Ballard Dies

There have probably been relatively few famous inhabitants of Shepperton, a small suburban corner of Middlesex within spitting distance of where I live, but unquestionably J G Ballard who died on Sunday, age 78, was one of them.

Certainly one of Britains major post-war writers, James Graham Ballard saw the future embodied in the present culture, and wrote his own apocalyptic ‘Ballardian’ version of it, based strongly around the outer suburbs where he – and I – live. He clearly foresaw the surveillance society and many of the problems of late capitalism.

Best known for his ‘Empire of the Sun‘, a superbly written work based around his experiences as a child in the Japanese internment camps in China and made into a film, it was his other works which are more important, perhaps culminating in his last novel, Kingdom Come (2006), firmly set in the suburban zone around the M25. In many ways close to home.

It was a great disappointment to me that the film ‘Crash‘ was  migrated by its Canadian director to Toronto.  The book was very firmly set in the Heathrow area, and, although I’m not sure it would have been a better film in West London/Middlesex, it would certainly have added to its relevance for me.

I wrote briefly about him and his work, and how it had inspired some of my own photography in ‘Under The Car‘, based on a section of a lecture I gave in 2007 in Brasilia.

© Peter Marshall
A Ballardian landscape © Peter Marshall

G20 Bank Videos

More and more videos are coming onto the web giving a fuller view of the protests in the City of London on April 1, and in particular of the way the police handled the demonstrations.

The Guardian was of course the first to feature the assault on IanTomlinson just before his fatal heart attack, and among the other highlights there is a short clip by Jason Parkinson,  showing police carrying out a baton charge on press photographers. Another clip by Jason records police threatening press photographers under Section 14 of the Public Order Act, telling them to leave the scene and stop taking pictures – or be arrested (they later issued an apology for this.) Others worth viewing include Rikki Blue‘s footage of riot police attacking peaceful demonstrators at the Climate Camp in Bishopsgate.

If what happened at Bank and in Bishopsgate can be called riots, on the evidence of the videos the rioters are mainly the police, although you can clearly see a few minor incidents involving demonstrators in the videos. The breaking of windows at the RBS was an isolated ocurrence, which involved few people and was soon abandoned. On Jason Parkinson’s blog you can see a good impression of rather more of a riot at in Strasbourg where the NATO summit was taking place on April 4. This is serious stuff, where the photographer’s kit needs to include helmet, gas mask and body armour.

Here in London things are usually more sedate, and only the police get kitted up with riot gear, (which always seems to alter the way they behave)  although photographers may well need to rethink after April 1. Another video of the events by Ollie Wainwright on Vimeo includes footage of David Hoffman, a veteran photographer perhaps best known for his pictures of the Poll Tax Riots, being attacked by a policeman using a riot shield to beat him in the face. There is a lengthy slideshow of his pictures of the day on his web site.

Hoffman bets that no other photographer used a senior citizen bus pass to get the the event, and he may be right, but only because I chose to walk from the station as I was early and to take the underground when I left early to go to the peaceful march in the West End.  The pictures that I took before I left give a good impression of the kind of peaceful demonstrations that the organisers of both the G20 Meltdown and the Climate Camp had planned and were taking place before the police intervened.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

There were perhaps 5-10,000 peaceful demonstrators in the City and probably less than a couple of hundred who had come with the intention of making real trouble. Sensible policing would  have isolated the troublemakers rather than attacking everyone indiscriminately.

Stop Sri Lanka’s Genocide of Tamils

The British Tamils Forum organised another massive protest march in London on April 11th, marching from Temple to a rally in Hyde Park. The march began around 1.30 pm, and  by the time I left around 4.15pm stretched most of the way from Westminster to Hyde Park.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

When even the police give an estimate of numbers as 100,000 you can be sure it is a very big march, and as the crowds were generally pretty solidly packed there seems little reason to question the independent estimates of around 150-200,000 people.

The vast majority of them were Tamils, with probably only a few hundred white faces. There didn’t seem to be a great deal of media interest, and I saw no photographers from major newspapers or news agencies and no cameras from major UK TV stations. It was such a large event that I could have missed them, but usually at the start of marches there is a crowd  of media in front, while on Saturday there was just me, three other photographers, none of whom get regular work for the mass media and a Tamil with a video camera.

However it was reported by some, including the BBC where three very short paragraphs and an indifferent photo accompany a longer piece on the two Tamil hunger strikers in Parliament Square.

It was quite a contrast with the Bethnal Green march on the death of Ian Tomlinson earlier in the day, a small event where there were almost as many media as marchers, with all the major agencies, papers, channels and most of the freelances I know putting in an appearance.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.
Photo of Velupillai Pirapaharan, founder and leader of the LTTE

The Tamil march was also very much a family event – at one time I found myself facing a row of around 20 push chairs, and they were many children carrying placards and being carried on shoulders, as well as crowds of young people and students, and adults of all ages, including some who looked old enough to be my mother or father.

They were united in their opposition to the killing of Tamils in Sri Lanka, but also the vast majority of those marching in some way expressed their support for the LTTE, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. A few carried actual tigers, fortunately only large toys, but many wore the colours or carried flags or portraits of the founder and leader of the Tamil Tigers, Velupillai Pirapaharan (sometimes spelt spelt Prabhakaran.)

In the UK, the LTTE has been a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000 since 2000. This makes it a terrorist offence for a person to support the group or wear clothing which arouses the “reasonable suspicion that he is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation.” Police sensibly made no attempt to arrest all 200,000 marchers on Saturday despite their clear breach of the Act.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.
Police object to a dummy with the President’s face

Although enthusiastic, the Tamils had no intention of causing serious trouble in London and only three arrests were reported. I saw only one small incident, where police prevented marchers from carrying a dummy with a photograph which of Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa as its face. Once this photograph was removed they allowed them to continue.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.
But her’s another getting shoe’d

Britain has a long history of lack of care for the Tamils in Sri Lanka, going back to colonial days. When we gave Ceylon independence in 1948 we neglected to take any precautions to safeguard their interests. Within a very short time many had been disenfranchised and deported as “Indian Origin” Tamils, whose ancestors had been brought to the country by the British in the middle of the previous century. Since then there has been a continued programme of repression, religious discrimination and marginalisation of Tamils, with Sri Lanka being established as a Buddhist republic in 1972. The LTTE was founded in 1976, and for some years until 2006 large parts of the Tamil areas of the country came under their civil administration.

At least a part of the LTTE success for many years came from the extreme and desperate measures that they have used, including assassinations and suicide bombings. Both sides in the conflict have committed numerous atrocities against civilians. Various international attempts to broker peace over the years came to an end in 2006, since when the Sri Lankan army has been engaged in a full-scale assault on the Tamil areas and the LTTE seem now very close to final defeat as an organised military force, although they are expected to re-emerge as a guerilla group.

At the moment the Sri Lankan government’s policy appears to be aimed at the complete annihilation of the LTTE and much of the Tamil population. Others are being resettled in transit camps and then ‘welfare villages’ which may seem rather more like prison camps than normal life.  At the moment it seems unlikely that there will be any effective intervention by outside powers to prevent the genocide of the Sri Lankan Tamils; David Miliband did phone to ask the Sri Lankan government not to return to a full-out assault following their two-day cease-fire,but his plea seems unlikely to be taken seriously. The situation is desperate and although marches like this should call attention to it, the mass media hardly seem to find it newsworthy. We appear to be approaching a truly scandalous climax to years largely of scandalous indifference.

It takes only a few seconds to send an e-mail letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights about the Tamil crisis and there is also a petition form which can be downloaded on the Tamil Writers Guild,  for filling in and faxing to your MP or Gordon Brown.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

G20 Demo at Excel Centre

Sorry, forgot to publish this one last week!

Like almost everyone else, I couldn’t get near the Excel Centre on Thursday 2 April when the G2o were in session. So here’s a picture I took earlier!

© 2004 Peter Marshall

But half a mile down the road where we were allowed to protest was a rather lively demonstration about Ogaden and Oromo, where the Ethiopian government is fighting the Ogaden National Liberation Front and the Oromo Liberation Front and generally setting out to prove it is the most brutal regime in the world.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

More about these protests and a few others – including a small group from Stop the War/CND on My London Dairy

In Memory of Ian Tomlinson

While I was writing this piece I took a look at the Sky News web site, which carried a short report of this march from Bethnal Green Police Station to lay flowers at the scene of his death.  It wasn’t a bad report of the actual event, with a fairly indifferent photo and some of the short address by Ian Tomlinson’s stepson on video, but what really stunned me were some of the ignorant and vituperative comments made on the site.

For those of us who were there – and went to the vigil at the Bank later – it was clear that the organisers of the G20 Meltdown and this march had been shaken by the killing.  The police too I felt showed it had shocked them. And Paul King made it clear on the video that the family appreciated the support they had been shown by the marchers.

Whoever posted the report on Sky couldn’t restrain themselves from feeding the flames of ignorance in the final paragraphs where they use a quotation from the G20 meltdown site to suggest that this event would somehow end in riot. Nobody who was there would have thought there was any chance of that. Anyway, here’s my account and some opinion. More pictures and less text on My London Diary.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.
Chris Knight discusses arrangements with the police

Several hundred marchers, some carrying flowers, and almost as many photographers and videographers turned up at Bethnal Green Police Station for the start of a memorial march for newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson. The march was called by G20 Meltdown, whose organisers including Chris Knight and Marina Pepper were among those who led the march. They had intended to hold a carnival party in protest at the Bank of England on April 1, but police turned it into something far more sinister, which ended with many demonstrators being attacked by police and Tomlinson’s death.

At the Tomlinson family’s request, the march was peaceful, silent and respectful.  Although they did not take part in the march, stepson Paul King spoke briefly at the start from the steps of the police station, surrounded by a five-deep semicircle of cameras. He described the family’s pain from the tragic death of a “much-loved and warm-hearted man” and at seeing the video of the assault, and hoped that the invstigation would be full and that “action will be taken against any police officer who contributed to Ian’s death through his conduct.” He ended by saying that he hoped he could continue to rely on the support of the demonstrators in the future.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.
Paul King

Short speeches from the march organisers called for a properly independent enquiry into police violence surrounding the G20 protests and for criminal charges to be brought against those responsible.

Leaflets were distributed for a new campaign to end violent police tactics at peaceful demonstrations. There is a No to Police Violence web-site and also a blog, Once Upon A Time in Hackney.

The police were solicitous, on their best behaviour, clearly wanting to avoid any friction, and the officer in charge was I think one of those who had been in charge at Bank on the day the incident happened.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

Some marchers carried flowers to lay close to where Ian Tomlinson was the victim of an unprovoked police attack from behind on the corner of Royal Exchange Buildings. Here there were more speeches, which I missed, having left to photograph the Tamil march.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

Among those marching were some of Sean Rigg‘s family, and I’m told his sister spoke eloquently about his case at Bank. Sean died after being taken ill in police custody in Brixton Police Station on Thursday 21 August 2008, and his family also took part in last year’s annual United Friends and Families march along Whitehall in October and at the  Justice 4 Ricky Bishop march in south London in November.

Chris Knight had announced he would be making a vigil at Royal Exchange Buildings in memory of Paul Tomlinson over the Easter weekend, and invited people to come at any time, but in particular to join a candlelit vigil at 8pm. I couldn’t make that but I did call in the afternoon and photograph him and the flowers at the scene.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

Tragic though it was, and we must all feel a great sympathy with his family, the death of Ian Tomlinson following an attack (or possibly more than one attack) by police during the demonstration at Bank where he was a bystander is not the real story. I almost fell into same trap as the media by describing him as an “innocent bystander“; he was, but then at least 99% of the demonstrators were “innocent demonstrators” and somehow that isn’t a cliché you see much.

And of course it isn’t a story about a few coppers who went berserk, although there were quite a number whose conduct clearly went beyond the acceptable and as well as the one or two who may face criminal charges unless the CPS wriggles them out of it, if justice is to be served there would be hundreds of disciplinary cases with many of those concerned being drummed out of the force.

Its a story that sticks not to the bobby on the beat but to the politicians in and out of uniform who run them, who appeared on the media promising riots and Armageddon, who instilled their officers with fear and hate and trained them to efficiently beat innocent protesters with batons. Labour ministers, a Tory mayor, police chiefs have all conspired to make demonstrators – to borrow a term from the Scientologists – “fair game.” Its a way of looking at people that justifies almost any action – such as planting catapults as evidence (it happened at Speakers’ Corner on March 28), destroying their property and riot police marching in squads into unarmed crowds of people who are holding their hands up in the air, intent on bludgeoning everyone to the ground. It’s a policy which can also cover misusing laws, issuing misleading (or false) statements to the press, and more.

The media of course don’t come out of this at all well. The BBC in particular I think let us down; they simply do not have enough first-hand reporters and far too many people with their seats firmly on office chairs. Like the press they compete in the stoking of public fear and the stigmatising of democratic protest. Of course it isn’t largely the journalists who are responsible – with a few exceptions (mainly among ‘columnists’) they do their job as best they can, often, particularly for photographers and videographers, at some personal risk. But it isn’t the guys on the job who produce the programmes and papers, who decide on what has “news value” and dictate the values behind that decision.

To find the real stories behind the news you need to look elsewhere, to blogs and web sites, where you see eye-witness reports, pictures and video. The media are too busy resenting the presence of such things to have worked out how to make effective use of these sources – and of course like any other sources you need to read them with a critical and often cynical eye on where they come from. But it certainly isn’t a coincidence that the two stories which have dominated British news over the past week came from the mobile phone of a “citizen journalist” and blogs.

And if you want to know the real story behind the arrests of over a hundred activists suspected of conspiring to commit aggravated trespass at the Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station you won’t be looking at the press but to the blogs.

© 2006 Peter Marshall
Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station

Visteon Occupation Ends

The factory occupation by workers sacked at a few minutes notice by the administrators for Visteon ended on Thursday, and I was there to photograph as they came out of the building.

They were obeying a court order which had named their convenor, Kevin Nolan and demanded that they vacate the premises by noon.  Their action and the publicity it gave had certainly lent urgency to the talks between union officials and the bosses of both Visteon and The Ford Motor Company about a proper settlement for the men, and hopes are still high for some kind of acceptable settlement.

Covering an event like this isn’t just a matter of being there and taking pictures, you need to think about how to show the story and find the pictures to do so. I don’t as a matter of principle set up pictures, but that doesn’t mean I don’t try to use a little intelligence.

How do you show the support by students for the workers?

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

Your thoughts about the company’s position?

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

The man leading the action?

© 2009 Peter Marshall.
Convenor Kevin Donal and the occupying workers

Admittedly this picture was to an extent posed – I was standing there as another photographer talked to him and asked if I could take his picture – but that was all.

Then there were key moments as the workers came out, as for example when one was holding the certificate for 35 years of good service (over 25 of which were as a direct employee of The Ford Motor Company before they set up Visteon as a part of their enterprise.)

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

What doesn’t show in pictures like this last one is that I was only one of perhaps 20 press photographers and videographers all trying to get pictures, and at moments like this, all trying to get more or less the same picture.  To be successful you need to have thought in advance and got in the right place – and it sometimes takes a little bit of assertive behaviour to stay there, though most photographers do try to avoid getting in the way of others.

On My London Diary you can see more of how I tried to tell the story through my pictures. One of the great things about putting work on the web is that I can do it at some length, while it’s very unusual to get more than a single picture in print.

The action at Visteon isn’t over yet. Although they have come out of the factory, the sacked workers are still picketing the two gates of the plant in an effort to prevent the removal and sale of the valuable machinery on site and to get the ‘Ford Terms’ they were promised when they were transferred to Visteon.

Oxford St Fashion

Well, not really a fashion show. I haven’t sunk that low yet!

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

Just War on Want and No Sweat! pointing out to shoppers that chains like Primark rely on workers in chains – or at least on starvation wages working 80 hour weeks – in Bangladesh to sell cheap fashion clothes in Britain.

Primark’s prize Oxford St store opened two years ago when War on Want did its first Fashion Victims report on the shocking conditions for workers at suppliers for it and other high street shops.  Primark’s reply appears to have been to have put a notice in its shop window claiming that it took an ethically responsible attitude towards the working conditions of its suppliers – while continuing to ignore the evidence. War on Want’s new report, Fashion Victims II, shows that conditions have actually worsened since the first report.

More on the protest, more pictures and links to the report on My London Diary.

Incidentally it wasn’t easy to produce a good picture despite some attractive models in chains. This one is I think the best, not only because of the model’s pose, but also because it shows everything – the models, the War on Want poster, the No Sweat! banner and the shop window with the Primark title. And no, it wasn’t posed.  Shot with the 20mm on the D700 (so a real 20mm) and just a little touch of fill from the built-in flash. Perhaps I would have felt happier with something just a smidgen wider and the SB800 I lost earlier in the week. Actually I’d feel a lot happier if I hadn’t lost that flash!

Visteon Occupation

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

The sign on the Visteon factory at Ponders End still proudly reads “An Enterprise of Ford Motor Company, Limited” but in fact they sold it and the workers out some years ago.  When Visteon was set up, workers were given new contracts, along with promises that they would continue to enjoy the same conditions they had with Ford. Now Visteon has abandoned its UK plants to adminstrators KPMG and those promises appear worthless.  Workers were told in a six minute meeting that they no longer had a job and given an hour to take their personal possessions from their lockers and leave.

Later, on hearing that their fellow workers in Belfast had occupied the factory, they returned, found the back gate open and followed their example. On Saturday I turned up with a couple of hundred others at the factory to offer support in their attempt to get a fair settlement from their former employers, in which they have the backing of their union, Unite.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

Many of those who used to work there have given 30 or 40 years of their life to Ford/Visteon, and although of course they have been paid for their labour, it really represents an investment by people that our labour laws don’t properly recognise. I’ve been through “transfer of undertakings” and felt some of the pain and the inadequacy of our laws, though I was fortunate and retained a job, while some colleagues were – and deeply felt – discarded.

More about the occupation and more pictures on My London Diary

All Fools Day Disappointments

April started badly for me.  It was a day with demonstrations all over London and although I went to some and took some pictures, I find them a little disappointing.

© 2009 Peter Marshall
Many hands make light work of putting up tents for the Climate Camp

Not that they are particularly bad pictures. Some I would normally have been happy with. But when I look at some of the pictures other people took on the day I can see that I missed most of the action, although by the time I left Bishopsgate it seemed pretty clear to me that the police were spoiling for action.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.
Police squad attack protester

Really I wasn’t equipped for it. Wednesday was a day when photographers needed hard hats and shin pads to stay with things, as well as a strong bladder and a masochistic streak. The people who got the pictures were with the demonstrators, held for hours by the police, then in the middle when the police horses charged or the riot police moved in, lashing out indiscriminately.

It was a day when I felt sickened when I watched the images and the videos – mainly not yet shown on the mainstream media. Watched the peaceful Climate Camp protesters holding up their hands and chanting “We are not a riot” as the riot police stormed in, batoning everyone on the street. There was a level of unprovoked violence by police unprecedented in this country both on Bishopsgate and around the Bank of England. One man who was there has died.

It should have been headline news on the BBC. There were cameras there and video available, but they had a different agenda, losing most of the respect I still retained for them.  They reported the death as ‘unrelated’ to the events, which appears to be simply untrue.  Some of the newspapers did a little better, but not much, even those who had reporters and photographers there.  It isn’t a great deal of use having a free press if it doesn’t do its job.

I hope there will be a full and wide-ranging enquiry into the aggressive policing, although I don’t have a great deal of confidence – under our current government they seem to be able to act with complete disregard for the rule of law. If there is an enquiry it will almost certainly be a whitewash.

I wasn’t around when things went up. Partly because I went to cover another event – the official ‘Jobs not Bombs’ march through the centre of London organised by Stop the War, CND, BMI and Palestine Solidarity, which, as expected was a worthy if not particularly exciting occasion.

© 2009 Peter Marshall.

Then somewhere, somehow I lost my SB800 flash. It could have been stolen while I was travelling on the underground – I often forget to close my bag properly, or I may have dropped it climbing up for a better viewpoint, perhaps onto the plinth at Trafalgar Square. All I know is that I put my hand into my bag to put it back on the camera and it wasn’t there.

Otherwise I might have gone back to the City from Trafalgar Square and got a little more of the action, though more likely I would have travelled out to the Excel Centre where the Campaign against Climate Change were demonstrating with their iceberg. But without a flash, an evening demonstration didn’t seem worth going to, and I took an early night instead.

I’ve not been lucky with SB800s, which I think are a great flash unit. This was my third, and the second I’ve lost.  One was stolen from my bag. Another failed after two weeks and it took me three months to get a replacement unit – which then failed within days of the end of its guarantee and is sitting on my desk waiting for me to take it to Nikon for expensive servicing.

The SB800 is the best flash unit I’ve used – when it is working, and when powered by five 2500 millamp hour NiMnH batteries has an extremely fast re-cycle time and keeps working through a day of heavy use – more than 500 flashes. Unfortunately it has now been replaced by the SB900 which seems rather less attractive as well as more expensive.

So I’ve ordered a cheap Nikon i-TTL compatible flash – at around a fifth of the price of the SB800 – and will see how that performs. I must also get round to taking the other SB800 in for service. In the meantime I’m having to work with a Nikon SB80DX which doesn’t combine well with the latest Nikons.

Although Nikon’s flash units are great when they are working, they just don’t seem to have the robust reliability of the old workhorse units like the Vivitars I used to rely on.

I’d gone out to photograph the demonstrations, not police violence.  And so far as that went I suppose I didn’t do badly. You can see the G20 Meltdown with two of the four Horsefolk of the Apocalypse, the start of the Climate Camp on Bishopgate and the Jobs not Bombs march on My London Diary.