Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Get in on the Airplot – Final Call

I don’t often re-post long messages from elsewhere, but this one is a little different, and it’s something I’ve been involved with for years, opposing airport expansion in general and the expansion of Heathrow in particular.

I grew up in a house under the flight path of one of Heathrow’s two main runways, and almost every day of the year planes were coming into land very low over our back garden and rattling the windows of our house , and for some time I was a keen plane spotter – back in the days before they removed the identification letters to make complaints harder. But then I grew up, and soon realised that this was an airport in the wrong place, and later became aware of the lies and deception that led to its setting up and then gained permission for each stage of its expansion with promises that it would be the last.

In 2003 I took part in the protest march against a third runway from Sipson to a rally on the village green at Harmondsworth (above – and more pictures) and I’ve photographed many protests against it since. The Airplot is an effort to make the development of a small piece of land needed for the third runway legally rather more difficult by registering as many people as possible as ‘beneficial owners’, and I’ve been since very soon after Greenpeace came up with the idea – and if you are not already one, please join up now.

So here is the message from the Airplot team – and please do it now.

Hi folks,

Airplot: http://www.airplot.org.uk

As you might know, Airplot is a small piece of land in the village of Sipson, on the edge of Heathrow Airport. If Heathrow’s third runway goes ahead, both Airplot and Sipson would be destroyed.

So far, an incredible 77,500 people have signed up as beneficial owners to Airplot, along with Greenpeace, Greenpeace, Emma Thompson, Alistair McGowan and Zac Goldsmith. We want to reach 100,000 by May 1st. Can you help?

We realise that you might already be signed up – if you are, please try and get some more people involved, like your friends and family. There’s just three weeks left to do this; when the deeds are finalised on May 1st,the names of all Airplotters will be included, and everyone will be issued with a certificate of beneficial ownership.

If Heathrow expands, Sipson and the surrounding area would be destroyed, and the airport would become the single biggest source of climate pollution in the country. Even though the current government’s plans for Heathrow received a major setback in the courts last month, we will not rest until the project is completely shelved.

If the new government tries to restart the project, we will challenge the proposals through the planning system and are prepared to take peaceful direct action to stop the runway.

Help us grow the Airplot community 100,000, to defend Sipson and the climate, and to let the next UK government realises it is answerable to a huge body of people.

While there is still time please:
Share this message on Facebook and post it to your profile
Get all your family to sign up at http://www.airplot.org.uk
Invite your friends to: http://www.airplot.org.uk
Tweet it, or retweet our Airplot posts from @greenpeaceuk

Thank you!

The Airplot Team

Ford/Visteon Ex-workers March For Pension Justice

In general in the UK as elsewhere, laws are made to protect the interests of the rich and powerful who make the laws, although some have obvious benefits to the rest of society. But in areas around trade unions and pensions, the dice are rather clearly loaded against the workers, as we have seen in several court decisions lately (and if you haven’t read Brendan Montague‘s piece on the judge involved in the RMT decision which, while carefully not alleging any irregularity, demonstrates “the closeness of the British judicial system to major corporate interests” you may like to and ponder why our media keep remarkably quiet about such things – and why they chose to represent the failure to meet some technical requirements of the act which had no effect on the actual voting as “ballot rigging” when the ballot followed normal procedures under independent scrutiny.)

Our pensions laws appear to enable companies to play fast and loose with monies paid by the employees and the employers contributions paid on their behalf. So while Unite may pursue Ford and Visteon over what can only be described in terms like fraud, injustice and theft, their chances of getting justice in court may not be too high. Men and women who had worked for thirty or forty years for Ford/Visteon now find that they have pensions a half or two thirds those that their conditions of employment had promised. It is truly scandalous.

This is one of too many areas where shame attaches to our Labour government for failing to take action over its 13 years in office, years which saw an unprecedented number of new laws but unfortunately few which addressed the real issues of justice, fairness and equality.

You can read more about the pensions scandal and see my pictures from the London march and rally on 31 March in My London Diary. (Some were posted immediately following the event on Indymedia and Demotix.)

Last year I also covered the closure of the Visteon Enfield plant (here and here) and a May Day demonstration by Visteon workers outside the offices of the company administrator, KPMG who had made them (around 610 people working at Belfast, Enfield and Basildon) redundant. The workers and the support of their unions forced Ford and Visteon to agree to a proper severance package rather than the statutory redundancy payments KPMG had offered.

Although Visteon UK was declared insolvent in 2009, Visteon Corp remains one of the largest world suppliers of car parts, with total assets last year of over 4.5 billion US dollars. This is still small compared to Ford, whose assets are over $220 billion.

I was surprised that so few photographers covered this march which raises significant issues, and I was pleased to be there and to lend my support. But in some ways it is easier to work when there are a few more photographers around and you stand out rather less, and we do all pick up ideas from others when covering events. At times I did feel a little on my own.

Section 43 Victory – But Orphan Works Won’t Go Away

Section 43 of the Digital Economy Bill, which would have made many of our photographs ‘orphan works’ and easy game for commercial publishers wanting a free ride on photographers backs got caught in the ‘wash up’ at the end of the current UK parliament. Conservative members led an attack on it and the whole section was deleted.

Photographers – including me – were delighted. I have over 50,000 photographs on the web, all potentially liable to be stolen and used had this section passed into law. And in the fairly unlikely event that I had caught any of the thieving publishers all I could hope for would be a probably derisory usage fee for that particular case.

So I was pleased I’d bothered to write to my Conservative MP, and that he had supported the cause, bringing it up with the shadow minister, who wrote me a letter in reply and spoke strongly against this section in the debate. I don’t kid myself that my action on its own had any bearing on the result, but it was the fact that many of us did the same that gave us the result.

The reply I got from my MP made it clear that he hadn’t considered the issue before he read my letter; so much legislation goes through parliament that most MPs don’t know much about most of it and there is really very little real scrutiny of many measures, indeed often virtually none unless outside people – like us – get stuck in.

Of course it doesn’t end here. There is actually a need for cultural institutions to be able to use material where the owner of the rights genuinely cannot be traced, and I think too that there does need to be legislation to deal with this and with the impact of the Web on disseminating material that often does lose it’s connection with the creator and copyright owner. But this needs to be done not by allowing a free for all overseen only very laxly by the Intellectual Property Office (who unfortunately don’t seem to understand IP) but by some proper system which realises and protects the rights of creators especially where these have not been traced.

As a good starting point I think it should always be made more expensive for commercial users to make use of so-called ‘orphan works’ than those where the creator is known – fees for such material – collected and held by a suitable body – should be based on standard rates, such as those suggested by the NUJ, with a percentage added to meet the costs of the collecting body.

Perhaps the fees this body collects might be held for a period of several years by the body who would then pay over the standard rate fee if it was claimed. After that time it could go into fund that might in some way be generally distributed to creators in a similar way that DACS does for copyright licensing fees.

It would perhaps be more difficult to decide on the allocation of such fees among creators, which would to some extent be arbitrary. But I would propose as a necessary qualification for receiving a share to be membership of a relevant professional body – a trade union, professional agency or similar body. It may not be entirely fair, but I think it is important to support professional creative practice rather than all of those who put pictures on the web.

Also we need changes to the law to make it easier to identify the creators of images, in particular the proper recognition of moral rights. Attribution should become mandatory for newspapers, magazines, removing the derogation they currently have. And the current law which apparently does make it an offence to remove ownership data (including metadata) should be strengthened and implemented, in the first case by prosecution of any companies producing software which does so automatically and withdrawing this from sale.

‘Orphan works’ should too be clearly attributed as such, and one of the responsibilities of the body collecting the fees for their use should be to display thumbnails, keywords and usage details of them on line in a searchable database, at least for the period of time that the fees may be claimed. Creators would then have only to look in a single place to see if their work was being used.

These are just some of my ideas, but its an area we need to look at carefully, to discuss and to come up with practical, workable and fair solutions. You can be sure there are commercial interests out there that will have their lobbyists pushing their own schemes on our next government.

Radio 6

In a way it’s good news that I’m rather getting behind with writing about my own work here, and also in putting it on My London Diary. Good because I often write about the problems that I’ve had or silly mistakes I’ve made, and there has perhaps been less than usual to write about, but also good because it means I’ve been busy.

Too busy in fact to put my recent work on My London Diary, though some of it at least has gone on to Demotix, which gets it to a larger audience with the slight hope that it might sell. Although I’ve always been determined not to let money determine my priorities, it does come in handy at times, and this is one time of year that I’m reminded about it, as today is the start of a new tax year. I’m afraid the Chancellor can’t expect too much from me, and I for one won’t be at all worried about the coming in of a new 50% tax rate for high earners. Though as I’ve said before, “the poor pay taxes, the rich pay accountants.”

It’s over a week ago – last month even – that I was outside Broadcasting House in London to photograph a “protest party” against the closure of BBC 6 Music, a digital-only station that is hidden away somewhere hard to find on my DAB radio but can be listened to world-wide on the Internet. It plays a rather wider range of music than the chart-orientated stations and has access to a huge BBC archive including the sessions by the late John Peel, who I sometimes used to listen to despite the music he played (it wasn’t all bad.) Six isn’t a station I listen to, but much more at the core of public service broadcasting than say Radio 1 or 2 (or BBC 1 TV) which aim at exactly the same audience as most commercial broadcasters.

Cutting it – as the BBC intend – doesn’t really seem to be a case of saving money. It actually costs less overall than one or two of the popular presenters elsewhere in the BBC (who would be no great loss) each earn. It’s a pin-prick in the budget, but along with the Asian Network fits untidily with the BBC’s marketing plans. Frankly they should sack the marketers, which would also save them more.

You can see the pictures from the event and read more about it on my London Diary.

The only real problem in taking pictures was the rain, with several heavy showers. Another advantage of the new Nikon 16-35mm (which this month’s British Journal of Photography expects to come out later this year – and I’ve been using for around 5 weeks) is that it is fairly well waterproofed. Of course I have a UV filter on the front. With long lenses the lens hood offers useful rain protection, but on a wide-angle this is very limited, and you get in the habit of wiping the filter with a cloth very regularly and before virtually every shot. Even then you lose a few, though sometimes the drops fall on areas that don’t really affect the picture. The kind of diffused blur a raindrop gives isn’t a great problem on clouds for example.

After this outing, my two Nikons have now each acquired a small piece of black tape across the small lever that switches from matrix to centre-weighted to spot metering. Although spot metering can be very useful (and I used to use it all the time with black and white film in the Olympus OM4, though it was a rather large spot) if you select it unknowingly it can give rather unpredictable results. With the Nikon D300 and D700 there are also some easily forgotten interactions with other areas of the camera and flash operation. Useful though spot metering can be, it isn’t something you ever want to use by accident.

I’m also finding it far too easy to change exposure mode by accident – and to forget to return it to my normal P setting when I’ve deliberately altered it for a particular series of shots, and can see no easy solution to this. It is surprising how long it can take me to realised in the viewfinder that I’m taking everything at 1/2000s or with the lens wide open.

Waiting around with a couple of other photographers at an event the other day, one of them admitted to almost always using his Nikon on ‘P’ setting (as I do) saying he told people that ‘P’ stood for ‘professional’, and ‘A’ for amateur. ‘M’ of course is for ‘mental’ and there were several suggestions for ‘S’, all slightly rude. But with occasional use of the thumb-wheel over-ride, P (or rather then P*) really does provide the easiest and quickest way to get things right.

I’ve mentioned before my “cockpit drill” which – in theory at least – I carry out every time before taking pictures, usually on the way to an event. Checking the ISO, Quality and White Balance settings, thinking about any adjustments I might need to my basic custom settings, and then making sure that shutter speed in S mode, aperture in A mode and both in M mode are set to useful values (usually around 1/200 and f5.6 or f8 though if I know I may suddenly need a fast shutter speed or extreme depth of field I’ll set them for this) so that if I want to switch to them in a hurry I don’t have to waste time fiddling around. Setting sensible values also helps if you switch modes accidentally. Which I do.

Anniversary of a Death

Today is exactly a year since a 47 year old newspaper seller, trapped by police in a “kettle” around the Bank area in the centre of the City of London while trying to make his way home from work, was assaulted by a police officer and collapsed and died a few yards away on the street from his injuries.

Most of us feel that if the assault had been carried out by anyone other than a police officer, the person concerned would by now be convicted and serving his sentence. Of course the police are in a different position to the rest of us, licensed to use reasonable force where necessary but in this and in many other cases, including the execution of Jean Charles de Menezes in a tube train at Stockwell Station and the almost 200 a year poorly investigated deaths in custody highlighted by the United Families and Friends campaign raise important concerns over their actions and accountability.

The situation in the UK is less extreme than that exposed to the world by the censored Crossfire exhibition in Bangladesh, and we do things more subtly in this country where essentially our class system, land inequality, constitution and laws date from the Norman conquest in 1066 – with of course many later amendments and adjustments.

I left Bank on April 1, 2009 before the situation became violent to photograph elsewhere and so only know about the events later through the published accounts and also personal conversations with many of those who were there, including several photographers who were also injured by police attacks.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.
Sisters of Sean Rigg, killed in Brixton Police station, march in memory of Ian Tomlinson, April 2009
I didn’t go to this morning’s anniversary laying of flowers by the family and others on the pavement where Ian Tomlinson died, partly because of pressure of work, but also because I thought it would be an event suffering from media overcrush, with photographers and videographers elbowing for limited room. Although I usually manage to hold my own in such scrums (anticipation and getting there first fairly often is a great help, though not when some TV crews simply barge rudely in front of you) I seldom enjoy it and often, particularly with events such as this feel it is too much of an intrusion.

I felt that particularly strongly at the last event commemorating Ian Tomlinson and in particular about the laying of flowers by the family. And I was as intrusive as most of the others, though I was appalled by the apparent lack of any sensitivity of one TV crew on the spot.

I’m pleased that – for once – the mass media are taking an interest in the kind of issues that many of us have worked on for years and met with a blank wall from editors. But that means there will be more than plenty of people there to take pictures. There are still many events of some importance that few of us cover.

So despite my sympathies for the Tomlinson family and interest in the issues around Mr Tomlinson’s killing I decided this was one event I would not make the journey to cover.

More on Crossfire

Last week I posted about the exhibition ‘Crossfire‘ at the Drik Gallery in Bangladesh which was barricaded by armed police and the public refused entry. Now on Shaidul News you can read
Drik: Photo power an illustrated article about this with pictures of the opening of the show in the road outside the gallery and a demonstration against the censorship by Satish Sharma which first appeared in Himal Magazine.

The original article in Himal Magazine is easier to read and there are more pictures in the slide-shows there. In it, Sharma discusses several cases of censorship and ask what it is about the photograph that invites censure and censorship.

Those in power fear the power of the photograph and seek to control it. It is a power that comes in part from its status as evidence, at least apparently a very direct stating of the facts, but perhaps even more from the way it can seize our emotions, more directly than writing. The still photograph by crystallising a moment more directly than film.

BA Cabin Crew

While some of my friends were up at first light touring the gates of Heathrow Airport and photographing the pickets (and in some cases then rushing up to Bolton to photograph the UAF being attacked by police as they demonstrated against the EDL there) I had a fairly leisurely start to the morning, catching the 203 bus just before ten to get me to Bedfont Football Club in Hatton, where BA cabin crew were gathering for a meeting at 10.30am on the first day of their 3 day strike.

Although there were quite a few of the BA workers there, they were probably outnumbered by the press and trade union supporters from elsewhere and there were also BA pickets at the various entrances to the airport which covers a pretty huge site on the edge of London.

Heathrow, started by subterfuge during the Second World War as a replacement for Croydon should of course have itself been replaced by now with a more suitably sited airport which would not pollute so much of the capital. For some reason as a nation we have always backed away from the most suitable sites, somewhere well out of London and close to the main rail and motorway routes between London and Birmingham (perhaps Milton Keynes would have been better as an airport than a new town!) Instead we’ve had relatively hare-brained schemes such as Boris Johnson has recently proposed for the Thames estuary. But at least our national madness made for a short bus journey for me on Saturday, even if the pollution from Heathrow is probably reducing my life expectancy materially.

Parts of bus journey give tiny glimpses of the past before the airport, when Heath Row was a village full of orchards and market gardens and farmland, though without the airport much of this might also have been replaced by the kind of development that has swamped the neighbouring village of Stanwell, or become the kind of derelict green belt eaten away by gravel working and small office or factory developments which is rather common in what was Middlesex.

Of course I’ve written about the event and put more pictures on line elsewhere, including My London Diary. It got to be a real press scrum during the actual meeting, and I was in the second row, which was fine for working with a telephoto to photograph the speakers, but made it hard to get full-length shots.

The light rain didn’t help either, and for some time I was so much in a crush I couldn’t be bothered to try and take my flash off one body and put it on the other where it might have been more useful. Working like this in the rain I keep a microfibre cloth bunched up in my left hand and used it to wipe the lens filter between shots, though a few were still spoiled by rain on the lens. And every time I use it I still think I should really have bought a large chamois leather which would do the job just a little better!

© 2010, Peter Marshall
BA workers were told they would be sacked if they talked to the cameras – I hope they were allowed to clap

There were a few more shots at the end of the rally as people began to disperse, and then I lazily caught another 203 to Hatton Cross, just a few minutes walk away, to photograph the pickets there.

There did seem to be a rather full set of BA jets parked in the distance, though it was tricky to include them and the pickets in the same shot.

Unfortunately the Piccadilly line wasn’t running all the way into central London where I needed to be next, but another bus, the 285, took me quickly to Feltham station for a train to Waterloo.

UBS Picks on Cleaners

There is something I find sickening about the way that bankers can pay themselves large bonuses but happily use contracting companies to clean their offices that cut the pay of some of the poorest in London. Not only have the cleaners at UBS suffered a loss in pay, they’ve also lost their rights, and Alberto Durango got the sack for protesting about it as their union rep.

The protests continue, and on Friday night I was there outside the UBS’s large and impressive offices in London’s Liverpool St – next to the station – to cover the event. As at the previous demonstration I photographer there in February, it was damp and there wasn’t a great deal of light. It’s also difficult to think of new ways to photograph an essentially similar event, and the pictures have a certain deja-vu.

But there are times when I think just being there and witnessing and making an attempt to bring what is happening to the attention of others is important, and this in its own small way is one such.

Earlier in the event the two children in this picture were holding a banner with their drawings on it and the message ‘Reinstate My Daddy Now!!!’ but I couldn’t find a way to get a good picture of it (you can see a couple of attempts, along with some of the other pictures I took on My London Diary, which also has more about the event.) Some things just don’t fit a frame well whatever you do.

News, Freedom etc

BBC news this morning reported that a committee of MPs and peers, the joint committee on human rights has asked that a review of all of our terrorism laws passed – often in great haste – since 9/11 should be “an urgent priority for the next Parliament.”

This jogged my memory about a video that EPUK pointed out in this weeks newsletter. Born Under Punches ( Big Brother mix) is a video around 10 minutes long that puts images and clips from various sources along with text – including quotations from George Orwell, Stella Rimington, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Capa and others to the sound track of “Born Under Punches” by Talking Heads.

It includes some familiar pictures of familiar events – including the killing by police of Ian Tomlinson, a year ago next Thursday and various other events in London where police have clashed with protesters and photographers trying to report the events.

Robert Capa is best known for his advice that if your pictures are not good enough it’s because you are not close enough, usually interpreted simply in a physical sense in terms of feet and inches, but also I think meaning that you are not sufficiently involved. One of the books that included his work, lurking somewhere on my shelves, was ‘The Concerned Photographer‘ published in 1968, fourteen years after his death, edited by his brother Cornell Capa which also included the work of Werner Bischof, Chim (David Seymour), Andre Kertesz, Leonard Freed and Dan Weiner.

It is this need to get close to the action that often results in friction between photographers and police, and also means that photographers often get a much clearer view of what is happening at events than some other journalists, even many camera crews. While some independents with movie cameras get in there with the photographers – notably Jason N Parkinson, who appears in ‘Born Under Punches’ on both sides of the camera, the news organisations with larger cameras and often two or three people tend to stick to the sidelines and only move in for the more organised ‘photo ops’, sometimes pushing rather rudely in front of us still photographers to do so.

So when – as in the reports of last Saturday’s protest involving the EDL and the UDF – photographers tell a very different story to that put out by the BBC and some other news organisations, you can believe the photographers. They were there, as were some journalists, while the BBC are generally only thereabouts. Photography isn’t just f8 and be there, but both a a sine qua non for photojournalists. Having heard BBC reports of events that I’ve covered in the past, I have no doubts that their reporting is often incomplete, sometimes incompetent and almost always biased.

The BBC does make some excellent programmes (and I often enjoy listening to them on the radio.) I’ve always supported the idea of the BBC and I think it vital to our democracy that we have public service broadcasting and a truly independent news service. But years of covering protest in London have led me to the conclusion that the BBC no longer – if they ever did – provides this. Frankly programmes such as the ‘News Quiz’ and the ‘Now Show’ are often closer to the truth than the news broadcasts or the ‘Today’ programme.

Capa’s quote used in the video was a good one: “The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.”

Crossfire

Yesterday, as I read on PDN Pulse, an exhibition opened in Dhaka, Bangladesh with police barricading the doors of the Drik Agency where it was being shown.

The statement on Drik reads:

Drik Picture Library was forcibly closed down by the police today to prevent the launch of Pathshala, South Asian Media Academy, and the unveiling of a photography exhibition by photojournalist Dr Shahidul Alam, `Crossfire.’

From midday onwards, Drik was pressurised by RAB, police and Special Branch officials to close down the show on grounds that it does not have official permission, and later, on the grounds that it will create anarchy.

In its 20 years of existence, Drik has forged a unique position in the international cultural arena, which has earned Bangladesh a special place in the world of photography. The unfortunate event which was broadcast worldwide has tarnished the image of this democratically-elected government. We call upon the government to immediately remove the police encirclement, so that the exhibition can be opened for public viewing, and Bangladesh’s image as an independent democratic nation can be reinstated.

The show, with photographs by Drik’s founder Shahidul Alam and curated by Jorge Villacorte from Peru with research by Momena Jalil, Tanzim Wahab and Fariha Karim, was scheduled to be open to the public at the Drik Gallery until 31 March 2010 but currently can only be viewed on line due to the police action.

‘Crossfire’ gets its name from the statements issued by the RAB (Rapid Action Battalion) , a sinister black-clad group formed six years ago from members of Bangladesh Police, Bangladesh Army, Bangladesh Navy and Bangladesh Air Force which carries out extra-judicial killings and torture of people in custody. Set up in 2004 by Law Minister Moudud Ahmed, they have killed over 1000 people, whose bodies are then dumped in fairly random locations and a stock press release states that they were “killed in crossfire” between the police and criminals. A new word, “crossfired” has been added to the vocabulary.

As Alam say, the facts of these murders by the RAB are already largely well known, and a court which tried to investigate them was recently dissolved by the Chief Justice immediately before the Government was to give evidence. The installation at Drik in his words aims to “to reach out at an emotional level. I aim to get under the skin. To walk those cold streets. To hear the cries, see terror in the eyes. To sit quietly with the family besides a cold corpse. But every photograph is based on in-depth research. On actual case studies. On verifiable facts. A fragment of the story has been used to suggest the whole. A quiet metaphor for the screaming truth.”

The large format colour pictures show scenes where these killings occurred, and had to be taken in secret, often early in the morning – also a favourite time for the murders. The existence of the show also had to be kept secret, and it was only announced on the 16 March, when Where Death Squads Struck in Bangladesh was published in the Lens blog of the New York Times with a slide show of the pictures.

On ShahidulNews you can read more about Crossfire, with a Google Map giving details of many of the killings and their locations, and a dark video, ‘RAB Night Walk‘.

Shahidul Alam is Bangladesh’s best known photographer and his work has often before been controversial. Last November a show on Tibet at the gallery was closed down by the police following pressure from the Chinese government, and the web site was hacked and fake virus warnings put on it to deter people from viewing it. Thirteen years ago, as the Lens article relates, Alam was set on in the street by a group of men who pulled him out of a rickshaw, stole his camera and computer and stabbed him 8 times – in what he describes as “a particularly unsubtle warning” about his opposition political activities.