Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Bhopal & The Olympics

The story was about the Olympics and the campaign to get Dow Chemicals dropped as a sponsor for it because of their environmental record, and in particular for their refusal to take responsibility for the continuing poisoning of groundwater in Bhopal after the Union Carbide plant their was abandoned following the largest ever environmental disaster yet.

The Labour Friends of India had organised a ‘photo-opportunity’ to take place in Trafalgar Square in front of the Olympic clock exactly 200 days before the start of the London Olympics, with a banner reading ‘200 days to drop Dow’ in a passable pastiche of the Olympic logo and a bottle allegedly containing water from Bhopal with a rather nicely designed spoof mineral water label as ‘B’eau Pal’ water.

Holding this was Labour MP Barry Gardiner, and also present was a woman who had been in Bhopal at the time of the massive poison gas escape that killed thousands, including her aunt. Also present, by the time things got underway were around 3o photographers and videographers, ensuring that there was something of a scrum, as well as several of the ‘Heritage Wardens’, the Mayor of London’s security staff who hadn’t known this was going to happen and were not too happy with it.

It was tricky to get anything just a little different in such a situation and I didn’t really manage it. A straightforward picture or two of the banner and people in front of the clock – perhaps this was the best:

and several pictures of the MP with the bottle – here’s another

as well as several of Bhopal survivor Farah Edwards, including some of her reading her speech

were the best I could do in the circumstances. Perhaps I might have arranged something with a little more interest, but I don’t like to arrange things. I’ve not seen any of the pictures the other photographers got, but I doubt if they were very different.

Demotix were obviously very worried about running the story, perhaps because of the draconian legislation around the Olympics here, and their claims to own as trademarks things like London, 2012 and Olympics. I twice posted a comment to the story, but all that appeared was a message saying my comment was awaiting moderation. Two days later it still hasn’t appeared. I’ve never known comments being moderated before on the site, usually they have appeared immediately.

What I posted in the comment was simple history about Dow Chemicals and their involvement in Vietnam, both producing napalm for use by US forces (and they continued to produce it after the other companies in the business had been persuaded to halt production) and as one of the companies producing Agent Orange, a dioxin contaminated herbicide which as well as killing the crops on which the rural population depended as an intended part of the military strategy also has resulted, according to the Vietnamese, in 400,000 people being killed or seriously maimed and half a million children born deformed because of its use.

Photographer Philip Jones Griffiths heard about the effects of Agent Orange, and returned to Vietnam to take pictures. He met with a great deal of cover-up – as he wrote in an introduction to his work on the Digital Journalist site:

In almost all cases I was denied access, usually by polite smiling nuns. At the risk of sounding paranoid I became convinced they had been told to keep the press away… I left Vietnam in the summer of 1971 without ever seeing a victim.

After the war had ended he returned – and saw and photographed the full horror of the situation. The gallery of images on-line doesn’t make easy viewing and it is a history that for me makes Dow a totally unsuitable company to sponsor either the Olympics or the Paralympic Games.

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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 licence to reproduce images

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Free Shaker Aamer – A Plague of Photographers

On Saturday I went to photograph a protest marking 10 years of illegal detention in the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay which was taking place on the North Terrace of Trafalgar Square. I’d put this in my diary some weeks earlier, having been given a flyer about it by one of the organisers, who had also sent me several press releases. I’ve photographed other related events over the years, sometimes being the only photographer present and more often with just a handful of others, though a few have been high profile media events.

I wasn’t pleased to receive an e-mail the day before the event which had been sent by an Editorial Assistant at Demotix, one of the on-line sites where I submit images and stories giving details of the event and begging photographers to cover it, because I knew that this would mean the event being swamped by people with cameras, and it was. In my account on Demotix I estimate the number of people present at the protest at around 200; what I didn’t say was that over a third of those were there to take photographs. Possibly they even outnumbered the protesters.

© 2012, Peter Marshall
Free Shaker Aamer – an ‘Anonymous’ protester in a ‘V for Vendetta’ mask and ‘Metropolitan Peace’ uniform

Don’t get me wrong. Anyone present with a camera has as much right to be there and take pictures as I do. But among the photographers I met there were at least a dozen of us who regularly send pictures to Demotix, including some whose work is generally as good as anyone working for the press or conventional agencies (and a few of them were present too.) Demotix would have had far more pictures than it needed without sending out the request. And almost certainly it would have had better pictures, because the crowd of photographers it had been partly responsible for generating made it difficult for all of us to work. It does seem to be shooting itself (and certainly its more regular photographers) in the foot.

The excessive number of photographers did not only make it difficult for us to work, with other photographers constantly walking into pictures as we were taking them (and I’m sure I walked into other people’s pictures – and a couple of times I realised I had done so and apologised) but also made the event less satisfying for those taking part. One elderly woman grumbled to me “why do cameramen think they are more important than the rest of us” as I tried to get out of her way after taking a few pictures of one of the speakers, and I didn’t stop to enlighten her as I was busy working. Of course I try to disrupt events as little as possible and to keep out of people’s way as much as I can (although I admit some others are rather less careful) but in the end I have a job to do, and doing it badly would help no-one.

Of course ‘cameramen’ – and ‘camerawomen’ of whom there were quite a few present – are vital to events such as this, whose purpose is to gain publicity for the cause. So I was sent a ‘media release’ (also on-line) which told me about the ‘Photo opportunity’ when ‘activists dressed in orange jumpsuits and black hoods will perform a visual display representing the 171 prisoners who remain at Guantánamo.’

Photographically – apart from avoiding other photographers filling my frame and a few problems with exposure, particularly in some of the close pictures – if a black hood more or less fills the frame you do need to think more about exposure than the time allowed, as auto systems increase the exposure to make it mid-grey. Then there was the problem of just how transparent you want those black hoods to appear – and Lightroom does sometimes make it possible to show rather more than could actually be seen.

I also wanted to make clear exactly where the protest was held, and for most of the pictures chose to include either Nelson up there on his column, or the fairly recognisable portico of the National Gallery. And yes, quite a few of my pictures I did reject because they had photographers or parts of them in the wrong place – at times it just was not possible to avoid them when taking the pictures.

As I’ve remarked before, I’ve photographed quite a few events related to the illegal detention of prisoners at Guantanamo, and for some of these I have been either the only photographer taking pictures or one of a small group. Unlike most photographers, I almost always get my stories and pictures published somewhere, even if I have to do it myself here or on My London Diary. It’s a shame that few of them make the mass media, but even my own sites have a larger readership than many small publications. I started My London Diary in part because so much that was happening in London, and protests in particular, were ignored by the conventional media.

The focus of the rally was a call for the release of Shaker Aamer, held initially in Bagram and then at Guantanamo, imprisoned without trial and tortured repeatedly. He was cleared for release by the US military in 2007, and by Obamas administration in 2009 but somehow remains held there, probably because of the embarrassment his testimony after release would cause to the US. A London resident who went to Afghanistan as a humanitarian worker, he has a British wife and four children, including a son aged 10 who he has never seen who live in Battersea, south London. There are grave concerns for his physical and mental health.

The protest also called for the Algerian detainee Ahmed Belbacha, who lived in Bournemouth from 1999 to 2001, shortly before his detention, to be allowed to return to the UK. He was also cleared for release by the US military in 2007 but cannot be released to Algeria because the threat to his life.

My story and pictures in Shut Guantánamo: End 10 Years of Shame 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 licence to reproduce images

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December Completed

December was a busy month for me, not just for photography, and of course there was Christmas and all that. Although I enjoy the food and the presents and family events etc it does get in the way a bit, particularly as most of this country now seems to close down for around ten days from Christmas eve to a couple of days after the New Year.

That week when most of the country seemed to be either dozing at home or fighting at the sales I was taking pictures most days, though some of them family images that I don’t normally make public. But here are a couple of very different images from between Christmas and the New Year.

One of many pictures that I took in Kensington High St, as close as protesters can get to the Israeli embassy down a private side-street, at a protest on the anniversary of the Israeli attack on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, in which 13 Israeli soldiers and between 1000 and 1500 Palestinians, mainly civilians were killed. It’s an asymmetry that I think needs to be kept in mind when Israel talks about self-defence.

A day later I was in Whitechapel and photographing the Royal London Hospital. Like the above image it was taken with the D700, but while the demonstration image was a single exposure with the 16-35mm f4, this is stitched together from around a dozen, all made at the wide end. I’ll probably retake it at some time, as I would have liked just a little more foreground, and there are just a few minor stitching issues.

One of the problems is that there is no way to lock focus on the lens, which was manually focussed at infinity, and it is very easy to knock the focus ring which is close to the nodal point near the front of the lens. And this was taken hand-held without a tripod (I hadn’t expected to need one), which in any case makes it tricky to keep that nodal point in a fixed position between exposures.

The easier way to work would be to use a semi-fisheye lens to get a similar angle of view, although this results in rather smaller files than the 36Mp from which the small version above was produced.

More pictures and stories from last month are on My London Diary – and here are some links.

December 2011

Surrey Hills Walk
End The Siege Of Gaza
Staines & Stanwell Moor
Syrians Protest at London Embassy
Egyptians Protest At Embassy
Bradley Manning Birthday Demo
Iraqis and Syrians Protest At US
Congolese Protests Continue
Kurds Call For A Stop To Syrian Massacres
UK Uncut Xmas Protest At Vodaphone
UK Uncut Xmas Protest At Topshop
UK Uncut Santa Calls on Dave Hartnett
Congolese Election Protests Continue
London Night
10 Years Stop The War Book
Mumia Abu-Jamal 30th Anniversary Protest
USA Climate Treaty Wrecker
London Wandering
Congolese Protest Against Kabila Vote-Rigging
Stand Up For Climate Justice
Occupy LSX Climate Justice Workshops
City Xmas Celebrations
Britain First Support Emma West

Hetherington’s Last Post

Another superb Duckrabbit post Tim Hetheringtons last photos and their presentation on the Guardian, which together with some interesting and informed comments explores pretty fully the kind of rather unformed misgivings I’ve had about this and several other features on war photography over the past year or so.

It’s worth too taking the time to watch the almost 15 minutes of video on the page, made by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, where Staff Sergeant Sal Giunta of the 173rd Airborne tells his own story of the events in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley which led to him being the first living Medal of Honor recipient since the Vietnam War. There are also more clips about their movie ‘Restrepo‘ on YouTube.

Restrepo was shot entirely in the Korengal Valley, focussing on a 15-man outpost which gives the film it’s name -and which was named after a medic killed in action there at what was considered one of the most dangerous military postings. Hetherington and Junger’s statement on the front page of the movie site includes this:

“Our intention was to capture the experience of combat, boredom and fear through the eyes of the soldiers themselves… Their experiences are important to understand, regardless of one’s political beliefs. Beliefs are a way to avoid looking at reality. This is reality.”

New Year Honours

Definitively the most heartening list of the year end was described in The Guardian as the “impressive list of the great and the good, packed with scholars and sportsmen, authors and artists” who have for various reasons snubbed our outdated and discredited honours system, long used by both parties when in office to reward nonentities for long service to the party or donations to the cause, along with a smattering of those who deserve public recognition and assorted celebs tagged on in facile attempts to improve the party image.

The list, prepared by civil servants possibly to avoid further embarrassing refusals – although it does contain some serial refusniks – was leaked to the Sunday Times before Christmas and has been published in part in most of the newspapers. The highest accolade must surely go to L S Lowry, who refused on 5 occasions, including when he was offered a knighthood. The list doesn’t give any reasons for the refusals, and most of those on it have not commented on their motives, which in some cases were simply a desire to keep out of the limelight. And certainly a few felt a little insulted at being offered only a minor award when they felt they deserved top honours. Some of them did also accept other honours at a later date.

Among the others in alphabetical order are Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, JG Ballard, Honor Blackman, Alan Bennett, David Bowie, Roald Dahl, Albert Finney, Lucian Freud, Michael Frayn, Dawn French, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, David Hockney, Trevor Howard, Aldous Huxley, John le Carré, George Melly, J B Priestley, Vanessa Redgrave, Jennifer Saunders, Alastair Sim, Evelyn Waugh and Benjamin Zephaniah. I’m not sure what lies behind the Times paywall, but possibly the fullest list is on Wikipaedia, which even includes Oliver Cromwell.

Only a very few of them have broken the tradition of silence in refusing awards. Ballard, certainly one of my literary heroes, went public in stating that he turned down the offer of a CBE because of his opposition to the whole “preposterous charade” of the system, and Benjamin Zephaniah also went public, refusing the offered OBE as a protest against the years of slavery and brutality in the British Empire and against the invasion of Iraq.

Perhaps the most upsetting thing is that not a single photographer appears on this list – unless you count Hockney, who I think continually fails to understand what photography is about and what it can do. Although I enjoyed seeing some of his ‘joiners’ I lacked the ignorance that allowed him to convince himself and others that there was anything novel in what he was doing (photographers had indeed started doing it with daguerreotypes.) But if you can draw like him there is perhaps little need to understand photography.

There are of course other awards, and certainly the most entertaining list is The Photo Follies 2011 Awards from Jeremy Nicholls on his Russian Photos blog. It does include quite a few things I’ve mentioned here over the year, and is certainly a fine compilation of idiocies.

The Year in Pictures

It’s that time of year when every publication is pushing out it’s version of the year in pictures (and while last year one of my pictures featured in at least one of them, I don’t anticipate it happening again.) But looking at one of the better examples of such reviews my mind went back to a picture taken on 12 May 1937 by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Judging from the New York Times, the ‘milestone’ of the year in Britain in 2011 was a royal wedding (though they also have a fine picture by Facundo Arrizabalaga of the riot police in Croydon) , and the wedding image, while well-timed and perfectly exposed is frankly rather boring and anodyne – just like almost all the rest that the press used from the event. Cartier-Bresson was photographing a coronation rather than a wedding, but a very similar royal event, and managed to make a picture that has a great deal more to say.

I tried hard not to photograph this year’s wedding, but literally had to step over the people camping out in Westminster as I went to photograph a protest on International Workers Memorial Day, so I did take a few pictures of them which you can see in Waiting For Will & Kate.

On the day itself I kept well away, though I did take a few pictures at Republic’s Not the Royal Wedding Party and just one or two on my way home through Soho, where the event was certainly seen as a good excuse for a party.

© 2011, Peter Marshall
Of course you can see my own record of the year at great length on My London Diary, although so far it only goes more or less to the end of November (which I’ll say more about when I’ve given it a final check.)

It is of course events in London not shown in the New York Times or My London Diary or elsewhere in photographs that are having a great effect on the world economy, but people clicking mice or working on a keyboard generally make for boring stock rather than news photos. If you want to understand more about how banks and financial organisations working in the City of London, largely unregulated since the Thatcher-inspired Big Bang (and, yes it was them and not Gordon Brown, David Cameron, George Osborne or us spending recklessly on credit cards or even dodgy mortgages) have destroyed the UK economy and threatened the world, there is a graph of G10 Debt Distribution which deserves to be featured in every review of the year, produced by Morgan Stanley. It shows the UK’s financial sector with a debt of over 600% of our GDP, dwarfing the relatively small government and household debt.

There is a section in the NYT year about the Occupy movement, which has raised many of the issues (or, as the politicians and press like to say, doesn’t seem to know what it wants), but good as some of the photography is, it is also an illustration that it is the moments of conflict and drama that attract us as visual people, while for me the Cartier-Bresson image with which my thoughts started perhaps leads us to think more deeply about the issues. But I doubt if it would make the papers today.

Back To The Fifties?

I don’t know what I had done to deserve that little glance, perhaps a hint of anger or at least annoyance, but together with the lighting that was just catching her face it lifted this image of a blonde from the others that I had taken of her and her fellow leopard skin fur wearer (I’m sure they were synthetic) holding their ‘Feminism Back By Popular Demand‘ posters.

The Fawcett Society had decided to highlight their claims that government cuts were in danger of putting back the gains towards equality that women have made back to the 1950s by asking its members to attend the march in 1950s dress, and there were certainly some interesting examples of this, as well as those who came bearing kitchen implements, brooms and other symbols to represent their perception of the government’s “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” attitudestoward women. David Cameron certainly stirred up an enormous resentment with his patronising sexist House of Commons put-down of Labour MP Angela Eagle “Calm Down Dear!” and if he really intended it as humour it was abysmally judged and few took it as a joke.

Of course I wasn’t there as a fashion photographer, but it was certainly hard to resist the opportunity.

And so I didn’t, though I think almost all of the time I was trying hard to show these women in the context of the march, for example by very carefully positioning the background Fawcett Society placard in several images.

More pictures and more about the march in Don’t Turn The Clock Back on My London Diary.

More on Saturday

Continued from Last Saturday Everything Was Happening

From Topshop, I ran along Oxford St towards Vodaphone, which company had been voted for by UK Uncut supporters as the main target of their ‘Christmas special’. By the time I arrived, they were being prevented by police from entering the store – and UK Uncut are peaceful protesters who wouldn’t try and push their way in, so they simply gathered on the pavement outside.

There was plenty of room for them, as this section of Oxford St is currently one-way, with just a single lane fenced off at its centre, leaving a much wider than usual pedestrian area.

After chanting the indictment against Vodaphone, who it now seems have dodged not just the £6billion that UK Uncut originally alleged, but actually £8billion (or eight thousand million pounds in old-fashioned English) using the human microphone we’ve become used to from the Occupy movement – with one person reading a phrase which is then shouted out by everyone else – slow, tedious but remarkably effective – they then turned to singing UK Uncut’s Christmas Carols with suitably different lyrics to some familiar tunes.

I tried hard to get the idea that people were singing, and also to show where they were singing and getting the odd Santa hat, particularly with messages about tax was a bonus. Taken with the D700 and 16-35mm at 17mm, f5.6 gave enough depth of field. I used a fairly high ISO to get a reasonably fast shutter speed. On the full-size original you can read the words on the carol sheets, though I made sure to get a copy so I could quote from it in my story on Demotix (which will appear later on My London Diary.)

After that, the protesters even started dancing, but after taking a few pictures I decided I could leave and go elsewhere – which meant catching a bus towards Downing St.

On my list of events I had a protest listed by the Congolese, but the main group present when I arrived were Syrian Kurds, supporting the protests in Syria and calling for a ‘Free Syria.’ They were using both the old Syrian flag from the days when Syria gained its independence and also the flag of Kurdistan, and calling for the revolution in Syria to produce a federation in which the Kurds would gain recognition (many of them are stateless in Syria, and subject to laws against their language and traditions.) It seemed to me important to try and show both flags together where I could.

Flags at protests often make the pictures more interesting, but they can also be very frustrating, and it took a few frames to get one with the flag at the top which was being waved around blowing out well.

Just a few yards away there were a few Congolese, but it was only half an hour after their protest had been timed to start. Probably more would turn up later, but since I thought it unlikely I would be back I took some pictures. The big attraction in several ways was the dancing, mainly by some of the women, and I was especially attracted by one of them wearing a blue shirt with the yellow and red stripe and yellow star of the Congo flag.

But as I was preparing to leave, I saw a group of four of the men posing for a photograph. Although I don’t like to pose people – it’s interfering with the event – I’ve nothing against taking pictures of groups that the protesters themselves have set up, and I went across and they were happy for me to take aphotograph as well, playing up a little for the camera.

I was pleased it was a fairly slow bus ride from Whitehall to Bond Street, giving me time to have a little rest and finish my late lunch, although just a little worried that I might be too late at the US Embassy where I knew the friends of Bradley Manning were holding a vigil. But when I arrived, not only were they still there, but there were two other groups protesting.

The other protesters – pro-regime Syrians and Iraqis together with some people from Stop the War – were united in protesting against US intervention in their region. The Syrians wanted an end at attempts through the UN and other ways by the US to intervene in the actions their government is taking against what they call terrorists, while the Iraqis were celebrating the defeat of the US army, whose last active troops were leaving that day (though they were calling for the various ‘advisers’ and mercenaries also to go.) Both were united too in condemning the BBC and other media for telling lies about their countries.

Overall I couldn’t really find images that were strong, but there were a few individuals who I think told the story well. It was really much the same with the vigil for Bradley Manning.

Finally, I strolled down to the Egyptian Embassy, only to find 3 rather bored looking police and no protest. I was a few minutes early, so I took a walk around the block, and when I returned on time there was one man there. It was cold and I wanted to go home, but a couple of other photographers had arrived, so at least I had someone to talk to. After 20 minutes or so a few more protesters had arrived and they decided to start, and so did I.

There was really very little light, and even at ISO3600 the ambient in the pen where the protesters were standing was giving me readings like 1/4s f4. So most of the pictures I took were with flash, though I did play around a little without. I don’t like just using flash, because in photographing these kind of events it isn’t possible to play with multiple light set ups. You could work holding the flash at arms length, but I actually prefer the effects you can get with it on camera. I’ve experiments a little with using larger diffusers – and used to use these with film, but with the SB800 I don’t find they make a great deal of difference.

Flash doesn’t really work – except for fill – on the P setting on the Nikons. My best results come from working in S mode, with a fixed shutter speed. By selecting a suitable value you can get usually get a decent balance between flash and ambient, and in these dim conditions I found 1/20 a sensible compromise. This left the 16-35mm at maximum aperture (f4) which is fine. Some of the images are sharper than others, depending on the amount of movement of both photographer and subject. Personally I think I preferred a bit of blur, as in the picture above, but I think I used a similar but overall sharper frame for Demotix.

Fuller stories from Saturday are on Demotix – and will be posted later with more pictures on My London Diary.

MY DEMOTIX LINKS FOR 17 DEC 2011

UK Uncut Santa Calls on Dave Hartnett
UK Uncut Xmas protest at tax dodgers Topshop
UK Uncut Xmas protest at tax dodgers Vodaphone – London
Syrian Kurds In London Call For Stop To Syrian Massacres
Congolese Protests Continue in London
Iraqis and Syrians Protest At US Embassy – London
Bradley Manning birthday demonstration at US Embassy
Egyptians protest in London as Cairo troops attack protesters

Lacoste Censor Larissa Sansour

I was shocked to read that high-end French clothing chain Lacoste had demanded the removal of Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour from the shortlist for the 25,000 Lacoste Elysée Prize, and even more disgusted that the Swiss Musee de lElysée, which I had thought to be an international venue with some integrity had bowed to their demand.

Earlier in the year Sansour had been nominated as one of eight artists short-listed for the 2011 prize, and along with the others received an initial grant – as the Museum page states*

” With the aid of a grant of 4,000 euros, each nominee will be invited to develop a photographic project around the theme la joie de vivre. They will be free to interpret this in which ever way they favour – in a direct or indirect manner, with authenticity or irony, based upon their existing work, or as an entirely new creation.”

Sansour submitted three photographs for her project ‘Nation Estate‘ to the museum in November 2011, and according to her press release, they “were accepted, and she was congratulated by the prize administrators on her work and professionalism.”

In what appears to be a simple act of political censorship, Lacoste refused to accept her work, regarding it as “too pro-Palestinian.” You can read more about this on the ‘Electronic Intifada‘ blog, as well as on Sansour’s own site. The museum’s web site removed all mention of Sansour from the material about the Lacoste Prize around a week ago.

Much of the sponsorship money that goes into major museums unfortunately comes from companies wanting to improve their rather unsavoury images – and in the UK we have the example of BP, a major promoter of climate change and environmental catastrophes such as the Canadian tar sands sponsoring our major public galleries – something I’ve covered in such events as Climate Rush’s Tate Britain Oil Spill Picnic and the incredible Rev Billy’s Tate BP Exorcism.

But damaging though this sponsorship is, so far as I am aware it has not been allowed to erode the artistic integrity of the institutions in the same way as this.

Further Developments

Since I posted, Lacoste has now completely withdrawn from this prize. You can read more about it at the British Journal of Photography and also at the Washington Post. *When I checked at the museum site just now the page about the prize it was empty.

I find it hard not to feel that Lacoste and the Elysée museum have both behaved incredibly stupidly in thinking they could get away with this kind of behaviour. It really is shameful that the museum did stand up to Lacoste – even if it would have meant losing the sponsorship, which in the event they have in any case done.

Lacoste’s statement says “Today, Lacoste reputation is at stake for false reasons and wrongful allegations” but I find it hard to take their statement (quoted in its entirety on the Washington Post) seriously. The reasons and allegations seem all too clear and all too true. Museums and artists would be well advised to avoid crocodiles, and certainly not sell out to them, and the only person to come out of this with any credit is Larissa Sansour.

Last Saturday Everything Was Happening

People sometimes think that photography isn’t work. My wife for one, and in some ways I agree with her, and it’s certainly great to do things that I really want to do and sometimes at least get paid because people want to buy the pictures or publish them. But I actually find it can be pretty exhausting, both physically and mentally.

My camera bag isn’t that heavy, though non-photographers I hand it too usually wince a bit at it’s weight. A couple of camera bodies, three lenses, flash, little oddments like spare batteries, lens cleaning stuff, remote release and then the kind of necessities of life – a bottle of water, umbrella, sandwiches,maps and a paperback to read add up, together with the bag itself to perhaps around 7-8kg (around 15lb for non-metric readers.) At the start of the day I can hang it on my left shoulder and hardly notice it. But by the end of the day it does drag a little. It perhaps doesn’t help that I only have one shoulder, probably a legacy from my rugby-playing youth; not only does my right side just kind of slope down with little on which to keep a bag in place, after a minute or so the pain reminds me that it really isn’t a good idea to try.

Many photographers now use back-packs. Certainly easier on the shoulders, but they can be a real pain to other photographers if you are working together in tightly packed situations. And though I don’t do a great deal of lens-changing, it is rather easier from a bag than a back-pack, even the kind that swivels around the body.

As usual I digress. What I wanted to say was that Saturday was rather an exhausting day for me, one that reminded me I’m getting older. But also one that demonstrated again why London is a great place to work, particularly if you want to photograph protests and similar events. Possibly the nine I photographed was something of a personal record for a day (discounting such multi-events as the mass lone demos orchestrated a few years back by Mark Thomas against the ridiculous limitations on protest imposed under SOCPA.)

And even so, there were other events taking place I was sorry to miss. Some because it really is impossible to be in Downing St and Belgrave Square at the same time (had I taken my bike with me I might almost have made it, but probably it would have been stolen earlier while I was photographing on Oxford St.) There was an interesting walk in the East End that was truly out of the question. There are also some events where you really have to stick with them as things unfold, and others that are pretty static and at least visually can be summed up in a few minutes.

My photographic day started in Parliament St, which as the name suggests is very close to Parliament, and is what most people think of as the bottom end of Whitehall just off Parliament Square. I’d been told that there would be lots of people in Santa costume there at the head office of our tax people (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs – HMRC) who’ve lately been letting some big companies get away with not paying billions they owe in taxes, and of course they and the guys across the square in parliament make sure there are plenty of loopholes for them and their rich friends to creep through. If you are poor (or even in that ‘squeezed middle’) you pay taxes; if you are rich you pay accountants.

I arrived a little late, but just in time, to find one Santa and two helpers approaching the very impressive but firmly closed door. The protesters were just outnumbered by the four photographers, but more massively by the police, with a FIT team taking pictures and others standing around and sitting in vans, but not interfering with the protest at all. We took our pictures (there wasn’t really a lot to photograph as you can see) and left.

I had a little time to kill before the next protest, and as usual when I’m in the area I went across to talk with the protesters in Parliament Square, but they were still asleep so I didn’t disturb them, but walked around the square (still fenced off from the public – one of London’s minor scandals – and with a couple of guys paid there to sit inside the fence all day and do nothing) and then back up past Downing St to Trafalgar Square, finding nothing much happening at either location.

The great thing about free entry to museums and galleries is that you can wander in to the National Gallery on the north side of the square (or the National Portrait Gallery just a few yards around the corner) and spend say ten or fifteen minutes looking at a couple of your favourite paintings or perhaps finding something new, and I quite often do when I’ve time to spare. But time was getting on and I decided to get to the next location, so got on a bus to take me to Oxford Circus.

Another photographer was already there waiting opposite Topshop, and he told me that just a few minutes ago he had seen Bruce Gilden taking pictures at Oxford Circus, followed by a group of people, perhaps some kind of photo workshop. So having mentioned him in a post recently, I took a little walk looking for him (the flashes should have been easy to spot) but didn’t find him, and returned to Topshop.

Waiting outside there with another photographer, one of the higher ranking police officers came over to talk to us, telling us we would be allowed inside the store to a designated press area for the protest that was timed for 1pm. Around 15 minutes earlier I decided to go into the store, simply walking past the heavy security there with my two cameras on my chest as usual – and I don’t think they noticed.

But inside the store I decided I was unlikely to get much chance to take photographs – and the police officer had been talking absolute bullshit. So I left the store a couple of minutes before the protest occurred, knowing that there would also be a protest outside that I could cover. I’m not sure it was the right decision, but it did avoid trouble for me. Some other photographers who had also simply walked in past the security did get some pictures, but they were almost immediately either illegally assaulted and “arrested” for aggravated trespass by security staff or escorted out of the store (as I was three years ago when the Space Hijackers protested there.) Police did quickly arrive and “de-arrest” the photographers (and arrest the protesters) and they should be able to go to court to get compensation for their treatment.

Outside the shop, there were rather more demonstrators (including some who had been inside but left immediately when requested, but later we were told six had been arrested) and the protest continued for a few minutes before police decided to clear the pavement. They told the protesters that they were committing an offence by obstructing the highway, then proceeded to obstruct it even more effectively themselves for rather longer!

The protest continued for some minutes longer on the road and then on the opposite pavement, and it was a very confused situation, with crowds of shoppers mixing with the protesters, many of whom were taking the opportunity to give out leaflets explaining that the protest was taking place because Topshop avoids paying its proper share of UK tax.

It’s a situation that few people think we should tolerate, and one that the actions by UK Uncut have put firmly on the political agenda. Even the Conservative Party are having to take tax avoidance seriously despite representing so many who profit from the current failures of the system to collect tax fairly. Gradually more and more people are coming to realise that the amounts involved in tax evasion and tax avoidance are truly massive, dwarfing the losses to the country from illegally claimed benefits that get so much publicity in the right-wing press.

Soon it became clear that most of the protesters had melted away, and it was time for me to run along Oxford Street to where I knew their next protest would be.

Continued in another post