Photo Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Labour, Labour Home Snatchers!

Anarchist Martin Wright leads a protest as a Labour Party activist is called to the microphone

The picture above has an interesting structure with a strong central figure and two planes defined by the poster he is holding and the banners behind, which appeals to me. But it is also a picture in which the text is important, particularly the poster message ‘Labour Leaders in the Social Cleansing of Council Estates in London’, not just because it actually makes an unfortunately true point, but because it very clearly makes the point which this image is about – a protest by one of London’s leading anarchists over housing, and against the policies pursued by Labour councils in London.

Tanya Murat of Southwark Defend Council Housing and a council tenant in Walworth

When the Labour government brought in the idea of regeneration it was probably for the best of motives, an attempt to improve the housing of many who were living in sub-standard accomodation by providing them with homes that met modern standards. But it was soon being used to do something very different, partly because developers saw it as a huge money-making opportunity, partly because some councillors and officers saw it as a way to develop their careers (and personal fortunes), partly because local authorities lacked the knowledge and experience to deal with the developers, and at least in part because of the demands and limitations imposed by central government on local authorities.

The result has been a culture in which the needs of the people local authority housing is intended to meet – local residents – have become largely neglected, with councils aiming at realising the values of public assets and some councillors and officials getting treated to extravagant entertainment and getting lucrative jobs. Of course local councils have always suffered from people exploiting their positions for their own interests (and only a very few have been brought to justice.) But the huge redevelopment proposals which came out of thte regeneration process provided rich pickings for some.

Most local government in London is Labour led – with some borough such as Newham having no effective opposition at all. So mostly it is Labour controlled councils that are demolishing estates and handing public assets over to often rather corrupt developers – including some housing associations. Conservative councils are just as bad, but there are few of them. And we expect Conservatives to serve their own interests and those of their wealth friends, while Labour we expect to be ‘for the many not for the few’.

Ted Knight (right) argues with Martin Wright

Class War and other anarchist and left groups had come to take part in the protest called by called by ‘Axe the Housing Act’ against the demolition of council estates but neither they nor housing activists they have worked with were given the chance to speak. The final straw for them was when a prominent London Labour Party activist was called to the microphone. It is a long time since Ted Knight was ‘Red Ted’, the leader of a Labour council which planned and built homes on the premise that “nothing was too good for the working class”, was in power, but he remains a member of a party that has been responsible for more than 160 estate demolitions in the capital (though he has been fighting against some of them.)

‘Labour Labour Home Snatchers! Even Worse than Maggie Thatcher’

It wasn’t then suprising that Class War and some other activists erupted at this point, disrupting the meeting by shouting their views. They didn’t stop the meeting, but held it up for some time before things quietened down enough for Knight to speak – and the arguments continued. The banner behind Martin Wright, on which only a few words can be seen (you can read it unobstructed at the right of the picature above ), shows Corbyn reading another Class War poster, listing the names of many of the estates Labour Councils are demolishing, thrust in his face as he went to speak at another protest.

‘The people Ballotless by MendaCity Hall’ – Sadiq Khan rushed through proposals to avoid ballots

Some weeks after this Labour did make a new policy statement on housing, which did include some of the demands activists including Class War and residents have been making, among them calling for all estate residents to be balloted and to be treated better when councils want to ‘regenerate’ estates. But those proposals are still being largely ignored by London Labour councils, with London Mayor Sadiq Khan rushing through a number of proposals which failed to meet the new standards, and others finding excuses to avoid implementing them.

There have been a few sucesses, notably in Haringey, where a huge level of protests by activists iniside and outwith the Labour Party resulted in the election of Labour councillors opposed to the billion-pound giveaway of council assets involved in the HDV (Haringey Development Vehicle), but elsewhere in London Labour councils dominated by the Labour right (and organisations such as Progress) are still finding ways to continue the old and discredited policies.

I tried to cover both the main protest and the reaction to it from Class War and others, and separated out the two on My London Diary. There were a number of speakers representing estates currently being demolished or under threat in the main protest, but it did seem a shame that it was not more inclusive.

Class War protest Labour Housing record
No Demolitions Without Permission
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All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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Retouching

I spent most of last Friday retouching around 50 scans from negatives that I took in 1981, using Photoshop. It’s a rather tedious job, but it does enable me to reclaim images from negatives that have often suffered rather from the ravages of time, poor storage and attacks by gelatine-devouring minute insects. It is the insect damage that is most difficult to correct, with multiple tracks visible sometimes over large areas, particularly noticeable in skies, and also in deep shadow areas. It isn’t always possible to completely remove it, but usually I can at least hide it, sometimes needing to make skies lighter than I would prefer and shadows darker.

There are of course photographers who don’t beleive in retouching in any way – and purists in the digital age who, particularly for news photographs, object even to any burning or dodging. I’m glad I don’t work for an agency like Reuters who have such an extremist view, not least as I think it unjustifiable, though of course there are things we shouldn’t do which some of their photographers have been caught out doing in the past, removing content from pictures.

Fifteen years ago I took many of my pictures using fill-flash, particularly to lighten faces which would otherwise be in shadow; now using cameras with greater dynamic range I do this when necessary mainly in Lightroom or Photoshop to obtain the same effect. Both to my mind equally acceptable photographic techniques. And taking this further, no photograph taken with flash or other added lighting really represents the scene as it was, but is an artifact produced by the photographer. As of course in other ways is every photograph.

The camera never records a scene as we see it. For us, seeing is a far more complex process, which processes the raw data in many ways, seeing more in shadows and highlights, emphasizing the subject against the background and more. We can only produce images that reflect what we saw and felt that made us press the shutter by working on the image after it has been taken – and even then only imperfectly. That we all take many poor photographs is not due to us consciously making bad pictures, but I think largely a matter of the gulf between what we see and how Nikon or Canon’s hardware records.

Back in the darkroom days we danced our hands and held shapes on wires and more in the enlarger’s beam to get the image we wanted. Now Photoshop makes these things easier and more controllable – and we only need to do them once and not for every print we make. Many of the vagaries of processing – dust spots, scratches, air bells and more – could only be corrected on prints, using fine pointed brushes and spotting dyes; even worse were dark spots, where delicate scraping with a scalpel was the only recourse. Sometimes we had to retouch a print and then photograph it to make a copy negative for further prints, usually on a larger format.

Back in the earlier days of photography, when large negatives or glass plates were the norm, then these could be retouched, but this was hardly possible with 35mm film, though scratches could be filled with varnish or, in a rather revolting but widespread darkroom practice, a little grease from rubbing a finger on the outside corner of your nose.

I was reminded of the days before my time today by a post on Facebook linking to a couple of articles about retouching in the early years of photography, How Photo Retouching Worked Before Photoshop and The Art of Retouching – Pre-Photoshop, and it is a subject often covered in great detail in early photographic text-books.

Edward Weston was employed as a negative retoucher by a portrait studio in Los Angeles in 1908 before becoming a studio portrait photographer. In the 1920s he came to hate retouching, but it was only in 1929 that he felt able to hang up the sign in his studio window that read “Edward Weston, Photographer, Unretouched Portraits, Prints for Collectors.” Though I very much follow his demand for realism, on the only occasion I’ve seriously considered buying an original Edward Weston print I couldn’t bring myself to do so becuase of the small dark and light dust spots on it which I knew would annoy me every time I saw it on my wall. I think it would, despite these, now be worth roughly a hundred times as much as when I failed to buy it.

Mark Silber has put on-line a rather nice film made with Kim Weston about his grandfather’s darkroom practice, including a little vintage footage of Edward. Kim talks briefly about his re-touching of portraits. But I do wish he’d taken out some of the dust on his later work – as has been done for reproduction, You can watch Richard Boutwell of BWMastery.com retouching one of his prints using Photoshop on YouTube, though the sound is missing on the first 5 minutes of the 1 hour video video.

D-Day Anniversary Approaches

A D Coleman has broken his unusual 3 month on-line silence to return to the long campaign by him and his colleagues to correct the myths about Robert Capa‘s D-Day pictures (and the related issue of the Falling Soldier), realising that:

“with the 75th anniversary of D-Day coming up on June 6, 2019, I’ve just realized that I’m likely to feel compelled to correct an endless stream of repetitions of the Capa D-Day myth, which has so permeated our culture that this investigation has barely begun to dislodge it.”

This particular post, Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (39), examines a recent article in a Le Monde supplement by Cynthia Young, the curator of the Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive at the International Center of Photography in New York, and as such a leading figure in studies of Capa. Her ‘Les deux icônes de Capa’, published in October 2018 completely ignores all recent evidence which has established beyond any reasonable doubt the true circumstances under which Capa’s 1937 Spanish Civil War ‘Falling Soldier’ and his 1944 D-Day ‘The Face in the Surf’ were made.

Coleman berates Young for “not just ignoring contrary evidence and doubling down on the myth but actually adding spurious details to it“, pointing out that her activity is “fatal to credible scholarship“, and is extremely damaging to the reputation of one of photography’s major institutions, the ICP.

The post also looks again at John Loengard‘s contibution to the myth in his 1994 book Celebrating the Negative which includes Loengard’s photograph of the hands of Cornell Capa and the 8 surviving negatives above a light-box, along with his commentary which, as Coleman comments, included the myth of the melting negatives that any professional photographer should have dismissed out of hand. Certainly many of us had.

The post ends with a rather more amusing D-Day story with a picture of the Royal Mail £1.25 stamp from a series “showcasing the ‘Best of British’ “. The picture of allied troops knee-deep in water as they waded ashore from a landing craft with its caption, ‘D-Day: Allied soldiers and medics wade ashore’ was outed within minutes of its posting on Twitter as showing a US landing on a beach in Dutch New Guinea (now in Indonesia), and the design had to be abandoned.

Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (39)

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My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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Anarchists & Underdogs

I read a post a week or two ago, pointed out to me by an anarchist friend, on the British Culture Archive web site, posted there last March, Anarchists & Underdogs | Images of Social & Political Graffiti in the UK and as well as sharing the link with you, thought there were also a few images I took in the 1980s of similar material.

It was one thing thinking that, but since I had no real idea of when I might have taken the pictures they were not that easy to track down. I’ve never really concentrated on taking pictures of graffiti, though in more recent times I have photographed some of the more colourful images on walls in Leake St underneath Waterloo Station, a route a sometimes detour through when I’ve just missed a train home and have 22 minutes to wait for the next, in Shoreditch, London’s graffiti capital, and elsewhere, not forgetting Hull’s great Bankside Gallery. But these are more murals than graffiti, and the earlier examples, both in the BCA article and here are simple text statements, usually of a political nature.

‘George Davis is innocent, OK’ appeared on walls across London, and is one I’ve written about before, though I can’t remember where. It was so common it hardly seemed worth using film on, unless there was a little more to it. Of course he was probably innocent of this one particular charge but otherwise a prime villain. Police had deliberately held back evidence that would have led to his acquital and the identification evidence was unsound and the huge campaign over his sentence led to early release in 1976 although the conviction was only finally quashed in 2011.

Many of us knew that such things happen – and I was later openly threatened with being “fitted up” by a police office back in the 1990s – but the George Davis case brought it out into the open in a way that hadn’t happened before. But what made me photograph this particular instance was the anti-nuclear figure with a CND symbol next to it and the location. I didn’t even feel it necessary to include all of the G.

Housing was an issue back in the 1980s as it is now, with London Councils being accused of racism and social cleansing. Of course things have changed. Then the councils were building council housing – if not always doing so in a way that really met local needs, and clearing largely privately owned slums, often in very poor condition, though some were structually sound and could better have been refurbished. Now they are working with property developers to demolish council estates and build properties almost entirely beyound the means of the council tenants who are being displaced by the new developments and mainly for private sale at market prices, under the banner of ‘regeneration’. Tower Hamlets, traditionally Labour, came under Liberal/SDP control days before I took this picture by a majority of twoin a low (35%) turnout.

Joe Pearce was, together with Nick Griffin, one of the leading members of the Nazi National Front; together they took over the party in 1983, and reorganised it from a racist political movement into a racist gang based on young poor working class urban youth, particularly skinheads. Pearce had set up the NF paper ‘Bulldog‘ in 1977 when he was only 16 and in 1980 became editor of ‘Nationalism Today‘. He twice served prison sentences for offences in his wiriting under the 1976 Race Relations Act, in 1982 and 1985–1986. In 1989 he was conveted from Protestantism and membership of the Orange Order to become a Roman Catholicism and, according to Wikipedia, “now repudiates his former views, saying that his racism stemmed from hatred, and that his conversion has completely changed his outlook.”

I took all of these pictures in London’s East End in May 1986.
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My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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AI Faces

Around twenty-five years ago my elder son passed his GCSE Art with a project, rather reluctantly endorsed by his art teacher, using ray tracing to produce drawings which he had generated on my computer, I think at the time still an Amstrad PC1512. I think we had to leave it running overnight for the best of them, and could only produce hard-copy by photographing the screen as we only had a black and white printer, but my memory of them is faint.

They weren’t particularly good drawings, though better than some entered for GCSE Art, and were certainly in no way photo-realistic. But both computer hardware and techniques have made great bounds since then, and the latest faces generated using AI and shown on PetaPixel in These Portraits Were Made by AI: None of These People Exist are entirely convincing.

The were produced by NVIDIA researchers Tero Karras, Samuli Laine and Timo Aila using generative adversarial networks (GAN), about which even they write “Yet the generators continue to operate as blackboxes, and despite recent efforts, the understanding of various aspects of the image synthesis process, e.g., the origin of stochastic features, is still lacking.” Having briefly scanned their publication, which contains the images shown on PetaPixel, my understanding is still definitely lacking, and, unless you are the kind of person who crunches tricky equations before breakfast it is unlikely to add much to your comprehension either.

I can’t even get this blog to reproduce the equations properly, but here’s one I just found:

lZ = E h 1 2 d G(slerp(z1, z2; t)), G(slerp(z1, z2; t + )) i

where z1, z2 ∼ P(z), t ∼ U(0, 1), G is the generator (i.e. g ◦f for style-based networks), and d(·, ·) evaluates the perceptual distance between the resulting images. Here slerp denotes the spherical interpolation operation [49] that is the most appropriate way of interpolating in our normalized input latent space…

So I guess that makes it all clear?

What I can see is the potential that this development has for fake news and for advertising images (and as another group of images from the paper illustrated entirely filling the few gaps in Facebook not already occupied by cat pictures.)

Doubtless it won’t be long before programs based on this a other similar research are common on our desktops (and even on our phones) and as well as producing non-people will be churning out images of real people doing things they never did in places they never visited.

I’m unsure too, about the copyright issues involved around these images, which rely on multiple real photographs for their generation, though I suspect those who run the software will claim the copyright.

Nor is it easy to predict the effect it will have on photographers, though it has the potential to replace much of the stock photography market, something that would not greatly worry me, though I think may greatly reduce employment in the area.

It may even increase the value of the ‘real’ photograph, an image whose integrity is vouched for by the credit line of the photographer – so long as we retain our integrity and our photographs have something to say.

Harlesden Protest Police Brutality

After an knife attack on a main street in Harlesden, a van load of police arrived and began questioning people on the street. Among them was a young black man who they had seen smoking cannabis and who, perhaps because of this was, was a little disturbed to be surrounded and questioned by police.

The scene of the police crime

What happened next was recorded on the phone of someone standing just a couple of yards away in a small crowd that had gathered around the group. They were protesting that the police were arresting him, and doing so with quite unnecessary force, with one officer viciously kicking him as others tried to handcuff him. And then, when he had been cuffed and was being held face-down on the pavement, clearly under control, another officer came up and sprayed him in the face from close range with CS gas.

Although force is often needed in making arrests, particularly when suspects are not cooperative, this very clearly went far beyond what was necessary. Both the kicking and the use of CS gas were clearly intended to inflict pain rather than to assist in the arrrest. The video went viral, and North West London Stand Up To Racism called an emergency protest at the site of the arrest, seeing the incident as a clear case of racist policing.

The man arrested was shortly afterwards de-arrested, having clearly no link at all to the knifing the police were there to investigate – and which their attack on this unfortunate man made it much less likely that they would find any evidence. Not only was it racist policing, it was also something that was counter-productive in the investigation of the crime and corrosive to police-community relations.

It was dusk as the protest began, and soon got darker, but I persisted in working by what ambient light there was. Quite a few pictures were ruined by subject movement but few if any by camera shake, so this was a situation where image stabilisation would not have helped, although faster lenses would have come in useful.

The arrested man’s mother spoke briefly at the protest but requested that we did not photograph her. Others were happy to be photographed, and some actually requested I take their pictures.

When people ask me not to photograph them, I generally assess both the situation and the public interest if any in taking their pictures before accepting their request. In this case I was happy to agree. Of course in general in the UK we have the right to photograph anyone in a public place like the street, and even in private places we can generally take pictures although publishing them might be an offence. But there are times when it isn’t appropriate to stick up for our rights, and where a little humanity makes more sense, and this was one.

Harlesden Protest Police Brutality

King’s brings cleaners in-house

Although I had to leave King’s College before the decision was announced, there was very much a feeling of celebration among the workers waiting in the area outside the building where the council meeting was taking place, By the time I’d got my pictures ready to file there was an unofficial tweet of the decision, which was formally announced the following morning. I felt very pleased for the cleaners and also glad that I’d been able to support their campaign by attending and photographing a number of their protests.

People still keep telling me that “protests don’t work”. And its obviously true that some don’t. Our country still went to war in Iraq despite the largest ever protest against it (and one I was sorry to miss, having come out of hospital the previous day and still being unfit, though I had photographed various other protests against the war previously.) But I’ve always felt that protest could have stopped us going to that war with better leadership of the movement. I do sometimes wonder if there were people in the pay of the intelligence services among them who deliberately let the moment slip. But many protests do acheive their aims, and others provoke and promote important debates and help to change public attitudes and political policies.

Some of the most succesful protests I’ve been involved with over the years have been by low paid workers, calling for better pay and conditions of service. Many of them have been organised by small grass-roots unions, but a few like at King’s College by more determined branches of a major union, in this case Unison. Although often they involve only small numbers of workers, for these people the gains can make huge differences to their lives, both in pay and in satisfaction with their jobs and in health and safety at work.

Some of these campaigns have had almost immediate success, with companies recognising the reasonable demands of the workers and, having been alerted to the Dickensian practices of contracting companies wanting to distance themselves and their reputations from these. Others have been long and hard fought, with Unison at SOAS fighting for over ten years to get workers brought into direct employment, though considerable gains were made on the way; the University of London central administration at Senate House is still dragging its feet. Universities seem less concerned about their reputations than many private firms, or perhaps they simply have more board members with entrenched views.

The event at King’s started on the pavement outside the college in the Strand, where students including the KCL Intersectional Feminist Society were running a lively protest. The pavement gets very busy during the rush hour and police came to try and move the students who insisted on continuing the protest but did try to prevent the pavement being blocked. The police also eventually led away a man who had come to argue with the students; I could make no sense of what he was saying and was unsure whether he simply had mental health problems or was a fascist trying to provoke them as the students said.

More welcome as visitors were two RMT members, who had been attending a strike meeting nearby, and stopped to express their support for the cleaners. The RMT has been active in supporting its own low paid workers and against management victimisatino of their trade union representatives – a major problem in many of the disputes by low-paid workers.

The students then decided to go inside King’s College to join the cleaners who were waiting outside the meeting. Those outside who were not members of the college, including myself, were signed in as guests to go through the security barriers and we joined the cleaners inside.

Apart from being pleased to see the cleaners, many of whom I knew from previous events, things also became rather easier photographically. There was far more space and it was easier to move around than on the crowded pavement – though the crowds perhaps made for more interesting images. But importantly the lighting was much easier to work with – though again less dramatic.

On the Strand, as this picture shows, the sun was low and shining directly along the street, giving deep shadows and often excessive flare. Photographing into the sun gave more dramatic images, and it was sometimes possible to hide the sun behind banners or placards, but it made photography difficult. Taking pictures with my back to the sun was easier, but many of the pictures had both areas in bright sun and those in deep shade.

Had I been making portraits I might have used fill flash, but with wide-angle images this isn’t really practicable, and I had to rely on processing to bring up the shadows and take down the highlights, often with some additional dodging and burning. For the backlit images local use of Lightroom’s ‘De-haze’ was essential. Lightroom continues to improve both in functionality and in ease of use, though I didn’t welcome the recent news that future versions would abandon support for Windows 7, still by far more usable than Windows 10.

Inside King’s, the height of Somerset House’s East wing (where the council meeting was taking place) and the low sun kept the area in shade. Less dramatic but much easier. I’m sure there is some kind of moral in this!

More at Kings College workers await council decision.

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My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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Migrant Mother

Had you asked me a few days ago I think I would have said that there was little more to say about Dorothea Lange‘s ‘Migrant Mother’ which has already had so much devoted to it, as one of photography’s truly iconic images. But there appears to be at least one significant fact I was not aware of in the new book from the Museum of Modern Art, written by Sarah Meister.

Perhaps not enough to make me want to read the book, but James Estrin, the co-editor of Lens, the New York Times photographic blog, has written a post on it, as always clear and concise, Unraveling the Mysteries of Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’.

As the image was one of a set taken for US federal Farm Security Administration, it is of course available at the Library of Congress, where you can download several versions of it and the others Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children.

This is a smaller version of my favourite of this image, and probably the oldest. The current version of it, available for download as a large tiff if you want to make your own print, has slightly different scratches on it, and both versions would take considerable retouching to make a really good print. As the LoC page above states “This is an unretouched version of the image listed in #1. This version of the image shows a thumb in the immediate foreground on the right side.”

There is more about the retouching to remove the thumb in the book and Estrin’s post, which remind us that Roy Stryker, “Lange’s boss at the Farm Security Administration … thought it compromised the authenticity not just of the photo but also of his whole F.S.A. documentary project” although such practices were widespread at the time and “Ms. Lange considered the thumb to be such a glaring defect that she apparently didn’t have a second thought about removing it“, getting an assistant to retouch the image in 1939, some 3 years after she had made the image in February 1936 (according to the FSA, though possibly March.) Personally I’m with Mr Stryker on this.

Perhaps the most interesting issue raised in the book is that after Florence Owens Thompson came forward and identified herself in 1978, an Associated Press article revealed that she was not as had been assumed of European descent ‘but “a full-blooded Cherokee Indian” from Oklahoma‘, something that would certainly have caused the image to have been seen differently had it been known when it was widely published – and even now where considerable prejudice still exists against Native Americans. Lange appears not to have provided the usual field notes and captions for this set of images, and to have known relatively little about her subjects.

Sarah Meister’s book is one of a series “One on One” on individual items in the collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art. Surely a prime candidate for such a series should be a book by A D Coleman on Robert Capa‘s iconic D-Day landing image, for which the material by Coleman and his collaborators has been published online in voluminous and convincing detail at Photocritic International in the Robert Capa D-Day Project. While I’m sure that this will one day emerge in book form, I think it is unlikely it will be published by MoMA.

Climate Reality

Together with several other photographers we spent some time looking for this protest – and met protesters who were also having the same problem, but finally we found it, not actually at Tate Modern where the Facebook event page had said, but hidden from there behind some greenery at the edge of the busy riverside path in front of the gallery. I think it had only just started, and certainly quite a few others arrived later than us, perhaps having had a similar problem to us. We’d actually walked close to it earlier on our way to the Tate, but it had been hidden on the edge of a larger crowd of tourists listening to some busking musicians.

Like many protests it was rather a matter of preaching to the converted, and there were some good and worthy speakers, but perhaps a little lacking in popular appeal, but it was a part of a worldwide action, and seems to have been set up mainly to provide a photograph to send to the international web site. At the end of the rally those at the protest came out of the bushes to stand in front of Tate Modern and be photographed from a high balcony looking down at the crowd, who had been asked to wear yellow for the event.

I hope the photographer on the balcony got a decent picture, though I suspect it wasn’t too impressive.

Certainly it didn’t work that well from the ground, though I did my best, trying to show we were in London by including St Paul’s in the background, but getting the whole crowd in needed a very wide angle of view and this made the cathedral rather small; it was only a little better when I cut off a few at the edges. There was a similar problem when the crowd were asked to turn through 180 degrees for a picture with the former power station behind them, with its high brick wall and tall chimney.

Of course I’d been using St Paul’s in the background while I was taking pictures of the protest and the speakers, but a longer lens had made it more visible, though of course not showing the size of the crowd – a few hundred people. By the time they were invited to walk up onto the Millennium footbridge I think quite a few had decided to leave. Probably the best viewpoint was as they came up the slope, but they did so in dribs and drabs. And once on the bridge it was difficult to photograph them protesting along it. I lent out with my camera, strap wrapped securely around my arm and tried a few pictures, but framing was tricky as I couldn’t see either viewfinder or rear screen. The frame at the top of this post was my best effort, and I was quite pleased with it.

I then rushed down to ground level and took some more photographs. Again there was the problem of either showing the whole group with a fairly wide view which made them rather small, or of using a longer focal length and showing just a small section of the protesters. As you can see from my other pictures on My London Diary at Worldwide Rise for Climate the latter approach was probably better than the wider view above.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Marikana, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Brazil

Monday 13th August was a long day for protests in London, and one that reflected the global nature of London both as a financial capital and in its population now.

The first event I covered reflected the huge involvement of the City of London in the exploitation of mineral resources around the world, and with it the callous disregard both for the countries whose resources are being plundered and in particular the workers involved. The very buildings we walked around on our tour of investors, insurers and shareholders profiting from the violence against people and nature in Marikana were a reminder of the great wealth that was appropriated from our Empire and is still being made from countries around the world.

This was a story backed up by facts and figures in presentations at the brief stops the tour made as the tour stopped at Majedie, Schroders, Investec, Legal & General and BASF, the major customers for Marikana’s platinum.

The tour came three days before the 6th anniversary of the Marikana Massacre when 34 striking miners were shot dead by South African police at Lonmin’s platinum mine, for striking for better wages and living and working conditions. Those shot were trying to disperse and hide and many who survived are still in prison, and 19 were charged with murder. There has been no justice and no compensation for the victims’ families or for the injured mineworkers. One of the South African company directors implicated in ordering the police to take action is Cyril Ramaphosa, now President of South Africa.

From the city I went by bus on my way to Belgravia, taking a route that took me down Whitehall. Looking out of an upper-deck window I saw there was a protest taking place opposite Downing St, rang the bell and jumped off at the next stop.

I’d photographed the Bangladeshi Nationalist Party UK at an earlier event also calling for the release of their party leader Begum Khaleda Zia, jailed in February for five years for embezzlement; her supporters claim the charge was politically motivated.

I took a few photographs, but couldn’t stop long as I was on my way elsewhere. Friends from Bangladesh have told me that both the BNP and their opponents now in power, the Awami League are both corrupt and neither represents the interests of the people of their country. There are some things on which I don’t know enough about to take sides.

Fortunately buses in London are usually frequent, and before long I saw the next on my route and made a run to the stop to catch it, getting to Belgrave Square only around ten minutes later than intended.

Belgrave Square was for a return visit to hunger striker Ali Mushaima, campaigning for his father imprisoned in Bahrain and camping on the pavement in front of the embassy. Early in the morning the previous day someone in the embassy had gone onto the ambassador’s balcony and thrown a bucket of an unknown liquid down on him while he was asleep.

The police had been called but do not appear to have taken the attack very seriously. While diplomats have immunity the attack is thought most likely to have been carried out by one of the bodyguards who are subject to the laws of this country, but the police appear to have declined to make appropriate investigations.

The campaigners from Inminds.com had returned to show their support in an emergency protest, along with a few friends of the hunger striker. Though the police had failed to properly investigate the attack, a small group came to harass the protesters, telling them they could not protest on the pavement outside the embassy, but had to move to the opposite side of the wide street.

There were arguments and threats of arrest, but the protesters who had previously protested in the same place with police on duty not objecting, refused to move and went ahead, performing a short piece of street theatre in which Theresa May sold arms to the Bahraini dictator which he used to shoot protesters, who were then chained up. Unlike in real life the International Criminal Court came to their rescue, released them and condemned the Bahraini regime for their crimes against humanity.

It was unrehearsed and something of a shambles, but pictures taken by Inminds were later made into an effective comic strip about the situation in Bahrain.

I rushed off and jumped on another bus to take me back to a protest outside the Brazilian embassy. I arrived shortly after it was due to start, but there were very few present and nothing much happening. Eventually more people arrived and the protest began, and I was able to take a few pictures before it was time to leave for home and some food.

The protest by the Workers’s Party (TP) was calling for the release of former President Lula so he could stand in the October elections. The TP say that the right wing who have seized power in Brazil have brought highly dubious charges against both Lula and Dilma Rousseff to prevent them winning in the elections.

By the time the event got going, the sun was low in the sky and shining almost horizontally into my lens making it impossible to work from some positions, and there were some excessive flare made unusable. It also created some very high contrast where there were areas of sun and shade in the same images. Fortunately working with RAW images does make it possible to do a fair amount of taming the contrast, so long as detail is retained in the highlights, but it does add to processing time. Some can be handled by overall changes but faces that are half in shade and half in sun sometimes need both ‘dodging’ in the dark areas and ‘burning’ in the light parts.

More on all four events on My London Diary:

Justice For Marikana – 6th Anniversary
Release Bangladeshi opposition leader
Attack on Bahrain Embassy hunger striker
Free Lula – Brazilians for Democracy & Justice

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My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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