Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

War Over War Photography

I’m not a war photographer, and probably I panic far too easily ever to have made a good one. The worst thing I’ve been hit by taking pictures is paint, though there have been some near misses from bricks, bottles, bags of flour, shoes and other handy urban missiles and over the years I’ve received numerous and sometimes all too convincing threats of violence both at close range and occasionally on-line by people who “know where you live.” And a few rather nasty moments, as when when guy was dragged back by his BNP mates after promising to do something totally anatomically impossible to me with my camera.

Like most photographers who cover demonstrations I’ve been hit, pushed and punched and spat at, mainly by the police,* but occasionally by the rabid right or fringe anarchists or even bulky men with Northern Irish accents and dark glasses. But usually when trouble starts I like to try and cover it from the sidelines rather than get stuck in, to think carefully about whether I want to go there.

Unlike most other photographers now covering such events in the UK I refuse to carry or wear a helmet, a decision that would not be tenable in most other countries, but then I only work in England, and seldom even outside London.

But though I don’t do it, anyone with an interest in the history and practice of photography has to have an interest in what has been an important strand in our medium, at least since Roger Fenton went to the Crimea. As well as Fenton, I’ve written in the past about a number of the great war photographers – Robert Capa, Gene Smith, Don McCullin, Stanley Greene are just a few that come immediately to mind.

So I’ve been following with great interest the controversy aroused by the ‘The War Photographers biggest story: themselves‘, a controversial point of view posted on the Duckrabbit blog on July 1, and in particular the responses to this from a variety of points of view. A follow-up post on July 4, with the improbably long title Christopher Morris, Shut up, stop thinking for yourself and kneel before the almighty war photographers pictures. Rafiqui., Err, maybe not tonight Chris highlights a perhaps rather tetchy and perhaps ill-thought out comment to the first piece by the one of our leading current war photographers, Christopher Morris of VII, and a response to that by Asim Rafiqui. Again interesting reading, with a growing string of comments. Really quite a war!

Duckrabbit truly has form in raising interesting questions about photojournalism, for example with Faking it how to win a World Press Award but get banned from a wildlife comp for life last February, and radio documentary producer Benjamin Chesterton and photojournalist David White have produced some great work. As well as the blog, their website also has some fine features, for example The Other (side of Sweden) which shows the work of photographer Joseph Rodriguez with young Muslims growing up in the city of Malmo.

* I take that back – the police have yet to spit at me.

Giz Us A Job

This was the third protest outside the Triton Square offices of Atos Healthcare, the company that run computer-based fitness for work tests for the government, who have caused huge distress to many disabled people.

There is something of a Catch-22 about the whole situation. If you can get to the job centre to attend for the test, then clearly you could also get to work, and if you don’t manage to get there you will be penalised for not attending…. Never mind that it might have needed you to organise friends to help you to get there or that it may take you several days to recover.

The tests that Atos don’t really look at the capabilities of the individuals but use a series of stock questions and force the person conducting the test to choose a stock answer, when there may really be nothing that really matches the person in front of them. Rather than a proper medically based test it is a matter of ticking boxes on a computer screen, and although some kind of medical experience is demanded of those carrying them out it may not be in an appropriate area to the person being tested. Someone who has worked with sports injuries may well be assessing people with mental health problems.

You can read more about these tests and the drastic effects they have had on some of those who have been failed by them on My London Diary in Atos, Giz A Job! and my earlier posts.

At one of the previous demonstrations here, one of those who spoke was the sister of a man who had committed suicide when the tests failed to recognise his mental health issues, and one of the protesters at this event carried a placard about a woman with terminal cancer who was given zero points – no disability – at an Atos test. 70% of those who appeal the decisions have their appeals upheld, an alarming failure rate.

The lighting outside the offices, with bright sun in the canyon between tall glass-faced buildings was in places fairly dramatic, with patches of bright sun and reflected sunlight in otherwise quite deep shadow.

You get some idea of the problem in this picture, where fill flash and considerable Lightroom magic has managed to bring the RAW file down to the output range of an image, with just a little loss of highlight detail at top centre. I quite like the challenges of tricky lighting, which tend to result in more interesting images, but at times it was difficult to avoid excessive flare.

As usual, some of this time I was shooting with my personal extended lens hood, otherwise known as my left hand, held above the lens. The built in hood on the 16-35 is as would be expected, almost useless, having to cope with such a wide angle of view, and that on the 18-105, although better is still not very effective.

It’s in this situation that you notice that the optical viewfinder has a slightly smaller view than the camera actually takes (I think according to the manual, which I can’t be bothered to find, showing around 95% of the images. So quite a few of the actual images taken in this way – looking through the viewfinder to see the increase in contrast when you are shading the lens from the sun – turn out to need a little cropping along the top edge where my fingers show in the image but not in the viewfinder.

As you can see there is still some flare in this and some other images. Occasionally things like this green spot can add to images, but usually they just look odd. I’ve toned this down to some extent, but perhaps might also have desaturated it a little more. I wouldn’t want to remove it completely, as it and its less obvious near neighbour perhaps do give a little of the impression of the light conditions (along with the greatly toned down bright area of pavement at bottom right.) But I would see no ethical problem in removing flare spots which are generally not apparent in the actual view you are photographing.

Most of the protest was taking place in the shadows, and there was little excitement about the event, though things became more interesting when the protesters decided to go for a ‘walk’, making their way around the barriers provided by the police into the passageway through the building past the office reception area. Light was lower here, provided by lighting in the ceiling and coming through the glass windows of the offices, and was also of varying colour, greener from the overhead lighting and rather orange from that indoors.

I wasn’t entirely happy with the pictures I was getting in this fairly confined space from the 16-35mm with the D700, and when the protesters went back later I decided to try using the 10.5mm fisheye on the D300. As always it was a strange beast to use, but I think it did the job pretty well.

I got very close to Clare as she raised her camera at arms length in front of her to take this image, trying hard to keep the camera more or less upright. The picture is very slightly cropped at the right and top, and also I’ve corrected the curvature slightly – perhaps around 10-20% in Lightroom. The horizontal angle of view is around 140 degrees and I’ve managed to include both the faces of the group of demonstrators on the right and the police and security outside the revolving door at left.

It doesn’t include all the protesters – they continued in a rough circle behind me , and in a perfect world perhaps the placards at the right would have been about this event and not for other protests, but that’s how things were. But there is something here about the curving lines that brings this image together for me, whereas the rectilinear distortion you get with the 16-35 at 16mm as in the image below seems to sweep things away at the edges.

The Battle of Byker

I missed the Radio 4 broadcast of The Battle of Byker about Finnish photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s work in this inner-city area of Newcastle on Friday morning (1 July 2011) where she talks about her work there since 1969 as a part of the Amber Films collective, and some of the people she photographed over the 40 or so years she has worked there talk about the area, but only because I was going out to take pictures, and this morning found time to listen to it (for the first time, although the BBC keep calling it ‘listen again’.)

Konttinen’s work in Byker is a unique record of an area most of which has now disappeared; sub-standard housing which has been largely demolished, replaced by a motorway and the Byker Wall estate. Although housing conditions were certainly improved, some of those in what had been a close-knit community were scattered across the city in order for the new Byker to be born. But this was in some ways a pioneering project that was a new vision of redevelopment, with a rolling programme that so far as possible did keep people in the area and also a scheme that actually consulted with the people of Byker, involving them in the design process of what was to be their new home – exactly the kind of thing I had been involved in pressing for in Manchester a couple of years earlier but we had failed to acheive.

Byker supplied a model which unfortunately has now largely been abandoned – as my recent post on the Heygate estate showed. Ideas about community and people have been superseded in the rush for profit for developers. Even the current government recognise the importance of Byker, seeing it as the embodiment of the Big Society.

The Battle of Byker is well worth listening to, and remains available on the BBC iPlayer only for a week after the transmission, so don’t delay. It should have been much greater publicity by Radio 4, but they seem to have devoted all of their attention over the past few weeks to plugging Wimbledon. Though given our lack of tennis players it is hard to see why we still bother to watch this (and I’ve avoided doing so.)

While you are listening to the programme (or if you read this too late to listen to it) look at the work from Konttinen‘s book and show Byker(1983) in black and white and a smaller selection from her recent Byker Revisted in colour.

On the Amber Films web site you can read some recent news:

The photographs of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Amber’s films – an intertwined collective narrative of works between 1968 and 2010, documenting working class and marginalised communities in the North East of England – have been inscribed in the UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register as an archive of national cultural significance!

The fight against the Arts Council’s inexplicable decision to axe Side Gallery as a revenue client in its National Portfolio’ is continuing, although there is no recent news about it on the site – in April they did note that “The Arts Council has registered the strength of feeling and has indicated a desire to find other ways of supporting the gallery.” The petition which many of us signed was delivered to the AC in May, and you can read more about what I thought of their decision in my post written in March, Arts Council Cuts Side Off. But unfortunately there seems as yet to be no sign that the AC has truly recognised the value of what they should regard as the jewel in their photographic crown.

Slutwalk

Some years ago I went to one of the personal safety training courses run by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust that had been organised at my workplace. I was the only man in the group there, although much of the advice that was being given there was relevant to me as I made a habit of walking around obscure parts of London with a bag carrying almost £10,000 pounds worth of equipment on my left shoulder, stopping occasionally in some very isolated areas to display some of it to any prospective muggers.

I don’t know if it happens now at these courses, but among the personal advice given to us by the woman trainer was the suggestion that we could reduce the risk to ourselves from sexual assault by dressing in a deliberately unprovocative way. It wasn’t a part of the course that I felt particularly applied to me, but it caused no outrage among the others taking the course, who I think regarded it as sensible advice. And there was certainly some other advice I found useful, and its perhaps why I have yet to be mugged while taking picutres.

But as is often the case, what matters is how advice about behaviour is given and by whom, and for a male police officer to talk in a way that might be taken to suggest that some of the blame for a criminal act is due to the victim is clearly going to cause considerable offence.

Of course there is no excuse for rape under any circumstances, and the women on the slutwalk were certainly making the point clearly that “whatever we wear, wherever we go, yes means yes, NO MEANS NO.”

Being a man photographing women in a demonstration like this required a certain sensitivity that I don’t think all the photographers present showed. One of the many placards I photographed said ‘Don’t be so distracted by the underwear that you forget THIS MARCH IS ABOUT RAPE’ and it was a sentiment that I had tried to keep in mind throughout, with most of my pictures concentrating on those who were using the event to put forward clear ideas about the issues.

Of course I didn’t always agree with what the protesters were saying. I don’t for example think it sensible to call for Ken Clarke to go as the mass produced SWP posters did, if only because any replacement would almost certainly be a right wing bigot with less sensible views on almost every issue. Nor did I think I was “thinking like a rapist” when I was photographing a placard that accused me of it; what I was trying to do was to think how I could effectively get across the message that these protesters were trying to convey.

You can see quite a few more of my pictures from the event in Slutwalk London on My London Diary. Here are a couple more of my own favourites.

The Liberator of Parliament Square

I suppose as someone who has long felt that the main qualifications for being a Conservative MP were to be ignorant and opinionated I should have felt vindicated at the tasteless blatherings of one such lunatic on Radio 4 on the morning following the announcement of Brian Haw’s death.

Instead I was sickened, although a contribution from Bruce Kent about Brian did a lot to restore my faith in humanity. But what really got up my nose was the Tory twit going on about how Parliament Square should be for everyone to make use of and not just for one person to make a protest.

I wonder if he had ever actually set foot in Parliament Square or does he arrive at the House of Commons blindfolded in a limousine? Certainly he had absolutely no grasp of what has been happening on the ground there over the last ten or so years.

© 2006, Peter Marshall
Police hand out SOCPA Section 132 Notices to bystanders and press in Parliament Square warning them they are liable to arrest if they remain

One of Brian’s great achievements has been the liberation of Parliament Square. Before his protest started the square was a black hole in the centre of our capital, surrounded on all sides by traffic with no pedestrian crossings from the surrounding streets which were and are still thronged by tourists. Ten years ago it was rare to see anyone at all making there way to what was essentially a large traffic island. Most of the tourists on its periphery probably thought it was a banned area, and the authorities clearly intended it to be what the police like to call a ‘sterile zone‘.

Tourists, already fazed by London’s traffic coming at them on the wrong side of the road, stood little chance of making it to the middle of the square, and even few Londoners chanced the risky and rather unpredictable crossing.

Over the 10 years of his occupation, Brian and his friends and later other protesters have effected a great transformation – one that Ken Livingstone as Mayor failed to do – in opening up the square to people. Many came to see Brian, others to mount their own protests and yet more to sit and picnic on the grass – before Mayor Boris – for reasons political under a minor horticultural smokescreen – fenced it off.

Thanks largely to Brian, we’ve seen a remarkable change in London and a movement of the centre of political protest in the capital, a movement away from Trafalgar Square down Whitehall to Parliament Square, where it is a little harder for it to go unnoticed by both parliament and the media.

Brian and the other protests in the square became a tourist attraction, with group leaders umbrellas raised bringing their charges across the traffic lights and it was very much an advertisement for British democracy – though given the repeated attempts by politicians to get rid of him rather an unmerited one. Truly it was more an index of Brian’s doggedness, as well as the support he received from many, including the occasional judge or magistrate who remembered the freedoms our law is supposed to protect – if unfortunately it seldom does when the obviously more important vested interests of the rich and powerful are involved.

And as for Speaker’s Corner, mentioned by that Tory ignoramus, it was long ago abandoned to religious bigots and eccentrics, a minor tourist attraction rather than a site with any meaningful politics, and a happy hunting ground for photographers of the meaningless gesture.

But although Brian’s example may have liberated Parliament Square, the battle is still taking place to take it away from the people and keep it back under tight wraps. We need to support those who are continuing to protest there, in particular Babs, Barbara Tucker, who has been with Brian there for so long and is continuing his battle. Read more on BrianHaw.tv where there is also a link to the “tastless threat” on the Today programme.

Brian Haw RIP

© 2007, Peter Marshall
Brian Haw: Find Your Courage; Share Your Vision; Change Your World. (T-shirt from Dan Wilkins, The Nth Degree.) Brian and Dan were both very pleased to have copies of the picture.

The news of Brian Haw’s death in a German hospital came as no surprise to me after his long illness, but it still was a shock and a feeling that the nation has lost a figure of importance, a man who almost single-handedly reminded us of the need for a national conscience and who dedicated his life to the cause of peace in ten years of protest in Parliament Square.

I have to admit I was slow to recognise the seriousness of his protest, and although I had photographed him earlier, on black and white film, the earliest picture I posted on My London Diary was only in October 2004, by which time, according to the notice, he had been in place for 1219 days.

At first I’d been put off by his concentration in the early days of his protest on the single issue of the suffering of children due to the sanctions, as well as by his fundamentalist Christian views. But his protest became more general about peace and I got to know him just a little and began to appreciate his sincerity and persistence, becoming a fairly regular visitor to Parliament Square, as well as photographing him in nearby protests.

© 20045 Peter Marshall
Police drag demonstrator away as peace protestor Brian Haw holds a placard “War Kills the Innocent” in front of Cenotaph and Code Pink wreath, “How Many Will Die in Iraq Today?”. Whitehall, 7 Nov, 2004.
© 2005 Peter Marshall
Serious organised crime and police bill: Haw addresses the Houses of Parliament

I began to drop in for a visit whenever I had a few minutes to spare and was in Central London, only bothering to take pictures if anything special was happening. And although like almost everyone else who visited I occasionally got on the wrong side of Brian’s temper, I kept on going, unlike many others. There were times when I didn’t agree with him, but I still felt it was important to support him and the continuing protest against the war, even or perhaps especially when many former supporters appeared to desert or turn against him. And I feel it was an honour to have known him and perhaps to have captured a little of his spirit in my pictures of him.

© 2008, Peter Marshall
Police laughed at Brian Haw as he tried to make a complaint after an officer had pushed his camera into his face making it bleed.

© 2009 Peter Marshall
Police arrest Brian and push him into back of a police van – he was released the following day after an extremely brief court appearance – the arrest was simply harassment by the police. 30 Oct 2009

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Brian with a t-shirt with the front page of The Independent after the protest at the state opening of Parliament

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Just after I took the portrait,police arrived to serve a warrant on Babs for using a megaphone – their idea of a 9th anniversary present.

I’d watched Brian’s health obviously deteriorating over the years, worn out by the continuous strain and hardships of his protest, and in particular by the harassment of the police and others – including at times gangs of army-trained thugs the police were somehow blind to see as they attacked the peace camp in the middle of the night. The pressure and also the periods of boredom in the square also meant that he was smoking heavily. It came as little surprise to find that he had been admitted to hospital in September 2010 with breathing problems and that a tumour had been found. Although he was certainly a man who would put up a hard fight – he’d always lived that way – the years in Parliament Square had taken a heavy toll on his general health. It’s true to say that Brian lived and died for peace.

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The Scandal of London’s Largest Ghost

London’s Heygate Estate, 25 acres in a prime position next to the Elephant and Castle in Southwark has had a bad press. Completed in the early 1970s and home for years to more than a thousand families it was a brave and far-sighted attempt to provide high quality social housing in a remarkably green development for its time. Given proper management by the council over the years it would now be seen as perhaps the most successful development of its era. Instead it is a rotting, empty ghost city, waiting to be demolished and replaced by lower quality development which will doubtless make millions if not billions for private developers. The developers certainly got a bargain, paying only £20 million for a site and the advantage of some £1.5 billion of public funds going into the Elephant redevelopment scheme.

It had the disadvantage of being built at a time when architecture was passing through a visually brutal phase, and the vast slab blocks that surrounded it to create an oasis inside were on a massive scale. It didn’t look a friendly place from the outside, and in the early years before the many trees that were planted grew it was a little bleak inside.

Somewhere Southwark Council lost the plot – or perhaps changed to a very different one – and made a concerted and largely successful attempt to change what had been seen as a good place to live into a sink estate, through a lack of maintenance and using it to rehouse “problem families”; coupled with a great deal of bad press and TV documentaries – those walkways made for some great images and it was so handy to get to. The council describe the scheme as ‘failed architecture’ but in reality it was the council that failed it, and the architecture is still in excellent shape – and likely to have been longer-lasting than its proposed replacement.

You can read more of the story of how the Heygate was demonised in the Guardian article from March 2011, The death of a housing ideal and more about its present state at the blog set up by one of the few remaining residents, Adrian Glaspool – a good place to start is here. For more information see the Southwark Notes blog, which has a great deal of information and comment on the council’s actions here and elsewhere in the borough.

After the decision to demolish and sell off the estate was taken, the council started encouraging tenants to move out in 2007, giving them a six month time limit to find replacement homes (they had stopped giving secure tenancies in 2001, meaning that they had no obligation to rehouse the roughly 30% of tenants who had moved in since then.) Tenants were supposed to find properties through the council’s Homesearch scheme, but very few were on offer. Evictions and compulsory purchase, along with less legal measures, were eventually used to more or less clear the estate, with just a handful of residents now remaining. Labour councillors when in opposition accused the council of “strong-arming and intimidating tenants and leaseholders out of their homes on the Heygate” but little seemed to change after they were voted into power in 2010.

Leaseholders on the estate were treated in a particularly shabby fashion as the Council carried out a programme of what was essentially forcible removal from the estate. The leaseholder’s action group site states:

“Leaseholders were left to watch as their neighbours were moved out one-by-one, leaving them all alone in blocks infested with vermin. Vacated properties were not cleared before being sealed up, lifts were turned off, the district heating & hot-water system was turned off, estate lighting was turned off, cleaning services and rubbish collections reduced and postal services dropped.”

Also on their site you can find details of the ridiculous undervaluation of properties made by the council:

“Elderly leaseholders or those with language difficulties came off particularly bad, and the council was able to convince some to accept offers as low as £32,000 for a 1-bed flat and £66,500 for a 3-bed maisonette. “

Similar maisonettes in this area cost around £300-400 a week to rent, and the market price is probably in the range £175-250,000.

The blog quotes environmentalist Donnachadh McCarthy, writing in the ‘Southwark News‘ describing the demolition of the Heygate and Aylesbury estates as ‘one of the biggest carbon crimes of the decade by a local authority.’ It has certainly resulted in an enormous waste of public money, and as well as the carbon waste involved in demolition of usable buildings some 40 years before the end of their lifetime and their replacement by new build, the estate is now a considerable urban forest and most of its trees appear certain to be felled.

Like other buildings of its age the estate contains considerable amounts of asbestos, not a great safety hazard unless disturbed, but making the job of demolition of these structurally sound buildings difficult. For this reason it will be perhaps another four years before the demolition of the larger blocks actually starts although almost all the tenants and leaseholders have been forced out and the estate allowed to become derelict.

Recently a fringe area of the estate has been demolished, but work is not timetabled to start on the rest of the estate until late 2014 or early 2015. In April this year, some of the few remaining residents decided to clear the former garden areas and use the space to grow flowers and vegetables, informing the council who at first started legal proceedings for ‘unlawful gardening’ but then entered into talks aimed at authorising and controlling the allotments.

Residents and other interested parties held a day of workshops to try and influence the regeneration of the whole Elephant & Castle area on July 4 which I was unable to attend, but I took these pictures on the following day, along with many more on the Heygate estate, more of which will go on My London Diary shortly. In particular I made a number of panoramic views of the area which perhaps give a better impression of the estate and in particular its trees, and I’ll post some of these later.

A Soggy Meringue

If you’ve not yet read the article by Simon Crofts on the Hargreaves Copyright Review it is worth reading. A freelance photographer based in Edinburgh, Scotland, he studied law at Oxford, so ‘The Hargreaves Copyright Review. Its a soggy meringue‘, unlike the Hargreaves Review itself, is written by someone who knows what he is talking about.

Worth sending to your MP too, so that they know what is happening, along of course with your own views. You can read more about the likely effects of adopting the Hargreaves proposals on the Stop43 site.

It was pressure from photographers led by Stop43, but also aided by the many of us who got our MPs to ask some of the right questions about the proposal that prevented it being bumped into law before. E-mail is easy, but paper still gets a lot more attention. Check their name on the e-mail site if you are not sure, then send your letter to them at:

House of Commons
London SW1A 0AA

Many MPs, including my own former MP (one of those who got their fingers – and seat – singed in the expenses scandal) have been keen photographers and last time I wrote I got a surprisingly detailed and interested response, with my MP contacting the minister and shadow minister and putting my (and his) concerns to them.

Red Hands for Uribe Vélez

If you are a Colombian, what you think of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010, may depend very much on how his policies affected you personally. Many, particularly among the middle class and wealthy extremes of Colombian society have prospered from his polices, while more than 2.5 million poor farmers and others have lost their land, and around 1,400 indigenous people and more than 500 trade unionists have been murdered by paramilitary groups and others encouraged by his government.

For those taking part in this protest, there were no doubts. Uribe was a murderer, a man with blood on his hands, and halfway through the protest, many of them covered their hands in red paint as a symbol of this.

I tried hard, but somehow I wasn’t quite happy with any of the pictures I had taken to show this. Everything was just a little too disorganised, and the few closer images also lacked any real impact, just losing the connection with the event.

Perhaps this was the best of the tighter images, but the fairly low (and very uneven) light doesn’t help, and I would have liked the skulls at left to be sharper.

I tried getting close to a hand and using it out of focus in the foreground, and although it isn’t a bad image, it didn’t really stand out. My favourite picture with the red hands – and there are rather a lot to chose from in Picket Against Former Colombian President is probably one of the several young girls at the event, but it really is just a picture of her with a recorder and a red hand, and doesn’t for me fit the mood of the event.

Or perhaps this one below, again more of a portrait, but the pattern of hands intrigued me, including one on the sign at right.

Again the mood of the image perhaps doesn’t really fit the demonstration, and you can see very clearly the lighting problems, with shadow and bright sun. Fortunately working with RAW format it was possible to keep the white vest of the woman at right in bright sun while also keeping the shadow tones at a reasonable level, although quite extensive use of Lightroom’s local dodging and burning and highlight control was needed. While taking the picture I was also thinking that ‘main’ (at right) means hand in French. Just a pity they speak Spanish in Colombia.

When I posted my pictures with some text on Demotix, I wasn’t at all surprised to see a comment quickly added by someone who appears to be a Colombian, praising Uribe as the best President Colombia ever had and labelling all those who oppose him as supporters of the FARC guerillas. This isn’t of course true; some at least of those present are simply human rights activists. Even if Uribe did ‘make the trains run on time’ for Colombia, that can’t justify the means.

Keep the NHS public

It was surprisingly dark and gloomy on the Euston Road around 5pm when I arrived for the Islington march to ‘Keep the NHS Public’, which was gathering under the trees opposite University College Hospital. Although I know that digital cameras such as the Nikon D300 and particularly D700 that I use give great results at high ISO, I find I still have a great reluctance to push them into the regions that were off limits in the days of film. Looking at the results I got, it seems obvious that I should have given myself at least a stop more to work with most of the time, and there were just too many that were not quite sharp enough, either because of slow shutter speeds or insufficient depth of field.

One of the first people I met there was a woman I’ve known for some years – and a former colleague of my wife – who embroiders her own placards for protests. The health service affects us all, and there were a very wide range of people attending the protest along with many medical students and health professionals, and I hope my pictures reflect this.

I rather liked this woman who was walking around at the start of the march waving a red ‘Unite – the union’ flag, reminding me of a socialist realist poster, and took a number of pictures – several of them on My London Diary – though I don’t think any of them quite caught what I saw. I also took several pictures of one of the organisers of the march, Janet Maiden, who works in the Haematology department at UCH, which I felt happier that they captured some of her energy – even if they weren’t always quite sharp.

Backgrounds are important too – and in the image above it is clearly to those who know London taken at UCH. More readily recognisable are perhaps these gates at Downing St, where a small group decided to sit down away from the main group.

and even more so, the man on the column in this image.

Although I perhaps took better pictures with the slightly less well known but still fairly recognisable National Gallery and portico of St Martins in the Fields in the background, which you can see with the rest of the pictures on My London Diary in Keep The NHS Public.