September, 2010 | >Re-PHOTO

EDL and Iranian Greens Protest Al Quds March

The English Defence League (EDL) complain that they get unfair treatment from the media who often depict them as a racist and fascist mob. I’ve tried to report them accurately and present a slightly more nuanced view, but at times they don’t make it easy.

Although some of the leaders of the EDL try to avoid racism and extremism, clearly they are unable to control the more extreme of their supporters, some of whom have been or are members of racist and fascist organisations and others clearly hooligans.

The EDL is one of a number of allied movements that bring together disaffected elements from a largely white working class who feel alienated from the political parties and government and neglected by them (don’t we all.) Where in the 1930s this might have taken them to the left (though Mosley too had his supporters) the left now seems to have lost the ability to make links with ordinary working people.

During the Al Quds Day march, many of the EDL supporters were chanting obscenely Islamophobic slogans and singing Islamophobic songs which make a nonsense of their claims not to be against Muslims in general but only against extremism.

A couple of days before the march a ridiculous ‘fatwa‘ had appeared on one of their web sites attacking the press and promising violence against them. And during the event in Grosvenor Square a number of them came and made threats against some of the press who were photographing them from the other side of a police line. Neither or which is likely to endear them to reporters and photographers.

During the march in Park Lane, a full but open beer can was thrown by one of the EDL demonstrators, landing on the roadway a few feet in front of me and bouncing on to miss me by inches, going between me and another photographer a couple of feet away and then hitting a woman on the march, though fortunately by this time it had lost most of its force after a couple of bounces, and she was not hurt. It seemed most likely it was aimed at the press (and me in particular) and could well have caused serious injury.

Earlier I had photographed a small group of EDL supporters being held by police behind a bus shelter and being prevented from demonstrating against the Al Quds Day march. I did feel it was an unnecessary restriction on the right to demonstrate, though the police did I think allow them later to make their way down to an area the police had designated for the counter-demonstrators.

The march turned round just before the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, and the police had made a pen for them at this point. Part of this was occupied by around 20 members of the democratic opposition in Iran, the Iranian Green Movement, whose poster ‘Down with Dictator‘ linked Ahmadinejad, Galloway and Saddam.

Next to them was a larger group of perhaps 80 people behind a number of EDL-related flags and banners. As well as various versions of the St George English flag, there were also Union Jacks, an Ulster Flag and an Orange Order Flag along with an Israeli and Portuguese flags. The only banners I could read read ‘Jerusalem will never be Pisslamic‘ and ‘Al Quds = Nazi Terrorists – Get Out of UK‘

I tried to walk across and photograph the counter demonstrators but was prevented from doing so, first by an EDL steward, and then by police. So all my pictures at this point were taken from the other side of the wide road – with focal lengths up to 300 mm. The EDL had made it clear to the police that they didn’t want the press near them and had threatened that they might be attacked if they came closer. I feel the police should have told them that the press had a right to report and that the police would make sure they were able to do so rather than go along with the threat of violence.

Later in Grosvenor Square we did get near the EDL demonstrators – separated only by a single line of police – and there were a number of threats made towards particular photographers by EDL supporters – as well as a few more friendly approaches. And, after a while some of the EDL did perform for the cameras – and said “There, you’ve got your pictures.” Yes, we had – but don’t blame us for the behaviour of the EDL.

As I wrote in my report of the event (which you can read on My London Diary, along with more pictures):

It is really very simple: if any group wants to get fair treatment by the press, all they need to do is to behave in a reasonable manner. Photographers in particular don’t make things up, but photograph what is there.

Flying Visit

Years ago when I was photographing London’s Docklands I needed to get a picture with a plane taking off from London City Airport. The first time I wasn’t quite happy with what I’d got and I had to wait almost an hour for the next aircraft to appear.

London City got planning permission because they promised to have only a very limited number of flights and to use small quiet turbo-props that would take off at a steep angle and thus cause very little noise. How things have changed. Over 90% of the flights now are by noisy jets leaving the airport at lower altitudes and they already have plans to expand to 176,000 flights a year – almost 500 a day. Had levels of this kind (or the current level) been stated at the initial planning inquiry their would have been little chance of the airport being built in what is one of the most densely populated areas of the country.

It’s become a favourite place for the wealthy owners of private jets, as well as running scheduled services but is now aiming at a much larger market. It started very much as a premium service for rich businessmen who could avoid the lengthy delays at normal airports; your taxi from your city office could drop you at the airport door ten minutes before take-off and you could rush through the lounge passport in one hand, briefcase in the other and still catch your plane. Now you can get there on the DLR and need to allow a little more time as increased security and larger passenger numbers slow things down a little. But check in times still seem to be in minutes rather than the hours at Heathrow and Gatwick, so it’s perhaps not surprising it is getting popular.

Which is bad news for local residents – and the reason for their protest group ‘Fight the Flights‘ which is mounting a legal challenge against Newham Council’s approval of a rise in flights from 91,000 to 120,000 annually in the High Court this November.

The airport was set up for short haul flights, mainly to continental cities, but now serves a wider range of destinations including New York (check in time for BA customers with hand luggage is 15 minutes!) But the most contentious of these are domestic flights such as the services to Manchester from here and the other London airports – currently 38 flights a day.

From central London to central Manchester by train takes around 2 hours 7 minutes – and there is a train every 20 minutes during much of the day. The flight from either Gatwick or Heathrow – including checking – takes from 10 to 20 minutes longer, and the journey times from the airport at both ends are likely to add considerably more. Even with flights to Glasgow, the train journey of 4 h9m compares pretty well with the flight time from London City – including minimum check-in and exit times – of 2 h35m when you include the travel times to and from the airport.

But Saturday’s demonstration was not about convenience but about climate change. A typical rail journey from London to Manchester results in 15.9kg carbon dioxide per person, while the flight produces 52.8 kg – more than three times as much. Add in the amounts for the journeys to and from the airport and the difference is even greater.

We don’t need short domestic flights, the noise and hydrocarbon and other pollution they cause around the airports (air pollution around where I live near Heathrow is often above the accepted limits for various pollutants) both blights and shortens our lives. But man-made climate change has far more serious effects on the poor around the world through the destabilisation of climate that is already becoming evident through the increasing incidence of droughts, floods and hurricanes and rising sea levels. It is also the poor who are most threatened by the aviation industry’s attempts to move to using agrofuels. Almost all biofuel production is at the expense of the environment, clearing forests to grow fuel crops such as palm oil, or diverting land that was previously in use for food production, accelerating the rises in food prices, so that the poor starve.

The Campaign Against Climate Change demonstration wasn’t a large event, but the issues it raises are vital ones. Aviation is the fastest-growing source of greenhouse gases and it’s thus important that the richer countries such as ours tackle it and find ways to slow and eventually reverse its expansion.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
John Stewart of HACAN and Anne-Marie Griffin, chair of Fight the Flights
with campaign plane and banners

Photographically I couldn’t find a great deal to do, though the protesters did have an inflatable jet with some suitable slogans, and there was someone dressed as an air hostess with a label on her back ‘UneasyJet’. And of course the people involved.

Later my favourite mermaid appeared too. But I wanted to photograph her along with Phil Thornhill of Campaign Against Climate Change standing at the front of the top deck of the open top bus as it made its way towards Trafalgar Square. Easy enough to organise if I had time and money, but not when you get the idea and want to do it straight away.

One thing I often mean to bring with me but usually forget (it doesn’t quite fit in my camera bag) is a monopod. Given that and a remote release (which I don’t own) it would have been fairly easy. But I had to do with leaning backwards over the front rail of the bus, holding the D700. I took a few holding the camera at arms length, though it was hard to get the right angle. All the time I had to work with one arm, holding on tight with the other as the bus was bumping along the road.

You can see more pictures – and more about the demonstration – on My London Diary.

USA Upholds Copyright

In what was a surprise decision to many of us, a US court awarded a young British photographer, Lara Jade Coton , almost $130,000 in a copyright case over the use of a self-portrait she had made at the age of 14 on the cover of a DVD re-issue of the hardcore porno video apparently about a photographer and his model, ‘Body Magic.’

You can read more details on the Russian Photos blog, and also in a post made by the photographer on DeviantART when she discovered the abuse of her image in 2007, when she was only 17; there are also a number of pretty sickening comments to that message, as well as some sympathetic and sensible advice. Perhaps the most obvious was to find a good copyright lawyer and sue – which she did.

Coton also reports the successful result on her blog, with a link to the coverage of it on Plagiarism Today web site.

The surprise was the amount of the settlement awarded to photographer Lara Jade Coton, who had not registered the copyright of her photograph, which was apparently stolen from the DeviantART web site, with the US Copyright Office.

Received wisdom (and much legal advice) suggests that unless you register you can only claim minimal damages as opposed to the “punitive damages” available for the abuse of registered work.

Of course it was not just copyright abuse, but also defamation and other related offences and Coton’s lawyer had claimed $430,000 damages. The judge actually disallowed a claim for punitive damages on the grounds that the defendant’s actions lacked malice, although his actions towards her complaint appear malicious and dismissive.

The case got wide publicity in print and on the web in 2007, and there were reports that some of the more negative comments posted in response to these articles came from those involved in stealing the image.

This settlement is great news for Coton, but also for all the rest of us whose work is in danger of being ripped off by US businesses. Until now they could be fairly sure that most non-US based photographers would not have registered work their at the US Copyright Office and would thus not pursue the matter through the courts where if successful they could expect only minimal damages. This case should at least make them think again and perhaps decide not to steal images from the web – or if they do and are caught out, to come to a reasonable settlement.

Coton was fortunate to find “a wonderful lawyer in Florida Mr Richard Harrison of Allen Dell PA” who was prepared to take on her case, doing a lot of work in his spare time to help her. She also has some good advice to all photographers, “be wise about where you upload your images, the size you upload them and be smart about the steps you can take towards finding legal help when youve found your image being used inappropriately.” We should all congratulate her for taking on the fight.

Three Cities, Three Photographers

The basic idea behind the show ‘Paris, New York, London‘ was a simple one – three cities, three people, each with their own ‘mini show’ of pictures from one of them – which I came up with it sitting in a pub around a year ago with Paul Baldesare.

We had just finished a two person show together in the Shoreditch Gallery, a small venue with space for perhaps 35 pictures of an average size for photographs, with some double hanging. It has actually got smaller since I first organised a show there, with one of the three walls (the fourth is a large window) now covered with storage and longer available for hanging.

Shoreditch – and particularly Hoxton where the gallery is – is an up and coming area of London, and the Shoreditch Gallery is one of two rooms occupied by a pleasant café in a small square called Hoxton Market, just a few yards from Hoxton Square which now has some pretty heavyweight art galleries.

Paris, New York, London is the sixth show I’ve organised in this space on an annual basis. The first three were mixed shows for a now defunct charity group called the London Arts Cafe, including painting, drawing and photography and included work by some fairly well known names in the art world – and we produced a printed catalogue for each of them. And perhaps because they were mixed shows rather than simply photographic shows, I sold pictures at all of them. Since then I’ve organised three purely photographic shows. The first, when the gallery still had three available walls, was English Carnivals, with work by four photographers, myself, Paul Baldesare, Bob Watkins and David Trainer. Last year, down to two walls, I took one and Paul the other with a show ‘Taken in London‘.

Three cities for ‘Paris, New York, London‘ is going to be a little of a squeeze. As the third person, Paul and I decided to invite John Benton-Harris to show some of his recent digital work from New York with us. Both Paul and I have known John for some time; Paul was a student of his years ago and I’ve several times written about his work, particularly pictures of the English and St Patricks’s Day – as well as lecturing about him at the FotoArtFestival in Bielsko-Biala in Poland. We liked the work he was now doing with digital particularly on his trips to New York and thought it would be good to have it in the show. Some of the pictures were taken with the Nikon D70 camera I’d done a deal with John over after I’d moved on to a D200 a few years back, though he now has several more digital cameras.

I think I originally wanted to call the show ‘London, New York, Paris’ though I’m not sure why I thought that sounded better. Perhaps because like the two previous shows it was going to be a part of PhotoLondon, the East London photography festival. But when I came to register a domain for the web site around the beginning of the year, that name wasn’t available, so it became ‘Paris, New York, London.’ As always with our shows, the actual selection of photographs for the show was left to each person involved, though we agreed that we would have a maximum of 12 pictures each, and that these should form a coherent group of images.

I started photographing Paris in 1966, but that year I dropped my camera in the lake at Versailles while getting into a rowing boat with my wife-to-be, and the water did nothing for my holiday snaps. The camera never really recovered either, though it was around 4 years before I could afford to replace it. Four years shooting on film with a shutter speed set on 1/125 that could be anything between around 1/30th and 4 seconds wasn’t a great start to my photography. But in 1970 I splashed out around £30 on a Russian Zenith B with a 50mm f2 lens and really got started in photography. In 1973 I went back to Paris and took some of the pictures that made up my first published magazine portfolio and you can see that work, along with some from later years on my Paris site.

In this show I have a dozen colour images from 1988, which were selected from the 65 or so in my latest Blurb book, Photo Paris, a slightly revised version of which with some of the reproduction improved is now available. Direct from Blurb it costs £16.45 + carriage, but at the show party (date to be announced) I’ll have copies at &15. And if you insist I’ll sign them.

Photo Paris was taken over a few weeks in August 1988 when I was staying in a flat in Montreuil, just outside the Paris border to the east, one of the settlements around the city that make up the ‘banlieue’ which saw riots a few years ago. The area in which we stayed – like much of Paris – still then had much of a village feeling (unlike many of London’s ‘villages’ which exist only in the minds of estate agents.) Quite a few of the other images are from Belleville and Menilmontant, largely working class districts on the slope at the north-east of the city. It’s an area that the great Willy Ronis made his own through his superb images of the 1950s (and in 2008 I walked his favourite walk.) But back in 1988 I probably hadn’t heard of Ronis and I made my own way around the area, parts of which were being radically modernised, though little trace of this appears in my pictures. I was interested in evoking a past age at least as much as recording the present.

Paul Baldesare‘s contribution to the show from London contrasts two decades and two areas, with images from the City of London, including some of those he showed in ‘4 On London‘ in the 1990s with those from his more recent pictures of London’s shopping Mecca around Oxford St.

You can read more about “A taste of the Big Apple” by John Benton-Harris on the Paris, New York, London web site, where there are four of his 12 pictures from the show. I’m particularly pleased that I was able to print 8 of his images for it.

Rather than having an opening, we decided to have a show party later in the month, to which all will be welcome – I’ll post the details as soon as they are confirmed.

The show opens on Saturday 2 October (although I think we may actually still be putting the work up if you come early in the day) and closes on 29 October. Mon-Fri 8am-6pm, Sat: 10am-4pm. Closed Sun. The Shoreditch Gallery is at the Juggler Cafe in Hoxton Market, which is just to the east of Pitfield St, down either Boot St or Coronet St, a few yards north of Old St. Lots of buses stop near and the nearest tube, Old St, is about 5 minutes walk to the west.

On Show in London

One of the things that I really miss with the revamped monthly British Journal of Photography is the ‘On Show’ listings. Although they were never comprehensive, they gave a pretty good selection of the photography shows in London and around the country, particularly those whose details were not covered by other listings.

There were some gaps, and in particular a number of commercial art galleries never bothered to tell BJP about their shows (and just occasionally some of the more important public galleries too.) But often I’d rip out the page when I was catching the train up to London and thought I might have a little spare time to take in a show, and I’d spend a few minutes on my journey deciding which exhibitions to try and get to.

For a while you could also access ‘On Show’ on line, I think even for a month or two after the magazine went monthly, but it no longer appears either in the printed monthly or on the web site, and I’ve not yet found a decent alternative. The monthly BJP does have an exhibitions page, but it’s hopeless, listing just a few exhibitions that have already appeared in the Sunday papers, or are on elsewhere in Europe or the US.

Of course there are listings sites, but most of them seem defective so far as photography is concerned. Photography-now is an international site and its UK pages do include the major shows and quite a few of the commercial galleries, but not many of the other venues. Probably the best site that I’ve so far found is Spoonfed, where you can search for photography in London but the format makes it near to impossible to use sensibly – if you click on the link to see all of September’s shows you will find that a show that is open 20 days in the month gets 20 listings.

Despite the problems, I managed to find a couple of photographic shows to visit yesterday afternoon and both are certainly worth a few minutes of your time.

Chris Beetles, in Ryder St (a short walk from Green Park tube) is showing a good selection of Edward Weston pictures printed by his son Cole Weston, and you can see all 37 of them on the gallery web site. The show is on until 25 Sept 2010. Cole, who died in 2003, was the youngest of Weston’s four sons, and although he was a photographer himself was better known for printing his father’s work.

Prices for the prints on show range from £4000-10500, and personally I would rather spend a considerably smaller sum on one of the finely printed books of his work (and I actually have several.) Cole’s prints were considerably cleaner than some of his father’s – those in this show seemed without blemish – but somehow they seem to lack a little of the intensity of those his father printed (and even of some of the fine reproductions in books.)

At the Michael Hoppen Gallery in Jubilee Place, off the Kings Road (the buses stop a few yards away at Markham St) are two shows that certainly offered a greater challenge, by two of Japan’s best-known post-war photographers, Daido Moriyama, (b1938) and Shomei Tomatsu (b1930.) The Tomatsu show is due to end 9 Oct 2010 and Moriyama 10 Oct 2010.

Moriyama is the more challenging of the two, a self-consciously avant-garde photographer impressed by the work of William Klein, Weegee and other American photographers and artists, who early in his photographic studies worked for three years as an assistant to Eikoh Hosoe. On Japan Exposures you can see an interesting presentation of his early magazine work, looking at two Japanese books of his work from 1965-1970 and 1971-4.

© 2005 Peter Marshall.
Eikoh Hosoe looks at his camera phone in a pizza place called Alcatraz

and takes a picture of me!

Moriyama worked on the city streets, often at night, with a 35mm camera, often taking pictures without the benefit of the viewfinder, and pushing Tri-X far beyond its design criteria. Printed high contrast and on a large scale his work is often reminiscent of Pop Art’s use of dot screens (and the Moriyama foundation’s web site presents them as coarse halftones.) His work epitomises the aesthetic behind the influential Japanese magazine Provoke, “are-bure-bokeh*” or “rough, blurred, out of focus.” Started in 1968 in Tokyo by photographer and writer Takuma Nakahira and others, the magazine, which published Moriyama’s work in it’s second issue, had a short publication history (three issues) but started a movement under it’s title including many young Japanese photographers of the era.

Although the Provoke photographers (including Yutaka Takanashi, Koji Taki and Takahiko Okada as well as Nakahira and Moriyama) very much saw themselves in revolt against the photography of the past – and that very much included Shomei Tomatsu – looking at the older photographer’s work now the similarities are rather more marked than the differences, and he is now seen very much as a precursor of ‘Provoke’.

It’s a show that is very much worth going to see, particularly for the presentation of Moriyama’s work on a scale impossible in print. There does now seem to be a considerable publishing industry devoted to his work in Japan, though rather fewer seem to be available in this country. A new monograph, Daido Moriyama: The World through My Eyes (ISBN-10: 8857200612) is to be published by Skira on 12 Oct 2010, and Daido Moriyama: Shinjuku 19XX-20XX, (ISBN-10: 3775717293), pictures from a Tokyo district he became obsessed with, is still available at a reasonable price.

While in the gallery I also looked through the fine book ‘The Skin of the Nation‘, produced for Tomatsu’s first retrospective outside of Japan which was shown in New York, Washington, San Francisco and Winterthur,Switzerland in 2004/6. And no, I’m not surprised that it didn’t make the UK. It’s perhaps unfortunate that one image by Tomatsu – a beer bottle melted by the heat of the nuclear holocaust at Nagasaki – has been so successful that it has obscured his other work. Before I started to write about the show I went on line and ordered myself a second-hand copy.

*Bokeh here does not mean the excessive pre-occupation with the rendering of out of focus areas which bedevils some areas of the Internet, but simply that things are not rendered sharply because they are not in focus.

England’s Bumpy Bits & Marmite

Hearing on the news a few days ago that Oxford researchers have suggested that high doses of vitamin B may help prevent memory loss, I immediately reached for the Marmite, which is certainly high in B12 and folic acid, though no one seems quite able to remember whether it has much B6. Perhaps a downside is the presence in it of glutamic acid, an excitotoxin, possibly implicated in various neuro-degenerative diseases, and you would also have to eat a jar or two a day to reach the B12 dosage levels of the Oxford trials.

But it reminded me of our week in Cumbria last month. Not that Marmite actually appears in the pictures on the web but Bob, who at 80 still very much has all his marbles was there and eating it every day on his breakfast toast.

Personally I don’t go for toast, certainly not at home where we eat good bread. Toasting is really a way to make cheap and stale bread palatable, and to inflict it on Linda’s fresh home-made wholemeal seems sacrilege. But Marmite has its place in my photography, or at least in my camera bag, in the sandwiches that I always like to take if I’m going out from home and would otherwise miss a meal. Being on a strictish diet (low fat, low sugar etc) makes buying food out a problem, and I need regular meals to keep blood sugar at reasonable levels.

So I can recommend curd cheese, Marmite and raw onion (thinly sliced) as a cheap and tasty filling for wholemeal bread sandwiches, although it’s a shame that Marmite – even in jars – seems to be runnier than it used to be. If you want to be sure about the B6, perhaps you should eat it with peanut butter, though I don’t fancy the mix and peanuts are too full of fat for me.

The last set of pictures from Cumbria I’ve put on the web were taken on a walk to Keswick from a few miles north where we’d gone with the others on the holiday – including Bob – who as keen bird watchers they were going to spend a few hours not seeing the ospreys. We did stop for a minute at one of the viewing points but certainly weren’t going to wait for birds who couldn’t be bothered to turn up on time.

Most of the walk was pretty level, roughly following the River Derwent upstream, but the hills were all around us. I took a few pictures and they are on My London Diary (along with other sets under the label ‘Cumbrian Interlude’ covering the Cumbrian Coast, around Wigton, and Caldbeck and Hesket Newmarket, the home of Doris’s 90th Birthday Ale.)

Talking to a woman at the Horse Hospital on Friday we found we had a common view of the country. Her former partner had liked going for country walks and she hadn’t, clear grounds for separation. The real problem, as I said, is that “it’s all green.” Never my favourite colour.

It’s not really a good idea to walk to Keswick. Because you end up in Keswick. A tourist trap, though the churchyard was empty and pleasant enough and the Luchinis ice cream can be recommended, the only really good thing about the town seemed to be the view away from it. It’s a town you could walk away from with a happier heart.

All pictures with the D300 and Nikon 18-105 VR (27-157 eq), a decent single lens to take on holiday that covers almost everything. Incredibly cheap for a Nikon lens at around £200, it’s considerably better built (though not pro standard), optically superior, lighter and shorter than the 18-200mm which costs almost 3 times as much. There is a detailed review of it at Photozone (avoid the opinionated muppet elsewhere) which comments on it’s very high resolution figures and also the rather pronounced distortion and chromatic aberration.

This is presumably a deliberate design decision, as both distortion and CA (along with the inevitable vignetting) are readily removed by software – automatically when I import the files into Lightroom 3, though I haven’t yet got a profile for this specific lens and am using one that isn’t quite a perfect match. Overall I think this is probably the best value for money ever from a Nikon lens.

Flag Burning, Photography & Politics

One of the things that stuck in my mind from Antonio Olmos’s talk at Photoforum last Thursday was the advice given to him that he passed on to us, that “if you find yourself surrounded by photographers, you are almost certainly in the wrong place.”

But at times at events such as Saturday’s demonstration and counter-demonstration outside the US Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square there was rather a crush and it couldn’t be avoided. However at one point I found myself facing a very large group of photographers and was pretty sure that I was in a better place than they were.

I’d been in the small crowd of Muslims Against Crusades taking pictures as they milled around on the pavement when I realised that their main man, Anjem Choudary, was beginning his speech and was able to get behind the front row of his listeners just a few feet from him to take pictures. I’d followed one man with a largish TV camera, and shortly afterwards there was another similar camera on my left shoulder. As often happens I had to move forward slightly to get their lenses out of my field of view, getting right up to one of the other MAC speakers.

Apart from wanting to photograph Choudary speaking, I knew that he was going to be around when they burnt the US Flag, so was a guy to stay close to. It would be good to get him in the frame as well as the burning flag, and if I could also have something recognisably the embassy in some of the pictures it would be a bonus. The most obvious thing was of course the eagle and flag – at half mast for 9/11 – on the top of the building.

After the speech the crowd became more fluid as the flag was produced and I was able to move slightly to where I wanted to be. And I more or less got the pictures I had wanted, although at some point another photographer squeezed down low – but not quite low enough – in front of me. Those burning the flag placed it and also the photograph of pastor Terry Jones (which was remarkably resistant to burning) the right way round so far as I was concerned too, and the pack of photographers on the other side made an interesting background for some of the pictures.

It would have been nice for all of us to have been able to move exactly where we wanted to get the best pictures, but of course that isn’t practical in such situations. There are always photographers saying “let’s move back so we can all get a picture”, but it seldom can work – and no hope at all in situations like this. You have to get in there while respecting the people working around you as much as possible by trying not to get in their way, and do the best you can.

Moving back occasionally makes sense, but generally it results in nobody getting a decent picture (and here we were in the middle of a crowd and couldn’t move back.) Capa’s dictum “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” usually applies.

As people continued to squirt lighter fuel onto the flames I would have preferred to be a few inches further away as it was getting uncomfortably hot. Some of the pictures are taken at 16mm and the flames were rather closer than they look.

Later, as I was standing around between the MAC and the EDL and talking with other photographers we decided there was little to choose between the two groups of extremist demonstrators (or come to that government whose embassy we were in front of, that had given the world Vietnam, Guantanamo and more.) We thought about living under a country ruled by either of the two groups. The MAC seemed slightly more civilised, but there were other things to consider. “Beer” I said, “at least under the EDL you could get drunk enough not to care.” “Bacon butties” added another, but the real clincher came with “Adultery!”

My own politics? Well, if anyone ever tries to form a Liberal Democratic Christian Socialist Anarcho-syndicalist Environmentalist Situationist vaguely Pacifist party I’ll probably double it’s strength as shadow minister for culture and sport, areas where I would have some really interesting policies. Photography (real photography that is) would certainly get a much better deal under our administration and the current art establishment would be in for a very hard time. As for sport I’m at least 110% for it and think we should all be encouraged to do some, though of course I’d institute a total ban on anyone getting paid for playing games. You’ll have to wait for the rest of our manifesto.

More about the MAC protest and more pictures on Demotix, where there is also a separate post about the EDL, who earlier had marched to the 9/11 memorial, laid a couple of wreaths and held a two minute silence for the 9/11 victims before coming to shout at the Muslim extremists. More pictures still in a few days time on My London Diary.

Brian Griffin at NPG

Last Friday evening Brian Griffin gave a talk on his photographs on display at the London NPG as a part of their London 2012 project until 26 September 2010 as a part of the late night opening there. I’d arrived over an hour earlier, having walked across from the Royal Festival Hall where I’d been meeting someone earlier who was on her way to an earlier start at the Royal Opera House, and thought I’d spend some time looking at the NPG collection and some of the other special activities on offer for the NPG’s ‘Late Shift‘.

I started by sitting for a portrait booth from ‘Take Away Art’ with Artist Joceline Howe hidden inside. I have to say I found the two minute sketch of me disappointing, and the figure could have been anyone in a silly hat and a fancy frame, though I did rather like the portrait of the young lady who sat before me, but then she was considerably more attractive anyway.

I also took the opportunity to look at the exhibited work from this year’s BP Portrait Award, and have to say I found that disappointing too. There seems to be a current vogue for producing painted portraits that have a photographic look to them, and most of them I would have found rather disappointing as photographs. There were some other portraits I found more interesting but none of them were among the winners.

Also rather disappointing was the display ‘Twentieth Century Portraits‘, photographs taken by Dmitri Kasterine, that was due to open the following day but was actually in place for the Late Shift. Kasterine (b1932, England) whose father was a White Russian and mother English, began taking portraits in the early 1960s for Queen and other leading magazines, and the works on display include many well-known figures from the arts. A few of the pictures are rightly celebrated, the icons by which we remember, for example, Francis Bacon, but in the main I found most a little ordinary.

I think there is some more interesting work on his web site, and a family group I rather like on his blog posted last month that shows he is still busy.

Walking around the gallery it struck me that many of the more interesting pictures on display are not actually portraits – and that quite a few of the portraits are actually rather tedious, including much of the modern work. This came home to me particularly in a gallery entitled Expansion and Empire, where one of the more fascinating works shows Queen Victoria presenting a bible to an African guest, and another Florence Nightingale receiving the wounded at Scutari. (There is also another large image of the Queen visiting the wounded and also a picture of the relief of Lucknow.) There are other portraits of Nightingale, the best of them certainly one of the small photographs on display but not shown on the web page. But it is the larger group images that dominate the room, and not just because of their size.

In a way I think Brian Griffin’s work for the Road to 2012 is a twenty-first century equivalent of these paintings of historical scenes, though of course he has not tried to portray actual scenes (though nor really do those historical examples.) But his work certainly does have something of their sense of theatre, although I don’t think Jerry Barrett or Thomas Jones Barker would have understood or sympathised with Anna Raybon‘s statement that the ‘Road to 2012‘ “was to be art, not PR“; clearly for them, even if the term was then unknown, PR and Art coincided.

His talk was fairly well attended although there was plenty of room for more. Introduced by Raybon, the NPG’s Commissions Manager, the event started with a showing of the film clip of the live performance by Griffin and musician Steve Nieve on the Late show in 1988, which you can also watch on YouTube. Entitled ‘The Big Tie‘, it shows Griffin’s work on Broadgate, with a very young looking Griffin both talking and singing.

Friday he didn’t sing, but engaged in a conversation with Braybon about project and the making of some of the pictures. At one point Griffin demonstrated how he posed models “like puppets“, pushing and pulling their limbs into the positions he wanted, engaging them as actors in producing the scene he wanted. But he and Raybon stressed, the scenes only really came to life when one of the sitters added something of their own, such as when a young boxer leaned out of the tight sculptural group of four figures and raised his gloves to the camera.

Like most of his pictures, this image of the ‘young ambassadors’ from an East Ham school who had played a large part in swinging the decision to London was based on a painting, Griffin had an image of it in his mind but only actually identified it several months later on one of his frequent visits to the National Gallery.

Some of the sitters also had their own games to play. Griffin had wanted to photograph then minister Tessa Jowell kneeling on the office carpet and draping herself onto a chair. But she came in and told him she wasn’t getting on her knees for anyone and he had to rethink. Is it just me that sees the picture that resulted with her arms out on a chair back as her with a Zimmer Frame?

Griffin also stressed the teamwork involved in making these portraits, working with Braybon and others including his assistants on location – usually with two hours to make a picture. Towards the end of the performance he brought four of that team up onto the stage to answer questions – something that certainly came as a surprise to his printer, Mike Crawford.

After the talk I went with Griffin and half a dozen of his friends to a show in the basement of the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury, ‘Fake Food & Fast Cars: The Pop Couture of Kate Forbes‘, an incredible display of the “highly conceptual costumes” created by this film designer. It continues until 2 October 2010, and is certainly worth a visit. I asked her if I might take some pictures, but failed to persuade her to move out of deep shadow in the dimly lit gallery.

Griffin, born in Birmingham in 1948, grew up in Lye, between Halesowen and Stourbridge in Dudley and his show at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris from November 19 2010 to January 23 2011, ‘the Black Country’ is based on his memories of growing up there, with portraits based on people he knew as a child, including his family.

A couple of weeks ago he went back there to photograph some of the places that played an important part in his growing up including Ma Pardoes (The Old Swan pub) in Netherton, Netherton butchers, The Black Country Living Museum and Solid Swivel Engineering. After showing in Paris the pictures will go on display in Dudley in 2012.

Kate Forbes worked with Griffin on this project to ensure that the costumes reflected the period and location of his youth. The single picture from it on the web page, My Mother, 2010 shows a woman representing Griffin’s mother when he was a child, with hands soaked in some kind of black oily substance, in a factory overall.

Carnival Thoughts

This year I didn’t spend as long as usual at the Notting Hill Carnival, arriving an hour or two later than usual as I was waiting for an gas engineer coming for an emergency service to our water heater on Sunday. The weather forecast hadn’t been too good and it did seem a little less crowded than usual.

Sunday is Childrens’ Day at carnival, and is always a little less crowded, while the Bank Holiday itself can get too crowded to move around easily in many parts of the area. I find it rather easier to photograph on the Sunday, although the Monday is a better day for partying.

There did seem to be fewer elaborate costumes than previous years – perhaps the recession is hitting the carnival. Certainly many voluntary groups are expecting cuts in funding from local councils if these have not already happened. But its always been the people that interested me more.

We got a little light rain, which didn’t dampen the atmosphere much at all, but dark clouds made a pretty drastic cut in light levels making photography a little trickier. But then it really poured down for a few minutes and I took shelter, while trying still to photograph the few braver souls who were partying on in the street.

Fortunately for them (though perhaps not for me, as I rather like the effect of the driving rain) although the shower was very heavy it didn’t last long. I was working at ISO 1250 and although the D700 is pretty waterproof I needed to keep just under shelter in that kind of downpour, so had the Sigma 24-70 set at 70mm. 1/160 s was just fast enough to get a sharp image despite the moving subject and gave rather nice streaks on the image.

Later the sun came out and the lighting got very contrasty. So working on Ladbrooke Grove I perversely decided to work in the trickiest area I could find for light. Fortunately Lightroom is able to work wonders if you shoot RAW (as I always do.)

Here’s an example, with some of the people in deep shade and others in sun. I’ve evened things out a little with some fill-flash (nominally at -1 stop with the SB-800) and exposed (probably more by luck than judgement) to avoid burning out the almost white houses in bright sun in the background. Here is what the file looked like when first imported into Lightroom:

Back in the days of film and darkroom printing it would not have been possible to make these kind of changes. Working with transparency, the starting point would have been completely burnt out in some areas – the situation hopeless. With colour neg there would have been similar highlight detail, possibly very slightly more, and with some fairly tricky burning I might have managed to bring out the blue sky and some of the building detail, but some of the more subtle changes would certainly have been impossible.

We do now have an incredible degree of control in the printing process, enabling us to change so much about an image with some precision. Back in the darkroom we could play around a little – as well as dodging and burning we could also try local warming of areas, swabbing them with concentrated developer or alkali, flashing and more, but they were all rather limited tricks and not exactly reproducible. Printing from the computer we can make precisely located and exact area adjustments of tonality, contrast, saturation, hue, sharpening etc.

Of course there may even be some people who prefer the effect of the original (as happened when I posted previously about how I’d improved a picture. But it wasn’t the way I saw the scene and didn’t reflect what I was thinking when I took it.

Twickenham Pirates

It sometimes takes me quite a while to add things to ‘My London Diary‘ though I try to keep it as up to date as possible. But if you go there as I’m writing this on September 12th, the front page is still on August 2010. Well, at least the year is right, unlike quite a few other web sites.

My London Diary is a blog, but unlike this one that uses WordPress, it is rather more hardcore, hand-coded using html (though I speed things up a bit by making use of an ancient version of Dreamweaver, although there are some parts of the code it doesn’t understand.) When I first put the site on line it didn’t seem possible to do the kind of thing I wanted to do as a blog, and even now it would impose limitations.

But the coding is hardly time-consuming, what takes the time is ‘developing’ and editing the pictures and writing the text. For events that I also post to ‘Demotix’ I usually write the text more or less immediately after the event, usually while the image files are being loaded to my hard disk and imported into Lightroom, and re-use that text with minor variations on My London Diary. I’ll also select a small group of images for Demotix, and get them ready for uploading.

At some point I also make a wider selection of the images I’ve taken, process these in Lightroom and export full size high quality jpegs to my hard disk. These are the images that I generally work with, only going back to the archived RAW files if there is a special reason to do so.

But I’d just forgotten about my trip to Twickenham, where I’d gone to meet my son and his wife and daughter and have afternoon tea (actually a beer in my case) with his mother-in-law. On the way we just happened to meet some pirates getting aboard for a trip on the river. As well as some naked ladies and a few other little things. So I decided I ought to put some of it at least on the web.