February, 2009 | >Re-PHOTO

New York Times

Thanks to Mikko Takkunen of Photojournalism Links for drawing attention to a nice series of stories on The New York Times, One in 8 Million, stories of New Yorkers (though treated rather differently from Weegee!). The latest, photographed by Todd Heisler, tells the story of Georgiana DePalma Tedone, a remarkable 90 year old who still gets up around 2.30am to make mozzarella for sale in her Brooklyn shop. Just a shame its such a long way for me to go to buy some (along with her Saturday roast beef, though you need to get there early to catch that.)

And there are some other great links on the page, including another New York Times feature, Great Performers by Paolo Pellegrin of Magnum, behind the scense images of eight of the current biggest names in film, including Kate Winslet and Bradd Pitt. Its a set of pictures I first heard about on the often interesting APhotoEditor site.

Frankly I can’t say all 48 of the images in the slide show excite me greatly – many without star names attached would not rate a second glance, but there are perhaps a dozen or so outstanding images, not a bad average, and its all a very welcome change from the standard views, although some of the success of the work perhaps owes a lot to the post-processing by Picturehouse in NYC.

Sri Lanka Petition and Update

Avaaz.org is asking people from all around the world to send a message to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging her to help protect civilians in Sri Lanka’s civil war. 250,000 civilians are currently trapped in the battle zone of a deadly conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil rebels.

I’ve already done so earlier today. You can join in at this address:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/sri_lanka_civilians/99.php

Sweet Nothings – Vanessa Winship

I don’t know why so few of my friends go to openings at HOST gallery in Honduras Street, (perhaps the guys from Hackney dropped by later or it didn’t seem political enough) but on reflection many of the rest are south Londoners, and Photofusion closer to their natural habitat, with anything north of the Photographers’ Gallery perhaps seeming like another country. But it would be really worth their while jumping as I did on a number 243 and making the trip in the next few weeks, because Vanessa Winship‘s ‘Sweet Nothings‘, continuing until 5 March 2009, is really London’s outstanding show at the moment and one not to miss.

Posed portraits in large format may not seem state of the art, and Winship has deliberately pared her approach to a minimum, and it is perhaps this and her remarkable young Anatolian schoolgirls that give her work its strength and a resonance from almost the entire history of photography.

©: V Winship; used with permission

There is definitely something there of the daguerreotype portrait, perhaps in the way her subjects stand facing the camera and the photographer. For these young Anatolian girls from the rural east of Turkey – as for those early subjects – the act of being photographed, delightful though Ms Winship is, is still a considerable ordeal, not to be taken lightly and one for which at times, again as in the early days, they cannot stand still long for their images to render sharply.

Particularly when photographing in school interiors (some pictures are in school yards and other outdoor locations) with a 4×5 camera and using only available light, exposures may sometimes run into appreciable fractions of a second rather than the instantaneity we take for granted with high ISO cameras, fast apertures, and small formats. Of course the times concerned do not approach the minutes needed for the early processes.

Turkey is a country with significant ethnic minorities, the largest of which is the Kurds who live in the east of the country and across the border in neighbouring states. Since its inception the modern Turkish state has attempted to minimise ethnic differences – at first by force, when in the early years of the twentieth century literally millions of Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians were killed to create “a Turkey for the Turks”, but more recently largely by repressive laws and policing.

The Kurds make up perhaps a fifth of the population of Turkey, mainly speaking Kurdish rather than Turkish. For many years until 1991 speaking Kurdish was an offence in Turkey, and it is still discriminated against. Government over the years have referred to them as ‘Mountain Turks’ or ‘Eastern Turks’ rather than recognise their existence as a separate ethnic group, and there are no reliable figures for their numbers. Resistance to forced assimilation has led to a violent armed rebellion with Kurds calling for a separate state of Kurdistan and government repression.

©: V Winship; used with permission

Education is utilised by the government as an important means for the assimilation of ethnic groups and great efforts have been made to increase attendance at schools, particularly by girls, who had traditionally often remained in the home and without formal education. One important aspect of the education system is the use of Turkish as the first (and possibly only) language and the language of instruction.

Going to school is a part of a process of socialisation and of indoctrination into Turkishness. The adoption of a common blue uniform is part of this and its basic form appears to be a kind of smock; to English eyes it resembles something that might have been designed as a coverall at the time of the Arts and Crafts movement for girls engaged in cookery or domestic science.

But what is important for these images is the way that it is individualised with various embroidery and trimmings. Often these seem to included traditional motifs such as flowers although the photographs also show some evidence of a more twentieth century globalised culture.

Although looking at a single image from this series one might see parallels with the portraits of August Sander, this really brings out the virtually orthogonal nature of their intentions. While Sander was interested in establishing a typology, this work is almost entirely about individuality and how it springs out at us from the sameness of the situation, the uniform and the technical approach.

Several other photographers are mentioned in a foreword to the book ‘Sweet Nothings’ containing 45 of these images , published in the UK by Foto8 and available from HOST. Although there are some visual similarities, for example between Winship’s pictures and a few of the images of Diane Arbus, I think the resemblance ends there – Arbus had quite a different agenda (and the same could be said for the others mentioned.) The images in the book are finely printed and I think the more intimate scale perhaps suits the work better than the exhibition wall, although it was good to see the work large.

The exhibition prints, fine inkjet prints on Canson paper made from the large format negatives are superb, but also have a vintage feel, perhaps reminding me in some ways of the best photo-mechanical reproduction of the mid-twentieth century, although with a sharpness not then achievable. But there is something about both the sharpness and tonality which is a little different to modern silver prints whether from film or digital.

But in the end what makes these images memorable for me is the faces and body language of the girls as they face the camera, usually posing with a friend or sister, occasionally alone or in a threesome. Although few of them are in any conventional sense beautiful (and some decidedly not) they have a powerful and highly individual presence in these fine photographs.

Fairey or Not?

I don’t know I have a great deal to contribute to the controversy of the use of a photograph by Shepard Fairey as a basis for his Obama posters, other than to be rather clear that this is definitively not a case of plagiarism. It may well however be a matter of copyright abuse.

Frankly I think it shows a certain stupidity or at least a lack of forethought on Fairey’s part (although seeing what some other artists have got away with – Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince being prime examples – in my book appropriation is clearly an offence rather than valid art – perhaps he felt no need to bother about the legality of what he was doing.)

You can read a thorough examination of the US legal issues as would be expected by Carolyn E. Wright on her Photo Attorney blog, where she makes clear that although it is a case for the court to decide, she would be happy to take on for the copyright owner.

As well as a very useful Checklist for Fair Use, she also links to a blog post by John Harrington on Photo Business News that looks at the question of whether the photographer, Mannie Garcia or the AP owns the copyright. Garcia reproduces both the photograph and two posters by Fairey on his web site (and I wonder if he has Fairey’s permission to show his work and if otherwise this constitutes fair use.)

Funnily enough, at the top of the post where you might expect the Photo Business News blog to have run either the poster or Garcia’s photograph – either could I think have been justified in the US as fair use – we instead have an ugly rectangle with the two letters ‘AP’. (Fair use is mch more restricted here in the UK, although my policy not to use images without permission is because I’d like people to ask me before using my work rather than for any legal reasons; you will need to click on links elsewhere – such as that to Garcia’s site above – to see the photograph and poster in this case.)

In the past my own work has been used as a basis for work by various artists which has been sold or published. In at least one case I’ve received a standard licence fee for supplying a print or file for this use, but in most cases I’ve simply granted permission, knowing that the work produced will both be very different from my original both in appearance and usage.

But although it seems clear to me that a licence should have been sought in this case, Fairey’s real offence seems to me to be laziness. There are many thousands of images of Obama that have been published in print and on the web, several of which were actually identified in the press as sources for the poster before Mannie Garcia’s image was located. It’s a good photograph, but not outstanding, the kind of head shot that any of us would take and be happy to have taken at an event where a well-known figure was speaking. What for me makes it a little more than most is actually the way the flag behind frames his head, at a similar angle to the tilt of Obama’s head, something Fairey has not copied. But I actually thing there are some considerably better pictures (of other people) on Garcia’s site.

Had Fairey not chosen to have simply traced from this particular image, including its basic lines and some of its tonal structure (though in a much simplified form) but followed good practice in using a number of similar images as source material for his poster there would I think have been no claim to answer.

But he should be accused of laziness or sloppy practice and cetainly not plagiarism. The poster is quite obviously a powerful work that although based on a photographic image has created something new and quite different (and frankly considerably more iconic), not any attempt to pass off Garcia’s photograph as his own.

My final thought:

Digital Journalist – Dispatches from Gaza

The Digital Journalist has long been one of my favourite on-line photo magazines, published by a real pro, Dirck Halstead (who shot his first war for LIFE when he was 17) and running some of the best features on photojournalism, if just occasionally the perspective does seem a little too aggressively USAmerican. So although the latest February issue is dominated by a recent event in Washington (about which I’d like to keep decently silent), I was pleased to find that Dispatches contains four essays from Gaza, with a note about them by Marianne Fulton, who curated many fine exhibitions in her 27 years at George Eastman House in Rochester and edits this section.

Jim Hollander has worked as a photographer since the 1970s, covering Israel since 1983; chief photographer in the area for Reuters from 1985, he now holds a similar position in EPA. His contribution deals with the total lack of cooperation – almost at times amounting to open conflict – that photographers received from the IDF. He finishes by saying that in the “23 days of misgivings and misturst we were not allowed to get even close to a soldier to see how this war was waged.” You can see more of his phtoography on the Hollander artists family web site.

Unable to get into Gaza, Israeli freelance Ilan Mizrahi photographed the effects of the Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel. It’s a story that should be told, and although of course on a different magnitude compared to what was happening in Gaza, traumatic for those closely affected. More of his work on his own site.

Ahmad Khateib lives and works in Gaza and his four pictures, two of funerals, one of a young boy in the rubble and another of homes destroyed by Israeli bombing have a greater immediacy. He was not just there and close enough, but as he says an actual target: “I am not lying about the Israeli army when I say that they know where journalists live and work and they hit the housing and offices of the international news agencies and Arabic ones.”

Greek photographer Stefania Mizara has worked with many NGOs and she managed to get into Gaza with a group of doctors on Jan 12. Her pictures too capture something of what was happening; relatives waiting desperately at the hospital, relief supplies in the UN building in Gaza City burning after being bombarded with white phosphorus bombs, a child whose house has been destroyed and graffiti left by Israeli soldiers. You can see some of her pictures from Kosovo here and a more varied selection of work on Lightstalkers.

Photography Crunch

Photographers have perhaps always complained about hard times – and they have often been harder for the best photographers, as for example a reading of Edward Weston‘s Daybooks will show. But the widely published news about rates at The Sun which I read on the Press Gazette site last week led to complaints that these were below 1993 prices. The rates for photos in The Times are even lower, with a minimum rate of £54 and a postcard size image (11-25 square inches) earning £90.

Of course back in the 90s I can remember complaining that the fee one magazine was offering for a story and pictures was actually less than they had paid me for a similar feature fifteen years earlier. And those ‘Fleet Street’ rates above are of course considerably higher than anyone can expect from the regional and local press, where conversations often end with the mention of any payment at all, and fees are generally minimal.

In one of the comments to the Press Gazette feature, Roger Maynard takes things back further still, suggesting that lineage rates, also cut, are “not much higher than the sort of lineage paid back in the sixties...”

It makes me wonder what future there is if any for the press as we know it – on wood pulp or on line. There just don’t seem to be enough peanuts going round at the moment to sustain anything really worth publishing.

Personally I’m happier to publish my work in different ways, even ones that don’t produce any direct income but which do allow me to write what I want to say and publish the pictures I want to publish – if for various reasons not always exactly how I would like. So I’ll write stories for Indymedia or NowPublic and of course here on >Re:PHOTO and My London Diary. The audiences may be smaller, but they are certainly, dear reader, much more select, intelligent and interested.

Of course you reading this are one of a growing number who know that various blogs and web sites – including but certainly not exclusively those from the commercial media – are increasingly how we keep in touch with what is happening. While too much of the press is at least metaphorically down in the gutter looking up the skirts of celebs – thanks to the BJP I learnt a new word for this type of photographer this week, “crotchdog.” Much to my surprise, despite the snow paralysis of the UK this week’s issue arrived on my doormat at the usual time so congratulations to them on this.

Suburban snow in Staines

But almost all other areas of photography are also feeling the pinch – even advertising and fashion. Commercial galleries around the world are hitting hard times – and according to Bloomberg, prices of some of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seacapes currently on show the the Gagosian gallery have been reduced from $450,000 to $360,000!

According to a news item this week’s BJP (like the link above this may need a subscriber login, but in this case you can read the original press release at CIPA), one area still looking healthy is sales of digital SLRs. The Camera and Imaging Products Association forecast a 6% increase in worldwide DSLR sales over 2008, to more than 10 million. Not only a staggering number of cameras, but even more mind-boggling the number of pictures these will produce – and what will happen to them?

What will happen in the UK at least to the prices for DSLRs is that they will rise. I’ve left thinking about buying a Nikon D700 rather too long. A few weeks ago I could have bought one for just over £1400. This week the cheapest I could find was £1625, an increase of £200. This week’s price is likely to look cheap in a few months time.

However, anything dealing in any way with financial advice coming from me should carry a prominent health warning. I ignored the professional advice a few years ago to take my savings out of unit trusts, signed up for a fixed price deal on gas when prices went sky-high last summer and more.

Irish Ghosts

I’ve been intending to write something about the current show at Photofusion, David Creedon‘s Ghosts of the Faithful Departed, since I went to the opening a couple of weeks ago.

David Creedon speaking at Photofusion

You can see roughly 20 of the images from this on Creedon’s web site – along with some of his other work, although I think ‘Ghosts’ rather stands head and shoulders above the rest. Some of the images on the web have an odd sparkle – perhaps over-sharpening – but otherwise it gives a good idea of the show.

I usually go to Photofusion openings more to meet people that to see the photographs, but this time they were certainly worth a look. Creedon captures well the sense of frozen time in many of these interiors with an eye for detail and a feeling for colour.

It is subject matter that is a gift for photography, at its heart a medium concerned with the freezing of time, and at the opening Creedon spoke clearly about his feelings and the work. These isolated derelict rural homes were where the remnants of families, single people who stayed behind to look after elderly parents when famine drove their brothers and sisters to seek work in England or America. The parents died, the carers, now elderly lived and died and they were simply abandoned, left to decay and rot.

The pictures provide evidence of religious obsession and other aspects of eccentricity common among the old who live alone and of course have a particular resonance for the Irish as a part of their national history. Those of us who can claim no Hibernian connection perhaps view them more objectively, and although I enjoyed the show I did sometimes feel the photography was a little over the top. Perhaps the printing could have been less dramatic (it reminded me at times of Cibachrome’s gross hyper-realism) and more senstive and nuanced. And sometimes I felt that images were too arranged, lacking that certain accidental character that for me characterises great photography. This was perhaps a Guiness of a show (and I enjoy a pint, particular from Dublin) rather than fine wine.

The opening was also perhaps over the top, with three speeches. The photographer acquitted himself well – and I would have liked to hear him talk more about the work. The diplomat was diplomatic, short and sweet, but the academic appeared out to prove he had no great love or knowledge of photography, which was rather a shame.

How Long is a Hundred Years?

I did go into my darkroom last week, but only to start a job I’ve been putting off for 18 months, filing the last films that I developed. And while I was there I also tidied up the 50 or so films still waiting to be processed whenever I get round to it. So now I know there are exactly 27 36 exposure cassettes of TCN400, 15 of Fuji colour neg, 2 120 rolls of same and most intriguingly, 2 cassettes of T-Max 100. Much of this was shot alongside digital when I wasn’t too sure I could get what I wanted from the digital – but found I could. But I’ve not the slightest idea what can be on that T-Max, and some day soon my curiosity will force me to dev it to find out.

Of course, any b/w liquid dev I still have lurking will by now be a murky brown, so I’ll either have to find a shop that still stocks such esoteric materials or get out the recipe book and those jars of “raw chemicals” stashed in a corner of my loft next to the antique chemical balance.

All of the rest needs C41 and just one of the things that puts me off processing it is wondering whether those colour chemicals I have are still OK to use – but of course the longer I wait the less likely they are to be usable.

It’s even longer than 18 months since I made a print in the darkroom. I first ordered Piezography inks from Jon Cone in Vermont in 2000 and was immediately hooked on the quality of output I could get on matte papers such as Hahnemuhle’s German Etching. It was platinum without the hassle, though not without some problems, most of which Cone solved for me with the introduction of his “new generation” Piezotone inks in 2002 – and as a beta tester for the icc profiles I made sure they worked perfectly on my Epson 1160 printer. So well that I’ve yet to move on to his even better Neutral K7 inks, and although the inks I’m using are well past their best before dates they still seem fine. And unlike some unlucky Epson owners I’ve never had problems with these inks clogging my print heads.

I’ve also been printing glossy black and white and colour using Epson Ultrachrome K3 inks (in an Epson R2400) and Epson’s ABW (Advanced Black and White printing) using papers such Permajet Fibre Base Gloss, which really does give prints that match darkroom output – and rather better than some modern papers. The increased control from digital printing is such an advantage with ‘difficult’ prints too. But something I read today makes me think I’ll have to change my ideas on this.

What started me thinking about this was a very long post by Jon Cone on the Yahoo Piezography3000 group (you will need to sign on with a Yahoo ID to read it), in which he discusses what is meant by a 100 year print – as based on the lifetimes that inkjet manufacturers such as HP, Epson and Canon quote, using the tests by Wilhelm Imaging Research (WIR.)

As Cone makes clear, WIR figures are based on an end point of “nearly 35% fade or discoloration” while much smaller differences of around 5% are actually visible. He suggests the 35% level was set as something achievable with chemical colour prints over reasonable periods when Wilhelm started testing – at a time when we had just realised that they deteriorated greatly. He writes: “I think most b&w photographers would be more than willing to have thrown [the print] away long before” that level is reached. How long before is the real thing we need to know, and frankly we don’t have the information needed to even make a reasonable guess.

The industry standard also prevents manufacturers from releasing detailed test results – they can only state a figure in years and the light level of 450Lux 8 hours per day. Because of the way that the tests are commissioned and can be reported, inks that show a truly acceptable under 5% of fading in a 100 year test end up with the same rating as those that test close to the limit – at which level a print would have long been fit only for the bin.

So the answer to that vital question for a print with a ‘100 Year’ WIR rating could be almost anything. It could be as low as 25 years or as high as 250, and that 25 year possibility worries me (though it should worry younger photographers more.) It would obviously be a help if the actual ‘100 Year’ terminal result – whether it was 2.8 or 28% fading – was published and we could then make up our mind, but I can’t help the conclusion that the way in which WIR results are published is calculated to benefit the manufacturers rather than provide useful information to photographers.

Cone continues to say that WIR has actually now stated that its predictions can no longer be relied on for inksets that produce b/w prints by combining black and colour inks – as in Epson’s ABW and prints made using Canon and HP ink sets. He also discusses the new i*metric proposed by WIR which is in public beta and gives an explanation of why this too fails to give satisfactory predictions.

Cone has published data from many of his own tests on his own inks. In the post (and it is worth reading in full, as well as the discussion that follows) he discusses the fading of the current Piezography inks which he states are designed to fade less than 5% (ie below the visible level) under an illumination test of approximately 150 years at 450Lux 8 hours per day.

A further post by Cone in the thread (the latest as I write, but its a thread I’ll be following with interest) looks at the problems of the archival nature of paper and states that testing by WIR ignores this. He is currently carrying out tests on Epson K3 ABW versus Piezography K7 and PiezoTone which he started using Epson Velvet Fine Art paper. Epson describes this as:

Acid free base to preserve fine art and photos
100% cotton rag for archivability

and they publish a Permanence rating from WIR of 61 years.

This figure is perhaps confirmed by Cone’s test, because he says that it “yellowed so bad after 60 years LUX I had to scrap it.” He is now repeating the test but using Hahnemuhle Photo Rag paper.

My Conclusions

1. If you are a photographer selling prints, you need to be very careful in what you say about archival quality or lifetime of your prints. Most current claims are incorrect because the tests they are based on are not related to visual print quality.

2. If you are producing black and white prints you need to use specialist inks (such as Cone’s) and papers to produce prints with lifetimes comparable to traditional ‘archival’ silver prints. If like me you want to use Epson’s Ultrachrome K3 inks for colour and also to make glossy black and white prints on the same printer, then you might be advised to look at printing methods that don’t use the colour inks as well. The K3 set includes black, light black and light light black and it is possible with third party software such as Quad Tone Rip or BowHaus’s IJM/OPC to print using just these.

3. If you are a museum which wants photographs as a long term record you should be concentrating on the archival storage of digital files as the primary record rather than prints on paper. (And of course it goes without saying that you also need to be aware of the problems of long-term digital storage – and their solutions.)

4. I dislike posts with titles that ask a question and then fail to give an answer, but really there isn’t one. If you use most inks and papers that are rated at ‘100 Years’ and keep them under reasonably sensible conditions – avoiding strong sources of UV or materials that give out gases such as rubber etc, then they will probably last without noticeable fading for at least 15 years. If you chose the right inks and paper, probably ten times that.

Tamils March in London – BBC Fails Again

Around 100,000 Tamils marched through Westminster today to persuade our government to take action over the Sri Lankan genocide of the Tamil population, to shame our media into breaking their silence over what is happening there and to call for the establishment of a Tamil homeland, Tamil Eelam.

For a second time this month, I felt ashamed of the BBC. Ashamed because I grew up believing that our national broadcasting organisation was the best in the world (and in some ways it still is.)

Of course its first glaring failure this month was the kowtowing of its management to Israel when they decided not to broadcast the Gaza appeal. A second blot on the organisation came today. This evening, fresh home from this massive demonstration in London by Tamils, I turned on Radio 4 for the six o’clock News and found to my amazement that it hadn’t happened. There was not the slightest mention of it. Later I checked the BBC News web page – again nothing.

Probably the largest popular demonstration in the country since the massive anti Iraq war demo in 2003 is news. Between a third and a half of the UK’s Tamil population on the streets in Westminster is news. And certainly the genocide that is taking place in Sri Lanka, with government troops shelling areas packed with civilian refugees is news. But apparently not for the BBC.

Sri Lanka – Background

Sri Lanka is another of Britain’s colonial cockups. When Britain took over Ceylon in 1796 there were separate kingdoms, each with several thousand years of history and which had been treated separately by the Portuguese and Dutch colonists. But in 1833 the British decided to unite the Tamil and Sinhalese areas to make their administration more convenient. And when we got out of India and gave Ceylon its independence in 1948, little if any thought seemed to have been given to the division. The constitution – on a Westminster model – handed the Sinhalese a built-in majority and had no safeguards for the minority Tamils, around 30% of the population.

Most Tamils in Sri Lanka are Hindu, while nearly all the Sinhalese are Buddhist. A considerable minority – over 15% of Tamils are Christian and there are also some Tamil-speaking Muslims, who regard themselves as a separate group from the other Tamils

Within months, the government had deprived more than a million Tamils of their citizenship. These were the descendants of Tamils the British brought from India in 1834 to work their colony – and who joined Ceylon’s Tamils who had lived there for at least 2500 years. Many Tamils were also driven from their homes and replaced by Sinhalese in a deliberate policy to reduce the Tamil domination of key Tamil areas.

The government voted to make Sinhala the official language, with Tamil and English having only a secondary status in 1956, and many Tamils in government employ lost their jobs. A peaceful protest inspired by the example of Ghandi was met by riots encouraged by the government, with police, army and government taking no action to stop the killings.

The last official links with the UK were broken in 1972 when the government declared Ceylon to be a Buddhist republic, Sri Lanka, although it remained a member of the Commonwealth. The setting up of the republic further marginalised the Hindu, Christian and Muslim Tamils.

In 1983 the government took part in a massive pogrom against Tamils which was widely reported in the international media. It was the start of a series of major actions against Tamils that continue to this day, including bombings, tortures, rape, the assasinations of human rights activists, politicians and aid workers.

The response of the Tamil people was to try and establish a Tamil state, Tamil Eelam, and a key organisation in this has been the Tamil Tigers (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or LTTE.) The LTTE carried out a number of attacks and was for some years in effective control of Tamil areas in the north of the island, setting up banks, courts, social services and other aspects of civil administration in some areas. This infrastructure has been a major target for the Sri Lankan Army and Air Force with much being destroyed or captured.

The LTTE made headlines across the world with some of its attacks, including a suicide bomb at the country’s major Buddhist temple in 1998 in which 16 people were killed and a raid on the international airport in Colombo which destroyed several aircraft in 2001. But government restrictions on newspapers and journalists mean that they have effective control of the news and most of what happens in the Tamil areas is not reported.

There have been various attempts at peace settlements, particularly since 2000 when Norway became involved as an intermediary. Both sides accuse the other of breaking every agreement made, in particular over agreements to work towards a federal state.

The Sri Lankan Army appears to feel that at last it has the Tamil Tigers on the run and is determined to try and finish them off, whatever the cost in civilian deaths and injuries, bombing and shelling areas where they think the Tigers are hiding and where they know hundreds of thousands of civilians have taken refuge. Civilians that manage to escape these areas have been put into camps where the world’s press and humanitarian organisations are refused access – and about which we can only presume the worst.

Saturday’s march

But I am only reporting from Westminster, and the massive demonstration there, united in its strength of feeling and dedicated and intense in its demand for an independent Tamil homeland, Tamil Eelam, in the Tamil area of Sri Lanka. Although the chanting was loud and feelings were rightly running high against the atrocities, with street theatre acting out the attacks of the Sri Lankan army on the people and children and adults dressed in bandages and blood (or rather red dye) stained clothing, there seemed little danger of public disorder.

When I arrived around 12.40, the streets from Vauxhall station to the assembly point by the Tate Gallery were already crowded with people and I had a job to push my way through to the front of the march – although fortunately everyone was very polite and helpful (including the stewards and police – this was a march it was a delight to photograph.) It was a march that never really started, but from a little before 2pm slowly edged its way forward in small steps, and by a little after 3pm the front of the march was in Parliament Square.

Although there are over 50 million Tamils in India and only 3.1 million in Sri Lanka, most of the the UK’s 200,000 or so (estimates range from 150-300,000) come from Sri Lanka as a result of the discrimination and persecution their community has suffered there at least since the 1960s. Most of them live in London, particularly in East Ham, Walthamstow, Brent, Merton and Croydon. Among the Tamils in the UK are around 2,500 NHS doctors.

Many of the police along the route were in fireproof clothing, and stood clutching fire extinguishers with the pins removed for immediate action. They were not fearing a burning of flags or some incendiary attack on Parliament, but were ready in case some individual attempted to burn themselves to death as a protest. Fortunately they did not need to rush into action.

It was a very slow march up past Parliament, with people stopping at intervals to sit down on the road, to the considerable annoyance of the police, who at times made some pretty ineffectual attempts to speed the march up. But there were so many demonstrators they were powerless; even though the demonstrators generally law-abiding they were determined to have their day and take their time.

Among those marching was at least one Sri Lankan MP, M K Shivaji Lingam of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), who has stated that “it will be impossible to crush or destroy the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) militarily” and that “Hindu culture (in Sri Lanka) is at stake” threatened by the attacks by government forces that have taken over and damaged many Hindu shrines. In December he visited India and obtained the support of several Hindu groups for the Tamil cause.

I left around an hour later, with marchers still streaming past the Houses of Parliament, with the end of the march still coming up Millbank, and Horseferry Road just reopening to traffic. Bringing up the rear was the decorated bus or ‘tiara’ built in Karachi for Dalawar Chaudhry who owns a restaurant in Southall, which as well as its normal extensive decoration had posters calling for an end to the ethnic cleansing and highlighting the killing of politicians and human rights activists in Sri Lanka.

More pictures from the event on My London Diary shortly

Chinese New Year

London today celebrates the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Ox, but I don’t feel any great need to go and take pictures, or indeed to go and join in the celebrations.

I’ve nothing against the Chinese, and I’ve been to the celebrations in London most years. The roads will be crowded for the parade and later in the day the streets of Soho’s Chinatown will be packed to the gunnels (or gunwales) with crowds trying to watch as the lion dancers and their teams of drummers visit the many shops and leap at the hanging greens above their doorways, or queue to eat in the many restaurants.

It’s certainly a spectacle worth seeing, but I’ve seen it before and photographed it many times and don’t feel a need to repeat the experience. Looking at the pictures from last year or earlier years

I feel I’m simply repeating myself (though of course I did take other pictures:)

but perhaps the best are from earlier years where I shot mainly in black and white and concentrated on the people

Of course it’s an event that brings out the Flickrati in droves (again I’ve nothing against them but don’t feel moved to join them, though I do have a free account with 97 pictures there) and where everyman and her dog has a camera and is pushing to get pictures – so, unlike some of the other events I photograph I don’t think my pictures will be missed.

And it’s actually much harder to work with amateurs than with a whole pack of pros.

Pros tend to be aware of other photographers and to “do as they would wish to be done by“, at least to some extent working together as a team and not deliberately impeding others; a certain unwritten etiquette applies (though TV crews sometimes think they are God and treat still photographers as dirt.)

But holding a camera phone at arms length and concentrating on its small screen makes some people (mainly young and male and self-assured) completely oblivious to the presence of others as they happily walk right in front of me as Im photographing or hold their phone right in front of my lens.