Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Library Victory Celebrated

One of the most pleasant events I’ve photographed was this weeks official re-opening of Friern Barnet library, something that may become to be looked back on as a pivotal moment in the history of both the Occupy movement and left opposition, if not in democracy itself, in this country and the start of a real and powerful localism, with squatting activists from Occupy and usually conservative residents associations coming together with campaign groups and local opposition politicians to defeat the local authority.

The library, which Barnet council had closed and locked up in April 2012 was occupied at the start of September when, a couple of days after the act making squatting in residential property, activists climbed in through a convenient ‘open window’ and made their home there. Within days with the help of the local campaigners they had reopened the library and it was soon stocked with 10,000 books donated mainly by local residents.

You can read my account of the celebrations and how the battle with the council was won at Friern Barnet Library Victory Celebration, and see my pictures from the event. There is more detail about the role of Ugo Hayter and others from Leigh Day & Co (“a highly distinctive law firm who is not afraid to take on challenges that would daunt many others”) on their web site. The occupation meant the council had to go to court, and the legal arguments led to Barnet negotiating a lease for a newly formed Friern Barnet Community Library (FBCL) company.

I felt rather bad that despite several personal invitations I hadn’t made my way up to the library during the five months of occupation. (It has been a busy time for me and although it is in London, it isn’t the easiest place for me to get to and my journey on Tuesday morning took a couple of hours with three trains and a fairly long bus ride. Coming home the trains didn’t quite connect as well and it took a little longer.) So I went hoping to make up a little for my lack of effort by taking a set of pictures that captured something of the atmosphere of the event.

I think I was fairly successful, despite a few problems. Contrary to the weather forecast I’d heard early in the morning the sun came out and gave some extreme lighting at times, particularly inside the library, with patches of bright sun on relatively dimly lit shadow areas. The library ceiling was just a little high to effectively use bounce flash – and it with the flash needing to fire at full output, recycle times on my Nissin unit of 3-4 seconds were too limiting. Direct flash fill that made a difference also gave nasty shadows, so I decided to work without flash and try to even things out a little in post-processing, setting my usual one-third stop of underexposure which I thought would be enough to prevent the highlights burning out. When it came to process the RAW files, I found that in some pictures it hadn’t been quite enough, and perhaps a full stop would have been better.

After a few speeches and the handover of the keys, people from all the groups involved who had worked together to save the library joined in a long chain holding hands and walked around the two small green spaces at each side which they also hope to preserve from development. There were some great shadows of the human chain across the grass, but I had to work more or less directly into the sun to use them, and the inevitable flare and ghosting wasn’t too kind to me. But in some ways my favourite images of the day were of them dancing past the front of the library.

Afterwards the local councillor who had been closely involved cut a ribbon stretched across the door (the only part of the proceedings where I couldn’t really find a good position with TV crews and other photographers having lined up while I was busy photographing the walk around the greens) everyone went inside for more speeches, and the cutting of two celebration cakes, one a long ‘bookworm’ cake with a long line of candles. It took half a dozen people to light them all, and I felt their cooperation and the glowing candles was a good expression of the cooperative effort that was involved in the saving of the library.

There had been so many opportunities for pictures during the event that I was surprised when one of the occupiers said to me as I was leaving that some of the press weren’t happy with the pictures they had of the actual handover of the keys and wanted to stage another picture outside the library. I submitted a picture of this clearly captioned as a re-staging of the handing over of the keys for the press outside the library, but other photographer’s pictures of this same staged tableau were published in the press as if they were the actual event. The pictures almost got taken with a large brass key from a photographer’s key ring rather than the actual library keys, but fortunately the right ones were produced just in time. But I felt it was a false and clichéd approach, although one of the press photographers there has argued emphatically that this was a display of professionalism. Not in my book.

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

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen

I last wrote about the work of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen a couple of years ago, when the BBC had just broadcast a radio programme about her work. I bought her book ‘Byker‘ when it came out in 1983, and even the rather dull reproduction (standards really have improved greatly) couldn’t hide the power of her work on this area on the edge of Newcastle in a period when it was being completely redeveloped.

It was a subject that appealed to me as well as fine photography. The redevelopment of Byker in the 1970s showed how planners had learnt at least from some of the mistakes of the earlier decade that had taken me into political activism on the streets of Manchester before I became a photographer.

Born in Finland, Konttinen had come to London to study film at the Regent Street Polytechnic and there with like-minded fellow students had formed a collective to make documentary films. Amber Films had a commitment to documenting working-class life, and though they had started in London soon found that the capital was too expensive to live and work and moved to Newcastle, a city 300 miles to the north, where the older industries which it had depended on were in severe decline. She fell in love with Byker, moved in and lived there for 11 years, getting to know the people. Being a foreigner and being a young woman was almost certainly an advantage as she went round getting to know people and taking pictures, and as she writes “The first night I sat alone in the ‘Hare and Hounds’ I was taken under the collective wing.” And over the years she really did become a part of the community she was photographing and she goes on to write of her neighbour pointing “out proudly: ‘When she first came in our street, she couldn’t tell hello from tarra, and now she speaks Finnish with a Geordie accent.'”

I mention her again because her work is featured on the New York Times Lens blog Byker in Black and White and again today in Bringing Color to Newcastle. The mention comes with a show in New York at the L. Parker Stephenson Gallery from 15 Feb until 18 May 2013 and a lecture by Konttinen at the International Center for Photography on Feb 13 which should be streamed live (and at some point make its way into their archive on the same page.)

Although the BBC programme linked on my page no longer has the audio available, the text does perhaps give a slightly different view (as too do my comments), and the other links on my page still seem to work, taking you among other places to Konttinen’s page on Amber Online, where as well as work from ‘Byker’ and ‘Byker Revisited‘ you can also see pictures from eight of her other projects.

On the Side Gallery page of the Amber website there is some more about her trip to New York, including a link to a short film on making her ‘spacehopper’ print.

Haka or Hospital Closure?

I seldom travel outside of London to cover events, partly because there is so much to do inside. Greater London covers quite a large area, a little over 600 square miles and has a population of over 8 million, so there is no shortage of stories, and my own definition of London is a little wider than the official designation. I still consider myself a Londoner although because of a little gerrymandering in the 1960s the town where I live found itself left out in the cold, attached to an alien Surrey with which it felt little in common (and indeed an ancient rivalry, still fought keenly at Lords and the Oval.)

But London is one of the most cosmopolitan of cities, with a population including people from every country in the world, and – according to the 2011 census – populations of over 20,000 for some 27 of them, and pretty large numbers from quite a few more. One group that doesn’t make it into that top 27 are New Zealanders, but there are still quite a few of them, and on one day a year Kiwis come out on mass to celebrate Waitangi Day with a Circle Line pub crawl which culminates in a haka opposite the Houses of Parliament.

I didn’t photograph them this year, partly because this year Transport for London had the neat idea of putting a damper on the occasion by closing down both the Circle Line and also that part of the District Line that which uses the same tracks. Undaunted the Kiwis (who’ve suffered from some part closures in previous years) would be following the same route on foot, staggering between the various pubs that mark out the route. But it wouldn’t be quite the same. Back in 2008 an alcohol ban came into force on the tube, which also must have had a slightly sobering effect on the event, although perhaps largely unenforceable for such a mass event. But I was pleased I had photographed the event a few months earlier.

So I got as far as putting the list of pubs into my diary and working out some rough times and places to photograph, but in the end decided it wasn’t worth trying to cover, as I was unlikely to get anything as good as I did in 2008.

But the main reason I didn’t get to see the haka again was that there were other events I decided to cover and the times and places just didn’t seem to work out. I could just have caught the start of the event on my way to Enfield, but decided it wasn’t worth the detour.

Hospital closures are arousing a great deal of anger at the moment, and mass protests like that at Lewisham a week ago – though even 25,000 on the street for a local protest and the almost unanimous opposition on medical grounds as well as those who can add up pointing out the financial unreason of the proposals hasn’t yet managed to open the closed mind of the minister. But the fight continues, there and elsewhere, and another hospital affected by similar plans for downgrading is Enfield Chase, more or less at London’s northern extremity.

I knew the protest there would be much smaller than at Lewisham, and wasn’t disappointed to find a couple of hundred local people waiting for the start of the protest on a cold and windy area of grass in front of the war memorial with banners saying Save Chase Farm Hospital.

I’d been given a time for the event but hadn’t realised that the march would not start until an hour later – and that there would really be nothing happening in that hour. It seemed rather a waste of time for the protesters, standing around and getting cold in a rather out of the way location, and it seemed a bit of a waste of my time too – and had I known I’d probably have gone and had a drink with the Kiwis in Notting Hill en route to Enfield.
© 2013, Peter Marshall

There always is something to photograph, but perhaps not a great deal. And I also had a decision to make, when I was told by one of the organisers that if I stayed with the marchers until they reached the hospital there might be a scoop for me. It wasn’t hard to work out what was likely to happen and there was a banner which read ‘Enfield Young Socialists Occupy Chase Farm‘ to help me if I had any doubts, but although it would have added to the story, a look around at those present told me that any occupation was likely to be a token one, a few hours before they were ejected by police.

In the end I decided to stick to my plans for the day, which were to follow the march until it was time to take a train to another event I had said I would probably cover.

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

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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London Dérives

Just published today, after much gnashing of my few remaining teeth, is a book of pictures taken on my rather aimless wanderings around London in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Well, not exactly aimless, but mainly walked with no particular destination in mind.

In those days, before the Travelcard, most of my walks were circular in nature, starting and finishing at the same station, and these starting points were also largely determined by those places to which it was possible to book a ticket from my closest station. When I did venture further it was a matter of buying two or three or more separate tickets in the course of the journey.

London Dérives (or as Blurb will have it, being a US based company ‘London Derives’) ISBN 978-1-909363-08-3 contains 73 of my black and white pictures and the best way to buy it is to download the PDF version which is currently only £4.00, less than my usual price. You can of course see the preview and at the moment a full preview is on-line, though I may cut down the number of pages visible in a few days. Viewed full-screen it is almost as good as the PDF, although I hope some readers will download this as it does make a donation to keeping this site running as well as to Blurb – and they take Paypal as well as plastic.

For most of the 1960s I was a student, and very much involved in the events of 1968, although things were a little quieter in Manchester than in Paris. But among our bedside reading at that time was ‘The Society of the Spectacle‘, a translation of Guy Debord’s 1967 La Société du spectacle. When a few years later I had the time and money to start taking photographs, this was one of my text books for how to approach contemporary life with a camera. Twelve years earlier Debord had written ‘Introduction a une critique de la geographie urbaine‘ and in the main text of London Dérives I quote from this and his Theory of the Dérive.

One problem with Debord is that his thought was very French, and translations into English often lose the struggle, ending up with something that is in English but make little sense. London Dérives has a new translation of one often quoted key passage from his ‘urban geography’ that talks about his idea of the dérive (it’s sometimes useful being married to a linguist, though any mistakes are almost certainly mine.) Like the published works of the Situationists, this short translation (but certainly not the rest of the book) is issued with an ‘anti-copyright’ message – it can be shared freely and without any need to attribute. Here it is:

The sudden change of mood in a street over only a few metres;
the obvious division of a city into clear-cut areas of mental
climate; the steepest slope – in no way connected to the
contours – down which aimless strolling will be led; the
captivating or repellent nature of certain places, all this seems
to be neglected. Or at any rate never considered as depending
on reasons that can be brought to light by a thorough analysis
and turned to advantage. People are aware that there are
gloomy districts and others that are pleasant. But they usually
convince themselves that the elegant streets give a sense of
satisfaction and that the poor ones depress, hardly any more
nuanced than that. In fact, the variety of possible combinations
of moods, just like the solution of chemical substances
into an infinite number of mixtures, leads to feelings as diverse
and as complex as those brought on by any other type of
spectacle. And even the most basic objective scrutiny shows
the impossibility of formulating a qualitative or quantitative
distinction between the influences of the diverse built
environments in a city based solely on the period or style of
architecture, much less on the living conditions.

Introduction à une critique de la géographie urbaine
Guy Debord, 1955

It took many hours of work to get the pictures ready, with some images needing around an hour and a half of detailed retouching, thanks to my negative files having been infested by tiny insects some years ago. Too small to see clearly with the naked eye, the remains of these insects and the tracks they left chewing up the gelatin are only too obvious in enlargements. Fortunately after retouching they are generally not visible in the images in the book. It was also an opportunity to remove some of the other oddities we often got with film, and in most cases the images in the book are the best I have ever made from these negatives.

In the period covered by this book I made approximately 30,000 negatives, mainly in London. Some of these were on projects which are the subject of other books – such as Before the Olympics on the Lea Valley and forthcoming volumes on Docklands, the River Thames, post-industrial London etc, and I have not included pictures from these areas in this work. As well as the 73 images that made it to the book, there are roughly twice as many that I scanned but were not selected. I’m thinking about making a set of the best of these these available to purchasers of the book (print or PDF) as a low cost supplement.

Continue reading London Dérives

Short Stories…

The February show in the 2013 Photographic Residency Project, SHORT STORIES FROM AN AUTONOMOUS SPACE, curated by David Boulogne of 2012PICS and featuring contributors to that site is a set of ten black and white photographs with short texts featuring images from my ‘Before the Olympics’ project and book based on my Lea Valley web site.

The 10 pictures went up on the wall at Workshop Coffee Marylebone (75 Wigmore Street London W1U 1QD) and will be there for the rest of the month. I’m told the coffee there is the best in West London, and I’m sure unlike those shops selling second-rate coffee they pay their taxes.

David describes Short stories from an autonomous space as

“a unique partnership presenting monthly a rare photographic survey produced by artist photographers gathered under the 2012pics project. The mission of the collective is to create archives related to the change of the urban landscape in the East-End with the 2012 Olympic Games.
It is also a platform for contemporary documentary photography that reveals individual initiatives undertook in the last 30 years in a progressive fashion.”

In my statement about the work I wrote:

PETER MARSHALL
Before the Olympics

In 1981 I began a long-term photographic project in the Lea Valley from the source of the river to the Thames at Limehouse and Bow Creek, concentrating on the urban changes which were taking place and have continued. As a part of this project I photographed the busy industrial area of Stratford Marsh and around the Bow Back Rivers, returning in the 1990s and the early 2000s and again after the Olympic bid was announced and then won, recording as far as I could it’s transformation from a productive area to the urban wasteland with scattered monumental structures it is today. I hope to continue the project to record the legacy of the Olympics when the area will be hopefully be returned from behind its high security fences to more productive use as a part of a wider project on urban development in East London. A selection of work from this project was published as Before the Olympics: The Lea Valley 1981-2010; second edition 2011: ISBN 978-1-909363-00-7.

The shows through the year will all use the same set of frames, with an image size of 23cms square, and all of my images were made on 35mm film with an aspect ratio of 1.5:1, leaving plenty of space for texts to accompany them. These tell something of the history of the area which counters the deliberately misleading statements about the area put out by the Olympic developers.

Of course the Olympics has come and very much left its giant footprint on the area, changing it almost beyond recognition. I hope something to benefit East London can be salvaged from its legacy and also that I will be able to continue to record the area as it is, at least in part, reopened to the public. You can see some of my latest pictures from the area in Olympic Area Slightly Open from a visit in December 2012.

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

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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Should We Ask?

The NPR ‘the picture show’ has an interesting story What It Feels Like To Be Photographed In A Moment Of Grief about a photograph of a woman praying in front of a candle and statue of the Virgin Mary outside the St. Rose of Lima church in Newtown, Conn., on the day of the school shootings there, taken by AFP photographer Emmanuel Dunand.

The woman contacted NPR after they ran the picture, identified herself and wrote that although it was a beautiful image and she wasn’t asking for it to be taken down, she “would like to make a point about responsible journalism, it would have been nice if someone could have asked my permission.”

The photographer’s response was that he thought that in the situation, leaving her alone was the most respectful thing to do. I’m fairly convinced that in the circumstances I would have come to the same decision.

There are I think several things that are not really brought out in the short feature or really in the 140 comments people had made on it by the time I read it, and also it connects with something I was thinking about writing about a small incident when I was taking pictures last Saturday.

There is a sense that the picture in question is not really a picture of a particular woman, who is hardly recognisable in the image, her face largely covered by hair and her hands far more important in the image. This is a picture which gains from being generic, from expressing the feelings of many rather than being an image of a particular person.

The NPR talked to Kenny Irby of The Poynter Institute, who gave what I think was a very confusing answer about the two benefits of photographers introducing themselves and interacting with their subjects. It showed a complete failure to understand the difference between news and features, perhaps surprising coming from a leading journalism school. It isn’t as Kenny Irby says ‘unfortunate‘ that the AFP does not have a policy requiring photographers to ask for subject’s names when they are photographed in public places, it is very much at the foundation of news photography.

The woman in the picture is quoted as saying “all of a sudden I hear ‘clickclickclickclickclick’ all over the place. And there are people in the bushes, all around me, and they are photographing me, and now I’m pissed. I felt like a zoo animal.” I don’t know how accurate a description that was, but it shows that there were many other photographers as well as Dunand involved, and it obviously can be very disturbing and intimidating to be surrounded in this way. But this was a very public event, in a place ‘packed with local residents and the media’ and the attention she got was inevitable. Hers was a private grief but she was expressing it in a very public place and in a way that was certain to attract attention.

Her final sentence in the quote was perhaps unfortunate. Zoo animals often come to welcome visitors and generally don’t have strong feelings against being photographed, often playing up for the camera. It’s one reason why I don’t much like zoos and have seldom photographed in them. And though I don’t mean to suggest that she was acting for the camera, many people – even in distressing situations – do so. As of course many people including Susan Sontag have pointed out.

News photography is sometimes tough. I’ve at times photographed through tears and I think all good photographers ever who photograph difficult events will have too. But like Dunand who commented “all you want to do is put down flowers, you don’t want to take photos” we have a job to do. He is also reported as saying that ‘if he sensed that someone was bothered by the camera, he simply put it down’ and I think most professionals would do the same. But of course it may well not have been the click of his camera that disturbed.

There are many times when I start taking a picture on my own and find myself surrounded by a crowd. I don’t like working with a pack of other journalists, and when I feel the shoulders pressing against mine I always know I’m in the wrong place – and after I’ve taken my picture try to move away. Many events now we have far too many people with cameras trying to photograph, and those who generally behave the worst towards both the subjects and other photographers are generally not the professional photographers present.

But there are times when I think it is right to ask and I do. One happened last Saturday, when I was photographing the start of the large march to save the hospital in Lewisham, one of the most successful, well-run and needed in the country, threatened simply because other hospitals have huge debts arising from the policy of a former government – the private finance initiative. Closing Lewisham wouldn’t even do much – if anything – to solve the financial problem and it is more of a human sacrifice demanded by the current government -both metaphorically and literally, as its closure would lead to excess deaths among the sick and injured in the area.

I was photographing one of the local MPs and some of the senior hospital staff at the front of the march when one of the march stewards asked me if I had seen a family taking part with a young child in a pram who was on a drip. It would he said, make a good picture. The family were on the pavement only a couple of yards from the head of the protest in a very public place, and it would have been possible to photograph them without asking, but I felt that it would be unduly intrusive to do so – I needed to get very close. I went up to them and asked. They said no. I didn’t take the picture, though I think it might have been an image that would have dramatised the protest and perhaps made some front pages.

Of course I did take many other pictures. There were only two others where I felt I needed to ask permission, both involving people not actually taking part in the protest. One had no problems, and in the other one of the two people ran away while the other was happy to be photographed. Of course I did talk to many other people while I was taking their pictures – particularly to the parents of the children I photographed, but it wasn’t a matter of asking permission – this was a situation where permission could be assumed and almost everyone was pleased to be photographed (and some demanded it!)

More of my pictures and story at Save Lewisham Hospital.

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

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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Tony Ray-Jones – Pepys

Until I read a three part article on the Pepys Estate at Deptford published in ‘The London Column‘ I wasn’t aware that the work which Tony Ray-Jones took for the Architectural review was now in the RIBA photographic library.

The first of three posts on the Pepys Estate, Deptford links to BBC archive footage of a remarkable programme first broadcast in 1969, Bird’s Eye View – The Englishman’s Home – shot mainly from a helicopter with commentary by John Betjeman who refused to fly, but worked with the footage as it was edited. Rather slow-moving by modern standards, though Betjeman is always a pleasure to listen to, unless you have a strong stomach for the sentimental and picturesque you might like to skip the first thirty-something minutes where inevitably it lingers far too long over many stately homes, and omits the true history of misery, repression and exploitation behind their architectural splendour. Ground-breaking it claims to be for its aerial perspective, but the approach is comfortable and conservative in its politics.

After a brief trip to fairy-tale Wales at around 30 minutes the programme shifts first to Chiswick House in Betjemans beloved Middlesex, before moving to truly urban housing in Bath “in the crater of an extinct volcano” and then Clifton in Bristol, built when it was the second city of England (built on the unmentioned slave trade) then on to Brighton, our best-looking seaside town. The helicopter (and commentary) concentrate on the Georgian terraces of the 1830s before zooming down to the Pavillion.

Next come a couple of ‘model’ villages built on some of the huge estates – including the single house left in the old village at Chatsworth that had spoiled his Lordships view and Edensor built up the hill for his tenants: “I can’t see why this sort of thing is any more inhuman than what a council does today“. I can.

Then its comfortable North Oxford and swimming pool suburbs, “the sort of house that everybody wants, an acre and a garden and no cow“. Finally at 39 minutes we get to Port Sunlight “a protest against northern back to backs” (which don’t get shown), and on to Peacehaven. Betjeman comments on the snootiness about this cliff-top development, but his defence of it seems to be based more on a wish to stand out from the architectural crowd than any real knowledge of the place – to which two of my aunts moved to die around the time the programme was made.

At 42 minutes comes Harlow New Town (“do you think this is the way we ought to live and do as we are told)” and on to a new Lyons estate at New Ash Green in greenfield Kent, then at 44 minutes, Docklands and high rise, with brief glimpses of the Royal Docks and Roehampton. The programme ends with the Pepys estate: “But where can be the heart that sends a family to the 20th floor of such a slab as this … .caged halfway up the sky… what is housing if it’s not a home” and the wide cleared site for Thamesmead with a its early blocks under contsctuction – “how human will it be?” asks Betjeman.

The image by Tony Ray-Jones, ‘Pepys Estate, Deptford, 1970‘ brings us back very much into the real world of a group of young kids playing on the estate, as does the text by Owen Hatherley and the further picture by Ray-Jones on part two of the series. In part three. Robert Elwall writes about the work commissioned by Hubert de Cronin Hastings, owner of the Architectural Press and editor of its leading journal, the Architectural Review from Ray-Jones and some other leading photographers in a series entitled ‘Manplan‘ which ran 8 themed monthly issues from September 1969 to September 1970 and its place in the history of architectural photography. Ray-Jones’ contribution was in the last of these, ‘Manplan 8: Housing‘ and perhaps the final straw; it was an experiment too much for many of the magazine’s subscribers and had to be abandoned.

Searching in the RIBA Photo Library using the term ‘Ray-Jones’ returns 167 images by him (rather more than the 138 mentioned on The London Column), from the Pepys Estate, from Lillington Gardens in Pimlico, from Haringey, Thamesmead, the Old Kent Rd, Blackheath, Battersea, Southwark, Crawley and New Ash Green and elsewhere and includes architect designed small houses as well as council estates.

The most interesting pictures to me are those of children playing around the estates at Thamesmead and Hammersmith and particularly in the Pepys Estate at Deptford, which appears to have occupied him more than the other sites. Some of the work seems straightforward architectural work – and at times similar to images I and many others have taken of similar subjects (and frankly there are a few that are a little boring), but the work comes alive once he found people to include in the picture – and there are a few where there is no visible architecture.

But his purely architectural work – like much of that genre – often leaves me cold. Too often the pictures are of idealised structures, everything clean and tidy, with the emphasis on new buildings, pristine and unlived in. I suspect like me, Ray-Jones was truly more interested in the lived in, buildings that have developed a character through use – and abuse. Too often architectural photographs look like pictures of models rather than the real world, and although I’ve spent a lot of time photographing buildings, I’ve never called myself an architectural photographer.

I’ve written here before on some of the issues over housing, and in particular the privatisation of estates such as the Pepys Estate, and it was good to read Owen Hatherly’s piece. You can read some of my own thoughts in Views of Deptford and on posts about the Carpenters Estate (Around the Olympics) in Stratford and the Heygate Estate (Southwark’s Shame) at the Elephant.

The three pictures illustrating this piece are from my own archive, and include some which will appear in the books I’m currently working on from my pictures of London in 1970-85.

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

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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Grey Day, Golden Dawn

It’s hard to know why the Greeks should have such an ugly embassy in London, backing on to Holland Park, and in a street (also called Holland Park) otherwise full of rather nice Victorian detached villas from the 1860s. I wonder if embassies are somehow exempt from planning laws, not that these generally concern themselves much with aesthetics.

I’d come to photograph the five hundred or so who had answered the call from Unite Against Fascism (UAF) to show their solidarity with the people of Athens, several thousands of whom were marching in their city at the same time in a protest against racist violence, with the fascist Golden Dawn (GD) party being implicated in many of the attacks. Although GD claims not to be fascist, many of its members have been shown giving Nazi salutes and it has published materials praising Hitler, Hess and others and one of its MPs has a ‘Sieg Heil’ tattoo. In earlier years the party made no pretences and decorated its party congress with swastikas and other Nazi symbols. More recently, its party magazine praised Hitler as a “great social reformer and military genius” and it ran in the elections with the anti-immigrant slogan “So we can rid this land of filth“.

What I hadn’t expected was that police would allow a small counter-protest organised by a group calling itself the ‘British Friends of Golden Dawn’ just a few yards from the main protest at the embassy. They looked just like the EDL – and several of them recognised me from when I’ve photographed their protests.

It is hard to to understand the thinking of protesting in support of a pro-Hitler group like Golden Dawn while holding up the Union Flag, the flag of a country which was one of the leaders in the fight against Hitler. You can’t really be an ‘English Loyalist’ and support the fascists.

I’d dressed up well but it still felt cold, round about freezing. Before the protest I’d walked through the snow-covered Holland Park, dotted with large snowmen. I didn’t stop to photograph them, I’d already seen far too many snow pictures.

The UAF protest attracted many leading figures on the left, including Tony Benn, who looked well but spoke only briefly, leaving others to make the real speeches. One of the others was Gerry Gable, editor of Searchlight, who I don’t recall ever having met before, though the EDL have accused me of working for him. I’ve never given Searchlight pictures and so far as I’m aware they have never used anything of mine, so I was surprised when one of the Golden Dawn supporters shouted out at me for being a “Searchlight photographer.” I’ve nothing against Searchlight, but it has never happened. It is just a part of a right-wing myth that sees all journalists as in the pay (some hope) of sinister left-wing conspiracies, when in fact most of us are struggling to make a living from a largely right-wing press.

Weyman Bennett of UAF came to look at the counter-protest and shouted back rather jovially at their insults, doubtless heartened at their pathetic performance. Soon the police appeared to tell them it was time to leave, and having arranged transport to the protest for them led them away to the nearby underground station, along with a few anarchists shouting insults. I took a few pictures with the 70-300mm as they walked away, but couldn’t be bothered to run to get closer.

There really was very little light all day, with heavily overcast skies. I’d been using flash to photograph the speakers, who were under a gazebo, and had set ISO800 for that, wanting a fairly wide aperture with theD800E on ‘S’ and working at around 1/60s, using the 18-105mm, a decent portrait lens at its longer settings. But when I switched to the longer zoom without flash I forgot to increase the ISO, and few of the pictures are really sharp. Working without flash on the D700 I was using a higher ISO and had no problems.

More pictures at Anti-fascist Solidarity Against Golden Dawn.

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

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

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A Cold Wednesday

A week ago at this time, a little after nine in the morning, I was standing on the platform at my local station, waiting in a bitter wind for the train to take me to London. It was, for England, cold, around a degree or so above freezing. I don’t like cold weather, though I’d more or less dressed for it, with an extra layer under my thin coat and long johns under my lightweight trousers, an extra pair of socks and of course a scarf and hat, and I was keeping warm enough, though getting rather too hot when actually sitting on the train and bus which took me to Notting Hill for the Pussy Riot London Solidarity Demonstration close to the Russian embassy.

The cold weather had obviously put off protesters and when I arrived at the pen more or less opposite the embassy there was only one lone protester standing there with his placard. Across the road closer to the gates of the private road on which the several embassy buildings stand – and in which neither protests nor photography are permitted – was a small group of people, one photographer I knew talking to several students, some also with cameras who had also come for the protest, but decided not to stay.

As they got ready to walk off, I went across the road to photograph the one man in the pen, and the other photographer followed me and we talked to him and took a few pictures of him and his placard with the embassy in the background. Soon we were joined by another photographer, making it three to one.

By now I was wondering what to do. There didn’t really seem to be much of a story here, although it was a part of an international day of protest in support of the jailed Pussy Riot protester Maria Alyokhina, the London event was rather disappointing. I was standing in the cold and had at least half an hour before it was time to start my journey to my next appointment. It was too early to go to the pub, and I didn’t feel like a coffee. Fortunately another protester arrived, doubling the size of the protest, so the three of us talked to her and took more pictures. Then a few minutes later two men came, doubling the number again. More pictures. I was now expecting a group of four to arrive, and it was getting close to the time I had to think about taking a bus. Just as I’d said goodbye, rather disappointing a single further protester came to join, and I took a final picture or two before rushing to the stop. The protest was due to continue for almost another couple of hours and given the weather if I’d been going to protest I wouldn’t have been in any hurry to get there on time.

I like bus journeys in London, at least on double-deckers, where the top deck gives you an elevated view of the city and the streets, but they are seldom a rapid mode of travel. On foot the journey to the Royal Courts of Justice – around three and a half miles – might have taken me an hour, and the bus (taking a slightly less direct route) shaved five minutes off that. But it was warm, and saved me getting tired carrying a heavy bag. Underground is faster, though it involves more walking and I miss the view, but perhaps more importantly I can ride the buses for free but have to pay on the tube.

At the court I was surprised to find not one protest but two taking place. I’d come to photograph the Mental Health Resistance Network and Disabled People Against Cuts supporting a judicial review of Work Capablility Assessments on the grounds they violate the Equality Act by not being accessible for those with mental health conditions. They were setting up their protest on one side of the entrance, but in a pen on the other side were a large group of protesters with placards against psychiatrists and their dosing kids with dangerous medicines – Stop Psychiatry Drugging Kids.

There was something in this second group that made me feel a little uneasy. In part it was the organisation, with neatly lettered large placards, red hoodies, and t-shirts, just too organised for a normal protest, more like a PR stunt. And though some of the things they were saying about the medicalisation of normal behaviour and the profits made from this by the drug companies are pretty sound, the name of their organisation, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights worried me. If it was a genuine citizen’s organisation I should certainly have come across it before. There were a few people wandering around with clipboards and at first I thought perhaps this was being organised for a TV film, but then I met a man in a white coat with a stethoscope and a batch of labelled pill bottles who threw me a dose of woo woo science and the penny began to drop. I still took some pictures and wrote up the story, because despite what they represent, from what they told me I felt the actual case they were protesting was a good one to protest.

But the MHRN and DPAC’s Equality Protest Against ATOS Work Assessments was a more important protest, and one that effects many thousands of disabled people who are ‘being put through a traumatic and harrowing experience needlessly’, losing their benefits through incorrect decisions by tests administered by ATOS which the government’s own assessor has ruled ‘unfit for purpose’. It is an inhumane policy imposed by a doctrinaire government that seems to be taking a sadistic delight at creating hardship for the poor and disabled, with a total lack of understanding or empathy for those who suffer – and in some cases are driven to suicide.

The policy was the subject of a parliamentary debate last week and I’m pleased that at least one of the papers used one of my pictures from the protest. Parliament was clearly concerned by what is happening, although the government remained unmoved and unrepentant. This is certainly one of the nastiest policies of a cabinet that simply has no idea of the problems faced by those without millions in the bank. We need welfare reform, but unfortunately the Labour government set it off in the wrong direction, based simply on cost cutting rather than developing caring and personalised solutions that would actually be more cost effective. Real assessments of people’s capabilities would make possible support that enabled them rather than leaving many contemplating suicide.

Another, slightly shorter, bus ride warmed me up and took me back west to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, where a regular protest in solidarity with Bradley Manning was being held on day 963 of his detention, as his defence were arguing at Fort Meade that his case should be dismissed because fo the failure to bring him to a ‘speedy trial’. The protesters, who were going on to the Ecuadorian embassy to join the daily vigil there in support of Julian Assange, were there to Stand with Brad at US Embassy. They stood in silence, their backs to the hedge, facing the US flag and eagle on the top of the of the building as they played the soundtrack of a video, ‘Collateral Murder’, showing war crimes by US forces, allegedly leaked by the ‘courageous whistleblower’ and published on Wikileaks, leading to Manning’s arrest and the US attempts to get Assange into their hands via Sweden.

I made this picture stretching across the wide hedge, holding my D800 with the 10.5mm DX fisheye at arms length. It was tricky holding the camera level and getting the framing right, and it might have been useful if I could have remembered how to use ‘Live View’ though I’m not sure I could really have seen clearly enough. As always photographing flags can be a bit of a lottery, and I was lucky to get one frame where everything was right with the wind holding the flag right out above the eagle. The curve given to the embassy by the fisheye (and corrected to cylindrical perspective to get all the verticals upright) actually greatly improves the rather boring architecture) and the horizontal angle of view of around 140 degrees enabled me to get in around half of the line of protesters.

I left them as the soundtrack was still echoing from the front of the embassy, and again more protesters were still arriving, but I was cold and had had enough. It was time for another bus and then the train home.

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

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

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A Friday Afternoon in London

It took quite a few tries before I got everything how I wanted it for this picture. I could have speeded things up by directing things a little, but that would have meant crossing what is for me a vital line. But the poster, the banner and the placard here sum up what this protest outside the London Office of mining company Vedanta – was about.

Of course I took pictures in which the people involved feature more prominently, including CEO Anil Agarwal himself with blood scattered across his face on the end of the banner, as well as a forthright comment about him on a poster held by an Indian activist – and more at De-List Vedanta from London.

It was a fairly animated protest, but I couldn’t find anything very different to photograph. I had to leave after around an hour to go to the next event I wanted to cover, at Broadcasting House, around a quarter of an hour’s walk away, which was due to start at 2pm. I arrived more or less on time, to find a few police and an empty pen set up for the protest. Shortly after the first protester arrived, and after another half hour or so there was a protest to photograph, if still a fairly small one, against the bias at the BBC against Palestine, and in particular their complete failure to report the hunger strike by two Palestinians held without charge or trial in Israeli prisons and the assault on one of them in the courtroom.

You can see the other protesters and read more about it at BBC Ignores Palestinian Hunger Strikes.

I’d done all I could think of there by around 2.30pm, and wanted to find out where I could meet one or other of four or five walks that were taking place that afternoon marking the 11th anniversary of the illegal US prison camp at Guantanamo bay, mirroring the routes by which five men (or rather four men and a boy) had reached there, visiting the embassies of all of the countries who had colluded in their illegal rendition by the US. I’d missed the start, and the routes hadn’t been published, but I had the mobile numbers of the walk leaders for the two I was most interested in. Unfortunately neither were answering their phones.

So I was kind of looking for a needle in London’s haystack, but I had a few clues. I knew where they had started – one at the Pakistan and the other at the Afghanistan embassy – and I’ve visited most of the embassies in London at some time or other. I knew there were an awful lot of them in the area around Belgrave Square, so I took a bus to Hyde Park Corner and walked there. No sign of anyone there, so I thought I’d wander up to the Pakistan embassy. Again blank. I realised then that I was close to the Ecuadorian embassy, so took a short detour to visit the daily afternoon vigil there and talk to the small group and take a few pictures – Assange Supporters Continue Embassy Vigil.

Finally as I walked away towards the French embassy on Knightsbridge at last I saw some orange suits in the distance and ran to meet the group of a dozen or so tracing Shaker Aamer’s illegal rendition – and on their way to Belgrave Square.

I tried to get a little echo of ‘Abbey Road’ as they crossed the square, but without actually posing people to copy it closely. In Rendition Routes to Guantanamo you can read the letter they tried to deliver to the Turkish embassy (and they did give a copy to the Portuguese embassy) which makes clear what illegal rendition entailed.

By this time I was a little cold and tired, and I left the walkers who (like me) were going on to the US embassy for a vigil there and took a bus to one of my favourite London pubs not too far from there to sit down with a drink for half an hour in front of a warm open fire – and do a little editing of my pictures in camera. Then it was off to the US Embassy for my final event of the day, Guantánamo – 11 Years of Illegal Detention.

It had been a long and tiring day for me, longer than I like to work now, and the pictures at the last event weren’t among my better examples. But although I was pleased to get on the bus and start my hour or so journey home, my day was not of course finished.

When I got home I still had to edit the pictures, do a little post-production, keyword and caption them and send them off, though I had to eat first, and it was well past midnight that I finished, even though I left writing the stories to go with the work until the following morning. Few of the things I photograph make urgent news, and I’ve decided to keep to my old-fashioned slow working methods rather than join the modern world and take a laptop with me when I’m photographing and send in pictures directly after I take them, but I try to get them in the same day. By the time I went to bed it was around 14 hours since I’d left home to travel to the first protest.

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

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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