Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

We Need A Noorderlicht Here

I’ve just been reading Pete Brook’s post Some thoughts on, and thanks to, Noorderlicht Photo Gallery following his experiences there with the highly successful show Cruel and Unusual which he co-curated with Hester Keijser which closes there on April 8. And successful isn’t in this case just marketing-speak. He writes:

Cruel and Unusual was extended by a week due to public demand. Visitor numbers have been substantial and the Dutch press went doolally over it. National radio, newspapers, magazine features the whole shebang.

As he makes clear, this show was not just important for showing some fine photography but mainly for the issues that it raised, and showing that photography can still have a substantial impact on how people think about social issues.

As grand an ambition it may sound, Hester and I hoped the show would be a warning shot across the bows of Europe: DONT REPEAT AMERICAS MISTAKES. DONT MASS INCARCERATE!

It’s a message that needs to be heard in other countries across Europe, and particularly in Britain, where our current government seems to have an obsession with aping failed US policies, in health and welfare, education, immigration and prisons. (Failed that is in providing solutions for social benefit, though highly successful in providing profits for the companies that increasingly run these services for – or rather against – us.)

But Noorderlicht has a great record in organising its festivals, inviting open submissions for its projects and tackling difficult or novel subjects. Reading Pete Brook’s post gives a real insight into the kind of place it is and why it works so well. It certainly made me feel that we need an organisation like Noorderlicht here.

St Patrick’s Day

It seems a long time ago now, but St Patrick’s Day was only around two weeks ago, with the main London event on the Sunday following the day itself. Although I’ve photographed this a few times, like many events it seems to have grown rather less interesting over the years, and I decided not to bother photographing it this year. If it had been passing my doorstep I would have gone out, but travelling up to London on a Sunday tends to be a very slow affair, with train services usually disrupted by line closures for engineering work, and there are plenty of things for me to get on with at home – like trying to get My London Diary up to date or scanning some of my extensive archive of negatives.

But I’ve always enjoyed the rather smaller-scale local celebrations on the actual day – which this year happened on a Saturday – at Willesden Green in Brent, and I’d put that event down in my diary. But there was a small problem, that I was also covering a major demonstration by Syrians the same day, starting before and ending after the Brent parade.

The Free Syria supporters were gathering at Paddington Green for their march to the embassy, and I went there after an hour or so standing around on Oxford St where too few people had come for a workfare protest to really be effective. Probably the weather, light but steady rain, had put some off coming, but fortunately except for five minutes or so when I did go outside the small shopping centre to take a few pictures of the hardier who had arrived, I was able to sit down inside and keep dry. But it was still raining at Paddington Green, raining enough that despite frequent lens-wiping, many pictures still had blurred areas from water on the front glass, and Sod’s Law being as it is, usually in a critical area of the image. Fortunately it had slackened off a little by the time the march began, but I was still pleased to leave it after it had gone a quarter mile or so and run to the nearby tube station, catching the two trains I needed to take me to Willesden Green, where I arrived around 20 minutes before the parade started.

For most such events, the best time to get pictures is while people are getting ready for them, particularly the last few minutes before the start. People are generally standing around and waiting, often closer together than they will be during the actual event, and, if you want them to pose (and I usually don’t – my problem is usually stopping people posing) they have time to do so. It’s also a good time to photograph the crowds around the start, although I also like to photograph them along the route as the parade makes its way to the library and everyone comes out of the shops and bars to watch, as well as at the end of the procession where there are various performances.

Of course there was a parade, and St Patrick was in it (twice) along with lots of others including the Mayor, and we were all Irish for the day.

I was sorry that I had to rush off as the parade was ending, back to the tube and this time to the destination of the Syrian march, the embassy in Belgrave Square, arriving a short time after the march had got there, but in plenty of time to take more pictures. I hadn’t expected anything much to happen on its route, and talking to some of the other photographers covering the event I’d missed nothing.

I tried a few things with this man and his eyes along with those in the poster – and in this frame, which I think was the best, added a third pair. But perhaps I should have framed more tightly, though I do rather like the ear at top left. One thing I just could not get exactly how I wanted it was the gallows with an effigy of Asad, and after chasing it for a while through a pretty solid and seething crowd I decided I’d done my best and abandoned the attempt.

I’d had enough of the crowd and taken some pictures I felt reasonably happy with, so it was time to leave and go the short distance along the road to the smaller pen holding the supporters of the Asad regime. Here there was no crowding and physically it was much easier to work, but somehow I felt the whole thing lacking. It seemed rather more like a PR stunt than a protest, with slickly produced portraits of the dictator and truly deafening music.

Even though I’m sure that these people were genuine in their support for their president I found it hard to get inside things, perhaps because my own views are so different to theirs.

This was the picture I liked most of those I took, and perhaps it’s because of the two very different faces the women are making, and that the image of the president is less glossy than the others on show, but also because half of the image is almost dead black, and those two hand gestures which could be read as miming shooting give it, at least for me, something of the sinister.

You can see more of my pictures (and accounts) from the day on My London Diary:

Free Syrians Protest
Brent St Patrick’s Day
Asad Supporters Counter-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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More Women

Although I took these pictures just over 3 weeks ago, I’ve only just got around to adding them to My London Diary. I’d sent some off elsewhere on the day I took them and just forgot to add them to my own web site. I was having a pretty busy few days and they just slipped my mind.

Mornings just aren’t my best time at the moment, and I’d been up very late the previous night working on the pictures I’d taken at three events the previous day and hadn’t got as much sleep as I needed. It wasn’t a really early start, but I was still half asleep when things started around 10.30 am, and somehow I managed to leave the Nikon D300 on manual setting at a fairly unsuitable exposure setting for the bright morning sun – probably what I had been using in the dull rainy conditions of the previous afternoon.

Of course I should have noticed, and if I’d been properly awake would have done so, but I’d taken rather a lot of badly overexposed images by the time I looked more carefully and discovered my mistake. As usual I’d been working mainly with the D700 and the 16-35mm, just grabbing the D300 for the occasional image that needed a longer lens. And in the bright sun the images on the back of the camera looked OK, but I hadn’t checked either the exposure details in the viewfinder or the histogram.

Most of the overexposed images were beyond saving, and the few I could salvage – such as this woman with a peace symbol on her cheek – didn’t quite have the normal tonal quality. Most of the other pictures could only be turned into rather odd poster images, not the kind of effect that interests me.

It didn’t help that I was also having problems with the SB800 flash that had stopped working the previous evening, either because of the rain or through over-heating, and was now either not firing at all or giving unpredictable output (I’d been having some problems with it for a while.) There was a strong low sun and I really needed to use flash fill. b

I’ve now got two out of commission SB800s and am wondering if it is worth taking them in for repair or simply buying a new flash. In the meantime I’m working with a cheap Nissin unit that doesn’t always seem to do what I want. Nikon’s SB910 is bigger and heavier than I like, apart from being expensive and in the end I decided to go for the SB700, which I ordered today and should get early next week.

Not all my problems with ‘Women on the Bridge’ were technical. The press had been invited to a photo-call on the bridge at which some of the celebrities at the front of the march were to release white doves. But the event security stopped us from going up there, and I stood for a quarter of an hour in a slowly seething crowd of photographers muttering to each other but not quite deciding to push past security to get on with the job. Finally we were allowed onto the bridge and I ran up with the others, but we were still far too far away when the few pigeons flew up. Whoever was in charge of the event had got things seriously wrong. They had their own photographer and video there but not the press, and missed an opportunity to get the publicity they wanted. Of course it probably wouldn’t have been a great picture anyway.

Personally I also had a problem in that I could only recognise one of the celebrities who were there. I’d expected to find the names of the others on the event web site, but there was no information at all when I was writing my story. I don’t have a great deal of interest in celebrity, and don’t watch TV so there are few that I can recognise. Usually I have to ask the other photographers, but at this event I couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t stay for the speeches – when I might have found who some of them were, and I suspect some were very worthy.

And perhaps because I missed the speeches it was an event that for me seemed rather corporate and rather lacking in political edge. Held on International Women’s Day which came out of the Communist Second International, this somehow seemed too tame, too moderate, too uncommitted as a celebration of that event. Rather like getting the Chamber of Commerce to organise the events for May Day.

NHS

I was a post-war baby. Just, born a week after Hitler packed it in though the war was still continuing against Japan. So I grew up in our post-war welfare state, drinking clinic orange juice and cod liver oil, and from the age of three enjoyed the free healthcare provided by the National Health Service. The nation was rightly proud of a public service that was comprehensive, based on clinical need and not the ability to pay and free at the point of delivery.

It’s hard not to see the Health and Social Care Bill, recently passed by parliament as anything but an attack on the principles of the NHS, and as someone who is now reliant on it – and liable to be increasingly so in future – I personally feel uneasy. We’ve seen the kind of short cuts and poor service that private providers have been responsible for in other areas. The kind of companies that will be involved have shown that they are interested only in making profits and not in providing high quality services.

If I had not been photographing the protests against the bill on 7 March I might well have been there protesting, although the pouring rain might have put me off. I don’t often photograph holding an umbrella, but there was no choice when I started taking pictures – I needed it to keep the rain off the lens, and even wiping the filter with a cloth immediately before each exposure I still had some images spoiled by water droplets on the glass. But at least the wet conditions did give some reflections on what would otherwise have been a rather empty pavement.

The protest was meant to be a human chain around St Thomas’s Hospital, opposite Parliament where the bill was being debated, but there weren’t enough people to go all the way round. And getting everyone to keep holding hands wasn’t easy, especially as many were holding placards. The picture above, taken on a corner using the 10.5 mm starts with a placard. It was perhaps a pity that the closed stall with its St George’s flags rather blocked the view of the hospital.

The 10.5 gives a very wide angle of view, and I used it for quite a few situations at this event, despite its slightly bulbous unprotected front element being a tremendously efficient rain drop collector. It also let me show both the protest and the Houses of Parliament in a single image, though the protest banner is only very small in the image.

Like most of the images I take with the lens, this has been corrected to a cylindrical perspective, making the verticals straight rather than curved. The balustrade of the bridge is in reality straight too, though in the image it appears to curve through something approaching 90 degrees. The two banks of the river are of course roughly parallel rather than converging as shown, and the horizontal angle of view of the picture is around 145 degrees.

The protests continued throughout the day with a lobby of parliament and protest opposite it:

It was still raining for the lobby, but fortunately by the time for the doctors and students to march at around 5pm it had stopped.

Though of course it soon got dark, and by this time I think the water had affected my flash which was working only as and when it pleased.

More pictures on My London Diary:

Doctors & Students NHS March
NHS Not For Sale Lobby
Save Our NHS Human Chain

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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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Women On The March

From the Workfare protest I rushed a quarter of a mile west to Orchard St, where an all-women march was forming up. The Million Women Rise is an annual international event held close to International Women’s Day, campaigning to end violence against women.

Of course there were not a million women on the streets of London, perhaps a little over a thousand, but it was still a sizeable event, and one of relatively few that makes its way down London’s main shopping street, and I took most of my photographs on Oxford St.

I’ve photographed it I think every year since it began a few years back, and I’ve occasionally had some rather hostile reactions from a few of the women taking part – including some of the students. It’s certainly an event it would be rather easier for a woman to photograph, and I can’t work in my normal manner. I didn’t have any problems this year, but in previous years the march stewards have sometimes been rather aggressive towards men who stepped off the pavement while the march was on the road.

I don’t like to stand back and use a long lens, but I did use the 18-105 towards the longer end rather more than I usually do. Possibly I needn’t have been worried, because on the few occasions I did go onto the roadway to take pictures this year I didn’t get hassled, whereas in past years I’ve suffered some pretty heavy stewarding for as much as letting a toe go over the edge of the pavement. Perhaps attitudes are changing. One of the placards many women were carrying stated ‘Together We Can End Male Violence Against Women’, but I think it will need men as well as women to do so. Most of us are against violence in person relationships, whether by men or by women on women or men.

You can see more pictures in Million Women Rise March on My London Diary.

Workfare

Although London and the South-east of England are suffering from a drought, with low rainfall over the past 18 months and bans on the use of hose-pipes coming in, I started March photographing in the rain on Oxford St, though it did clear up a little later. It was only light rain that day, but since then most days I’ve been out taking pictures it’s also rained, enough to make photography a little tricky on a couple of occasions.

I was on Oxford St to photograph a protest against the government’s workfare scheme, which involves those out of work being forced to take unpaid jobs, supposedly to get experience of work, with major employers who have elected to be a part of the scheme, in order to retain their benefits. The companies involved get workers for nothing, and the benefits amount to around £1.78 an hour compared to a national minimum wage of just over £6.

If the workers were really being trained it might be an acceptable scheme, but in most cases they are simply being used for unskilled work, replacing paid workers. Not surprisingly it has been labelled ‘slave labour’ by many.

For once this is an issue where protests have clearly been effective, with quite a few companies actually withdrawing from the scheme. The protesters met outside BHS, and the protest started by hearing that since it had been organised, BHS had decided to stop participating, so they were off to protest elsewhere. The instruction, to protesters (and of course also photographers and police) was to follow the two flags to the next destination.

There followed something of a cat and mouse game along Oxford St, made a little easier to follow after the first protest outside Pizza Hut when a map was given out with some of those taking part in the scheme marked on it. Of course the flag carriers were sometimes used to deliberately mislead the police and in the rather confused events it wasn’t always possible to keep my eye on the key protesters, so I wasn’t always able to be in the right place at the right time, though I did rather better than the police.

Sometimes of course you have to make a guess, and it can go wrong. I spent some time waiting outside a well-known charity that takes part in the scheme expecting the protesters to make at least a token protest there, but they had decided against it, and in doing so missed just a little of the action, and had to run to catch up when the group moved away to its next location.

It’s also often difficult to know when it’s safe to leave, and I wanted to cover another event, and in this case my guess was correct, as I learnt later that the Holiday Inn was the final destination of the protest.

More pictures on My London Diary in Boycott Workfare – Oxford St.

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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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Trespassing on Gallery Walls

As always, Shahidul Alam writes a thoughtful article on photography in his Trespassing on Gallery Walls in which he looks at the peculiar nature of the photograph that empowers it. Something that means that as the art world ingests our medium, “It has led to concerned photography being considered passé. In the hallowed world of limited-edition copies, the fine art print is about the object and not its purpose. Form triumphs over content.”

As he goes on to point out, photography has at times altered the course of history, changing people’s views – and regimes such as that in Bangladesh continue to provide evidence of its power when they close down shows such as Into Exile: Tibet 1949 to 2009 and Crossfire. But do read his article, written as the introductory piece for the February issue of PIX, a photographic quarterly from India, where you can download this issue on the theme of Trespass. It contains some fine work, and I particularly enjoyed the black and white essays by Mark Esplin, Siddhartha Hajra, Aparna Jayakumar and Devansh Jhaveri.

Esplin’s digitally taken diptychs in City Builders (2010) pair portraits of New Delhi’s homeless with night images from the streets of the city. Hajra in ‘Opera Monorama‘ has photographed the performances of “Monorama or Rajuda (as he is commonly called in his neighbourhood)… a transgendered person who performs in closed community spaces during the spring season which is associated with Sitala puja.” It is sensitive and intriguing work. Jayakumar in ‘On the Wrong Side of the Equator” is working in the surreal world of the film set, a Bollywood recreation of an Angolan hamlet in India. Jhaveri in Trespass looks at the Hindu cremation rituals.

In his piece, Alam makes reference to the “amateur grabs of Abu Ghraib“, with which we are all familiar, but an earlier – and non-photographic post on his blog, Control by seed, written by Najma Sadeque, is about a far more serious grab which occurred at Abu Ghraib, the home of Iraq’s national seed gene bank.

Under the control of Paul Bremer, military head of the Provisional Authority in 2004, Order 81 dealt with plant varieties and patents. It allowed plant forms to be patented and genetically-modified organisms to be introduced. Farmers were strictly banned from saving their own seeds. Its “goal was brutally clear-cut and sweeping to wipe out Iraqs traditional, sustainable agriculture and replace it with oil-chemical-genetically-modified-seed-based industrial agriculture.”

As Sadeque writes: Its not for nothing international researchers have termed the deliberate annihilation of Iraqi agriculture the ultimate war crime.

Occupy London

I was sorry to hear about the eviction of Occupy London from their site outside St Paul’s Cathedral, although it had seemed inevitable. Last Thursday afternoon, when I was standing on a hillside in Derbyshire I got a text message suggesting I might like to photography at the St Paul’s camp later that evening when they would be taking some of their tents down to move elsewhere, and was sorry I was unable to go and do so, but it was a sign that some at least of those occupying had decided to move before they were pushed.

Monday night and Tuesday morning when the eviction happened I was back home and in bed with my phone and computer turned off, and only heard the news the next morning. But in any case, although I only live a little over 20 miles away, it isn’t too practicable for me to get to London in the middle of the night – it would take me a couple of hours on my bike.

I knew of course that other photographers would be there, covering the events more or less from the start, so there was little point in my making the effort had I been awake.

I was sad to hear what happened, because OccupySLX has I think had an impact that few of us could have predicted, creating and influencing public debates about issues that would otherwise have remained brushed under the carpets. And of course the eviction doesn’t end the Occupy movement in London, with one site, Finsbury Square, still going and few would dismiss the chance that others may begin (certainly the police haven’t.) But what we have seen so far doesn’t deserve the gloating that some politicians and bloggers have been making much of over the last day. It is very much a story of success that we should celebrate – and hope for the future.

Few of us who were at the general meeting on Westminster Bridge on October 9, six days before the occupation started that took a decision to occupy the Stock Exchange thought that this had any chance of success.

And when it failed on October 15, to many this seemed the end. Even when it became clear that some of those present were determined to set up camp in front of St Paul’s, many predicted it would be cleared within 24 hours. Even the most optimistic of us thought that it would certainly all be over well before Christmas – certainly when the first cold weather came.

But of course it stayed much longer than the few weeks most people gave it. And it didn’t just stay, but spawned other sites, including Finsbury Square, the nearby Bank of Ideas, a court in Shoreditch etc. Only Finsbury Square currently remains, as the School of Ideas was also evicted on Monday night – and to make sure it stayed evicted bulldozers flattened it early on Tuesday morning.

It didn’t just stay. It worked, it protested, it taught. It attracted many influential and well-known names to come and visit, to give their support and talk. At first people may have laughed at the idea of the “tent university” but it became something of a graduate school.

I’m not a part of Occupy London, although I sympathise with many of the ideas they put forward. I dropped in for the occasional visit, often when passing on my way to other things, but didn’t have the time to commit to being a part of it. I’m not sure I would have done even so, as there were things I was uncomfortable with, apart from being rather old and fixed in more comfortable ways. But I am sure that their presence has enriched London. And I look forward to more of the story.

Wim Wenders on James Nachtwey

Burn Magazine prints a long speech by Wim Wenders on the photography of James Nachtwey, made at the award to Nachtwey of the third Dresden International Peace Prize at the Semper Opera House in Dresden, Germany on 11 Feb 2012 .

It’s an interesting eulogy, and one in which Wenders backs up his arguments with a detailed look at three images by Nachtwey.

Wenders as well as being an internationally renowned director for his films including Paris, Texas (1984) and Buena Vista Social Club (1999) and, nominated for this year’s Oscars, Pina (2010), is also something of a photographer himself, as you can see from his Places, strange and quiet which was shown in London last year.

WPP Pietà

I’ve been reading quite a lot of criticism of the WPP winning image by Samuel Aranda on various pages around the web, and you can read an interesting summary of the controversy it has aroused from Jeremy Nicholl on his ‘The Russion Photos Blog’ in his Why The Critics Of The World Press Photo Muslim Pietà Are Wrong By The People Who Know Best.

I’ve not always been too impressed by WPP winners, and I share many of the overall criticisms that various people have made over the years of the WPP and other similar awards. I’m not a fan of such competitions, which I think tend to trivialise work and concentrate on the spectacular and neglect work that is perhaps in the longer term more important in changing attitudes and exposing evil. Although I have a great admiration for those photographers who continue to expose the horrors of war – and think it is a necessary and useful work, unfortunately much of it is now only too familiar.

Samuel Aranda’s image spoke strongly to me when I first saw it and still does now. And its strength comes from the way it uses various stereotypes, and repositions them. I don’t agree that the Pietà can be claimed as uniquely Christian imagery, although we know its representation in Western art. But I would expect similar images to emerge in any representational art tradition, because essentially it is about a human relationship, between mother and child, which is widespread across humanity and I think has a powerful evolutionary basis. Although taken up and used by Christians and made a part of Christian iconography, its roots I think lie deeper in our humanity.

The black burkha is in some respects a more potent and loaded symbol of our times, promoted by Western media in a demonisation of Muslims, a looming presence that relates back to sinister and shadowy nightmares and horror, as well as to more recent images, media hysteria and even some government bans. This is a picture that reminds us strongly of the person and the humanity underneath that black covering, her gestures amplified by the white gloves.

This is a picture that speaks at several levels about good and evil, and the framing and the shadows help to make it a powerful statement, as well as a complex one.

Nicholls ends his piece with the comments from four Yemenis, including the young man and his mother in the picture, both of whom are proud and happy to see it winning the contest. Like him I find it hard to disagree with their verdict.