Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

A Small Step For Women

I looked hard on the Photo Boite web site, and on that of the Artbox (hold your mouse at right to skip the silly intro, but unfortunately the only way I could find to turn the annoying music off was at my speakers) to find information, but that isn’t what either of these sites are about. For me they concentrate too much on design rather than content and also get slightly up my nose by messing quite unnecessarily with my browser window, as well as being just a little on the slow side.

So I can’t tell you anything about how they selected the 30 women whose work is showcased on ‘30 Under 30 Women Photographers‘. Quite a few of them are French or based in France, some are Canadian or from the US, and a sprinkling from elsewhere. I didn’t recognise the names, but there were are few images I think I had probably seen before (and rather more very similar to others I’d seen before taken by other photographers, which is perhaps only to be expected in work by young photographers of either gender.)

Although I can’t say I found everything on the site of interest, and some of the work I found myself looking at rather more out of duty than interest, I think there are a few here that we may hear more of in the future. The final item on each photographers set of pictures is labelled BIO and gives some information about the photographer – from just an email address to a page of text, sometimes in French. But I think the site is , as it says on dvafoto, “Worth a look“.

So thanks to Matt Lutton and M Scott Brauer for posting a link to it, although I find their conclusion “Its a great step in toward equality in the traditionally male-dominated field of photography” ridiculous. Although women are still under-represented in such surveys as PDN’s 30 (I think only around eight in the most recent selection) they have always included some of the best work there. A little over a third of the 30 Central and Eastern European photographers selected for the book ‘Lab East‘ were women. It may not be equality, but it is a very significant presence.

Of course, as Natalie Dybisz / Miss Aniela write in the foreword to ‘30 Under 30‘; “Visit a modern photography tradeshow like Photokina in Cologne, and most of the visitors you see swarming past are male, with their photography gadgets slung around their necks”. It’s a boy’s toy’s show which few if any serious photographers of either sex visit. There seemed to me to be a fairly high proportion of women among contemporary photographers represented by galleries at Paris Photo – and probably a majority in the people on the stands and in the aisles.

Women have been playing a vital part in photography for many years – even in Victorian times – although certainly very much under-represented until relatively recently and still to some extent, particularly in some fields now. Almost all of my best students were women. I’ve known and worked with many women in photography and published many articles about women photographers – including some of what I consider my best writing on Julia Margaret Cameron, Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin and many more. Of course I didn’t write about any of them because they were women but because of the contribution they had made to the medium.

‘30 Under 30 Women Photographers‘ is one of many, many small steps that have been made towards equality, and I welcome and applaud it for that, though also wishing some of the work on show had been rather better.

Housing Emergency

The current cold weather spell in the UK often makes us think of those without anywhere to sleep except on the streets and to be thankful that we have a decent place to live. Our house may not be a palace, but at least we can usually keep warm and dry inside it, even if sometimes I sit at the computer wearing a scarf and hat and wondering if I could possibly type ok wearing gloves.

Before we bought this house, I’d spent around around four years living in a series of privately rented flats, then three years in public housing in a flat that would could never have afforded to rent privately.

Around thirty years ago, government basically abandoned the idea of public housing, selling it off on the cheap to tenants, preventing a sensible level of investment in the sector and later hiving it off to housing associations. The latest proposals will mean that many families in high rent areas such as London will be unable to afford to stay in their homes as low wage earners will no longer get the current level of support needed for them to pay market rents.

It’s a policy that makes no sense and in practice will not work, at least not in London and the south-east, but is likely to cause a huge amount of hardship and chaos before things get sorted out. So not surprisingly a wide range of people and groups are opposed to it, but the protest in Whitehall a couple of weeks ago was a small one – later if the policy is enacted we may well see riots.

For now there wasn’t a great deal to photograph, or at least I couldn’t find a way to really make strong images.

This was perhaps my best attempt, and it was one where the image doesn’t really fit the 1.5:1 ratio frame – I think it would be better with a crop to the left edge of the red ‘Housing Justice’ banner.

There were a couple of MPs speaking, and the obvious way to photograph them was over the pile of cardboard boxes, so I got into the right position for that only to have a couple of colleagues ask me politely if I would move a little so that they could get the shot (I think they probably thought “as well”, but sometimes that isn’t possible, and I think this was one of those times.) Since I’d taken a few frames I moved, but I don’t think I’d got quite what I wanted.

Of course I’m almost always happy photographing people and gestures and this woman’s hands and expression I think express the worries of people well, and I almost managed to frame the placards how I wanted them – just a little too tightly cropped.

You can see the rest of the pictures – with more about the event – on My London Diary. Unfortunately although of course I also posted it to Demotix, I don’t think it made any of the papers; I think they were full of some royal nonsense and didn’t have space for anything serious.

Reviewing My Photos

I sometimes wonder how many good pictures I’ve taken and not noticed since I’ve moved to digital. In the old days, working on film I contact printed everything – including eventually colour as well as black and white, and the contacts went into a file. It was easy to sit down and leaf through these files, and when I went back to find a particular image I often be glancing through the pages in search of it and see other frames that looked interesting and mark those up for printing too.

Then came digital, and I tend to take a quick look through the whole set of images and select those I think worth processing further, and sometimes that’s it. Anything that doesn’t strike me on that initial look may never be seen again, although it may still be on my disk or in my backup.

I try always to go back and take a second look, but it is easy to forget, and when I’ve taken a large number of pictures it is certainly easy to miss things. So this morning when I had a little time and nothing absolutely urgent to do I went through the whole set of pictures from the last of the three days of student protests.

Mostly what I found were simple alternative takes of images I’d previously developed and already put on My London Diary. A couple might have been better than the ones that I’d actually used, but there wasn’t a great deal in it. But there was one which I’d missed completely.

It’s a picture I rather like of some of the students dancing in Parliament Square, and I took a dozen or so frames of this group, but almost all with the camera in portrait format. This was one of them, but the subject just didn’t fit the upright frame, with not much happening in the shadows at the bottom and too much blue sky on top. Cropped to landscape in the normal 1.5:1 format I work in doesn’t quite work, and the image above is roughly 1.38:1, noticeably squarer. I usually like to get the framing correct in camera, but it isn’t always possible, and in this case the moment was just that and had gone by the time I took the next frame almost immediately afterwards.

There were a few other things that I found that perhaps seemed more significant after I’d had time to consider the event more fully, for example the images showing the large padded placard book covers.

As well as finding a few from early on in the march, I also found a few more of them in use against the police barricade in Parliament Square, although I hadn’t really been able to get into a good position.

It was also a chance to prune the hopeless images from the event from my hard disk, flagging them as rejected by pressing the ‘x’ key in Lightroom as I went through the images and then using the menu at the end of the process to delete the whole lot. It’s a faster method than deleting them one by one as you go through.

One thing I find slightly annoying is that I can’t find a simple keystroke to ‘unflag’ a rejected image. I’d prefer it if the ‘x’ key acted as a toggle rather than having to use the mouse and menus to do so. Perhaps there is a reason for this, but I can’t see it.

Tagging images with a colour tag does toggle on/off in this way, whereas giving them a star rating doesn’t. So I could use a colour tag to select images for mass deletion as an alternative.

Finally, Day X3 Pictures

Various things have stopped me getting my pictures from Day X3, the third large student demo organised by the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts two weeks ago on My London Diary before now.

It’s only partly sloth and general laziness. Partly Christmas coming and one or two things I had to do for that (including the odd party!) Going away for a few days didn’t help, nor did having a few other events to photograph. But more than anything it was the sheer number of pictures that I took on December 9th and the complexity of the event.

I’ve now put around 150 pictures covering the day from around noon in Malet St to when I left Whitehall and Parliament Square shortly after the vote.

This was one of the few events I’ve covered this year where having a UK Press Card really made a difference. Without it I would not have got back into Parliament Square around 4pm to take more pictures, and had I stayed there from earlier would have been trapped in the kettle with the rest of the protesters, perhaps not getting out until just in time to run for my last train home just before midnight, after having had my photograph taken by police.

Having a press card doesn’t stop you being threatened or assaulted by police, although unlike several of my colleagues on this occasion I only got threats, while they were hit by batons, kicked by police horses and had equipment smashed. At least one was convinced that he was picked out as a target because he was a press photographer. This time I emerged unscathed, partly because I’d earlier got rather badly crushed by the crowd and decided to go somewhere a little less dangerous.

Of course I might have taken some better pictures had I stayed longer, but certainly I would not have managed to get an article on Demotix by around midnight that same day as I did. The text of that article is now (with some slight corrections) on My London Diary, along with the 30 or so pictures I posted with it and quite a few more.

Local & International

It was a bitter afternoon as a few members from the local Brixton Global Climate action group met at the recently re-landscaped Brixton Oval between the library and the Town Hall at the major road junction in the centre of the town. Where previously there had been a small oval area with grass and flowerbeds around a central tree, there is now a large, flat and rather bare expanse bordered by the busy A23, and a cold wind was making the most of sweeping across it.

It was difficult to make much of the event photographically, but although it was small and local, it was one with a global significance. The Brixton group was one of 70 around the world, but apparently the only one in the UK, to respond to a call by one of the largest organisations in the world, La Via Campesina, representing 150 million people around the world, small farmers, agricultural workers, rural women and indigenous communities around the world for ‘Thousands of Cancuns for Climate Justice‘ to mobilise grass roots solutions and actions.

I’m not sure I made a great job of it, but I did my best, and put the story on Demotix, where it also got a mention on their blog, but not a great number of readers. Putting it on My London Diary and here on >Re:PHOTO will actually attract many more views.

There on My London Diary you can also read more about the event, and the call which arose from the ‘Cochabamba People’s Agreement’ produced by the 40,000 who attended the Cochambamba People’s summit for climate justice earlier this year and was brought to Cancun by the Bolivian Government but its concrete proposals for a sustainable future rejected.

And there are a few more pictures, but I think by the time it came to break open the pink pig ‘World Bank’ piñata I was too cold to think straight and couldn’t quite get the timing right.

The Nikon autofocus system is fine for things like photographing predictably moving objects – like racing cars – but with people taking rather random hits I would have been better switching to manual focus and avoiding any time lag as the camera tried to focus. Almost every frame the actual exposure came too long after I pressed the release.

UK Uncut Pay Day

Saturday December 18th is ‘Pay Day‘, UK Uncut‘s second day of demonstrations around the country against tax dodgers, once again targeting Vodafone and Sir Philip Green, on one of the busiest shopping days, just a week before Christmas.

I’m at a meeting and then travelling across the country (snow allowing) and so won’t be photographing this event, but I have just put more pictures from their first day of action in Oxford St on December 4 on to My London Diary.

We had snow then too, and my train took an extra 25 minutes to get in to London and although I ran up and down the escalators on the Underground I still was not there in time to get inside Topshop for the start of the protest (though since I was carrying a camera bag the security there would probably have ejected me in any case.)

This was a protest that caught the attention of the media, and as well as a crowd of press and freelance photographers, there were also many others there with cameras, crowding around the door and the line of security men and police across it.

I’m not particularly tall either, which doesn’t help when you are in a crowd. The protesters were at the back of the store and I couldn’t get a good view of them. There were a lot of shoppers still inside the store at that point taking pictures of what was happening on their phones and compact cameras, and they were better placed than us.

Later it was still a huge crush whenever there was anything happening in the doorway of the shop or even on the pavement outside. But I did get some pictures that I rather liked, and in particular a whole series of one young woman.

My difficulty was that I was really too close, having to work with a wide-angle lens and sometimes getting a little more distortion than I wanted. I couldn’t move to either left or right, being pushed from both sides and from behind, as well as ignoring a policewoman who kept telling me to move back.

Later I photographed the same woman protesting outside BHS, and there both protesters and photographers had a little more room.

In some ways it’s a better picture, with some well-placed text on the two placards, but I find the upper one stronger, partly because of the closer approach (and the distortion that comes with that), partly because of the tauter expression which gives it a greater urgency. But it also works better because of the radiating light fittings above the head, and, perhaps most importantly because the text in the image is more importantly placed and also ‘TOPSHOP tax dodgers’ is rather more central to the protest than the more political slogans of the lower image.

Having arrived late and perhaps missed what might have been the most interesting part of the protest I was pleased to find that at least one of my images did appear in the press.

It was that pointing finger, accusing Sir Philip that made this the picture to be used, and this was the ninth of a dozen frames I took of her pointing, some including more people. Three frames used a similar framing to this image, but in the other two the finger stands out less as rather than being over the red background, it is over the face of the man behind.

For this I was using the D300 with the 28-105 Nikon at 57mm focal length. The top image was on the D700, 16-35mm Nikon at 26mm, and the middle picture the D300 at 67mm. All at ISO 800 to give me decently fast shutter speeds. It was an overcast day but but not too gloomy and I didn’t use flash in any of the pictures, though I have opened up the shadows and brought down some of the highlights in the processing in Lightroom.

Students – Day 2

The second of the series of student demonstrations organised by the National Campaign against Fees and Cuts took place on November 30th, and they had a further demonstration on December 9th, which I also photographed and posted about a few days ago.

The next big student demonstration will be towards the end of January, because Parliament has a longish break over Christmas, as do many students. But another person or group, rumoured to have links with the EDL, has set up a Facebook page for a ‘fake’ demonstration on Monday 20 Dec, presumably with the intention of in some way discrediting students, perhaps hoping for some kind of violence. It’s one I won’t photograph even though some people may turn up.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
A police medic holds a protester with his left hand and takes a swing at him with his right while friends try to pull him away

The second day of action started in Trafalgar Square but did not develop as expected. Rather than a short march down Whitehall to Parliament Square and then on for a further protest outside the Lib-Dem headquarters, over half of the demonstrators decided to head off early, were blocked by the police and then commenced a ten mile fast march around much of central London, before returning to Trafalgar Square.

It was a peaceful march by the students though I witnessed one small attack by a police officer on an individual student and another use of what seemed rather unnecessary force to stop a group of the marchers taking a short cut. There were a couple of fireworks thrown – one exploding at my feet, and a few snowballs mainly aimed at the police.

The marchers got lost in the maze of back streets around St Bartholomew’s hospital in the City – and there wasn’t even a policeman there too ask the way, as the City of London police either hadn’t noticed the demonstration or had decided to stay out of its way, at least of the half hour in spent on their patch before I gave up and caught a bus.

The protesters were convinced the police were trying to kettle them, but so far as I could see they made no effort to do so until very much later in the day, following a certain amount of pushing and shoving in Trafalgar Square when most of the protesters had already gone home – and I too left before they imposed a kettle.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Just beyond the banner some students were trying to push through the police line. Others were simply walking out one of the the other entrances to the square which was still open.

It was a chaotic event, and the accounts on sites of some of the left-wing organisations differ dramatically from mine. I think you do get a fairly good idea of what went on from my description and pictures on My London Diary, though of course it wasn’t possible for me to be everywhere and see everything.

Climate Change

Yesterday I went to Shepperton for a carol service in the shade of the reservoir next to the studios, and then on to dinner a few yards down the road. Several times during the evening I thought of Shepperton’s most famous twentieth century resident, the late J G Ballard, and wondering how his dystopian vision could fit into this rather cosy corner of suburbia.

I particularly thought of his vision of a flooded world, and of the perils of global warming and the failure of will of almost every nation around the world to get to grips with the issue at Cancun. The notable exception was Bolivia, and at the annual Campaign Against Climate Change march and rally a few days earlier I had photographed Maria Souviron, the Bolivian Ambassador to the UK, speaking.

At Cancun we saw an agreement, but it was very much an agreement for the richer countries to continue more or less business as normal, and one that even were its best hopes realised would still produce an unacceptable climate warming. It was an agreement to lift the foot off the accelerator slightly when what is urgently needed is a change to reverse gear.

De-growth isn’t really a word in English, and certainly not an idea in conventional economic thinking, but an idea that we need to embrace for our civilisation to have more than a very limited future.

I’ve photographed these annual marches and other demonstrations by the Campaign Against Climate Change since they began – and then I was still using film and mainly black and white. And although I could very much sympathise with Caroline Lucas when she said she hoped we wouldn’t need to be here again next year, I also felt it was both highly unlikely that our Lib-Con government was going to completely change its spots and make our protest unnecessary – and that it is an event I’m always keen to photograph.

I was glad I wasn’t the official photographer in Hyde Park, perched up in a cherry picker what seemed a very long way above the crowd lining the numbers 2030 in Hyde Park – the date that the protest was calling for Britain to be a zero carbon country. There is a long history of such overhead shots, and they do still sometimes attract the attention of the media, though personally I find them very boring. It looked very chilly up there and I don’t have a great head for heights, and would have been shaking from both fright and cold.

I’m pleased too that I can’t see myself in the official photo, though I was certainly there somewhere, taking pictures while standing in one of the lines while the others were waving towards the camera.

You can just make out a pink pixel where these guys were jumping up, and though you can see the white suits of the group below, the pants don’t appear to be visible.

Of course there were also more – and often rather better opportunities for pictures while the march was forming up and also during the march, and you could actually read the text on the banners and placards.

And while it was just possible to recognize from some of the distant buildings on the horizon that the ‘2030’ image was taken in London, it was just a little more obvious in some of the pictures I took later!

And although Caroline Lucas was apparently not well, she spoke as powerfully as ever and if anything looked healthier than usual while she did so.

It was a cold and overcast day, and I was generally able to work without flash, but by the time it came for the rally at the end of the march it was beginning to get a little dark, and I needed to use flash. I was standing fairly close to the speakers who were a couple of feet higher on a platform, which was covered with a fairly white roof. The struts you can see are a little ugly, but otherwise it wasn’t a bad background, and I was able to get some bounce from the front of it by aiming the SB800 flash on camera up at 45 degrees.

Later they added a powerful light low down in front of the speakers, giving them a rather ghoulish appearance as well as some nasty shadows from the microphone and stands. Using flash again helped, as well as providing much better colour rendition than this continuous light.

More on the Students – Day 1

I’m at last beginning to catch up with putting my work on My London Diary, though I’ve still got a few things to do. I’ve already posted here about the pictures that I put on Demotix immediately after the days of protest, but you can now see a wider range of the work that I took on My London Diary.

On the first of the protests against the cuts on 24 Nov , rather to my surprise (and it was a longer day than I expected too) I took almost 1,500 images, although there are considerably fewer on My London Diary – about 100, or roughly one in 15 of those I took. I don’t normally shoot as many, but there were times when there was a lot of action and I was shooting short bursts of images.

Editing down such a large number of images is a problem, and I’ve been rethinking my workflow a little recently. Lightroom (I’m now using version 3.3) is a great piece of software and I’ve found out a little more about how to use it.

The way I used to work was to import all my images into Lightroom, before starting to select them in the Library Module, where you can rate them in various ways, giving them 1-5 stars or with one of five colours. So usually I went through all the pictures and give those I thought worth processing a 2 star rating. Ones that particularly stand out might get 3 stars. Then I reviewed all those with 2 or more stars to select a small sample to process immediately and send off to Demotix or elsewhere, giving them a colour rating. If I’d shot several events on the same day, I used a different colour for each.

I decided a while back, that it was no longer generally worth sending pictures directly to newspapers – the time I spent simply wasn’t justified by the results, and I wasn’t prepared to make the effort and compromises required to get my pictures there fast enough.

Partly it was a matter of equipment – I seldom take my notebook computer with me when I’m out taking pictures, but more important to me was that I like to select and process my pictures carefully before they are used. I also like to write stories to go with my pictures, and taken together these eliminate my chances of meeting the kind of deadlines papers expect – literally wanting pictures within minutes of being taken (or even seconds with some events.) My pictures do sometimes get into the papers, but not as urgent news.

So uploading the whole contents of the memory cards from a particular event into Lightroom isn’t usually a problem, though it can take quite a while. It gives me time to do other things – like research and write a story to go with them, or even have some dinner.

Often while I’m travelling home to do this, I have time to do a quick edit using the screen on the back of the camera, but I find this too small for most purposes. It does enable you to delete the really hopelessly exposed or framed images, and you can zoom in to check for sharpness, but not really a great deal more.

Recently I’ve started to do a more rigorous selection on the computer before importing the images, reading them while still on the card. The import dialogue in Lightroom enables you to view the images still on the card either as thumbnails in a grid or singly, and to decide whether or not to import each of them. Just as in the Library grid view you can also zoom into the images and check sharpness too. It isn’t perfect – and I’d like it to actually start the import as you are making the decisions rather than do it as a batch when you have completed your review.

There are also quite a few pictures that I’m unsure about because the default jpeg that Lightroom presumably reads from the RAW file isn’t good enough, and which need a certain amount of processing before you can decide if they are worth keeping. It’s actually easier to do the review of these once they have been imported into Lightroom, as the processing in my import preset usually helps, and in any case the Library module allows you to quickly apply some rough processing – such as increasing or decreasing exposure.

Lightroom is sometimes just a little slow at viewing them on my computer (which at more than 3 years old is beginning to show its age) but overall I find quite a saving in time if I can drastically cut the number than I import. It also of course saves storage space – those 1500 images are about 11 Mb each, and would occupy around 16 Gb on the hard disk – or 4 DVDs for a backup. So unlike working on film where everything got files, I’m moving to a more selective approach. Of course had I been using film I would have shot less, worried about running out of film – and I seldom used more than a dozen 36 exposure cassettes – about 450 frames.

Until now I’ve kept almost every file that I created with the digital camera, worried that I might miss something important. Now, having imported those files that I selected I go back and open the import dialogue again, making sure that I’ve ticked the checkbox not to import duplicates. I can then check through the pictures again, more rapidly as thumbnails in grid view (I use the slider to make the thumbnails as large as possible) and import any that I missed first time, before removing the card and putting it back in the camera. The pictures will stay there just in case I want to find something else from among them until I format the card, usually on my way to the next event.

The pictures here are just a few of mine from the day that I don’t think have been used anywhere other than in my own story, now on My London Diary, with a fairly large set of images including these.

Students Protest Fees Rise

I’ve been a little busy over the past few days, with little time to post here, though I have put some work on Demotix from my day out with the student protests on Thursday.

There, along with the pictures you can read my view of the protest, which was a huge and very spread out affair, both in terms of time and territory. Its obviously not possible for a single person to be everywhere and see everything and every photographer there has to make choices about where they go and what they photograph. So both my story and my pictures reflect this.

Some of those are made on the spur of the moment, dictated by events. When I saw the ‘Book Bloc’, protesters carrying large and thick placards with the names of well-known works such as ‘Brave New World’, ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, ‘One Dimensional Man’ and even Richmal Crompton’s ‘Just William’ trying to use these as shields and push their way through the barriers and riot police, naturally I tried (though with not a great deal of success) to photograph this, and again when I saw flames and a huge cloud of black smoke, along with everyone else I went to take pictures.

But there are other choices that are more basic. Some hinge on equipment. I seldom use long lenses – the longest in my current camera bag is an 18-125mm on my D300 (equivalent to around 175mm on the FX format.) I like to be in there, close to people when I photograph them, which isn’t always healthy when protests get a little heated. I used to have a 55-200mm, but lost it during a scrum in one of last month’s demos, and can’t quite decide whether to replace it – and if so with what.

Over the past few years, many of my colleagues who cover protests have begun to carry protective helmets, dangling from their backpacks – and on their heads when needed. It’s something no well-dressed photojournalist is without these days, but I decided against doing so. There are fortunately relatively few occasions here in the UK where they are really needed, and then mainly as protection against police batons. But there have been a couple of times in recent weeks when I’ve felt rather exposed without one, or have decided to keep a little out of the firing line.

It’s also a matter of philosophy. I go to events wanting to tell the story rather than aiming to capture spectacular or saleable images. It isn’t generally how the press works – as we’ve seen in the last few days with page after page devoted to a minor incident involving two royals in a car deliberately escorted into an area full of wandering protesters. Like most other photographers I was miles away at the time. Or a huge amount of coverage given to one probably rather drunk young man who decided to swing on a flag at the Cenotaph – rather than the many thousands throughout the day who had treated this monument with respect.

Of course there are themes that interest me. The large number of young protesters, many school sixth-formers, some of whom have occupied their schools. The changing nature of demonstrations in this country with a growing anarchist fringe. The growing disconnection between established political parties, trade unions etc and many people – especially students (this wasn’t one demonstration, it was two, with the NUS and others curiously sidelined by their own choice on the Embankment.) The problems of policing demonstrations and of policing the police and so on.

All of these things feed in to what images I choose to make (and not to make) when covering events. There are around 30 images on Demotix, and I’ll put more on My London Diary in a day or two.