Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Police States – Hoo and Beijing

I’ve been in Scotland for the past couple of weeks, visiting Glasgow and Iona, and missing much of what’s been happening both actually and in the media – though I did see a few seconds of the Olympics when I walked through a lounge on a ferry near Oban.

In a previous post I wrote about the rally at Rochester and the march to the Climate Camp at Kingsnorth in Kent on August 3, but I left the march after a couple of miles to come back, make that post, then pack for Scotland. The few press reports and radio news items I heard in the next week weren’t at all informative about what was actually happening at the camp, with no mention at all of the workshops, talks and other educational events taking place, and very little about the activities of the police.

In Rochester, the police were, so far as I could see, doing what they should do, having regard for the safety of the protesters on the march and allowing the rally and protest to proceed while also ensuring that those not involved in it could carry on with their activities with minimal disruption. While I was present, press and others photographing or reporting on the event were not impeded in any way.

Down the road and later in the week things appear to be very different, as you can see from the reports on various blogs. One of the best is Jason N Parkinson’s, with a number of reports including one with a video showing the police searching journalists – including Jason himself and Marc Vallée, who also has some powerful images. Although some situations might justify such searches, this would not appear to be one, and the length of time for which they were detained seems totally unjustifiable and the incident seems a clear attempt by police to restrict press freedom.

For the week, this part of Kent – the Hoo Peninsula – became a police state, apparently under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice Act, which police appear to interpret as giving them the power to do “anything they like” – including – as Marina Pepper describes, for male police officers to touch her in a way that in any other circumstances would have had her “pressing charges for sexual assault and expect justice to be done.” They also confiscated her grandmother’s table cloth as an offensive weapon and then lost it.

Section 60, intended by Parliament to give police powers to deal with football hooligans or others who might be ‘tooled up’ for trouble, should only be used where there is a reasonable belief by a senior police officer of incidents involving serious violence taking place. Few actual occasions where the police have used Section 60 orders would appear to meet this condition, and the intentions of the climate campers were largely if not entirely peaceable. Does trespass and the possibility of some damage through direct action qualify legally as ‘serious violence’? I would have hardly thought so, but then I’m not a lawyer.

Section 60 gives police the power to “stop any person or vehicle and make any search he thinks fit” whether or not he has any grounds for suspicion, and to seize articles which “he has reasonable grounds for suspecting to be an offensive weapon.” This means “anything made or adapted for use for causing injury to persons” or “intended by the person having it with him for such use by him or by some other person.” It seems highly unlikely that that there could ever be reasonable grounds for seizing a table cloth.

The police have often if not always pushed laws beyond what Parliament intended in defence of the status quo, often knowing that if and when things come to court there may be a fair trial and the case will then be thrown out or lost – as has happened frequently in recent years. Perhaps one day we will get a government that believes in freedom and attempts to rein in the force, but I’m not holding my breath.

As we have all seen, in China these things are simpler, and journalists covering the protests at the Olympics have been prevented from photographing, assaulted and in some cases detained, despite the promises of press freedom given by the authorities to obtain the Games. Among those assaulted was the Guardian’s Dan Chung, and his pictures as well as those of him being attacked are on the Guardian site along with a video of ITN News correspondent John Ray being taken away in a van. There is link to another video of the event on the PDN Pulse site.

Incidentally Ray says he was detained by the Chinese for about 30 minutes, ten minutes less than the photographers stopped in Hoo.

Climate Camp – Kingsnorth

Photographers – including my own union, the NUJ – have again complained about the media policy at this year’s climate camp which started today at Kingsnorth on the Isle of Grain in Kent, the proposed site of a new coal-fired power station. Last year I decided I wasn’t prepared to work within the restrictions that the organisers had set, and only covered a little of the actions outside the camp on the final day.

This year, my reasons for not covering the camp are simpler – I have to be in Scotland while it is taking place, but I was able to photograph the ‘No New Coal’ march from Rochester to the camp, or at least the rally in Rochester and the first couple of miles of the march.

Climate Caravan arrives in Rochester from Heathrow

Rochester is certainly a historic city (or an historic one) and I think we were perhaps making history there today in an action – along with those against a third runway at Heathrow that may come to be seen as a turning point for our government – and our planet. Unless we move beyond green rhetoric to green action now, the opportunity to save the world may be missed.

There is no such thing as clean coal. If a new coal burning station is built at Kingsnorth this single plant will add more pollution than many whole countries currently produce. The company and our government talk about carbon capture and storage, but Kingsnorth will not incorporate these (just be ‘ready’ for them.) It is far from certain that these technologies will ever be developed and even less likely if so that they will be economic.

The nettle that we have to grasp is that of decreasing energy use. So far we have cut emissions simply by exporting the industries we used to have to other countries. We still actually use the products of the energy, but the pollution counts against the producing countries not us.

‘No New Coal’ march sets off from Rochester

Some things would be relatively easy to cut. We could travel less, and do more of it by less polluting methods – using rail or ship rather than air, possibly developing the use of slower but more fuel-efficient methods such as airships rather than aircraft. Increasingly better on-line communications should be cutting down the need for travel to meetings, but in fact we seem to be travelling more despite using them.

Renewable methods of power generation would cut down emissions, although we also need to cut down the use of power and also of water. A shift to more local methods of power generation rather than increasing reliance on large power stations could have a very useful effect.

But importantly people need to be persuaded that you can live better while using less energy and less resources.

The ‘No New Coal’ march goes over the Medway towards Kingsnorth

So although I still have reservations about the media policy (and there is considerable interest from the media in the camp) I hope it will be successful. Because I’ll be away it will be rather longer than usual before more pictures appear on My London Diary.

A Bitter Birthday

Yesterday was my elder son’s 32nd birthday, but he wasn’t at home – I expect to see him later today when he comes back home. But yesterday I went to another birthday party, for a young man exactly two years younger than my son. His family, a few miles away in London, haven’t seen him since 2002 and may never see him again.

Fair Tiral?

Binyam Mohamed, born in Ethiopia but lived in London and was given refugee status in 1994 was in Afghanistan in 2002 and fled across the border to Pakistan when the fighting started . There he was kidnapped and handed over to the CIA becoming one of the many subject to “illegal rendition”. First they flew him to Morocco, where he was tortured for 18 months. At times he was shackled in excruciatingly painful positions, sometimes hanging, for hours or days in darkness, unable to move to relieve the pain, often with headphones blasting music at ear-splitting volume into his head. Other abuses included regular razor cuts to his genitals. The torture continued at Kabul’s Dark Prison where he was rendered next, before going on to Guantanamo. You can read more about his treatment on the Reprieve website, at the National Guantanamo Coalition or on You Tube (and related videos there.)

The US now intend to put Binyam in front of a military tribunal, calling for the death penalty. The “evidence” was produced during his torture and none would be admissible in any proper court.

The London Guantánamo Campaign had organised a six day vigil at the US embassy calling for Binyam’s release and return home, which culminated in a protest party on Whitehall, urging our Government to do more to get the US to release him. I hope that Gordon will talk to Obama about it too when they meet tonight. Earlier this year I photographed a day of demonstrations in London on the 6th anniversary of the setting up of the illegal prison camp at Guantánamo, with events organised by Amnesty, the London Guantánamo Campaign, London Catholic Workers and ending with a rally in Parliament Square by Cageprisoners / Guantánamo Campaign, at which Binyam’s case was raised.

As I walked away I felt for Binyam and for his family. When I see my son tonight I’ll remember them again.

You couldn’t make it up

My pool picture ban over paedophile fears is a real headline from the Metro and tells the story of an 82year old woman who was stopped while taking pictures of an empty paddling pool on a common in Southhampton. A council employee told the widow to put her camera away because she might be a paedophile.

Of course she was in a public place and carrying out a perfectly legal act. Even if the pool had been swarming with children she would still have been within her legal rights to take photographs, although it would be a brave woman (and a much braver man) that would insist on those legal rights in the current perverted climate.

Although Southampton council have apologised, they stated: ‘It is appropriate that our staff are aware of who is taking photos.’ This confuses the act of taking photographs (whether or not they include children) with a potential risk of sexual offending against children. In practice it seems rather unlikely that potential offenders will draw attention to themselves by using a camera in this way in a public place, and council staff would probably be more sensibly employed giving greater attention to any adults without cameras – and in particular those who loiter without cameras around where children play.

With or without a camera people can behave in ways that may be suspicious – approaching children, talking to them, following them etc, and although they may of course be perfectly innocent I think most of us would agree it a good idea if council workers and others kept an eye on their actions. But people in any position of authority, however slight, need proper training, and part of it should be to learn that photography in public places is not an offence and no more a suspicious activity than walking a dog – probably considerably less so given that many children are attracted to animals.

There is a poll (‘The Big Vote’) on the Metro page (at the right of the page) which asks readers to vote on whether they think the council worker’s action was over the top. I was flabbergasted to find when I voted that there was a whole 6% of people who didn’t.

Local Government workers ask for a fair pay deal

Unison and Unite were the main unions involved in a two-day strike in protest at the pay deal the Government is imposing on most workers in local government, which will mean most of them get increases that are less than the current rate of inflation – pay that is worth less.

Various pickets and marches were organised across the country, and I photographed a march by a couple of thousand trade unionists in central London on Wednesday.

Local Govt march

I’m in favour of fairness over pay, and the public sector has always taken a knock when the government finds the financial going tough – and never makes things up when the economy booms. However I couldn’t help reflecting as I was taking pictures that many of the photographers there are scraping by on a fraction of what most local government workers earn, with fees for freelance work generally being much the same as they were 10 or even 20 years ago. The minimum wage doesn’t apply to freelances, and many would be financially better off in any full-time employment.

Many if not most people who try to make a living through photography fail. Often they spend a few years trying, then either give up completely or discover some other source of income to support them while they continue. I’ve known photographers whose living comes from renting property, from selling stuff on e-bay, from delivering milk, from gardening jobs, part-time teaching, waitressing and more. Many rely on partners who have regular paying jobs – some even in local government.

Tent City

“Tent City“, the occupation of the Wembley Sports Ground in opposition to the building of a city academy on the site was finally brought to an end early last Friday morning, when specialist bailiffs acting for Brent Council turned up and removed Hank Roberts, the local secretary of the two major teaching unions, the NUT and the ATL who had locked himself to the flagpole on the top of the changing room block.

Hank Roberts (left) talks to another protester on the roof – with Wembley Stadium in the background

Although I wasn’t there for the eviction, I had climbed the ladders up to the roof to talk to Hank and some of the other protesters on Wednesday, when he was continuing the protest despite a court injunction against him personally and the protest in general. The fight to stop the academy will continue, but the plans to house 200 children in portable classrooms on the site for next September now seem likely to go ahead, despite the poor educational experience this seems almost certain to provide.

I also wrote a complaint to the BBC about their biased reporting of the occupation, which highlighted the comments of a Brent Council representative and failed to mention the educational reasons for the action or that Roberts was a teacher and union secretary. As yet I have not received a reply.

I was very glad I could climb down after half and hour or so, as I have no head for heights, perhaps because my father used to take me up on roofs that he was repairing. Our ideas about ‘Health & Safety’ were very different then and there were times when he had to look after a small child and earn a living.

You can read more about the ‘Tent City’ protest and see more pictures on My London Diary

It’s a free country (at least in New York)

New rules from the New York Mayors Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting (MOFTB) about photographing on the streets of that city will I think be welcomed by photographers who work there. They make it clear that you don’t need a permit unless you want to use extensive equipment or vehicles or want to block a significant part of a street for your work.

If you only use a hand-held camera (still or video) – even if it is on a tripod, you don’t need a permit, as it makes clear: “Standing on a street, walkway of a bridge, sidewalk, or other pedestrian passageway while using a hand-held device and not otherwise asserting exclusive use of City property is not an activity that requires a permit.” Tripods can still land you in trouble if you block road lanes or use them on narrow pavements, but do not in themselves need a permit – they too are generally regarded as “hand-held equipment.”

Similarly it states ” the filming of a parade, rally, protest or demonstration does not require a permit” and you don’t need a permit if you are a press photographer with a NYPD pass.

To photograph in city parks and inside public buildings will still require authorisation from those in charge of them and permits will continue to be required for the certain activities “including but not limited to animals, firearms (actual or simulated), special effects, pyrotechnics, police uniforms, police vehicles” etc.

The new rules came only after several rounds of public consultation and seem a useful clarification of the right to photograph on public streets (and the activities that, largely reasonably, require a permit.)

Although we have a similar freedom to photograph in public places in the UK without need of permits, it might perhaps be nice to have a similar statement clarifying this in our country and in our major cities in particular, where increasing photographers are finding their right to photograph while on the public street without permission challenged, particularly by the growing armies of heritage wardens, community support officers, security employees and others who police our streets.

One site worth looking at for UK photographers is UK Photographers Rights
by Linda Macpherson LL.B, Dip.L.P., LL.M, a lecturer in law at Heriot Watt University, and I’m glad to read from one of the comments that she is working on a revised version of her “short UK guide to the main legal restrictions on the right to take photographs and the right to publish photographs that have been taken” which you can download there.
The comments on the page, and in particular Linda’s replies to them make some interesting reading, although they are occasionally debatable (as are so many things in law.)

Trafalgar Square - without a licence
Trafalgar Square – without written permission to photograph
(Seventh Day Adventist Youth march against gun & knife crime)

One particular instance concerns the by-laws which apply to Trafalgar Square which thousands of photographers – myself included – regularly break which require written permission for “photographs or any other recordings of visual images for the purpose of or in connection with a business, trade, profession or employment or any activity carried on by a person or body of persons, whether corporate or unincorporate“.

This is exactly the kind of nonsense that the New York MOFTB rules clarify and largely dispense with – making clear exactly what kind of photographic activity needs a licence, and provides a very good example of why would benefit from a similar document in London.

Editors Don’t Look at Pictures?

When a picture of Iran’s recent missile tests hit the front pages of major US newspapers and made news services including the BBC, one thing was obvious at a glance. It was a fake, as a blog on the NY Times clearly shows (thanks to State of the Art where I first saw the story, although there is rather more about it and how it broke on PDN Newswire, as well as a later update on the story on PDN Pulse.)

An Irani Photoshop user had cloned in an extra missile, and it wasn’t a convincing job. One missile doesn’t look a lot different to another, but when several clouds of dust from the right hand missile appear identically and rather distinctively underneath the missile to its left it is a bit of an instant give-away.

(When I looked there were over 600 comments on the post, although I’ve not read them all. Some suggest there may have been further doctoring of the image.)

Yet though it was an obvious fake, not only did the picture fool Agence France Press, who picked it up from an Iranian Revolutionary Guard web site who picked it up and distributed it (and I rather doubt will be sending the licensing fees back to Iran), but editors at leading newspapers and web news sites.

If anyone in the media was seriously looking at photographs, the cloning would have been spotted immediately – it really is rather an amateur job as surely there must have been other images with the dust clouds at a different state from which they could have been borrowed – or a little intelligent reworking could have made them a less than perfect match. Of course it isn’t the only case of bad photo-manipulation – and State of the Art have also reported Fox News being caught badly uglifying a NY Times reporter recently, I think using one of the tools available for making a mess of your mates to post on your social networking site.

But the news is dominated by people whose business is words.

Paper Planes for Ruth Kelly

Flash mobs can be rather tricky things to photograph, particularly for those of us who find it difficult to be at the right place at the right time. According to the FAQ on the UK Flash Mob web site, a flash mob is “a sudden gathering of people into a crowd that do something unusual for a few minutes in unison and then disperse.” I photographed one of their events – the London start of a Flash Mob Global Pillow Fight in Leicester Square – earlier this year.

‘Stop Airport Expansion‘ was both the name of the group who had organised the event (and an earlier one to celebrate the opening of Hedatrow T5 that I missed) and the message they wanted to send to the elusive Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly, who has refused to visit local authorities or meet with local people who will be affected by airport expansion, particularly by a third runway at Heathrow. The ‘Stop Heathrow Airport Expansion Flashmob‘ took place outside the offices of the Department for Transport in Marsham St, though where she was at the time nobody seemed to know.

I’ve been opposed to the expansion of Heathrow as a local resident since I used to watch the aircraft low over the garden from my pram. The airport began with deception before my birth, pushed through in wartime (and diverting resources from the war effort) and has continued to grow and grow, repeatedly breaking promises that each new development will be the last. I photographed marches against the building of the third runway at Heathrow in 2003 as well as earlier this year.

People did appear fairly dramatically just before 11 am, although there were perhaps not quite enough of them to make a real mob.

The whistle came early
And when someone (at right above) blew a whistle just before 11.02 (their clock was wrong) everyone took it as a signal to throw their planes, though they did pick them up and throw them again at around the correct moment. They had to pick up the planes in any case, as police had warned them they might otherwise be charged with littering.

Planes in flight

Catching good pictures of paper planes in flight turned out to be surprisingly tricky. I’d fortunately realised there might be a problem in advance, and turned the D300 on to the high speed mode. Usually I leave the camera on the low speed continuous setting, which I’ve set using the custom setting d4 to be 3 frames per second. I find this is the fastest speed I can leave it on and reliably take a single exposure by a short shutter press that doesn’t jab and cause camera shake, while allowing me to take a sequence of images by holding my finger down.

Up till now I’ve also been using the 14 bit RAW setting, which restricts the maximum frame rate to slightly slower than this, at 2.5 fps. I’ve seen reports that there is very little advantage in using this compared to the 12 bit setting, but hadn’t found the time to test it out for myself. (I’ve continued to use RAW compression which I tested on the D200 and found made no discernible difference in my kind of pictures.) But waiting for the mob to flash, I’d remembered to set the bit depth down to 12 bit so I could shoot 12 bit RAW bursts at 8 frames per second.

You can see more of my efforts at photographing the Stop Heathrow Airport Expansion Flashmob on My London Diary as usual.

I didn’t notice any drop in quality in these files compared to the 14 bit ones, but the extra number of pictures on a card was significant (the manual suggests around 1.3 times as many.) I found I got almost exactly 100 files per gigabyte compared to around 79 using 14 bit, a very slightly smaller difference. I’ll perhaps get round to making some more careful comparisons of image quality for myslef shortly – and when I do will write more.

Even in 1/8th of a second, a paper plane moves a considerable distance, and catching them flying low with the added milliseconds of reaction time and shutter lag was a lottery in which I had no outstanding success. Of course I could have set something up, but I’m not that sort of photographer.

Time Running Out

Time seems to be passing very quickly for me at the moment, and I could hardly believe it when I had to start a new month on My London Diary. So it was perhaps fitting that several of the events I’ve photographed recently have been about time running out for our planet.

June 30 was the last day of a government consultation about what started off as a potentially good idea – eco-towns – but has ended up as an unpopular mistake. Eco-towns were promised to be zero-carbon new developments using brown-field sites and acting as exemplars of ecological development in various ways. But the thinking behind them was never properly explored, and murky compromises with the building industry muddied the original concept, and we ended up with proposals that really looked very little different from other new town developments, largely to be sited on prime agricultural land. Brown-field sites are harder to find and generally give developers more problems.

It was hardly surprising that local protest groups emerged to oppose most of the proposals, nor that most of their opposition was on environmental grounds although probably very few of us welcome development in our own backyards. (I certainly hated it when the council built rather plain flats on the unregistered common land at the end of my garden.)

BARD against Middle Quinton

Certainly I think the strength of the opposition which was demonstrated outside the Houses of Parliament on June 30 will at least worry the government – as should the comments of prominent architects and environmentalists.

More on the story – and of course many more pictures –
in Eco-Towns Scam – Parliament Lobby on My London Diary.