Re-photo

Saturday December 18th is ‘Pay Day‘, UK Uncut‘s second day of demonstrations around the country against tax dodgers, once again targeting Vodafone and Sir Philip Green, on one of the busiest shopping days, just a week before Christmas.

I’m at a meeting and then travelling across the country (snow allowing) and so won’t be photographing this event, but I have just put more pictures from their first day of action in Oxford St on December 4 on to My London Diary.

We had snow then too, and my train took an extra 25 minutes to get in to London and although I ran up and down the escalators on the Underground I still was not there in time to get inside Topshop for the start of the protest (though since I was carrying a camera bag the security there would probably have ejected me in any case.)

This was a protest that caught the attention of the media, and as well as a crowd of press and freelance photographers, there were also many others there with cameras, crowding around the door and the line of security men and police across it.

I’m not particularly tall either, which doesn’t help when you are in a crowd. The protesters were at the back of the store and I couldn’t get a good view of them. There were a lot of shoppers still inside the store at that point taking pictures of what was happening on their phones and compact cameras, and they were better placed than us.

Later it was still a huge crush whenever there was anything happening in the doorway of the shop or even on the pavement outside. But I did get some pictures that I rather liked, and in particular a whole series of one young woman.

My difficulty was that I was really too close, having to work with a wide-angle lens and sometimes getting a little more distortion than I wanted. I couldn’t move to either left or right, being pushed from both sides and from behind, as well as ignoring a policewoman who kept telling me to move back.

Later I photographed the same woman protesting outside BHS, and there both protesters and photographers had a little more room.

In some ways it’s a better picture, with some well-placed text on the two placards, but I find the upper one stronger, partly because of the closer approach (and the distortion that comes with that), partly because of the tauter expression which gives it a greater urgency. But it also works better because of the radiating light fittings above the head, and, perhaps most importantly because the text in the image is more importantly placed and also ‘TOPSHOP tax dodgers’ is rather more central to the protest than the more political slogans of the lower image.

Having arrived late and perhaps missed what might have been the most interesting part of the protest I was pleased to find that at least one of my images did appear in the press.

It was that pointing finger, accusing Sir Philip that made this the picture to be used, and this was the ninth of a dozen frames I took of her pointing, some including more people. Three frames used a similar framing to this image, but in the other two the finger stands out less as rather than being over the red background, it is over the face of the man behind.

For this I was using the D300 with the 28-105 Nikon at 57mm focal length. The top image was on the D700, 16-35mm Nikon at 26mm, and the middle picture the D300 at 67mm. All at ISO 800 to give me decently fast shutter speeds.  It was an overcast day but but not too gloomy and I didn’t use flash in any of the pictures, though I have opened up the shadows and brought down some of the highlights  in the processing in Lightroom.

 
Students burn placards on the plinth below Nelson in Trafalgar Square

The second of the series of student demonstrations organised by the National Campaign against Fees and Cuts took place on November 30th, and they had a further demonstration on December 9th, which I also photographed and posted about a few days ago.

Students go up Regent Street having come up Piccadilly from Hyde Park Corner

The next big student demonstration will be towards the end of January,  because Parliament has a longish break over Christmas, as do many students. But another person or group, rumoured to have links with the EDL, has set up a Facebook page for a ‘fake’ demonstration on Monday 20 Dec, presumably with the intention of in some way discrediting students, perhaps hoping for some kind of violence. It’s one I won’t photograph even though some people may turn up.

A police medic holds a protester with his left hand and takes a swing at him with his right while friends try to pull him away

The second day of action started in Trafalgar Square but did not develop as expected. Rather than a short march down Whitehall to Parliament Square and then on for a further protest outside the Lib-Dem  headquarters, over half of the demonstrators decided to head off early, were blocked by the police and then commenced a ten mile fast march around much of central London, before returning to Trafalgar Square.

It was a peaceful march by the students though I witnessed one small attack by a police officer on an individual student and another use of what seemed rather unnecessary force to stop a group of the marchers taking a short cut.  There were a couple of fireworks thrown – one exploding at my feet, and a few snowballs mainly aimed at the police.

The marchers got lost in the maze of back streets around St Bartholomew’s hospital in the City – and there wasn’t even a policeman there too ask the way, as the City of London police either hadn’t noticed the demonstration or had decided to stay out of its way, at least of the half hour in spent on their patch before I gave up and caught a bus.

Marchers going past the Stock Exchange with no police in sight

The protesters were convinced the police were trying to kettle them, but so far as I could see they made no effort to do so until very much later in the day, following a certain amount of pushing and shoving in Trafalgar Square when most of the protesters had already gone home – and I too left before they imposed a kettle.

Just beyond the banner some students were trying to push through the police line. Others were simply walking out one of the the other entrances to the square which was still open.

It was a chaotic event, and the accounts on sites of some of the left-wing organisations differ dramatically from mine. I think you do get a fairly good idea of what went on from my description and pictures on My London Diary, though of course it wasn’t possible for me to be everywhere and see everything.

Yesterday I went to Shepperton for a carol service in the shade of the reservoir next to the studios, and then on to dinner a few yards down the road. Several times during the evening I thought of Shepperton’s most famous twentieth century resident, the late J G Ballard, and wondering how his dystopian vision could fit into this rather cosy corner of suburbia.

I particularly thought of his vision of a flooded world, and of the perils of global warming and the failure of will of almost every nation around the world to get to grips with the issue at Cancun. The notable exception was Bolivia, and at the annual Campaign Against Climate Change march and rally a few days earlier I had photographed Maria Souviron, the Bolivian Ambassador to the UK, speaking.

Maria Souviron, the Bolivian Ambassador to the UK

At Cancun we saw an agreement, but it was very much an agreement for the richer countries to continue more or less business as normal, and one that even were its best hopes realised would still produce an unacceptable climate warming. It was an agreement to lift the foot off the accelerator slightly when what is urgently needed is a change to reverse gear.

De-growth isn’t really a word in English, and certainly not an idea in conventional economic thinking, but an idea that we need to embrace for our civilisation to have more than a very limited future.

Bush in bed with the Esso tiger in March 2002  – the wheels fell off on Westminster Bridge

I’ve photographed these annual marches and other demonstrations by the Campaign Against Climate Change since they began – and then I was still using film and mainly black and white. And although I could very much sympathise with Caroline Lucas when she said she hoped we wouldn’t need to be here again next year, I also felt it was both highly unlikely that our Lib-Con government was going to completely change its spots and make our protest unnecessary – and that it is an event I’m always keen to photograph.

I was glad I wasn’t the official photographer in Hyde Park, perched up in a cherry picker what seemed a very long way above the crowd lining the numbers 2030 in Hyde Park – the date that the protest was calling for Britain to be a zero carbon country. There is a long history of such overhead shots, and they do still sometimes attract the attention of the media, though personally I find them very boring. It looked very chilly up there and I don’t have a great head for heights, and would have  been shaking from both fright and cold.

I’m pleased too that I can’t see myself in the official photo, though I was certainly there somewhere, taking pictures while standing in one of the lines while the others were waving towards the camera.

You can just make out a pink pixel where these guys were jumping up, and though you can see the white suits of the group below, the pants don’t appear to be visible.

Of course there were also more – and often rather better opportunities for pictures while the march was forming up and also during the march, and you could actually read the text on the banners and placards.

And while it was just possible to recognize from some of the distant buildings on the horizon that the ‘2030’ image was taken in London, it was just a little more obvious in some of the pictures I took later!

Climate Rush in the march at Parliament Square

And although Caroline Lucas was apparently not well, she spoke as powerfully as ever and if anything looked healthier than usual while she did so.

It was a cold and overcast day, and I was generally able to work without flash, but by the time it came for the rally at the end of the march it was beginning to get a little dark, and I needed to use flash. I was standing fairly close to the speakers who were a couple of feet higher on a platform, which was covered with a fairly white roof. The struts you can see are a little ugly, but otherwise it wasn’t a bad background, and I was able to get some bounce from the front of it by aiming the SB800 flash on camera up at 45 degrees.

Later they added a powerful light low down in front of the speakers, giving them a rather ghoulish appearance as well as some nasty shadows from the microphone and stands. Using flash again helped, as well as providing much better colour rendition than this continuous light.

I’ve been a little busy over the past few days, with little time to post here, though I have put some work on Demotix from my day out with the student protests on Thursday.

There, along with the pictures you can read my view of the protest, which was a huge and very spread out affair, both in terms of time and territory. Its obviously not possible for a single person to be everywhere and see everything and every photographer there has to make choices about where they go and what they photograph. So both my story and my pictures reflect this.

Colour coding:Green=protester, blue=police, red=photographer

Some of those are made on the spur of the moment, dictated by events. When I saw the ‘Book Bloc’, protesters carrying large and thick placards with the names of well-known works such as ‘Brave New World’, ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, ‘One Dimensional Man’ and even Richmal Crompton’s ‘Just William’ trying to use these as shields and push their way through the barriers and riot police, naturally I tried (though with not a great deal of success) to photograph this, and again when I saw flames and a huge cloud of black smoke, along with everyone else I went to take pictures.

But there are other choices that are more basic. Some hinge on equipment. I seldom use long lenses – the longest in my current camera bag is an 18-125mm on my D300 (equivalent to around 175mm on the FX format.) I like to be in there, close to people when I photograph them, which isn’t always healthy when protests get a little heated. I used to have a 55-200mm, but lost it during a scrum in one of last month’s demos, and can’t quite decide whether to replace it – and if so with what.

Some photographers like me still wear woolly hats

Over the past few years, many of my colleagues who cover protests have begun to carry protective helmets, dangling from their backpacks – and on their heads when needed. It’s something no well-dressed photojournalist is without these days, but I decided against doing so. There are fortunately relatively few occasions here in the UK where they are really needed, and then mainly as protection against police batons. But there have been a couple of times in recent weeks when I’ve felt rather exposed without one, or have decided to keep a little out of the firing line.

It’s also a matter of philosophy. I go to events wanting to tell the story rather than aiming to capture spectacular or saleable images. It isn’t generally how the press works – as we’ve seen in the last few days with page after page devoted to a minor incident involving two royals in a car deliberately escorted into an area full of wandering protesters. Like most other photographers I was miles away at the time. Or a huge amount of coverage given to one probably rather drunk young man who decided to swing on a flag at the Cenotaph – rather than the many thousands throughout the day who had treated this monument with respect.

Young students protest in Parliament Square

Of course there are themes that interest me. The large number of young protesters, many school sixth-formers, some of whom have occupied their schools. The changing nature of demonstrations in this country with a growing anarchist fringe. The growing disconnection between established political parties, trade unions etc and many people – especially students (this wasn’t one demonstration, it was two, with the NUS and others curiously sidelined by their own choice on the Embankment.) The problems of policing demonstrations and of policing the police and so on.

Ministry of Lies

All of these things feed in to what images I choose to make (and not to make) when covering events. There are around 30 images on Demotix, and I’ll put more on My London Diary in a day or two.

Earlier this year a number of photographers campaigned succesfully to stop Clause 43 of the Digital Economy Bill, which, as I wrote at the time “would have made many of our photographs ‘orphan works’ and easy game for commercial publishers wanting a free ride on photographers backs.”

As I said at the time, it would be back, and it is – and there was a good post about it by Jeremy Nicholl on his Russian Photos blog last month.  A few days later The Guardian (who should have known better) published an article by Stephen Edwards, suggesting that the actions of photographers had effectively sealed up the BBC archives “in which photographs either form no part (radio), or in which they are of relatively small importance (television)” and calling for what he describes as “a  simple, fair and equitable solution” by the government re-instating this provision.

Unfortunately he is wrong. Clause 43 was neither fair nor equitable, as it failed to provide recompense for those who had produced the material while it would have enabled commercial organisations (and the BBC as a commercial organisation) to profit from their work.

Photographers aren’t opposed to all change, but they are in favour of changes that recognise and appropriately reward the creators of material. Legislation that did that would be welcome.

And as I recounted in New Thinking on Copyright, the photographers who mounted the campaign that played the largest part in stopping Clause 43 came up with some proposals that could for the basis for a new copyright law, and there have been other suggestions that would also solve the problem in a way that gave proper consideration to creator’s rights.

More recently, Jeremy Nicholl has published another article on his blog,
Exposed: The UK Orphan Works Covert Propagandist which lets us know what The Guardian should have made clear about its author when it published the piece.

Another project that might be worth looking at is  MILE (Metadata Image Library Exploitation) which aims to promote European cultural heritage and make digital art more accessible by improving metadata. On the information page of its Orphan Works site it has a short explanation of orphan works, which makes clear the importance providing income to artists and artists’ estates.

Certainly the last thing that should happen is the kind of rush into inappropriate legislation such as Clause 43 (rumoured to have been dictated to Peter Mandelson by one of his billionaire friends in that villa in Corfu.)