Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Million Women Rise

Photographing last Saturday’s ‘Million Women Rise‘ march in London would have been rather easier if I had shaved my beard off. The march was a ‘women only’ event, although I’m fairly certain that there were a few men marching in the thick of it with their partners.

The previous day I’d told one of the women photographers I was working with about this event, and she was able to photograph it in the way I would normally work, getting into the right position and making contact with people as she took their pictures, while I was limited by having to stay on the sidelines – except at the head of the march.

Of course there were plenty of women on the march who wanted to be photographed, and some even rushed across to make sure I photographed them, or slowed to make space so I could read their banners, but too often I was further away than I would have liked, or could not get a proper line of sight.

So these two women from the ‘Stripping The Illusion‘ campaign against lap dancing by Object were carrying placards in the shape of teacups, protesting against the ridiculously named ‘Spearmint Rhino’ which they have given an “Award for the biggest misuse of the word ‘Gentleman‘” (shown on the left hand placard) but I didn’t manage to show them well enough to use an image and thus mention them when I wrote about the event. Nor did I manage to get a picture of the woman behind them with her placard about Shirin Alam Holi, a 28 year old Kurdish political prisoner in a Tehran jail sentenced to death in January for “warring against God” by working with a Kurdistan opposition group. And I’m sure there was much more I missed, both in the march and by not attending the rally at its end.

Of course I did manage to take some pictures, even some I like, but so many times I wanted to get closer and couldn’t. Standing on the sidelines I sometimes felt rather more like a voyeur than I like, having to use a longer lens than usual.

I did step a few inches into the road to take this picture, and just a few more inches to take the next frame which showed more of the text on the banner. Immediately one of the stewards was at my elbow, requesting politely that I show my support from the pavement and not from the road.

I’m not complaining because I feel hard done by. Rather just that I wasn’t able to support the event as fully as I would have liked, and as I have managed to do at other women’s events. You can see some of what I did manage to do on My London Diary.

EDL & UAF

I didn’t enjoy photographing the English Defence League on Friday. If they had come into a pub where I was having a drink with a friend we would quickly have drunk up and gone elsewhere, and if I hadn’t have been there to take photographs I would probably have crossed to the other side of the road and walked by.

Fortunately they were on their best behaviour, and when the three of us who had walked down together decided we needed to get into the crowd of them and take some pictures if we weren’t exactly welcome we were tolerated, and after a few minutes (when we had been joined by many of the other photographers and journalists, some of whom had been hovering on the edge when we arrived) they really began to put on an act for us.

So we didn’t get any violence, and I was even able to have some reasonably sensible conversation with some of them, though there was a considerable amount of taunting particularly of a younger photographer who seemed a little nervous and a young Asian woman reporter. But all around us was a sea of obscenity and racist comments, all at the same time as they were assuring us they weren’t racists and posing with a black guy as their proof.

At first I wrote “see” and perhaps that would have been appropriate as the EDL seems very much more like some kind of twisted religion, a cult of St George, the English Flag, football, drunkenness and anti-foreignism. It isn’t exactly chauvinism and certainly not patriotism – for they dismiss virtually everything that shows Britain at its best. It’s a fear of people and cultures that are different from “us” and one that includes English people like me and the UAF and Muslims. Though of course Muslims do appear to have a special place in their demonology.

Earlier in the day I’d been with the UAF (Unite Against Fascism) counter-demonstration, in another crowd of people taking pictures, but this was a very different crowd, racially mixed and with at least as many women as men. I felt much more at home, these were my people, a part of my vision of the future for England. Whatever I thought about the politics it was just a so much more positive experience.

Photographically my main problem throughout the day was the sun, but it also gave some of the pictures an added interest. I think I’m far too sensitive to flare in my pictures, and when I sat down to edit the work I shot late that evening probably eliminated some I should have kept in. Working with a wide angle – Nikon’s new 16-35 zoom – and shooting more or less straight into the sun makes flare virtually inevitable. It’s a fact of photography and really I should accept it, but I find it hard. And of course some agencies are likely to throw out pictures because of it. But I shouldn’t be working for the agencies, they should be working for me. When I have time I need to go back and think again about some of those I rejected.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
A little bit of flare – the sun was more or less at the top of the flag at top centre
I was impressed by the 16-35mm. Focus seems noticeably faster than the old Sigma 12-24, and I didn’t miss the extremes at the wide end, while the extra at the longer end is very useful. I think this will become my favourite lens, and on a bright day like this f4 was more than fast enough – the widest aperture I used was f5.6 and that was accidental. Even in dull light, with perfectly usable results at ISO3200 I think f4 is usually fast enough, though perhaps I might one day get either the Sigma 24 or 28mm f1.8 lenses for low light work. One perhaps one day Sigma – PLEASE – will send my f2.8 24-70 back and it will work properly…

Since I don’t yet have the 24-70, I was working with the Nikon 18-200mm on the D300 body and it as usual did a pretty good job, though occasionally refusing to focus. I’ve had it checked twice without a great deal of improvement. Its something that happens very occasionally with all auto-focus lenses in my experience – some subjects just won’t work, but more with the 18-200mm than I think reasonable.

In one of the melees between press and police I lost the lens hood from the Nikon 18-200, though it was no great loss, being largely decorative – you can’t really design a hood to cover this range. But all the Nikon lens hoods I’ve owned seem to be too flimsy to stay in place with the bayonet system they use – and even tend to fall off when you put the camera inside your coat to shield it from the rain. I’ve caught this one or picked it up from the ground countless times, but this time didn’t notice it in the crowd. But its no great loss, though it provided some physical protection.

More pictures from the event on My London Diary.

Crown Court Demo

Last Friday morning was a little disconcerting as I found myself walking up a road that I’ve not visited for many years, but first walked up in the mid 1950s, in short trousers and with a new blazer that was a little too big to give room for growth and satchel. I didn’t quite get as far as my old school at the top of the hill, though I saw it a little ahead as I turned off at the building before it, Isleworth Crown Court, a new building since my young days.

I wasn’t going to court but to photograph a demonstration outside it, where young Muslim boys and men who had been picked out from CCTV coverage of the demonstrations in January 2009 during the Israeli attacks on Gaza were being sentenced.

Before their trials the judge had told them he’d already viewed the evidence and advised them to plead guilty. I didn’t think this was how we usually did justice in our courts, and certainly at least one defendant who went against this advice later left the court an innocent man. But most decided to plead guilty, doubtless being advised that this would result in a lesser sentence.

But the opposite appears to be true. The judge made clear in at least some of his judgements that he was very much intending to make an example of these people aimed at their community. Actions that at other times might have been expected to lead to a smallish fine or suspended sentence led to jail sentences of a year or even two.

Protesters see the trials and sentencing as both racist and an attempt to suppress legitimate expression of protest as well as unjust. The effects on the young men unfortunate enough to have been identified from the camera footage (mainly because, unlike many more seasoned demonstrators, they had not thought to keep their faces masked) are clearly disproportionate to their actions. Collectively they seem certain to fuel terrorism in this country, their severity and unfairness acting as effective recruitment for dissident groups. I can only hope – though it doesn’t seem likely – that their will be some review and serious reduction in these sentences after the judge has done his worst.

Stop the War had called an emergency picket of the court at relatively short notice, and probably few people know where Isleworth is or find it easy to get there early on a Friday morning (though its only 35 minutes on the Piccadilly line from the centre of London – and a ten minute walk.) So I was really quite surprised to find around 15 people there when I arrived – and about the same number again arrived while I was there.

Photographing around courts can be a problem, and we were told we had to move away when we tried to take pictures of a couple of women with placards just in front of the court entrance. The protesters too had to move just a few yards away on the pathway leading from the small car park at the front of the building. But otherwise the police were helpful, even moving their car out of the park to give the protest more space.

This was my first outing with the new Nikon 16-35mm f4 lens. I’ve been using the Sigma 12-24 as my main wide-angle on the D700, and although it works well on the DX format D300, with the full frame it is just a bit extreme. Very few pictures really work at 12mm, and although I seldom notice the stretching at the edges that results from its rectilinear design in the viewfinder, they are only too obvious when I see the image on my computer screen or in print.

Using the physics and geometry I learnt many years ago just a hundred yards or so up the road from the court, while the distance from the the centre of a simple 12mm lens to the sensor is – for a subject at infinity – 12mm, the distance from that same lens centre to the corner of the frame is 24.6mm, giving roughly twice the magnification. Hardly surprising it is noticeable, as the maths also applies to the much more complex arrangement of glass in a photographic lens. The horizontal angle of view of the lens at 12mm is around 112 degrees, and anything over 90 degrees really calls for a different perspective except in very special cases. On full-frame anything below around 17mm is seldom much use.

Nikon used to make a 17-35mmf2.8, and it was a good lens for film and for DX Cameras, but they discontinued it a while back, though it is still listed on the Nikon UK site. It was also rather large and heavy, and still sells second-hand for around a grand. With their FX camera they brought out a larger, heavier and more expensive 14-24mm f2.8, which seems a very good lens but has a bulbous front element that you can’t put a filter on for protection. It is faster and doubtless sharper than the 12-24mm Sigma I’ve used for around six years, but considerably larger and heavier, and given a choice I’d buy the Sigma again. It does the job and the D700 (or D3s) takes away much of the need for fast lenses.

But when Nikon announced their new AF-S NIKKOR 16-35mm f/4G ED VR it seemed to me to be an ideal lens for FX, although the various boards across the Internet were full of photographers who strongly and vituperatively felt otherwise. My only disappointment was that it was quite so large and heavy – around the same size and almost as heavy as the 17-35 f2.8 – in part perhaps because of digital favouring a design that gives rays more perpendicular to the sensor, and in part because it includes VR – Nikon’s Vibration Reduction II system.

I’m not sure that I need VR. In practice I haven’t found it seems to make much difference to my picutres even on the 18-200 zoom where I’d expect it to be most valuable at the long end. But it doesn’t seem to do any harm – most of my pictures were sharp before and they are still sharp now. But I think it does more for test exposures than in anger, though perhaps it will help in those situations where people are pushing me while I’m taking pictures.

VR also puts up the price of lenses, though I think I got a pretty decent deal considering I got the lens the day after it was launched for a price that was in three figures ( just.) Focus is really fast and everything seems pretty sharp – usable wide open though just a little better at f5.6, but the difference isn’t big in practice. The corners seem pretty sharp, there is a little chromatic aberration which is readily corrected in Lightroom, and distortion seems reasonably low, though I’d want to correct it for architectural work – not quite as good as my old 12-24 Sigma in this respect. And it does feel like a lens built for pro use, unlike many cheaper Nikon lenses which clearly are not, although in true Nikon fashion, the lens hood can rather easily get knocked off. It’s one area where Sigma are clearly superior.

So once I get the Sigma 24-70 back from repair (soon please – its been almost a month away now – and get it right this time), I’ll be putting this on the D300 body, where it works like a 36-105. Or for for those days when I feel I might need something longer I’ll use the Nikon 18-200 (27-300) on the D300.

Marcus Bleasdale – Rape of a Nation

Marcus Bleasdale‘s The Rape of a Nation on Burn is a powerful set of 25 images from the “deadliest war in the world today” taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where 5.4 million people have died since 1998. Many of the 45,000 who die each month do so from readily preventable causes due to the complete collapse of the economy and any systems of health care.

As well as the strength of the images, I was also impressed by the presentation, with an interface that really works, and where for once it makes sense to click the “full screen” icon – which gave me excellent quality sharp 1560×1050 pixel images (though the size will presumably depend on your screen.) I was able to view the pictures at my own speed with captions appearing over a small strip at the bottom of the image on mouseover and a left-click changing to the next picture, and everything worked smoothly.

This is also a site that attracts some interesting comments on the work – and where the photographer himself replies. Well worth reading, and in his replies he does provide some links to sites which supply some powerful insight into the political and economic forces behind the war which was an aspect I thought lacking in the text when I first looked at these pictures on Burn.

The Future for Photography?

Last night’s meeting of the London Photographers Branch of the NUJ was an interesting one, with the union’s General Secretary Jeremy Dear asking for our thoughts about the looming threat of orphan works legislation in the Digital Economy Bill and a panel debate with Martin Argles, Kelvin Bruce and John Harris, chaired by Jess Hurd.

The two subjects are of course linked, in that the present clauses in the Bill currently being considered in Parliament very much threaten our future ability to control copyright and make a living.

One body that thinks we are making a fuss over nothing is the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) a part of the government’s Department for Business, Innovation & Skills . Their grasp of the subject is clearly demonstrated when, according to a report on page 4 of this week’s British Journal of Photography (BJP) by Oliver Laurent, told him that any photographer could opt out of imaging licensing schemes that would allow usage of “orphan images” by phoning or e-mailing the licensing body.

The rather obvious flaw is that we are talking about images where by definition the photographer who created them is not known to the licensing body, so there is no way that they can exclude the images of any particular photographer. The only thing you could opt out of is payment for images that have been used through the scheme!

The IPO also think that any licensing scheme would not apply to images found online, whereas it seems fairly clear that this is by far the main source of such images and one that is most unlikely to remain untapped for any length of time by image users.

Although the proposal as it stands is a disaster, the idea of a body such as the Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) being able to licence the use of images whose copyright owner has not been determined is actually a good one, and could actually be a useful source of income for photographers. But there do need to be proper safeguards to protect our interests. Here are some of the points I think are vital:

there needs to be a clear and proper definition of the kind of ‘diligent search’ that has to be made before any image can be treated as an orphan image;
fees charge for usage of orphan images need to reflect the going commercial rates for the usage (which would be passed on to the claimant if a claim is made), plus an additional fee to cover the expenses of the licensing body;
all images licensed for use need to be displayed in a suitable way on a web site published by the licensing body so that photographers may readily search this to find when their images have been used so they can make a claim;
that firm action should be taken against any bodies which remove metadata from images as a matter of course when putting work on line;
that attribution for photographers should become mandatory for all printed and electronic media.

I think that legislation should also look again at the problem of photographers getting redress for any use of images without consent, and provide simplified processes and some greater sanction against unauthorised usage. At the moment there actually is probably little or no incentive for publishers to bother to licence orphan images.

The panel debate brought up some interesting points (and it was recorded and is now available on the London Photographers Branch web site) but I think failed to grasp the magnitude of the changes that are currently happening.

Martin Argles did tell us that the”official” line for The Guardian management was that print is dead and that the future is on the web, and we all know that the local press has already effectively disappeared in many parts of the country (there are still a few real local papers.) But I don’t think that the discussion really took these changes on board, nor the growth of citizen journalism and blogging.

But so far the web has failed to generate the kind of revenue needed to support the press as we know it, and in particular the kind of fees that we know are needed to keep photographers in business. The real problem with the web is also one of its great strengths, that content is almost entirely available free.

Some sites of course make money through the sale of goods, and others through advertising, traditionally the support for print newspapers and magazines. It’s proved hard to make enough, though I worked and made a reasonable part of my living through an advertising-supported commercial site for around 8 years. It isn’t a model I particularly like as it does very much distort what gets published – as we’ve seen in our newspapers and magazines over the years, driving us into the yards of drivel dribble over celebrities and sport that passes for news in most papers.

I’m not sure that the kind of subscription model that some newspapers are now advocating will succeed – there are too many free services, often providing more up to date and more accurate information. At the moment there isn’t a news equivalent of ‘Wikipedia’ but I suspect it may be a matter of time, and there are many detailed news reports appearing on various citizen journalism and other sites.

At the moment we pay our telecoms company (via our ISP where they are not the same) for providing bandwidth but make no contribution to those providing the content on that bandwidth. I hopethis is a situation that may change, although the charge could well be so low we would hardly notice it. Content providers – even this blog – would then have the option to register and claim their share.

But whatever happens I think there will in the future be very few still photographers able to make a living from photojournalism. There were a couple of interesting statistics that came up in the discussion last night. One that the number of staff photographers – I think in Britain – is now only around thirty, and the second that the number of photographers that graduate from our colleges each year is roughly the same as the total number of people making a living from photography.

Most of those people – and many of us currently in the business in various ways – will have to find other ways to make a living, and this isn’t really a new thing. Many of the photographers whose work I admire never really made a living from it, or did so only for a part of their working life. Some relied on partners or family to keep them going, others taught or worked at other jobs. Some lived on weddings or other social photography while pursuing their real work as a personal project.

Earlier I mentioned the BJP, and that is also changing. Established in 1854 it has been a weekly magazine since 1864, but this week’s issue is the last in the current format. The new version the magazine will now be on sale from the first Wednesday of every month for £6.99. I’ve yet to be convinced there is a point in the kind of monthly publication it intends to be, but it certainly has become much less important as a weekly publication, the print version lagging behind on-line sources of photography news. Because it was a weekly publication I’d often not only read the news that interested me but also written about it here before BJP had a chance to publish. But I’ll miss it as a weekly. Something I read with my lunch most Wednesdays.

If you are a photographer living or working in London, if you haven’t already joined the London Photographers Branch of the NUJ I’d suggest you consider it now. It’s good to be able to talk to others and discuss the problems and challenges we face on the job. It’s often good to know that you have a union that will give you support if you need it.

An Anti-social Act in Accrington

Photographing Santa Claus, people in fancy dress and a pipe band marching through the town constitutes suspicious and anti-social behaviour according to Lancashire police. The story and video taken by one of the two photographers stopped by police in Accrington a week before Christmas was published by The Guardian last Sunday. He was arrested and held for eight hours before being released without charge.

The two photographers taking pictures in the town centre were initially approached by a young police community support officer who stated she was questioning them under the Terrorism Act – obviously in direct contradiction of the advice issued to all police by the Home Office. The two men concerned could almost certainly have avoided a confrontation by telling her what they were doing rather than standing on their rights, but they took the latter course, and the situation escalated in a rather predictable way. The acting sergeant she brought in to back her up perhaps realised that the suggestion of terrorism was ridiculous, and instead came out with the accusation that taking photographs was an anti-social act.

It was a situation that was nothing to do with law and everything to do with saving police face, as the sound-track of the video which Bob Patefield kept running throughout the confrontation until after his arrest I think makes clear (the photographer accompanying him finally did give his name and address and was not arrested.)

The really disturbing part of the story for me is the attitude of the police authority. Rather than admitting that the officers concerned had made a mistake and apologising, Lancashire police, according The Guardian, issued a statement which said ‘”they and members of the public were “concerned about the way in which [Patefield] was using his camera”. It said police felt they had “no choice” but to arrest him because he was refusing to co-operate.’

I don’t actually think it generally makes sense for photographers – or citizens generally – not to cooperate with the police, although I think we do need to stand up for our rights to take photographs. If people – whether or not in uniform – ask me why I’m taking pictures I tell them, and if appropriate shown them some ID or offer them my business card.

Things are a little easier because I have a UK Press Card- for some years through the PPA and now from the NUJ – though it isn’t always a great deal of use and on several occasions police have simply refused to accept it as genuine. I also carry a copy of a letter from one of the libraries I put work in, confirming to “whom it may concern” that I work for them and giving a name and a phone number for any queries. In the past with some projects I’ve found it useful to carry some examples of my work to make it easier to explain to people what I am doing. Just because the law says I have a right to photograph in public places doesn’t mean that it isn’t sometimes a good idea to explain what I’m doing to anyone who is concerned or even just interested in what I’m doing.

I photographed on the streets for more than 20 years before I had a proper press card, and particularly during the IRA campaign was stopped by police quite a few times while taking pictures. Usually our exchanges were short and polite and both police and I soon happily continued on our ways getting on with our work. Actually I think they were often rather glad to get away as I do tend to go on a bit about photography.

Mr Patefield was almost certainly acting within the law in standing up for his rights, and appears to have been wrongly arrested. He may even be able to take a case against the police and get some compensation for what happened to him – as has happened to some others. I rather hope so.

Freedom to Film – Worldwrite in Hackney

Last October I went to Hackney to join education charity WorldWrite in their protest against the interference with the right to film in public places that they have faced, mainly by officials working for Hackney council. I wrote about it in Worldbytes Defend the Freedom to Film, which included a few pictures I took in Ridley Road market, one of the places where they had been told they could not film.

You can now see the film ‘Freedom to Film‘ they made on that day, and – health warning – one of the people they interviewed is a rather maniacal looking photographer called Peter Marshall. Apart from that it’s a well made film that states many of the issues clearly.

One of the points made on the film is that we are all being watched all the time by CCTV – as the notice above makes clear, though I couldn’t quite follow its logic. Though I do seem to remember someone being convicted of a lewd act with a bicycle last year.

But seriously I’m pleased that WorldWrite are making a stand and promising to record and make public every interference with their filming in public places. The flier they were handing out during the filming gave a clear statement of the law:

There is in fact NO LAW against filming or taking photographs in public places and permission or a licence is NOT required for gathering news for news programmes in public spaces.

I hope Hackney Council are listening and ensure their employees get the message.

Just a few yards away is God First Hair Do and you can see a picture and a few more pictures from Ridley Road on My London Diary.

Street Party

I often think London serves its tourists rather badly so far as it’s well-known landmarks are concerned, and as it happens I was taking pictures in three of them on the same day, Trafalgar Square, Parliament Square and Piccadilly Circus.

Trafalgar Square was improved greatly when the north side of it was closed to traffic, and at least makes a try with the column, lions and fountains, and the National Gallery along the whole of its north side is an impressive building (though its new block is uninspiring – thanks to Prince Charles we didn’t get a “monstrous carbuncle” that by now we would admire and love, but instead later got the unusually timid and rather bland post-modern Sainsbury Wing by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. The square’s south end is still a traffic scheme, with poor old Charles isolated on his horse, and again St Martins to the east is on the other side of a busy road. It’s an area that cries out for a more radical approach, particularly to traffic movement.

Parliament Square is frankly ridiculous. Traffic flows around all four sides and there is not even a crossing for pedestrians to get to the central area – you need to study the traffic lights and take your chances when they stop the cars. Understandably one of the constraints on the area is the need for security, but rather than ugly tank defences above ground we could have some nice landscaping – perhaps even a moat… And of course redirect traffic around the east and north side only, with proper pedestrian crossings.

But Piccadilly Circus is just a mess. A rather shabby pedestrian area around Eros, and its main feature a wall of advertising, but again traffic is the real problem, and the congestion charge doesn’t seem to have helped much. Perhaps one problem is that it is a flat rate charge, and that once you’ve paid it for the day it acts as an incentive to drive around more. Perhaps road pricing that charged for the actual time spent on the road would be more efficient – and have a built in incentive to avoid congested areas.

I don’t have a lot to write about last week’s Valentine Party at Piccadilly Circus. Of course as well as photographing the people involved I wanted to show where it was happening, and make use of that aluminium statue (after all Eros was particularly relevant to an event about love) and also all that neon – as it was an event opposing commercialisation.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Historic Annual Earth Healing Circle at Piccadilly Circus
This year’s party was perhaps too popular, making it too crowded for there to be a great deal of dancing, and also often too crowded to take pictures. The 12-24mm did come in handy, though as usual it was often just a bit too wide. But I enjoyed taking pictures and meeting people. More about the event and a ridiculous number of pictures on My London Diary.

More on Copyright

I’ve long been a fan of the Photo Attorney blog by US attorney Carolyn E. Wright, which recently celebrated five years on line – though if you have an old bookmark you should to update as it is now at a new address. (I think all the links I made to the old site still work.) She gives some great advice on legal matters for photographers, much of which is relevant to those of us outside the USA too. Occasionally her site has been the first place where I’ve read about some of the problems photographers have had here in the UK too.

A week ago Wright made a great post on another blog I look at regularly, A Photo Editor, in an article Photographers- How To Deal With Infringements and one of the benefits of not mentioning it here immediately is that this has now attracted quite a number of interesting and informed comments. Her piece has some useful advice on making use of the DMCA (the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 1998) as well as the advice “If you created the photo in a country that is a signatory to the Berne Convention, you do not have to register in the U.S. to protect your copyright or to file an infringement lawsuit in the U.S. However, if you do, then you may be entitled to statutory damages and attorneys fees” which perhaps makes the situation clearer than some other sources (Though one of the comments asks the very good question why, since the US is a signatory, you need to register photos taken there. There’s signing and there’s signing!)

But her piece very clearly lays out a series of steps photographers can consider and take to try and recover fees for the use of their work. However much of this may soon be history so far as UK photographers are concerned, with the Digital Economy Bill now making its way through Parliament. As mentioned here before, this law is Mandelson’s baby part dictated to him in a Corfu villa by David Geffen and is expected to be passed within the next month or two and, as the Copyright Action web site puts it:

“It introduces orphan works usage rights, which – unless amended, which HMG says it will not – will allow the commercial use of any photograph whose author cannot be identified through a suitably negligent search. That is potentially about 90% of the photos on the internet.

“Copyright in photos is essentially going to cease to exist…”

On that site you can read and download a letter to post to your MP, preferably with your own comments, but otherwise as it stands (download links are in 3 formats at the bottom of the letter.) If you are a photographer or a lover of photography and a UK voter please consider doing so – and don’t leave it, do it now. I’m getting mine ready to send now.

Private in Public

Last Friday lunchtime I was photographing a demonstration in the City of London, in front of a large modern office building close to Liverpool St station. The building houses UBS, a Swiss-based company formed by the 1998 merger of the Union Bank of Switzerland and the Swiss Bank Corporation, the second-largest manager of private wealth assets in the world and the second largest bank in Europe according to Wikipedia.

It’s also a company that is trying to bolster its reputation following a continuing investigation into dodgy off-shore accounts designed to fool the US tax authorities, and last month it issued a new code of conduct and business ethics which all employees are required to sign. Apparently the new interest in ethical conduct doesn’t apply to its own relations with cleaners, and it handed over the cleaning contract to a new company, Lancaster, on Feb 1. They immediately cut the cleaners hours – and thus their pay – and sacked the union shop steward, Alberto Durango.

The UBS offices have a wide pavement area in front of them, generally walked across by the public but actually owned by UBS – the kind of privately owned public space that makes up large areas of our cities now. UBS is on the southern edge of the large Broadgate estate which is one such area, developed on the former site of Broad St station (which was of course part of the publicly owned British Rail before it was sold off.) The public are freely allowed onto such areas as consumers to visit and consume the services of the various companies that occupy them, but we are not allowed the freedoms that we normally enjoy on the public highway – such as free speech and taking photographs.

To me this is reflects a deficiency in our planning processes – which should insist on such pavements being a part of the public highway as a condition of planning consent and also possibly of our laws about what is and is not public space. Photographers recently demonstrated at Canary Wharf against the restrictions on photographing there – another large private estate on formerly public owned land.

So I wasn’t at all surprised after I took this picture

that the security guard at the left – his boss is the guy with the umbrella talking to some of the demonstrators telling them they can’t demonstrate there – came up and told me I was not allowed to take photographs. And of course when I asked him why this was, his reply was totally predictable. “Security, this is a bank” he told me. “But I’m pointing my camera away from the bank” I replied, “so how is security involved?” His answer was to tell me that if I continued to take pictures there he would call the police and ask them to remove me, although he did also tell me that I could photograph from the pavement by the side of the road – which would of course mean that I was actually photographing the bank. Somehow that wasn’t a problem.

Of course it isn’t really about security at all. It’s about asserting the rights of the property owner, and also on this occasion about the embarrassment of the company at having a demonstration about the truly abysmal way they are treating their cleaning staff.

What I think is more serious about this is that within a few minutes the police did arrive, not to deal with me, though several times officers did politely tell me to move back onto the public pavement when I strayed on to the private forecourt, but to force the protesters to move off of private land. I fail to see that a peaceful protest on private land that is causing no damage, is of limited duration and no threat to public order should be of any concern to the police. It seems to me to be essentially a civil matter rather than a criminal one, and that the police force have rather more important things that should occupy them.

I’d be very much happier with a police force that acted to protect the rights of workers.

More pictures from the event on My London Diary.