Category: Photo Issues

The flags were blowing wildly in the wind as the group marched down Willesden High Rd

When I heard and saw BBC London’s ‘Inside Out London‘ investigation into letting agents I thought of the 1950s and 60s, when signs saying “no blacks, no dogs, no Irish” became common on London lodging houses, and we had a ‘race riot’ in Notting Hill.  The Race Relations Act 1965 outlawed discrimination on the “grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins” in public places, and he Race Relations Act 1968 extended that to housing, employment and public services.

But the programme clearly showed that letting agents – at the request of a person wanting to let a Notting Hill flat – were prepared to make sure that they were prepared not to show that vacancy to a black enquirer, even though they knew this would be illegal. Even though some of those concerned were themselves from minority communities, they were prepared to discriminate rather than risk losing the business.

The two agents who featured prominently in the feature were both on Willesden High Rd, about half a mile from each other. I didn’t expect the protest, organised for the day following the protest to be huge, but I felt it was an important issue and decided to cover it.

My journey to Willesden, never particularly straightforward, was made more difficult by a derailment in the early morning when a container came loose and brought down the overhead power lines and gantries supporting them at Camden Town. Although it had occurred at 3am, the on-line information still had trains running normally when I left home considerably later, and it was only as the train from Richmond approached Willesden Junction that we were told it would go no further. We all had to get off, and found the staff on the platform there knew little more than us. After a few minutes we were told there would be a train running as far as Gospel Oak, more than far enough for me, as I only wanted the next stop, Kensal Rise, but when it would come was still a mystery.

I was still standing wondering whether to leave the station and take a bus when it did come in, and fortunately I arrived at Kensal Rise only around 15 minutes after I had expected. I ran for a bus, but just missed it. But on main routes in London it’s seldom too long before the next one.

In the event I arrived only a few minutes after the protest was meant to start, and before many of the protesters. Its a small but sometimes tricky problem to know what the times for protests mean, but normally I try to arrive at least a few minutes early, and just occasionally that’s too late, while other protests are considerably more laid back and don’t really get going for half an hour or more after the given time.  A few I’ve waited half an hour or so, then left, assuming nothing was going to take place, only to read a report of them on Facebook the following day.

Among the protesters in a slightly larger group than I expected were several people I knew from previous events, including Isabel Counihan whose family campaign to get Brent council to rehouse them has attracted considerable attention. Their campaign soon widened to support others with having problems around social housing, including that of one man who committed suicide following loss of benefits through DWP incompetence and notice of eviction by the housing association who have plans to redevelop the property.

Also present at the protest were councillors and others from Brent Council, against which the Counihan family had been fighting – and whose housing department had caused their problems through initial poor advice and later what seems to be confusion and sheer malice.

A little coolness between the two parties might have been expected, but one man took it further, speaking rudely to Isabel and then standing in front of her banner in an attempt to prevent the press photographing it.  I’d already done so, and made sure it was reasonably prominent in my coverage of the event, when perhaps otherwise it might not have been used.

I’d already talked to her and she had told me than that they were in the process of getting a new banner for their ‘Housing For All’ campaign, and later after the unpleasant scene she decided to roll her banner up, and instead carried one end of the Brent Housing Action banner on the march.

The protest was on a narrow pavement next to a bus stop on a busy road outside National Estate Agents. Fortunately the 16mm was just about wide enough to get the whole of the shop front and protest in without standing in the traffic, but a local press photographer perhaps didn’t have or didn’t want to use anything so wide, and organised people into standing on the edge of the pavement, going out in the road to take pictures. Personally I preferred to keep safe.

I’m not a fan of estate agents, who seem to me to take rather too much and do rather too little for the money. But at this protest some of them went up a little in my estimation as a couple walked out from another nearby agency, Harts, and joined the protest.

After a while and some chanting outside National Estate Agents, which was closed and shuttered, perhaps because it was Eid ul-Adha rather than for the protest, they decided to march along the road to the second letting agent, A to Z Property Services, where the protest continued, as you can see in Letting Agencies Illegal Colour Bar.

Later I read in the local paper that one of the agencies was disputing the version of events put out by the BBC. It was perhaps hardly surprising news, though having watched the programme I thought a statement more along the lines of “Its a fair cop, Guv” might have been more appropriate
Continue reading No Colour Bar

I don’t spend a lot of time in Soho, though it’s one of London’s more interesting areas, with an atmosphere of its own. As the Soho Society, formed in 1972 when the whole area was in danger from comprehensive redevelopment states, it is “a remarkable square mile with a remarkable history.”  Thanks largely to their efforts, Soho was made a Conservation Area, and although continually under threat, much has survived.

Soho 2003

Much of its character comes from the many small businesses there covering a huge range of goods and services, both for the trade and the general public. Unlike most of the rest of London (and other cities and towns) it has largely resisted the chains and franchises, although there are a few, mainly on the major roads that cut through or surround the area. Tourists flock to Chinatown – and so do London’s Chinese population, but it’s also a great place to buy Italian groceries (and perhaps the best sandwiches in London.) And so much more.

Soho has also a reputation for sex, and as well as various clubs and bars catering for various tastes, there are still open doors on some streets sometimes with a red light and a small card, ‘Model upstairs’. ( I assume this doesn’t refer to, say a model train, but can provide no  first-hand information.)  Years ago while walking through the area it was common for young (and not so young) ladies to come up to you, perhaps to ask if you had a light for their cigarette, or simply to ask “Looking for a good time, Dearie?” but now such business is apparently more often conducted by phone.  ‘Working Girls’ as they are now styled can work much more safely from a flat, with added protection from the presence of a ‘maid’, often an older woman who has retired from the ‘game’. Or so I’m told. Personally it isn’t a trade I’ve ever thought to patronise, and I have some sympathy with campaigners who want to make paying for sex by men (or women) an offence.

Prostitution is not illegal, but pimping and brothels are, and more than one sex worker in a flat or house makes that into a brothel.  The image above isn’t a great picture, but one that (literally) spells out rather clearly the problem. Women turn to prostitution as a way to make a living, often in desperate circumstances where they have few alternatives. It is a traditional occupation and fits in to Soho with few problems where it is a business run by the women involved. Police crackdowns on legally working prostitutes are largely prompted by those who wish to empty properties and redevelop the area.

Of course police should have a role in the matter. There is exploitation, women who are trafficked and many truly terrible things happening in the sex industry in Soho as elsewhere in London, and the police should be cracking down on it, getting evidence, arresting those responsible, taking them to court and getting convictions. But unfortunately we see very little of this. Instead they pick on the easy meat, where they can get results without having to have any evidence or take anything to court.

Police sent a threatening letter to Soho Estates, the landlord of a block in Romilly St, threatening them with prosecution for allowing their property to be used as brothels. Soho Estates then pressured the lease-holder to evict the women, who were apparently all working singly and thus legally in self-contained flats.  And they were evicted. The police can chalk up a success, and the developers, here and elsewhere, have empty buildings they can attempt to redevelop. There are still some on Westminster council who would like to see Soho disappear (and are perhaps rubbing their hands at the thought of the profits they could make from it.)

It was a popular protest with the press, with women (many if not most not themselves prostitutes but supporters of their case) wearing masks adding to the attraction.  It was also unusual, in that the boss of Soho Estates, John James (the son-in-law of the late Paul Raymond) came out with a colleague to try and justify his actions, saying the police had left him with no alternative. He was allowed to have his say, but it wasn’t an argument that cut ice with those protesting, who suggested he should have called the police bluff, as they had no evidence in support of their case.

The protesters gave a much warmer welcome to a woman from the Soho Society, who came to give her support for them. Many of the women involved have families in the area and are respected as residents, carrying on one of its traditional trades, in a way that causes little if any nuisance to others who live around.  Women who work in flats contribute to the local economy and are a part of what gives Soho its unique character; taking prostitution off the streets improves the area and is ten times safer for the sex workers.

More about the event and more pictures at Police & Developers Evict Soho Working Girls.

Continue reading A Morning in Soho

Royal London is in a right Royal mess. Not unfortunately the Royal family, an institution I would only be too pleased to see go bust, unlikely for various reasons though that is, but the Royal London Hospital, which managed quite well for the 250 years before it became Royal, but is now in trouble.

Its old building, dating from the 1750s was updated in the nineteenth century and again at the start of the twentieth, but by the twentyfirst was a mess. When I wandered around its corridors a few years ago, failing to follow the confusing signage, it still seemed a place where Flo Nightingale would have been at home, and sitting in the waiting area in the entrance or standing under the outside portico in recent years was to be in a curious limbo, with patients, some pushing drips on stands, slowly towards the ‘fresh air’ of the Whitechapel Road for a fag.

Royal London Hospital, Stepney Way, Dec 2011

Now its all shiny new and blue, part of one of many Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes which are crippling the NHS. Conceived under John Major, PFI never made sense other than as a trick to make government borrowing look less than it really was. At the start, Labour opposed it, but in government went on to use the scam to a huge extent to provide new schools and hospitals in a number of disastrous schemes. The one including the Royal London was the largest of all in the NHS at £1.1 billion, and Barts Health Trust has to find £129 million this year to pay the private companies involved – an annual amount that will rise to £274 million by 2048.

Royal London Hospital from Cavell St, Dec 2011 Some views from it at Whitechapel – Hospital Views

Unsurprisingly this huge amount means they can’t afford to run health services in the area properly.  They can’t even open the new hospital fully, unable to staff two floors, and are making huge cuts at other hospitals and of community services too.  Hospital staff are suffering, having to try to provide services with a lack of nurses and other support – and of course the people of East London will not get the service they deserve. There are staff cuts, and also downgrading, with staff being paid on lower rates than their training and experience merit. Community Health services are being severely cut and sold off. The only winners are the companies who financed the PFI deals, and whose experienced negotiators often managed to completely outwit the civil servants in setting the terms.

Staff at all the hospitals in the group (and others around the country who are also affected by PFI schemes) are angry at the cuts that are having to be made to pay rich private investors, and are calling for these PFI schemes to be scrapped. The protesters at the Royal London were initially refused permission to protest in front of the hospital, but enough turned up to block the busy pavement opposite Whitechapel Station in the evening rush hour that police moved them there.

I was pleased as a photographer, because the fairly narrow pavement made it difficult to work – the 22mm view above makes it look less crowded than it was, and most of those present are out of picture to the right – and this was also the only position from which the hospital – the blue building in the centre – could be seen.

Though working in the crowd there did provide some good opportunities for pictures. I particularly liked this because of the spread of ages and the contrasting expressions of the man listening to the speeches and the woman carrying the child who is laughing because she has seen me taking her picture. This was the second or third frame, and at first she was looking concerned, but I think this makes a better picture. A little later I took another picture of her and behind her a man with a child on his shoulders in which she again looks serious – you can see it in Scrap Royal London NHS PFI Debt – but I think this is a better picture.

There were also some more active protesters, including this nurse shouting in support of a speaker from the Royal College of Nursing, the largest nurses’ union. Whipp’s Cross, where she works, is another of the Barts Health NHS Trust which is suffering hugely from the Royal London PFI.  I was standing fairly close to her – I couldn’t get any further away in the crowd, and though this is taken with the 28-105mm at 48mm (67mm equiv) it does have just a hint of what is sometimes called wide-angle distortion, which I think makes it a little more dramatic. You can see too the lighting from the low sun,  which also slightly restricted the choice of point of view when working. Here I’ve moved to put it just behind the placard above the woman’s hand – and you can see it has made just a little bite out of the edge of it.

After the police got the protest to move, the speakers were in front of the new hospital buildings, which was better in terms of context, but not necessarily more exciting pictorially, particularly as everything was now in shade. The audience was also more organised, with many behind the large main banner. Of course banners are important, but they do also get rather in the way.

I’d stood for some while trying to photograph again the nurse I’d photographed earlier, who was reacting strongly every time a speaker made a point or called for a response, and was at the front just behind the banner. But when I moved in close she stopped. I tried for a while, then moved a couple of yards back, standing behind a man who was filming in the opposite direction, towards the speaker. As she reacted, I moved in and took pictures including this one above (16mm D700), only to find a woman tugging at my sleeve to try and get me to move.  They now wanted to film in the direction where I was standing.  Well, tough.  I wouldn’t normally deliberately move into someone else’s picture, and hadn’t done so in this case, and I expect a reasonable degree of respect from other photographers and videographers. This was a protest and not a set for TV. Once I’d got the picture I wanted I moved out of the way. They could get their ‘reaction shot’ without me the next time the crowd erupted. But I was shocked by their bad manners.

Continue reading Royal London

Sometimes its hard to know whether our current government are obtuse or devious. The public are rightly concerned about the activities of lobbyists in Parliament, particularly those pushing particular commercial interests. Part of the reason we’ve yet to get effective environmental policies is undoubtedly the activities of lobbyists on behalf of the big energy companies, though perhaps they really have enough politicians in their pockets to get policies tailored to their needs in any case. And it would be hard to exaggerate the number of them who have direct interests in issues like the privatisation of the NHS which is going on apace while being denied.

But back to lobbying and the gagging bill. Rather oddly it turns out to be something with very little effect on commercial lobbying, but likely to effect all the charities and other groups which use elections as a legitimate way to put their causes forward, as well as the campaigning activities of trade unions.

My own feeling is that government is in a mess, with little real examination of the affects of policies, and some fairly unscrupulous if not dishonest and misguided individuals in cabinet offices. We have a bunch of crooks who are prepared to tell lies about what is happening, to misrepresent statistics and to flout the law to pursue policies which benefit themselves and their friends. If the courts rule against them, they appeal. If the appeal fails they change the law.  Previous governments often got things wrong, often made a mess of things – both Labour and Conservative – but I think we now have something different, with the deliberate misleading of the people. Its perhaps something that really first became obvious with Tony Blair,  lying to us, spectacularly over Iraq, but which has got far worse, far more endemic.

A photographer in the background I could have done without

But perhaps I’m just getting old and even more cynical. Of course there are still members of parliament in all parties who are there for the best of motives, working hard for the people they represent, plugging away at good causes, rebelling against bad laws, but few are likely to end up as cabinet ministers, and if they do it will mean compromising their beliefs.

I’m not sure there is a solution to this, but if so it would be most unlikely to be palatable to parliament and stand no chance of being enacted. At least not before our civilisation collapses – and with luck it will see me out, though I don’t give it too long.

I didn’t sit down to write a political rant, but to write about photographing this and possibly another protest against political madness. In the morning it was the about the misguided gagging bill, or to give it a more official title, the Transparency in Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning, and Trade Union Administration Bill.  Protests like the one I photographed have actually had some effect, and the government has had to undertake further consultation having realised it had little chance of passing through the House of Lords.  Part 1 of the bill completely fails to tackle corporate lobbying, part 2 would basically suspend democratic debate by non-party advocacy groups for  a year before every general election and part 3 would involve trade unions in unnecessary and restrictive red tape.  I think it unlikely that it can be transformed into a satisfactory piece of legislation in the five weeks proposed.

Photographically the main problem was other photographers getting in the way, most notably when the organisers of the protest were setting up some photo opportunities. I don’t always want to take part in these, but I’d try to keep out of the way and out of the picture for those who do, and found myself wishing others did when one walked into the background to take a different picture just as I was taking mine. The top image was taken during the main photo-op, though it is only a detail and not the whole view, which to my mind was very boring. But it was a rather more boring picture than this showing most of the whole  group that a national newspaper chose to use, despite being offered several more interesting pictures.

After I’d been photographing this protest, essentially about freedom of speech, I was flabbergasted when a woman approached me and suggested I should not use some of the images I had taken. I had photographed – mainly at their demand – a group of teenage girls who had been taking part in this public event, and somehow she thought I should not use these. It was hard not to be rude.

More pictures at Don’t Gag Free Speech.

Continue reading Gagging Free Speech

If I hadn’t come back to review the pictures I made of  protesters opposite the Egyptian embassy in early October for this blog post, there are a dozen or so of my images I might never have seen again. It perhaps would not have been a great loss, because none of them are great images, not even among my own best images, but it reminded me of how easy it is to lose digital images.

They wouldn’t have been entirely lost. At the moment I still keep (and try to back up) all of the raw files I shoot, except for those which are really technically hopeless or terminally unseen. I don’t keep those I take by accident when I grab hold of the camera carelessly and hit the shutter release or stick my elbow on it when I sit down (well, I might if that random process ever produced an interesting image.)  Or where for some reason I completely missed what I was trying to photograph. But I still keep the near misses, the images I make when I’m working my way to what I want and all the rest that are decent. A few years back I was asked for pictures of an incident in connection with a court case, and those that were most relevant were just those kind of images, which had I only kept the most successful would have been deleted.

But that full set is a dead or at least dormant, something I’m unlikely to look through again unless something special like that request for evidence comes up.  Active is the selected work that I put on My London Diary and other web sites and which I keep as full-size jpegs on my internal and external hard disks.  Some of it is also stored externally, in the archives of the several libraries that occasionally sell my work, and a much, much smaller amount in digital or print form in other collections.

I select my work in Lightroom, giving a 2 star rating to those that will end up in that active collection. Some other images – including near duplicates of those images – get a single star. Then the images that I send to Demotix or elsewhere, all of which should be ‘2 star’ images, get an additional colour rating, using a different colour for each story on a particular day. LR has 5 available colour labels, yellow, green, blue and red. And purple, but purple is a pain as there is no hot key for it (Adobe uses 0-5 for stars and 6-9 for colours – and apparently couldn’t think of another hot key – perhaps Ctrl+7 would be useful – and why not let us have 3 more colours on Ctrl+6, 8 and 9.) Fortunately I seldom have more than 4 stories for a single day.

When I want to write out a set of images for My London Diary and for the jpeg collection, I select them by the 2* rating. Which is usually fine, but just occasionally – as for this protest – I’d managed to give the best images a blue rating but to not assign them to 2* (or more likely to somehow remove the 2* rating from them all, though I can’t find any way to do this on a whole batch in LR.) So when I selected the pictures to write, I got only the three that hadn’t been selected to send to the agency rather than the whole 15.

It was a fairly long and slightly confusing day for me, and at the Egyptian embassy I found not one protest but two. Opposite the embassy were the supporters of the deposed President Morsi, and a few yards down the road a smaller group who had come out in support of the army who had deposed him.  So it perhaps isn’t surprising that I didn’t notice a fairly small group of images was missing. But coming back to write about the protest for >Re:PHOTO it was obvious.

There were interesting differences between the two protests, and of course the posters and placards were very different as you can see. I felt rather more welcome at the protest supporting the removal of Morsi. It was a smaller protest and easier to move around and take pictures.

More in Egypt For & Against Muslim Brotherhood which must be one of the longest web pages I’ve written, with the newly added images making a total of 35 on the page, roughly twice the normal number I aim for. Thank goodness for broadband.
Continue reading Oh, So Easy to Lose

Although it felt rather like a demonstration, ‘10,000 Cuts & Counting‘ was described as ‘a ceremony of remembrance and solidarity’ with the many sick and disabled people who in the last few months of their lives were called in for Work Capability Assessments carried out by Atos on behalf of the Department of Work and Pensions.

Most knew they had only weeks or months to live, and doctors were well aware, but still they were called in for tests to see if they were ‘fit to work.’ Imagine the stress of having to attend the tests – and for many the real physical difficulty too. But even worse, many were judged fit to work on the basis of a computer-based questioning based on capabilities such as being able to sit in a chair, walk a few yards, press a button, lift a book… Those administering the tests for Atos are trained to catch people out and to reach their targets for cutting down the number of people who qualify for benefit. Many of those 10,000 will have lost their benefits – including some who will have lost them at the previous test and successfully appealed against the result. The system is inhumane and administered by a company that gets paid more the more people it fails. Neither the Government nor Atos appear to have any concern about the effect the tests have on those who undergo them.

There were some harrowing stories from many of the speakers about their own experiences and those of other disabled people under the system, but I couldn’t help feeling that it was preaching to the converted. Most of those who attended were already actively involved in campaigning and protesting over the issues involved. On a Saturday morning there were relatively few others in Parliament Square, and the four great institutions surrounding it, to each of which at one point we faced and made a plea – the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, the Supreme Court and the Treasury – were all largely empty, other than for the tourists queuing for the Abbey.

I thought a little about how I could make the most of the carpet of white flowers covering the grass of Parliament Square in front of the platform, and working from close to the front with a wide angle seemed to be the answer. I got down on my knees – you can tell photographers by the worn and dirty patches on their knees – and tried the 16-35mm, but it wasn’t really as wide as I wanted. The answer – yet again – was the 10.5mm fisheye, being very careful to keep the horizon level on the dead centre of the image. And afterwards it is just another plug for that Fisheye Hemi plugin.

The 16mm covers around two thirds of the view of the fisheye, but even if cropped to the same stretch of the buildings on the horizon, there is a subtle difference, and the flowers in the version from the fisheye don’t have the slightly disturbing elliptical aspect that a rectilinear ultra-wide produces at the edges. Despite the curvature of the straight gantry above the platform with the ‘Scrap Atos’ banner, and of the roof of the Houses of Parliament behind, the fisheye view actually appears more natural.

One problem with using the fisheye is flare and ghosts, and with a lens with such an extreme angle of view it isn’t possible to use a lenshood. There is a little lip around the lens, but that serves more to protest the glass than to shade it. Sometimes the effect adds to images, but more often it is a distraction. Probably it would be possible to retouch the lighter area at the upper right of the banner completely, but I simply darkened it a little. The sun was I think just outside the frame at top right, and you can see the effect of flare in the Victoria Tower and the trees at right of picture. The whole area needed darkening and also some increase in contrast.

Otherwise, the flowers made it rather difficult to cover the event, and kept the audience at rather a distance from the speakers, though it was actually much closer than the top image makes it seem. Photographers couldn’t easily photograph them either, as the flowers went right up to the platform.

This isn’t a great picture, taken with the 16-35mm at 22mm, but it perhaps gives a more accurate idea of the area covered by the flowers (though perhaps making it look a little smaller than it was) and clearly shows how they made a ‘no go’ area for photographers at the centre of the event. It accounts for me taking a third of the photographs that morning with the 70-300mm, usually a lens I use rarely if at all.

I wouldn’t have chosen to take Michael Meacher MP – one of a small number of MPs who have consistently stood up for disabled rights (two others, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell were also present) – at 300mm (450mm equiv), the kind of focal length best reserved for bird spotters, and it would have been good to have been able to get a tighter image. I was able to photograph him – and the others involved, such as David Ison, the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral who chaired the event , from a much closer distance talking to people.

Most of the pictures in ‘10,000 Cuts – Deaths After Atos Tests‘ were taken either before the event started, when the audience were spaced out more widely and it was possible to walk up to them, or around and behind the stage.

Continue reading 10,000 Cuts & Counting