Political Issues | >Re-PHOTO

Drop the Debt in London

Thursday I spent a day out in London, but my idea of a day out is perhaps different to most people. It started badly, when I forgot where I was supposed to be going and went to Trafalgar Square rather than Parliament Square!

I’ve changed from using my ancient and rather inconvenient diary software that produced nice neat printouts of my schedule to a rather more up-to-date piece of software, but haven’t so far managed to get it to give me such nice lists. Thursday I was in a rush and just glanced at the screen, scribbled a few notes and ran for the train. And got it wrong.

So I was late, and missed the start of the event I’d gone to photograph. Really organisation is vital, and I wasn’t the only one who had messed up, as the organisers hadn’t realised they needed permission from Westminster City Council for what they wanted to do.

The two mistakes didn’t quite cancel each other out, but it did mean I’d missed rather less than I would otherwise have done. I was able to catch up and photograph the rest of the event.

Birmingham May 2008
Paper chains in Birmingham

Which had started several weeks ago in Birmingham, where at the ‘Journey for Justice’ we had celebrated the 10th anniversary of the human chain which had been perhaps the most effective demonstration ever at a G8 Heads of Government meeting. Without any violence by demonstrators or police it put the cancellation of the overseas debts of the world’s poorest countries firmly on the political agenda.

There is still a very long way to go for the ‘Drop the Debt’ campaign – with only 20% of such debt yet dealt with. But that 20%, as the director of Christian Aid noted, has meant as much as the contributions collected in a thousand years of the annual fund-raising in Christian Aid week, one of this country’s major charity collections.

The paper links in the chains made this year in Birmingham were to take the ‘Drop the Debt’ message to the G8 meeting in Japan in July, and last week a small group of London activists carried them to the the Department for International Development in Palace St where they were met by Development Minister Gareth Thomas.

Drop the Debt, London

Photographically things were a little tricky. As you can see, the meeting took place outside on the pavement, at the entrance of the building. There was a fairly huge difference in light levels in the bright sun on the pavement and the deep shade of the entrance.

Photographers sometimes tell me that digital doesn’t have the dynamic range of film, but generally that simply means they haven’t learnt to use digital. It can really deal with much the same range as colour neg, though to do so in this kind of situation does require that you shoot RAW rather than jpeg, and also make use of some flash fill where you can.

The big plus is that with digital you can see immediately whether you have things right, not mainly from the picture display, but from the histogram, and if necessary adjust exposure and flash intensity. Here I was also moving the flash (with the plastic diffuser head that came with it) to point in the direction that needed flash and as far as possible away from the parts of the subject in bright sun.

Apart from a few pictures with my new ultra wide-angle – which I discovered was stuck wide-open and had to give up with, most of the pictures came out fine, at least so far as exposure was concerned.

On the tube to my next location I played with the stop-down lever on the back of the ultra-wide, and fortunately was able to sort out the problem. Obviously I’d changed lenses in a hurry and banged the small lever against the mount, bending it enough to prevent it moving smoothly. After straightening it out carefully the lens worked perfectly.

Having spent around thirty years working with what seem to be the best camera mounts ever designed – from Leica and Olympus – the Nikon mount does seem a little crude.

Another Clapham Celebration

The SS Empire Windrush, which brought the first major group of Caribbean settlers from Jamaica to England in 1948 sank in the Med near Algiers around six years later, but a major monument of those times that have changed our country so greatly over the last 60 years remains.

Many of the 492 who arrived on the Windrush came with a suitcase and their hopes but little more. Many had served Britain in the armed forces, sometimes based in this country, and some few had places they could go to, but most were urgently in need of somewhere to stay while they sorted out jobs and a place to live.

One of the deep shelters, built for government use in the early 1940s and later opened for use as a public air-raid shelter in 1944 was pressed into service, quickly being adapted to provide basic living accomodation. This shelter still survives (along with the other London deep shelters) and the surface buildings are on the edge of Clapham Common near to Clapham South station.

The nearest labour exchange to the shelter was in Brixton, about a mile walk, and led to the area becoming the home of the Caribbean community in England. So it seemed an appropriate place to be celebrating the arrival of the Windrush, 60 years ago on Sunday.

Children listen to Four Kornerz and the Churchboyz at Clapham Windrush celebration

Although a small group walked from the deep shelter, the actual celebration took place a quarter of a mile away at the bandstand in the middle of Clapham Common, and was organised by Christian Aid, together with the Windrush Foundation and local churches. With speeches and gospel music it was more an aural than a visual event, although the children taking part in their own way made it rather more interesting.

One local church, Holy Trinity Clapham, played a major part in the event, as it had done in the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the Act abolishing the slave trade.

A commemoration walk last March started there, where worshippers in the ‘Clapham Sect‘ at the centre of the movement had included William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, John and Henry Thornton, John Venn, Zachary Macaulay and others, and went around the area stopping at notable sites associated with them, including the probable site of the ‘African Academy‘ in the picture above.

World Naked Bike Ride

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to photograph Saturday’s World Naked Bike Ride in London again. I wrote at some length last year about its ‘photography’ policy and my objections to it – it seems to be a blatant attack on the freedom of the press in particular and on individual freedoms at a time when both are under considerable fire from the law and order fascists. I won’t repeat myself – it’s still on line. But if you take part in a public event and want to hide your identity or blushes, as I’ve said before, the answer is simple:

don’t shoot the photographer; wear a mask.

I also wrote a shorter piece about news values and nakedness after last year’s ride. There is a paragraph I rather like in it, so here it is – though you can of course use the link to read the rest.

10,000 marching for Palestine. Perhaps 3,000 Orangemen and women. A thousand or so naked or near naked cyclists. No contest, not even for the BBC. When I switched on Radio 4 for the 10 oclock news there was only one London event. And there was no one there wearing a burkha.

Definitely not a burkha, but she made me think of both of my comments from last year.

But the World Naked Bike Ride is in several ways an interesting event, although as in previous years while bodies are very much on display environmental messages seemed at times to be rather well-hidden, leaving many of the public along the route bemused.

The two young women standing next to me at the start weren’t commenting on the state of the planet or the strangulating grip of car culture but that they had never seen so many penises before, and they were certainly glorious in their diversity. We speculated together briefly on whether the ride showed a greater proportion of circumcision than among the general public and if so why that should be and other major penis-related issues.

Later I was in the middle of a group of young men who loudly expressed the view that the whole event was “f**king out of order, innit” and that it should not be allowed, but most of the people standing around me as I photographed seemed startled but generally amused by the ride, even if few realised what it was about.

According to the web site, it is a “peaceful, imaginative and fun protest against oil dependency and car culture. A celebration of the bicycle and also a celebration of the power and individuality of the human body. A symbol of the vulnerability of the cyclist in traffic.”

I don’t know how many cyclists took part – it seemed roughly the same size as in previous years, and my guess would be a thousand or two. Of course it wasn’t just cyclists, there were some skateboards and roller blades, and some odd sort of curved metal thing. Surprisingly only two unicyclists – you have to be an exhibitionist to ride a unicycle, so I’d expect rather more. (Perhaps they are all away in Nova Scotia keeping most of their clothes on and ‘Riding the Lobster‘ along with one of my sons?) One of them was riding with the slogan “One Love, One Wheel” on his chest.

Cyclists take up quite a bit of road space compared to marchers, so it is certainly more impressive than a march with the same number of people, and of course the bared flesh greatly adds to the impact.

More pictures on My London Diary, though as always only a fairly small fraction of those I took. If you were on the ride and would like your picture (if I took one) email me and I’ll send one if I can.

Access to Life

The most recent posting on the Magnum blog, Access for Life looks at a success story about AIDS. When antiretroviral drugs first appeared in the 1990s, they made it a maneagable chronic disease for the 5% or so of sufferers who could afford the treatment. In recent years campaigns including the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria launched in 2002 have cut costs and introduced new ways of using the drugs so that many more can continue to live.

The Access for Life web site features work by eight Magnum photographers in nine countries around the world, photographing peope before and four months after they began antiretroviral treatment for AIDS. So far I’ve only looked at the story from Russia by Alex Majoli which is featured on the blog, and which tells a powerful story making use of his colour and black and white pictures along with some simple snatches of video and a fine soundtrack (with sub-titles for the Russian dialogue) but I’ll go back and look at the others on the web site later. They feature some of my favourite photographers, including at least four I’ve previously written about.

Other photographers on the website along with Majoli , are Paolo Pellegrin, Jim Goldberg, Gilles Peress, Jonas Bendiksen, Steve McCurry, Eli Reed and there are two reports from Larry Towell covering Swaziland and South Africa.

Partying on the Tube

One of the downsides of living out on the edge of the city is that it can be hard to travel home very late at night. My last train leaves shortly before midnight on a Saturday and it’s then seven hours until the next. The hourly all-night bus service which used to serve us now drops me around 4 miles away.

So I tend not to photograph things that happen very late at night, and missed the Circle Line tube party on 31 May to mark Boris’s alcohol ban starting the next day.

I’m not a fan of the ban, though I would like the Underground to be safer for both passengers and staff. The ban will inconvenience tourists and others who occasionally like a cool beer as an antidote to the often stifling heat on the tube as they go from one of London’s attractions to another, or who like to relax a little on the way home from work, while I suspect that travel police will continue to largely turn a blind eye at large drunken groups of football supports and others who can be a real nuisance, whether or not they are actually drinking on the train. There are simply not enough police around to control them and adding an extra area of friction between them and the police is hardly likely to improve matters or manners.

Tube Party

I was reminded about the ban yesterday, as I was at last getting some of my pictures from another Tube party earlier this year ready to go into the stock libraries, something that tends to get on top of me (adding the captions, keywords and so on is a really tedious chore.)

Unless you are a New Zealander you will probably not know about the Treaty of Waitangi, a rather curious agreement signed by some Maori chiefs and British representatives in 1840. We used it to legitimise a takeover of the country, although in more recent years the Maoris have found it a way to claim some limited and belated reparation, and Waitangi Day is now celebrated as the New Zealand national Day.

Circle Line Pub Crawl - Waitangi Day

The main celebration in London over the past few years had been the Circle Line Pub Crawl, starting early at a pub near Paddington and leaving the train at every station along the line for another beer or two, arriving at Westminster and Parliament Square around tea-time (though little tea is in evidence.) There the square is packed with a heaving mass of Kiwis, some of whom strip to the waist and perform a noisy Haka before making for the station and the next stop and pub, although relatively few make it to the official end of the party at Temple station, having mostly by then dispersed to other pubs around Whitehall and Strand.

Despite approaching 10,000 distinctly unsober participants, it all seemed very good-natured, and although a slight inconvenience to some travellers (who might be advised to change to the District line services serving the same stations but totally ignored by the party-goers) does little or no harm while giving a little free entertainment to Londoners. Much of the inconvenience seems to be caused by official over-reaction including the temporary closing of some stations and stopping (or non-stopping) of some Circle line services, when a more intelligent response would be to put on extra trains and work the participants through the system as rapidly as possible. “We’ve got a crowd on the platform, so lets stop the trains and close the station” really doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Circle Line Pub Crawl - Waitangi Day

It’s an event that already waves a digit to numerous by-laws, including those on drinking in public places such as Parliament Square, and I wonder if Boris’s tube ban will have any impact on it, other than perhaps to add brown paper bags to the already quite impressive dress code.

Circle Line PUb Crawl

By the time you read this, you should be able to buy some of the pictures through Alamy, as well of course as directly from me – and there is a wider range of pictures on My London Diary which takes you through the day telling the whole story of the event as I saw it.

More on Metadata

Thanks to a friend for pointing me at the presentations now on-line from the 2nd annual Photo Metadata Conference, held in Malta on 5 June 2008, which included the first public presentation of the refurbished IPTC Core and a new IPTC Extension set of photo metadata.

If you feel you missed out on a jolly trip to Malta (and last year’s event was in Florence) then at least you can console yourself at having missed all of the Powerpoint presentations that are now available for download. Most of them actually seem to be saying more or less the same things and at times it seems as if the main interest during the sessions will have been in the colour of the shirts or dresses worn by the presenters.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. If you did get there it meant you could have spent your time in the bar and not missed a lot, and it’s good for all of us that there does seem to be considerable agreement over the necessity of metadata and its future direction.

Actually there are a few points of interest, especially for me in a presentation (download it from the programme page) by David Riecks that shows just the pig’s ear that major stock distributors make of it at the moment.

And that is really the root of the problem at the moment. There isn’t a great deal of point in a campaign to get photographers to put the meta-data in if libraries and others shake it all about and remove all or most of it.

Lightroom (and some other programs – but I use Lightroom) has made it relatively easy for photographers to add some essential metadata as a matter of routine when processing their raw files (or even jpegs if you have to shoot jpeg) although I’d like the process to start even earlier with camera manufacturers getting more into the act.

Every picture we shoot digitally now has EXIF data recorded, including the date and time. No photographer should ever find themselves having to enter this data into software manually (though if – as I’ve done at times – we manage to set the wrong year or the wrong time zone, we need to be able to correct it.) Software can pick it up automatically and rewrite it wherever it’s needed.

My camera also allows me to add some user-input data to every picture. It would only add a few bytes to firmware to allow the entry of some specified fields – such as copyright (what my data always contains), e-mail address and perhaps ‘Headline’ which would then be available to software. Which could then, for example copy the files to an appropriately located and named folder when you upload these to your computer, and perhaps also choose appropriate pre-sets for other purposes.

Several of the presentations address some of the real basics that make metadata useful, such as:

data should never need to be entered twice
it should be and offence to remove metadata or edit it without permission

(Some copyright lawyers claim removal is already is an offence under copyright law.)

Keywording
Perhaps the discussion that I would have found of most interest was “Keywording versus Controlled Vocabularies” which rather strikes me as a false dichotomy. To make keywording really useful you need a controlled vocabulary, and a controlled vocabulary seems to require some way to use it, which is by keywording. This was a ‘panel discussion’, and what you can download certainly throws little light on the topic.

Perhaps one of the problems is that the same keyword needs to be able to sit in several different hierarchical trees. Yesterday I was adding the keyword ‘Haka’ to some of my images to go in a library (actually I was adding it for a second time, because it was a keyword in the file I was uploading, but the system doesn’t read most of the metadata in the files – so I spend hours and hours re-keying.)

Haka in Parliament Square for Waitangi Day

If I was setting up a keywording system using a controlled vocabulary I might want to include Haka in a heirachy part of which would look like this:

>Country>New Zealand>Maori>Culture>Haka

but I might also want to include it in a hierarchy that was cross-cultural and looked at various types of dance and their function, part of which would look like this:

>dance>war dance>Haka

or perhaps we might want to look at it in yet other ways.

How we make such links is important both in keywording and also even more so in developing smart methods of searching – which is really the important end of the process.

PLUS
Something that I think we will hear more about is PLUS, the Picture Licensing Universal System, which will provide a single world-wide system for describing licences and to embed licensing information as metadata in images. It won’t replace IPTC, but provides only licence-related information – including of course address and copyright details. It seems it will be free to use, although I’m not sure whether non-members of PLUS will be included in their seachable creator data-base when this is up and running. Widespread adoption of PLUS would give added protection to image creators and clarify conditions for those wanting to use images.

Of course the success of such a system depends in part on national laws. If the US does decide to do its own coach and horses over so-called “Orphan Rights” (as to some extent it has always done on copyright) it will almost certainly severely weaken the utility of PLUS. But intellectual property rights are increasingly an important part of world trade, and perhaps the age when the US can run the world is coming to an end?

Smash EDO

Brighton residents who had marched against the war in Iraq formed ‘Smash EDO‘ in 2004 when they learnt that a factory in their city, EDO (since taken over by ITT and now known as EDO/ITT) was responsible for making guidance systems and other components that made the bombing of Iraq possible. They began a continuing series of regular demonstrations against the company that was profiting from killing people there.

As well as regular weekly ‘noise’ demonstrations, they have organised other events and meetings around the country, and made a film, ‘On The Verge’ about the campaign. They successfully fought an injunction by EDO that would have prevented demonstrations and got the local council to pass a motion upholding their right to peaceful and lawful protest following some very questionable police activity and arrests during demonstrations.

Around 600 marchers walked and danced along the main road towards EDO

On Wednesday I went to Brighton to photograph the ‘Carnival Against the Arms Trade‘ which Smash EDO had organised. It started as a lively fun event, but got a little out of hand when police tried to stop the marchers before they had reached the EDO factory.

Police tried to stop marchers

The marchers pushed over the police barriers and past the police who made only token attempts to stop them at that point. At two other points in the remaining two hundred yards or so the police again made a rather half-hearted line across the road, delaying the march slightly until people again pushed through to the factory gates.

Batons were used

Although there had been a little pushing and shoving, and police had certainly extended and used their batons, I only saw banners rather the demonstrators being hit and in general tempers had remained fairly cool and behaviour relatively restrained, rather as if in a slightly unruly rugby scrum, although with rather more shouting. There were a lot of police, but most were just standing and watching their colleagues getting pushed back

Eventually around 300 of the marchers reached the gates (others had waited further down the hill or gone home), which were protected by a triple line of police, with more in reserve. I went back and up the hill to get an overall view and discussed the situation with some of the others around.

It looked like stalemate – but how wrong could I be!

The general opinion was that little further was likely to happen. The factory was surrounded by a high and secure fence and there were more than enough police to hold the demonstrators at bay, with now quite a few taking a rest further down the hill.

So I thought I’d more or less done all I could and walked down the hill to catch a bus. Maybe get home and file some pictures…

But apparently as soon as my back was turned, someone mysteriously opened a gate and demonstrators rushed in, soon followed by police. A few windows were broken and there was considerable violence, with police using batons and pepper spray as well as bringing in police dogs. It seems just a matter of good fortune that nobody appears to have been seriously injured.

Ten people were arrested, mainly for minor offences, though they were all held for 30 hours before being released on police bail without charges being laid, to return to the custody centre in early August. While they were being held, police raided a number of their homes and seized several computers, mobile phones and clothes.

You can see more of my view of the events on My London Dairy, and reports mainly about what happened after I left the scene early on Indymedia. I should have stayed until things were more obviously over, but it was a nice day and I had other things I wanted to do!

Seven Years in Parliament Square

Brian Haw started his one man protest in Parliament Square on 2 June, 2001. Despite police harassment and vigilante attacks (ignored or even encouraged by police) not to mention an Act of Parliament designed to get rid of him, he is still there seven years later.

I can’t remember when I first saw him there, or when I first photographed him, but I have many pictures from over the years. You can of course read more about him and the Parliament Square Peace Campaign on the Parliament Square web site.

I was among those who went along on Sunday afternoon to mark the occasion, joining him and his regular supporters in the square. Brian himself was marking it by fasting and praying until Monday 2nd.

You can see a few more pictures on My London Diary. It was a dull, drab day with not a lot happening – as must have so often have been the case over the 2561 (and counting) days that Brian has been there.

This was at the 5th anniversary in 2006:

2006 Parliament Square

And one from the 6th anniversary:

Over the years Brian has seen and taken part in many of the political protests in Parliament Square and around:

With peace protesters at the Cenotaph in 2004. Brian holds a placard “War Kills the Innocent” in front of Cenotaph in Whitehall, where the Code Pink wreath reads, “How Many Will Die in Iraq Today?”.

My favourite picture of him was taken during the rally against the replacement of Britain’s Trident nuclear missiles in March 2007.

Brian Haw

Brian’s T-shirt in this picture carries the message “Find Your Courage; Share Your Vision; Change Your World” which seems so appropriate. It – and the quote – was produced by US disablement activist Dan Wilkins, who was delighted to see Brian wearing it when I sent him a copy of the picture.

Humans say NO to Heathrow

NO to a third runway at Heathrow

I took this picture with one hand on the camera, the other holding a large sheet just like those in the picture, taking part with around 2600 others in the large human ‘NO’ that was being recorded live on BBC News TV when I made this picture. I checked to make sure that my own ‘NO’ was the correct way up, but not everyone was so careful, not that you could have seen in the view from the cherry-picker or helicopter.

It was an event at which most of the protesters were local people, many who will lose homes if the runway goes ahead. Of course they will get compensation, but the terms are often far from fair financially. Some have long links with the area, many with parents or spouses and other relatives buried in the Cherry Lane Cemetery, opened in 1936, which may be covered by a spur road to the airport if plans go ahead.

Activists on the march from Hatton Cross to Sipson

The march and rally attracted support from MPs of all parties with constituencies under the flightpath. Surprisingly one of the closest boroughs to Heathrow, Spelthorne (until 1995 boundary changes it included the site of Terminal 5) where I live supports the development – along with its MP. This will probably change once the plans for the fourth Runway through its centre are leaked!

MPs Justine Greening (Con, Putney), John McDonnell (Lab, Hayes & Harlington), and Susan Kramer (LibDem, Richmond Park) at the front of the march in Sipson
I’ve written about the proposed development and Saturday’s demonstration on My London Diary as usual.

No Third Runway

Today I photographed a demonstration against the continuing expansion of London Heathrow, certainly one of the worst located airports in the developed world.

I grew up under its flightpath. In my back garden in Hounslow I would imagine myself reaching up and touching the planes as they passed overhead. It wouldn’t have needed very long arms. I dreamed (or nightmared) of them passing over in flames (though sometime it was true) and jumping across the sky as flaming fragments.

Heathrow was established by deception – as a miltary airstrip for which there was no military purpose. It has grown by lies. The third terminal was all the airport would ever want, but as soon as planning permission was obtained, in went the application for a fourth. Of course that would be enough. But somehow we have a fifth, and the sixth will soon be with us unless we stop the madness.

The quiet Middlesex villages I cycled through as a child – and by the time I was ten I was roaming through them all on my bicycle and further afield – are either already gone or under threat. Longford, Sipson, Harlington, Harmondsworth and more.

Harmondsworth, 2003

Harmondsworth, 2003

Look at the placard at the right of the picture. Here is a detail from another frame that states clearly what the BAA, responsible for Heathrow, promised about the possibility of a third runway there:

Detail of BAA's view of a third runway at Heathrow
Rule out third runway say BAA

I hope today’s demonstration – in which over 3000 people gave a resounding ‘No’ to the idea of a third runway will cause even our un-green government to think again. It has been clear to anyone who took a careful and balanced view that Heathrow was in the wrong place since the 1950s – if not before. Government after government has refused to grasp the nettle and start to develop another London airport on a more suitable site. We now have a different situation, with increasing oil prices as we go past ‘peak oil’ as well as an much greater appreciation of the catastrophe approaching through climate change. From every point of view – even a strict economic one that ignores environmental issues – Heathrow needs to shrink rather than expand.

I’ll post some of my own pictures of today’s demonstration shortly. For the moment you can see a few my pictures from the march from Sipson to Harmondsworth in June 2003, and you can also see the BBC’s video coverage of the event, in which I appear rather too prominently, immediately after the huge ‘NO’, taken from a cherry picker, as a photographer in a blue check shirt, first walking towards the camera and then walking back into the frame to take another picture.