Category: Political Issues

A short section of the seven mile scarf after joining

Seven miles long – and they had a bit left over. CND’s Wool Against Weapons protest on Nagasaki Day, 69 years after the second atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, stretched all the way from the atomic bomb factory in Burghfield to the better-known site at Aldermaston, both in rural Berkshire.  Neither end is particularly easy to get to by public transport, though I have at various times walked most of the way from London to Aldermaston, (including the final Reading to Aldermaston section of the CND Aldermaston March in 2004) it didn’t seem sensible to try to cover a 7 mile long event entirely on foot.

Joining the lengths of scarf at the roadside

Hand-knitting or crocheting a scarf of this length and getting it into place clearly needed a great deal of planning and coordination. If people were knitting a 5 ft scarf you need a thousand of them for each mile and one of the major points about the protest was to get a great many people around the country – including many who for various reasons are unable or unwilling to get out on the streets – to participate. Groups around the country organised the knitting and brought the scarves joined together in rolls of around a hundred foot to centres along the route, from where they were stretched out and joined together.  Along the route there were ‘mile posts’ with small groups coordinating the event and some serving tea and coffee and snacks,  each one allocated to a different region.

Rolling out a spool of joined scarf lengths along the route

I could have got a lift to the route from the nearest rail station – Mortimer – but decided I needed to be more mobile, and the ideal way for the kind of distance and roads involved was a bicycle.  It would have been a long ride from home, but was easy to take it with me on the train to Reading, with Burghfield, where the London Region of CND was meeting a around half an hour’s ride away.

I’d planned it so I could take a relatively slow ride along the whole route, jumping off my bike wherever I saw an opportunity to take photographs, stopping at all of the mile posts to photograph what was happening there, and also between them where people were rolling out and joining up the scarf.  A bike has the great advantage that you can jump off anywhere, lean the bike against a fence or a tree or on the ground and take pictures. The route was along narrow country roads – some quite busy with traffic – and with relatively few places where it would be easy to park a car, particularly as the police were intent on keep traffic moving along the road as well as avoiding the protesters becoming roadkill.  It took me around 75 minutes to cover the 7 miles to the fence of the site at Aldermaston.

Two women were still knitting away at Aldermaston. Eventually the scarves will be turned into blankets for refugees

I’d wanted to be sure to cover as much as possible of the activities involved in the protest, and arriving at Aldermaston I was pleased to find a couple of women still knitting scarves, as well as a large display of various banners tied to the fence and to roadside trees.

‘Pom Poms not Bombs’ on the fence at Aldermaston AWE

Going back to Burghfield was considerably faster – helped by a little wind and a longish downhill stretch, but mainly by only stopping once to take a few pictures – I made it roughly three times as fast. I even sped past the turning to Burghfield, but quickly realised my mistake as there was no roadside scarf, and had to brake and turn around.

Anti-nuclear protesters from France joined in and had knitted some scarves

The event had been planned to reach its climax at 1pm exactly, and stewards were phoning anxiously to check along the route that the whole length had been joined. They got the message just in time and everyone along the route was lifting up the scarf and making a lot of noise with bells and whistles.  I’d decided to run along and take pictures of as much as I could during the few minutes they would keep this up, keeping on foot as there would be people to photograph every few yards of my way, and this worked well. Stopping to take pictures meant I only covered a little over half a mile, although I got quite exhausted from running with a heavy bag between the frequent stops to take pictures.

Dancing with the scarf where it crossed a minor side road on the route

I stopped and talked with one group who were holding the scarf at a minor road junction  – lifting it up over a car that wanted to go down the side road, and dancing around the rest of the time.  The sun was coming almost directly from behind them and their shadows were dancing with them on the road.  The strong back-lighting took a little work in Lightroom to get the results that I wanted, but there was no way I could have used flash fill with a group strung out away from the camera.

CND symbols and Pete Seeger’s ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ took me back to the sixties

Back at the Burghfield base things were very much getting back into sixties mode – I’m sure they were singing ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ when I took the picture above and there were other songs and poetry readings, as well as some political speeches. I sat around for a while to recover from my run up the lane and back and after listening to CND General Secretary Kate Hudson decided I had the energy to cycle back to Reading for the train home and the lengthy editing of my pictures.

I was quite pleased with the set of pictures, taken with my usual Nikon D700 with 16-35mm and D800E with 18-105mm DX, though more for the overall view they gave of the event than for any individual images, though I had a nice set from my run after the joining up had been confirmed.  But there were one or two places where back home looking at the pictures I could clearly see I’d missed an opportunity. The most glaring was at the Aldermaston fence, where I hadn’t recorded the longest and largest banner in a single image.

I’ve got ‘What would you spend‘ in one frame and ‘you spend £100 million on?’ in another, but really getting the whole thing together would have been rather better!  If I’d taken them from the same place with the same focal length I could have joined them up, but rather better would have been to have used the 8mm fisheye to get it all in a single frame.  I was just in too much of a rush, too worried about actually making it back to Burghfield, and not realising quite how much faster my return journey would be.

Wool Against Weapons.

Continue reading A long pink scarf

After working and studying in London, Marcus Garvey returned to his native Jamaica in 1914 and on 1 August founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) to unite all of Africa and its diaspora into “one grand racial hierarchy.”  The movement flourished when he took it to the USA and in 1920 claimed 4 million members.  August 1 had been chosen to found the organisation as it was Emancipation Day, the anniversary of the legal ending of slavery in the British Empire in 1834.

The slave trade had been banned in 1807, and two hundred years later I had photographed events commemorating this in Central London and in Kennington, Brixton and Clapham, which I described as “the spiritual and physical home of the abolition movement.”

As I wrote then, “fortunes made from slavery helped to build many of the institutions from which we still benefit, including our many of our great galleries and museums. Slavery founded many of our banks and breweries and other great industries, and made Britain a wealthy nation.” All of us in the UK – black as well as white – benefit from this legacy, even if, as I also pointed out, “the same wealthy elite that treated Africans so callously exploited the poor in Britain. My ancestors were thrown off their land and probably some were imprisoned for their religious beliefs by these same elites.”

The bottle is of African Palm Juice, traditional for libations in many West African ceremonies

Since at least 1999, some African organisations and countries have been pressing for compensation to the descendants of those who were enslaved by the Atlantic Slave Trade, and the Marcus Garvey anniversary event in Brixton was a gathering before a march to Parliament to present a claim for reparations.

Among those at the event were a number of people who recognised me and greeted me, and a few  who wanted to know why I was taking photographs – who I was working for. As usual I answered them politely, telling them I was a freelance photographer with a particular interest in London and its communities and in protests, and that my work went into agencies and could be used in newspapers, magazines and books, and almost all seemed satisfied. Except one man, in pseudo-military garb, who felt that my presence as a white man at this event wasn’t appropriate, and threatened that some people present might violently object. But others were much more welcoming and clearly happy to be photographed, some asking me to take their pictures.

I’d hoped to photograph the start of the march but things seemed to be running rather late and I had to leave to cover another event while the speeches were continuing.

Pictures and Text: Rastafari demand reparations for slave trade
Continue reading Marcus Garvey Centenary

Nikon D800E, 18-105mm DX, 75mm

The last Saturday in July saw London’s largest demonstration for some time, against the Israeli invasion of Gaza. I don’t know how many people there were taking part in it, far too many for me to make a reliable estimate, although I did walk from the front to the back of the march as it was leaving from close to the Israeli embassy.

Following the meeting between photographers from the London Photographers Branch of the NUJ and people at Stop the War, who were the march organisers which I mentioned in Gaza Stop the War, there were considerably better arrangements for the press at the opening rally in Kensington High St, and we were able to work far more sensibly, though outside this press area the crowds obviously made things difficult.

Nikon D800E, 18-105mm DX, 21mm

Things were still just a little tricky with access to the actual platform – which obviously does need proper control – but eventually after waiting five minutes or so I was allowed up to take the couple of pictures of the crowds which I’d decided I wanted. But I resented wasting five minutes of my time for no good reason when I could have done it in ten seconds. Not that I mind waiting, but that five minutes would have been spent getting other pictures than might have been better for me and for the cause.

Nikon D700, 16-35mm FX, 16mm

At the head of the march too there were still the usual problems, with photographers having to snatch images from outside a large and heavily stewarded ‘box’ in front of the main banner.  It would be less of a problem if it was half as long, but Stop the War miss out by not allowing photographers proper access for a few minutes at the start of the march, and also at key sites where the march halted – for example outside Downing St.

I walked over half a mile with the front of the march, trying to get decent pictures, but then gave up and worked my way back to the end of the march, sometimes waiting for people to walk past me, sometimes walking backwards inside the march, sometimes going on but slowly making my way back to the start point just over half an hour after the start of the march. By then I’d probably covered about two miles to get nowhere, walking and running backwards and forwards and it was hot and I was tired.  I wanted to be in Whitehall, three miles away when the front of the march arrived there, so I took the Underground to Westminster and walked up Whitehall, stopping for ten minutes or so to photograph a vigil opposite Downing St by ‘Stolen Children of the UK’, families whose children have been taken away from them by the secretive  family courts.

Nikon D700, 16-35mm FX, 16mm

As I was talking, I heard shouting from Trafalgar Square, and rushed to meet the front-runners of the Gaza march – now well ahead of the main banner – just as they turned into Whitehall for the final half mile.  Five minutes later came the ‘box’ of stewards and the main banner, and I took a picture from above the box, standing on the plinth of one of the statues in Whitehall, before infiltrating behind the main banner and photographing inside the march.

Nikon D700, 16-35mm FX, 16mm

As we came into Parliament Square, one of the stewards whose arm I was leaning against told me to go past her and take pictures and for the last couple of hundred yards I was able to photograph the front of the march with the Houses of Parliament behind them and I was able to work more freely for a minute or so.

During the rally that followed there was also a good area from which the press could work and I photographed  a number of speakers before heat and exhaustion became too much for me and I left for home.

Israeli Embassy rally – End Gaza Invasion
End Gaza Invasion March to Parliament
Stop the Massacre in Gaza Rally

Continue reading End Gaza Invasion

An umbrella adds to the colour

The annual Al Quds (Jerusalem) Day march in London has often aroused controversy, and at times this has made it difficult to cover, with those taking part being very suspicious of photographers. As someone who likes to work close to people with a wide-angle lens, it often meant a considerable amount of argument with stewards to be allowed inside the march. But things have seemed different in the last couple of years, and I had no problems at all this year, with everyone being very open and friendly.

Women shout up at the windows from which vegetables had been thrown at the marchers

The only incident of opposition to the march I was aware of came after the march had gone a few hundred yards south from its starting point at the side of the BBC’s Broadcasting House when a few root vegetables where thrown down at marchers from an upper floor window. I didn’t see them come down, though I was only a few yards away, but I was photographing marchers and not looking up, but I heard the angry response from the crowd, who stopped and shouted up – but whoever had thrown them was no longer visible.

Later I heard that there had also been a small group of far-right protesters who turned up during the rally at the end of the march, outside the US Embassy, but I had left the march well before it reached the embassy.

Much of the opposition in past years has concentrated on the backing for the Islamic Human Rights Commission, whose Al Quds Day Committee organises the event, by the Iranian regime, and Al Quds day was introduced by Ayatollah Khomeini. And although the march is supported by a wide range of groups it is still seen by some as being dominated by Iran. Clearly this year the march was almost entirely about Palestine, with the then ongoing attack by Israeli forces on Gaza at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

It’s always difficult to know how to approach things. There were two large banners of the Iranian leaders, and just a few stalwart supporters of Khomeini you can see in my pictures and who I’ve photographed in previous years. They were there, and in their way photogenic, but unrepresentative. I photographed to a handful of Hezbollah flags, but there were very few on show, whereas some years ago there were large groups of them.

This is also an event that has inevitably been accused of anti-Semitism, and I was looking for anything that would substantiate that. Being against Zionism, or against the use of disproportionate force by the Israeli forces and their killing of children and other civilians is clearly not anti-Semitism. Even the support for groups such as Hezbollah isn’t necessarily anti-Semitic – as the Jews who marched as usual at the front of the Al Quds procession and were greeted as old friends by many of the Muslim leaders make clear, you can be Jewish and opposed to the state of Israel. And as the sheet of slogans held in the hand of the man leading the chanting says ‘Judaism is OK, Judaism Yes, Zionism No‘.

Perhaps the closest I came to any evidence of it was the use by just one of the several thousand protesters on the march of a quotation attributed to former Prime Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon, one of several disputed quotations by him. There seems to be no evidence that he ever made this particular statement about burning Palestinian children which appears to be entirely fabricated. It first appeared on the web around 2002 and in 2003 IHRC published it, while stating they ‘could not independently verify its authenticity‘, which seems irresponsible given its inflammatory nature.

Photographically things were pretty straightforward, with just a little light rain meaning I had to keep vigilant for raindrops on the lens filters, and work with a cloth in my hands to give the occasional wipe. But it wasn’t raining that hard, but the light did go down a little, and most of the pictures on the D700 were taken at ISO 1600. I didn’t get around the changing the ISO on the D800E from my normal ISO 800, but it didn’t seem to cause me any problems. Perhaps for once I had image stabilisation turned on – it often seems to mysteriously get turned off.

As usual I using the D700 with the 16-35mm, switching to the 70-300mm for some more distant views of the march from a higher viewpoint. The 70-300mm is another full-frame lens and I generally prefer to use it on the D700 rather than get the larger file sizes from the D800E.  The 18-105mm was on the D800E all the time, with its DX format giving sensible file sizes (15.4Mp) and an equivalent focal length of 27-158mm.

So there was quite an overlap in the focal lengths covered between the this and the 70-300mm, which I think is useful, as it saves needing to switch between them so much. There is also an overlap between the ranges of the 16-35mm and the 18-105DX that is equally useful, especially when I raise the wrong camera to my eye. I still find it confusing at times that the smaller lens has the greater focal length.

Al Quds Day march for Jerusalem

Continue reading Al Quds march

I can’t understand why London has always failed to sort out its problems over airports, although it’s something that has affected me much of my life.  I was born just a mile or two from the site of one of London’s earliest airports, and with another just down the road. As a kid I played in my back garden with the planes streaming into Heathrow sometimes so low overhead that I felt I could reach up and touch them and had nightmares having seen them come over with flames coming from their engines.

Speeches after protest march at Harmondsworth against proposed Third Runway at Heathrow, 2003

Heathrow was a mistake from the start, pushed through by dressing it up as a military airport (which wasn’t needed)  in WW2 by people who knew it would not get approval as a civilian project. By the 1960s it was glaringly obvious that London needed a new airport, and both the Roskill Commission and the Edwards Report concluded Heathrow was in the wrong place (and was badly designed.)  Roskill called for a new airport, suggesting 3 sites to the north of London and Foulness, eventually making Cublington their preferred choice. PM Edward Heath responded to nimby pressure and rejected this, going instead for Foulness (Maplin Sands),  and things started to get moving, only to be cancelled a couple of years later as too expensive.

Cliffe, 2002

Various studies and proposals followed, with another estuary site, Cliffe, being finally rejected in 2003, and Boris coming up with his island plan in 2008. Another runway for Heathrow – which would have made the problem of it being in the wrong place even more acute – was rejected in 2010, but in 2012 the Davies Commission was set up in a thinly veiled attempt to revive this dead duck.

Climate Rush protest against Heathrow Expansion, 2009

Meanwhile, other countries facing similar problems have gone ahead and built their new airports in sensible places. In London we’ve made things worse by developing yet another airport in the wrong place, London City Airport. Roskill I think got it more or less right back in 1971, and we should be considering sites in that general area, around the M1 and the A1.

‘The Future’ protest at London City Airport, 2014

So when Tamsin Omond  handed me a flyer and invited me to photograph a protest by a group who call themselves ‘The Future’ at London City Airport, I was keen to do so, even when it did mean travelling across London rather earlier than I like.

The Eye, The Future. London City Airport, 2014

On their web site they write:

The Eye is The Future’s symbol.  A large circle drawn around the eye to mean:

We are connected:
We unite with a circle drawn around our eye to fight for our future.

We are the watchers:
We judge the powerful when they do not act to protect the future from climate change.

We are the creators:
We refuse to be victims. We create our own world.

Continue reading London Airports

Israel began its 2014 military attack against Gaza, ‘Operation Resolute Cliff ‘ (though they gave it the different, more defensive-sounding title ‘Protective Edge‘ for the English speaking international audience) on 8 July, although the ground invasion only began on the 17th, so ‘Stop the War‘ had some time to prepare its first major national protest in London on the 19th July.  And it was a large protest, with thousands filling Whitehall at the start and more at Kensington High St for the final rally, if not on quite the same scale as the truly huge protests before the invasion of Iraq.

Like most people in this country, I was appalled by the hundreds of innocent civilians who had been killed in Gaza, and the huge imbalance of power and destruction between the two sides. Of course I’m against attacks on Israel, but looking at the coverage by world news channels – and even some reports from BBC reporters, even if the BBC at times seemed to be an Israeli propaganda channel – the attacks seemed entirely disproportionate. If I’d not been at the protest as a photographer and journalist I would have been there as a protester.

I’ve had a long and slightly fraught relationship with Stop the War. Back in 2002, as well as photographing marches and rallies in London, I was also out in my local area most Friday evenings holding a placard or handing out leaflets to workers on their way home. A dozen or so of my images were included in the the book ‘Stop The War: A Graphic History‘ published to mark 10 years of its protests, and some of these are among those I published here in a post when this came out.

But there are some issues over which I’ve disagreed with Stop the War – in particular over Syria, where I felt our government should have given much more support to the Free Syrian Army while their opposition supported the Assad regime with its long and bloody record of oppression of the Syrian people. I’d also felt, back in 2003, that they had lost their nerve – or had been so dominated by outdated political thinking – that having won the arguments and gained such widespread support across the British people, they had failed to take advantage of this. So while I support – and admire much of what they have done, I’m not uncritical.

And, as a photographer and journalist, it’s my job to be critical. I’d heard many accusations that those protesting against the Israeli army attacks were anti-Semitic. Was there any evidence of this on this march at at the rally. Plenty of Jewish marchers, some of them, along with many others on the march calling for a boycott of Israeli goods. A few Israeli flags on a painting, on placards. So far as I tell none were being used in an anti-Semitic manner, but were calling for an end to the bombing of children and other war crimes by Israeli forces. Placards and speaker after speaker making clear they were not opposed to the Jewish people or the existence of Israel but against Zionism and the criminal attacks on civilians in Gaza, calls for Israel to respect international law and UN resolutions.

Of course there was considerable support for Hamas, who were elected as the majority party in Gaza in the 2006 elections, taking complete power there later in the year after a misguided US-backed attempt to unseat them. Israel’s response was to impose a blockade on Gaza, a form of collective punishment on the whole population of Gaza which is almost universally considered illegal. And many if not all of those taking part in the protest were calling for the lifting of the blockade.

I also saw – and made sure I photographed – four people carrying Hezbollah flags (and one with them a Lebanese flag.) This is a group widely regarded around the world as a terrorist organisation and who consider Israel to be an illegitimate state. Although officially they distinguish between Judaism and Zionism, many leading members are recorded as having made anti-Semitic statements.

I managed to sneak in and take a picture of Jocelyn Hurndall, Kamel Hawwash, Garth Hewitt, Ismail Patel, Andy Slaughter MP, Rushanara Ali MP , Diane Abbot MP & Lindsey German holding the main banner

As a photographer I’ve often had problems with the stewarding of ‘Stop the War’ organised protests, with some over-officious stewarding.  I’ve on occasion been assaulted by one of their stewards and narrowly avoided possibly serous injury by their disregard for my safety.  At this event the stewards made it very difficult to photograph the people holding the main banner – mainly the speakers – at any stage during the march, and failed to provide any working space for the press at the pre-march rally.

Back at one Stop the War march in 2002, photographers sat down on Park Lane in front of the march bringing it to a halt because we were not allowed access – and negotiated five minutes to take photos before the march continued. Perhaps we should take direct action more often! Though it’s perhaps better to work through the NUJ (see later.)

George Galloway MP

Things were a little better at the rally following the march, in the main road close to the Israeli embassy, but failed to give any real space in front of the speakers for photography. A narrow two foot gap between the front of the stage and the crowd barriers was not really enough, and those photographers who managed to get access (myself included) were crowded  at one side, hoping that the speakers would occasionally glance in our direction.

Although there were all sorts of people in this small area – including many taking pictures on their phones – many of the press were refused access. The stewards controlling the entrance asked who people were working for and refused entry to photographers with UK Press Cards who told them they were freelances  – as the great majority of photographers now are, while allowing others without proper press cards in to the area. I  was admitted because I gave the name of the agency I send work to rather than saying ‘freelance’.

Following this protest, representatives from the NUJ London Photographers Branch met with Stop the War, and at the next Gaza protest we got some extra space and the stewards controlling entry recognised the UK Press Card.  Good relations between protesters and press are in everyone’s interest.

See a rather large selection of images from the event at End Gaza Killing Now.

Continue reading Gaza Stop the War