Photo Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Sean Rigg

Sean Rigg was killed by police in Brixton Police Station on 21 August 2008. It took almost 4 years for the inquest into his death to be held, and they jury were then denied the possibility of giving the verdict that they would have otherwise reached. Instead they gave a lengthy narrative verdict which made clear exactly how police actions led to his death, and also condemned the NHS for their failures before his arrest and killing. The Rigg family immediately called for the Crown Prosecution Service to bring criminal charges and for a public inquiry into deaths in custody, not just that of Sean Rigg, but of the many others who die as a result of police action – including many that for various reasons don’t make the official statistics,

I first met Sean’s sisters at the annual United Friends and Families Protest march along Whitehall to Downing St in October 2008, and was impressed by their determination to fight to find what really happened to their brother and to get justice. Their tenacity has resulted in an inquest that made clear the crimes that were committed, the cover-up by the police and the the complete failure of the IPCC to investigate what took place. But they – and the other families of the several thousand people who have died in suspicious circumstances by police actions or in police custody, in prisons or in other secure facilities have yet to see justice.

From the start, the ‘Justice & Change’ campaign’ the family set up has been concerned not just with their brother’s death, but with the wider issues of justice and accountability of the police and our judicial system.

I’d arrived at the Sean Rigg 4th Year Memorial in the large assembly hall inside Lambeth Town Hall on 21 August around 20 minutes before the start of the event and was in time to take a seat with several other photographers close to the middle aisle in the second row of the hall. I’d missed an official photocall a few minutes earlier with the family and the banner, but that isn’t the kind of thing I usually bother with. I had plenty of time to make a few test shots, hoping that the same main lights would be on for the meeting, and found I could just about get usable results without flash on the D800, working at around ISO 3200 with the Nikon 28-105mm wide open. It isn’t a fast lens, only f5.6 at the long end, and I probably should have brought the Sigma 24-70 f2.8, but I’d had to rush back from an outing, grab my bag and run out of the door to get to the event, and just hadn’t had time to think. But I think the Nikon is sharper.

I did take some pictures with flash, but I don’t like to use it more than I have to, as when I’m attending meetings I find a lot of flash photography is disturbing. But for some pictures there just wasn’t enough light without.

It was an interesting meeting, but perhaps went on a little too long – over two hours, and some of the ‘questions’ from the floor turned out to be lengthy speeches. But I was really waiting for the march through Brixton that was to follow. It did eventually, but I think was held up by a number of people with video cameras stopping the leading figures and interviewing them.

Eventually everyone was lined up outside and the march started, going just a quarter of a mile down the road to the police station. It got very crowded around the memorial tree, and I got into an argument with a man with a camcorder who came and stood right in front of me after I put my hand on his shoulder to ask him to move. He became very angry, but fortunately everyone was keen to calm things down.

Unfortunately at this point my SB700 flash started refusing to work at all on the D700, and it was very dark. I couldn’t see any reason why, and it worked fine when I switched it over to the D800. It’s the kind of annoying thing that can happen, and often the reason is simple and obvious once you sit down and take a look at things in good light, but is impossible to solve when you are frantically trying to work in darkness, as I was.

I swapped the 16-35mm to the SB-800 – it’s just a bit wider than the 18-105 – and continued working with flash. I was working at 1/60 at f6.3 with the flash, and it was so dark that to get any real contribution from ambient light and avoid an almost black background I needed to use ISO 6400.

This picture was taken at 17mm (around 25mm equiv) and the flash was I think set to underexpose by around 2/3 stop. I think I’m actually too close for flash to be reliable, but the main problems I was having were actually subject movement and focus.

I was a little reluctant to follow the group who went inside the police station to photograph there, but soon realised that I needed to as everyone else pushed in. Inside the lobby there was a decent light level and I could work without flash, but it was so squashed there wasn’t really room to change lenses. I had the the 10.5mm onto the D700, so was only getting the 5Mp or so files that DX lenses give on that camera. I had the DX body set on ISO 3200, and once processed in Lightroom 4, the quality isn’t bad. When the Superintendent came to a side door to talk to the crowd I was on the other side of the lobby, but with the camera held as high as I could reach I managed to get a picture that I thought worked OK.

The lighting for this is helped by someone using a video light, though I’ve not quite got the colour balance optimised. But LED lighting is now feasible with still cameras too, working at fairly close distances and high ISO, and I’m thinking of buying a powerful and portable unit. I do have a very cheap unit, but it hasn’t enough power to be useful, except perhaps for reading in bed.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

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Twisted Images

Thanks to Twisted Sifter for a page with 15 Photo Manipulations Before the Digital Age published in advance of Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York which claims to be the first major exhibition devoted to the history of manipulated photography before digital and will feature “200 visually captivating photographs created between the 1840s and 1990s in the service of art, politics, news, entertainment, and commerce“. The show runs from 11 October 2012 to January 27, 2013, and there is currently a short text about the show on the Met Site but not much more unless you have a press login, when I think you would be able to see the same 15 images as on Twisted Sifter.

Some of these are well-known – for example Henry P Robinson‘s very Victorian deathbed scene, Fading Away, Toulouse Lautrec as artist and model (by Maurice Guibert) and others by Maurice Tabard, Barbara Morgan, Grete Stern, a decidedly odd (aren’t they all) F Holland Day and one of Gustave Le Gray‘s cloud studies, but perhaps the more interesting are some of the commercial and anonymous images, including a ‘Man on Rooftop with Eleven Men in Formation on His Shoulders’, Saint Thomas DAquin’s ‘Man Juggling His Own Head’ and a daguerreotype of a man with two heads.

From the text I’m not sure how much this show will add to previous exhibitions and books which have featured such images – which I think have always got more than their just share of attention. They are an interesting side line, and often amuse, which is what some of them were meant to do. But some of those that amuse, their authors meant to be taken seriously.

Before the Olympics goes ISBN

Today I published my first book to have an ISBN, though I hope it won’t be my last and I have another 99 numbers waiting to find a home, and hope to begin work on my rather monumental ‘London Series’ shortly – a little of the work from which is on my ageing Buildings of London site (though web sites don’t really age, just get to look rather dated.)

It isn’t really a new book, but a revised edition of my book first published in 2010 and is now ‘Before The Olympics‘ – The Lea Valley 1981-2010: Peter Marshall ISBN 978-1-909363-00-7

Those few of you who have a copy of the first edition needn’t rush out to buy a copy – available direct from Blurb (and at their US site) – as the changes are relatively minor. The new edition has no new pictures – and actually one small image less, and I’ve slightly revised some of the captions and text. But probably the main changes are in tidying up the design and also slightly but noticeably increasing the size of many of the smaller images.

Publishing with an ISBN makes books easier to find, and also means that I have to send a copy to the British Library under the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003, though the requirement to deposit a copy goes back several hundred years longer.

There is a preview on Blurb which shows over a third of the book. At £26.99 for an 80 page paperback it isn’t cheap, roughly twice the price I would like to be able to sell it at, and unfortunately I can’t offer the kind of discounts that would enable it to be sold through the shops. At the moment this new edition isn’t included in my book sale, though I do still have just a few copies of the first edition available.

It does include (if I counted right) 246 of my pictures taken around the Lea, though some are still unfortunately small. It was put together using Blurb’s free Booksmart software, which does impose a few annoying restrictions on design and has some problems with handling text, but generally does the job fairly well, although I’m considering using proper DTP software for future books. I chose Blurb’s Premium paper with a lustre finish, which does well with both the black and white and colour images, but does increase the cost a few pounds. But reproduction is important, and this was the first paper from Blurb that I felt was good enough for black and white.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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Non-photographer Wins Photography Prize

I’ve nothing against photo-montage. I’ve written about it and admire many of the classic works by photomonteurs such as the Dada artist John Heartfield as well as more recent work. I’ve even allowed my own pictures to be used in photomontage, but it isn’t photography. There have been photographers who have worked with photomontage, and again there are some I admire – such as Misha Gordin, as well as a few who I think are mildly interesting, including Jerry Uelsmann, and a few whose work I find simply sick.

John Stezaker, the winner of this year’s £30,000 Deutsche Börse prize at the London Photographers’ Gallery is not a photographer, but that doesn’t seem to matter, and the 2007 prize went to Walid Raad who also didn’t take the pictures he used.

Writing in The Guardian, Sean O’Hagan commented:

Does that matter? Evidently not except to other practitioners who may think photography still has something to do with deep seeing, and then capturing that moment of deep seeing, in a split second. That is now in danger of fast becoming an irredeemably old-fashioned idea, both in the teaching of photography and in the market-driven curating of photography.

I’m one of those old-fashioned practitioners, and rather resent a photography prize being awarded to a non-photographer. I quite like some of Stezaker’s work – the prize was for his Whitechapel Gallery show – and although it reminds me very much of the kind of thing that other artists have been doing almost since the start of photography (well before Dada and the Surrealists), he certainly sometimes does it very well. But it ain’t photography!

You can also read about it on PDN, BJP and again in The Guardian in a piece by arts correspondent Mark Brown among other places.

Photographing the EDL

I don’t like photographing the EDL, and they certainly don’t like being photographed, but I think it is important that their activities are recorded, and I try to do so with care and accuracy. If they emerge from my pictures or text looking bad, it isn’t because of how I photograph them, but because of what they say and do.

I didn’t set this picture up, but just started taking pictures of the group drinking in the beer garden of the pub in Chelmsford a couple of weeks ago from the street outside. When one of the other people I was taking pictures of complained to a police officer about me photographing him without his consent, I was pleased that the officer told him that I have every right to photograph, whether he wanted to have his picture taken or not. Though after I had taken a few pictures he did ask me very politely if I would mind moving away as it was getting them worked up (I could be wrong when I remember him saying I was disturbing the animals.) I’d taken several pictures like the above, and didn’t think I would get anything more so I was happy to oblige.

As I walked past the small group of EDL around the pub door, one of them pointed me out to the others and said “He’s OK” while pointing out another photographer walking with me as someone who should be chased away. It isn’t up to them to decide who should and shouldn’t be allowed to photograph them.

But perhaps because of this, later, when I moved close to the banner at the front of the march I wasn’t asked to move away, although other photographers had been cleared across the road by the police. Though I think it was really more my ability to merge with the background and be unobtrusive when I want to.

Eventually the march moved off, and I photographed as it went past me. One rather large man walked towards me, though I wasn’t too worried as there were several police within a couple of yards. He moved in close and said “I hope all your family die of cancer.”

I stopped to note down his exact words and then continued to photograph. Unlike most marches where I like to get in the middle of things, I had to work largely from the pavement, as I was getting some pretty hostile comments as I was working. Fortunately their was some good lighting and I think some of the pictures work well.

I didn’t have my voice recorder running during the event, but what I heard from many on the protest seemed to me to be full of hate against Muslims (and photographers!)

As the front of the march reached the turning for their rally outside the town hall I went back to the centre of the shopping district where ‘Essex Unite Against Fascism’ had been holding their rally, noticing on my way that the police had sealed off the area with some high fencing and large cordons. The counter-march was all ready to go, but was being held until the EDL were safely surrounded by police.

There were just over three times as many people, and a huge difference in atmosphere. Rather than hate it was a welcome that came out from the crowd, with everyone pleased to talk and be photographed and looking so much happier. And everyone was entirely sober. It was a pleasure to photograph them rather than a duty.

Of course there was some anger expressed in some of the Essex UAF’s chants, such as “E-D-L go to hell! Take your Nazi mates as well!” and “Follow your leader, shoot yourself like Adolf Hitler!” but the second at least was shouted with a certain humour, with some breaking into laughter afterwards. Other chants were more affirmative, such as “We’re black, white, Asian and we’re Jew!”

I think my text and pictures on EDL Outnumbered in Chelmsford portray both groups accurately, although the view of the EDL is perhaps too kind to them, and I perhaps did a better job of making good images. Sometimes a little of a challenge helps.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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Thank Heaven For Clouds

I hadn’t actually meant to go for a walk by the Thames when I left the house, but was hoping to photograph some protests about increases in rail fares and proposed cuts in jobs and services on the railways.

I should have gone earlier, when I knew a larger protest would be happening, but travelling in the morning rush hour is just so expensive, and I’d been sent details about a later protest. I can get a ticket to visit my son almost 200 miles away for roughly the same price as it costs for the 19 miles each way into London if I catch an early train. So I caught the first train I can get at the still expensive off-peak rate, and arrived to find nothing much worth photographing still happening. So little that I took no pictures.

The train operators say they have improved the service, and the trains do rattle less, but when I first moved to where I live there were six rather than four trains an hour to London and the fast trains did the journey in 29 rather than 35 minutes. And without keeping to that special railway operators time which means that any train can close its doors and leave half a minute early.

It was a fine day, sunny but with some nice clouds, so it seemed a pity not to take some pictures, and I decided to walk along a little of the Thames path in London once more, starting from Battersea Bridge as I’d been assured there would be something to photograph at Clapham Junction latter (wrongly as it turned out.)62 This area of London used to have industry along much of the riverside, including a large factory and lots of wharves, and I’d recently scanned some black and white images from around 40 years ago when I first came here. Now almost all of that has gone, replaced mainly by expensive flats, with the odd hotel and some offices.

One gain from these changes is that you can now walk beside the river virtually all the way, and there are also one or two decent buildings among the largely profit-oriented poor quality developments. Changing attitudes to health and safety do unfortunately mean that you can no longer walk on a high-level path through the waste-transfer station next to the mouth of the Wandle, and I’m sorry I never did when it was open.

When taking largely open landscapes like some of the views across the Thames, I was pleased to have plenty of clouds in the sky. Having a clear blue sky is about as welcome as a uniformly grey one so far as I’m concerned. One of the buildings I passed on my walk is St Mary’s Battersea, where I’ve on previous occasions photographed the stained glass windows commemorating two of my favourite artists, William Blake who was married here and JMW Turner, whose mother was a Marshall, though so far as I’m aware not related. Turner was rowed across the river from his home in Cheyne Walk to paint the skies from the porch of the church. I don’t think he would have bothered on a blue sky day either!

The flats above are on the ‘Pure Genius‘ site that was occupied by ‘The Land is Ours’ in 1996; they were evicted after five and a half months but the site remained derelict and empty for seven or eight years afterwards. In May 1997 I photographed the march on the first anniversary of the occupation, and two weeks later put on-line what now seems a very curious web page, Pure Genius – One Year On, with some weird scans of my pictures.

On the opposite side of the river, demolition seemed to be taking place at Fulham Wharf, but the sand and gravel site there and on the south bank immediately upstream of Wandsworth Bridge was still working, and I made another panorama from the bridge as well as taking a few more pictures. You can see more at Battersea Riverside on My London Diary.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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10 Things from Anders Petersen

A beautiful post on Eric Kim’s Street Photography site, 10 Things Anders Petersen Can Teach You About Street Photography in which Kim explores the thoughts and pictures of Petersen. I’m not sure that you can teach most street photographers anything- its a genre that seems to attract and encourage the unthinking, and one which I think is generally long past its sell-by date – but most of it is great advice for most photographers.

Not necessarily what you should do, because you need to find ways of working that suit you, and there are many who his won’t fit, but there are things which we can all learn from even if we decide on a different path. My thanks to Peggy Sue Amison, artistic director of the Sirius Arts Centre in East Cork, a place I often wish I lived closer to, and whose Facebook posts often light up my mornings, as this one did, for sharing this.

Back in the days when I was at least a part-time street photographer (before I saw the light?) I followed at least some of the 10 precepts from Petersen, although in my case the inspiration came from the work of guys like Winogrand and some of Cartier-Bresson’s images on the run (rather than his ‘waiters’). Perhaps the most important is the first:

1. Shoot with your heart, not your brain

and something that disappoints me about much recent street photography is that it seems to be more about clever design exercises than working from the heart. Another that struck a real chord with me is Kim’s number 8, ‘Focus on content, not form‘, but it is really an article you need to read and digest for yourself. And when you have done so, like me you will probably want to go on to read more by Kim, and in particular his 10 Things Garry Winogrand Can Teach You About Street Photography.

Kim and Petersen also comment on equipment, basically the need to keep things simple. My favourite street cameras were the Minolta CLE with a 28mm and the 35mm f2 fixed lens Konica Hexar. With both I worked with the exposure manually set for the lighting conditions, usually at an aperture of f5.6 and manual focus set usually at 1.8 metres, which gave me a reasonable zone of focus. The only thing I had to think about was being at around the right distance and pressing the release. Nothing digital I’ve tried quite comes up to these cameras – perhaps the nearest – apart from size, noise and bulk – is the Nikon D800 with a 20mm lens set to DX crop (a 30mm equivalent.)

For most work now I need a more flexible approach, but the idea of reducing thought about anything technical to a minimum still holds. Almost every exposure I make is with the camera on ‘P’ (photographers joke it stands for Professional), although I often use of the thumb wheel to modify the shutter/aperture combination when I can see a need for a faster shutter speed or greater depth of field, as well as usually having some exposure compensation – my default is to give an extra 1/3 stop.

Thanks perhaps to some curious thinking by Nikon, P doesn’t give sensible results with flash at night, unless you like your subject with a black background. Usually I switch to A so I can choose the aperture or S if I want to use slow shutter speeds.

Working fast with longer focal lengths is really only possible with good autofocus, and modern camera viewfinders are generally pretty poor for manual focus. Although I often know I don’t need to focus when I’m working wide-angle, most of the time I leave it on, as otherwise I forget to turn it back on when I really need it.

Memories of Auntie Mabel

There really is probably little reason why most of you reading this should have much interest in my Auntie Mabel, though she was one of my favourite aunts. But I think these pictures have a wider appeal than simply being about a particular person. They were made in 1977 a few weeks before her 85th birthday, using available light and Tri-X or HP4 film, probably pushed a stop or two.

Mabel Marshall was born (as I’m often reminded) on the day that the last train in England ran on the broad gauge lines out of Paddington. The train pulled into Swindon on Friday 20 May 1892 and immediately the engineers got to work on replacing the track with standard gauge, completing the job over the weekend. Meanwhile elsewhere, my grandmother was giving birth. She may well have been aware of the changes taking place to our rail system, as she herself had travelled down those wider lines some years earlier from Wales, where much of her family still lived. And even when I was small, they still used to send a bird – usually a goose – down ready for the table at Christmas, to be collected by one of my uncles from Paddington station.

Mabel had four sisters and two brothers, all younger than her. The girls were all of the age whose possible husbands were men killed in the First World War, creating a great shortage of men, and only one of her sisters ever married. Mabel, seven and a half when my father was born, as the eldest of the children will have taken much of the responsibility for looking after him and the other young ones, but she never had children of her own – almost 40 when she was married, she was probably by that time too old.

She and my father actually got married within a year or two, not of course to each other, but their partners were also brother and sister, she becoming a Tabor while my own mother, a dozen years younger than Mabel became a Marshall. Her husband had taught the classes at the Richmond and Twickenham Bee-Keeping Association when my father went to learn bee-keeping (later my father was to look after the assopciation’s hives and teach others there.) The two men got on well and introduced each other to their sisters and that I suppose is where my story really starts, though it was perhaps 20 years before I came into it.

Mabel and Alf were married around 1931, and moved into a rather gloomy late Victorian semi-detached in Sunnycroft Road, a large house for two, but it was often rather crowded on the family occasions when we visited. Around 45 years later when I took these pictures, Mabel had been a widow for some years, living there alone.

Even when I was a child in the 1950s it had seemed an old-fashioned house, still lit by gas, when most of the rest of us had long moved to electric. Little if anything had changed by 1977 except that there were now rather more photographs on the stand in the rarely used front room, which include one of my own wedding pictures (fortunately largely hidden) as well as one of my own first son who was with us on our visit.

I knew as I took the pictures that this was probably the last time we would visit the house; life on her own was becoming difficult and before long Mabel would be moving out into sheltered accommodation. The next time we visited she was living in a single room, still with some of the same photographs on display, but otherwise very different (and about 15 degrees Celsius warmer.) I gave her one or two of the pictures, but I think by then her sight had almost gone.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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Hizb ut-Tahrir Supports Rohingya

It was back in 2004 that I first came across Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain, which I described then as “an independent Islamic political party dedicated to re-establishing the Islamic way of life under an Islamic caliphate (Khilifah.) The repetition of the word ‘Islamic’ was of course deliberate and intended to mirror the relentess and repetitive approach of the speeches and the visual effect, with its large banners, black characters on intense orange.

© 2004, Peter Marshall
Hizb ut-Tahrir march against ‘Busharraf’, 2004
There were very few journalists and photographers at that event, and I remember talking to one of them, a man who had been researching and following the movement for some time and who considered it to be a dangerous and influential fundamentalist movement which governments would be wise to proscribe.

There have I think been a few minor changes over the past 8 years, at least presentationally, although the protests still look much the same, but I think the speakers are a little less strident (though I only understand those who speak in English) and some have been careful to point out that they are not aiming at the overthrow and replacement of the British state and that their ambition is for the Khilfah to replace the current corrupt and largely dictatorial rulers of the Muslim states. Although their removal seems an excellent idea, I’m certainly not convinced that I would want to live under the rule of Hizb ut-Tahrir, and I still find some aspects of their protests unsettling.

One is the separation between men and women at their protests; it isn’t the actual segregation I find so disturbing but that women seem often to be treated as second-class citizens, off to one side of where the real action (in this case the speeches and the loudspeakers relaying them) was taking place, with none of the speakers being women. Many of them were so far away along the road that they could not see or even hear properly what was going on. The only time I’ve seen the women of Hizb ut-Tahir ever fully taking part in a protest was at a ‘women only’ protest over the French ban on Islamic face veils.

The protest on 11th August was at the Bangladeshi High Commission in a wide and fairly empty street in Kensington, not far from the Natural History Museum and the Albert Hall. Although some of their protests over the years have attracted the attention of many photographers, again this was not one of them, and when I arrived a few minutes after the time the protest was to start, I seemed to be almost the only journalist or photographer present other than the organisation’s own people (and of course many in the protest were taking pictures with their phones.)

I like to get to events on time, if not at least a few minutes early. Often the most interesting situations happen as people are arriving and things are being set up, though I also generally stay on as long as I can. Years ago, when I first went to photograph a number of carnivals with a few friends, I was surprised that as soon as the actual procession started they would put their cameras away and go to the pub, but usually they were right, many events are essentially over for the photographer once they have started. Others – and perhaps this protest was one – never really begin.

My lateness was simply a result of London traffic and my decision to take a bus to the protest. Buses are my favourite method of travel around London, giving a great view of the city from the upper deck, but like cars and taxis they are unreliable. On this occasion I’d had far too long to enjoy the view of Fulham Broadway on my way to Kensington.

The only really reliable way to get around London is on a bike, or for shorter distances, feet. But I don’t like taking my bike to protests, as finding a good place to use my heavyweight lock can be difficult, and even the best locks only deter the more casual thieves and don’t protect against vandalism. They are also a nuisance with marches, when you have to go back to the start to collect them. But had I thought, I would have ridden to this static protest in a posh area on a sunny day when traffic was likely to be bad, especially with various large sporting events in the city. But I’m getting old and lazy and have a free bus pass I like to use!

The still photograph can’t convey the actual words that people say, but it can show something of the mood and I concentrate on the expressions and gestures of the protesters and in particular the speakers. Words and images may come from placards and banners, which are also very important in photographing protests.

Photographers are very attracted by sounds at protests, whether those of people chanting, shouting or speaking or (absent from this event) music or drumming etc. If you are working with video, the sounds are often the most important part of the event, but as a still photographer you need to keep reminding yourself that they don’t record in your images. You have to work to try and catch the feeling of the moment. It’s a start to be seeing and hearing the excitement – it suggests you are somewhere near the right place – but you have to work hard to make it show in your images.

Of course it’s important to be honest about the event you are photographing, while obviously your photographs will also present your own point of view. I’m often unhappy about the way that single images are used in the press which often give a very distorted view of events, and I’m far happier presenting my own work through sites like Demotix or My London Dairy where I can tell a story in some depth, both in pictures and text.

Although I often share the concerns of Hizb ut-Tahrir which they express in protests – as in this case over the terrible oppression of the Rohingya people in Burma, caught up in the long-running dispute between Burma and neighbouring Bangladesh, with its origins going back into the British rule of India (more on this – and more pictures – in Hizb ut-Tahrir Supports Rohingya on My London Diary), like that journalist I talked to I find the movement disturbing. It seems to represents an extremism which I find chilling, just as I do that of the extremist Christian and political groups I’ve photographed. But unlike many extremist groups, Hizb ut-Tahrir welcome media attention and are always attentive (sometimes perhaps a little too attentive) to journalists and photographers. I don’t think they should be banned but I do wish that more mainstream and moderate Muslim organisations were more vocal both about them and the wider issues that they address.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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Raoul Wallenberg

One of the bonuses of walking around London as I do quite often is that you often come across places and events you were unaware of, or at least that let you see them in a different way.

In September 2004, I’d gone to Hyde Park Crescent to take pictures of ‘Horsemen’s Sunday‘, an event I’d read about but never seen, and where most of the men apart from the vicar turned out to be women or children. I was staggered to find that the Hyde Park Pony Club had so many members, but it was an event that once seen I’ve not felt the need to revisit – and I think Thelwell would have done it more justice. I find horses tricky to photograph and I think they look at their best from a distance, like bicycles they don’t respond too well to my usual ultra-wide approach, though the 12-24mm Sigma I was using then on an DX camera was rather less extreme than either the 10.5mm DX semi fisheye or the 16-35mm FX I now prefer.

London when my father was a boy a hundred years ago was still a largely horse-powered city – and he helped his father making horse-drawn carts, later graduating after a period working in munitions and a trip to France patching up biplanes for the Royal Flying Corps (and on to Germany in the RAF to fraternize with the Fräuleins returned to find the internal combustion engine had taken over and for a while he built wooden fire engines and charabancs. London’s pollution became rather less obvious (the horses mainly moved out to the Home Counties as expensive toys for the wealthier commuters and their families) and needed much less shovelling but rather than being good for the roses and veg now poisoned us, first mainly with lead, but now with nitrogen oxides and respirable suspended particles. I’m always a little worried by the abbreviation PM, as in PM10 or PM2.5, because those letters are my initials. Of course the also stand for Prime Minister, and I could certainly do a better job than the present incumbent, though I’ve no wish to volunteer.

But, back to real life, as I wandered away from the wealthy horse riders of London, I came across another event taking place a short distance away, a group of people standing around a piece of sculpture that had not been there the last time I’d wandered down Great Cumberland Place perhaps ten years earlier, and I stopped to investigate and take a few pictures, and a couple of them ended up in My London Diary too.

But this year I went to the same place on purpose, and did I think a little better with the pictures of the Raoul Wallenberg 100th Anniversary.

It was commemorating one of the great heroes of the twentieth century, a man who put his own life at risk by going to Budapest as a Swedish diplomat during the Nazi occupation to issue the Jewish population there with false ‘protective passports’ which identified them as Swedish subjects awaiting repatriation saved probably 100,000 from the death camps. (Surprisingly he survived the Nazis only to be imprisoned and killed by the Russians – and a new inquiry into the date and manner of his death was announced by Sweden recently.) The anniversary wasn’t entirely unnoticed in the media, with similar events taking place elsewhere around the world, but I think I was the only professional photographer and journalist present at the London event.