Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Speak Out!

Some events are important but don’t really offer a great deal for the photographer to work with. On Saturday lunchtime at the Angel in Islington I went to a demonstration against the shameful way that we treat people who want to come and live in this country and to contribute to our economy. Some come seeking asylum, some for other reasons, but whatever restrictions we have on immigration, we should treat people fairly and humanely. At the moment it is only too clear that we do not.

We have policies that stop people from working but fail to provide proper support. That imprison people who have committed no crime (and set up special prisons for the purpose, run for profit by companies that are apparently without morals.) We have a Borders Agency that seems to take delight in operating procedures that deny people proper legal representation and that appears to be institutionally racist. A government that seems determined to outflank the racists on the right hand side in an attempt to gain electoral advantage.

The people in the background of this picture are from the Suarez family. One of their young members who grew up in this country – where all his family now live – faces deportation because of a juvenile offence. He’s one of the successes of our system in that since then he hasn’t been in trouble again. But a few years later he is threatened with deportation to a country he left when he was six and has no family. His case has gone to the European Court of Human Rights, but our immigration officers don’t care about that – they tried to deport him without waiting for the legal process to take its course. He’s still here only because all his family turned up at Heathrow to protest when they tried to put him on a plane. They will probably try again and hope they can get away with it without the family noticing.

But it was Christina who made me thing and feel most at the event. Nineteen years old, her husband is in Campsfield Detention Centre awaiting deportation, breaking up their young family. She had never spoken in public before, and broke down in tears. It was hard to keep on photographing, but I felt I had to, to do what little I could for her case – and to put the pictures and her story on news sites as soon as possible.

More about the event, the cases and more pictures on My London Diary.

Agustí Centelles (1909-85)

This morning I listened to the Today programme as I washed up the breakfast things and heard an interview with Sam Lesser, one of the seven remaining Britons who went to Spain with the International Brigade, all of whom have now been made Spanish citizens and given Spanish passports.

Sam Lesser in 2006

But of course as well as those thousands of brave individual who went to Spain to fight for freedom, there were many Spaniards also fighting.

And when we think of the photographs of the Spanish Civil War, probably we immediately think of Robert Capa – and in particular his ‘Falling Soldier‘ picture.

But of course there were also Spanish photographers. Or in the case of Agustí Centelles (1909-85), Catalan photographers. A photojournalist in Barcelona, he became an official photographer for the Republican government, and even managed to continue using his Leica when interned in the Bram refugee camp in France in 1939.

When he fled to France in February 1939 he took several thousand negatives with him. Later, when France was occupied by the Germans, he decided to return in secret to Spain, but left his negatives hidden in a house in France, as his pictures could have incriminated many Spaniards and led to their persecution by Franco. It was only 40 years later, after the fall of Franco that he could return and reclaim his work.

An exhibition of his work from 1936-9, “Agustí Centelles: journal dune guerre et dun exil, EspagneFrance 1936-1939” opened at the Jeu de Paume (Hotel de Sully site) in Paris yesterday and continues until 13 Sept 2009. You can read more about it in French on their site, and also in English on Art Knowledge News. There is also an extensive collection of his work on line at VEGAP – I’ve not yet looked at all 336, but what I have seen is enough to convince me that we should be thinking of him as the major photographer of the Spanish Civil War.

Too often we think of events that happen abroad – particularly in the majority world – only in terms of the photographs made by photographers from the Western agencies who travel there – almost as if photographs that don’t come from Magnum or VII or Getty or Reuters somehow aren’t real. Agencies such as Drik should have changed the way we see the South by now.

Pure Genius – Only 13 Years One Month late

I’m not sure now why the virtually only pictures I took at the ‘Pure Genius’ land occupation in 1996 were made on a swing lens panoramic camera. Perhaps there was something about the open spaces of that site – now occupied by tall luxury riverside flats – that made me want to think panoramic. But I exposed two complete rolls of film in the Horizon – 42 exposures, and just 5 black and white images, I think on a Leica.

The site was a large one, 13 acres, and by the time I took these pictures on May 6 the activists from ‘The Land is Ours‘ had already begun to transform the site, erecting buildings and preparing the land to grow crops.

I was reminded of this 13 years on by the news that a group inspired by this earlier ‘The Land is Ours’ action had occupied a long empty and overgrown site next to Kew Bridge as the Kew Eco-Village. I took a little detour to walk past there and take a look on my way home on Sunday but as nothing much seemed to be happening and I didn’t want to miss my train home (only hourly on Sundays) I didn’t try to make contact. Perhaps I’ll return another time when more is happening.

You can watch a video of the occupation, look at a local blog, Here Be Dragons (I met The Dragon – and Green Dragon Lane is just a few yards away) and follow KewEcoVillage on Twitter and there is a Facebook group too.

I made some quick scans from the 1996 pictures and have put nine of them on My London Diary . They aren’t great scans, as I made them like contact sheets, with the negs still in their filing sheets, so they are a bit dusty and a few of the negs were not quite flat… And using the Epson V750, some of these colour negs are a little too dense to give good scans, correct colour balance is murder, and you get some light leakage around the edges… Considering everything they are not bad at all on screen.

The Wandsworth/Battersea Guinness site remained empty for years after the TLIO occupation was ended forcibly after five and a half months. Eight years later, in June 2004, I returned and took this picture of the new flats that were going up, and work was still going on on the last block on the site last year.

The 1.8 acre site next to Kew Bridge has been empty and awaiting development since it was cleared in 1992. It should be a local scandal given the housing shortages (and high prices) in the area that the local council hasn’t stepped in at some point and taken over the land for social housing. Given the current economic climate, it seems unlikely that the current owners, St George West London Ltd, who bought the site in 2003, will be able to start building in the near future.

Their first planning application was turned down, and their second made last year for a 2 acre site including the next door pub includes a new pub, shops, offices and 170 residential units has not yet been approved. You can read more about the proposed development and its problems on the Strand on the Green site.

The Horizon that I bought cheaply around 1996 produces negatives around 56x24mm and they have a horizontal angle of view of approximately 120 degrees. The rotating lens produces what I think is called a cylindrical perspective. It has a nice clear viewfinder that is not 100% accurate but pretty good for it’s type and very bright. The built-in spirit level appears in the viewfinder making it easy to use this camera hand-held – for many pictures getting the camera level is essential, as otherwise the horizon will be nicely curved. When the camera is used upright, all vertical lines remain straight, but any non-verticals that do not pass through the centre of the image will be curved.

Incidentally you can still buy a very slightly updated version of the Horizon, the Horizon 202 (there are other models too) either under its own name or marketed as a Lomo. The difference is in the price – and possibly the guarantee – and of course you don’t get to call your pictures Lomographs, which may be an advantage.

I bought a replacement Horizon on eBay a couple of years ago for about half the cost of the equivalent Lomo in the bookshop of a well-known London gallery. The first lasted me around ten years of fairly regular use – several hundred films at least, though it had needed some minor repairs that I’d been able to make myself. Not bad value for a panoramic camera costing well under under £200 (now just slight over since the pound has gone down.)

More from Stratford Marsh

It saddens me a little now to walk on the Greenway across Stratford Marsh to remember what has been lost. The business estates and small works etc of course were not to everyone’s taste, although there were some modest but pleasing buildings among them, but there were some invigorating areas of minor wilderness, and some lush willow trees along the Pudding Mill River, along with some nice little touches of the picturesque.

© 2005 Peter Marshall
Willow trees by the Pudding Mill River on Marshgate Lane, 2005

The trees were at the left of this scene – June 2009

So much has now gone, and so many areas are now inaccessible – as for example:

You can see many more pictures of the Olympic area, including Stratford Marsh on my River Lea site, including some from the 1980s as well as since 2000. When I get time I’ll add more from the 1990s, when the waterways and footpaths in the area were all cleaned up and neatly signposted for walkers.

Saturday I went to take pictures to show the progress being made in covering the area with concrete for the Olympics, and made some more panoramas:

The opposite side of the Greenway to the Olympic stadium

You can see this rather larger, and also panoramas including the growing Olympic stadium and other pictures of the site on My London Diary.

Unfortunately the section of the Greenway south of the main railway line to Stratford High St is closed until Spring 2010, with a detour in place across to Pudding Mill Lane at Pudding Mill Station and down this to Marshgate Lane and Stratford High Street. This is to allow the roadway under the railway to be dug out to allow double-decker buses to pass under.

Poplar Walk

Poplar isn’t an area of London I know particularly well, although I’ve walked around it a few times and taken some photographs. I’ve found more to interest me just down the road in the Isle of Dogs, to the west in Limehouse, or along the Lea and Bow Creek to the east and north.

But it was very pleasant to take a walk around on Saturday afternoon in the company of around 18 other people and be led around by Bridget Cherry, who together with Charles O’Brien and Nikolaus Pevsner wrote the definitive volume on the architecture of East London in the ‘Buildings of England‘ series – she started work with Pevsner in 1968 and was editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides from 1971-2002.

The walk was one of half a dozen ‘Story of London’ trails organised by the Heritage of London Trust in association with Pevsner Architectural Guides, and although you’ve missed the chance to be guided personally by the experts you can still download a copy of the walk from the web site. (Or you can instead use the book, which includes rather more buildings and generally more detal than the walk, but is a little less convenient to carry than an A4 sheet.)

The walk started just below the stairs in this picture and related the buildings around Poplar High St and the East India Dock Road to the development of the area from the 17th century to the current day.

The most recent building mentioned on the walk is also one of the more controversial. Robin Hood Gardens, completed in 1972, has been encouraged by the council to get into very poor condition, partly by simple neglect but also by using it as a sink estate and permitting overcrowding. They want to demolish it and rebuild on the rather large site (and some people would undoubtedly make large amounts of money from doing so.)

© 2009 Peter Marshall
Narrow balconies overlook the park in the centre of the development; the outer side has wider ‘streets in the sky’ for access

Many tenants like the estate (though some hate it) and it still seems basically an excellent solution to a difficult problem, and a unique one. I was more than surprised to find it was not a listed building – it is a major work by two of our best-known architects – and shocked to hear that it was turned down. I’m sure the grounds must have been more to do with the politics of the situation than architecture.

Growing salad crops

You can read more about the area and the walk and see more pictures on ‘My London Diary‘

Police Try to Censor Protest

On Sunday Sikhs marched through London on the 25th anniversary of the storming by the Indian Army of their holiest site, the Golden Temple at Amritsar. Indira Ghandi had ordered the assault to capture or kill Sikh separatists who were in the compound at a time of year when it was also full of pilgrims.

It’s hard to be sure how many people were killed by the attack, but independent estimates suggest around 5,000, including many women and children, as well as hundreds of Indian soldiers and a relatively small number of Sikh militants.

A few months later, Mrs Ghandi’s Sikh bodyguards killed her. Following the assassination, high-ranking Indian politicians from her Congress Party incited mobs to indiscrimately attack and murder Sikhs, and thousands were massacred. Sikhs continue to fight for a nation of their own, Khalistan, through groups such as Babbar Khalsa International, and repression against them has also continued; Sikhs allege that “over 250,000 Sikhs have been killed by in an orchestrated genocide by the Indian government.”

You can see more about the march and rally before the march on My London Diary, where there are many more pictures.

One aspect that worried me was an attempt by the police to censor the placards before the start of the march. The officer in charge, Superintendent Raj Kohli, the Met’s highest-ranking Sikh officer, objected to a number of them because of the images on them, and a woman officer said that some might cause offence, particularly because they might be seen by children.

I didn’t think that the arguments the police put forward were in fact valid. Children would be unlikely to be able to interpret the images in any detail when they were being carried on placards in a demonstration, and I think they would have rather less impact on children than on adults. The placard that Kohli was most insistent about was different, showing a simple graphic of a person’s head seen in a gun sight, and the name of a prominent Indian politician who was implicated in the massacres of Sikhs. He saw this a clearly a provocation to violence, while I would see it more as an expression of what should the persons concerned deserve.

Although some agreement seemed to have been reached between Kohli and the protesters, many if not all of the disputed placards were carried in the march and can be seen in the pictures on My London Diary.

Kohli was carrying an A4 printout of the symbol of Babbar Khalsa International, a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act, 2000. This was present, along with the name Babbar, on many of the placards and banners that people carried in the march. So far as I saw the police took no action over this, perhaps because it would have involved dealing with thousands among those marching.

BKI and attempt to establish Khalistan certainly appears to have the support of a large fraction of British Sikhs, and more obviously so than when I started photographing Sikh events, perhaps around ten years ago. It’s only aim appears to be self-determination for the Sikh nation and I can see little reason why our government should feel a need to include it on the list of banned organisations. Though of course I wouldn’t want to express any approval or support for it, as that would almost certainly be an offence.

Hizb ut-Tahrir and Pakistan

It’s hard not to agree that America is the root cause of much of the current troubles in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, but while it may be an ‘American War’ that Pakistan is currently fighting, it is rather harder to see what the solution should be.

The placards say ‘Khilafah – only way to stop America and Terror’ but at the moment a Caliphate isn’t on offer from any of the sides in Pakistan, and Muslims are capable of killing Muslims without the encouragement of the USA.

It’s also hard to disagree with Hizb ut-Tahrir when they talk about many (if not all) Muslim regimes as corrupt. But those areas under attack by Pakistani and US forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan have seen terrible repression, particularly of women, under Taliban rule. If any of the speakers mentioned this, I missed it.

I missed too hearing what the women who made up almost half the march thought, as none were called to speak. At the two rallies they stood apart, some way from the speakers – the party insists on the segregation of sexes in public activities, insists on the covering of women’s bodies except for face and hands, forbids women ot be in private with men except immediate family, bans them from important public office and insists on their duty to obey their husbands.

More about the march and more pictures on My London Diary.

Yemen?

I was pretty ignorant about Yemen. Until last Saturday I’m not sure I would have pointed it out absolutely correctly on a globe, though I knew it was somewhere in Arabia. In my younger years, Aden featured regularly on the news, mainly as somewhere where British soldiers were shot at. Aden was the centre of something called a protectorate, which I think meant that while we had colonized the city itself, we’d been happy to support a whole hotchpotch of local rulers in the area around it, so long as they mostly played ball with us.

After it got independence in 1967, South Yemen became a socialist republic, receiving support and in particular arms for Russia. North Yemen was an Arab Kingdom (once under Turkish rule) and later a republic, and the two countries soon decided in principle on merging to form a single state of Yemen, though it wasn’t until 1990 that this finally happened.

Four years later, may of those in the south were fed up with the union – they didn’t seem to be getting much out of it while people from the north were getting jobs and taking over land in the south. Southerners rose up and began a civil war in 1994, aiming to leave the union and were soon defeated.

Why I needed a crash course in the history of the Yemen was because there were around a hundred supporters of South Yemen demonstrating opposite Downing Street on Saturday afternoon. Most of their placards were in Arabic, and they didn’t have a press release- or at least not in English. Perhaps the event was meant more for the Aden TV crew who were there than a British audience.

More about the event, the history of the Yemen, some rather gloomy prognostications and some pictures on My London Diary. It’s not enough for me to take pictures, I need to try and put the events I photograph into some kind of political perspective.

March for Jobs

My first destination on Saturday was Highbury and Islington, and I took the precaution of consulting the Transport for London web site to find whether the Victoria Line was working, and it told me it was fine. So I got off the fast(er) train to Waterloo at Clapham Junction (You can’t really call it a fast service when Southwest Trains have increased the timetabled time to get there by 5 minutes over those when I first started travelling from here in the 1970s – to avoid any fines for running late.

One of the many things that has completely disillusioned me about New Labour was its failure to take control of the railways when we voted it back into power in 1997. Privatisation had so obviously failed that there was no sensible alternative but reverting to a nationalised system – and with the chance to set it up on a much improved basis. But instead they made it worse. Now we have trains that close their doors half a minute before the timetabled time – if they want to run a train at 9.58.5 they should call it the 9.58.5 service, not the 9.59. We have services that take 35 minutes to Waterloo rather than 29 0r 30 minutes. And we have fares that have increased considerably more than inflation. That’s the legacy of privatisation.

There are of course a few improvements. The trains are quieter and smother running. They are non-smoking throughout. What’s really annoying is that they actually have greater acceleration and higher maximum speeds – so really we should be seeing services that are faster rather than slower. Occasionally when engineering works re-route mainline services by our route we get speeds that show what modern trains can do on our route, cutting times from the now normal 35 to around 20 minutes.

I only have to wait 5 minutes for the even slower service that stops at Vauxhall, and walk briskly down to the Underground, where I find no service. It wasn’t TfL’s fault, as a passenger has jumped in front of a train at Stockwell. But given modern communications I think we could have expected to be told this before getting off the train at Vauxhall.

The fastest way to proceed is to go back into Vauxhall station (its claim to fame is that it provided the Russian word for station) and get on the next service to Waterloo, arriving there around 15 minutes later than if I’d stayed on my original train.

Fortunately the parts of the underground I need are working, though as usual at weekends several lines are suffering from closure. It’s a slightly slower journey than usual from having to change at Piccadilly Circus, and the Victoria Line, still running from Victoria only, has some large gaps and it’s around ten minutes before my train arrives.

Logistics – working out how to be at places at the right time – is very important in the kind of photography I do, often covering several events in different parts of London over a day. Fortunately, although the March to Defend Jobs, Services and Education was timed for 11.00, this was the time to start gathering, and the march doesn’t actually get started until around 11.40, so despite the travel problems I actually arrive well in time.

As a photographer in London, you need to allow plenty of time for snarl ups and other problems. Driving is frankly pretty hopeless for getting around quickly, not least because of parking problems. The most reliable way to travel is a bike, either motor or leg-powered, and for longer distances you need to rely on underground or overground trains. One of my most useful photo accessories is a folding bike, which can be taken on trains at any time, but it gets in the way when covering demonstrations and marches.

For this march, which goes from Highbury Fields to Archway, I do rather wish I had brought the Brompton, as it’s a bit further than I remembered. But I know it would get in the way later in the day.

It’s hard to photograph events such as this. There just isn’t a great deal of visual interest, and it involved no real celebrities. The trade union banners are colourful, but essentially two-dimensional. It’s really hard work to get much out of it, but there are a few pictures I’m pleased with.

This was my favourite, taken with the 20mm f2.8 Nikon lens on the full-frame D700 from a low angle and including a placard that says what the event is about as well as one of the more colourful union banners from the PCS. The expressions of the two main figures , shouting a slogan, also helps, and there are a number of strong lines all in the same direction – just off of vertical that give it a strong dynamic feel. Working at ISO 400 gave an exposure of 1/640 at f10, freezing the movement at giving depth of field that extends from the hand close to camera in the bottom centre to the top of the banner and the buildings in the background.

In the old days, I would have been shooting at a pre-set aperture and using ‘zone focus’ to give me a good idea of the depth of field I would get. Nowadays I’m increasingly relying on ‘Auto-area AF’ which claims to distinguish people from background, along with continous servo autofocus – the C setting. Exposure was also automatic, using matrix mode, and its coped well with the bright area of sky. Usually – as in this case – I’m impressed by what modern auto systems can do. I could have done it as well manually, but not in the fraction of a second I had to take this picture.

I left before the rally had finished – by then it was running considerably late – and again was thankful I’d come by public transport, as I could just walk the short distance to Archway tube rather than having to go back to the starting point.

Many more pictures on My London Diary.

Can Anyone Apply for an NUJ Card who has a Camera ?

Oh no, Commander Broadhurst, no, no, NO, NO!

Some advice for any high-ranking police officer. If you come to a conference of 200 press photographers, don’t say things like “I don’t know whether, or what vetting system there is for holding an NUJ card, can anybody apply for an NUJ card who has a camera?” And it isn’t really sensible to talk about a “phalanx of cameras” getting in the way of police either or make too much of expressing support for the actions of front line officers to people who have been assaulted by them. When someone gets up and describes how an officer in riot gear shouted at him “I don’t care if you’re press” and then broke the arm holding up a press card with a baton blow, or how another photographer wearing a protective helmet was hit so badly that he suffered from concussion for two days, that isn’t helpful.

The card we use is not an NUJ card, but a UK Press Card, issued by the NUJ and other bodies on behalf of the UK Press Card Authority and states “The Association of Chief Police Officers of England, Wales and Northern Ireland and the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland recognise the holder of this card as a bone fide newsgatherer.” But apparently neither the man in charge of public order for the Metropolitan Police nor the officers on the front line do.

It isn’t easy to get a press card from the NUJ – you have to provide evidence that you work in public places and so have a need for the card, and that 50% or more of your income comes from journalism for NUJ membership.

Two hundred of us there all tried to tell him – and he had to abandon his presentation to the NUJ ‘Photography Matters‘ conference at that point and sit and listen and try to respond to complaint after complaint about police behaviour.

Notable among these was the use of the Public Order Act to compel a group of around 20 press photographers to leave the Royal Exchange area on May 2. An officer came up to them as they were standing behind a police cordon, and addressing them starting with the words “Ladies and Gentlemen of the press…” informed them that unless they left the area for half an hour they would spend the rest of the day in a police cell. Why? Because the police were about to set police dogs loose on the demonstrators.

This wasn’t the only session of the conference, and others, if less important were more informative or entertaining. Penny Tweedie presented a retrospective view of her career, starting from when the NUJ stopped her getting a staff job in Fleet Street because she was a woman and couldn’t possibly cope with being the only photographer present on a night shift if anything stressful happened. You can read a little more about the other sessions that I was able to attend on My London Diary, where there are also more pictures from the day. All were taken with a 20mm lens (one is severely cropped) as when I put my hand in the bag for a longer lens I found it wasn’t there. It was an early start for me and in my rush to get the train I’d not packed it. It’s a nice lens, but some shots would be easier with something a little longer.

During the lunch break we all had an opportunity to look at the 2009 Photography Matters exhibition, with 50 pictures from 35 photographers – and I was very pleased that two of my pictures made the show, including a rather nice picture made with the 12mm Sigma (on the D300 – so 18mm equivalent) of a ring of police around a few demonstrators at City Hall on the night the London mayoral election was announced.

I took this picture with a policeman pushing my shoulder, telling me I had to leave the area. It was hard to see any particular reason for this, but I knew there was no point in arguing – and that to do so could lead to my arrest. Fortunately I managed to hang on long enough to change the lens and get the image.