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Stop The War March, November 2001

Stop The War March: Although I’ve usually posted events from the past on the actual anniversary, this post comes a day late as by the time I remembered this I had already written a post for yesterday. So although I’m publishing this on 19th November, the march organised by Stop The War took place on November 18th 2001. It was a large one, although as I wrote the reports by police severely under-counted the numbers taking part.

The Stop the War Coalition had been founded in September 2001 in the weeks following 9/11 after George W. Bush had announced the “war on terror”. At first its protests were mainly directed against the war in Afghanistan, but later it opposed the the US-led military invasion of Iraq and since then has campaigned against other wars against Libya, in Syria and elsewhere.

In recent years it has been one of the groups involved in the many protests, small and large against the genocide taking place in Gaza along with CND and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

I had covered their first major march by Stop the War in October 2001 and have continue to photograph many of their events to the present day, though for medical reasons had to miss the largest public demonstration in British history on 15th February 2003 shortly before the invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003.

Back in 2003 the coalition was a huge one. Wikipedia states “Greenpeace, the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party (SNP) were among the 450 organisations which had affiliated to the coalition, and the coalition’s website listed 321 peace groups.”

The Socialist Workers Party has always played a leading role in Stop the War and the Muslim community has been important from the start with the coalition recognising “a war against Afghanistan would be perceived as an attack on Islam and that Muslims, or those perceived as being Muslim, would face racist attacks in the United Kingdom if the government joined the war.” The Muslim Association of Britain was closely involve in organising this and other protests.

In 2001 I was still photographing using film, both black and white and colour, and all of the pictures I contributed to picture libraries were in black and white, as are those on My London Diary. Back then the demand from newspapers and magazines was still mainly for black and white and was still reproduced largely from prints.

Occasionally I would print images taken on colour negative as black and white prints to submit but mainly I had sufficient pictures taken as black and white. There are some people who now convert their colour digital images into black and white, feeling I think that it somehow makes them more ‘authentic’. It does occasionally make images stronger but mostly it simply makes them less descriptive and often confused.

Below is the post I wrote for My London Diary. It says nothing about why the protest was taking place, which would have been obvious to viewers at the time that it was against the war in Afghanistan.

“November 18 we were back again marching to stop the war. Two hours after the march started there were still marchers leaving Hyde Park, and we were getting messages that Trafalgar Square was full. The police estimate of 20,000 was pathetically low and even the organisers’ figure of 50,000 might have been on the low side. It’s always difficult to count such things (I usually give up counting around the one thousand mark when I’m covering demonstrations and make a guess above that, but this was certainly on a similar scale to the countryside march which is the largest event in recent years.

The march was more split up into factions than most, although the start was fairly mixed. There were large organised male and female sections of Muslims for Justice in the middle of the march and a big group of younger marchers, including anarchists, towards the end. Actually I didn’t manage to see the end of the march, and people were still arriving in Trafalgar Square when I left.”

A few more pictures on My London Diary

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Paris Photography – 2012

Paris Photography: 2012 was my final visit to Paris to see Paris Photo and some of the other photographic events across the city. Although I enjoyed my time in Paris, I was finding the actual dealer-led Paris Photo show hard to endure – you can read more of my thoughts on it in Paris Photo – Photograph as Commodity.

I’ve long thought that the art market has had a hugely negative impact on photography, a medium that – after the cul-de-sac of the Daguerreotype – has unlimited reproducibility at its centre. It really lives in print and on the web, in books and in prints that can be cheaply made and sold and not in expensive limited editions. Of course photographers need to live and some are benefitting hugely financially from photography being sold at high prices, but I feel it has resulted in the emphasis moving away for the core of photography.

I’d hoped to blog from Paris, but poor internet connections from my hotel and elsewhere made that impossible – but I made copious notes at the many events I visited – some with Linda and others including Paris Photo itself on my own.

In the six days I think I visited over 80 shows in galleries large and small across the city making notes on all that I saw, and after I returned home wrote up and posted my ‘Paris Photomonth Diary – the links are in reverse order of the week:

PARIS PHOTOMONTH DIARY
Monday Blues
Sunday Afternoon
Sunday morning at the MEP
A Photo-Off Guided Tour
Saturday Morning
Paris at Night
Menilmontant
Friday Morning
More Photo-Off Openings
Thursday Afternoon
Thursday Morning
Paris Photo Wednesday pm
Wednesday Morning
Openings – Tuesday
Paris Photo – Photograph as Commodity

I also posted these here on >Re:PHOTO, along with a few of my pictures at intervals in November and December 2012 completing the set of articles with Paris 2012 Complete which also has the links above. I think the whole series gives a fairly good impression of a rather busy six days.

I was surprised reading them again today to find how much I had covered and they include some thoughts about the work I saw that I still find interesting. I won’t included the material here as you can just click on the links above to access it. So here I’ll just post a few of the pictures of Paris I took on one day, Thursday 15th November 2012.

During the six days we also did quite a lot of walking round the city from show to show and sometimes just walking to enjoy the city, though we also bought a weekly season for the Metro – it seemed ridiculously cheap, only a little more than for a day in London.

I was carrying a Nikon D800E DSLR, a full-frame camera but I used it in DX mode and several Nikon lenses including an 18-105mm zoom, 20mm and 10.5mm fisheye. I’d left my heavy wide-angle zoom back in England to keep my bag small and light.

There are very few situations where a 7360 x 4912 pixel file is really needed and the only reason I had for moving to full-frame was for panoramic landscape images. For the rest of my work the 4,800×3200 pixel DX format was more than enough. There is no visible advantage until you make prints greater than A3 and even then the difference is hard to see. Nikon orginally said that DX was enough and they were right, but had to move to full-frame to keep up with the marketing.

On My London Diary you can see more picture from Thursday 15th November 2012, including quite a few of the shows we visited – as well as pictures I took on other days. I think I probably did better later in the week when I didn’t spend so much time in Photo Paris.

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Pride in 2002

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.

More black and white pictures start here on My London Diary.

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Hizb ut-Tahrir, Spain and Copyright – 2009

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.“

Hizb ut-Tahrir, Spain and Copyright - 2009 — *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.

We are now free to ignore any © symbols on images made by artists (including photographers) who died more than 70 years ago. Of course museums and others can still make a charge for supplying high resolution images, but if you can find large enough files on the web or by scanning reproductions in books they are yours to use, free of charge, thanks to THJ v Sheridan, 2023.

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.”

More on My London Diary at Hizb ut-Tahrir protest War in Pakistan.

Spanish Practices in Regent St

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.

More pictures at Spanish Practices in Regent St.

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Vietnam – Who Took The Picture?

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.

*This is not a photo by Fay Godwin! Sleepy Lion, Chatsworth © Peter Marshall, 1980*

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.

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Just Shares, Riverside & No to the Crook, the Toff, The Fascist or Cop 2008

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

‘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.

more pictures

London Riverside – South Bank and Southwark

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.

A few more pictures.

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.

Many more pictures.

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1995 Colour Part 5 – Waltham Forest

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.

*Pond, Epping Forest, Whipps Cross, Waltham Forest, 1995, 95p03-262*

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.

*Houses, Sunset Ave, Woodford Green, Redbridge, 1995, 95p03-142*

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 Photos beginning at this picture. My next post in this series will look at more of the non-panoramic images from Waltham Forest.

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Paris Photo November 2012

Paris Photo 2012: I’ve missed Paris Photo again – the 2024 ‘edition’ took place from November 6th – 10th and it was deliberate.

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.

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End The Torture 2004

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.

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March & Rally for Palestine – 2002

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.

A few more pictures on the April 2002 page of My London Diary.

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