Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Stop The War: 2006-2009

These are the final set of my pictures that went into the final edit for the Stop The War book, several of which were used. There were probably more pictures sent in for these later years, although I think the coverage of them in the book is weaker.

There were three pictures from the wreath-laying by military families on Remembrance Day in November 2006, with Rose Gentle and others laying wreaths. They weren’t actually my favourite images from the day, but ones that I thought represented the event better – I think my best work concentrated more on the people involved. Two of these in particular I think are critically dependent on being in colour, making use of the wreaths of red poppies. Take away that foreground wreath in the lower image and you are left with a very ordinary view of a line of people that would certainly have ended in my reject bin.

‘Stop The War – 10 Years‘ is I think an important book about an important subject, and one that is in general terms a very handsome volume, with some superb art work and some pretty decent snaps. One that I’m sure many people will buy and enjoy. It’s a book that I’m pleased to have my work in, although I wish some of the images had been treated with greater respect and sensitivity; a couple in particular were used so badly that on looking through the book I actually failed to recognise them as mine.

In some respects – as might be expected – this is a very political book, one that treats its subject from a particular sectarian viewpoint, and one which is not shared by all who took part in the events it depicts. As well as the stories it tells there are also people and stories missing from its narrative almost as if by a Soviet ‘airbrush’ ; ‘Stop The War’ was a coalition but one largely dominated and driven from a particular perspective which was only a part of a wider anti-war movement. In some ways my own files over the period tell a fuller story, and perhaps one which may emerge before too long on Blurb.

Many other photographers also produced notable images of some of these events. Some have told me in no uncertain terms that there was no way they would donate their work to ‘Stop The War’, who on at least one occasion generated a photographers’ protest, when along with others I sat down on Park Lane in front of one of the march, disgusted at the treatment of photographers by the march stewards, demanding that we be allowed to work. Along with other photographers I’ve been pushed, threatened and assaulted on various occasions by ‘Stop The War’ stewards (and often had others apologising to me for the way I was treated) and I once narrowly avoided serious injury when sent flying backwards.

This is also a book that records and celebrates what was a failure. We didn’t stop the war. Despite getting millions out a a march and the support of a majority of the British people. Despite fighting speeches at events by Tony Benn and some others, ‘Stop the War’ failed to think and act in a radical fashion at the critical times and seemed locked into outdated modes of action; ‘Stop The War Dinosaur‘ when we needed ‘Stop The War Uncut‘. It was a battle where we had the support of the people and we could and should have won.

Stop The War – 10 Years

Stop The War held a launch party for their new book, a profusely illustrated graphic history of their 10 year campaign, at Housemans radical bookshop last night. The event was attended by many of the leading figures in the campaign, including Tony Benn who contributed the foreword to the book ‘Stop The War: A Graphic History‘ and made a short speech at the event. The book should be available now at all good bookshops, as well as direct from Stop the War.

In time I’ll put a few more pictures on line from this event on My London Diary – the site is currently running about a month behind GMT. Perhaps too I’ll post here my own contributions to the book, as well as possibly some of those that in the end didn’t get used.

Housemans is a fairly small shop with some narrow areas and at the start it was far too crowded to be worth making pictures, although I found myself standing next to Tony Benn when he made his speech and took a few frames. But most of the rest are from later in the event when numbers had thinned out considerably, apart from some of us photographers making the most of the free wine. I think the wine had slightly affected the D700 too (I had it with me from an earlier event I’d been covering) as rather fewer of the pictures that I took – all with the 16-35mm f4 – were as sharp as usual and the framing lacked the kind of precision that I usually aim for.

Many artists and photographers have contributed to the campaign through their work over the years, and have continued that in making their work available for this volume. A central section, ‘The Art of Politics’ includes images by such well-known figures as Banksy and Ralph Steadman, and throughout the book both as illustrations and in many of the photographs we see the work of David Gentleman, whose graphic posters have inspired the movement.

The book, produced under the editorial direction of Andrew Burgin, with Marie Gollentz as editor and design by Peter Palasthy is a fine piece of work and should win prizes.

There are photographs by around a couple of dozen photographers, including Guy Smallman who responsible for photography research (Ruth Boswell for the art research) with most of the pictures coming from from half a dozen of us, including some fine work by Paul Mattsson and Brian David Stevens as well as Guy himself. Many of the photographers and some of the artists were present at the launch, and several of us took pictures.

Fittingly the first section of the book is given over to photography, and after the art section the final part of the work is a ‘Graphic Timeline’ which attempts to list all of the many actions organised by the national movement (of course there were many more local events), illustrating many by posters and photographs, as well as thumbnails giving page numbers of photographs in the initial section.

Of course no photographer is ever entirely happy about how their pictures are published, although I was very pleased to have a few of mine included. But editors often prefer the wrong images, insist on cropping them, even take colour images and convert them (sometimes not particularly well) to black and white. The only way that photographers can get work treated exactly as they want it is to publish their own work – which is why I’m so keen on Blurb!

And after all I’ve been producing my own ‘graphic history’ of Stop the War, along with other protest movements for over ten years on My London Diary. I was amused when one of the other major photographers told me that he had used my site to identify the particular events where he took some of his pictures in the book.

Michelle Sank & Mary Turner

Yesterday evening’s Photo-forum, a monthly meeting “for working photographers across the spectrum to bring images, ideas, photo stories, approaches and work in progress for supportive debate and criticism” was a very special event, although not as well attended as most.

Of course we are coming up to Christmas, and there are many parties and other Christmas events taking place – there seem to be even more than usual this year, perhaps in some kind of reaction against the financial austerity. The weather wasn’t too great either, though London was nothing like Scotland, where people were being advised to stay home. Perhaps if I hadn’t have been coming up to London for a meeting earlier in the day and hadn’t known who was speaking I might have stayed home. There certainly was a powerful wind, and as I walked past the Occupy London camp at St Paul’s in mid-afternoon some tents were getting blown away and people were struggling to keep some of the structures up. And term had probably ended for some of the students who boost the audience whenever well-known speakers appear.

The format of Photo-forum is a simple one, with two photographers showing their work on the screen and talking about it, one before the interval and one after, often with some interesting questions and debate. It’s also a great opportunity to meet and talk with other photographers, both before the meeting, in the interval and especially afterwards in the pub, where we eat the free food paid for by a raffle drawn at the end of the evening for prints of the speakers’ work.

I’ve long been aware of the work of Michelle Sank, and have written about it here and elsewhere on several occasions, but it was good both to see a wider range of her work, as well as to hear her talking about it and her passion for photography. She also has a very fine web site, which again I’ve mentioned before, on which you can seem almost all of the work she showed last night, and which shows her various projects in depth. The site is a model of simplicity, clean, elegant and generous in making her work available.

Her practice is perhaps rather different from most of those in the audience, with art institution and gallery commissions enabling her to pursue what remain her very personal projects, but its social documentary aspect certainly makes it far more accessible and worthwhile to most working photographers than some things that appear on photography gallery walls, and I think those who had come to the event with little if any knowledge of her work were very impressed by it.

When I first saw her work around ten years ago, it stood out from what at the time was a host of new portraiture often with similar subject matter, including some by already well-known and much touted art-world photographers, because of the strong empathy between the photographer and the subjects. Clearly these were social documents as well as portraits and were made with a concern for the wider issues involved, and this was something that came out clearly in her comments as she showed the work.

Mary Turner‘s pictures often appear in ‘The Times’, but what she showed at Photo-forum was clearly something in which she had a strong personal involvement and interest. Unlike the typical news photographer (and many of our best press photographers are unlike the typical news photographer) she did not ‘jet in’ to Dale Farm for the highlights, but worked with the people living there from 2009 on, and is still following them now.

Although I only visited Dale Farm briefly on one occasion (and was very aware that I was not covering the story there in any depth), Turner’s pictures of the travellers in their vans reminded me very much of my earlier experiences, before I started taking pictures, of working as a student to defend travellers in Manchester against evictions and harassment by the local council.

Turner got to know some of the travellers extremely well, so that she and her camera became accepted as a part of their normal life, and her pictures display a great intimacy, as well as the lack of illusions about their lifestyle which she also made apparent in her sometimes laconic commentary. Her mainly wide-angle views of them both inside the trailers and outside on the site appealed strongly to me.

As well as the roughly 60 pictures from 2009-2011 which include some from weddings and other events off-site, she was also there for the ‘Last Days at Dale Farm’ shown in another set of images, where again her relationships with the travellers and the access that this gave her to their private lives makes her work stand out from that of other photographers, particularly in showing the reactions of the travellers to the eviction.

Like the others present on the morning of the invasion by riot police, she too has a picture of ‘Minty Challis, an activist and supporter of the Travellers protests against their eviction, October 19th 2011‘ holding up a crucifix in front the the blazing wreckage, and it is one of the better images from this ‘photocall’ for showing more of the scene, although probably much of the tighter cropping in the other images published was made by editors rather than photographers. But it was the next picture in the sequence, a darkened silhouette of people on a roof looking down towards the fire, the sun breaking through under dark cloud and a menacing row of gateposts at the left, like robots advancing inexorably on the site that I found more dramatic.

Turner’s pictures are a fine record of a way of life, and also of the destruction and the lawlessness of Basildon Council, bailiffs and police, ignoring the legal niceties and protections laid down by the courts in carrying out this eviction at huge public expense. They also make clear the nature of the site, laying bare any of the arguments that the long campaign made any sense in terms of planning law.

Although media interest largely disappeared after the dramatic events of October 19, the story is not yet over, and Turner is continuing to visit the travellers and record what is going on, and there are likely to be further developments after Christmas. Perhaps at some point a determined investigative reporter (unless Leveson outlaws them) may uncover the true back-story behind what seems to be Basildon Council’s determined long-term racist vendetta against Dale Farm which would provide an ideal text to accompany a book of these pictures.

If you are a working photographer based around London and don’t know about Photo-Forum it really is worth finding out more – and you can eamil the address on the web site to be put on the mailing list to be sent a couple of emails every month reminding you of the meetings, which take place on the second Thursday of each month in Jacobs Pro Lounge in New Oxford St.

My only regret about the evening was that I wasn’t one of the winners of the raffle.

New Breed

London-based Italian born photographer Mimi Mollica is the latest photographer to be featured on Verve Photo: The New Breed of Documentary Photographer, which highlights a fine series of pictures ‘En Route to Dakar’, taken along the 34 km internationally funded motorway under construction that links Dakar to the rest of Senegal.

Verve Photo is is a web site that every time I visit I find many things that are worth seeing. Among the highlights of my most recent visit was a link to A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan which examines thirty years of Afghan history. The multi-media presentation is based on 14 trips to Afghanistan between 1994 and 2010 by photojournalist Seamus Murphy (b.1959. Ireland).

On the right side of the blog page is a long list of all the photographers whose work has been featured. It’s an impressive and very long list and every one is worth exploring further.

John Pilger on War and Journalism

John Pilger‘s feature Once again, war is prime time and journalism’s role is taboo makes some very good points about journalism and in particular the role of Leveson, which he suggests is simply a ‘media theatre‘ to deflect us from the real issues.

As Pilger says, “Blame Rupert Murdoch and the tabloids for everything and business can continue as usual.”

While phone hacking may have caused a few celebs some inconvenience or minor distress, and has unpardonably caused some innocent victims considerable grief as well as possibly interfering with police investigations (and rather more will have been interfered with by those brown envelopes), the ‘business as usual’ of the press, and in particular embedded journalists in covering up the activities of British forces – including, according to lawyer Phil Shiner who Pilger quotes. the killing of “hundreds of civilians” and “ the most extraordinary, brutal things, involving sexual acts” are far more serious.

This is of course only half the story, and Pilger also quotes from a Ministry of Defence document from WiliLeaks in which the Ministry “describes investigative journalists -journalists who do their job – as a ‘threat’ greater than terrorism.”

At a time when there is so much bad press for journalists, it’s good to be able to quote such a glowing testimonial to at least some of our profession. But do read Pilger.

Leveson

The basic problem that the Leveson inquiry seems to be concentrating on in the last few days seems not to be about news and photography but about the non-news aspect of the media and its obsession with so-called celebrities. That photographers seem to be cast as the villains in this piece seems both unfair and also dangerous for our freedom to report the real news.

In my view it isn’t any part of the job of the press as such to report on the inconsequential activities of the various nonentities that occupy much of the tabloid space, along with the various scandal magazines. It is not what the freedom of the press is about, and the concept of a free press should not be used to defend it. Were it possible I’d personally be very happy to see legislation that put an end both to ‘celebrity culture’ and the reporting of it; both are I think aspects of enslavement rather than freedom.

Over the years we have seen an increasing trivialisation of ‘news’ with an increasing failure to report on the real issues in a cultural devaluation fuelled in particular by television. It’s a canker that has wormed its way deep into even the most respected of our media – so many of are angered that institutions such as the BBC and newspapers including the Guardian think that stories such as the recent trial of the doctor who let a singer take an overdose deserve to be headline news.

When the colour supplements first came out they often covered real stories; I read the reports by guys like Don McCullin from Biafra and elsewher and many other fine photographers and writers. Now, even from the most serious of newspapers there is seldom much serious journalism or photojournalism, and the magazines are stuffed with silly fashions at silly prices, recipes with 37 ingredients that nobody ever really cooks, reviews of restuarants that only people on bankers bonuses can eat at and all kinds of tat at ridiculous prices, trivia upon trivia upon trivia. Frankly the odd ‘celeb’ getting a bit annoyed at someone poking a lens in their face seems of little consequence when we have a whole culture that is disintegrating and it is just a relatively minor manifestation of this.

Of course the guys who hang around outside homes and pester people on the streets, the ‘paparazzi’, are seldom real photographers, and most of the pictures that they take prove the point. As images they are poorly composed, badly lit and tedious to the extreme, but still the newspapers and magazines fall over themselves to pay big money for them. And it can be really big money, with some photographers making more from a single picture than I make from a year’s work. Take away this financial incentive and there would be no problems.

Unfortunately it is very hard to see how it would be possible to frame laws that would restrict the undesirable activities of the paparazzi without restricting the freedom of the press and of photographers in particular.

The relationship between photographers and celebrities is of course more complex than the media reports of the Leveson hearings suggest – they are after all brought into being by the lens. But I can’t help thinking that Leveson would have been far more likely to reach sensible conclusions if it had concentrated far more on the problems of ‘ordinary’ members of the public who get caught up and trampled by the tabloid circus (some of whom have made the headlines by their testimony too) and much less on giving more publicity to the sometimes relatively minor moans of some celebrities.

There are a couple of things I’ve read about this which started me thinking about the problem. One is a lengthy piece by Edmond Terakopian, Im A Press Photographer & Very Proud Of It, who describes Leverson rather accurately as ‘turning into a witch-hunt against photographers‘ and the other an open letter by Christopher Pledger that he quotes in full in his piece. Pledger makes a very good point about the way that TV news disparages photographers in many reports for their intrusive nature, when many photographers would feel that the TV reporters making these reports are part of the same media operation and in my experience usually more intrusive than their still counterparts.

Another issue raised is that of press cards and of ‘fake’ press cards. Although we do have a nationally recognised scheme under the UK Press Card Authority that is recognised by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), that does not make those issued outside of this scheme ‘fakes’. The UK Press Card is however backed by a verification scheme and is only issued by a limited number of media organisations (the so-called ‘gatekeepers’) and so has a status that other cards do not. But journalism is changing and news and news media is a wider concept than when the Press Card scheme was established; many who are now increasingly contributing to the news media work through organisations that are not part of and don’t fit the recognised scheme.

Not For My Xmas Present!

I won’t be rushing out to buy a copy of Vivian Maier: Street Photographer which, according to Amazon will be available from 8 Dec, published by Powerhouse Books as a 128 page hardcover (ISBN-10: 1576875776 ISBN-13: 978-1576875773) at the pre-order price of £24.64. It’s cheaper in the US, and the Amazon page includes a one minute video which exposes the book and around twenty of her pictures, and makes very clear why I think the hype around her is unjustified.

Make no mistake, Maier was a good photographer. A very good eye who picked up stuff from all sorts of guys and made her own take of it. You can see in the video and the half a dozen images on the web site that she has learnt well from Walker Evans, from Lisette Model, from Lee Friedlander, from Henri Cartier-Bresson from Harry Callaghan and from others. What you don’t see, despite the several self-portraits, is any clue as to who Maier herself was as an artist.

It says in the text that she took over 100,000 photographs in a period from the 1950s to the 1990s, though overwhelmingly I think her work shows its 1930s roots. 100,000 over 40 years is a relatively modest output and not unusual for the keen amateur that she was, at 2,500 pictures a year, it works out at around 50 a week. It’s hard also to know how much of the back-story is true. Did she show her work to no-one, or was it that the people in Chicago she did show her work to didn’t find it of particular interest.

Mike Johnston on The Online Photographer seems considerably more convinced of the book’s worth than me. It seems a pleasant enough volume, but certainly nothing to get excited about, and I sincerely hope nobody buys me it for Christmas, though I’m sure there will be considerable media hype and many photographers are likely to find a copy jammed in their stocking. Please, please not for me.

There are obviously others who disagree with my verdict on her, and the featured comment by Sherwood McLernon says “I think of it as the book that I had hoped The Americans by Robert Frank would have been, but wasn’t.” which must deserve some kind of award.

I don’t know where McLernon was sitting waiting for the publication of ‘The Americans’ in 1958. Maier had hardly started in photography when Frank took 2 years and around 28,000 images to make the work in 1955-7. Published first in France, where Robert Delpire put his future with the family firm on the line to get it in print, it shocked the photography world, or at least those who saw it, as most of the reviews were extremely negative. Wikipedia quotes Popular Photography as deriding his images as “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness.”

The Americans is in no way a perfect book, but it became a seminal book, although it remains in some respects a difficult book. Maier’s work (both in the show and on the various web sites) is safe and easy to assimilate. If I wanted one word to describe it, I think “anodyne” would do nicely, whereas for Frank it would be “iconoclastic.” The mention of Frank is however interesting, as looking at her work in the gallery this summer, one thought that came to me was that despite her obvious talent and facility, she had never really got to grips with his work.

If you are looking for a present for a photographer with any interest in street photography and you find they haven’t got a copy of ‘The Americans’ then I suggest you buy that rather than this book. Maier’s work is easy listening while Frank’s remains challenging, even after I’ve known it since the 1970s when I was getting into the medium.

You might also want to look at Martin Parr’s pick of the best books of the decade, made for the PhotoIreland Festival in the Summer. Perhaps among a few of his choices I might endorse is John Gossage’s Berlin in the Time of the Wall – you can see a selection of the pictures at the Stephen Daiter Gallery, but even at the reduced price of $132 it’s a little expensive for my relatives.

Perhaps at some time I’ll try and write more seriously about my own picks of recent photography books, and I have another of my own Blurb publications arriving shortly.

Ten Years On

Stop the War, along with CND and MAB marked the 10th anniversary of the Invasion of Afghanistan with a protest in Trafalgar Square followed my a march to Downing Street, which was led by that redoubtable woman whose picture ended my previous post, Hetty Bower.

I rather like the feeling in this image that the man on her right is not helping her to walk but holding her back.

It was, as the picture shows, a rather dull day, but for much of the press the big news was the appearance at the event of Julian Assange. There was a huge scrum when he arrived into the enclosure around the platform in Trafalgar Square, but I decided it wasn’t worth trying to join it as there would be a much better opportunity later.

Fortunately I was right, and in just about the right place for it, and took far too many pictures of him. This is the one I like best, though perhaps I could improve it a little with some more work in Lightroom, I think it is just a little too dark at the moment.

I didn’t quite get the picture of him that I wanted, something that had a little more character, but it’s certainly better than many I’ve seen. There were far too many speakers (and I missed quite a few while away elsewhere) but I did take a few pictures of them that at least I like.

I spent quite a while trying to get exactly what I wanted with Jemima Khan, and I think I came close, but had to work in a split second with John Pilger.

I’ve photographed Tony Benn so many times that I wasn’t going to bother yet again, but then I saw him and thought the lighting wasn’t bad as he took out his pipe to relax for a minute or two before being interviewed for TV.

George Galloway always has a good line in theatrical gestures, and I thought this was one of his better attempts, though I’m not sure I would really call him an ‘artist’ as the caption on the screen above him seems to.

There is something I really like about that little bit of movement in the far hand.

Some people are much more difficult to photograph. Jeremy Corbyn MP, the newly appointed National Chair of Stop the War Coalition, often seems to speak with his eyes closed or near closed and it seldom makes for a good picture. I photographed him waiting to speak standing in front of the Landseer lions, and can’t decide which of the two frames on My London Diary that I prefer.

You can see the other one, and my other pictures from the event on My London Diary in Ten Years On – Stop The War Coalition. Things got a little hectic for a while at Downing St, and there were so many photographers that I kept getting pushed forward, too close to the action. It might have been a good time to use the 10.5mm, but the crush was so tight there was no way I could change a lens.

I could only work with the 16-35, mainly at the wider end, and do the best I could.

I’ve photographed many Stop The War events over the ten years it has been in existence, and at the moment am eagerly awaiting the launch of a publication celebrating those ten years, which includes quite a few of my pictures. But this event came several months too late to be included.

Cable Street Revisited

Cable Street occupies an important place in British left-wing history, and like all such events is shrouded in myth. I’ve been criticised by some for pointing out some of these, but I think it never belittles our history to get the facts right. Just as last month, when the EDL tried to march into the East End, the people of the East End never got to fight the fascists. The battle in 1936 was with the police, and the people were successful. It was a victory for the people, and one against the fascists even if they didn’t actually come into contact.

This year the police were fighting with the EDL at times, and it was the police who stopped the EDL, as well as succeeding in stopping the people from the East End getting at them, although I saw no real attempt made to breach the police lines. The protesters against the EDL in 2011 remained peaceful, except when a coach full of EDL stopped in the area and started to insult people.

Back in 1936, the East End didn’t stop the fascists, though on that one day they did manage to stop Mosley marching through. But the fascists were busy inside the East End then. It was also a time when real battles were being fought against them in Spain, and several thousands of brave men, many of them communists or anarchists, including workers from the East End, defied the government and went to fight.

Relatively few of those who went to Spain – or who stopped the police in Cable St – are still alive, but the memory of what they did lives on, not least through the splendid mural in Cable St itself.

The picture taken 5 years ago, when the celebrations were a little smaller and more local makes the connection between Spain and Cable St clear. This year there were people from all over the UK present, including quite a few Indian groups as well as the local Bangladeshi organisations.

This year’s 75th anniversary also included several groups connected to Spain, including the International Brigade Memorial Trust, the Connelly Association and the National Clarion Cycling Club, who had taken part in an anniversary ride from Scotland. Their banner was also that of the ‘Centuria Anglesa Tom Mann’

More about the 70th anniversary in the second story down this page of My London Diary, and this years event is Battle of Cable St – 75 Years.

I took two frames with this woman carrying a banner, the second with the red flag hiding the boy in the green glasses, and I’m not sure which of the two I prefer. The main photographic problem was one of contrast, with a huge difference between the shade and sunlit areas. Even the picture above, where the sunny areas were small required some fairly extreme burning in.

Of course fill-flash becomes very useful in these situations. When Max Levitas was speaking, one of my friends standing next to me was cursing as he didn’t have his flash with him; Max as the image above shows, was standing with his face in the light and forehead in shade, and flash was really essential to cope with this. Usually I have the flash set to -2/3 stop, and I don’t think the exposure can take the flash into account, so I generally use -1/3 stop of exposure compensation with it.

Another image where it was essential was this of 106 year old Hetty Bower, who was 31 at the time of the battle, and certainly the oldest person on the march – she walked the whole way from Aldgate. She was looking up at the mural when I took this picture of her with a friend.

Benny Wenda

I woke this morning to hear a name I recognised on the news, listed as a wanted man by Interpol. I first photographed Benny Wenda at a protest opposite Downing St against biofuels in April 2008.

There are several more pictures of him and his companions on that page, along with a series of captions which read:

Musicians from the Free West Papua Campaign

Benny Wenda , Chairman of Demmak – the Papuan Peoples’ Tribal Assembly, was arrested, imprisoned and tortured by Indonesian solders for his part in leading a peaceful independence movement, but manged to escape and come to the UK.

West Papua was invaded by Indonesia 3 months after it gained independence from the Dutch

West Papua is the left hand half of Papua, the large island above Australia on the globe

The final caption was perhaps the only time I’ve found a photographic use for the Campaign against Climate Change’s inflated globe in a greenhouse, which has always seemed at other protests a visual embarrassment however conceptually appropriate it may be. For once I was pleased to have it there, and made sure that Mr Wenda’s uke was strategically positioned for the picture.

On Friday 14 Aug, 2009 I photographed Benny Wenda again at a protest opposite the Netherlands Embassy in London marking the anniversary of ‘The Day of the Broken Promise‘, 15 August 1962. Then I wrote a much longer piece which you can read there on My London Diary, as well of course as taking more pictures. There were few journalists present and I think I was the only photographer who attended the event.

I’ve often said that the whole world comes to London, and this was another example (though Mr Wenda actually lives in Oxford.) I sincerely hope that our government will act to prevent Interpol carrying out this politically motivated extradition.