April Roundup

The last few days of April were busy ones for me, and it was hard to keep up with putting work on-line on my own site – hard at times to keep up with sending them to Demotix and elsewhere in the hope of sales. More hope than reality as the media move increasingly away from real news towards the manufacture of celebrity – and increasingly pay pennies rather than pounds.  And now I’m struggling with events from May, though I’m trying to take things a little easier.

Stoke Poges Walk

Ten Years of Genocide in Darfur

London Invaded by Sci-Fi Fantasy
Iranian Greens May Day Protest
Workers Memorial Day

Hizb ut-Tahrir protest Bangladeshi Regime
Lonely Vigil at US Embassy

Save Ealing Hospital & the NHS
March of the Beekeepers
Get Britain Cycling Report Launch
UK herbalists Want Regulations
Gurkhas Call for equal treatment
Drax Biomass Threat to our Planet
Bring Shaker Aamer Home
Protest the Privatisation of NHS

Stand Off at Venezuelan Embassy
Copts Say End Egyptian Persecution
Armenians Remember the Genocide
Supreme Court Nyamgiri Decision
G4S – Palestinian Prisoners Day
Don’t Hang Prof Bhullar
Outlaw Caste Discrimination
Release Palestinian Prisoners
Who wants to evict a Millionaire?
‘3 Cosas’ -Sick Pay, Holidays & Pensions
Feathers Fly in Trafalgar Square
PMOI Protest Iraqi killings
No to Bedroom Tax & Benefit Caps
Vaisakhi “Save a Live” Vigil
Thames Path: Cricklade to the Source
Thames Path: Buscot to Cricklade

Thames Path: Shifford to Buscot
Nuclear Fool’s Day – Scrap Trident

Continue reading April Roundup

Bee-have

The trouble with bees is that they are dying, which is a disaster for us all, but also on a more trivial level that they seem unavoidably to lead to bad puns. On the morning of Friday 26th April I sat at my computer and began to type in a status update, ‘To Bee or not to Bee...’ but I think (and hope) that I came to a decision, jumped up, grabbed my camera bag and headed to the station on my way to Westminster before I pressed the enter key.

Part of the reason why I’d been in two minds whether to go had been the huge publicity about the issue, with mentions in the daily papers and that morning on Today programme and Radio 4 news; I didn’t know if it was going to be a very big protest, but I was sure the media would be swarming over it.

My indecision meant I missed my first train (not really the first, but the first without taking out a mortgage for the ticket) as well as the next slow service, and got to Parliament Square half an hour later than if I’d not prevaricated, and had missed the first 15 or so minutes of the photo-call. I’d been right about the media scrum, with almost as many photographers and videographers as people taking part in the protest.

As usual, the picture that almost everyone was trying to take – in a line 3 or 4 deep – wasn’t of great interest – a big crowd behind the main ‘March of the Beekeepers‘ banner and behind that Big Ben, but I took a couple of frames just because it was there when I arrived, before moving away and into the crowd to find something more of interest. I tried to make use of the many placards close together, with glimpses of that clock tower between the placards, and concentrated on single people or small groups in the foreground, particularly those who had gone to some trouble with flowers or bee-keeping clothing.


Just how much Big Ben do you need in a picture?

Perhaps this much?

After a while I got fed up with the big clock, and tried playing with hiding it or almost hiding it, and then tried to forget it and concentrate on the people and their costumes and props. There was a group in full bee suits, but somehow I couldn’t quite get to grips with them – the costumes were just too overpowering.

I made one picture playing with Big Ben that I did rather like, where I was able to use several circular shapes in the image of a woman in a bee costume playing a tenor sax. It wasn’t entirely straightforward because she was swaying around as she played, but I was able to frame the clock in the bend at the neck of the instrument, with one of the two balls on springs on the top of her head in the sky just to the left of the spire and the bell of the sax (elliptical rather than circular) at the bottom right of the image. Looking at if afterwards I wasn’t sure if I should have framed it a little wider to get the ball on the second of her antennae in the image as well, rather than choosing to cut off the image at the top of the bell tower (which also has a tiny ball.)

By now I’d realised that there were several celebrities present, though I hadn’t recognised them including fashion designers Dame Vivienne Westwood and Katharine Hamnett. But Katharine Hamnett was carrying the box containing the petition, a yellow box labelled ‘SAVE THE BEES’ and they were on their way to Downing St to hand it in.

Now we were in a position for one of those familiar arguments between those photographers who want to get in close and those who keep saying “lets go back, guys, so we can get a long shot.”  This got a little more acrimonious than usual when one very young lady, I think still a student, called a highly respected press photographer easily old enough to be her father, a “dirty pap“.  Anyway while the argument was continuing – and I couldn’t move back because my way was blocked by the photographers behind, I got in close to get the image I wanted, with a great feeling of movement and a four nicely placed bees, as well as the petition and the two designers with people in bee veils behind them. When I could manage to move back so that anyone who wanted a long shot had a clearer view –  a TV crew  jumped in the gap holding up the whole protest as well as greatly annoying the photographers. It wasn’t so much the camera but the large and hairy microphone on a boom that was really a pain for all the rest of us, and the interview completely stopped what was happening until the organisers broke in and said that they had to get on to meet their pre-arranged time at Downing St.

I didn’t bother to go inside through the security check at Downing St – things in there are seldom of great interest, although editors seem to like the boring pictures – and made my way back to Parliament Square for some more pictures of the bulk of the protesters who had stayed there while the small group went to deliver the petition.

The crowd there was getting quite animated, chanting various slogan, and there were a number of people taking videos and photographs. When one of the videographers walked in front of me, I decided it was time I moved in closer too, and did so, only to have another of them come and actually pull at on my jacket and tell me I had got in ‘his shot’. I ignored him as best I could while I finished photographing the person in front of me and then moved back.

These things often happen when a lot of people are working together, but it’s something you really just have to live with, and while most of us respond sympathetically to a polite request, grabbing people just is not acceptable. I hadn’t got in the scene he was taking on purpose – and was just as much a part of the event as whatever he was filming. This was an real event not something set up in a studio for his convenience.

More pictures at March of the Beekeepers.

________________________________________________________

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

________________________________________________________

Time to Bring Home Shaker Aamer

Shaker Aamer should never have been held by the Americans. He should never have been tortured at Bagram. Guantanamo should never have been set up, and he should never have been kept there for more than 11 years. But he is still there, and still being tortured. Like many of the others held there he has been cleared for release. Like most he is now on hunger strike.

I’m one of the 117,387 UK citizens who signed a petition on the government web site calling for his release, which led to a debate by MPs in Westminster Hall on 24 April.  And while I’ve photographed and written about numerous protests calling for his release and put this on the web, it is only in recent weeks that the campaign to release him has really emerged in the mass media in the UK.  Obviously I’m pleased it has, and hope that it will lead to real action by the government, rather than them supporting the case in public while in private agreeing with the US government that releasing him to the UK would bring out into the open a great deal of evidence about both US torture and the complicity of our security services in this.

I wasn’t there for the debate, nor for all of the protest, leaving shortly after it began to photograph a protest in the City, and only getting back a short while before it finished. But I was please to be able to hear and photograph Conservative MP for Battersea Jane Ellison, one of a number of MPs who came out to talk the the protesters. Aamer’s family live in her constituency and she has given her support to the campaign and hopes to be able to have a debate again shortly inside the House of Commons.

Continue reading Time to Bring Home Shaker Aamer

Down Three, Up One

When I get news of a forthcoming protest – from any of a wide range of sources – I put it in my diary and usually on the night before I copy down the relevant details onto a small sheet of paper, usually around A6 in size to put in my pocket when I go to take pictures. Sometimes I need to do a little research, both to find out what the particular event is about, and sometimes to check on travel times, ways to travel and so on. Some days very little seems to be happening, and on other days events in London are just like the buses, they all come along together.

Saturday April 20th was one of those days when quite a few things were happening (or were supposed to be happening) and it wasn’t physically possible for one person to be at all of them. So I’d spent some time deciding which it was feasible to cover, thinking about when I would need to leave one event to be at the next one in time to take pictures and how I would travel between them.

On paper it looked good, and I left home hoping to cover five events, four protests and one of the more commercial events that take place from time to time in Trafalgar Square, that Saturday to celebrate St Georges day (which was actually 3 days later.)

The first event was an annual march to remember the Armenian Genocide, which began with a massacre on April 24, 1915 when the Turkish authorities arrested around a thousand leading members of the Armenian community in the capital city of Constantinople (now Istanbul) and murdered them. Turkey still hasn’t acknowledged its role in the atrocities which continued off and on for the next 8 years with around 1.5 million Armenians being killed. The Armenians demand that Turkey recognise it as a condition of entry into the EU, and also want it to be on the UK National Curriculum.

I felt that the picture I took while people were meeting for the march on a side-street on Oxford St somehow fitted well. The national flags, the uniforms, the wreath and of course the expression on the young woman at the right of the image, which for me was one of yearning or longing. Although I doubt if it was for her lost country, it served the purpose.

Technically, the lighting contrast in the scene, with the important figures in the shade and bright sunlight on the background was pretty impossible. Working with flash was out of the question as it would have alerted her and the others to what I was doing. This wasn’t the first frame, but I think the third of the situation,and with flash that girl and probably the others would have been posing for me. giving a very different – and less interesting – image. I realised as I was taking it that it would need considerable post-processing to get the effect I wanted – and it was only just possible.

There was just enough detail left in the over-bright background for me to burn down, and just enough light on the foreground figures for me to work with, altering the contrast slightly and making things a little brighter.

I walked with the Armenians to their laying of wreaths at the Cenotaph – you can see the pictures in Armenians Remember the Genocide – and then left them to go back to Trafalgar Square, where St Georges Day was being celebrated officially. But  it didn’t seem to be celebrated at all, or at least not in any interesting way – so after walking around the square and taking a good look at things I crossed that off from my list of events.

Next was a protest against the bedroom tax, also planned for Trafalgar Square, which I expected to take place on the North Terrace, and I sat down on the wall in front of the National Gallery and waited for it to start. By the time I’d finished my sandwiches, there were two people present, along with a pile of placards, and it was around half an hour after the advertised time. I decided it made more sense to do something else, and took the tube to South Kensington, where supporters of the newly elected President Maduro were preparing to protect the Venezuelan embassy from his opponents.


Supporters of President Maduro discuss how they should protect the embassy

There were around 30 people there when I arrived, with a megaphone and the embassy wall had a number of posters and banners stuck to it.  The opposition were due to arrive in a few minutes, and there were only a handful of them present, but soon more began to arrive, and an interesting situation developed, with considerable arguments between the two groups, who faced each other a few yards away.

The police were rather late to arrive on the scene, but came eventually and stood in a line between the two groups, though I don’t think their presence was necessary as neither side seemed likely to become physical. Shortly after this I left, intending to return later, as I expected a march to be taking place back in Westminster.

On my way back I took a second look for the bedroom tax protest. Although there is considerable outrage against it, there seem to have been many small uncoordinated protests rather than any large ones in London, and the one I was looking for was still too small to be seen! Nor could I find any sign of the march I had been expecting – so that was the third disappointment of the day.

But then I came across a protest – Copts Say End Egyptian Persecution – I’d not known about, taking place in Old Palace Yard, where Copts living in the UK were protesting against the new regime in Egypt, led by President Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, which they accuse of being behind recent attacks on Copts, including an attack on St Mark’s Cathedral in Cairo when a funeral was being held of five men killed in earlier violent clashes in the northern suburbs of Cairo. This was something I knew little about but was pleased to be able to report. The speaker who got most applause while I was there was an Egyptian Muslim who spoke about the need for the different communities in Egypt to live and work together.

As that protest drew to a close I hurried back to South Kensington, where both sides had increased in numbers, with many more of the opposition to Maduro having turned up and making a lot of noise.  Most Venezuelans working in the UK are from the middle classes who feel threatened by the popular reforms that President Chavez brought in, and they had come to make their opposition clear.

But although they had the numbers, the supporters of Maduro – for me at least – had the winning argument. Although the margin by which Maduro won was smaller than expected, it was still a majority, and rather more convincing than that by which many other democratic leaders have been elected in recent years. More in Stand Off at Venezuelan Embassy.

From my original five stories, I’d only managed to cover two. It isn’t unusual to find the occasional event that only exists in the imagination of those posting the details on the web, or that turns out not to be worth covering, but things are not usually that bad. Fortunately it’s also not unusual in London to find things happening that I knew nothing about as I’d done on this occasion, and I felt quite pleased with my day despite the disappointments.
Continue reading Down Three, Up One

The Marquis of Lansdowne

The Marquis of Lansdowne is not my name-dropping of a personal friend, but a former London pub, fortunately still standing in Hoxton, but not in ale since around 2000 (and possibly not a place I would have cared to frequent since it had a make-over as ‘Partners’ around ten years earlier.) Recently it has been threatened with demolition by plans for a  £13.2m expansion of the neighbouring Geffrye Museum.

Back in the 1980s I began over a project to photograph the whole fabric of London, wandering in a fairly systematic manner through the capital rather than the rather freer approach of earlier years that you can see in my recently published ‘London Dérives‘, (and the images on this post come from it and the accompanying web site.) Most if not all of the pubs and many of the shops in this earlier work were derelict.

But my ‘Buildings of London‘ project, which began long before Google’s ‘Streetview’ made it somewhat redundant, was more conceptual than literal. Although I intended to look at most of London and went about it in a fairly systematic way, I had a clear focus on photographing not everything, but the interesting and the typical.  You can still see a few images from it in the web site I built in 1996, itself now a rather decrepit relic – seventeen years is a long time on the web (though I had to make a few changes to keep it working, and added a few pictures, it still retains the essentials of its 1996 design.)

I’m not sure if I ever photographed The Marquis of Lansdowne, though I will have looked at it, and at the now demolished ‘The Flying Scud‘ nearby on my walks in the area.  It would probably take an hour or two of searching through my files to be sure. It isn’t an outstanding building, but one that is very much typical of its age and certainly that I would be sorry to see demolished. You can see what it looks like now in an article in Building.co.uk by William Palin, a trustee of the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust and former Secretary of SAVE Britain’s Heritage.

So I was very pleased to see in Spitalfields Life that a long campaign which has included a feature in ‘Country Life’ (not a publication usually concerned with Hoxton) as well as a series of articles in Spitalfields Life and work by the Spitalfields Trust and others has resulted in the building being saved, with Hackney Council Planning Committee telling the Geffrye Museum to rethink their development plans to include this building.

I hope the Museum will see it as an opportunity to enhance its display of period rooms (well worth a visit) to include that of a genuine neighbourhood Victorian (though the building is a little older) pub, truly a part of the living room of many among the working class of the era in overcrowded neighbourhoods such as these.  Hopefully too it will be realistic enough to have some genuine beer on tap, although the current London price per pint is at least a month’s Victorian wage.

Indian Protests in Westminster

One of the great things about photography is that you meet people and learn things, and at the protest by CasteWatchUK and the Dalit Solidarity Network I learnt a little about Dr B R Ambedkar (1891-1956) which led me when I got home to find out more about him on the web – and you can read a little of what I found in Outlaw Caste Discrimination on My London Diary, with quite a few pictures from the event.

Through several friends over the years I’ve known something of the problems faced by Dalits in India, and it was good to be able to cover the protest about caste discrimination here in the UK, something I know has been strongly felt by some communities here, particularly the Ravidass, whose March against Caste Discrimination I photographed in 2009.

The government policy – perhaps based on advice from groups dominated by those in higher castes – to reject legislation and simply have an education programme called ‘Talk For A Change’ was overturned for the second time by the House of Lords, who on the day of the protest again voted for caste to be treated legally as an aspect of race. Around ten days later the government finally accepted defeat and tabled an amendment accepting this – good news for the 400,000 or so (though estimates differ widely) Dalits or ‘untouchables’ living in the UK who will soon be protected.

After photographing this protest, I walked up Whitehall to a group of Sikhs protesting opposite Downing St in a vigil calling for justice in India and an end to the death penalty and in particular to get the UK Prime Minister to argue the human rights case with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and to put pressure on him both to stop capital punishment completely in India and to prevent the hanging of Professor Bhullar, on death row in India for 18 years, whose execution is thought likely to be imminent.

Talking to the people there they told me that the police had expressed concerns about their presence there for the funeral of former PM Thatcher whose hearse was to pass along Whitehall the following morning. Later I was please to find that the police had not attempted to clear the protest, which was still continuing when I went past ten days later.

While it was easy to photograph the large and active protest by Dalits in Parliament Square it was harder to find a strong image with the Sikh vigil, and I wasn’t very happy with my images – in Don’t Hang Prof Bhullar. Without setting something up there seemed nothing much I could do, and setting something up would I think compromise the whole basis of my work. This is a vigil where nothing much happens most of the time, and my record of it shows nothing much happening. Though it doesn’t make good ‘news’.
Continue reading Indian Protests in Westminster

We Didn’t Evict a Millionaire


Going down the escalator at King’s Cross

Lord Freud’s house – in a pleasant a leafy estate in Highgate – was perhaps a little disappointing for a millionaire. It reminded me of the house in a rather less salubrious outer London suburb that my family had until my father retired to the south coast the 1970s. Though location is important and it would probably sell for around 5 times as much.  But property prices in parts at least of London are now so silly that almost anyone who owns a house there is a millionaire.

Lord Freud is, I suspect, very much richer than that. And the gap between those like him and the kind of people who will be hit harshly by his Bedroom Tax is now so immense that it is hardly surprising that he has no conception at all of what it is actually like to live on low pay or on benefits. Only a person with no idea of what it is like to be poor could have come up with an idea like this. Or some of the other attacks on the poor from the coalition.

I’m not rich, and there are many things I can’t afford, but fortunately seldom have to think much about money now. But I can remember when I had to count every penny. I remember my mother writing down every small amount she spent into a red covered notebook, adding up the bills every week, hoping that there might be a few pence to go into the Post Office towards the next pair of shoes I’d soon need when my feet outgrew the ones I was wearing. I remember too when my total wealth in the world amounted to £4-14s7d and a few pennies in my pocket, but I was lucky and was about to get a job -and in those days almost a fiver was worth a great deal more than it is today. I’ve always had enough to pay the rent and to eat and -apart from buying cameras – have never developed expensive tastes. So I completely lack the qualifications to be a member of the cabinet, even apart from not having been to Eton and Oxford.

And of course, Lord Freud was not in (I imagine he has several other homes to go to), and this house was surrounded by police, who despite all the ‘secrecy’ from UK Uncut had obviously put together ‘Bedroom Tax’ and ‘Millionaire’ and come up with the names of those whose homes you could reach easily from Kings Cross on a Travelcard. The only people who were in the dark were most of the protesters, and I suspect a few got lost on the way.


Platform at Kings Cross -A woman proudly wearing the t-shirt she still had from the Poll Tax protests

Photographically the most interesting part of the event was the tube journey, and fortunately the Nikons give great results in the relatively low light of tube stations. The escalator and platforms were fairly dim, but I was still able to work at 1/125 at f5.6 at ISO3200. Flash isn’t allowed in the underground, but I didn’t need it.

I’d been photographing the man with the ‘Tories Against the Tax’ placard on the platform, and when the train came in rather than follow him through the same door took a gamble and went through the next, hoping he would then turn and be facing me in the middle of the carriage. He did, and I got what I thought was my best picture (the five photographers visible behind him blended in well with the other passengers and don’t really spoil it) and was also in a good position for a further image when he got a seat.

Although the quantity of light was fine, the colour isn’t, with some bad fluorescent tubes. Flash might have given a better result but only if I could have used enough to completely light the scene with it. I didn’t think I could or I might have tried it at least inside the carriage. I think it still isn’t allowed, but I don’t think would present a safety hazard, which is the case on platforms, where it can temporarily blind the drivers.

There were a few other pictures, both at Kings Cross and at our destination that I was quite pleased with, and you can see in Who wants to evict a Millionaire?

I spent several hours covering the event and produced what I thought were some good pictures but I don’t think any of them have been used outside of Demotix and My London Diary (and now these on >Re:PHOTO.) It isn’t always the good pictures that make the news, and of course there were many other photographers at the UK Uncut protest, and mine were not available until perhaps four hours after the first images of it arrived. There were few if any arrests, no real ‘celebrities’ present and no violence – so nothing that would make it an important story for most of the mass media.

From the bus on my way home I saw a few people with placards just before it stopped at Kentish Town station, and decided to go and see who they were and what they were protesting about. I spent about ten minutes talking with the group, and wasn’t at all happy with the few pictures that I was able to make (the steadily falling rain didn’t help) but I thought there was enough interest in the story that despite the rather ordinary pictures it was worth putting on line – and you can see the longer version as Release Palestinian Prisoners. To my surprise one of the images was used by a national newspaper a few days later.
Continue reading We Didn’t Evict a Millionaire

UK Government Gives Our Work Away


One of the first batch of my on-line images to carry a visible watermark

On 19 June 2010 I came to an important decision for me about posting images on the web. Previous to that date for some years I had been ensuring that the images that I had posted carried metadata stating my copyright and contact information, and posting the images almost entirely on sites where that information remained intact. But I’d found some were appearing without my permission on blogs and other sites with that information removed (but unfortunately never on sites that seemed worth suing, though most did respond to my requests for removal or in some cases attribution.) Even on sites that had asked and/or attributed and/or linked, the images themselves had often lost its metadata when images had been resized for use.

So, almost 3 years ago, I started routinely adding my copyright and contact details fairly discretely along the bottom edge of every image I uploaded onto my own web sites (those in commercial libraries have a more obvious overprint from the library.) People told me I should put it across the middle so it won’t be cropped off, but I wanted to avoid unduly diminishing people’s enjoyment of the work. And clearly if anyone cropped the image to remove the copyright they would be breaking the law.

The message ‘Copyright © 2010 Peter Marshall mylondondiary.co.uk‘ isn’t always too clear to read, but it is always (with a few rare exceptions) present on images posted since then – and occasionally I’ve got around to changing the year to match the current date. Usually by around March the following year. It isn’t perfect, but it would be very hard for anyone to claim ‘due diligence’ and use the work without payment given its presence. And of course I can be contacted through a link on the front page of the listed web site.

But that is what is now likely to happen in the UK, thanks to a sneaky bit of legislation by the government who tacked it onto the end of an unrelated bill, the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act which received royal assent last week. You can read the details in The Register’s article UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now. And as Andrew Orlowski’s subhead makes clear, ‘Everyone = Silicon Valley ad platforms tech companies.’

I’m not sure that his conclusion

“In practice, you’ll have two stark choices to prevent being ripped off: remove your work from the internet entirely, or opt-out by registering it. And registration will be on a work-by-work basis.”

is entirely true, though I am a little worried about the many images I still have on-line without a visible watermark – probably at least 30,000. I haven’t yet found a simple piece of software that will enable me to batch process them simply and add visible information in a way that it isn’t easily removed, though I suspect it wouldn’t be too difficult to write.

I’ve also made sure that my name, which appears visibly on the images is available through the only current registry, PLUS, still in Beta. Becoming listed is free, but “The PLUS Registry operates on a co-op model, funded by optional contributions from “Supporting Memberswho are able to make a small annual contribution. As a Supporting Member, you will receive a unique PLUS Member ID for your business, for use in images, licenses and documents of all kinds.”  It’s free and easy to set up a basic account, and there is a video tutorial on the Help page which takes you step by step through it if you need it.

Including your unique PLUS Member ID appropriately in the metadata of your images should protect images where the metadata is intact without individual image registration, although PLUS also hopes to offer additional by image search and other services for registered images. Otherwise if metadata has been stripped (and doubtless the Silicon Valley skimmers will do so themselves even if companies like Facebook, Instagram or Flickr can be persuaded to stop) then a visible watermark should perhaps also include either your PLUS ID or the fact that you are registered with PLUS. It would be good to have a standard visible method of indicating that images have been made by a PLUS listed creator, but I don’t think there is one. I’m thinking of adding the word ‘PLUS’ to my watermark, so it would now look like:

Copyright © 2013 Peter Marshall mylondondiary.co.uk – PLUS

The UK law is only a skeleton, which will be fleshed out by statutory instruments which will be issued later this year, which I hope will explicitly include the need for those wanting to make use of images to look at metadata and visible information and search PLUS and other registries that may be established.

It seems fairly likely that the legislation will be challenged legally as in breach of various international treaties including the Berne Convention, as well as becoming the subject of protests by photographers and other interested parties.
Continue reading UK Government Gives Our Work Away

3 Cosas


Justice for Cleaners, May 2006

I think the first time I photographed London’s cleaners was at the launch of the London Citizen Workers’ Association, very nearly seven years ago on the ‘Feast of St Joseph the Worker’, better known to the rest of us as May Day. London Workers was, I wrote “a new organisation to support low-wage and migrant workers across London, backed by faith organisations, trade unions and social justice organisations” and a major part of their campaign was to get all workers in London paid at least the ‘London Living Wage.’

Although low paid workers have managed to get some employers to pay the living wage, mostly as a result of  very public noise protests outside workplaces, there is still a long way to go, and even where workers have managed to get the living wage, the terms and conditions of many low paid staff are still grossly inferior to those of others who work in the same places.

I was at the University of London to photograph a protest by low paid workers there in what they have called the ‘3 Cosas‘ campaign. While some of those working in the university buildings are employed directly by London University, most of the low paid workers are employed by other companies – they are outsourced. And outsourcing saves the University money not by employing other people to manage their staff, not by more efficient working, but by cutting down on things like pensions, sick pay and holidays. These are the three areas, the three causes of the campaign.

While the university itself would not dream of treating its employees badly like this, somehow it is quite happy to pay other people to treat its workers badly, to exploit them. In fact not only are the conditions bad, but many also experience bullying, racism and other forms of disrespect from the managers employed by the outsourced companies.

The first protests by low paid workers that I photographed were supported by traditional unions like the T&GWU (Transport and General Workers Union – now a part of Unite) but sometimes it seemed to the workers that the these unions were not too keen to fight for their cause, often seeming too ready to concede and bargain with employers rather than to really push the claim for justice, and to allow companies to victimise some of the more militant workers.  Many of the cleaners joined the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), and later broke away from the other English branches of that to form a new union – though with an old name – the IWGB.

So one of the things I’ve been keen to show when photographing their protests are the flags, placards and banners  with the union insignia, although of course in a way that seems organic to the action – I don’t want to pose these any more than I pose people.  The banner here is fine, though the flags illustrate that these are tricky to photograph, often fluttering madly or hanging limp.

One other problem can also be seen in the image above is that of lighting contrast. The protesters are in a ground floor area below the building which, although it has large open doorways, is still considerably darker than outside. As you can see above, to maintain detail in the shadows inside means that the highlight areas through the doorway at left are largely blank. I’ve had to burn them in considerably to darken the figures outside as well as bringing down the ‘white’ slider in Lightroom down to bring the white area just within range.

Where possible I avoided the problem, as in the second image where I deliberately made the image from a position where the speaker effectively blocks the doorway behind. It seemed too that it was an image that summed up much of what the protest was about, both in the attitude of the speaker – helped by some nice rim lighting as well as that open mouth, but with the text of the placard and the solidarity of the people with their red flags and banner in the background, backing up  the demand.

More pictures from the event, inside and outside the lobby and more details of the situation and the campaign demands at ‘3 Cosas’ -Sick Pay, Holidays & Pensions.

Continue reading 3 Cosas

Contrasting Events

From the Sikh protest against the death penalty I walked the short distance up Parliament St and Whitehall to where the Counihan-Sanchez Family Housing Campaign were holding a protest against the bedroom tax and other tax and benefit changes that impact unfairly on the poor and disabled.

No to Bedroom Tax & Benefit Caps was a relatively small protest over issues that affect many, and one in particular that seems to those affected to be a particularly vicious and vindictive attack on those at the bottom of our society. Homelessness and the housing problem isn’t caused by poor people who have a little space in their homes (something the better off in our society take for granted), but by policies that have failed to build social housing, have rocketed house prices and private rents, in part through vast subsidies to private landlords through ‘housing benefit’, by the increased growth in second home ownership and the buying up of houses and flats as investment properties, and by the many properties left empty as their value increases. It’s a problem that Tory, New Labour and Coalition governments at least since Thatcher have not just failed to tackle but have actually contributed to.

Most of those present were from Kilburn, where the Counihan family has waged a high profile campaign against its own unfair treatment by the local authority, the London Borough of Brent, and encouraged and inspired others to stand up for their rights. One of those, a young woman and her daughter who had managed to get Harrow council to fulfil their legal obligations to her spoke at the event, as did a number of others. But though the various addresses were interesting, it was had to find much of great visual interest, and my pictures were just a little ordinary.

As I was photographing this event, another began to start alongside. As so often in London I had something else to photograph that I’d not known about when I left home (they almost make up for the times when I go to advertised events to find nothing at all happening.) Students often write to me asking where there are lists of protests or how I found out what is happening in London, or asking me to send them a list of events they can photograph. There really are no overall lists, although there are a number of web sites worth looking at to find what is happening, but many groups remain curiously secretive about their activities.

Amateur photography magazines sometimes publish lists of events to photograph, but that has always seemed to me to be the wrong way round, as if there are certain aspects of life, certain events that are photogenic, and that if you want to be a photographer you go to these and take photographs.  As if the aim of photography is to photograph the photogenic. My advice is always for people to get interested and involved in things and then to photograph them. Photography, as I’ve so often said isn’t about making pictures.

The group appearing alongside was the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, one of the military groups which combined to overthrow the Iranian regime in 1965, but which then lost out to the Islamic regime and had to take refuge in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. After the US invasion they gave up their arms and were confined to their camp by US troops while they were allowed to become a leading part of the Iranian parliament in exile, the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran.

But in 2009, control of their camp was transferred to Iraq, and since then they have been moved and subjected to attacks, regarded as a terrorist group by both Iraq and Iran, although the EU removed them from its list of terrorists in 2009. The London protest was to get support from the UK government for the appeals they have made to the UN Secretary General and the US for the protection they are entitled to under the Geneva convention as recognised by the US in 2003.

The protest was quite a contrast to the open and somewhat chaotic freedom of the event I had just been photographing, which had little form and where everyone present was invited to make use of the megaphone – and ‘open mike’ event. Behind the protesters was a platform that was a shrine to the many PMOI members who had been killed in the attacks, with rows of their photographs, and the protest itself had the precision of a military exercise, carried out to the beat of a drum and under clear direction, with the protesters responding in remarkable precision to the call if their leader. I mean no disrespect – it was just a very different way to organise, and I tried to show this in my pictures, as I hope you can see in PMOI Protest Iraqi killings.

Continue reading Contrasting Events