Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

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At last I’ve begun to put work from September onto My London Diary, held up for some time by computer problems. I’m still waiting for a new machine which should speed things up quite dramatically, but the old one I’m writing this on is more or less working (only one blue screen so far today) having been pretty drastically rebuilt after a complete failure when its memory fried.

My first working day in September was a busy one, although I didn’t quite get to photograph what I had intended. The EDL were coming to demonstrate in London, despite a ban on marches in the City of London and adjoining boroughs imposed by home secretary Teresa May. The first event I went to was organised by several groups that had split away from the EDL are were organising an ‘alternative’ and peaceful action well away from the East End in Westminster. I, the police and the organiser – who had sent me an e-mail asking if I would photograph it – had expected around a hundred people to attend, but it was much smaller, around twenty.

The groups taking part describe themselves as patriots and deny being racist, exactly as the EDL. Like the EDL they say they are only against extremist Muslims and deny charges of Islamophobia. On their placards and banners they call for free speech, for an English Parliament, for no adoption here of Sharia Law and for us to leave Europe. Their protest started with a quiet and fairly dignified march along the pavement to the Cenotaph, where they laid a wreath and observed a minute’s silence in memory of the soldiers who have given their life for their country.

To that point, although I don’t share their right wing views, there was little in their protest that I found objectionable but the reaction of some of them to a group of Syrians protesting against the repression of protests in Syria and asking for the support of the UK government did appal me.

Clearly these were not Muslim extremists, and the Syrian protests are certainly about free speech and many of them would be against Shariah. But to some of those in the ‘Alternative Action’ march they appeared to be foreigners who had no right to be here, and certainly no right to demonstrate on our streets.

Personally I felt rather rather happier with the Syrians, quite a few of whom were Londoners, and I very much sympathised with their protest. I find it hard to understand how anyone can not be moved to support them given the way the peaceful opposition by Syrians has been brutally repressed by the army under orders from President Asad.

Possibly some of the ‘patriots’ on the other side of the road shared some of my revulsion at the outburst of anti-Islamic feeling, and one of them did after a while say “Look, we haven’t come here for that sort of thing” and lead the group away.

More pictures at Alternative Action Anti-Sharia Protest and Protest Against Repression In Syria, and on my way to St James’s Station where the ‘Alternative Action’ started I visited Parliament Square to find out how the peace protest was going since Barbara Tucker had been sent to jail. You can see at Brian Haw Peace Protest Continues.

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Paris 1961

The French authorities denied it happened, but in Paris on 17 October 1961 police attacked many thousands of Algerians who were protesting across the city against the war in Algeria and in particular a curfew that had been imposed on the community, killing an unknown number of them – possibly as many as 300, but at least 50, and wounding many more. Many were beaten to death and their bodies thrown into the Seine. More than 11,000 others were arrested and bussed to three makeshift camps around the city, held for days without food and subjected to beatings. Many Algerians were deported back to Algeria.

The crackdown was ordered by Paris police chief Maurice Papon and later in the year President de Gaulle awarded him the Légion d’Honneur. Officially there were only three deaths and 64 wounded. The events were only accurately reported at the time in a few militant left
publications, though some details emerged in a National Assembly debate
at the end of the month. It was only around 37 years later that the
full truth of the events really emerged.

You can read much more about it in Le Monde, where you can see a set of photographs by Henri Georges, then a photographer for ‘Liberation‘, now published for the first time. There are also a number of other links to features.

We now live in very different times, with so many people photographing events and then – at least in countries like ours – tweeting and posting about what is happening. But we still see the way that the newspapers, radio and TV are too ready to accept the often misleading and sometimes entirely fabricated stories put out by police and other official sources. There was a reminder of this in yesterday’s parliamentary debate on the Hillsborough disaster, as well as a reminder of what happened over the death of Ian Tomlinson. And so many other stories, particularly those involving police violence and deaths in custody.

If you want to know what is happening on our streets, you need to be on them, and not rely on what you read in the papers or see on TV. If you can’t be there, then, unreliable as many tweets and other citizen journalism reports are, taken as a whole and together with the reports in the commercial media they are more likely to give you a true picture. If Twitter had been around in 1961 it would not have been possible to brush several hundred corpses under the carpet.

Notting Hill

I went to Notting Hill last week, and it was for me a notable event in several ways. I don’t often go that way except for my annual trips to carnival at the end of August, but I was there for the opening of a show at a gallery I’ve not visited before, one of a series of shows jointly organised by Tristan Hoare and Jean-Michel Wilmotte in the Wilmotte Gallery, in the former garage which became Lichfield studios (at 133 Oxford Gardens, London W10 6NE) and has now been converted into offices and an exhibition space by architect, designer and urban planner Wilmotte.

I was attending Shahidul Alam‘s first solo retrospective in the UK, My Journey as Witness‘ which runs until 18 November 2011. It was a memorable evening, although I was not able to stay as long as I would have liked, but was able to talk to both Alam and the Rosa Mario Falvo, the editor of his fine book, also called ‘My Journey as Witness.‘

I opened my copy this morning when I had a few minutes to spare while files were uploading and around an hour later I was still reading it. It is a work that is important not just for the photography but also for what it bears witness to about relationships between the majority world and the wealthy nations and and perhaps in particular about NGOs.

Back to lighter things, in August I was in Notting Hill and here are a few pictures to prove it:

Someone yesterday told me they had never been to carnival and described it as a monocultural event. Which perhaps just proves they have never been there or at least not in the last 20 or so years.

Part of its interest for me is in it being an event that very much now reflects the multicultural nature of London.

Plenty more (perhaps too many) pictures on My London Diary.

I’ve posted the work as two sets of pictures, one taken on the Fuji X100 and the other on the Nikon D300 DSLR as I was interested in seeing if I worked differently with the two cameras. In general I don’t really think so.

From the Lions Point Of View

“Isn’t it a thrill to have him here in London” said the woman behind me to a friend as we we all waited, hardly an empty seat in the small lecture area of National Geographics’s Regent St first floor, and the next hour or so listening to Shahidul Alam talking, showing pictures and answering questions certainly justified her anticipation.

Probably most of us in the audience had some idea of the incredible transformation Dr Alam has made to the world of photography, not just in his native Bangladesh but worldwide, although so much still remains to be done, but I think all of us found there was even more to him – and his family – than we had been previously aware.

Alam’s mother in particular was a formidable woman; determined to get a university education despite the opposition of her mother to the education of women, she left home every morning in a burkha “going to visit friends” and went to study. Armed with her degree she dedicated herself to the education of women, and having found little backing for her project, bought a tent and used it to set up her own school for girls.

Later too we heard that his father had dared to evade the “invitation” sent to him along with the other leading intellectuals of the country to take tea with the occupying Pakistani generals in 1971 just a few days before the end of the war. It was a story accompanied by a picture by Rashid Talukdar of a severed head in rubble, from the killing fields of Rayerbazar. Altogether more than a thousand teachers, journalists, doctors, lawyers, artists, writers and engineers were massacred.

Shahidul Alam was sent to study chemistry in the UK in 1972, gaining his Ph.D in London, and taught the subject while at the same time developing an interest in photography, at first making camera club style pretty pictures. But then he came across photographs that were harder to understand and seemed to have more depth – such as Steichen’s ‘Heavy Roses’, said to be the last picture he took in France in 1914, sumptuous but slowly decaying and fading as the Great War started – and began learning to see and to work at finding out what was interesting about such less obvious pictures. While living in Kingsbury in Northwest London he photographed people in his locality and took them to the local paper, who published them as a spread on the back page and paid him a tenner for them (a local paper paying – how times change!) – his first professional work.

He had (and still has) a particular love of photographing children, and having seen that a child portraiture studio – Young Rascals Studio in Acton – wanted photographers he went for an interview and got the job, and was soon the most successful of their photographers, earning around £350 a week, a pretty good wage at the time.

After a while, although he was doing well financially he decided that what he was doing was not something he wanted to devote his life to, and he made up his mind to return to Dhaka with his savings of £2800, and go back and live with his parents and try and become a photographer and take part in the life of his own country . It wasn’t easy to find any employment there, so he set up his own business as a photographer as well as starting to teach photography and work with communities.

Alam was at pains to point out that he had no problem with white western photographers coming to photograph in his country, but that he felt that photographers from countries in the majority world had an understanding of their own communities that provided them with a different viewpoint. He wanted a pluralistic world in which different people got to tell stories, but was against the kind of monopolistic view that media around the world tended to project of countries like his own. This was brought home strongly to him while on a visit to Northern Ireland when a five-year-old showed her surprise at seeing him playing with a few coins. Even at that age she knew that people from Bangladesh didn’t have any money.

Increasingly too he began to question his own position in his own society, as a middle class man with a camera – and characteristically began to do something practical about it. In 1994 he set up a women’s’ photography group, bringing a woman to the country to teach them, and he also began teaching photography to classes of working class children. He then set up the Pathshala school of Photography, now recognised as a world-leading school for photojournalism, with its students and ex-students gaining exceptional success in international competitions. It is also possibly unique in that all of those finishing the course have found work as photographers, though Alam did say that the market for photographers in Bangladesh was now becoming saturated and he was having to think about encouraging some students to work in ancillary professions such as picture editing and picture research.

It was great to see in his photographs and a short film clip how photography was being taken to the people in Bangladesh, with mobile exhibitions mounted on bullock carts and cycle carts being taken into villages, and also the work with village children. Alam also founded and directs the Chobi Mela international festival of photography held in Dhaka every two years which he set up is the largest photography festival in Asia and takes photography out on the streets (and on a boat) with a very different atmosphere to most festivals.

Through his photographic agency Drik, (now part of a wider multimedia organisation) set up in 1989, Alam has worked hard to change the way that rich world publications deal with events in Bangladesh and the majority world generally, although not always yet with great success. From 1983 the political events in his country turned him to documenting the political movement against the military rule of General Ershad which lasted, with minor changes until 1991. During the later years of that period there was increasing disorder and a ban on reporting pro-democracy activities – which newspapers responded to by ceasing publication. During this time Alam kept sending out pictures of the political events to news organisations around the world – who ignored them , as to them it wasn’t news. The only time the world press took any interest in Bangladesh was at times of natural disasters – cyclones and floods. (Presumably, though he didn’t say so, this became news because of the pressure from the major aid agencies, who avoid involvement in ‘political’ issues.)

Alam’s talk was entitled ‘When the lions find their storytellers‘, from the widespread African proverb “Until the lion has his own storyteller, the hunter will always have the best side of the story.” Whoever does not have a voice is almost always going to be the loser. His life’s work has been trying to tell the lions’ story and to teach the lions so they can tell their own story.

Drik Picture Agency has played an important part in this, and more recently has set up ‘Majority World‘, a platform set up to allow “indigenous photographers, photographic agencies and image collections from the majority world to gain fair access to global image markets” and to present image buyers with “the the wealth of fresh imagery and photographic talent emerging from the Majority World.”

He ended his talk with a little about two of his heroes, and the final image was what is now perhaps his best-known photograph, possibly the last official portrait of Nelson Mandela. As always, Alam had a story to tell, of how he was held up travelling from Mexico to take it and thought he had missed his chance to take the picture, but hearing about his transport problem, Mandela actually rescheduled the sitting for two days later. The picture seemed to be a suitable backdrop against which to take his picture and I got out my Fuji X100 and took a few frames from my third row seat, some of which needed rather drastic cropping.

Questions at the end of the talk brought out some other vast aspects of his work that he had not included, including the work he and his fellow photographers have undertaken over the years on the vast environmental problems of his country, much of which is likely to disappear as global warming leads to sea level rise.

One questioner brought up the problem of the relationship between documentary and art photography, and of how Alam has managed to work so effectively across both spheres. It was during his answer that he removed the pair of ordinary inexpensive sandals he was as always wearing and held them up into the light, saying put them in a gallery with the right display and lighting and they would sell as a work of art for thirty or forty thousand pounds (I did think he might have to change his name to Tracey Emin as well) before putting them back on his feet and saying these are now just sandals again. It was only a part of his response, but like much of his talk, one that promoted thought. He also talked about the Crossfire project on extra-judicial killings in Bangladesh which rather than attempting to look at these by documentary photographs of events he made large format colour images of the places where the killings had taken place, exhibiting them together with the facts about the events in what he called “A quiet metaphor for the screaming truth” – and which was closed and barricaded by armed police – but as I also mentioned here was opened in the road outside the gallery.

It was a talk that was full of hope and inspiration, but one that also left me with something of a feeling of despair for the situation of photography in my own country. In Bangladesh things seem much starker and the struggles and possibilities more obvious. Here photography often seems strangled, choked by the money and prejudices of the art world, distorted by academia. We’ve seen the abandonment of our major documentary resource, Side Gallery, by the Arts Council and the continued side-lining of our most democratic photography festival, the East London Photomonth, by the photographic establishment.

Shahidul Alam’s first solo retrospective in the UK, ‘My Journey as Witness‘ opens at Tristan Hoares gallery in the Wilmotte Gallery at Lichfield Studios, 133 Oxford Gardens, London W10 6NE on 6th October, and runs until 18 November 2011, with a book of the same title being launched the in the UK on October 10 by Skira, Milan. Copies are actually already on sale and I took a short look at it at the National Geographic Store. It is certainly a tribute to Alam that the first volume in what Skira intend to be a multi-volume series on the arts of Bangladesh is devoted to him and to photography. The book has an introduction by Sebastião Salgado and preface by Raghu Rai.

Also here on >Re:PHOTO you can read about two earlier exhibitions curated by Alam, in ‘Bangladesh 1971‘ at Autograph and ‘Where Three Dreams Cross’ at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2010. Writing about World Photography Day earlier this year (a piece prompted by a post on Shahidul News) I concluded:

Photography may have started in France (and England) and perhaps came of age in the twentieth century in Europe and the USA. But now much of the more interesting work is happening elsewhere.

It seems a good way to end this over-long piece too.

Shahidul Alam in London

When I began to write about ‘World Photography‘ eleven or so years ago, one man in particular earned my respect for his work in setting up the agency Drik and in general promoting photography from the majority world.

I’ve mentioned Dr Shahidul Alam quite a few times on this site, and next week those in London can hear him give a free public talk When the lions find their storytellers at the National Geographic Store, 83-97 Regent Street on October 4th at 6pm.

Later in the week, his first solo retrospective in the UK, ‘My Journey as Witness‘ opens at Tristan Hoare’s gallery in the Wilmotte Gallery at Lichfield Studios, 133 Oxford Gardens, London W10 6NE on 6th October, and runs until 18 November 2011, with a book of the same title being launched the in the UK on October 10 by Skira, Milan.

Al Quds Day Dilemmas

Al Quds Day was proposed by the late Imam Khomeini of Iran as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people and of opposition to the Israeli control of Jerusalem, as well as more widely “a day for the oppressed to rise and stand up against the arrogant.” He established it as the last Friday of Ramadan, and its celebration has become something of a controversy particularly in the last few years in London.

The annual Al Quds Day march here takes place on the Sunday before the end of Ramadan, and is organised by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, a body which receives funding from Iran. Although a wide range of pro-Palestinian groups give the event their support, few of the larger groups take an active part in the march, although speakers from some of them have appeared at the rally which follows this.

Although many of us support the Palestinians in their demands for a just settlement and an independent state and oppose the long-standing occupation and oppression by Israel (and most including myself also recognise the right of Israel to exist in peace in the area) few of us are supporters of the Islamic regime that currently oppresses the people of Iran – or indeed of the dictatorship by the Shah that preceded it.

As the march assembled, a small group of protesters gathered across the road, protesting against the march and for freedom in Iran. Many if not most of those marching in support of freedom for Palestine would have shared their hopes for an end to the current Iranian regime.

One affect of the counter-demonstrations by this group and others this year and in previous years has been to make the march organisers very sensitive to the way that the press covers the event. There are often also frictions between some of the stewards at largely Muslim protests and the press, particularly male photographers, about the photographing of Muslim women in the protest.

Few of these problems seem to arise from the women themselves, and certainly those from many Muslim countries – for example Palestine, the focus of this protest – seem seldom to have any problem with being photographed. As one Palestinian photographer friend told me when I asked, “you can do anything with them!”

At this event I did have some problems with some of the stewards, one of whom attempted to remove me completely from the protest, but I refused to go, moving instead to the front of the demonstration when I had finished taking a few pictures. Fortunately one of the people covering the event for the organisers knew me and the work I had published on previous demonstrations and told them that I should be allowed to stay and take photographs – and I was able to do so.

The rest of the photographers covering the event had been moved across the road, and I felt a little upset by this. But I’d been allowed to stay because I’d argued and stood my ground, and because some people there accepted my integrity as a photographer, and I felt I had to make the most of it.

Once the march started, I think all the photographers were able to work without problems, which hadn’t always been true in previous years. One previous year I had to appeal to Yvonne Ridley who in the march to prevent the stewards from forcing me out; fortunately she remembered I had talked to an photographed her on several previous occasions and vouched for me.

As the march reached the bottom of Haymarket, not far from Trafalgar Square, I noticed three men who I knew from English Defence League protests watching it come down the street. I’m sure they recognised me too, as I’ve been pointed out in right wing web pages and at one right wing protest as a left-wing photographer. Some who know me better on the right also recognise that although I disagree with many of their views I do try to present them accurately – and I’ve actually been invited to cover several right-wing events because of this. If any of my reports show them in a poor light it is because of what they do. Accurate reporting is I think vital.

So I knew that there would be another protest against the march, and the police had confined most of the EDL to a pen on the corner of Cockspur St and Spring Gardens, which seemed rather distant from the march, although within view as it turned onto Trafalgar Square. Probably most of the marchers didn’t even notice them, though I did see a few pointing at them and laughing and others making less polite gestures.

But as the march came down the side of the square I saw a small group I recognised from EDL events on the side of the road, and followed two women as the walked in front of the march, one stopping to give them the finger. Police soon took them to the side of the road.

I went to photograph the EDL and then walked back into the square to see what was happening, following a group of four or five others I recognised who were walking around the square. I missed a small incident where one man who police had apparently removed from the square once had returned and was arrested, then walked back to photograph those in the pen again.

A few minutes later I saw an EDL flag being waved on the North Terrace overlooking the square and hurried across to find a small group of protesters surrounded by police, who began to escort them out back to the distant pen. I managed to get to photograph them (one held up his hand to cover my lens) and then walked down talking to one of them who complained to me that they were not being allowed to protest in the square before taking a few more pictures.

I think that I wrote an accurate report of the events, including some of what the EDL had to say, which to me contradicted their claims not to be Islamophobic. But so long as they remain within the law – and on this occasion I think they did so – they have a right to protest and I think they were perhaps unduly restricted in this by the police actions.

The EDL accuse the press of not reporting them and of concentrating on the excesses of a few violent individuals when they do cover their activities. Of course in general that is true about all demonstrations, with peaceful protests seldom making the news, even if large in size.

Many more pictures in Al-Quds Day Protests on My London Diary.

Government Attacks Peaceful Protest

From Maggie’s I went directly to another event where there was also very little to photograph, but one that I had wanted to write about.

UK Uncut had launched a series of protests across the country that had caught the public imagination, campaigning in particular against people and companies who were avoiding – mainly by legal subterfuges – paying their share of UK income tax. It was a campaign that was getting wide support, not least because most people get their tax deducted at source under PAYE and don’t have any choice in the matter.

If you are wealthy – either as a private individual or a company – you have the option of employing accountants and tax advisers who will tell you how you can legally avoid paying UK tax, exploiting various loopholes and dodges. Companies that are actually based in the UK, trading here, getting their profits from UK taxpayers can apparently save billions entirely legally by pretending to be based overseas, setting up a largely notional office in some foreign country. Similar scams also help many of our richest private citizens to avoid large proportions of their tax bills.

Most of us knew that these things happened, but UK Uncut has made us aware of the huge scale that the national economy is losing out because of them – as well as the identities of some of the major culprits, with its protests at Topshop, Boots, Vodaphone, major banks and elsewhere.

Although the government occasionally condemns tax dodgers – and particularly those who do so illegally – successive governments have failed to take effective measures to prevent tax avoidance. The Conservative party in particular depends strongly on the contributions of those who gain most from lax tax laws, and protecting the interests of the wealthy – including many in the party – is at the heart of its policies.

For them, UK Uncut are a problem, and doubtless one that the police have come under great pressure to do something about. But their actions have been generally well-ordered and non-violent, composed largely of well-educated middle class protesters. They have occupied premises for short periods, holding classes in them, and have then left when requested without causing damage.

At Fortnum & Mason, UK Uncut were also well-behaved. Outside the shop a few yards away police were fighting other protesters as the largest and largely peaceful trade union demonstration in London filed past. The media were concentrating on the few hundred people involved in violence (and I’d left the UK Uncut protesters to go home shortly before they arrived at Fortnum & Mason, as I had been hit earlier by a paintball, and it was beginning to get rather uncomfortable as the paint was drying out), and I think the politicians and police saw their chance to act firmly against UK Uncut and carry out a mass arrest, linking them in the public mind with the rather mindless violence on the streets.

So the police lied to those in Fortnum & Mason, asking them to wait until things had quietened down outside, when they would be allowed to leave. Police praised them for their co-operation, but actually they wanted to hold them there until it was safe to bring up police vans to arrest them and take them away.

Many were then held for almost 24 hours in police stations, sometimes being refused their legal rights to make contact. Some were released in the middle of the night, miles from their homes and not knowing where they were, some dressed only in their underwear covered by near-transparent white suits.

Eventually charges against most of them were dropped. Around 30 were picked out and charged with the serious offence of ‘aggravated trespass’, apparently because there was evidence (such as the possession of leaflets) that they wanted to ‘promote their cause’. It’s unfortunate that the judge who pointed out that this was completely legal failed to take the obvious further step of throwing out these cases, though they seem almost certain to fail at a later stage.

What won’t happen – and why there won’t be justice in this matter – is any proper enquiry into the political pressures put on the police or disciplinary procedures against those officers who bowed to them, who lied to protesters and who were responsible for detaining the protesters and their lack of proper treatment.

By arresting so many, and by keeping up the long-winded process of bringing some of UK Uncut’s key movers to trial, the government’s attack on organised peaceful protest in this way has been extremely effective. But in the longer term it may have the effect of radicalising a larger and wider swathe of the public.

It was hard to know what there was to photograph outside the Magistrates Court, and I think many of those protesting there did not know what they should do. Some went into the public gallery though they had remove their white track suits to be admitted. There were few placards or banners, little chanting, just people concerned about what was happening to peaceful protesters and who knew that our legal rights to protest needed defending and were prepared to come and stand up for them.

I didn’t want to organise or pose people but I did try and get them in front of the sign with the name of the court, and to make use of both the white suits they were wearing and the few placards. There are more pictures (and text) on My London Diary: Support Fortnum & Mason Protesters.

Prison Photography

I’ve mentioned a few times the web site Prison Photography written by Peter Brook who also is the lead blogger for Wired.com’s Raw File photography blog.

Another blog I read regularly is the New York Time’s Lens, and a couple of days ago they ran a piece ‘Focusing on Prison Photography‘ in which James Estrin interviews Brook about his work and interest in prison photography, with examples and links to the work of a number of photographers. It’s an article that touches on important issues and links to some interesting photography, mainly by photographers whose work I didn’t previously know.

One UK photographer who has taken an interest in prisons is Ed Clark, and some time ago I reviewed his book Still Life: Killing Time on this site. I’ve also written about his more recent work Guantanamo: If the Light Goes Out on the camp and those who were locked up there, although I don’t think the longer piece I wrote about this ever got published. And I never got around to putting it on this site as I was waiting for a promised review copy of the book that never arrived.

Police Theft/ / Dulce Et Decorum / Scandal of Parliament Square

One story which hardly rippled the news last week was the removal of tents and display material belonging to the late Brian Haw and Barbara Tucker, currently held in prison, from the pavement of Parliament Square. Brian’s protest is continuing, with a band of volunteers taking shifts in manning the site.

Around 20 police arrived at 7am last Wednesday, 31 August, and, ignoring the protests of those present, removed the two tents and the 3 metres or so of the display, describing them as “litter.” One of the tents they removed is normally home to Barbara Tucker who was sentenced to nine weeks imprisonment for obstructing what she claims was an illegal search of her tent while she was in it. She also claims that she was refused legal representation and the proper disclosures and access to her paperwork for the trial, having been remanded to prison the day prior to the trial.

The officer who led last Wednesday’s raid to remove the tents and material was the same officer, Sgt David Cole who she had obstructed him on the morning of the State Opening of Parliament on 25 May 2010. The incident was filmed on Brian Haw’s camera, which police unknowingly left running after they had arrested him. He was also the officer who Brian on the video claims had assaulted him and subjected him to unnecessary violent restraint for some 40 minutes on an earlier occasion. The video is on the Parliament Square blog.

© 2011, Peter Marshall
One of the team who has kept Brian Haw’s Parliament Square Peace Campaign running 24/7 since his death and was there at the time of the police raid

Police earlier stole Brian Haw’s rather larger display in May 2006, after which it was re-created as the work of art, State Britain’ by Mark Wallinger down the road at Tate Britain. His last words were to Barbara Tucker, “Babs, our work is not yet finished“.

Just a few yards along the front of Parliament Square a second peace campaign, Maria Gallestegui’s Peace Strike, continues. One rather well-known political columnist (who just happened to go to the same primary school as my wife) paraded his ignorance and lack of observation and attention in The Guardian a few weeks back, suggesting that the slogan ‘ Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori’ (it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country) were rather an unsuitable slogan for a peace protest. Possibly the splattered pool of red paint – blood – from which the words stand out in white might have give him a clue what it was about, or even the words underneath “the old lie”. © 2011, Peter Marshall Hard to believe that Simon Hoggart was not aware of the most famous poem from the ‘Great War’, the First World War, Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, its title taken from an ode by Horace, with its vivid description of the terrible effects of a poison gas attack, which ends with the words “The old lie” followed by the quotation ‘Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.’

But then the comment did come from a man with a rabid fear of bicycles.

© 2011, Peter Marshall But perhaps the greatest scandal of Parliament Square is the continued denial of access to the public, with an ugly fence around the whole area encaging Churchill, Lloyd George and the others, with a few wandering ‘heritage wardens’ making sure we and the many tourists don’t enjoy our heritage.

Guardian Views

I don’t often find the time to sit and read a serious newspaper during the week. Normally I’ll just hear the news on the radio, usually while I’m eating, and perhaps skim through a few articles on the web, mainly ones that people have recommended on Facebook. And often, while I’m travelling up to Waterloo or Victoria on my way to take pictures I’ll take a quick glance through The Metro or relax with the Evening Standard later on my way home.

But yesterday I had to wait around at The Print Space while some of the pictures for my gardens show (more later) were being printed, and after leafing through a copy or two of Vice Magazine I picked up The Guardian and found a piece by Roger Tooth, the paper’s head of photography on picture manipulation and trust in news imagery.

You won’t be surprised to find that he’s against it – manipulation that is – at least so far as news photography is concerned, but it’s actually a very clear and sensible piece on the subject. Like me he comes down to a very simple principle, but one that would be hard to define in detail:

“cropping and toning basically anything that might have been done in a darkroom is OK, but the moving of pixels or “cutting and pasting” is forbidden”

and he continues by saying that “We have to trust our photographers and the agencies we deal with“. In the end it does have to come down to trust and the integrity of the photographers concerned. This is one reason why it is so important that photographs are properly attributed, not just to an agency (Getty or Hulton or AP never took a photograph) but to an individual. Of course attribution is one of our moral rights, though unfortunately at the time of the last copyright act the government let itself be lobbied by the newspapers and magazines into denying it to photographers. (The Guardian probably tries more than most, but it would be nice to see closer to 100% attribution there.)

Of course many if not most of the pictures published by The Guardian and all the other newspapers will have had pixels moved, and also other things done to them that would have been difficult or impossible in the darkroom. We routinely use tools to remove dust spots that clone pixels from one part of an image to another, and make complex adjustments to exposure, contrast, colour balance et al which were just not possible in those dim days of BD (before digital.) And back in BD I used to teach students how it was possible to combine negatives and many other tricks.

It really does come down to intention. To show the viewer what I saw as clearly as I can and as honestly as I can. What I do at the computer or in the darkroom is a continuation of what I do at the scene.

Tooth also makes the fine and sensible point that what is acceptable depends on the usage of a picture. Some things that would not be acceptable in a news photograph would be fine when making a portrait for the arts pages. There are still limits, but they are – at least arguably – in rather different places.

I did get time to read the Guardian at the weekend, although it was late on Sunday before I got around to reading Saturday’s news. I was pleased to see this picture (properly attributed) illustrating a feature about Smiley Culture after the news leaked out that the police who were present when he died and whose actions quite probably led to his death are not to face prosecution.

I thought immediately of the many other cases of suspicious deaths at the hands of police, where investigations have failed to come up with satisfactory explanations and where no charges have been made. Since 2007 the number of such deaths in the London area has roughly doubled – there are now around 30 a year. Smiley Culture has made the papers – and so for different reasons did the shooting of Mark Duggan and the killing of Ian Tomlinson, but most cases get little publicity.

© 2009 Peter Marshall
Marcia and Samantha, sisters of Sean Rigg killed in Brixton Police station in August 2008 attend a memorial vigil for Ian Tomlinson in December 2009

Of course not all the deaths are down to police action. But far too many mainly black and healthy young men die, and few if any police are ever brought to account. ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ remains a good question, and the answer for the UK is that nobody is really watching the watchmen, or perhaps more accurately that we have a complex system set up including complaints procedures, the IPCC (more police) and courts which work together to ensure that there is no justice. We should not be surprised when sometimes there is no peace.