Category: Political Issues

D700: 19mm

One of the more noticeable aspects of the long series of protests outside One Commercial St have been the various changes in the police response. At a personal level, relations between police and protesters have usually been cordial, with the protesters and police sometimes greeting each other on arrival as old friends. Though good anarchists with a firm belief that the police are an arm of state oppression and often expressing the view summed up in the acronym ACAB, they perhaps see the individual officers as duped members of the working class rather than the real enemies – the rich. “You should be on our side” they often tell the bill.

Class War’s protests are largely theatre, and many of the police at times show considerable evidence of being amused by them, more often obviously trying to suppress this.

But the most obvious aspect of the police response to the protests is inconsistency. I get the feeling that this is a result of political pressure on the police coming both from the complaints of the owners of the building and their influential political friends (the current owner is a Texan property tycoon and friend of Prince Harry), and also, since Class War entered the party political arena by standing candidates for the General Election, from high up the in the government.

A woman officer approaches Lisa McKenzie and tells her she is being arrested. D700: 16mm

It’s beyond belief that what happened outside One Commercial St on April 2nd was not a result of Lisa McKenzie standing for Class War against controversial government minister Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford.

D800: 93mm eq

The political sensitivity over this was something that led to the ridiculous over-policing of her election launch visit there in March, where a van full of police sat waiting in the station car park half an hour before they arrived and followed their every move around town until they all came out of the pub and took the train out of town. Even a single bobby on a bike would have been something of overkill.

There is no other explanation other than the political for the singling out of McKenzie and her arrest by a large snatch squad that took place towards the end of the protest on April 2nd. Police stated at the time of her arrest that it was for putting stickers on the window of One Commercial St (which they say is ‘criminal damage’) during the protest two weeks earlier.

Police put the handcuffs on Lisa McKenzie and take her away. D700: 20mm

Certainly people did put stickers on the windows at that protest, but Lisa was not among the perhaps five or ten who did so. If she had done, I would have taken a photo showing it, as I too was paying special attention to her because of her Chingford candidacy. No other person was arrested.

They are still charging her with placing stickers, alleging that this caused £50 of criminal damage, but have also added two other charges, of using threatening / abusive words / behaviour or disorderly behaviour and displaying a poster with intent to cause harassment / alarm or distress. The poster in question is an old Class War one, used at many protests and base on an old magazine cover, a graphic showing crosses in an extensive graveyard leading away to the distance, with the text ‘We have found new homes for the rich.’

It may – like most other Class War posters and banners – be thought by many to be in poor taste, but I find it impossible to see it as personally threatening and likely to cause distress. It will be a very sad day for freedom of speech in the UK if any court comes to a different conclusion.

D700: 20mm

Lisa McKenzie has been refused legal aid – something that few people can now get in the UK – and set up an appeal on a crowd-funding site, Lisa Mckenzie’s Campaign: The Right to Protest, to get the money to fight her case. It used – without my permission – the image from the head of this post on it (for once I don’t have any problem with this.) The appeal reached its initial goal within about a day, but more cash is still welcome.

D700: 19mm

Probably the hardest thing about taking the pictures at this and other arrests is keeping calm. I don’t always manage it. There was quite a lot of jostling and quite a few of the images I took were unsharp. Quite a few were obscured by police helmets or protesters.

D700: 22mm

Things also happen fast – from the first picture as police officers approached Lisa to her being thrown into the police van took 83s.

There were other people – including quite a few of the protesters as well as several photographers – also taking pictures of the arrest. The important thing is perhaps to keep thinking and keep anticipating. I was in the right place when they rushed with her towards the police van because I’d stopped taking pictures and moved there before the police did.

All of the images except one were taken with the 16-35mm on the D700. I didn’t really have time to change cameras and didn’t need to, but there are small differences in the zoom focal length, perhaps showing I was thinking about framing. A few of the pictures are cropped slightly, so I didn’t always have time to get it right, but the best are with the full frame.

You can see more of the sequence of 11 covering the arrest in order in Chingford candidate arrested at Poor Doors, along with images from the other 58 minutes of the protest.
Continue reading A Political Arrest

From the protest at Annington Homes at the end of the previous post, I took a bus to Trafalgar Square to follow up an e-mail I’d had from one of a group of protesters who had occupied the Admiralty Arch, an Edwardian building (1912) by one of the leading architects of the day. Sir Aston Webb’s building – a memorial to Queen Victoria which acts as the entrance to the Mall, leading to Buckingham Palace – shows perhaps the best and the worst of that era, a rather ponderous, over-fussy and grandiose Grade 1 listed white elephant.

It’s also something which rather reflects the state of our nation. Built to demonstrate national pride and as a fitting part of headquarters of the largest and most powerful navy and empire the world has ever seen, the address of the First Sea Lord, it was reported in 2012 as having been sold off on a 125 year lease to a Spanish property developer to become a luxury hotel. Although planning approval was obtained in 2013 and completion expected for 2016, work does not yet appear to have been started on the conversion.

I’d been very surprised earlier that morning to get the e-mail telling me that occupiers had entered the building by the roof in the night, and inviting me to go there. I wasn’t sure if I believed it, and wondered what the guy had been smoking, and hadn’t dropped everything to get there fast. In any case, it would have taken me an hour to get there, and other photographers closer to the spot were likely to be there well before me. So I took my time.

The story turned out to be true, with banners on the upper levels of the building clearly visible as I arrived. I walked around the building with another photographer, taking pictures of the rather odd and surely spurious ‘Notice to Vacate‘ posted “On behalf of the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government” at intervals around the outside of the building, wondering what to do. We met only a couple of other journalists there, who told us that they had photographed people putting out the banners earlier on, but nothing else seemed to be happening, with just a few security guards outside some of the doors.

We stood waiting and wondering what to do next, trying a few phone numbers to contact the occupiers inside without success. Then a door opened, and a man emerged, carrying a large torch, and we went to talk to him. He was rather suspicious of us, didn’t want to be photographed, and appeared to have been drinking, but after a while offered to take us inside to take some pictures. Unfortunately when he turned to do so he found that he had locked himself out!

I was just a little disappointed as I’ve never been inside the building and it might have been interesting to see. But I was also just a little worried that I might have got stuck inside as there were other things I was on my way to starting shortly.

When finally he managed to phone other occupiers and get them to let him back in and they told us we could only enter if we brought them some cigarettes and drink, I decided not to bother. More pictures at Admiralty Arch Occupied by A.N.A.L.

We took a bus to our next location, for Free the Palestinian Children outside the London HQ of G4S, the company that helps run the Israeli prisons in which they are held and tortured, and sometimes sexually abused. This was one in a whole series of regular protests against G4S by the Palestinian Prisoners Campaign, but included a speaker I hadn’t seen at previous events. As well as talking about those people, particularly young children such as the boys from Hares, picked up after a story was made up by an Israeli settler, and still held without charge over a year later, she told how while going to visit Palestinian prisoners she had been forced to remove her clothes and stand naked for inspection in public.

After she had finished speaking, another protest came walking towards us along Victoria St, going through the Palestinian protest. This was a peace protest, a Stations of the Cross Pilgrimage led by London Catholic Workers around locations in London connected with the arms trade. I’d hoped to catch up with this at some point on its route, but instead it had caught up with me, and I went with it to its next two prayer points before returning briefly to the Palestinian protest.

It was only a brief visit because I had another engagement in my diary, due to start in a few minutes a short bus journey away – and the bus stop was next to the protest. When the right bus came along the street I jumped on it, and was taken to Piccadilly Circus, close to the Le Meridien hotel in Piccadilly.

I don’t go much to hotels in Mayfair, and had never noticed this one before, and can’t tell you much about it now, except that it is a part of the Sheraton group, who have luxury hotels around the world. The protest was organised by the Hotel workers branch of Unite the Union. Most of the hotel workers in the UK who do the housekeeping, act as porters and work in the kitchens and restuarants are from overseas, and are one of the most marginalised groups of workers in the UK, and many are exploited because their English is poor or non-existent. They may work in luxury hotels, but often their conditions of work – employed by various outsourced contractors – fail to meet even our basic UK standards. Unite is at last having some success in organising them to stand up for their legal rights, although many can still get sacked for joining the union.

This strike was not however about their own conditions, but in solidarity with workers at Sheraton hotels in in Ethiopia and the Maldives who have been sacked for union organising. Pictures from here and outside another Sheraton hotel in Mayfair are at Shame on Sheraton – Hotel Workers.

My day was still not finished, with one more protest to cover. But that I’ll leave for another post.
Continue reading Four More

I’ve little idea exactly how many protests I’ve photographed about the continuing shame of Guantanamo, and of the incarceration and torture there of innocent prisoners, particularly of London charity worker Shaker Aamer, held there since its early days over 13 years ago. At the moment we are hearing encouraging rumours about his possible release, but there have been hopes before that have come to nothing. Both US and UK security services are thought to be hoping he dies in captivity rather than emerges to give evidence that would severely embarrass them about his own torture and that of others, and he is still being subjected to regular beatings and other mistreatment.

The London Guantanamo campaign have been holding a monthly protest at the US Embassy for over 8 years, and although try to attend any special protests they and other groups arrange, I only cover these regular protests if I’m going to be in the area for other reasons. They are generally rather small events, just a handful of people, with perhaps one or two in orange jumpsuits and black hoods, with a few posters, but mainly that there is little to photograph that I haven’t already done and done again. It’s a very worthy cause, but one that it is hard to make news.

As you can see from the small set of pictures at Shut Guantánamo! I didn’t stay long at the April protest, and didn’t find a great deal to photograph. I do rather like the one at the top of this post, because it presents the major elements that were present – the Obama mask, the Obama quote ‘We tortured some fo..’ (I hope most people will supply the missing ‘lks‘) and another poster about rendition with images and text ‘No Impunity for Torturers‘, and I think it does so in a lively way, with an extra hand at right holding out a card and at first glance Obama almost looking convincing.

Of course it isn’t a great photograph. There are a few things I would like to have been just a little different (including that hand which obscures the ‘lks’). If I’d been directing a scene the second take would probably have had the messages on the cards visible too. But this has a spontaneity that would be lost in posing.

The second protest I was on my way to was a short walk away outside the offices of Annington Homes, the company that is evicting people from Sweets Way in North London. The company hopes to make millions from these ex-military properties it bought on the cheap by knocking them down and redeveloping the site. It’s something that is happening all over London, cheap housing, often social housing being redeveloped into ‘luxury’ flats, usually with little or no regard for the people who live there either from developers or the local councils.

The great shortage of housing in London has led to huge increases in house prices and market rents. We need a huge growth in council housing to house the people we need to keep London running who can no longer afford even the so-called ‘affordable’ rents, but instead what is getting built are expensive properties for the wealthy, including many who will not even live in them, but own them as investments, cashing in on the ever increasing prices.

Again this is a picture I like for its spontaneity. The gestures and expression of the man holding the banner (and of course the child at the other end.) The deliberate cutting off of the cyclist at left. Taken at 16mm I was very close to the bike. You can see at Sweets Way at Annington Homes a few of the series of pictures that led up to this one.

It was a protest I enjoyed photographing, with plenty of movement and different situations, although the street had enough traffic on it to make it difficult to always be at the right place without getting knocked down.

The pavements are fairly narrow, and most pictures that I took required me to be standing in the road. Fortunately in these fairly narrow streets the traffic was normally slow-moving, and I was in little danger.

This was a long and busy day for me, and I’ll perhaps write about some of the rest of it later, after I get back from taking some more pictures.

Continue reading Spontaneous Images

This weekend, everyone in Britain and quite a few others around the world are celebrating Magna Carta. I’m not quite sure why, unless you happen to be a Baron, as it was really only a couple of years later in 1217 with the Charter of the Forest that ordinary people had much to celebrate, and even that applied only for Freemen, not to the serfs from which most of us are descended.

Of course, over the years, some of those rights awarded to the wealthy and powerful have kind of trickled down to the rest of us in countries like the US and the UK, though there is still very much one law for the rich and another for the poor.

One group that wanted to celebrate Magna Carta were the residents of the Runnymede Eco Village, founded three years ago this week when they set up camp on a long-disused area of woodland overlooking the area where Magna Carta was signed.

Diggers meet at the Runnymede Memorial and agree to celebrate Magna Carta in 3 years time

I sat with them on 16th June 2012 at the Runnymede Memorial erected by the US Bar Council as they discussed their land occupation and the idea of them hosting a celebration of the 2015 anniversary was put forward and agreed with enthusiasm. That’s my camera bag and coat in the foreground left there as I moved back slightly to frame the circle.

The first camp at Runnymede Eco Village in June 2012

I hadn’t really expected the Runnymede Eco Village still to be there three years later, but it is, and greatly expanded from the few tents that were there then, with many residents having built low impact off-grid homes in a variety of styles from materials mainly recycled from skips and demolition sites. Various court proceedings have meant it having to move a few yards down the hill to a wooded area on the slopes of Cooper’s Hill (incidentally the view from which inspired the first British poem about landscape, by Sir John Denham in 1642.).

The Eco Village has enjoyed good relations with its neighbours with many supporters in the neighbouring ‘village’ of Englefield Green. That one of the first things they did was to clear several skip loads of illegally fly-tipped rubbish from the area got them off to a good start.

Luke (right) a trained forester, stands in front of the home he built almost entirely from material in skips and demolition sites

Yesterday I arrived at the Runnymede site for the first day of a four day festival celebrating Magna Carta and three years of settlement by the Eco Village, and was warmly welcomed and shown round. As well as various musicians, the festival events included poetry, workshops and a number of distinguished visiting speakers who were to talk and lead discussions.  The Festival For Democracy should have been starting in earnest today, and continuing until Monday.

Unfortunately our authorities seem to have decided to do their worst and not to allow it. They started by pressuring the owners of the site to try and get the occupiers evicted, but an attempt to steamroller this through the courts was blocked by a judge who decided that the occupiers seemed to have some kind of agreement with the owners to occupy the area and adjourned the case to give the Eco Village more time to prepare their case.

It is unlikely to be a co-incidence that a few days ago the date for the court appearance was set as this Monday, 16 June, the last day of their festival and when the official celebrations at Runnymede (two miles away according to the BBC, but for those who can walk rather than drive, around half a mile distant) reach their peak.

But apparently that wasn’t enough for the political taskmasters of the police, and a little after noon small groups of officers appeared around each of the entrances to the site, and began to stop people entering. They claimed to be allowing the site residents to enter and leave freely, but were stopping others. A couple of weeks previously a rumour had been put out that there would be an illegal rave taking place on the rugby field adjoining the Eco Village, and this was being used as a pretext to issue an order under Section 63 of the The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994  which allows police power to restrict access, remove people and issue exclusion orders.

There appears to be no real evidence of any actual attempt to hold a ‘rave’, and the programme for the Eco Village’s festival clearly demonstrates that it would not be in breach of Section 63 (which applies only to ‘amplified music’ played during the night.)  The rumours are suggested by some to have been promoted by the authorities to justify the draconian police action.

As I wrote yesterday:

As I left it was unclear if the free festival, with its long and distinguished line up of speakers, poets, singers and performers will be able to continue and in what form. It would indeed seem a travesty if  at a time when we are celebrating 800 years of freedom under the law against the arbitrary power of the state achieved at Runnymede, the authorities should abuse the law by using those arbitrary powers to prevent a people’s celebration of freedom.

Perhaps rather than celebrating Magna Carta we should all now be out on the streets and demanding a new charter for the freedoms we thought had been won 800 years ago.

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More pictures from inside the Runnymede Eco Village in my feature from yesterday on Demotix, Magna Carta celebration at Runnymede threatened by police. And from the initial gathering at the Magna Carta Memorial on My London Diary. That meeting was attended by just one friendly police officer.
Continue reading Celebrating Magna Carta

We may not actually be sacrificing children to Rupert Murdoch and the like, but I think there is a good case to be made that we are sacrificing our culture to him and a few others, with “5 billionaires owning 80% of the media” as the protesters at’Occupy Murdoch‘ pointed out.

Of course this is not unique to the UK, although the spectacular increase in inequality we have seen here over the past 35 years  (a particularly steep rise from 1979-1991, with a slower growth until a slight hiccough in 2008 from which it has now recovered) have transformed us into one of the most unequal societies among the wealthier countries.

I grew up in a period where our society was much more equal, and a welfare state provided at least a basic support for those on low incomes or out of work, and government saw its role as supporting the people who needed it rather than penalising them.

“It’s The Sun Wot Won It” was the triumphant headline after the 1992 election victory of John Major, having ended a long campaign of putting the boot into Labour with the election day headline “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.” And equally, at the next election, it was again the Sun who claimed the the role of king-maker for Tony Blair, having managed to turn the Labour party into a vehicle for its own political views.

Of course it wasn’t just The Sun. There was also The Times, The Telegraph, The Daily Express, The Daily Mail… all together setting a cultural and political agenda, increasingly helped by the BBC as well as commercial broadcasters largely owned by the same small group of people as the newspapers.

But while I have a great deal of sympathy and agreement with the case that ‘Occupy Rupert Murdoch’ were making, it wasn’t an easy event to photograph, not least because the the fairly low level of support actually on the ground. Starting a protest at 10.30am on a Monday morning is probably not a good idea to attract large numbers of politically active people, most of whom, contrary to the myths put about by the press, actually have jobs to go to. So while many expressed support, most were unable to be there. Though there was a rather fine main banner with a portrait of Murdoch, and a rather less promising Sun. Along with a very well drawn large cartoon and an impressive four page newspaper, ‘The Occupied Sun’.

By the time that the marchers set off on the short walk to present the people’s warrant for the arrest of Rupert Murdoch (listing just a few of his areas of offending – war crimes, phone hacking, political blackmail, tax avoidance and environmental destruction) there was a small but respectable group, although the warrant was a little disappointing for photographers, a replacement having to be drawn up on the spot with a whiteboard pen on a large brown sheet of corrugated cardboard as the more carefully prepared version failed to arrive on time due to travel problems. But it was handed over to one of Murdoch’s employees who – perhaps rather sportingly – came out to receive it at a remarkably civilised ceremony, shaking hands with the organiser, environmental campaigner Donnachadh McCarthy, though keeping his gloves on to do so. There was a cold wind.

It was an event where it was difficult to anticipate exactly what would happen, and where there were around as many photographers as protesters. As the group carrying the arrest warrant made their way towards the barrier outside the News International building I left the group of photographers crowding around them and tried to envisage where the handover would take place and chose exactly where to stand to get the picture I wanted. It seemed important to get the ‘News’ sign in the image. As the rest of the press gathered around, I had to move in a little closer to keep them out of the frame, and also zoom in slightly from 16mm to 20mm, but essentially was able to take the image I wanted.

After the delivery of the warrant, the group moved to occupy a part of the plaza in front of News International, though some temporary building works blocked its view of the door. I was rather taken by surprise when Donnachadh picked up a token tent and it sprang out, but caught the moment if not in a very well-composed fashion. I had rather ‘taken my eye off the ball’ photographing and talking with some of the other protesters.

The protest was to last for a whole week, and much of the time when I dropped by there was very little happening, and I didn’t always stop to take pictures. Things got busy every evening, with various events and more people arriving after work but I had other things to do and couldn’t stay, but I promised to come back on Saturday for the mock trial of Murdoch.

More pictures at Arrest Warrant for Rupert Murdoch and Occupy Rupert Murdoch. I’ll perhaps write about the trial later.

Continue reading Murdoch Moloch

Class War’s Chingford candidate Lisa McKenzie holds a poster on the window of the Rich Door. D800E, ISO3200, 18mm (27mm), Flash, 1/40 f8

Class War’s protest on March 19th was livelier than usual, partly because the Texas millionaire owner of the block at One Commercial St was thought to be actually in the building, but also because there was a rather larger group present than most weeks. But perhaps the main reason was that there were no uniformed officers present for the first twenty minutes of the protest.

D700, ISO 3200, 16mm, 1/60 f4

The event was more congested than usual as both building works on the front of One Commercial St and pavement replacement works were taking up much of the usual space. It made it harder than usual to get in  the right place to take pictures.

Class War had prepared for Taylor McWilliams‘ presence, producing a ‘Wanted’ sticker with his picture calling for information on him: ‘Dirt? Gossip? Dodgy Deals? Sex? Drugs? Money?‘ They had also brought with them a number of copies of one of their best-known posters, based on a classic Class War magazine cover from over 30 years ago. An image of a giant cemetery with wooden crosses stretching to the horizon, it has the Class War logo and the message ‘We Have Found New Homes For The Rich.’

It may be an image in bad taste, but it is hard to see it as illegal, and I’ve previously photographed it at a number of public events where no action was taken. But one of the charges which police have now made against Lisa McKenzie is of displaying this poster ‘with intent to cause Taylor McWilliams harassment, alarm or distress contrary to Section 4A(1) and (5) of the Public Order Act 1986.‘ You can see from the pictures that the poster was not being displayed to those inside the building – presumably including McWilliams – but to the other protesters outside.

D800E ISO3200 18mm(27mm) Flash 1/40 f9

While clearly McKenzie was displaying the poster at the protest, another of the contentions in the charges is clearly false. She is charged with placing stickers on the building to the value of £50.00. From both from my photographs and my observation of her during the event I am clear that she put no stickers on the glass herself, but was simply holding the posters to the glass, with both hands occupied in doing so. It’s also evident that removing a sticker from the glass surface should take more than a minute’s work and perhaps a scraper and a damp cloth and would hardly justify a cost of 50p, let alone £50.

Of course I did see people put stickers on the glass and metal of the building, but McKenzie didn’t, and I was watching her closely because of her candidature in Chingford. Others were also as my pictures show displaying the poster, and certainly others were also saying similar things to her at the protest, but for some reason police only arrested and charged her.

Could it be because she was standing against a government minister in the coming general election? It seems clear that the arrest and charges against her are simply a matter of harassment – as was the arrest last November of another prominent Class War protester Jane Nicholl, and the seizing of the Class War banner with the accompanying arrest – which I understand has not yet been followed by any charge, although the police have not returned the banner.

D700 ISO3200 16mm 1/50 f4

McKenzie wasn’t arrested until two weeks later, but another protester was arrested after plastic road-works barriers were put across the main road. The arrest was made by two plain clothes officers who had earlier been standing around on the edge of the protest, too far away to see what was then going on.

D700 ISO3200 16mm 1/100 f5

The protest started ten minutes before sunset, and the light rapidly faded. But for virtually the whole hour of the protest I was photographing with the D700 without flash at ISO 3200 with the 16-35mm f4 lens wide open, and shutter speeds between 1/13 and 1/80th. Quite a few were a little blurred either due to camera shake or subject movement.  In some I added a little light with a Neewer CN-216 LED hand-held light source.

After taking a few frames with the D800E and 18-105mm without flash, I put the SB80 flash into the hot-shoe, still working at ISO3200 and using a shutter speed of 1/40th to get plenty of exposure by ambient light. Often using a slow shutter speed with flash on subjects where there is quite a lot of movement gives some interesting blur along with the sharp core image from the flash. The effect is sometimes rather hard to see in the web-size images.

D700 ISO3200 16mm 1/100 f4

Photographing the arrest was made a little tricky by the car headlights, which illuminated a rather narrow band of the subject and made some frames unusable with burnt out highlights. But I was able to burn in some where the exposure was not too extreme. And the flaming torches also pose some problems, which often call for some fairly extreme reduction of the highlights using the Lightroom slider or local adjustment.

You can see more pictures at Poor Doors blocks Rich Door.

Continue reading New Homes for the Rich

It seems a long time now since the General Election on May 7, and the shock of waking up the morning after to find the Conservatives were in power. Not that I have any great faith in Labour, but anything would have been better than a Tory majority.

Of course there was no chance that Class War would sweep to power. They were only standing in seven seats and when party leader Ian Bone talked at the party’s election launch about hoping to get into double figures he was talking about votes, not seats. And even for rather more serious parties – like the Greens – getting more than a million votes doesn’t give you proper representation, still just the one seat won by Caroline Lucas in Brighton. And if Labour had put the kind of effort they put into trying to unseat her into their fight against the Conservatives, the election might well have had a different outcome, though the dirty tricks would have generated considerable negative publicity.

We don’t have a fair electoral system. Attempts to reform it were voted out by the major parties who both thought they would prefer to continue to benefit from its unfairness, though I think Labour made the wrong call, failing to take Scotland into account – and going on to shoot themselves in the foot before and again after the referendum there.

But back to Chingford, the seat of Iain Duncan Smith, IDS, architect of dramatic changes to our welfare system, and a man caught out in lying and failures so many times, truly the man who launched a thousand food banks or more. And truly impregnable as the Conservative candidate in a true blue constituency like Chingford and Woodford Green. Any of the other candidates would have been a better choice, but none stood a chance.

Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge on a sunnier day in 2009

Chingford is on the end of the line, and not a place that sane Londoners would ever visit, except perhaps as a start or finish point for walks in Epping Forest. I’ve been there when walking the ‘London Loop’ path around the edges of Greater London, and also to Pole Hill, which has an obelisk marking the Greenwich Meridian when I did a project on that virtual line back in pre-Millennium days. I wasn’t surprised to find myself the only photographer who had come to record Class War’s second visit to to the place, along with a couple of people making a video about Class War for Vice.

I arrived half an hour or so early, and took the short walk up the hill in faint drizzle to Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge, built for Henry VIII in 1543, but given a makeover and a new name by his daughter in 1589, hurrying back down the hill in time to greet the Chingford candidate Lisa Mckenzie as she walked down the platform, wearing a bright red coat, something that has become a trademark of the ‘Class War Womens Death Brigade‘ since Jane Nicholl was picked on by police and arrested while wearing on at the Bonfire Night Poor Doors protest (see Poor Doors Guy Fawkes burn Boris.)

Class War Candidate for Chingford & Woodford Green arrives in the constituency

Jane Nicholl is arrested at the bonfire night protest for setting light to an effigy of Boris Johnson

The one piece of good news on Election Day was about Jane’s case, which came to court on that morning. Probably because of political pressure from on high heels in the Conservative Party, the police attempted to raise the seriousness of the charges, to a level where she could have been banged up for life, but almost hilariously failed to come up with any believable evidence. It was yet another case where the police were obviously committing perjury, clearly lying in the efforts to get a conviction, though as usual no action was taken against them.

In the end it became so ridiculous that the prosecution lawyer withdrew the case. The court also was of the opinion that burning an effigy of the London Mayor was a legitimate political protest and it was clear to all who had been present at the event that there was no danger to anyone caused by it. While our policing is often highly politicized, the courts do at least at time stand for a more neutral justice.

Lisa McKenzie and the Lucy Parsons banner opposite the Conservative HQ

Back in Chingford, it was not the most exciting of events to photograph, a small group of people moving down a fairly empty shopping street with a megaphone and a banner. If Chingford has a centre I’ve yet to find it, and nor did Class War. Some among the few constituents we met took the flyers and shared some very negative views of IDS, while others shrunk away in horror as if the gates of hell had opened.  I tried but failed to capture some of their expressions, but they turned away or fled at the sight of my camera. Though I did just manage to catch one old man on a passing bus scowling and making an angry ‘V’ sign.

The Metropolitan Police had clearly expected trouble and the group was provided with a police guard, a van following their progress a few yards behind as they walked down the street. Their senior officer provided the major interest in visual terms when he came to threaten one of the protesters with arrest if he continued to display a poster with a photograph of David Cameron and the word ‘Wanker’, which he said was offensive. As he walked back across the road, that protester folded the poster so that the the part he felt was offensive – Cameron’s face – was no longer visible and continued to display it.

The officer continued to stand across the road watching the protesters from beside the van full of police officers, as the rest of the protesters continued to display the Cameron poster and Ian Bone parodied the officer’s action and his stance as he stood sternly watching. The police took no further action, but continued to follow all of the Class War group until they finally got on the train and it pulled out of Chingford station.

Lisa puts a leaflet through the letterbox at Chingford Conservative HQ

After a number of speeches heard by only a few passing Chingfordians, Class War decided it was time to go to the pub, stopping briefly on the way for a photo opportunity outside the closed office of the Conservative Association.

NIKON D800: 18.0-105.0 mm at 26mm (39mm), 1/60s, f/4.5, ISO 6,400

Class War have serious political views, but believe that politics and protest should be fun as well as making their point. Given that the UK is now the most unequal of Western societies (equal worst with Russia) and that things are getting even worse since the financial crash their class-based analysis makes increasing sense. In part it harks back to the immediate post-war sense of purpose and community that gave us the NHS and the welfare state and opposes the selfishness and greed that Thatcher brought to the centre of politics – and which was perhaps the determining factor in our recent election  – and behind the odd Tory pledge to extend ‘right to buy’ to housing association tenants.  But Class War have no prospect of power, and standing a few candidates in the election isn’t about trying to gain seats, but about trying to raise issues – and in this case the issues around social class, welfare and benefits.

At what I tongue-in-cheek headlined ‘Class War party discuss tactics for Chingford General Election seat‘  and hoped I had made clear in the media summary ‘After a march and street rally in Station Rd, Chingford, Class War cadres adjourned with their candidate Lisa Mckenzie, who is opposing controversial Tory minister Iain Duncan Smith, to discus their forthcoming election campaign in the constituency’ there certainly was some talk of politics, but it was a rather more relaxed occasion, with a deal of hilarity over the Iain Duncan Smith masks that were brought out there.  It would perhaps have made for some more interesting images had some people worn those during the protest.

The picture above is one where I like the ‘red-eye’ effect from the mask held in front of Lisa’s red coat.  Perhaps I should have zoomed in to make it stand out more. Red-eye is of course often a nuisance in flash pictures, but here I was working with available light, though not a great deal was available in the dimly lit pub interior.

It was the first time that I remember using ISO6400. Matrix metering did a reasonable job of exposure despite the window light and the lens is wide open at 1/60s – any slower speed and there would almost certainly have been blurring due to subject movement.  Looked at closely – at 1:1 – the image lacks fine detail but is about as sharp as possible, with a noise (after suitable noise reduction) that has much of the feel of a ‘fast’ ISO400 colour film. The colour quality too is perhaps a little more filmic than when using digital at more moderate speeds.

It wasn’t a posed image. The two women are talking with a third just out of frame to my right, and I made several frames.  It’s the kind of situation where the noisy Nikon might have been a distraction, and the silent Fuji would have made working easier, but they had got used to be using a camera around them and were ignoring my presence.

Standing there, perhaps it was the presence of the gambling machine that made me think of this image as being rather like a fruit machine display, with the ‘Look £100 Jackpot’ standing in for the third result.  It would perhaps have been nice to read the full message on the t-shirt at left, but I rather like the hint of an ‘FU’ at the top left of it, and the ‘THE RICH’ below the IDS mask which blocks out the ‘CK FOOD BANKS’ on the top line and the word ‘EAT’ below.  It’s a very ‘Class War’ statement, and one like most of their slogans not intended to be taken literally.

More pictures from the street rally at Class War Chingford Election Launch, from the pub at Class War celebrate Election Launch, and from my journey from Chingford across London and into the occupation on the Aylesbury Estate with a few people from Class War at Class War go to Aylesbury Estate.

Continue reading Class War in Chingford

NIKON D800E: 16mm 1/250s, f/8, ISO 200, -0.3Ev

My photography has only had the most tenuous connection with the Royal College of Art, in that the first photographer I got to know in person had recently studied there and was still on the buzz, and that I’ve occasionally made just a little fun of John Hedgecoe who founded the photography course there in 1965, or rather his enormous output of glossily re-packaged how-to-do-it manuals on photography. You can find hundreds if not thousands of his pictures on Topfoto, but while it would be impossible to knock the professionalism, I find it had to see any personal style. It is perhaps curious that someone who so effectively epitomised photography as a trade should have been the driving force behind the UK’s most prestigious photography course at a college of art, though of course it does much to explain the impact that later courses at Derby and Trent had on photography in the UK.

But in the past months I’ve visited the Royal College twice, though not actually going inside, but in the company of cleaners, who have been demanding that they be paid the London Living Wage now, not from September as the college has offered. It may seem a relatively minor issue, but if you are living below the poverty line (and the living wage is the poverty line) then even a small difference is vital. If you can’t afford to take the tube for example, your daily journeys to and from work may add an hour or two to your working day, and not having to choose between eating enough and heating your flat is a great liberation.

The cleaners were joined in their protest by quite a few students from the college and you can read more about what actually happened in Poverty pay at the Royal College of Art.

NIKON D700: 16.0-35.0 mm at 16mm, 1/250s, f/8, ISO 640, +0.7Ev

The protest was at lunchtime, at the light was good, slightly hazy sun that meant the shadows were not too harsh, although the March sun was fairly low in the sky, and despite using a lens hood there were some images with ghosting and flare. With the 16-35mm the lens hood makes a difference but doesn’t work as well as it might at all focal lengths. Lens hoods have their limits in any case, and the ‘petal’ shaped Nikon hood does its best, though at times a carefully placed left hand resting on it can add a little extra shielding (though often it turns out to be slightly less carefully placed than it seemed through the viewfinder and require a little cropping to remove it.)

But it’s impossible to avoid flare and ghosting, and generally zoom lenses suffer more than primes. Optically there is little otherwise to choose between them now, largely a choice between the discipline of working with a single focal length and the versatility of the zoom. With digital giving high quality at high ISO, the wider apertures of primes are of less importance most of the time unless you want to make creative use of limited depth of field (and I seldom do.)

The effect of flare can be reduced by a little local use of the adjustment brush in Lightroom, adding some contrast and clarity, along with a variable change in exposure. If it’s only mild it can be more or less eliminated, but usually I prefer simply to reduce the effect. As lenses age, they usually seem to give more flare, perhaps because their inner glass surfaces become slightly dirty. Certainly the 16-35mm, now getting quite elderly, seems to be giving more flare.

The ghosts can sometimes improve an image, and although in theory they could be retouched, I seldom try. Doing it well is very tricky. I don’t think I touched the green and yellow disks in this image, but sometimes where they grab the eye too much I have been known to desaturate the colour somewhat and sometimes darken them slightly with the adjustment brush. I don’t feel doing so affects the integrity of the image – any more than removing the spots from sensor dust, both are results of defects in the apparatus.

NIKON D800E: 16.0 mm f/2.8, 1/250s, f/8, ISO 200, -0.3Ev

When the protest moved around to the other end of the college, adjoining the Albert Hall I took some images using the 16mm fisheye to let me get close to the protesters and still show that building very recognisably in the background.  Using the Fisheye-Hemi plugin does then eliminate some of the curvature and produce less distortion of people away from the centre – like the woman at the left edge. In the fisheye view she would be rather curved, and in a similar position on the 16mm rectilinear lens she would suffer a sideways stretch.

Tilting the fisheye when taking the picture has however resulted in verticals that diverge fairly dramatically towards the top of the picture. It perhaps helps in this composition. You can correct the divergence in Lightroom, but only at the expense of losing much of the image.

NIKON D700: 16.0-35.0 mm at 19mm, 1/200s, f/7.1, ISO 640, +0.7Ev

You can see some distortion in the face of the woman very close to the 16-35mm lens who was walking past me. Although often called ‘wide-angle distortion’ you can also get it from standard lenses when working very close to the subject. The relative distances from the centre and edges of the subject differ and thus so too does the magnification.

NIKON D800E: 18.0-105.0 mm at 45mm (68 equiv), 1/200s, f/7.1, ISO 200, -0.3Ev

Which is why a longer lens is more suitable when photographing fairly tight images of people, and a short telephoto – around 85mm on 35mm format – is often referred to as a ‘portrait lens‘. But you can of course take portraits with any lens. Hedgecoe’s best work was as a portrait photographer, particularly in black and white, and some of his best images were what is sometimes known as environmental portraiture, showing for example an artist in his studio, made with a wide angle to show the person in their surroundings. Others have made effective tightly cropped parts of faces with very long lenses.
Continue reading Poverty College

The picture above shows three police officers grabbing a banner from a protester at the protest outside the ‘rich door‘  of the flats at One Commercial St, the door at the front of the building on the main street that the social tenants in the block are banned from using.  As I’ve mentioned in previous posts here and in My London Diary, residents in the social housing and their visitors have to use a less convenient entrance in an often dirty alley at the side of the building – the poor door.

The banner the police are taking is one that has appeared at some of these and other recent protests being carried by Class War, and has been seen by thousands. Many of those who have seen it have been noticeably amused, some clearly expressing agreement, and while some may have felt it unfair or inappropriate, I’m not aware that anyone has been seriously offended by it.

It’s a banner that does cause me some problems, and I usually refer to it euphemistically as the ‘Political Leaders’ banner.  Similar posters with individual images of the party leaders were published by Class War at the time of the last election, and one over-zealous police officer organised a raid on the home of a well-known photographer who had displayed them in his front window.

There are two words that I seldom use in the caption across the bottom of the banner, the ‘f’ word and the ‘w’ word. I can remember the shock expressed in the press when the first of these was first used on live TV in the UK, but now it, like the ‘w’ word is commonplace, though still to some extent controlled.

We don’t often say it in polite middle-class company, but for the great majority of the population it is a part of normal speech; when I first went to work in an engineering factory as a student it accounted for around 50% of the speech of some of the workers on the shop floor, and there would be relatively few sentences without it. Travelling around London on public transport or foot I overhear it in frequent use. We may dislike it or disapprove of it, but it has little power to shock or offend.

After police seized the posters in 2010, the photographer concerned had a surreal exchange with the police, which resulted in him replacing the posters in his window but with the word ‘onanist’ replacing ‘wanker’. Later, a court decided the police action had infringed his right to freedom of speech and expression, and the photographer was awarded compensation for the police actions.

After the protesters had lit flaming torches and a green smoke flare, a police officer decided it was time the police took some action. He went up to the people holding the banner and told them it was offensive and they must put it away.

They asked him if anyone had been offended by it, and fairly clearly no one other than that officer had been, but he and another officer then the officers then warned individually each person holding it that they were committing an offence and might be arrested, and then seized the banner.

One of the people holding the banner continued to hold on to it as the police tried to pull it away, saying they had no right to take it. After they had forced it out of his hands, he was led away, and handcuffed.

Eventually police reinforcements arrived, including a more senior officer, who appeared not to be too pleased at what had happened, but the arrested man was taken away to the police station and the protest continued more or less as usual.

The last I heard of the case was that the police were trying to get the man to accept a fixed penalty so that the case would not go to court, where a conviction might be difficult.

The photographs – as often in other events – make things appear very much more ordered than they were. One thing that is largely missing from my pictures are the half a dozen photographers also trying to photograph them, and the crowd of perhaps twenty protesters also trying to see what was happening and at times to intervene while the banner was being grabbed and during the arrest.

A wide-angle lens lets me get in close, but its also vital to try to anticipate how the scene will develop and where it would be possible to take pictures. It’s also important that while recording the actions of the police photographers don’t impede them. Most of these images were made with the D800E and the 18-105mm DX lens at 18mm – 27mm equivalent. I was working at ISO3200 but on some images there was a couple of stops of exposure compensation, so making it more like ISO12,800. The reflective strips on police clothing give problems with flash, and the exposure compensation stops these burning out, though quite a lot of burning in of them and the fluorescent green jackets was needed.

There is also a high degree of editing. Much of the time it was quite crowded and people were pushing and bumping into me and even though I was using flash some are not sharp. The light was also fairly poor for autofocus. And many pictures were rejected because of people getting in my way as I was taking pictures. Of course I will have got in their way too.

The flaming torches also present something of a challenge so far as exposure is concerned. Getting detail in those flames as well as the rest of the scene isn’t too easy even given the great dynamic range of the D800E, and there are a few pictures where I didn’t quite do it as well as I would have hoped.  But others seem to have held the detail in the flames well – with the help of a little flash and quite a lot of Lightroom.

You can see more at Police seize Class War banner.

Continue reading Police nick Class War banner