrived home Boris Johnson (the Toff) had been announced as the winner and London suffered from a dysfunctional mayor for the next 8 years as he was again elected in 2012. Later those the police had penned were allowed to go home.
1995 Colour Part 5 – Waltham Forest: My Greenwich Meridian project had taken me into North London as far as Pole Hill in Chingford, but I also wandered more widely in the London Borough of Waltham Forest and even strayed into its neighbouring borough of Redbridge, photographing both with a panoramic camera and my ”normal’ pair of Olympus OM4s on black and white and colour.
Most of the pictures taken with these OM4s were made with the Olympus 35mm shift lens which could slide vertically and horizontally in its mount, particularly useful for photographing tall buildings when it by shifting it up I could keep holding the camera level and place the horizon close to the bottom of the image, so avoiding converging verticals or including large foreground areas.
Leisure Centre, New Road, Chingford, Waltham Forest, 1995, 95p03-441
Leisure Centre, New Road, Chingford, Waltham Forest, 1995, 95-3o-23, 1995, 95c03-335
But often I had the shift on a camera loaded with black and white film, with the 28mm on the OM4 with colour in it. I also carried an ultra-wide 21mm, a 50mm and a short telephoto lens for use when needed.
And just occasionally I photographed the same subject both with the swing lens panoramic and with one or other of the Olympus cameras – and I’ll include a couple of examples in this post. All of these pictures were made in February or March 1995.
Lee Valley Viaduct, North Circular Rd, South Chingford, Waltham Forest, 1995, 95p02-251
Southend Rd, North Circular Rd, South Chingford, Waltham Forest, 1995, 95p01-233
Recreation Ground, Higham Hill, Waltham Forest, 1995, 95p01-263
Sandpiper Close, Higham Hill, Waltham Forest, 1995, 95p02-122
Sandpiper Close, Higham Hill, Waltham Forest, 1995, 95c02-352
For these Sandpiper Close pictures I think the added angle of view of the panoramic greatly improves the image and gives for me a much more powerful impression of what I saw and felt standing there and looking down into the Lea Valley.
Riverhead Close, Higham Hill, Waltham Forest, 1995, 95p02-113
Although the two pictures of the Leisure Centre where only taken a few feet apart, they are very different images. Standing further back for the panoramic gives a better overall view of the site, but moving closer concentrates on the foreground. The slight colour difference between the two images – neither of them quite right – also complicates the issue. Colour balancing many of these old negatives is often very tricky.
Clicking on any of the images above will take you to a larger version on Flickr. You can also find some of the black and white pictures I took on the same walks in my album 1995 London Photosbeginning at this picture. My next post in this series will look at more of the non-panoramic images from Waltham Forest.
Paris Photo 2012: I’ve missed Paris Photo again – the 2024 ‘edition’ took place from November 6th – 10th and it was deliberate.
Magnum at the Rotonde de la Villette
By 2012 when these pictures from my Paris Photomonth Diary were made I’d been to around half a dozen of these annual events and had become rather bored by them though Paris was always enticing. Something of which I tried to capture in my book of a similar name, PHOTO PARIS, colour images I made there in 1988.
But the actual Paris Photo had lost its appeal for me, and while I still went dutifully around the many stalls I was finding less and less to attract my interest. Many dealers seemed to have more or less the same work on show each year, and more and more of the space seemed to be taken up by huge prints dedicated to commercial decor rather than having much photographic interest.
Of course I always met a few old acquaintances – and occasionally met some interesting people, but I also found myself more and more being treated with disdain by some of the exhibitors; I was too clearly a poor photographer rather than a rich collector.
I’ve never been convinced that photography becoming part of the art market has been a good thing. It has certainly produced a great deal of pretentious and empty work though it has provided an income for those few photographers who have learnt how to play it – with some becoming millionaire celebrities.
Of course there is no merit to starving in garrets but most of the photographers whose work interests me have made relatively modest livings from their work, some relying on income from other sources such as teaching or writing to supplement their income from photography. They were driven by vision and conviction rather than dollars.
From the start of my visits to Paris Photo it wasn’t the actual trade show that I found of most interest, but the huge explosion of photography across the city around it, in galleries, museums, shops and various public places. For the month around the show Paris was awash with photography.
More recently here we have had Photo London, but this has not attracted the city-wide festival of photography that takes place in Paris. The nearest we have had to that was the East London Photomonth organised by Alternative Arts which I think last took place in 2018. I organised several shows over the years which were included in this.
Photography has never enjoyed the kind of widespread cultural regard that our medium commands in France, nor has it developed the relationships that exist there. My friend John Benton-Harris often bemoaned the lack of any real photographic culture in Britain compared with that in his native city of New York.
On My London Diary in 2012 I wrote at length about the limitations of Paris Photo which is about photography as a commodity. Dealers can only show what they have for sale – and so for example despite his enormous importance in the history of photography and his encylopaedic work in Paris, Atget was almost invisible and that the search for novelty by contemporary galleries “All too often this seems to be a turning against the peculiar link with reality which to me is at the root of interest in our medium.“
And I commented, “After a few minutes walking around the great hall containing the photo fair I never wanted again to see work in which people had painted on their photographs, punched holes in them, cut them up, processed them deliberately badly and so on. I’ve never thought showing contempt for the photograph a likely way to produce worthwhile results, but there were rather too many photographers and galleries at Paris Photo who seem to think so.”
But otherwise there was plenty of work in Paris; “around 80 exhibitions in the Mois de la Photo, another 100 or so in the fringe festival, the Photo Off, over 50 in the Saint-Germain-des-Pres Photo Festival, and what seemed to be countless other shows outside of these events, as well as shows of work for the Prix Pictet, the Prix de Photographie Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière – Académie des beaux-arts, the Prix Arcimboldo for creation of digital images, the Prix Carmignac Gestion for photojournalism.” And that was not all, apart from Paris itself, always fascinating.
Many more pictures on My London Diary from the week we spent in Paris in November 2012 in my PARIS PHOTOMONTH DIARY.
Pictures from the End The Torture – Bring The Troops Home Now protest 20 years ago today on 22nd May 2004.
Back in May 2004 I was still taking pictures using the Nikon D100, the DSLR camera that really first made professional quality digital imaging available outside of highly paid professional photographers. I’d bought this 6.1Mp camera in 2002, but for the first year or more used it in tandem with film cameras, not least because at first I only had one Nikon-fitting lens, a 24-85mm, equivalent on the camera’s DX-format sensor to 36-128mm on full frame.
With film cameras I’d been used to a much wider range of focal lengths, from 15mm to 200mm and while I could do without the longer end, I still needed film for wider images. But by May 2004 I had some new lenses, a Sigma 12-24mm (18-36mm eqiv) and a Nikon telephoto zoom that stretched out to 210mm, equivalent at the long end to 315mm.
Both were fairly large and fairly heavy lenses, but together with the 24-85mm gave me a full range of focal lengths. Though with only a single D100 body I probably spent almost as much time changing lenses as taking pictures. None of them would have impressed the kind of photographers who like to spend their time photographing test charts or pixel peeping, but they were certainly adequate for normal photographic work.
The pictures from the Bring The Troops Home protest on 22nd May 2004 show I was determined to use the entire range of my new lenses, perhaps not always entirely appropriately. I think sometimes I zoomed out too far with the telephoto and occasionally would have been advised to use a rather less wide view with the Sigma. But others work well.
The protest was called at short notice by the Stop the War Coalition, CND and the Muslim Association of Britain to respond to the atrocities being committed in Iraq, following the publication of pictures showing abuse and torture of Iraqis by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Some pictures were first published by CBS in April 2004 but more came out in May.
The march organisers stated “The whole world is horrified at the terrible pictures of torture of Iraqi prisoners now emerging. They are the tip of an iceberg of abuse – dozens of civilians have died in custody of British and American troops in occupied Iraq. We are demanding the withdrawal of all troops from Iraq and for the Iraqi people to be allowed to govern themselves.”
At the rally there was an impressive array of speakers including Tonny Benn, Ken Livingstone, George Galloway, Lindsay German, Bruce Kent, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean Lambert and others from peace and Muslim movements and I photographed most of them on the march and as they spoke.
In Trafalgar Square the speakers were as usual on the raised area at the base of the column with a press area in front of that, and we are always looking up at the speakers. The longer lens let me get tightly framed head shots, but a few are perhaps too tight.
As well as speakers there were also theatrical reenactments of prisoner abuse by the ‘Theatre of War’ group with the march pausing briefly at various points for the three military personnel to abuse their roped and hooded victims. The also stood and performed on the plinth at the rally in Trafalgar Square.
Looking back at these pictures now I feel that perhaps because I had that long lens I concentrated more on the celebrities taking part in the event, and rather less than I would now on the bulk of protesters and their placards and banners. But I’m still pleased with a number of the images I made. Some I think could be improved by going back to the RAW files and reprocessing them in our now improved software to give them a little more contrast and clarity.
My London Diary has a little more about the protest and a much larger selection of the images I made at this event beginning some way down the May 2004 page. You can go directly to the pictures at END THE TORTURE – BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW.
March & Rally for Palestine: I find it interesting to look back at the march and rally in support of Palestine which took place in London on Saturday 13th April 2002 for several reasons.
The march was organised by the Muslim Association of Britain and came after the start of the large scale Israeli Operation Defensive Shield in towns and villages across the West Bank and battles against Palestinians in Jenin and Nablus in early April.
Operation Defensive Shield was aimed at at halting Palestinian suicide bombings against civilians in Israel which were taking place during the Second Intifada.
Around 30,000 people, mainly Muslims, had gathered at Hyde Park to march to the rally at Trafalgar Square (police estimates of the number at 10-15,000 were clearly too small.) According to CNN “they clambered on to Nelson’s Column chanting slogans before burning and tearing Israeli flags.”
Well, a few of them did burn flags, though not in my sight, but rather more joined in the chanting of ‘”Down with Israel,” “Down, down U.S.A.” and “Jihad!” or holy war.’ Later in their article CNN do quote a MAB spokesman telling them that jihad “means ‘struggle', it does not mean war“.
They also quote the MAB spokesman telling them that the youth “tend to get a bit excited just as a large crowd does at a football match” and making clear that the MAB “do not believe in the burning of any flag.”
I think you can see from my pictures that this protest had a very different atmosphere from the current protests calling for a ceasefire and the end of the massacres of the Palestinian people. The current protests involve the whole range of the British population – including many Jews – and are largely about ending the senseless wholesale killing and destruction while many in 2002 were clearly showing support for the activities of Palestinian militants including suicide bombers. There are a number of posters and placards in my pictures which would now result in arrests.
Tony Benn was one of the speakers at the rally and is of course no longer with us, but Jeremy Corbyn still speaks at today’s protests. CNN quotes him in 2002 as saying:
“This is a demonstration by thousands of British people, Muslim and non-Muslim, demanding peace and the establishment of a Palestinian state and withdrawal by Israeli forces. And the message to Tony Blair is now clear, he must stop speaking on behalf of George Bush and instead on behalf of peace and justice in the Middle East.”
Replace Blair by Sunak, Bush by Biden and it still makes sense.
This was also I think the first time I had posted colour pictures of a protest on My London Diary. Back in March 2002 I was still working with film, both black and white and colour negative.
Of course film does not come with EXIF data, but I think the colour pictures were probably made using a Konica Hexar F, with various Leica M fitting lenses, with those in the crowd using a 15mm Voigtlander. They were scanned with the first film scanner I bought, a Canoscan which had just come out in 2002, and neither hardware or software were really up to the job. The final picture is not one I posted in 2002, and I have improved the scan made then a little in Photoshop.
Invasion of Iraq Protest 2003 – On 22nd March 2003 several hundred thousand people marched through London against the invasion of Iraq which had begun four days earlier on on 19th March 2003.
I’d missed the huge worldwide protests the previous month, when on the weekend of 15-16th February according to the BBC, always conservative (I think a euphemism for deliberately lying) on protest numbers reported that a million people had marched in London on the Saturday among between six and ten million in 60 countries around the world.
George Galloway
I’d come out of hospital the previous day, February 14th, and was still very weak following a minor heart operation that had gone slightly wrong. So I could only wave to my wife and elder son as they set off to the station to join the other 1.5 or 2 million marchers.
I think it was March 6th that my doctor signed me off as fit to work, though I was still not back to normal, but I covered my first protest after the op two days later, cutting down the weight of my camera bag as much as I could to two cameras and five lenses – all primes.
Peter Tatchell
I’d spent some of my time recovering getting used to the Nikon D100 I had bought just a few weeks before going into hospital. It was the first digital camera I’d owned capable of professional results, and the first with interchangeable lenses, though I only then owned one in a Nikon fitting I’d bought with the camera, a 24-85mm.
As well as taking colour pictures on the D100, I was also taking black and white film using a rangefinder camera, probably a Konica Hexar RF, the kind of camera Leica should have produced but never did. It featured automatic film advance and rewind and had accurate auto-exposure and has been described as “the most powerful M mount camera there is.” And very much cheaper than a Leica. The nine pictures from the day I sent to the library I was then using were all black and white 8×10″ prints from the pictures made with the Hexar RF, as in 2003 they were still not taking digital files.
Here you can see some of the digital images I took on 22nd March 2003 with that single zoom lens. It was the first zoom lens I had used for over 25 years, having been rather disappointed with a telephoto zoom I bought soon after I got my Olympus OM1. The image quality on the Nikon zoom – about the cheapest lens in their range and light and relatively small – was fine if not quite up to the Leica lenses on the Hexar, but it gave some distortion – barrel at 24mm and pincushion at 85mm.
But the Nikon D100 was a DX format camera, and on this the widest angle of view marked as 24mm actually was equivalent to 35mm on my film camera. Hardly wide-angle at all, and on film I was often working with 15mm or 21mm lenses.
The digital images are shown here as I put them on-line in 2003, and I think I would get the colour rather better now. And of course digital cameras have improved tremendously since then, with much better dynamic range, and the software for processing digital images is also far better. Also with download speeds generally much lower in 2003 they were put on line at a much poorer jpeg quality so they would download faster – and also spread over a number of pages with perhaps just half a dozen images on each page.
The marchers met on the Embankment and marched to a rally in Hyde Park. I think I only used the D100 before and on the march and photographed the rally entirely in black and white. Probably this was a decision I made, but it could have been because the battery ran out. But I think I had decided just to use it to photograph people on the march.
We now know that Blair lied to take us to war and made use of the fake “dodgy dossier” to swing the vote in Parliament. There were no “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Iraq – and the UN had found none because there was nothing to find. But the US had been gearing up to attack over the past year and were not going to let the facts put them off, and Blair was their lap dog.
You can read more about the Invasion of Iraq on Wikipedia. While the US had prepared for war, they had made little or no preparation for what was to follow after President George W Bush declared the “end of major combat operations” on May 1st. Iraq was still in a mess when the US troops finally withdrew in 2011 and remains so today. It was as I wrote in 2003, the wrong war at the wrong time – and by 2023 over 60% of US citizens were prepared to state that the U.S did not make the right decision by invading Iraq.
More on the March 2003 page of My London Diary where you can also find pictures of another protest against the war on Saturday 29th March calling for more balanced coverage by the BBC.
Hull Revisited December 2005: Usually I sit down to write these posts and tell some kind of story about the events or places that I photographed on a particular day or walk or project. And the pictures in this article were all taken on 17-19th December during a short visit to Hull.
But when I looked at them they didn’t look as you see them now, and my first thought was about the colour and quality of the 49 images that I’d posted to the web back in 2005, and rather than writing about them I decided to try and improve them a little. Going back to the original RAW images taken on a Nikon D200 would have been the best way to do this, but would have been very time-consuming and instead I simply worked on the 600×400 pixel jpeg images that I’d put on-line.
Back in 2005 the RAW conversion software available was pretty much in its infancy and often required considerable judgement to get anything like the most from the images. Using the current version of Lightroom would have enabled me to improve the images considerably.
But time was short, and instead I spent perhaps 30 seconds on each image, bringing them into Photoshop in batches and then using its auto-color and and auto curve correction on each. On a few I had to modify the auto settings, fading the correction or tweaking the curve a little, but most were done fully automatically, and the improvements in some cases were dramatic.
We’d gone to Hull mainly to celebrate the 60th birthday of an old friend, and stayed at the large and architecturally interesting home of another friend, as well as to visit my mother-in-law in her nursing home. But I found some time to get out and photograph parts of the city I’d first photographed in the 1970s and 1980s as well as find some new scenes to photograph. Here I’ll post a few of them, but you can see more on My London Diary.
