Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Field of Remembrance

This year because of illness I’ve missed several remembrance events I would otherwise have photographed. But while I was in Parliament Square earlier crosses with poppies were already being planted in front of the abbey. This set commemorate the submarines that have been lost, the two larger blocks representing the First and Second World Wars.

My own father was in the First War. He was fortunate always to be a little behind the front line because of his job, and although he got given a gun and stood on guard duty occasionally he was never taught to fire one (and didn’t ever know if it was loaded or not.) His wasn’t a dramatic story or one involving great bravery and he suffered no significant injuries; it is the story of an “ordinary” man caught up in events.

At his call-up medical the doctor discovered he was deaf in one ear and asked him if he really wanted to go, and he said he “might as well.” Quite unusually 119377 Marshall W F eventually became 3rd “Ack Emma” in the Royal Flying Corps where his extensive experience and skills could be put to good use in keeping the planes flying. Late in life he wrote a brief memoir of the first 40 or so years of his life, including the war years. These two extracts are exactly as he wrote them:

Corporal said “Put it down here“. I pointed out that the pit was on the other side of the lorry, and it was only sensible to put it over there. I was reported and had to go to see the Sergeant -Major. He said that I was on active service and people were often shot at dawn for disobeying orders. I told him I didnt expect to live very long, and if he liked doing that sort of thing it was OK by me. He told me to clear off and not be so silly . I rather think he had a word with that corporal. I didnt hear anymore about it…

Chinese coolies prepared our sites and probably erected buildings; and of course they dug the petrol holes out. There was every nationality represented amongst the troops and auxiliaries. It was amazing how varied an organisation the armies were. There were lots of horses, mules and bullocks pressed in to do the work. Then there were the Tommies and the Frenchies and all the other fighting men, all colours, marching backwards and forwards – Colonials, Indians, Africans; we had an Empire then! Our armies were advancing then, and we had to keep up with them.

I thought particularly of that second quotation when hearing the disgusting nonsense talked by the leader of the British Nationalist Party, Nick Griffin, trying to hi-jack the war (in his case particularly the1939-45 war, but the same kind of thing was true in that war) to support his party’s racist policies. Without the active support of the very peoples he would like to deport we would have lost both wars.

Not of course that our main parties have kept faith with those people who fought for the UK and were British subjects, most of whom were denied the right to enter the UK under the Macmillan government’s panicky Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 and later of their remaining and largely meaningless status with the British Nationality Act of 1981 under Thatcher. Labour’s record on the subject is no better.

New Nuclear Power?

Having grown up in the era when nuclear power was going to make virtually free electricity in unlimited amounts – at least according to the industry – and having seen the fiasco it really was I’m unconvinced that nuclear power is the answer to any problem.

And of course I’m still unconvinced we have any real answer to the huge amounts of nuclear waste that our existing and decommissioned power stations have built up, yet alone the increased amounts power stations on the ten sites announced yesterday will produce. Apart from Bradwell, other exisitng sites to be reused are Sizewell, Suffolk , Hartlepool & Heysham, Lancs, Hinkley Point, Somerset, Oldbury, Gloucestershire and Wylfa, North Wales, and Sellafield in Cumbria, which is joined by the two new sites nearbty, Braystones and Kirksanton.

Not that I’m against nuclear entirely. Their is one huge nuclear power source whose greater use I entirely support. It’s called the sun.

Even in the UK it can be a useful source of energy, though probably more by its effects on making air and water move around in various ways. We have more than enough wind to meet our energy needs, even before we start to add in other renewables.

Of course there are problems in the kind of expansion of wind energy that we need, and in particular those caused by the failure of our government to act. Allowing the one factory in the UK producing turbine blades to close. Failing to make promises about the future return for renewable electricity and to use EU funding for the proper purpose (and using it to promote agro-fuel production, adding to the problem.) Failing to give any real lead over planning for wind farms and so on.

Another area of failure has been over cutting energy use, concentrating on a few easy targets and neglecting the major places we need to make cuts. Going down false(or at least highly unlikely) roads such as carbon capture and storage and carbon trading.

The government have been working hard to give themselves a green gloss, but overall is it any more effective than Mrs Thatcher’s ‘Keep Britain Tidy campaign? Not of course that the opposition look much more likely to get things done. It’s almost enough to make me join the Green Party again.

Apologies for the rant, but I find it hard just to watch my planet going down the tubes.

The locals used to find the River Blackwater had nice warm water downstream from the power-station and there is a nice white sand beach just a little downstream. I imagine the new station – if it ever happens- will be built close to the old, and make use of at least some of the existing infrastructure. Given it’s really only a short distance from London it’s an incredibly isolated place, with huge fields of organic wheat being harvested while I was there for a week in the summer.

Writing for Free

Although I now write ‘for free‘ that hasn’t always been the case, and may not always continue to be so. For eight years I wrote about photography for money (as well as out of obsession), and in a good month it made me enough to live on. Not that the readers paid directly for my content, but that the site I was writing for made quite a lot of money from advertising of various kinds. Often bloody annoying, but it paid my bills.

Almost all print magazines rely on advertising to pay for the content – the cover price is seldom enough to do so. On the web, few publications have managed to make a significant income from any source, but it can be done. There are a few excellent sites that do get money from subscriptions and from advertising, but for someone like me who has chosen (if only after being sacked) to go it alone, it isn’t easy.

This site – and ‘My London Diary‘ on which I present my own photography do very occasionally generate sales of my prints or fees for reproduction, but the return is very small for the hours of work I put in. Essentially I subsidise the writing of these sites by other activities, including sales through agencies, the occasional commission and so on. I’m always happy to consider suitable work in the London area – and every blue moon the site throws up a job from someone who likes what they see.

But I’d like to spend more time writing, and writing seriously about photography is very time consuming. A considered review of a web site, show or book really requires several days of work, and the longer features I used to write weekly on photographers and aspects of photography took even longer.

A D Coleman is a writer on photography whose work I admire – though of course I don’t always agree with his views. But where I’m a hundred per cent with him is in the series of features on his Photocritic site, Jeff Ward Wants My Writing Free – #1 and #2.

He quotes Ward as saying”the future should be open and accessible [online] repositories. and that Monetized knowledge is suspect, for me at least I dont buy it.

Unless someone pays for it, much of it simply won’t be written, or at worst we may be limited to writing by academics and museum curators – although they are usually pretty good at marketing their work for secondary payments – and there is no criticism implied in that. But already doing it for a living they have the choice of goivng it away should they decide to do so.

What we need is some financial model that encourages and rewards good writing – and also of it goes without saying, good photography that is worth writing about, something which is also gettting increasingly hard to market.

The number of readers of this site are an order of magnitude less than the site I was paid to write for but still significant. This blog, >Re:PHOTO, got over 86,000 page views for in October, and there were roughly the same number for My London Diary. And neither are the kind of site that people are likely to arrive on by accident, so this represents a significant audience, and I’m very pleased that people think it is worth reading my rambles and viewing the pictures.

At the moment I’ve no plans to introduce adverts, as I like the the site without them, but it’s hard to see how I can keep it that way in the longer term as income from photography seems generally to be declining. And the advantage of getting money from writing is that I would be able to devote more time to writing rather than doing other things to keep bread on the table.

In #3 of the series, written on Sunday, Coleman talks a little more about “the project I subsidize, organize, edit, and publish online, the Photography Criticism CyberArchive, a deep repository of historical and contemporary texts on photography and related matters by a wide range of authors.” I suppose I should declare a sort of interest. When he wrote to me about this some years asking if I would be interested in putting any work in there I certainly wanted to do so but the small print of my lengthy contract with About.com, Inc made it impossible for me to do so.

This didn’t mean then that that galleries around the world were free to rip off my stuff, although many did, while others who asked had to fill in forms and pay and send the fees to About.com, though I wasn’t always sure that I got my 50% from them it did sometimes happen. And of course students etc who asked were always told that so long as it was properly acknowledged they were free to quote me. I often wondered what proportion did ask, and certainly in the early years before anti-plagiarism software came into wide use could claim – probably with some substance – to have gained degrees at a number of US universities.

But, rather more seriously, the fact that I couldn’t put work into the PCCA in the longer term has meant it is no longer available at all. About.com withdrew it from the web a few months after they terminated my agreement, and neither they nor I can use it without paying the other. In perpetuity. Or possibly until a large group of former employees decide to take out a class action.

I have of course rewritten a few pieces, and posted these, but it is time-consuming, bringing things up to date, correcting errors and simply changing my mind or having new thoughts means it takes at least as long as producing the original, and with several thousand pieces (of which perhaps a few hundred are worth republishing) its a daunting prospect.

Fortunately I was rather more careful with images. Apart from those of a purely instructional nature – such as how to load a film tank – I was careful only to use pictures of my own that I had previously published elsewhere and grant About.com a specific single use licence just the same as those I was required to get from other photographers except for truly public domain imagery.

So when I put up a slide show of my images from Paris – and here’s a fairly random image from it –

they were from a set that I’d previously published on my own web site, where you can still see the thumbnails and full 58 images, including a few from Paris Photo where I’d still like to be going in a week or so’s time. But I’ll j ust have to make do with looking at those pictures from previous years, including last year’s PARIS SUPPLEMENT to My London Diary.

Back to the PCCA. It makes content available by annual subscription for personal study etc. As he makes clear “its really designed with institutional subscription in mind a situation in which one subscription fee would pay for access by a sizable user base.” Students and academics often forget that much of the material on the web they can access without payment they can only do because their institution has paid for a licence to services such as JSTOR .

But PCCA at the moment is subsidised by Coleman, partly because its content base is not large enough and also in a highly specific area, so attracting relatively few subscriptions, but mainly because unlike larger services such as Lexis-Nexis or JSTOR it is set up to look after the interests of the creators, paying them for their materials, rather than those of the publishers.

I’ve contributed a few essays to academic journals over the years that are now available through JSTOR. Of course there was no payment for the material by the journals, and I was never asked permission for them to put it on line or otherwise reuse it. Journals will get something for allowing their material to be used, but not those who actually provided the material.

You can read more about the details of PCCA in the feature and also at it’s web site. We are promised more features in the series.

Kingsmead Eyes

One of the many sections of the Guardian that usually goes direct into the recycling is the Family section, but on Saturday it had a rather striking self-portrait of a startled looking young Sally Hammond on the phone in a white dressing gown with pink stars. Sally had just got out of the bath and answered the phone, as no one else was available, and had just been informed of the death of a relative.

Sally is just one of 28 pupils from Kingsmead School in the London Borough of Hackney, who took part in a remarkable collaboration over 6 months with photographer Gideon Mendel, photographing their lives – friends, family, the estate, shops, Sunday Schools – things that appealed to them and they felt strongly about. Food features quite a lot!

Crispin Hughes, whose work I’ve written about on a couple of occasions, taught the children how to use the digital cameras they used on the project in a series of workshops, and in the pictures selected for the video on the Kingsmead Eyes site you can see that most of those involved were eager learners. At least one now wants to be a photographer when they leave school.

I wrote a a piece on Demotix a couple of months ago criticising a politician who compared Hackney with Baltimore as seen in ‘The Wire‘. It isn’t, but it is one of our more deprived urban areas, and the particular estate on which the school is – the Kingsmead estate – has a poor reputation.

It is a typical LCC red-brick pre-war estate of large 5 storey deck access flats – 980 in all – in courtyard blocks close to the Lea Navigation, just to the south of Clapton Park, and across the canal from Hackney Marshes – whose many football fields feature in some of the images and part of which will be a car/coach park of the London 2012 Olympics. This “village” estate of “Kings Mead” was officially opened by the King – George VI along with Queen Mary – in 1939. The flats were built to a high standard with modern facilities for the time, and the tenants who were rehoused from the slums of Bethnal Green and Stepney enjoyed their new luxury – even if they were a bit out in the country.

It was only in the sixties that they began to turn into undesirable slums, partly through neglect with shared stairways and decks as on many similar estates becoming dirty and sometimes dangerous places, and by the seventies estates like this had became sink estates, with the GLC rehousing problem families from across all London in them. Transfer to LB Hackney after Thatcher’s ridiculous abolition of the GLC (a policy based purely on spite) didn’t help and the estate became notorious after the death of a teenager during a homosexual orgy in one of the flats in 1985. There were also very high levels of burglary on the estate and many robberies on the streets by gangs of youths. Things began to pick up in the 1990s, party because of coordinated action by police and council to use injunctions, repossession orders and other civil remedies against trouble-makers, resulting in a rapid drop in crime, but also because of one of the establishment of one of the most radical “bottom up” community projects there, the Kingsmead Kabin, still running.

Regeneration funding was granted in 1995, and since then with the estate in charge of registered social landlord, Kingsmead Homes (Hackney) Limited, now the Sanctuary Housing Association, over £40 million has been spent on building refurbishment. Sanctuary Housing Association along with the governors of Kingsmead School supported the project.

As well as working with the 28 pupils on the project, Mendel also photographed every one of the 249 pupils at the school, using an old Rolleiflex. These portraits are shown as an composite image at the Kingsmead Eyes exhibition – on show at V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green until 7 Feb 2009 – giving as it says “remarkable diversity and origins of these children in more than 46 countries this becomes a truly global portrait, taken in a small Hackney school.”

But as the old theatre saying goes, “never work with children or animals” and in the video installation, which is part of the exhibition and can also be viewed on line makes clear it is their work – photographs, descriptions and poems – initiated and inspired by Mendel that really makes this project. (The video also credits Louise Nichols along with Gideon Mendel for Creative Direction, Mo Stoebe as Video Editor and Crispin Hughes for the Photo Workshops.)

But at the same time, Mendel also made his own documentation of the area. Knowing the work of this South African born photographer who has been based in London since 1990 Im sure it will be of a very high standard. You can hear him talking about his work, mainly on HIV/Aids but with also some other interesting issues raised particularly in the questions and his answers, on a long video made at the Front Line Club last year (1 hr 27min.)

This is another fine show as a part of photomonth, the East London Photography Festival which continues through November, and which opened at the Bethnal Green museum a month or so ago .

A long Brew – but Brown finally gets the Message

It was over four years ago that along with a smallish group of demonstrators I walked onto Westminster Bridge to photograph an illegal demonstration calling for a ‘Tobin Tax’. I knew what it was, and that it had been proposed by Nobel prize-winning economist James Tobin (1918-2002) in 1972 as a microtax – perhaps 0.1% – on currency dealings that would be so small as to not affect actual currency deals but would be enough to put a real drag on speculation.

It was a proposal taken up by charities concerned with the effect of speculation on the poorer countries in the 1990s (and given some support by French President François Mitterrand) and early 2000s, when they also suggested that a very small levy – perhaps 005% – would enable the wealthy countries to actually meet the promises they had made on overseas aid. For several years I had a large poster about the proposal on my kitchen wall.

As I wrote in 2005: (when I still hadnt found the Caps key)

the aim was to deter speculation on currency movements, thus giving the elected governments greater control over their fiscal and monetary policies, and reducing the power of unelected speculators (who include some of the larger multinational companies) to affect the markets. Exporters, importers and long-term investors would all benefit from less volatile exchange rates, and the revenue raised by the tax could make a significant contribution both to the revenue of national economies and also for international development projects.

as a small gesture of support for the tobin tax, another illegal demonstration took place in westminster this afternoon, unnoticed by police. a small group of demonstrators, again following an example from boston – although this time from 1773 – chose tea as a way to symbolise their protest. each threw a teabag, produced by one of the giant corporations, from the middle of westminster bridge into the river thames below.

As you can see, I hadn’t at the time quite perfected my technique for mid-air hovering that such events really require – and it still needs a little more work.

I really was pleased that the police didn’t try to arrest the protesters. I’d watched (and photographed) earlier in the day as police arrested and led away five protesters simply for peacefully holding a banner in Parliament Square, ashamed at seeing my country become a police state.

When Lord Turner brought up the idea of a Tobin tax again at the end of August, it seemed very much an idea whose time had come, and another leading Nobel prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz backed the idea at the start of October, saying that the technical problems which would have proved impossible in the past were no longer an obstacle with modern technology.

It came as a surprise to hear Gordon Brown adding his support yesterday. Perhaps after five years those tea bags had really brewed. Less of a surprise that the US immediately turned the idea down, but at some time Obama will have to decide to stand up to the bankers, so it may yet happen.

Brian Haw Harrassed by Police

I suspect the small group of police who came to Parliament Square around 7pm on Friday thought that there would be few people around, and will have been a little surprised when they started arguing and arresting Brian Haw to find they were being photographed by two freelances and an AP staffer, as well as another freelance shooting video.

The event appears to be a part of a long-standing campaign of harassment against the peace protester who has been in the square since 2 June 2001 – eight years and almost five months. Over the years police have made various legal and illegal attempts to remove him, and the government passed a law to try and do so – but messed up the drafting. So Brian is still there, still making his appeal to the conscience of the nation to stop the killing – particularly the killing of children – in Iraq and elsewhere.

I couldn’t understand the argument the officer was having with Brian, but each seemed to be accusing the other of not having acting lawfully. Eventually Brian was pushed and pulled along on his crutches, still protesting and lifted into the back of a waiting police van.

I returned the following morning and he was still in police custody at Belgravia Police station, but about to be taken into court. Apparently his immediate release was then ordered. When I came back later in the afternoon he was back in his usual chair in the square.

Although I was working very close to Brian and the police, I was careful not to get in the way, and had no problems, although things got a little hectic as he was actually put into the van, and I had several unsharp frames as I was pushed by police and other photographers.

Almost all of the arrest images were shot at ISO 3200, f4.5, 1/60 and using flash. The flash can’t handle subjects very close to the camera and over-exposure of these was a problem in some frames. Although I moved around the action as much as possibly, there is just too much similarity between the various shots I took, as you can see on My London Diary.

Catching up – Afghanistan

I’ve had a busy couple of weeks and there are quite a few events I’ve photographed and not mentioned here, starting with the march calling for troops to be brought back from Afghanistan. Given the strength of public opinion in support of this it’s perhaps surprising that there weren’t more than the respectable 10,000 or so taking part, but perhaps it reflects the very different reasons some have for calling an end to this war which is seems we can only lose, and which is killing more and more British soldiers.

Certainly not everyone opposed to it would want to march with Stop the War, CND and the BMI who were the organisers of this march. We are also just seeing the start of mainstream politicians beginning to say what the left has been saying for a long time; I’m rather surprised that the liberal democrats haven’t already come out firmly against the war.

Photographically the main problem was the weather, a dull day, very dull at times, and with the occasional little burst of rain. Fortunately the D700 is pretty well noise free at ISO 800, and that was fast enough to work at a decent shutter speed with apertures around f4-f5.6. Most of the time I was shooting on the Sigma 24-70 f2.8, and I like to avoid full aperture whenever I can; it’s usable, but definitely a little soft compared to f4. After that, stopping down is only really needed to get more depth of field, particularly at the longer end of the lens.

I took some pictures without flash, but some of them look a little colourless, almost drained. Flash does tend to add a little warmth and colour under lighting conditions such as this though I was generally keeping the amount pretty low.

Here’s a picture that shows this and that I like:

The stewards were holding us a short distance back and there was a very tight scrum of press and others in the minutes before the march started. Quite a few pictures I took – even like this one at 1/250 – have camera shake because other photographers were pushing me from all sides. The len was at 65mm and aperture f8 and for some reason I was using spot metering – which is really better when you have plenty of time and can think what you are doing. I was pleased to have two posters with the word’Bloodshed’ on them in shot.

I stood close to the start and watched most of the march go by, photographing close in and using the full range of the zoom. It’s an interesting exercise in thinking and working fast to try and frame compositions as people walk by and also enabled me to spot a few people and groups to photograph later.

This was one I liked, and again the flash livens it up a little (24mm, 1/250 f7.1) and enables me a lot more freedom when I come to develop the image in Lightroom – where I could choose to ‘burn in’ the figure at the right to the exact tone I want (perhaps just a little darker than above.)

Here’s one I took later on the march without flash, and although I think it’s a good image, I just can’t get the same kind of colour quality.

For once I walked the whole distance – which actually means I walked it several times, going back and forth taking pictures. And I took quite a few pictures of both audience and speakers in Trafalgar Square. But suddenly there was a disturbance at the back of the square, and several of us rushed out from the press area at the front of the plinth to cover it. Four Leeds supporters, in London for a match at Millwall had decided to heckle and insult the speakers, and the crowd had taken it badly, calling them racists and chasing them out. They were rescued and escorted by a largish group of police and it wasn’t easy to get clear pictures. As usual the answer was to think ahead and I was lucky when they stopped at exactly the right spot where I had chosen to stand on a ledge a couple of feet high and could look down on the scene.

Overall I was for once quite please with my afternoon’s work. No major disasters and quite a few pretty decent pictures. You can make up your own mind about them on My London Diary.

Brian Griffin – Olympic Portraits

I was in two minds as to whether to accept the invitation to the National Portrait Gallery‘s launch of the NPG/BT Road to 2012 Project. The decision to have the games in London is arguably one of the greatest British tragedies of the 21st century to date and it’s legacy for the Lea Valley and East London likely to be only slightly less damaging than Enola Gay’s flight over Hiroshima in August 1946.

But of course the games are going to happen in around a thousand days time, and it’s good to see anything positive that comes from it – such as this project. Brian Griffin is certainly one of the best portrait photographers currently working anywhere in the world at the moment, and it would he hard to think of a better person to photograph those people connected with what is – whatever I think about it – a major project. The six images unveiled today are the first of 20 by him, and commissions to other photographers will bring the total to 100. I hope those others chosen to work on the project will also be chosen on merit rather than, as so often happens in such things, for political reasons.

I’m not against sport. In my youth I played for various teams, getting a medal myself at the age of ten as a part of an all-conquering wolf club soccer team that included three players who went on to play professionally and at 16 I knocked over ten seconds off my Borough’s record for the quarter mile, finishing a hundred and fifty yards ahead of the next runner. But in my view games are for playing rather than watching and taking part is more important than winning. I think its a part of the Olympic Ideal, which doesnt seem to have much part in our official professional programme for sport.

Sandy Nairne, the Director of the NPG opened the event and was followed by rather predictable speeches from Lord Coe and Dame Kelly Holmes, but it was photographer (or artist) Brian Griffin who was the star performer, talking about some of his experiences in making the pictures and his thinking behind them. Above the speakers throughout the presentation was his picture of four from the thirty East London young people who went to Singapore to support the games bid, and he told us how he had decided to from them into a single sculptural group, but when he had taken what he thought was his picture, Alex Loukos in his red boxer’s helmet, jumped out from the group and made the image that he quickly captured and we saw on the screen.

Although Brian stressed that he thinks about his work as a fine artist, he still has the openness to the moment that makes his work truly photographic, and nowhere was this shown more in the set of six images that was unveiled at the event than in a picture of four civil engineers in hard hats under the Olympic stadium which for me – and several others at the event whose opinions I respect – was the outstanding image of the set. I was told that he has also taken a very fine portrait of Lord Coe, but this is apparently being held back for a later date.

You can see all six pictures on the NPG site, under the heading ‘The First Commission’ and read some of Brian’s comments about them on the London2012 blog. (Unfortunately Im not allowed to post the pictures here at a size I think useful so you will need to click on the links to see the work.)

Brian writes there “So, for example, the portrait of Jonathan Edwards and Denise Lewis. The colouration of this image, in the steel and glass environment of the building, echoes the feeling from a painting by the pre-Raphaelite Sir Edward Burne-Jones. The portrayal of Denise also leads me to the Edward Burra painting ‘Harlem’.”

In front of the actual print, my immediate thought was “Beam me up Scotty!”, and there is a definite “Star Trek” feel to this image, exaggerated perhaps by Jonathan’s hair looking like he’s got his hands on the Van der Graf machine and a slightly unreal quality about Denise Lewis’s skin tone and gesture which is a little more apparent in the actual print than in reproduction. However you see it, it remains a striking image.

Of course all of the pictures are excellent in their own way, and it was a bonus to have a number of the sitters present at the event. Not only could we see them with their pictures, and at least in some cases photograph them, but also I was able to catch one of them, triple-jumper Jonathan Edwards, getting his own back by taking Brian’s picture in front of his portrait.

It was good – as always – too meet Brian again, and also of course some other old friends and a few new ones. But as I left the picture below flashed into my mind and I felt a sudden sadness about the missed opportunity to make this a Green Games and incorporate the Manor Gardens Allotments into the site – and to see how Brian might have photographed Hassan and Sam and all the others.

© 2007 Peter Marshall
Sam Clark tries some of Hassan’s cake – which was great – while I wait for Sam’s sausages
Manor Gardens Allotments on the Olympic site, April 2007.
Peter Marshall

More pictures from the NPG/BY Brian Griffin event on My London Diary shortly.

ICO Plans Attack Press Freedom

If the suggestions – as reported in the Amateur Photographer – of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) about a ‘Privacy Code for online use of photography‘ on the streets were to be adopted it would be the end of photography as we know it on the web. Their proposals seem to me ridiculous and unworkable – and my immediate reaction was to check the date of the article by Chris Cheesman. But to my surprise I found it was written on 27 Sept rather than April 1.

The proposal are frankly ridiculous in several respects, but particularly in the attack that they make on news reporting, with the suggestion that it would become necessary to blur many faces in images for publication in newspapers and also on websites – except for social networking and similar sites. The AP reports that while “background shots of passers-by will not normally breach the Data Protection Act, images of a small group of clearly identifiable people, sent for publication to a newspaper for example, may be considered an infringement.” So it becomes clear that this is not just a threat to what can be published on the web, but also to the freedom of the press as a whole.

The proposals according the AP report “will not prevent someone taking photos in the street without the subject’s consent, provided that the images are for ‘personal use’ and the camera is not being used to harass people” but it will severely restrict what you can do with them. Stick them on Facebook or in your family album and you are fine, but publish them – even on Flickr – and it looks as if you may be damned.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.
Taking part in a demo on the street implies a willingness to be seen and photographed. More picture from ‘Bring the Troops home from Afghanistan‘

I mainly photograph public events and demonstrations, where those taking part know they will be under the gaze of cameras and thus implicitly grant permission to be recorded. At times I photograph the people who are standing on the street or in shop windows watching (and sometimes also photographing) events and it seems only a fair reciprocity that they too should expect to be watched and photographed. And it is clearly important that in situations involving crime, potential crime or unrest that journalists – including citizen journalists – should where possible record both potential criminals and the activities of the police, and that news media – print, broadcast and web – have a public duty to publish such images. Whatever the feelings of those who appear in them, or indeed the Terrorism Act, unless the pictures would clearly be of aid to terrorists.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.
Reporting on the police is important for a free press. More pictures from this incident involving football supporters attempting to disrupt the Bring the Troops Home rally.

I actually follow my own test that differs significantly from that which the woman speaking for the ICO suggests. Rather than asking “whether the subjects would object to their picture being published in this way”, I think “whether a reasonable person photographed in this way would have a reasonable objection to having this particular picture published.” It seems to me to be an important and fundamental difference, not least in that a “reasonable person” is also a reasoning person, while many of the objections that people have made about the use of their pictures have been purely on emotional grounds.

If someone walks down a street with a silly hat on, I don’t think they can reasonably object to a picture that shows them wearing a silly hat on the street, but if I have managed to catch them at a moment or from an angle that makes a perfectly normal hat look silly their objection might well be sustained. There is sometimes a fine line between being amusing and demeaning the person, but in general I think the distinction is clear.

Any test should probably also distinguish between people “in the public eye” who have chosen to live and profit from being public figures, and those in whom there is no genuine public interest. Although I usually chose to delete or not use images of – for example – politicians in which a momentary gesture makes them look silly, it would make the reporting of party conferences in particular rather boring if all were disallowed. And of course our current London mayor has made his political career on being seen as a buffoon (so perhaps we should not encourage him.)

So far as privacy is concerned, at present we have a fairly clear position – “a reasonable expectation of privacy” – which offers a reasonable degree of protection to people while allowing publication of news etc. There seems little if any need for any further restriction. We also have the law of defamation that restricts the use that can be made of images of people, and although too it isn’t entirely satisfactory it largely does the job required in limiting the activities of publishers.

It is perhaps an interesting question whether a photograph in isolation is actually personal data. If I publish a picture of you without any accompanying text, only those who already know what you look like will be able to identify the picture as being of you. Without being incorporated into a structure with accompanying data the image to the wider public remains anonymous.

Photographs only truly become data when, for example, they are put into a police database and used to produce “spotter cards” for use by police at demonstrations, or when they are displayed on a right-wing hate web site along with names and other data with the intention of encouraging violence or other illegal acts against demonstrators and journalists (thanks to Marc Vallée for the anonymised link posted on Twitter.)

I’ve published literally thousands of pictures of children over the years, but I’ve always been careful not to give names except in very special circumstances. At times I’ve blurred name badges on them – (and some pictures of adults) – in order to preserve a certain anonymity. I’ve generally only named adults in pictures who are in some sense public figures – if at times in a very local and minor way. There might I think be some sense in restricting or at least reviewing the local paper practice of giving names and ages in picture captions, although local papers are becoming a thing of the past in any case.

Increasingly we are moving from still images to the use of video, and here the problems that the suggested regulations would produce seem more or less insuperable. Could we really have online newspapers without news pictures and online TV without news film from the UK? It does appear to be what the ICO proposals might produce.

Bike Power at the nabokov Arts Club

Another first for my work tomorrow when it will be projected for the first time by bike power!

“The nabokov Arts Club returns with another extravaganza of live theatre, music, comedy, poetry and visual art in a vast, atmospheric Victorian warehouse in the heart of Shoreditch … at Village Underground, recently named Top Venue for Wow Factor by Time Out London… the Arts Club will be joining tens of thousands of people from over 150 countries for the biggest ever day of climate change activism. Well be part of a global action coordinated by 350.org to urge world leaders to take bold and immediate steps to address climate change and reduce carbon emissions. Within our solar-powered venue we will have a bicycle-powered art installation showcasing climate change photography…”

Which will include the set of 24 pictures – including the one above – that I put together for Foto Arte 2007 in Brasilia. Just in case you can’t get along to Shoreditch for what looks like a very interesting evening (and I can’t make it myself) you can see the full set of pictures here. As well as showing a number of demonstrations in London there are also some pictures from the Manor Gardens Allotments, which were bulldozed to make way for the London 2012 Olympics – see London Olympics – Green Disaster for my thoughts on that and links to some more pictures.

The partying in Shoreditch goes on from 8pm until 2am – including an extra hour when we change back from Summer Time to GMT, always a sad moment for those of us who like to photograph out of doors. The people there are going to produce a banner which will be photographed on the rooftop with the City as a backdrop and become part of the 350.org campaign to put pressure on world leaders to actually agree to some effective action at Copenhagen in December.

Village Underground is just a few minutes walk from Hoxton Market, where the exhibition ‘Taken in London‘ with work by myself and Paul Baldesare continues until the end of the month at ‘The Shoreditch Gallery‘ in the Juggler – see Opening Night, Hanging Day and Taken in London for more details. And just before lunch on Sunday, Paul and I will be giving a five minute illustrated presentation on the show as a part of the ‘This is Not A Gateway‘ festival in Hanbury St, Spitalfields, again about a five minute walk away. Things really are all happening in this part of London – and Photomonth 2009 really is keeping photography very much at the heart of them.