Month: May 2008

Taken to the Cleaners

London Cleaners at AON

It’s hard not to sympathise with the cleaners when you compare the rates they get paid for cleaning the London offices of some of the richest companies in the world with the ridiculous amounts paid to some of those who work there. They certainly deserve enough to live on – and the current minimum wage isn’t enough to survive on in London. Their demand is for a living wage – currently set at £7.20 an hour – as well as some basic rights as workers.

Their campaign aims to shame the companies by making a fuss, with demonstrations that are highly visible and audible. It was one event where I was glad I had a set of ear plugs in my pocket as they blew their whistles pretty mightily. The red t-shirts and flags make them stand out, particularly in the financial area where dull suits abound.

I’d like my pictures to be as powerful as possible, but it was hard to produce anything really dramatic – and even harder to get anyone interested in publishing them. More pictures and more about the campaign on My London Diary.

Changing Spaces at Photofusion

I usually like going to exhibition openings at Photofusion, though more often it’s the people I meet there that make it interesting than the pictures on the wall. Photofusion is very much a photographers gallery and most of the people at openings have a real interest in the medium. Its also a much more friendly place that most galleries, one where you can talk to strangers and meet new people, as well as bumping into old friends and acquaintances.

If anyone doesn’t know, Photofusion is London’s largest independent photography resource centre with a full range of facilities and services for pros, amateurs and students. Members can work in a well-equipped digital suite (or for the retro, darkrooms) hire a studio attend courses and events at reasonable rates, and Photofusion’s picture agency represents the work of many photographers whose work deals with social and environmental issues – including some of my own.

It’s also very handily placed in Brixton, 2 minutes walk from both the Victoria line tube and Overground station. When I did a project on people on buses Brixton was one of my favourite places to work, because there were just so many buses and people. I dropped in to Photofusion last night on my way back from photographing in the centre of London, a fifteen minute journey by tube.

The current exhibition, Changing Spaces, (until 21 June, 2008) has work by five photographers, Laura Braun, Mandy Lee Jandrell, Isidro Ramirez, Simon Rowe, Gregor Stephan and is a part of the Urban Encounters programme, a collaboration between Photofusion and the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths (part of the University of London, based at New Cross.) Curated by Paul Halliday and Catherine Williams, this also includes a conference, talks and workshops.

The show aimed to present different approaches by photographers to urban spaces, and is one of the more interesting currently on view in London, although I find some of the writing about it more than opaque. Here’s a short chunk:

Laura Braun’s move towards sub-urbanisation in the mid 1900s, show social and public spaces devoid of the photographs of Downtown Los Angeles, the once glamourous heart of the city, side-lined and in decline since the pressure of people however with the traces of their passing intact.

This certainly isn’t English as we know it, and must surely be the output of some deranged computer programme that strings together random phrases in an attempt to demonstrate artificial intelligence. But doubtless it will be clear to speakers of Acadamese.

Two projects of the five appealed particularly strongly. One was by Isidro Ramirez who gained a BA on the Editorial Photography course at the University of Brighton in 1998 and an MA in Photography and Urban Cultures at Goldsmiths in 2006. His pictures in the project What We Don’t See are of spaces in which blind and visually impaired people live and work, and show a fine sense of both space and light. I think they reveal considerably more about how the photographer sees than about how those who inhabit the spaces perceive them. Keeping spaces relatively open and uncluttered is of course essential when vision is limited, as we found when my late father-in-law used to stay in our untidy home.

Simon Rowe worked with Francesca Sanlorenzo and Ben Gidley of Goldsmiths on the 2004 Pepys Portrait Project. His work on show is “part of a larger project about the Pepys estate, present a portrait of a South East London housing estate as it moves into a new era. The project reflects a sense of the multiplicity of human and social relationships against a background of social change and regeneration.” Both this text and his pictures are models of clarity and show a real feeling for the people and place.


Some of the people in Simon Rowe’s pictures were at Photofusion for the opening

The Pepys estate in Deptford was built by the GLC, (Chief Architect Ted Hollamby,) in the 1960s on a prime 45 acre site next to the Thames to provide over 1,300 homes. Opened by Lord Mountbatten of Burma in July 1966, it was lauded at the time as a landmark in social housing, and gained a Civic Trust award.

Pepys Estate (C) Peter Marshall
Pepys Estate, 1982 (C) Peter Marshall.

By the 1980s, when the estate was handed over to Lewisham Council, the buildings had deteriorated through poor upkeep and the estate had become known for crime, vandalism and drugs. Problems were confounded by those of language, with many asylum seekers being housed there.

Regeneration started in the early 1990s, mainly refurbishing existing buildings, but came to a halt in 1998, with six blocks on the prime riverside sites not completed. Lewisham engaged in complex and highly doubtful moves, against considerable opposition from Pepys tenants, finally resulting in Aragon tower being refurbished as a private block by Berkley Homes (handy yuppy flats for over-paid workers at Canary Wharf) and the five low rise blocks being replaced by 250 new homes by Hyde Housing Association.

Robert Rauschenberg: Photographs

Suffering today from the annual and unwelcome reminder of ageing (though the presents are nice) I got to thinking about Robert Rauschenberg, who died two days ago on May 12, aged 82.

As the New York Times obit by Michael Kimmelman says

“A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.”

Although I have a book of his photographs (Robert Rauschenberg Photographs, Thames & Hudson, 1981, ISBN 0 500 54075 6) it seems to me that photography is the one medium about which this isn’t true, although of course he made considerable use of photographs in various mixed media works, both using his own pictures and solvent transfer prints from magazine images.

In the book Rauschenberg comments that he first took up photography as a young man, it was a “social shield“, covering up the perosnal conflict he felt “between curiousity and shyness“. In the interview published in the book with Alain Sayag, Rauschenberg says that while studying with Josef Albers (who he elsewhere said “was my best teacher, and I was his worst student“) at Black Mountain College in 1949 he became aware that he had to make a choice “I was serious enough or dedicated enough to know that I could not have at that point two primary professions“. Since at that point his photographic project “was to photograph the entire U.S.A., inch by inch” it’s perhaps good that he chose painting (later, in 1980-1, in his project ‘In + Out City Limits’, he did try to photograph at least parts of the country.)

Had Rauschenberg been as excited by other teachers at Black Mountain – perhaps Aaron Siskind or Harry Callahan, the history of art and photography would have been different.

Rauschenberg’s early photography was good enough for Edward Steichen to buy two of his prints – one a portrait of his friend Cy Twombly – for MoMA‘s photography collection – his first sale to a public collection.

The first group of pictures in the book are from the period when he had given up photography, and are perhaps the strongest, uncropped square format images with a strongly emotional content, although the often square-on approach to the subject and sensitivity to lighting carry suggestions of Walker Evans. His later work when he returned to photography (I think, from the evidence of the images with a 35mm SLR) in 1979-80 are more related to formal concerns and less personal, although many are still very interesting, concentrating largely on urban details. Many of them were from the project In + Out City Limits (1980-81) mentioned above, which was followed by other photographic projects, including Photems (1981/1991), and Chinese Summerhall (1982-83.)

Rauschenberg comments that for him photography is “a kind of achaeology in time only, forcing one to see whatever the light of the darkness touches and care” and goes on to state: “Photography is the most direct communication in non-violent contacts.”

Sayag asks him why he never crops, and gets this response:

Photography is like diamond cutting. If you miss you miss… You wait until life is in the frame, then you have the permission to click. I like the adventure of waiting until the whole frame is full.”

Rauschenberg was certainly a great artist, and had he devoted himself to the medium could also have become a great photographer.

Unfortunately very little of his photographic work seems to be available to view on the web.

Here is an example Untitled, ca 1952 though it is not in my opinion one of his more interesting images. There are also one or two fairly poor reproductions from In + Out City Limits: Baltimore, Los Angeles and a rather better exhibition poster for Los Angeles.

Anyone for Morris?

I’m never quite sure that I want to photograph Morris Dancing. Partly I think because it seems to be such a popular subject with amateur photographers – the kind of event that gets listed under ‘photo opportunities‘ in the amateur magazines. Fortunately I don’t think these have got onto May Queens yet. But it does seem to be a general rule that whenever something is listed whether on a press release or elsewhere as a ‘photo-op’ it is almost certain to be boring. You, along with 27 other photographers are presented with someone else’s idea (almost always a word person’s idea) of what would make a good photograph, typically some posed group, and its always hard work – if not impossible – to make a different and more interesting picture.

Of course Morris isn’t like that, but it does come with lots of wacky coloured clothes, stripy waistcoats, flowery hats and knee-bells that make it ‘photogenic‘ – another of my least favourite words, committed as I am to the proposition that it’s photographers who make photographs. Photogenic just means more clichés to struggle against, and all too often my doggy paddle can’t breast the stream.

Not that I’m against Morris at all. It’s a great tradition and guys like Cecil Sharp and the others who recorded and resuscitated its dying embers at the turn of the nineteenth century did a great job. If I didn’t have a life and two left feet I’d happily join up and spend more time with them studying real ale. I’m even on record as saying that the stupidest, most arrogant and wrong-headed decision the English Arts Council ever made was not to fund Morris Dancers; “Over my dead body” on of its more illustrious leaders was reported to have said in a rare pause from shovelling money into the bottomless pit of London’s Royal Opera House.

sword and wheel
Sword dancers at Embankment Steps, Westminster, London

The Westminster Day of Dance is rather a splendid event, organised by the “world famous Westminster Morris Men” who dress in tabards with a portcullis motif which makes me think of council employees (perhaps why I seem to have edited them completely out of the pictures I’ve put on line) though they do have a rather fine unicorn.

There were four locations where groups of dancers were putting in an early morning session before coming together in Trafalgar Square, and I decided that the River Thames would make for a more interesting London background, so started off at Embankment steps, with the view across the river, including the London Eye – see above. Shortly before the session ended I rushed down to Victoria Gardens, where I hoped that the Houses of Parliament and Rodin’s Burghers of Calais might form suitable backgrounds, though I didn’t really get either to work.

After a brief and pointless journey on the tube to photograph another event (on arrival I found it wasn’t starting until three hours after the time I’d found on the web) I went to see the Morris Men (and I think they were all men, although there are women Morris Dancers, following in the footsteps of the suffragette Esperance Working Girls Club of 1906) in Trafalgar Square, where they were competing rather successfully for the attention of tourists with Falun Dafa, celebrating its 16th anniversary and protesters against the slaughter of seals. The dancing continued at various sites around Westminster after lunch, but by then I was with the May Queens in rural suburbia.

There is a tendency for us to look back and see the interest in and revival of folk traditions – including both Morris and the May Queens around the end of the Victorian era as a conservative movement in political terms. There were actually strong links with the radical movements of the day both in the arts – the Arts and Craft movement – and in politics, including both socialism and the emancipation of women.

London May Queen

I’ve had an exhausting few days, partly from working in what for us in England has been some unusually hot weather but also because I’ve been out photographing rather a lot. People who aren’t photographers (even some who take a lot of photographs) think that photography is an easy number but – at least the way I do it – it can actually be physically and mentally draining.

My camera bag isn’t particularly heavy, typically around 15 or 16 lbs on my left shoulder, and I can stand around for hours without getting tired (though if I forget and pick it up on my right I start to feel pain in minutes.) But covering a procession or demonstration involves a lot of running around, much of it going backwards, as well as stretching, crouching and leaning to get the camera into the right place, often rather tricky as the subject is often moving too.

Mentally I think it’s rather like taking an exam when new questions keep getting fired at you and you have to respond instantly with answers. As well as the purely visual problems you are also working with people and situations. I’m not complaining – I do it because I find it exhilarating, but can also be very tiring.

Of course the subjects I choose to cover are relatively soft ones, unlike those of some other photographers. Despite some of the lurid stories of gun crime that appear in newspapers there is essentially little or no risk of “kinetic activity” when photographing in London, and the worst physical dangers I usually face are those of road traffic. And being able to get on a train and go home at the end of the day does make life so much easier.

Coney Hall
The Coney Hall May Queen and her dog in the procession

But despite the fact that the Merrie England and London May Queen Festival is a delightful and interesting event, I was still pretty tired by the end of it, and it was great to be able to relax and have a couple of beers before going home and downloading the images on to my computer. It’s also good not to have to work to tight deadlines, although I had to get everything transferred and backed up so that I could go out and take more pictures the following day.

Sutton May Queen
Sutton May Queen

The festival was held as always at Hayes Common, on the leafy suburban south-east fringe of London (and the pollen count was undoubtedly high as my itching eyes and sneezing testified.) I’d been invited to take pictures by the mother of the 96th London May Queen, though I would quite likely have been there in any case as I’ve been working on a project on the subject of May queens, hopefully for a museum show and book, since 2005. Given the problems that there can be now in photographing children, getting to know and be trusted by people has been vital.

You can read much more about the actual event, and see more pictures than you need on My London Diary, where there are also pictures from various previous May Queen events.

Slough Arm

“Come friendly bombs” wrote John Betjeman, and although Slough has definitely changed since his day, I’m not sure a walk through the town centre would convince anyone it was for the better. Like the rest of the country, industry there has to some extent declined, although there are still things being made in parts of the industrial estate.


A rural aspect on the Slough Arm of the Grand Union Canal
I went there on a Bank Holiday (the silly May one that isn’t May Day) along with Linda and Sam to walk along the Slough Arm of the Grand Union Canal, for a long more or less disused. Despite Betjeman’s ” There isn’t grass to graze a cow” it was surprisingly rural, where you weren’t walking past factories, many of which were disused.

The first couple of miles of canal were pretty empty, although there were a few people enjoying the fine weather (and some fishermen, although I thought this was the close season.) Most of the people we met were talking Polish.

The Slough branch of the canal is a five mile long dead end, but we didn’t walk all the way to the junction with the main line at Cowley Peachey, instead diverting past the sewage works to Iver to take a look at the church (covered in scaffolding) and buy chocolate and ice cream. Iver also has several pubs. We then came back over the canal and took the ‘Beeches Way’ to West Drayton where Linda and I caught a bus home and Sam a train on the first part of his journey to Milton Keynes – another 40 or so miles up the canal.

The last half of the walk was through the Colne Valley, a curiously remote area on the edge of London, traversed by many rivers – there are two aqueducts carrying the canal over the Colne and the Colne Brook. Also passing through it is the M25, and, just a little south of where we were, the M4. Much of the area is covered by the lakes left from mineral workings, along with other derelict industrial sites.

The Slough Arm

Who needs Oscars?

I have to admit to a certain feeling of ennui about the increasing number of awards for photography, especially so those that attempt to introduce something of the ridiculous commercial razzmatazz of the Oscars.

So I didn’t have very high hopes when I heard about the Sony World Photography Awards, especially when I learn they were to be held in Cannes. And although the Honorary Board members did include photographers Bruce Davidson, Elliot Erwitt, Martine Franck, Susan Mieselas and Martin Parr of Magnum, along with Nan Goldin, Mary-Ellen Mark, Rankin and Tom Stoddart. There are also some very well-known names in the other Academy members, along with a number of others whose photographic credentials are perhaps less credible. It was also a team lacking in international terms; far too many are from the UK and US, with only two from Asia, one from Africa and none from South America.

This week’s British Journal of Photography (some stories need a subscription to read online) has two interesting features on photographic competitions. One is about the SWPA (not to be confused with the WPA, which for all of us with an interest in photography is the Works Progress Administration), written by Su Steward (BJP editor Simon Bainbridge was one of the Academy, so perhaps she had to be even more careful than usual in what she wrote.) She gives an interesting view of the event and some of the problems, as well as commenting on the judging and winners, although the article has its own teething problem with a wrongly captioned image.

I did find it surprising, that after quoting the comment made over a Cannes Film Festival lunch that apparently kick-started the SWPA, claiming that there wasn’t “an Oscars for Photography” she failed to mention the “Lucies,” set up for that very purpose in 2003, when Henri Cartier-Bresson received the first Lifetime Acheivement Award. On the Lucie Award web site the front page quotes for Douglas Kirkland “The Movie Industry has its Oscars and the Photography Community has its Lucies.”

The 2007 Lucie Awards were:
Elliot Erwitt – Lifetime Achievement,
Kenro Izu – Humanitarian Award,
Ralph Gibson – Achievement in Fine Art,
Eugene Richards – Achievement in Documentary,
Philip Jones Griffiths – Achievement in Photojournalism,
Lord Snowdon – Achievement in Portraiture,
Deborah Turbeville – Achievement in Fashion,
Howard Zieff – Achievement in Advertising,
Heinz Kluetmeier – Achievement in Sports,
and the 2008 Awards will go to Richard Misrach, Josef Koudelka, Sara Terry: The Aftermath Project, John Iacono, Susan Meiselas, Visa Pour L’Image Festival, Herman Leonard and Erwin Olaf – with more details on the web site May 15.
I never attended the Lucie awards ceremony – despite being invited – partly because it didn’t seem my kind of event, but it surely deserves a mention in this context.


(C) 2007, Peter Marshall. Giacomo meets Max Kandhola

You can find more about the WPA event on its website – or buy the BJP. I’d just like to mention one of the winners, Giacomo Brunelli, who showed me his superb work at Rhubarb Rhubarb in Birmingham last year and I wrote about it for this blog, with a couple of examples, as well as introducing him to Luminous Lint.

Also in the BJP is an article first published on-line at Foto8 by two of the judges at the World Press Photo contest, ‘Unconcerned but not indifferent‘ by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chapman. They lift the lid off the proceedings there and also question the role of photojournalism, particularly as “photographs rarely break the news these days” or at least those that do are largely the products of ‘citizen journalism’, the blurred impressions from the mobile phones of those caught up in the affair. (When I wrote a guide to the photographs of 9/11 – first on-line on 9/12 it received hundreds of thousands of hits – I commented on the immediacy of such coverage, highlighting some of the more powerful examples.)

The BJP adds a little to the debate by publishing a reply by this year’s World Press Photo of the Year winner, Tim Hetherington, who argues that photojournalism remains as relevant today as it ever was.

I’ve been meaning to write for some time about the re-launched “all-new” biannual Foto8 magazine. 180 pages of essential reading for anyone with the slightest interest in photojournalism. If you are reading this are aren’t already a subscriber you almost certainly should be.

Photography as Intimidation

In October 2004 I wrote the following on My London Diary while covering the European Creative Social Forum‘s London Underwater 2050 Tour of the G8 Climate Criminals:

worrying was the deliberate police use of photography as intimidation, with the police photographer going out of his way to confront demonstrators, aided by two other officers.

i worry because i think it is an attempt to attack civil liberties, but also because such behaviour makes all photographers suspect. i can only work effectively if i gain the trust and cooperation of those whose pictures i take. perhaps it helps that photography is one of the activities that also arouses suspicion and intimidation by the police.

as i walked away at the end of the demonstration, this team ran 50 yards down the road and caught up with me, one calling “excuse me, sir” and tapping on my shoulder. i turned to face him, and found myself looking into the lens of the police photographer, who took my picture as his colleague started to question me about who i was taking pictures for. it seemed clear and deliberate harassment, intended to intimidate a photographer acting entirely lawfully, photographing on the public highway.

This was the first time that I’d come across the police use of photography in this way, and I was worried by it. Now it’s commonplace and few demonstrations take place without police harassing demonstrators in this way, without Fitwatch confronting the police FIT teams, and without police harassing photographers.


Fitwatch confronts the police FIT team at City Hall, May 2008

Like Marc Vallée, I was also photographed by police at the City Hall demonstration last Friday, while I was engaged in the subversive act of sitting on a wall and reading a book. I ignored them, but he had a long stand-off, camera in front of his face before the event, and also found the police camera pointed at him from close range later in the event. You can see his pictures on his blog.

An e-mail today pointed out to me a Guardian article: Police should harass young thugs – Smith by political editor Patrick Wintour, in which he reports home secretary, Jacqui Smith as urging police forces across the country to mount “frame and shame” operations stopping and photographing “identified persistent offenders on problem estates.”

The police have already used such tactics to photograph 14 young poeple “known to the force” on estates in Basildon. Wintour quotes a police spokesman:

“The aim is to target a small group of persistent offenders by openly filming them, knocking on their doors, following them on the estate and repeatedly searching them, as well as warning them in no uncertain terms that local people have identified them as lawbreakers.”

Smith is quoted as saying she wants “to create an environment where there is nowhere to hide.” I immediately think of Orwell’s ‘1984‘, although current-day surveillance techniques have perhaps outstripped anything he envisaged. As the article says, there may be “human rights issues about such tough tactics, especially if those harassed by the police have not been found guilty of any criminal offence.”


Marc Vallée receives medical attention after being injured by police in Parliament Square, October 2006.

Photography is not yet a criminal offence, indeed I have a letter from an officer of the Metropolitan Police confirming my right to photograph in public, written after a rather unpleasant encounter when two police threatened to fit me up around ten years ago. So far as I’m aware, Marc’s only offence has been to allow himself to be assaulted and injured by police, for which he received an out of court settlement earlier in the year.

Orphan Works

The US at at it again with an Orphan Works Bill, or two to be precise. You can read a thorough examination of what this means for photographers in Why the Orphan Works Act is Uncle Sam’s thieves’ charter by Tony Sleep on EPUK.

Basically this seeks to upturn the Berne Convention on copyright and make your photographs an open house for theives – unless you have paid for them to be entered in private registers certified by the US Copyright Office.

In particular any work on the Internet will be at danger, and if this is passed into law I think the only protection we will have will be to overprint every image we put on the web with a large visible copyright notice. I’ve always been against this approach as I think it severely damages the value of putting images on-line.

It is hard to see the rest of the world accepting this US usurpation of intellectual property and we may expect to see some retaliatory action if either of these bills becomes an act – as it seems likely to do with the end of term coming up for President Bush.

It’s also worth reading ‘A Wolf in Sheeps Clothing‘ on Photo Business News which makes clearer some of the problems. What is surprising is the support for the proposal from the ASMP, in a feature that contains the astonishing statement “In a nutshell, we see little financial harm to creators from the non-profit and non-fiction uses of orphaned images.” In other words they think we don’t – or shouldn’t – make money from “Uses in works of non-fiction, such as books, articles or documentary films or videos” and “Uses by non-profit educational institutions, libraries, museums or archives“, while they want to alter the bill to make sure that commercial users can’t use it as a “free pass to profit from infringements.”

For many of us this seems to imply we should be happy to give away a large chunk of our income. The APA (Advertising Photographers of America) seems rather more clued up when it comments “If left unchanged, this legislation has the potential to destroy the businesses and livelihoods of thousands of photographers, other visual artists, as well as the collateral small businesses that serve the industry, and are dependent on, creators.” It is also worth looking at the Stock Artists Alliance site – they too are also calling for major changes in the bill.

If you want to take action – whether you are a US citizen or not – the Illustrators Partnership page has some useful suggestions.

Of course there is a real problem with s0-called ‘Orphan Works’ although its perhaps not surprising that the Canadian approach – which instead talks about ‘Unlocatable Copyright Owners’ offers a solution far more favourable to creators. Simply, if you wish to use a copyright work and can satisfy the Canadian Copyright board you have made reasonable efforts to locate the copyright owner, they will grant you a licence and pay a fee to a collective copyright society. These fees can be claimed by the copyright owner up to 5 years after the end of the licence, but otherwise would be distributed to members in a similar way to the fees we can now receive for the photocopying of our work.

This system allows users to make use of such works for reasonable fees – but not free of charge, and also passes on fees to creators. There is a balance about it totally missing from the US proposals. I hope that other countries will take up similar proposals – and also take suitable retaliatory action against the US if they pass an Orphan Works act that effectively gets rid of copyright protection for works not registered in the US