Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Lea Valley in the 80s

Clearing out accumulated junk from the loft on Friday I came across several box files containing mounted transparencies from the distant past when I used to shoot on colour transparency.

Bow Creek

Way back it was the only colour generally accepted for publication, and although very little of my work actually got published, like all photographers with aspirations of seeing their colour work in print I shot colour transparency. The boxes were a mixture of Kodachrome, Agfa and various E6 emulsions. In those days I was extremely short of cash, and worked quite a lot of the time from bulk film, loading 36 exposure cassettes of both black and white and colour transparency film from 100 ft rolls using a bulk loader.

Most of the E6 I saved even more money by processing myself. There were various processing kits on the market, differing in their ease of use and in the colour and quality of the results they produced. And you did need to maintain a fairly accurate temperature at least in the first development. Although I did have some failures, it perhaps surprising that much of what I processed came out well. (The first few films I processed in the 1970s were E4, but when E6 was introduced in 1975-7 both films and processing were considerably better.)

Lee Navigation

What in particular caught my attention in the box files were half a dozen boxes labelled ‘R Lee’ and dated from 1982-3. The River Lee, for many years London’s forgotten river, has now become a fairly hot property as the main Olympic site straddles its various streams between Stratford and Hackney Wick.

Back in 1982-3, I hadn’t really worked out any proper filing and storage system for slides – and its a problem I only really solved by stopping shooting – at least for myself – on transparency film around 1985. I changed to using colour neg largely because of its greater latitude; shooting mainly in daylight, transparency gave dark empty shadows as soon as the sun came out, and I didn’t like the effect. But I was also influenced by seeing the work of other photographers who had discovered the benefits of colour negative, in particular it seemed possible to produce more natural and more subtle colour.

Lea Navigation

There were good systems for slide storage, but one thing they had in common was expense, and I was generally skint. Since I often used slides in slide shows at this time, all of my slides were mounted in slide mounts. The absolute failures were binned, those I might use immediately went into a slide album. The rest went back into boxes and eventually inside larger boxes into the loft.

Lee Navigation

Dark and relatively dust-free storage means most of them are still in decent condition, and I’ve now spent around 20 hours looking through them and scanning those of more interest to me.

Bow Back Rivers

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that many are variants on slides already in one of my few albums, though sometimes they are in better condition. A few really add to my record of the area at the time, but most reflect my absorption at the time with colour and form.

Stratford Marsh

Dating and pinpointing the locations on them is difficult – with little or nothing to go on expect possibly a month and year scrawled on the mount or on the box. Quite a few I recognise, and yet others I will be able to place from the contact sheets of my black and white work, generally rather more carefully marked up.

Kodachrome did at least come back in card mounts with a frame number on them, which can be useful, but unfortunately I didn’t add a film reference number or date.

I also curse the fact that I took so few pictures. Some days I perhaps walked ten miles around the area and only made a dozen exposures. Surely there was far more of interest.

Of course I was mainly photographing in black and white at the time, and you can see some of the pictures I took on my River Lea – Lea Valley web site, where there are already around 20 of my old colour pictures. Looking at those I’m reminded of how tricky it is to get the colour correct from slides compared to digital – I hope some of the new scans are better. If I can find the slides I made the existing pictures from I’l try to do some new and better scans too.

Consequences by NOOR

NOOR is an Amsterdam-based agency of nine documentary photographers which aims to “contribute to a growing understanding of the world by producing independent in-depth visual reports.” As well as encouraging and promoting the individual work of the photographers, “collective projects are at the core of Noor.”

You can see a little of one of these, Consequences by NOOR on-line at the moment, a slightly confusing blog on which more material will be posted later. The exhibition, which opens at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, December 7 – 18, 2009, looks at some of the crunch points of climate change around the world: “subjects include: a massive pine beetle kill in British Columbia, genocide in Darfur, the rising sea level in the Maldives, Nenet reindeer herders in Siberia, Inuit hunters in Greenland, a looming crisis in Kolkata, India, coal mining in Poland, oil sand extraction in Canada and the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest by Brazilian cattle ranchers.”

At the moment there is a single photograph and some text about each of the nine photographers, Francesco Zizola, Jan Grarup, Jon Lowenstein, Kadir Van Lohuizen, Nina Berman, Pep Bonet, Philip Blenkinsop, Stanley Greene and Yuri Kozyrev. It’s a distinguished list including a number of photographers I’ve written about in the past.

The latest post includes a video of Zizola shooting ‘A Paradise in Peril‘ in the Maldives, the lowest lying country in the world, and which will be one of the first casualties of the sea level rise caused by global warming and the melting of polar ice caps. In it Zizola talks about the situation and also a little about how he is trying to show it through his pictures, some of which are inserted into the video.

Zizola, born in Italy in 1962 and living in Rome, published the book Born Somewhere in 2004 after photographing the situation of children in 28 countries over 13 years. His latest book Iraq, part of an Amnesty International series published in 2007, contains pictures from the early months of the 2003 invasion. He has received many awards, including World Press Photo of the Year in 1996, seven World Press Photo awards and four Pictures of the Year Awards.

The Unseen Bert Hardy

It was a full house at the Photographers’ Gallery last night for Graham Harrison‘s talk on ‘The Unseen Bert Hardy’, and one from which I’m sure every member of the illustrious audience – including quite a few who had known the man – went away with their view of Bert Hardy changed, and wanting to see more of his unknown and unpublished work.

I think we all have a view of him – that perhaps comes in part from how he used to talk about his work – which sees him metaphorically as a skilled British craftsman in blue dungarees, a wooden folding two foot rule in his top left pocket and a pencil tucked behind his right ear – as well of course as a Contax around his neck, and the kind of attacking attitude you’d expect from a schooling in a gym on the Old Kent Road. Of course he was born a working class lad south of the river, just off the Blackfriars Road (he got a blue plaque there last year and of course has a seat in St Brides), he was a highly skilled technician – and as many of his published pictures and some of the new work last night attest, had both a great feeling for light and also the technical ability to use it, particularly what in the old days used to be called “contre-jour“. But he was more than that.

Part of his reputation comes from the comparison with Bill Brandt, and the famed Gorbals assignment in particular. It’s perhaps hard to understand why Picture Post (PP) sent Brandt on the job in the first place, because his rather splendid de Chirico-like views or the tenements are perhaps exactly what you would have expected of the man.

When PP panicked on seeing his pictures, they sent Bert to rescue the story. Or rather, as Graham Harrison pointed out, they sent the ‘two Berts‘, photographer Bert Hardy and writer Bert Lloyd. Lloyd, another south Londoner, had started collecting folk songs while working in Australia in the 1920, joined the Communist party in the 1930s and worked – often with Hardy – on stories for PP from around 1945-50, and was one of the pioneers of the folk revival, presenting folk as a live working class from rather than the effete activity of largely upper-class folk collectors. They worked together, “Lloyd engaged the subjects in conversation and Hardy photographed them” as it says below the poster for a show of Hardy’s work from Tiger Bay there fifty-one years after they were taken in 2001. The page also raises the question:

For generations, people in Tiger Bay have objected to how they have been represented by photographers, writers, journalists, social scientists and others. But they like Bert Hardys photographs of themselves and their community. Why is this so? What sort of documentary practice is this that local people find so alluring?

I’d like to think the answer is that it is one that is made by people like them who get down beside them and work with them, something that has very much to do with both Berts.

Another of the well-known projects on which they worked together was : The Elephant and the Castle, and you can still see 25 pictures from this – including quite a few not published at the time at the James Hyman site.

Back to the Gorbals. Through the party – and perhaps also through folk-song, though the two things were closely linked – Lloyd had a contact in the Gorbals, a Mr Mac-something (I was making notes in the dark and my handwriting is worse than Gordon Brown’s) who made the job considerably easier by taking them to the right places and to meet the right people.

Over his 16 years at the PP as its Chief Photographer, Bert Hardy shot over 800 stories and over 500 were published. 23 of the made the cover. He didn’t waste film and there were very few failures. When he was able to develop his own films, they were finer grained and I think sharper than those from the lab (and of course after PP, he went on to set up Grove Hardy, and there were several photographers present who had used them to print their work – including David Hoffman and Homer Sykes – as well as one of the printers who used to work there.)

Perhaps what came most clearly from the “unseen” work was a suggestion of a very much more complex photographer. As well as the warmth of vision, the humanity, the empathy with his subjects, there was an appreciation of the surreal – an aeroplane flying across the wallpaper behind a group at airforce training, a long row of people in lice-proof calico suits being sprayed, a half-naked yoga pose in front of so very conventionally dressed ladies and men on a line of sofas and chairs along the wall behind.

The talk was recorded, and I hope will be made available somewhere, either on Harrison’s Photo Histories web site or on the Photographers’ Gallery site. I hope what we have seen is just a first instalment and that Harrison will be able to go on and look at the rest of Hardy’s work in the archive to produce an exhibition and a book.

Although we’ve seen a few shows in recent years from PP photographers, there is still I think a lot to be found in the archive. When I tried to write about some of the other photographers who worked there it was hard to find their work for PP anywhere on the web as examples, and for most there were relatively few – and usually the same few – in publication. The Getty site isn’t that friendly and work is hard to find much by Felix Man for example. Unfortunately for copyright reasons what I did write on some of the others – Bill Brandt, Bert Hardy, Thurston Hopkins & Kurt Hutton is no longer on-line.

It’s perhaps time for a major show at one of the big London galleries to re-evaluate the work of all the PP photographers – including the stuff that only made it as far as the archive. It would be a great contribution to London’s increasingly successful photo festival, Photomonth, in a couple of year’s time. Or perhaps a season of shows at a smaller venue such as the Photographers Gallery? One small thought that comes to me is a tenuous Olympic connection – surely PP will have covered the 1948 games here?

Field of Remembrance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Nuclear Power?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing for Free

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kingsmead Eyes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A long Brew – but Brown finally gets the Message

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Haw Harrassed by Police

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catching up – Afghanistan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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