Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Southwark’s Shame

Last June I wrote a post The Scandal of Londons Largest Ghost, accompanying my panoramas of the deserted Heygate estate at the Elephant and Castle, a well-designed 1970s estate with years of useful life remaining – and which a council commissioned survey had concluded was not a ‘failing estate’ but nevertheless they decided to demolish it. It was a decision based on finance – getting the debt off the council books and making millions for the developers – but the financial crisis has stalled the process. It is shameful that a Labour council should be essentially selling off publicly owned assets for private gain, but even more shameful that when London has its worst housing crisis ever that some 1300 homes in a prime location in the inner city should be left empty since the residents were ‘decanted’ in 2008, four years ago.

Many of those residents were also shamefully treated. The council had a policy in recent years of using short term contracts for lettings, enabling them to disclaim responsibility for re-housing many of those who lived there; others were given little choice but to move to developments outside the area. Those who had bought the leasehold of their properties were also shabbily treated, often being pressured into accepting a fraction of the true market value of their properties.

In Walking the Rip-Off – Heygate & Aylesbury you can read more about what has happened on the Heygate estate and what is now happening on the nearby and much larger Aylesbury estate with some pictures (including a few panoramas) that I took during a walk around the two estates with some of the very few remaining residents of Heygate and tenants from the Aylesbury estate.

One of great strengths of Heygate is its green spaces, and some of these are now being gardened by remaining residents, former residents and other supporters, and were one of the things I focussed on. It is unfortunate for their cause that a few residents are unhappy about being photographed, although most were welcoming.

Of course, Southwark isn’t the only council acting shamefully towards its tenants and those in need of housing. On the Facebook site of CARP! you can read about Newham’s similar treatment of the Carpenters Estate next to the Olympic site. It’s worth looking at an Open University video which looks at this and the Excalibur Estate in Lewisham which I photographed in the 1990s and in 2010 in Excalibur Estate.

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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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Two To Tango

One of the things that I find relatively few photographers really seem to appreciate is that much of photography is really a collaborative art. It’s perhaps obvious in some branches of photography – where would Bailey have been without Shrimpton? But most of the collaborations I’ve been involved with have been considerably less intimate, often a matter of a few fractions of a second, and are often unwitting at least in detail on the part of my photographic co-respondents.

I’ve never been a great fan of David Bailey (or of fashion as a genre, though it has provided a living for some fine photographers), but when I was invited to apply for a post writing about photography for an Internet site back in 1999 by sending a trial article, I chose to make him the subject. He had made his name by going to New York with the Shrimp in 1962, and it amused me to make my own debut as a Londoner for a New York based company with a piece about another Londoner. Looking back, it isn’t a piece I’m particularly proud of (perhaps one of the few of the hundreds I wrote that I’m pleased is no longer on line), but it had a certain edge and humour and it got me the job.

I didn’t see BBC4’s We’ll Take Manhattan which was screened in January, though I suspect I would have been unable to watch it in its entirety, but the video about its making is almost certainly a more interesting piece, and considerably shorter. It’s also worth noting, as ‘Daks’ comments on the The Arts Desk piece that as usual film-makers rewrite history to suit their purposes – as well as presenting a highly censored version of Bailey-speak.

It should also be noted that the shoot was January 1962, and Diana Vreeland did not join Vogue until April 1962; in January she was still editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar. Bailey also claimed to have met Shrimpton at VOGUE studios where she was being photographed for a Kelloggs advert by Brian Duffy, who was one of the ‘terrible three’ (Bailey, Duffy, Donovan), so the BBC production was also not accurate with how they met. (Fashion Theory, Lustrum Press 1978)

Daks also goes on to point out that the BBC also showed ” a great documentary on Bailey – Four beats to the bar and no cheating“. You can watch it as four clips from a broadcast on Swedish TV starting here on YouTube. I’ve only watched a little of it so far. Or you could just watch Blow Up again.

I’ve always thought of My London Diary as being at least in part for the people who collaborate with me in the making of the pictures, some more actively than others. It’s one reason why I put so many pictures of most events on it – so that the people I’ve photographed can see the pictures I took of them. Often people will ask me where they can see the them – or if I can send them a copy – and it’s easier to give them my card and tell them they will be on the site in a few days, and that they can e-mail me.

One group I like photographing is Climate Rush, and I was with them a couple of times towards the end of April. Here’s Tamsin Omond cleaning up the London Air:

and I think this is the best – though you can see some others too in Climate Rush Spring Clean London’s Air on My London Diary. Earlier I’d grabbed a picture of her with the duster between her teeth that I quite liked too.

But of course Climate Rush, whose tagline is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s “Well behaved women seldom make history” and have adopted the suffragette slogan ‘Deeds Not Words‘ isn’t just Tamsin. She was at the solidarity protest for the Russian anonymous women’s punk band Pussy Riot the following Monday, but the best pictures I took in Protest Supports ‘Pussy Riot’ were not of her.

It wasn’t easy to make a picture that included the flag of the Russian embassy (not that anyone recognises the Russian flag now) visible at the top right, and the placard – from Pussy Riot in Moscow – is perhaps a little less clear than in some of the more obvious images I took, but I felt this was an image that reflected Pussy Riot more than the others which you can see 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.

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Course Report

I didn’t take many pictures on the weekend of April 21-2 because I was at a photographic workshop. If that seems odd, perhaps I should say I was running it, although facilitating would be a better word. Based at the View Tube, overlooking the London Olympic site during one of the last few weekends when that viewpoint will be available to the public, there were some disappointments, but I think we managed to have an enjoyable and fruitful time.

As usual, the main joy of the workshop was seeing how other photographers tackle the same challenges, in particular the others taking part in the workshop. Shortly I hope to be able to link to a mini web-site of some of the work that we produced which the Museum of London promised to host.

I started the course by trying to show how other photographers and film makers had reacted to the area, including of course my own work on the River Lea/Lee Valley 1980-2010 web site some of which is also in the Blurb book Before the Olympics, but also showing quite a range of other work, including images by the photographers featured on David Boulogne’s 2012 pics blog (which also has a little of my own work.) It was a shame that the View Tube didn’t have the facilities to display this or own work more than dimly.

One of the buildings overlooking the venue was of course the former Bryant & May match factory (above, taken a week before the course) which has been in the news this week as there are likely to be guided missiles based on one of its towers during the Olympics. It would certainly be an ideal site from which to attack the Olympic site, but hard to see it as a good defensive position, and in the thankfully unlikely event that any of the missiles was fired and hit a target the result could be terrible casualties in the East End.

We didn’t have any special access to the Olympic area, and the closures already in force were something of a pain, requiring some lengthy detours. Of course many of the paths that used to give access to the area – such as this one – were closed years ago.

This picture illustrates some of the changes that have taken place. A few years ago the path here would have been narrow, surrounded by grass and low bushes and empty. The view would not have been a huge building site with the stadium and other venues but a busy and thriving industrial area with factories, oil storage and office buildings. Somewhat run down – with some of the premises serving as artist’s studios – including the interestingly named ‘Tate Moss’, in 2007 when I took the picture below already severely affected by Olympic blight and the imminent demolition. Now there is serious pedestrian congestion.

More pictures from the area in Feb 2007 on My London Diary.

You can now see more of the pictures I took while walking around the area with the other photographers on My London Diary in Olympic Course Day 1 and Olympic Course Day 2.

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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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Handling Disabled Protests

I don’t have any problems with protests by the disabled, but the police don’t quite seem to know how to deal with them, particularly when they have attracted enough attention for there to be crowds of photographers present. The latest protest by DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) again resulted in them being able to block a major road through central London, just as their protest in January (Disabled Welfare Reform Road Block) though this time it was at Trafalgar Square rather than Oxford Circus and on a weekday rather than a Saturday.

I can’t decide which of the two similar pictures I prefer:

When I sent off the story to Demotix, I chose the lower of the two, where I’m closer to the face of the man in the foreground and the chain is a little larger. That he is looking in my direction also makes for a stronger image. But on putting the work on My London Diary in the post Disabled Activists Block Trafalgar Square I chose the upper picture for the ‘front page’. I like the two hands of protester and police officer on the chain, clearly linking them together. I think when I first saw them I thought that the hand and camera of another photographer at top left was an unfortunate intrusion; now I’m inclined to think that it works together with the videographer and photographer at the right to show how this protest took place with pretty massive press interest.

Incidentally, the guy with the video camera has himself been in the news, fighting not to hand over his work from the Dale Farm eviction to the police in what is clearly a ‘fishing expedition’, a move by the police that could seriously endanger the often tricky relationship between photographers and protesters. As NUJ General Secretary Michelle Stanistreet says,

“This case is a defence of press freedom – journalists are not evidence gatherers for the police.”

Earlier in the DPAC protest there had been an incident that seemed to be to be of near farce, when the police stopped the protest on the Charing Cross Road, and tried to insist that it proceed on the pavement rather than on the roadway.

This is just one of a number of pictures that I took while police argued with protesters who they had stopped, creating a far greater traffic hold-up than if they had simply allowed the march to continue.

It wasn’t a request that the protesters were likely to accede to, not least because it was hardly a practical suggestion, given the fairly narrow and somewhat cluttered pavement and a protest with a number of people taking part in wheelchairs and mobility scooters. But it did provide a good opportunity for photographs.

Disabled people are rightly very angry, with recent changes in welfare provision and in particular the imposition of testing procedures that are ill-thought out and administered with an incredible lack of common sense, common decency and competence by a private company highly paid on a contract that rewards them for refusing benefits rather than doing the job properly.

More about the protest at Disabled Activists Block Trafalgar Square 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.

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Olympic Site Lock Down

This weekend is the last time – at least until the end of September – when you will be able to walk the section of the Capital Ring that goes along the Greenway from close to Pudding Mill Lane station to Hackney Wick. For a couple of weeks you will still be able to access the You Tube from Pudding Mill Lane Station, but all access will cease and the View Tube close down a couple of weeks later.

I went there on Friday April 13 for two reasons, firstly to check what was still open for the workshop I was running in 8 days time for the Museum of London based at the View Tube, and secondly as I’d been asked by a friend who works for a foreign news agency to show him around the area.

We walked down from Stratford Station, a much busier area now that the Westfield shopping centre has opened, going through the 60s council estate which seems to be being deliberately run-down – with many empty flats despite Newham’s desperate housing shortage which got them in the news this week for trying to rehouse their homeless more than a hundred miles away. It’s certainly a prime site for private development, with large new blocks of flats and hotels appearing on nearby Stratford High Street every time I pay a visit.

At City Mill Lock I was surprised to see a small boat actually in the lock. Until a few years ago, this had old wooden gates that were long beyond use. The City Mill River was widened and made navigable for large barges as a part of a flood defence and employment provision scheme covering the area in the 1930s, but seems never to have been used by barges, and was more or less completely abandoned by the 1960s. Those wooden gates don’t look as if they were replaced in the 1930s, but a few years back I watched the lock being completely refurbished with completely new gates. But this was the first time I’d actually seen them in use.

The double gate was needed because the Waterworks River which it leads to, underneath the bridge from which I was photographing used to be tidal, and its level could be either above or below that of St Thomas’s Creek and the City Mill River at the further end of the lock. Probably it was never really needed, as the Waterworks River was only navigable around high tide, so the lock would only be needed when the level was the same or higher, and with the new lock on the Prescott Channel, built but hardly used for the Olympics, the river is no longer tidal.

My friend also took some pictures, and we walked down the steps to the lock side, where the man operating the lock – a G4S security guard – objected to having his picture taken. My friend laughed at the man, and told him he had every right to take photographs and the argument continued for a minute or so. I stood a little to one side as a witness, ready to take pictures should the situation escalate, thinking to myself that it was a pity my camera didn’t take videos or at least record audio, as still images really didn’t capture the situation.

Although the security man objected to being photographed, it became clear that he wasn’t actually going to do anything about it. His objection was that it would have been polite to ask his permission rather than security related.

I talked to him briefly about the lock and the Bow Back rivers, and we had a polite conversation, though I found he knew rather less than me. Had I been on my own, after taking the overall picture from the bridge I would probably have done this before going on to take his picture, but that’s just a difference in the way we chose to work, not something I need to do. If he’d been reluctant to be photographed and I needed the picture I would have still have taken one, but usually people don’t mind if they know what you are doing. But I didn’t particularly want a closer picture of him – I was more interested in the boat going through the lock and a picture that showed that and him operating the gates.

We went on and up to the Greenway and the View Tube, and although we saw (and he photographed) some of the other security men around, none of them objected. Of course they are used by now to crowds of tourists with cameras. But in other areas around the Olympic site there can still be problems with over-zealous security men who don’t know or understand the law, as some of my colleagues found a few days later. A group of them were stopped and two were assaulted while photographing the Olympic site from the public highway. What was particularly worrying was that their manager who came out after a minute or two defended their behaviour and is reported to have said that ” they were trained to deter people from taking photographs.” The report continues: “We asked for police to attend and two SO23 officers soon arrived, confirmed that our behaviour was entirely lawful and the G4S guards retreated back into the Olympic site.”

There will I’m sure be further such incidents, and G4S and other security companies really do have to address the issue of keeping within the law and giving their personnel the training that is needed to do the job properly. Any manager who thinks that they should be “trained to deter people from taking photographs” should at least be severely disciplined and sent for re-training in a proper attitude towards the public, if not dismissed.

© 2005 Peter Marshall
Paths like the one across this bridge were closed years back – and no doubt that iconic ‘F**k Seb Coe’ graffiti we all photographed has disappeared

Most of the rights of way that existed across the Olympic site were extinguished some years ago, leaving only the Greenway and the Lea Navigation towpath. Part of the Greenway has been closed for some time, at first for the Olympics and following on for the construction of Crossrail, and this section is expected to remain closed for another couple of years. After the end of May there will be no public access to the rights of way in the area at least until the end of September.

While I was there I made several new panoramas, including this from the exact spot where I photographed around ten years ago before any of the disruption, and have continued to do so except when access was impossible or for a period when the view was almost completely blocked by the blue fence. I found someone sitting close to it and painting the scene.

and continuing around the site a further view from a different viewpoint – the side window of the viewing gallery at the View Tube.

© 2012, Peter Marshall
Southern end of Olympic site from View Tube – 200 degree view
Rt click &’View Image’ for larger version

The two views use a different projection, the upper one is equi-rectangular and the lower cylindrical, usually more suitable for extreme angles of view. Both are quick stitches using PTGui, and not quite finished images, and a little on the dark side.

More pictures at Olympic Site Revisited.

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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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Roma Nation Day

The atmosphere of this year’s Roma Nation Day march in London this year was very different from that I photographed a few years ago. Then the march seemed almost entirely to me made up of Roma, with many women and children among them, and few non-Roma.

It is an event that celebrates the first World Roma Congress which was held in the UK in 1971, and remembers the genocide of around 500,000 Roma and Sinti in the Nazi holocaust. In 2005 the event began with a service in St James’s Piccadilly, after which they marched through central London, harassed rather by the police (and I was threatened with arrest) to keep moving fast.) But little has changed. In 2005 I wrote:

Roma from several countries marched across London against the ethnic-cleansing of 30,000 gypsies from their own land and in protest over threatened evictions at Dale Farm, Essex, Smithy Fen, Cambridgeshire, and elsewhere.

At Dale Farm, evictions finally went ahead last year and made the national news – and further evictions have followed there more recently with rather less publicity. This year at the protest there were Roma from Europe where the persecution of Roma appears also to have intensified, but there were few Roma women and children to be seen.There were also noticeably more non-Roma supporters, including some of those protesters who had been at Dale Farm and opposed the evictions.

This year the march started in Hyde Park, and went to the Holocaust Memorial Garden there, where after brief speeches, flowers were laid. From there the group visited several embassies of countries where the civil rights of Roma are under attack to protest outside them.

You can read more about this year’s march at Roma Nation Day Of Resistance.

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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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Pillow Fights

It’s good at least occasionally to have a rest from more serious events, and International Pillow Fight Day provided that on April 7.

It was hard to pick out a single image from the many I took during the 30 minutes, though the set does I think give a good idea of the event.

I first photographed International Pillow Fight Day in March 2008, when the London event took place in Leicester Square.

It was perhaps a little easier then to get in among the midst of things as the fight was in a slightly more confined space, and it was easier to take photographs because there were relatively few photographers present. This year there were hordes of us, and rather a lot of those taking part were busily performing for the press rather than just getting on with having a good time belting hell out of each other with their pillows. The pillow fight day is an idea of the urban playground movement, which aims to get people off the couch and taking part in things, and I’m not sure that I think acting up for the media is really much better than being a passive consumer of it. People should get on with their own thing.

This year I had some technical problems. My D300 suffered a mirror lock-up – which it frequently does – and in the heat of the moment I couldn’t clear this. Normally it’s simply a matter of using the menu item which is supposed to lock it up for cleaning, pressing the shutter release to lock it up, then turn the camera off for it to come back down into place. But the menu item was greyed out and unavailable. Once I had time to think about it I realised that this simply meant the battery was getting low, but in the heat of the pillow fight I simply thought the thing had finally given up the ghost. I’d been intending to use the10.5mm fisheye and get in really close, but only managed a single frame during the actual fight before the camera locked up.

I was also perhaps a little nervous about my equipment, having just got a new Nikon SB700 flash, I carefully put it away in my bag before the feathers started to fly. If you photograph in the middle of things, pillow fights can get pretty physical, and I didn’t want it to get damaged before I’d really had a chance to use it. Although my cameras stood up well to a little battering, I did get the D300 I was holding to my eye hit hard by a pillow and knocked into my upper lip, which hit a tooth and I was photographing for a few minutes with blood dripping.

I’ve also photographed a pillow fight that had a more straightforward purpose, in January 2011 outside Walthamstow station over the plans by developers Solum Regeneration to build a 14 storey hotel and 8 storey blocks of flats.

It was rather too spread out to generate the same kind of energy as the larger events, and that shows in the pictures.

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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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Limited Editions?

I’ve never been in favour of ‘limited editions’ of photographs. It has always seemed to me to be a repudiation of one of the intrinsic properties of our medium, its reproducibility.

It also seemed unnecessary, as most photographs are produced as actual photographic prints in relatively limited numbers – few photographers sell more than a few copies of any image as actual photographic prints, although they may get reproduced in thousands or even millions in newspapers, magazines, books or images on screen. Paradoxically while limited editions have been seen and marketed as a way to artificially produce scarcity, in many cases they will actually have resulted in more prints of an image being made.

Over the years many photographers have indulged in dubious practices on limited editions in various ways. Often an edition is not actually printed, but prints are actually made to demand, and may differ significantly from each other. Others have produced several limited editions from the same original – a practice that would be acceptable if made clear at the time that the first was being marketed, but perhaps not if decided on at a later date.

Of course there are positive aspects of limited editions. Some photographers like them because they feel they enable them to put a finish to older work and allow them to concentrate on new projects. Others see them as a useful marketing tool to make a living, and I’ve nothing against photographers making a living, although there are photographers who have managed it without limited editions.

The recent sale record-breaking sale of new prints of old work by William Eggleston has raised some interesting questions, not least about limited editions, with one major collector of his work who owns a number of his limited edition dye-transfer prints suing over the new limited edition of these same photographs. The details of the case so far are well covered in the three links from PDN Online that I won’t go into them further. It’s also interesting to read about them and the possible museum in Eggleston’s home town MemphisNewsPaper.

But this case also raises interesting questions about the photographic obsession with ‘vintage prints’, with the new large ‘pigment prints’ selling for an order of magnitude more than the orginal dye transfer edition. Possibly because they are better prints (though I’ve not had the chance to compare) and almost certainly because they are larger.

The new Eggleston prints are inkjet prints, or as the galleries prefer to call them ‘digital pigment prints.’ I don’t know on what paper, printer or inks these were made, but they are basically similar to those many of us can produce on our own printers, except for the size of 44″ x 60.

Craig J Sterling on Beyond the F-Stop comments “the digital print, in my opinion, has finally been legitimized … yes!” Looking around the giant dealer trade show in Paris eighteen months ago I’d certainly come to the same opinion, although as with these prints the labels went to great lengths not to include ‘I’ word; “inkjet” is still taboo in the trade. Sterling has also written about Limited Edition Prints, and includes the idea that it only became possible to produce true editions of photographs with the advent of digital – in the darkroom every print is an individual performance.

Although I rather doubt if the case against Eggleston will be successful (but I’m not a lawyer) it may perhaps serve to make photographers rather more careful particularly in those US states that have laws about editioning of art works. But what I would really like to see is more photographers adopting a democratic rather than an elitist stance towards selling photographs.

Eggleston’s work doesn’t need to be printed huge, and I’ve often thought that much if not all of it works better in books than on the exhibition wall (and the same is true of most photographs.) You can buy a copy of his ‘The Democratic Forest’, arguably his best book, for around £30 if you shop around, which gets you not just one but a sequence of 150 of his images for something like $578,460 less than that single large image of a tricycle. I know which makes more sense.

Justice For Trayvon

Like most people – or rather everyone I’ve talked to about it – I was appalled at the shooting of Trayvon Martin, a teenager going home from his local shop after buying a soft drink and some sweets, shot by a white man who claimed he felt threatened by this young black in a hoodie, apparently sufficient justification to get away with murder under Florida law.

Although this was clearly a crime committed because the victim was black, it surprised me that the protest at the US Embassy did not attract much wider support from the left in the UK. Not only were the great majority of those at the protest black, but even most of the photographers I met there were. The SWP had as almost always produced a placard – this one reading ‘No Justice No Peace‘ and a few members were present with a bookstall but otherwise there was relatively little evidence of solidarity.

Trayvon was killed in Florida, but the racism which led to his death is active here, and as recent events have brought again to public attention, very much present in our police force. As I noted in my post Protest for Trayvon Martin on Demotix and My London Diary, the speakers at the event were introduced by “Merlin Emmanuel, brother of Smiley Culture, killed by police in his own kitchen, and speakers included Marcia, the brother of Sean Rigg, murdered in Brixton Police Station.”

The picture above is not the most flattering I’ve taken of Marcia Rigg on the various occasions I’ve met her since her brother’s murder, but the angle and framing were carefully chosen to include the American eagle and flag flying on top of the embassy building. And it was intended not to flatter but to show something of her righteous anger at both the killing of her brother and the deception and lies the family have met with from police, IPCC and CPS in trying to find the truth of what happened in Brixton Police Station and to get justice.

Flags very seldom fly out straight in London’s unpredictable breezes and it took quite a few attempts to get this how I wanted it, working at around 90mm equivalent using the 18-105mm on the D300 in very overcast light. A little flash helped to keep a sensible tonality in her face, though I had to bring it out more in post-processing – adding a little brightness and contrast in some areas and burning down the flare from the brighter sky on her forehead. The sky and the flag also needed burning in.

The picture was taken nominally at ISO1250 but with one stop of underexposure – so really ISO 600 – and stopped down to f ll to get the background fairly sharp, and this gave me a shutter speed of 1/320. Both my Nikon flashes are waiting for me to take them in to see if they can be fixed, and this was taken using a cheap Nissin unit, which I don’t find gives as reliable exposure. Looking at the results from this and the other events during the day made me order a Nikon SB700. It seemed a bargain (though I think six times what I paid for the Nissin) compared to the larger, heavier, considerably more expensive and only slightly more powerful SB910.

People had been asked to come to the protest wearing hoodies and to bring packets of the sweets Trayvon had bought – Skittles – and bottles of the soft drink, and there were many opportunities to take people posing with these. I don’t like posed pictures, but I did take rather a lot of them at this event, and a few made it to the web pages at Protest for Trayvon Martin on My London Diary. The one above at least shows a certain spontaneity, as well as featuring the two joint chairs of BARAC, Black Activists Rising Against Cuts, Lee Jasper and Zita Holbourne.

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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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Artists At The Gallery

March for me went out with a very busy day, covering three protests in London, but for once they were fairly well-spaced across the day, even giving me time for a short rest (and a couple of beers with another photographer) before rushing to the final location.

Disarm the National Gallery was my starting point, where a team of ‘artists’, each with paint-stained smock, black beret and moustache (optional for the women), palette and easel painted a single letter of the slogan in a long row in front of the National Gallery. I’d been there earlier in the year when activists from the Campaign Against the Arms Trade had tried to run into the gallery when they were hosting a dinner for VIP guests to the DSEi Arms Fair in London (see Arms Unfair 4), and on this occasion the gallery was taking no chances of a repeat and had shut their main entrance on the portico overlooking Trafalgar Square. Today’s protest was quiet and entirely orderly and drew the attention of the public, including those in the long queue to enter the gallery by a small and easily guarded lower door, but it was hard to find a way to photograph it except for the obvious.

On My London Diary in Disarm The National Gallery you can see a few variations on this. It wasn’t too easy to get a picture like this, mainly because this area is actually a busy walkway, and it really wasn’t possible to work from a great enough distance to use a normal wide-angle or get a better perspective on the gallery building. When they did it for the second time the easels were a little better placed, and there are other images that are better. But this was I think the concept behind this protest. I was able to get the whole message in by using the 10.5mm fisheye, and then to get the verticals straight by converting to cylindrical perspective. The horizontal angle of view that this gives is something like 147 degrees, while anything more than around 100 degrees gets impossibly stretched at the edges with rectilinear perspective.

There was plenty of time to take pictures, though I had to be careful to keep out of the way of the people from CAAT who were videoing the event – except when they decided to video me photographing. So I could take pictures of the artists painting and other things that were happening, although it was hard to get away from a sameness in the images with almost everyone taking part being in the same uniform and doing the same things.

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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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