Category: Political Issues

Two weeks ago I wrote a post Arbus: 40 Years Gone which was prompted by a post by another blogger, James Pomerantz, who blogs as ‘A Photo Student‘, and I started that post by mentioning this fact, then went on to say something about its content, which included a reproduction of the obit written for Village Voice by A D Coleman. And in the rest of the post I mentioned and commented briefly on a recent feature by Coleman himself on his blog.

I hadn’t expected the post to cause any particular controversy, but my piece brought Pomerantz’s post to the attention of Coleman, who had previously been unaware of the use of his work in this way. Naturally he took objection and demanded the removal of his piece from Pomerantz’s pages, as well as posting a comment on the blog there.  You can read the rest of the story in Coleman’s own words in Night of the Living Infringers and a follow-up in Dog Days: News & Notes.

Copyright is vital to both photographers and writers and we should all take care to respect it, especially at a time when our government is making proposals that may damage it (see for example this article on the BJP site.

Regular readers of this blog will doubtless have realised that almost all of the pictures I post here were taken by me. On the few occasions I have posted images by others, I think I have always had at least their verbal permission to do so.  Similar considerations apply to the use of text, although I often quote from other articles on the web or in print I always try to be careful to only quote small portions of them and to give a link to the original. I still follow the very clear rules which applied to me working for a major publishing organisation writing ‘About Photography’, which were both editorial policy and also accorded with my own respect for the intellectual property rights of others.

That doesn’t mean that I’m not willing to share my work. Everyone is welcome to view the more than 50,000 images I’ve put on line and to read the millions of words I’ve written.  You can even print them out for your own personal, private use if you want. But if you want to publish them in any way – electronic or otherwise – and thus distribute them to others you need my permission, and certainly if you are being paid to do so or you or anyone else is in any way profiting from that publication then I would normally expect my fair share of that profit. Because it is my work you are using.

‘Fair Use’ is often cited by bloggers, but it has very strict limits, both geographical and in what it allows. I should make it clear that I’m not a lawyer,  but there is a very clear discussion of the US law on this on Wikipedia.  In the UK, as Wikipedia also states, the concept is known as ‘fair dealing’, and is limited “research and private study (both must be non-commercial), criticism, review, and news reporting.”  Most educational establishments pay licences which allow their students and staff to copy work in ways that fall outside these restrictions for images in books and magazines, and like most photographers I submit a ‘Payback’ claim every year to DACS stating the number of my works that have been published, and receive an annual payment for this use. If you haven’t done a return yet, this year’s Payback deadline is Friday 9 September 2011.

Bloggers have to respect copyright just like anyone else. Failing to do so is unfair to the creators of the work and also unfair to other bloggers who play by the rules. Back when I blogged and posted for a living I often had e-mail from readers asking why I didn’t always display the images I was writing about in my posts rather than simply linking to somewhere where they could be viewed.  Just like many other web sites did without permission.

July has finally dawned for My London Diary. It’s taken a while longer than usual for several reasons, not least the work I’ve been doing for an exhibition in September, something rather different for me, on the gardens of St John’s Wood. More about this later, but although I’ve only been photographing one afternoon a week for it, I’m working with digitally stitched panoramas and an hour of taking pictures can generate a day of work on the computer.

July’s first protest that I covered was outside the offices of the Crown Prosecution Service and the Director of Public Prosecutions and followed on from last month’s ‘slutwalk‘.   This first of a planned programme of ‘Slut Means Speak Up‘ events was calling for changes in the law and changes in police attitudes to rape survivors and sex workers. Women Against Rape, one of the groups supporting the protest, state that over 30 women who have “reported rape have been disbelieved and imprisoned in the last 12 months. Asylum seekers who report rape and other torture are often deported. Sex workers who come forward risk prosecution.”

This was in part a very emotional event, with a number of people telling stories of their own traumatic experiences and mothers and fathers of victims talking about the difficulties in getting justice.  At times I found it difficult to take pictures, and had to remind myself that my own problems were insignificant and that these people were making a great effort to get their stories told and it was my job to do what I could to tell them. Taking photographs – though needing sensitivity – wasn’t an intrusion.

Obviously the text of posters and placards is particularly important in protests such as this, and I think you can see this in the pictures on Prosecute Rapists Not Rape Survivors.

A myth seems to have arisen that somehow street photography died out in the UK, after a somewhat desultory start in the 1970s with the work of photographers including Tony Ray-Jones and John Benton-Harris, and was then somehow rediscovered in the early 21st century by new young and dynamic photographers.

This is of course completely untrue. Street photography is exemplified by the work of those photographers and the largely American photographers, mainly from New York and in the1940s very much associated with the Photo League and other New York pioneers such as  Leon Levinstein (1910–1988) and later reaching its heights in the 1950s with Robert Frank (b1924) and later with Garry Winogrand (1928 – 1984) and others, strongly influenced a whole generation of photographers in the UK in the 1960s and particularly the 1970s through the magazine Creative Camera.

Many of them continued to work in later years in a similar vein; although Ray-Jones died young, Benton-Harris is still working and many other, younger British photographers also picked up their influences. Where photography here in the UK in the 1950s and 60s when I was growing up was very much exemplified in the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson (often cited as one of those who developed the genre of street photography though I suspect he preferred the earlier description of himself as a surrealist – but took Capa’s advice not to get himself labelled as the little surrealist photographer but instead to call himself a photojournalist) but by the 70s Frank and Winogrand had very much taken over the mantle.

Most of those photographers continued working. But like Cartier-Bresson they called themselves photojournalists, or some preferred to be known as documentary photographers. But if you want to see much of the best of UK street photography in the 1980s and 1990s you do not have to look far and there is plenty in the coverage of disputes such as the miner’s strike, the poll tax and other major social and political events of the era. It’s a whole strand of photography, a swathe of street photographers that remain largely ignored by our museums and art establishment.  Despite many fine pictures being taken in London, its an area of work that is completely absent from the Museum of London show, London Street Photography 1860-2010, and perhaps also severely under-represented in its collection.  But if you truly want to see ‘Street Photography Now‘ in the UK you are rather more likely to find it in newspapers, magazines and on the web on sites such as Demotix than in shows about street photography.

Not that these are not worth going to see, but I think they reflect a misunderstanding of the source of much of the imagery they contain.  Perhaps one that in part we can blame H C-B for. I can’t for the moment remember which great American photographer first introduced me to the idea of ‘waiters’, dividing Cartier-Bresson’s oeuvre into those images stolen on the run and those which were more design-oriented, where the great master saw a location – perhaps a pattern of white washed houses of a Mediterranean village and sat or stood there for minutes or even hours, waiting for a person to put themselves in a key place in the design.  For me it is only the grab shots which are truly street and not the waiters.

Design is of course important in photography, but its more formal aspects come from a different source, in particular in my own case from the work of the Bauhaus, both direct in books such as Johannes Itten’s Design and form and The Art of Color, two of the most important texts for photographers ever published, and in the more photographic form of Andreas Feininger‘s many text books on photography one of which I bought when starting photography and which have formed the basis of almost every ‘how to’ photography book since. 

So although I may not often call myself a ‘street photographer’ now (or even a ‘post-street photographer’), street and the attitudes central to it still inform much of what I do, whether it’s photographing the ‘Right to Work Hound’ attempting to Hound the Con-Dems from office

or most (not quite all) of the pictures that I take at protests such as the J30 march against cuts and to protect pensions (including on this occasion my own fairly small one from 30 years of teaching.) These are pictures that are candid and spontaneous, that concentrate on ‘ordinary people’ rather than celebrities, which seems to me as good as definition of street photography as any and rather better than most.

Although that hound is becoming something of a celebrity.  You can now see rather more of my pictures from the event than on Demotix on My London Diary in 20,000 March for Pensions & Against Cuts, and decide for yourself if they are street.

I thought about going to celebrate the new nation of South Sudan on Saturday, but felt too tired after photographing a couple of other events in London to go on to do so, and caught the train home instead.

Of course the real celebrations were going on a few thousand miles away in   Juba, the capital of this newest of countries, but as I’ve often noted, the whole world comes to London to protest, and also they celebrate here when there is anything to celebrate.

But three weeks ago there was a powerful reminder of some of the problems that Sudan and South Sudan face, with a protest by the London-based human rights movement Nuba Mountains Solidarity Abroad. You can read about it and see more pictures in Solidarity with Nuba in Sudan

The Nuba mountains lie more or less on the border between the two countries, but have not become part of South Sudan. One of the more balanced and informed comments I’ve read on the area puts it like this:

The Nuba, as has been the case for more than 20 years, are fighting for their land and their cultural survival. The fact that their southern allies left them in the lurch by choosing to secede doesn’t change that.

The roughly 1.5 million Nuba (not to be confused with Nubians) have a diversity of religion, including Christian, Muslim and traditional faiths (even at times within the same families) as well as around 50 different languages. The Sudanese government, as well as quelling all military opposition in the area aims to create an Islamic state, making Islam the official religion and Arabic the official language. Sudan’s president al-Bashir at the start of the month repeated his orders for the ‘cleaning’ of the area and its conversion into a loyal part of this Islamic state.

Photographically I found it difficult not to concentrate on one young man, with wide open eyes. Though when he was joined by a younger girl with a similar gaze there was strong competition.

The problem in photographing her was the police barriers in front of the protesters, the upper bar of which was just above her eye level. As you can see clearly from the shadow on her forehead and jacket, I was using flash. The SB800 was as usual in the hot-shoe and really needed because the light level was pretty low and things just looked rather dull without it. But I did try a few pictures, including this one:

Skin tone is often an issue, and many of those taking part in the protest had truly beautiful dark skin, and in processing the images rapidly to put on the web I’ve lightened it too much in some pictures.

I had a few exposure problems with some of these pictures, largely because I didn’t realise that I had the D300 set for spot metering. In a picture like the one below, this gives quite different results from the face or the poster the woman is holding, neither of which is appropriate. Of course there is a beautifully clear symbol at the bottom left of the viewfinder image to tell you the metering mode in use, but when you are absorbed in the subject, anything else is easy to miss. Spot (or more pedantically, semi-spot) metering like this is a great tool to have on a camera, but one that requires considered use.

This is also a picture where it was important to have the whole of the message on the poster legible, and I was pleased to find that in this and most of the other images I took at least the key placards were legible. At this event it was easy, as everyone was facing more or less the same way and holding the signs in that direction, and there were plenty of them, unlike some protests where there is little or nothing to tell the viewer what they are protesting about.

This was another London protest ignored by the mainstream media, and I seemed to be the only photographer covering it. Although it’s taken a long time for me to post here, my story and pictures were on Demotix later the same day (I’ve used more or less the same text in the My London Diary feature.)  When sometimes I think about taking things easy and stopping reporting on events, it is events like this that might otherwise go unrecorded that keep me going.

I first photographed Hizb ut-Tahrir in October 2004, when they held a rally in Hyde Park and marched to the Pakistan High Commission in a protest against Presdent Busharraf. Then, as at most later occasions involving them I was quickly approached by their press officer keen to know where I was from. Although they were polite, it always seemed to be more a reflection of a desire to control than to help, although usually they did give me a helpful press release .

Writing about that event, I noted that they separated the women from the men, and that the rally was held by the men – with all the speakers being men and the platform in the centre of the men, with the women all in a separate group around 50 metres away, where it was hard to hear what was being said and even harder to see. There were a few women on the edge of the group, closest to the men, holding up camcorders, with zoom lenses  doubtless giving them a better view.

During the march too, the women marched separately, with a large group of men leading the march, and a smaller group behind the women. It pleased me slightly that although the instructions were repeated again and again that the marchers must all line up and march in lines of six people, there were a few who defied the orders.

Of course, all the placards were the official ones with no individuality tolerated, and the marchers were issued with sheets of the slogans to chant (and I reprinted most of them in my piece on the event.)  Hizb ut-Tahrir seemed to me a slightly sinister organisation, and certainly not one I would want to see in power in any country, but it was hard to see any good reason why they should – as some people wanted – be banned.

Over the years and quite a few demonstrations, little seems to have changed, although I have photographed at least one of their demonstrations – against the French ban on Islamic face veils – which was almost a women-only event (there were just a few men around who seemed to be there to make sure they behaved.)

One of the points made by Hizb ut-Tahrir it was difficult to disagree with in many of their speeches in English I’ve listened to when taking pictures was about the corruption and despotism of many Arab rulers. But the Arab spring we’ve seen this year has nothing to do with the kind of revolution they preach, based on establishing a peculiarly fundamentalist version of  Islamic rule under a caliphate (khilifah.)

But last month they were protesting against the persecution of some Muslims in Russia, where Hizb ut-Tahrir is an illegal organisation. In researching the article I wrote I got the impression their complaints of violation of civil rights there were real and justified, although perhaps more directed against members of their organisation than Muslims in general. You can read more about what has been happening in Russians Told ‘Release Our Sister Sidikova’ on My London Diary.

The only real problems in covering this event opposite the Consular Section of the Russian Embassy in Kensington were the weather and the traffic. The embassy proper is hidden away in Kensington Palace Gardens, a private street where neither photography nor protests are permitted, but the consular section overlooks the busy Bayswater Road, and the protest was taking place on the opposite pavement, which is not particularly wide.

There were perhaps around 50 men and 20 women present when I arrived, behind a line of police barriers on the edge of the road. So to photograph them I could either go behind the barriers with them or stand on the edge of the road. Usually police put these barriers with their triangular base pointing out into the road, but here they had put the bases towards the curb, making them stick out eighteen inches of so further into the road.  It seems a small difference (and it is easy to trip over those bases) but it does expose photographers significantly less to traffic. On busy roads like this there is usually too a line of cones to warn traffic which also gives us another foot or so to work in safely. But there were none here, just a police van parked in the road immediately before the protest, obscuring oncoming motorist’s view of it and any photographers.

Of course in tight working areas like this the 16-35 mm on the D700 is very useful, and mainly at the wider end. But one or two cars and lorries did go past uncomfortably close to me as I photographed the men and a smaller group of women at one end of the protest.

It had started to rain slightly as I arrived, but fortunately after a few minutes during which I was working microfibre cloth in hand and wiping the UV filter before every shot it stopped for a few minutes and let me get on with taking pictures. But not for long. Possibly the umbrellas help in some of the pictures, but as well as stopping the rain they also fairly effectively stop light, especially if large and black.

I stuck it out for some time, perhaps rather longer than I would have done if any other photographers had been present (of course there were people from Hizb ut-Tahrir taking pictures with cameras, phones and camcorders too.)  Much as I like many of my colleagues, it’s good to occasionally photograph different things to them. But then we got a really torrential storm; I put up my umbrella and thought briefly that there might be some interesting pictures as people sheltered from the rain, but decided instead to make for the nearby underground station and go to my next location.

Although I’ve only used pictures of the women at the protest here – it was mainly a protest about women after all – I actually spent rather more time photographing the men, and perhaps got some slightly better pictures, as you can see on My London Diary.