Category: Political Issues

The last day of June was a busy one for me, though perhaps not especially productive. The main event I wanted to cover was a march in London’s East End against the siting of missiles there during the Olympics. There seems to be an assumption behind this that in the unlikely event of an aircraft getting through the air exclusion zone to target the Olympic site it would be preferable to shoot it down so that it lands on East Londoners rather than those attending the Olympics, and that isn’t something Londoners are comfortable with. Many also feel that these missile sites – including a couple on the roof of residential buildings – could themselves become terrorist targets. It would certainly have been less contentious if the sites chosen had been office buildings – and there is no shortage of those around – rather than homes.

Kids on scooters with other things to do go past the front of the march

Previously there had been a well-attended and widely reported protest meeting about the issue, and the march itself had been given some publicity in the evening newspaper and on the air, so I went expecting a large event. Arriving at the area of parkland where it was gathering I was surprised to find relatively few people there, with the media almost outnumbering the participants. I think almost every photographer I know in London must have been there, along with a number of videographers, including some filming for major channels.

A couple listen to the speeches

There were some points of interest, and speakers included Brian Whelan, whose revelation of the missiles that were being put on his roof in the ‘Bow Quarter’ led to the missiles becoming public knowledge – and to him being given notice by the landlord.  There were a small group of protesters from Occupy London I’ve photographed at various events, carrying or wearing ‘Anonymous’ masks who got some special attention from the police liaison officers. The police too had obviously expected more and where out in force, though most kept a few hundred yards away and I think went away as the march started and they realised it was only a few hundred people.

It was of course a busy day with many other things happening, and even if they oppose the missiles I think most Londoners feel that whatever they do the Olympics and the growing security clampdown we are experiencing is unstoppable – whatever we do it will go ahead – and so protests are not worth the effort.  At least as some said to me, the Olympics will soon be over, though whether we will ever get rid of the increasing controls being imposed under the largely imagined threat of terrorism remains to be seen. But the missiles will surely go, along the with soldiers and ships, even if the huge area of the Olympic site remains a privately administered park where there will continue to be great restrictions on our freedoms.

It will also have been converted into a hugely manicured area. I can’t see it as any kind of gain that the kingfishers who used to live wild now will have carefully constructed and sited nesting boxes, that what in part used to be a wilderness through which we could roam more or less freely will now be  carefully controlled plantings, neat paths and flowerbeds with shag pile grass in place of the old diverse growth. And while we may dream of the removal of all those 10 foot high electric security fences, I suspect they will be a part of the legacy.

The missiles will be on one of the two towers on the converted match factory

It rubs salt into the wounds of some that one of the missile sites is the ‘Bow Quarter’, a gated development of expensive flats in the former Bryant & May match factory, a truly iconic (perhaps the most overused word in this Olympic year) location in labour history. Plaques on the outside wall recall Annie Besant and the 1888 matchgirls’ strike , when 1400 women walked out after some were victimised for refusing to sign a management letter saying they were happy with the working conditions – poor pay, long hours, fines for talking and other trivial ‘offences’ and disfiguring and painful illness and death from phosijaw (bone cancer) from the company’s insistence on continuing to use white phosphorus, already banned on health grounds in the US and Sweden – after Besant had published the terrible details.

The march ended with a short rally outside the missile site. It has more or less identical towers and missiles will be sited on one of them, possibly not the one in my pictures which is closer to the road but further from the Olympic site. The blue plaque at the left of the picture is about the history of the site.

More pictures on Missiles Out Of East London, and also on My London Diary you can see pictures from the two events I rushed back into the centre of London to cover as the protest in Bow ended, Congolese Protest and Sudanese march in London.

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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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It was a good idea as a way to mark the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment coming into force  on 26 June 1987 with a line of protesters in Trafalgar Square carrying placards saying ‘NO TO TORTURE’ in as many different languages as possible, but perhaps – as is so often the case – not one that leads itself to making memorable photographs.

Somewhere around around eight people standing in line is around the limit that will easily fit the frame, although of course you can work from one side of a longer line.

I could have set up something rather more interesting, but that isn’t the way I like to work, though another photographer did do a little arranging the results were still far too sterile for my taste. It would perhaps have been nice to use the wide set of steps coming down from the North Terrace where these pictures were taken to the square itself, but the square’s private police force (so-called ‘Heritage Wardens) tend to strictly enforce the Mayor’s by-laws against protests in the square. It is one of these apparently public areas that is in private hands, and even if those private hands are actually ours, still results in laws that restrict our freedoms. Even in a square that is a traditional home to dissent we are told we cannot protest without prior permission.

There were around 40 different languages on the placards – including English, which had been forgotten and was hastily written at the last minute – which is why it is rather weaker than the rest in the top picture. It wasn’t meant as some kind of political comment on the rather shaky record of the British and US governments over recent years, though there were protesters present to remind us of Guantanamo and call for the release of British resident Shaker Aamer, still held there because his release would embarrass both our governments, and others about the attempts of the US government to extradite a number of British citizens who face locking up for life in solitary confinement in US prisons – several of whom have already been held in prison here without trial for longer times than a UK court would have thought appropriate for any crimes they are alleged to have committed. And there were certainly well-written signs in the languages of countries with an even shakier human rights record.

But the better pictures that I made on this occasion were not of those signs in the different languages, or only partly so. In the end it is always people I’d drawn to rather than anything else. And although it was an evening I took no particularly memorable images, there are a few I was reasonably happy with – including these two.

You can see more in  No to Torture Vigil on My London Diary.  This was also the first time I took out my new camera, a Nikon D800E, which I’ll write more about in a later piece. It felt instantly familiar.

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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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While I was on holiday around the beginning of last month, I watched the first part of a BBC Two series ‘The Secret History of Our Streets.’ It was an interesting programme, but as I watched it there were some aspects that didn’t quite ring true, as well as a few silly gaffes. Like many TV programmes it concentrated on ‘characters’, and one of those, a local politician, it quite obviously had set out to pillory. But many things, not least the dates when things happened didn’t add up and rather than the villain the programme was determined to make him, he has probably done more to preserve the positive features of the area than anyone else. Without his efforts it would be a very different and a very worse place.

Deptford has seen its ups and downs over the years, and like much of East London near the Thames one of the really big changes in the post war era has been the complete loss of the docks and wharves, once the defining industry of the area. Over the years I’ve photographed much of the area, including new and old housing, the Pepys Estate and Albury Street, and been aware – as the programme makers obviously were not – of some of the planning issues and politics involved both locally and also nationally.

It’s always easy to demonise planners and architects, but back the the sixties when estates like Pepys and Evelyn were being built it was planners and architects who were among the strongest critics of such developments. While the programme very much implied that Nicholas Taylor was responsible for this kind of development, he was actually a leader in the fight against it, and in 1971, after these schemes had been built, stood for the council and after Labour regained power, fought hard and largely successfully for  “a more humane, low density and low-rise approach to inner city housing” which he had argued the case for in his book ‘The Village in the City.’

The programme has aroused some controversy on its blog, although apparently a number of critical comments have been removed, those who know the area and what happened in the 1970s and since have largely been appalled by the treatment of Taylor. One of his sons along with some friends have set up a web site, Deptford: Putting the Record Straight and distributed a leaflet in the neighbourhood about the bias of the programme.

Although the BBC is supposedly a responsible public corporation, there really does seem to be little control over it, and certainly little chance of effective public redress when – as in this case – programme makers really get things so wrong.  Really there should be an extra programme added to the series to correct the errors and give the corrections the same level of publicity as the misrepresentations, but I think that extremely unlikely.  And it’s worrying that the reputation of the BBC is used to promote such shoddily researched material.

The pictures here are a few of those that I’ve taken in Deptford in the past ten years, which has seen a change in the area that the BBC programme hardly noticed, with much tidying up and the growth of a large artistic community. The Laban Dance Centre is a major recent cultural  hub on Deptford Creek, and not far away is one of England’s finest baroque churches. We did get a quick glimpse of  Albury St, (though it was incorrectly described.) Formerly called Union St, it was named after the union of England and Scotland in 1707 and the terrace on the north side dates from around then.

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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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Cleaners who work at John Lewis in Oxford Street protest noisily outside

Although the cleaners work in the John Lewis store on Oxford St, unlike all the other workers in the shop they are not ‘partners‘. Their work is essential in keeping the place running smoothly, but the company is happy to regard them as second-class workers, somehow not a part of the enterprise.  They get none of the benefits of working for what is usually regarded as an enlightened company, an employee-owned UK partnership with the others who work in the building getting a share of the profits of their labours. Though the cleaners work at John Lewis, they are employed by a separate company, Integrated Management Cleaning, who pay them the minimum wage, are demanding more and more work in the same hours and allegedly treat them like dirt, or worse.

Currently the cleaners in the store are under threat of redundancy, having been told that half of them will be made redundant but that the remaining half will be expected to cover the whole of the work on the same number of hours and no extra pay. John Lewis may still proudly claim they are “Never knowingly undersold” but after the protest on 26 June certainly can’t claim “Never knowingly underpaid” about the workers that clean its store, some of them starting work at 6am and being required to be there up until 10pm.

Widespread realisation that it is impossible to live in London on the minimum wage led to the adoption by the GLA in 2005 of the ‘London Living Wage’, currently at £8.30 an hour compared to the statutory minumum of £6.08 which John Lewis’s cleaners currently get.  One of Mayor Boris’s recent manifesto promises was to “continue to champion the London Living Wage, pushing private and public sector employers to pay at least this level to all of their workers in London”, hoping to more than double the number of employers paying it during this term of office. Around 20% of London workers are still paid below it, so there is plenty of room for improvement.

John McDonnell MP

It’s hard not to be behind the cleaners and other low-paid workers in London in their campaigns to fight for the London Living Wage, but the support of the traditional unions has sometimes seemed at best muted, perhaps because it might erode the pay differentials between their members. There were disputes in which the cleaners had the support of the other unions, but felt very much let down by the negotiations that took place between union officials and management, and some of them decided to form a London cleaner’s branch of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World.) Formally recognised in the UK as a trade union in 2006, the IWW is an industrial union which seeks to bring together all workers in an industry rather than representing separate trades and is a grass-roots organisation run by its members.

As well as supporting their claim for a living wage, I find the cleaners and their actions are also usually good to photograph, though I keep thinking I need ear protectors as they make sure their protests are noticed by using plastic horns which at the close range needed for taking pictures with a wide-angle are literally deafening. Some of the shouting is also pretty loud, and their protests are always animated and with plenty of waving of red IWW flags, as well as placards and banners. There is also a great deal of spontanaeity and energy on display. Like most of London’s low paid workers the cleaners come largely from first or second generation migrants to this country.

There was a little light rain falling throughout most of the protest, so as usual I worked with a cloth in my hand, holding it balled up to the filter of the lens between taking pictures. The rain was fortunate in a way, because I soon wiped the filter and removed the small blob of greasy muck that had spoilt some of my pictures earlier.

Most of my better pictures were taken with the 18-105mm, partly because there were quite a few other photographers working, and because I also needed to keep out of the way of the shoppers walking pas the protest I was working from a little farther away than I usually like to. But I was working with the DX 18-105mm lens on the D700 body, as the D300 had given up on me more or less completely earlier in the afternoon as I arrived at Buckingham Palace.

Looking through the D700 viewfinder with the DX lens attached you see an irregular shaped image with the DX format frame superimposed on it. I’ve not worked much like this before, and it opened my eyes to the possibility, reminding me very much of working with a rangefinder camera where the bright line frame lets you see outside what will appear in your picture. The DX frame is just a little small, but otherwise it was just like going back to a Leica again – except that the frame in the D700 was absolutely accurate, while Leicas are only moderately close under the best of conditions, and generally rather poor with some lenses.

With the D700, there is a big drawback. The files in DX mode are only 5Mp, which is OK for most press uses, but rather small if you want good large prints. But with a D800, the viewfinder would look more or less the same but the files would be 16Mp. Previously I’d ruled out the D800 because I didn’t want 32Mp files, but now I saw it differently. And just over a week later I was out working not with a D800, but a D800E. But more on that later.

More on the protest at Cleaners at John Lewis on My London Diary. As they left, the cleaners shouted “We’ll be back” and the campaign there will continue until they get decently treated and their contribution to the company is recognised.

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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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16-35mm at 31mm

The ‘Carnival of Dirt‘ was an event to point out the environmental damage, destruction of habitat, human rights abuses, deaths and wars around the world caused by the activities of mining companies, many of which are based in London. Much of their activities are financed by the major London financial institutions – the big UK banks, the Stock Exchange, our pension funds and the rest of the City.

One particular London institution, the London Metal Exchange prides itself on being “the world’s premier non-ferrous metals market and offering “futures and options contracts for aluminium, copper, tin, nickel, zinc, lead, aluminium alloy and NASAAC, steel billet, cobalt and molybdenum” and on “setting the global standard.”

10.5mm, corrected to cylindrical perspective

It’s a industry whose standards have corrupted governments around the world, killed millions in countries such as the Congo, and gambles with the future of the planet.  Among the chief villains are Xstrata, Glencore International, Rio Tinto, Vedanta, Anglo American, BHP Billiton, BP and Shell.

10.5mm, corrected to cylindrical perspective

Given that the problems caused by mining are truly global, the opposition to them needs to be global too, and as well as various UK based groups including UK Uncut (the mining companies massively organise to avoid tax) and Occupy, the Carnival brought together  groups campaigning about the Congo, West Papua, the Philippines, Somalia, Latin America, Australia and the Canadian Tar Sands.

The morning’s event that I photographed was a funeral procession to honour the many who have been killed, with the Government of the Dead having some previous experience at such events. But it was a funeral with a New Orleans style carnival atmosphere and a rather good marching band playing.

Planned for a Friday in the middle of June we might have hoped for summer weather, but the day was cool with rather frequent showers, and I had considerable problems with the rain. Sometimes I do wish I had an underwater camera, although on this occasion as often there were more problems with the lenses than the cameras.

Given the price and amateur nature of the Nikon 18-105 mm I can hardly complain that it isn’t a good lens in wet weather. It’s a lens that almost doubles its length on zooming, pumping damp air in and out. Combine that with the temperature drops in heavy showers and the solar heating in the sunny intervals and it is never long before condensation begins to form on the internal lens elements and images degrade to unusable blurs.

Most of the time I would in any case be working with the 16-35mm on an event like this where its normally possible (and often essential)  to work inside the group of protesters. And the Nikon f4 lens is large, well-sealed and entirely professional. Both zoom and focus take place by moving internal elements. But after a couple of hours working, this too, rather to my surprise, started steaming up and also became more or less unusable.

10.5mm

For around half an hour, the only usable lens in my kit was the 10.5 mm fisheye, and although it is one of my favourite lenses I have to admit it is hardly a general purpose optic. Fortunately there was plenty I could do with it, though I did curse a little later at the extra work it gave me in post-processing, where I needed to convert most of the images from the full-frame fisheye to cylindrical perspective. Later the 16-35 had more or less cleared and I was able to take a few images with that, though some show a little blurring.

10.5mm, corrected to cylindrical perspective

Fortunately by this time the rain had almost stopped, as the exposed front element of the fisheye is great at collecting raindrops and just can’t be protected at all, just wiped immediately before each exposure.  Even doing this you lose a few pictures from drops that land between wipe and shutter press.

10.5mm, corrected to cylindrical perspective

On the train home I took a more careful look at the 16-35mm, still steamed up, and decided that the problem – or at least most of it – was not in the lens itself but on the rear surface of the filter screwed onto its front. Water must have got in between the glass and the metal body of the filter and at some point condensed there. Had I realised earlier I might have been able to keep working simply by unscrewing the filter and wiping the front element and rear of the filter dry before replacing it – or even working without a filter for a while, though I don’t like doing so.

All the images here were taken with the 10.5mm except for the top image, made with the 16-35mm. Of the 10.5mm images, all except one here were corrected to cylindrical perspective in post-processing.

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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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1984 for me always brings to mind George Orwell, but if you are a Sikh it has a different meaning, the year when the Golden Temple was stormed by Indian troops and when so many Sikhs were killed  there and in the massacres carried out by Hindu extremists and apparently encouraged by the Indian authorities, particularly after the killing by her Sikh bodyguards of Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandi, in which many thousands of Sikhs were killed.

The object of the assault on the temple complex was to clear out Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his supporters who were alleged by the Indian government to be terrorists and storing arms there. He led a movement calling for the return of Sikhs to their traditional practices and against Article 25 of the Indian constitution which declared the Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists to be part of the Hindu. He wanted a clear and distinct identity for the Sikh nation. Since his killing and the other events of 1984 many Sikhs have argued this can only be achieved by the formation of a Sikh state, Khalistan.

Few of the speeches were in English, though there were a few short bilingual contributions, and without knowing some of the background many of the placards would be hard to understand, and the event difficult to photograph intelligently.

One face on many of the placards was that of Balwant Singh Rajoana, involved in the 1995 plot which killed Beant Singh, Chief Minister of the Punjab who had ordered ruthless suppression of Sikh separatists and was allegedly responsible for the extra-judicial killing of many thousands of Sikhs. Sentenced to death in 2007, his execution fixed for 31 March 2012 was postponed following an appeal for clemency.

Placards and the messages on them are vital in photographing protests, and it’s sometimes easy to get things wrong. In this picture

I’ve framed the foreground placard so that it appears to say ‘Forget 84’, while of course the opposite was actually intended, as the image below makes clear.

Of course the real message of the upper image could be made clear in a caption, but captions and images are often separated. It’s best to make it clear in the image.

More in Sikhs Remember 1984 on My London Diary.

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

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

To order prints or reproduce images

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