Archive for January, 2013

Murder & Masterclass

Thursday, January 31st, 2013

I’m sometimes a little sceptical about ‘masterclasses’ and workshops, not least because I’ve myself taught a few over the years. While many seem worthwhile and some seem to offer very good value for money, others seem to be merely money-making exercises, charging high fees for the privilege of being taught by someone who has little idea how to teach and only a fairly basic grasp of the subject in which they are supposedly a master.

I’ve attended a few over the years too and they have varied immensely in quality, from disappointing to highly inspiring. I’m sure I wouldn’t be writing this now if in the 1970s I hadn’t made a trip to Derbyshire for a workshop with Paul Hill and Raymond Moore, something I’ve written about on various occasions, including in Darbis Murmury. It was so good I went back several times for more.

One that I’m sure was very worthwhile – and you can read about it from the point of view of a blogger who attended it – was last weekend’s Guardian Masterclass run by Antonio Olmos. At the bottom of sarasiobhan’s short piece is a list of ten ‘top things she learnt‘ at the class, which she is very complimentary about.  Apart from the ‘(use a 50mm fixed lens)’ they are all good sense – really a 50mm makes it hard to get in close enough, and a 28mm or a 35mm is better. Since sarasiobhan already uses a Leica X1 – with a fixed 35mm equivalent lens – it seems in any case redundant advice so far as she is concerned.

I wrote about Olmos before when he gave a talk to Photo-Forum in 2010, and he has produced some great work you can see on his web site, as well as regularly in  The Guardian where you can also read his advice on street photography.

I’ve been meaning for some time to mention his ongoing series The Landscape of Murder and the features on his blog (subtitled with typical self-depreciation ‘Ramblings of a mad visual mind’) are always worth reading. He has a separate blog devoted to his Landscape of Murder project which is perhaps the best way to approach this work.

In my post on his 2010 talk I wrote:

Olmos also passed on a great bit of advice he himself received, that if you find yourself surrounded by photographers when taking pictures, you are almost certainly in the wrong place.

and a week or so later I thought of his comment again when I was taking this picture:

© 2010, Peter Marshall
US Flag, photo of pastor Terry Jones, lighter fuel, US Embassy & Press, Peter Marshall

and wrote about it in another post, Flag Burning, Photography & Politics. It’s something we very much agree on (and readers may notice that I have often passed on this advice), and his work is distinguished by his thinking about his subjects and finding different ways to approach them.

Should We Ask?

Tuesday, January 29th, 2013

The NPR ‘the picture show’ has an interesting story What It Feels Like To Be Photographed In A Moment Of Grief about a photograph of a woman praying in front of a candle and statue of the Virgin Mary outside the St. Rose of Lima church in Newtown, Conn., on the day of the school shootings there, taken by AFP photographer Emmanuel Dunand.

The woman contacted NPR after they ran the picture, identified herself and wrote that although it was a beautiful image and she wasn’t asking for it to be taken down, she “would like to make a point about responsible journalism, it would have been nice if someone could have asked my permission.”

The photographer’s response was that he thought that in the situation, leaving her alone was the most respectful thing to do. I’m fairly convinced that in the circumstances I would have come to the same decision.

There are I think several things that are not really brought out in the short feature or really in the 140 comments people had made on it by the time I read it, and also it connects with something I was thinking about writing about a small incident when I was taking pictures last Saturday.

There is a sense that the picture in question is not really a picture of a particular woman, who is hardly recognisable in the image, her face largely covered by hair and her hands far more important in the image. This is a picture which gains from being generic, from expressing the feelings of many rather than being an image of a particular person.

The NPR talked to Kenny Irby of The Poynter Institute, who gave what I think was a very confusing answer about the two benefits of photographers introducing themselves and interacting with their subjects. It showed a complete failure to understand the difference between news and features, perhaps surprising coming from a leading journalism school. It isn’t as Kenny Irby says ‘unfortunate‘ that the AFP does not have a policy requiring photographers to ask for subject’s names when they are photographed in public places, it is very much at the foundation of news photography.

The woman in the picture is quoted as saying “all of a sudden I hear ‘clickclickclickclickclick’ all over the place. And there are people in the bushes, all around me, and they are photographing me, and now I’m pissed. I felt like a zoo animal.” I don’t know how accurate a description that was, but it shows that there were many other photographers as well as Dunand involved, and it obviously can be very disturbing and intimidating to be surrounded in this way. But this was a very public event, in a place ‘packed with local residents and the media’ and the attention she got was inevitable. Hers was a private grief but she was expressing it in a very public place and in a way that was certain to attract attention.

Her final sentence in the quote was perhaps unfortunate. Zoo animals often come to welcome visitors and generally don’t have strong feelings against being photographed, often playing up for the camera. It’s one reason why I don’t much like zoos and have seldom photographed in them. And though I don’t mean to suggest that she was acting for the camera, many people – even in distressing situations – do so.  As of course many people including Susan Sontag have pointed out.

News photography is sometimes tough. I’ve at times photographed through tears and I think all good photographers ever who photograph difficult events will have too. But like Dunand who commented “all you want to do is put down flowers, you don’t want to take photos” we have a job to do. He is also reported as saying that ‘if he sensed that someone was bothered by the camera, he simply put it down’ and I think most professionals would do the same. But of course it may well not have been the click of his camera that disturbed.

There are many times when I start taking a picture on my own and find myself surrounded by a crowd.  I don’t like working with a pack of other journalists, and when I feel the shoulders pressing against mine I always know I’m in the wrong place – and after I’ve taken my picture try to move away. Many events now we have far too many people with cameras trying to photograph, and those who generally behave the worst towards both the subjects and other photographers are generally not the professional photographers present.

© 2013, Peter Marshall
A photocall -which I often avoid – but people often want

But there are times when I think it is right to ask and I do. One happened last Saturday, when I was photographing the start of the large march to save the hospital in Lewisham, one of the most successful, well-run and needed in the country, threatened simply because other hospitals have huge debts arising from the policy of a former government – the private finance initiative. Closing Lewisham wouldn’t even do much – if anything – to solve the financial problem and it is more of a human sacrifice demanded by the current government -both metaphorically and literally, as its closure would lead to excess deaths among the sick and injured in the area.

© 2013, Peter Marshall
People waiting for the march to start – of course I didn’t ask

I was photographing one of the local MPs and some of the senior hospital staff at the front of the march when one of the march stewards asked me if I had seen a family taking part with a young child in a pram who was on a drip. It would he said, make a good picture. The family were on the pavement only a couple of yards from the head of the protest in a very public place, and it would have been possible to photograph them without asking, but I felt that it would be unduly intrusive to do so – I needed to get very close. I went up to them and asked. They said no. I didn’t take the picture, though I think it might have been an image that would have dramatised the protest and perhaps made some front pages.

© 2013, Peter Marshall
This woman and children were watching the protest – and I asked permission

Of course I did take many other pictures. There were only two others where I felt I needed to ask permission, both involving people not actually taking part in the protest. One had no problems, and in the other one of the two people ran away while the other was happy to be photographed. Of course I did talk to many other people while I was taking their pictures – particularly to the parents of the children I photographed, but it wasn’t a matter of asking permission – this was a situation where permission could be assumed and almost everyone was pleased to be photographed (and some demanded it!)

© 2013, Peter Marshall
I talked to the people while taking pictures – but permission was implied.

More of my pictures and story at Save Lewisham Hospital.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Tony Ray-Jones – Pepys

Monday, January 28th, 2013

Until I read a three part article on the Pepys Estate at Deptford published in ‘The London Column‘ I wasn’t aware that the work which Tony Ray-Jones took for the Architectural review was now in the RIBA photographic library.

© 2013, Peter Marshall
Pepys Estate, 1982. Peter Marshall

The first of three posts on the Pepys Estate, Deptford links to BBC archive footage of a remarkable programme first broadcast in 1969, Bird’s Eye View – The Englishman’s Home – shot mainly from a helicopter with commentary by John Betjeman who refused to fly, but worked with the footage as it was edited. Rather slow-moving by modern standards, though Betjeman is always a pleasure to listen to, unless you have a strong stomach for the sentimental and picturesque you might like to skip the first thirty-something minutes where inevitably it lingers far too long over many stately homes, and omits the true history of misery, repression and exploitation behind their architectural splendour.  Ground-breaking it claims to be for its aerial perspective, but the approach is comfortable and conservative in its politics.

© 2013, Peter Marshall
Chiswick House, 1977. Peter Marshall

After a brief trip to fairy-tale Wales at around 30 minutes the programme shifts first to Chiswick House in Betjemans beloved Middlesex, before moving to truly urban housing in Bath “in the crater of an extinct volcano” and then Clifton in Bristol, built when it was the second city of England (built on the unmentioned slave trade) then on to Brighton, our best-looking seaside town. The helicopter (and commentary) concentrate on the Georgian terraces of the 1830s before zooming down to the Pavillion.

Next come a couple of ‘model’ villages built on some of the huge estates – including the single house left in the old village at Chatsworth that had spoiled his Lordships view and Edensor built up the hill for his tenants: “I can’t see why this sort of thing is any more inhuman than what a council does today“. I can.

Then its comfortable North Oxford and swimming pool suburbs, “the sort of house that everybody wants, an acre and a garden and no cow“. Finally at 39 minutes we get to Port Sunlight “a protest against northern back to backs” (which don’t get shown), and on to Peacehaven. Betjeman comments on the snootiness about this cliff-top development, but his defence of it seems to be based more on a wish to stand out from the architectural crowd than any real knowledge of the place – to which two of my aunts moved to die around the time the programme was made.

At 42 minutes comes Harlow New Town (“do you think this is the way we ought to live and do as we are told)” and on to a new Lyons estate at New Ash Green in greenfield Kent, then at 44 minutes, Docklands and high rise, with brief glimpses of the Royal Docks and Roehampton. The programme ends with the Pepys estate: “But where can be the heart that sends a family to the 20th floor of such a slab as this … .caged halfway up the sky… what is housing if it’s not a home” and the wide cleared site for Thamesmead with a its early blocks under contsctuction – “how human will it be?” asks Betjeman.

The image by Tony Ray-Jones, ‘Pepys Estate, Deptford, 1970‘ brings us back very much into the real world of a group of young kids playing on the estate, as does the text by Owen Hatherley and the further picture by Ray-Jones on part two of the series. In part three. Robert Elwall writes about the work commissioned by Hubert de Cronin Hastings, owner of the Architectural Press and editor of its leading journal, the Architectural Review from Ray-Jones and some other leading photographers in a series entitled ‘Manplan‘ which ran 8 themed monthly issues from September 1969 to September 1970 and its place in the history of architectural photography. Ray-Jones’ contribution was in the last of these,  ‘Manplan 8: Housing‘ and perhaps the final straw; it was an experiment too much for many of the magazine’s subscribers and had to be abandoned.

© 2013, Peter Marshall
Waterloo, 1980. Peter Marshall

Searching in the RIBA Photo Library using the term ‘Ray-Jones’ returns 167 images by him (rather more than the 138 mentioned on The London Column), from the Pepys Estate, from Lillington Gardens in Pimlico, from Haringey, Thamesmead, the Old Kent Rd, Blackheath, Battersea, Southwark, Crawley and New Ash Green and elsewhere and includes architect designed small houses as well as council estates.

The most interesting pictures to me are those of children playing around the estates at Thamesmead and Hammersmith and particularly in the Pepys Estate at Deptford, which appears to have occupied him more than the other sites. Some of the work seems straightforward architectural work – and at times similar to images I and many others have taken of similar subjects (and frankly there are a few that are a little boring), but the work comes alive once he found people to include in the picture – and there are a few where there is no visible architecture.

© 2013, Peter Marshall
Violet Villa 1896, Putney, 1982. Peter Marshall

But his purely architectural work – like much of that genre – often leaves me cold. Too often the pictures are of idealised structures, everything clean and tidy, with the emphasis on new buildings, pristine and unlived in. I suspect like me, Ray-Jones was truly more interested in the lived in, buildings that have developed a character through use – and abuse. Too often architectural photographs look like pictures of models rather than the real world, and although I’ve spent a lot of time photographing buildings, I’ve never called myself an architectural photographer.

I’ve written here before on some of the issues over housing, and in particular the privatisation of estates such as the Pepys Estate, and it was good to read Owen Hatherly’s piece. You can read some of my own thoughts in Views of Deptford and on posts about the Carpenters Estate (Around the Olympics) in Stratford and the Heygate Estate (Southwark’s Shame) at the Elephant.

The three pictures illustrating this piece are from my own archive, and include some which will appear in the books I’m currently working on from my pictures of London in 1970-85.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Grey Day, Golden Dawn

Friday, January 25th, 2013

 

It’s hard to know why the Greeks should have such an ugly embassy in London, backing on to Holland Park, and in a street (also called Holland Park) otherwise full of rather nice Victorian detached villas from the 1860s. I wonder if embassies are somehow exempt from planning laws, not that these generally concern themselves much with aesthetics.

I’d come to photograph the five hundred or so who had answered the call from Unite Against Fascism (UAF) to show their solidarity with the people of Athens, several thousands of whom were marching in their city at the same time in a protest against racist violence, with the fascist Golden Dawn (GD)  party being implicated in many of the attacks. Although GD claims not to be fascist, many of its members have been shown giving Nazi salutes and it has published materials praising Hitler, Hess and others and one of its MPs has a ‘Sieg Heil’ tattoo. In earlier years the party made no pretences and decorated its party congress with swastikas and other Nazi symbols. More recently, its party magazine praised Hitler as a “great social reformer and military genius”  and it ran in the elections with the anti-immigrant slogan “So we can rid this land of filth“.

What I hadn’t expected was that police would allow a small counter-protest organised by a group calling itself the ‘British Friends of Golden Dawn’ just a few yards from the main protest at the embassy. They looked just like the EDL – and several of them recognised me from when I’ve photographed their protests.

© 2013, Peter Marshall

It is hard to to understand the thinking of protesting in support of a pro-Hitler group like Golden Dawn while holding up the Union Flag, the flag of a country which was one of the leaders in the fight against Hitler. You can’t really be an ‘English Loyalist’ and support the fascists.

I’d dressed up well but it still felt cold, round about freezing. Before the protest I’d walked through the snow-covered Holland Park, dotted with large snowmen. I didn’t stop to photograph them, I’d already seen far too many snow pictures.

The UAF protest attracted many leading figures on the left, including Tony Benn, who looked well but spoke only briefly, leaving others to make the real speeches. One of the others was Gerry Gable, editor of Searchlight, who I don’t recall ever having met before, though the EDL have accused me of working for him. I’ve never given Searchlight pictures and so far as I’m aware they have never used anything of mine, so I was surprised when one of the Golden Dawn supporters shouted out at me for being a “Searchlight photographer.” I’ve nothing against Searchlight, but it has never happened. It is just a part of a right-wing myth that sees all journalists as in the pay (some hope) of sinister left-wing conspiracies, when in fact most of us are struggling to make a living from a largely right-wing press.

© 2013, Peter Marshall

Weyman Bennett of UAF came to look at the counter-protest and shouted back rather jovially at their insults, doubtless heartened at their pathetic performance. Soon the police appeared to tell them it was time to leave, and having arranged transport to the protest for them led them away to the nearby underground station, along with a few anarchists shouting insults. I took a few pictures with the 70-300mm as they walked away, but couldn’t be bothered to run to get closer.

© 2013, Peter Marshall

There really was very little light all day, with heavily overcast skies. I’d been using flash to photograph the speakers, who were under a gazebo, and had set ISO800 for that, wanting a fairly wide aperture with theD800E on ‘S’ and working at around 1/60s, using the 18-105mm, a decent portrait lens at its longer settings. But when I switched to the longer zoom without flash I forgot to increase the ISO, and few of the pictures are really sharp. Working without flash on the D700 I was using a higher ISO and had no problems.

More pictures at Anti-fascist Solidarity Against Golden Dawn.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Richmond in the 70s

Thursday, January 24th, 2013

Sorting out the hundreds of my images from the 1970s that I’ve thought worth scanning I came across this one, not a great picture – which is perhaps why I couldn’t remember where I had taken it. I looked out the contact sheet to find little help. There were a series of half a dozen frames of this and adjoining scenes, but nothing obviously to indicate where I had been when I took them. The frames to one side were recognisably from the Shell Centre at Waterloo, and those after this were from close to my home, but there were no clues as to this location.

© 2013, Peter Marshall

The pictures seemed fairly carelessly framed (this may have been deliberate) and the only information I’d written on the contract was that they had been made with one of the several little Minox 35mm cameras I used to carry in a pocket all the time (I punched the filing hole through the model letters.) Hardly large enough to fit in a 35mm cassette, with a lens that folded into the body when not in use, these had a 35mm f2.8 lens that was every bit as good as the best SLR lenses. Or at least could be, as the first one I bought I had to fight with Leitz, the importers, to get changed as it was decidedly unsharp – at first I got back a rather sniffy letter from them pointing out that there were no performance standards for Minox products, but after I insisted they did replace it. It was a tough plastic clamshell design, but did break when it went flying out of my pocket as I ran down the street one day – and my insurance company perhaps surprisingly paid for the replacement. When that eventually broke down, Leitz apologised that they could no longer repair that model and offered me the latest version at around half price. So altogether I owned at least four of them over the years.

As well as being compact, it was also virtually silent, and great for photographing inconspicuously, although its automatic exposure was not always too reliable, and as with other very small cameras it was easy to get your fingers in front of the sensor – or the camera lens – when cradling the camera in you hand. The manual film wind also sometimes took rather a hefty effort with my thumb, which occasionally became rather painful.

Small cameras then didn’t necessarily mean worse results – those with good lenses could do just as well as larger beasts that took the same 35mm film and made images the same size – unlike with small sensor digital compacts.

I tried a few searches on Google using the shop names I could read on this and the other thumbnails I was looking at with some likely places and drew a blank, but once I looked at the scan at more or less full size I found the picture had a vital clue. Under the large 29 above one window the tiny bit of text I had thought to be decoration was actually the rest of its very short address, Hill St. Googling that suggested Mayfair, which it clearly wasn’t, but a quick search on my on-line A-Z found just two more Hill Streets in the Greater London area, in Richmond or St Albans.

I’d not visited St Albans in 1979 when the picture was taken, so it had to be Richmond, and it was good to be able to confirm this at the web site of the LB of Richmond and Twickenham, which has online a detailed  walk down Hill St, and I was soon looking at a picture of 29 Hill St taken in 1900, then the premises of Mr J.H. Jarvis, but clearly the same place at that on the right of my image.

© 2013, Peter Marshall

Around the corner are some much more recognisable properties next to the bridge which I’ve photographed on several occasions, and facing the river were the backs of some properties including a couple of listed buildings. I used to visit the area quite often at night some years earlier than my photograph, nursing a pint of bitter for an evening in my student years as I listened to the likes of Bobby Wellins playing in the old Palm Court Hotel. I wasn’t taking pictures then – I couldn’t afford to, as photography then was an expensive business – but later I took a few pictures of the exterior before the controversial redevelopment by Quinlan Terry in 1984 which rebuilt the Grade II listed façade but lost the atmosphere.

© 2013, Peter Marshall

The vertical image was taken in autumn 1979, probably with a Leica and the horizontal in May 1981, on an Olympus OM1. Little had changed though perhaps the weeds had grown a little.

A Cold Wednesday

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013

A week ago at this time, a little after nine in the morning, I was standing on the platform at my local station, waiting in a bitter wind for the train to take me to London. It was, for England, cold, around a degree or so above freezing. I don’t like cold weather, though I’d more or less dressed for it, with an extra layer under my thin coat and long johns under my lightweight trousers, an extra pair of socks and of course a scarf and hat, and I was keeping warm enough, though getting rather too hot when actually sitting on the train and bus which took me to Notting Hill for the Pussy Riot London Solidarity Demonstration close to the Russian embassy.

The cold weather had obviously put off protesters and when I arrived at the pen more or less opposite the embassy there was only one lone protester standing there with his placard. Across the road closer to the gates of the private road on which the several embassy buildings stand – and in which neither protests nor photography are permitted – was a small group of people, one photographer I knew talking to several students, some also with cameras who had also come for the protest, but decided not to stay.

As they got ready to walk off, I went across the road to photograph the one man in the pen, and the other photographer followed me and we talked to him and took a few pictures of him and his placard with the embassy in the background. Soon we were joined by another photographer, making it three to one.

© 2013, Peter Marshall
This was half of those at the London protest when I took the picture

By now I was wondering what to do. There didn’t really seem to be much of a story here, although it was a part of an international day of protest in support of the jailed Pussy Riot protester Maria Alyokhina, the London event was rather disappointing. I was standing in the cold and had at least half an hour before it was time to start my journey to my next appointment. It was too early to go to the pub, and I didn’t feel like a coffee. Fortunately another protester arrived, doubling the size of the protest, so the three of us talked to her and took more pictures. Then a few minutes later two men came, doubling the number again. More pictures. I was now expecting a group of four to arrive, and it was getting close to the time I had to think about taking a bus. Just as I’d said goodbye, rather disappointing a single further protester came to join, and I took a final picture or two before rushing to the stop. The protest was due to continue for almost another couple of hours and given the weather if I’d been going to protest I wouldn’t have been in any hurry to get there on time.

I like bus journeys in London, at least on double-deckers, where the top deck gives you an elevated view of the city and the streets, but they are seldom a rapid mode of travel. On foot the journey to the Royal Courts of Justice – around three and a half miles – might have taken me an hour, and the bus (taking a slightly less direct route) shaved five minutes off that. But it was warm, and saved me getting tired carrying a heavy bag. Underground is faster, though it involves more walking and I miss the view, but perhaps more importantly I can ride the buses for free but have to pay on the tube.

At the court I was surprised to find not one protest but two taking place. I’d come to photograph the Mental Health Resistance Network and Disabled People Against Cuts supporting a judicial review of Work Capablility Assessments on the grounds they violate the Equality Act by not being accessible for those with mental health conditions. They were setting up their protest on one side of the entrance, but in a pen on the other side were a large group of protesters with placards against psychiatrists and their dosing kids with dangerous medicines – Stop Psychiatry Drugging Kids.

© 2013, Peter Marshall

There was something in this second group that made me feel a little uneasy. In part it was the organisation, with neatly lettered large placards, red hoodies, and t-shirts, just too organised for a normal protest, more like a PR stunt. And though some of the things they were saying about the medicalisation of normal behaviour and the profits made from this by the drug companies are pretty sound, the name of their organisation, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights worried me. If it was a genuine citizen’s organisation I should certainly have come across it before. There were a few people wandering around with clipboards and at first I thought perhaps this was being organised for a TV film, but then I met a man in a white coat with a stethoscope and a batch of labelled pill bottles who threw me a dose of woo woo science and the penny began to drop. I still took some pictures and wrote up the story, because despite what they represent, from what they told me I felt the actual case they were protesting was a good one to protest.

© 2013, Peter Marshall

But the MHRN and DPAC’s Equality Protest Against ATOS Work Assessments was a more important protest, and one that effects many thousands of disabled people who are ‘being put through a traumatic and harrowing experience needlessly’, losing their benefits through incorrect decisions by tests administered by ATOS which the government’s own assessor has ruled ‘unfit for purpose’. It is an inhumane policy imposed by a doctrinaire government that seems to be taking a sadistic delight at creating hardship for the poor and disabled, with a total lack of understanding or empathy for those who suffer – and in some cases are driven to suicide.

The policy was the subject of a parliamentary debate last week and I’m pleased that at least one of the papers used one of my pictures from the protest. Parliament was clearly concerned by what is happening, although the government remained unmoved and unrepentant. This is certainly one of the nastiest policies of a cabinet that simply has no idea of the problems faced by those without millions in the bank. We need welfare reform, but unfortunately the Labour government set it off in the wrong direction, based simply on cost cutting rather than developing caring and personalised solutions that would actually be more cost effective.  Real assessments of people’s capabilities would make possible support that enabled them rather than leaving many contemplating suicide.

Another, slightly shorter, bus ride warmed me up and took me back west to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, where a regular protest in solidarity with Bradley Manning was being held on day 963 of his detention, as his defence were arguing at Fort Meade that his case should be dismissed because fo the failure to bring him to a ‘speedy trial’.  The protesters, who were going on to the Ecuadorian embassy to join the daily vigil there in support of Julian Assange, were there to Stand with Brad at US Embassy.  They stood in silence, their backs to the hedge, facing the US flag and eagle on the top of the of the building as they played the soundtrack of a video, ‘Collateral Murder’, showing war crimes by US forces, allegedly leaked by the ‘courageous whistleblower’ and published on Wikileaks, leading to Manning’s arrest and the US attempts to get Assange into their hands via Sweden.

© 2013, Peter Marshall

I made this picture stretching across the wide hedge, holding my D800 with the 10.5mm DX fisheye at arms length. It was tricky holding the camera level and getting the framing right, and it might have been useful if I could have remembered how to use ‘Live View’ though I’m not sure I could really have seen clearly enough. As always photographing flags can be a bit of a lottery, and I was lucky to get one frame where everything was right with the wind holding the flag right out above the eagle. The curve given to the embassy by the fisheye (and corrected to cylindrical perspective to get all the verticals upright) actually greatly improves the rather boring architecture) and the horizontal angle of view of around 140 degrees enabled me to get in around half of the line of protesters.

I left them as the soundtrack was still echoing from the front of the embassy, and again more protesters were still arriving, but I was cold and had had enough. It was time for another bus and then the train home.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

London Day and Night

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013

I’ve been putting in a lot of time over recent months sorting out my own work from the 1970s and early 80s, and have just decided that Lightroom can help me organise this stuff in a similar way to my current digital work. I’ve set up a new catalogue ‘London1’ and have imported several hundreds of scanned images – 16 bit tiff files – into it.

The raw scans need quite a lot of work doing on them – and some things are much quicker in Lightroom, for example rotating and cropping – and it is also probably an advantage that the edits leave the original file untouched. There are some things – like retouching – where at least most of the work needs to be done in Photoshop, and it is easy to use Ctrl+E and open and edit the original and then save it to return to Lightroom. But with so many pictures to work with, I’ve decided only to retouch the scans when I actually need to make a print. Too much of a job to retouch everything.

In Lightroom it’s easy to tag, keyword, select and sort files into collections, and then to output an individual image or a whole set with a preset for a particular purpose – for web, or book pages etc. And at least one of my next set of books will be from my early pictures of London.

Or at least it’s fairly easy to keyword and caption pictures – it sometimes would have helped if I had bothered to make notes, which I wasn’t too good at back in the 1970s. It should still be easy when, as in the case of ‘Carrington Mews Dwellings’ the pictures come with their own label, along with another, too small to read on the web but easily legible on the original that tells you they were ‘Erected A.D. 1877 by the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes’. There is a Carrington St in Mayfair – but Streetview shows it has nothing to match and Google can’t help for Carrington Mews either – and it isn’t listed in Wikipedia among the existing buildings erected by the MAIDIC. Pevsner of course wouldn’t have thought it worth mentioning, nor does it appear in the Survey of London. It is – or rather was, the bottom windows are boarded in my picture – somewhere close to Carrington St, as the adjoining image on the contact sheet is Whitbread’s ‘The Grapes’, still in Shepherd Market although now with décor rather less to my taste a free house ‘Ye Grapes.’

Of course they are not very early pictures of London, and people were photographing the city from the 1840s, when certainly a Mr Talbot made a calotype negative of  Nelson’s Column under construction in April 1844. 

One site that regularly published old pictures of London is Spitalfields Life, and a couple of days ago it had a feature The Forgotten Corners of Old London with images from the extensive collection of the Bishopsgate Institute – which is the source for many of its features on old London.  This particular set of pictures appealed to me as in some ways being like much of my own work, often recording things that seem peripheral or inconsequential but which have a certain resonance.

Another recent feature which  particularly appeals to me is Dark City: London in the 30s on the ‘Library Time Machine‘ of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, which republishes well 15 of the evocative night photographs from from London Night – John Morrison and Harold Burdekin published in 1934. The book has a total of 50 photogravures in dark blue by Burdekin with assistance from Morrison who also wrote an introduction.  I could reproduce some of these pictures here, but its better if you go and look at them all on the Time Machine site (if you haven’t got a copy of the book.) I added it to my collection ten years or so ago when I was researching a piece on the photographers of London. It came from an era when night photography was becoming much easier, and was perhaps prompted by Brassai’s night images of Paris.  Today night photography is easier still, but it remains a good idea to take a companion in many places, even in parts of London. Burdekin made a deliberate decision not to include people in his pictures and the streets are eerily empty of traffic, but London then mainly went to bed well before midnight and it would probably have been hard to have found any to include in many of the places he photographed. London is much more of a 24 hour city now and you might find yourself waiting for a long time for some streets to be empty. Then you took your friends and relatives along if you wanted people in your pictures.

A Friday Afternoon in London

Monday, January 21st, 2013

© 2013, Peter Marshall
‘You bulldozed my village … the whole world is watching’ ‘De-List Vedanta.’

It took quite a few tries before I got everything how I wanted it for this picture. I could have speeded things up by directing things a little, but that would have meant crossing what is for me a vital line. But the poster, the banner and the placard here sum up what this protest outside the London Office of mining company Vedanta –  was about.

Of course I took pictures in which the people involved feature more prominently, including CEO Anil Agarwal himself with blood scattered across  his face on the end of the banner, as well as a forthright comment about him on a poster held by an Indian activist – and more at De-List Vedanta from London.

© 2013, Peter Marshall

© 2013, Peter Marshall

It was a fairly animated protest, but I couldn’t find anything very different to photograph. I had to leave after around an hour to go to the next event I wanted to cover, at Broadcasting House, around a quarter of an hour’s walk away, which was due to start at 2pm.  I arrived more or less on time, to find a few police and an empty pen set up for the protest. Shortly after the first protester arrived, and after another half hour or so there was a protest to photograph, if still a fairly small one, against the bias at the BBC against Palestine, and in particular their complete failure to report the hunger strike by two Palestinians held without charge or trial in Israeli prisons and the assault on one of them in the courtroom.

© 2013, Peter Marshall

You can see the other protesters and read more about it at BBC Ignores Palestinian Hunger Strikes.

I’d done all I could think of there by around 2.30pm, and wanted to find out where I could meet one or other of four or five walks that were taking place that afternoon marking the 11th anniversary of the illegal US prison camp at Guantanamo bay, mirroring the routes by which five men (or rather four men and a boy) had reached there, visiting the embassies of all of the countries who had colluded in their illegal rendition by the US. I’d missed the start, and the routes hadn’t been published, but I had the mobile numbers of the walk leaders for the two I was most interested in. Unfortunately neither were answering their phones.

So I was kind of looking for a needle in London’s haystack, but I had a few clues. I knew where they had started – one at the Pakistan and the other at the Afghanistan embassy – and I’ve visited most of the embassies in London at some time or other. I knew there were an awful lot of them in the area around Belgrave Square, so I took a bus to Hyde Park Corner and walked there. No sign of anyone there, so I thought I’d wander up to the Pakistan embassy. Again blank.  I realised then that I was close to the Ecuadorian embassy, so took a short detour to visit the daily afternoon vigil there and talk to the small group and take a few pictures – Assange Supporters Continue Embassy Vigil.

Finally as I walked away towards the French embassy on Knightsbridge at last I saw some orange suits in the distance and ran to meet the group of a dozen or so tracing Shaker Aamer’s illegal rendition – and on their way to Belgrave Square.

© 2013, Peter Marshall

I tried to get a little echo of ‘Abbey Road’ as they crossed the square, but without actually posing people to copy it closely. In Rendition Routes to Guantanamo you can read the letter they tried to deliver to the Turkish embassy (and they did give a copy to the Portuguese embassy) which makes clear what illegal rendition entailed.

By this time I was a little cold and tired, and I left the walkers who (like me) were going on to the US embassy for a vigil there and took a bus to one of my favourite London pubs not too far from there to sit down with a drink for half an hour in front of a warm open fire – and do a little editing of my pictures in camera. Then it was off to the US Embassy for my final event of the day, Guantánamo – 11 Years of Illegal Detention.

© 2013, Peter Marshall

It had been a long and tiring day for me, longer than I like to work now, and the pictures at the last event weren’t among my better examples. But although I was pleased to get on the bus and start my hour or so journey home, my day was not of course finished.

When I got home I still had to edit the pictures, do a little post-production, keyword and caption them and send them off, though I had to eat first, and it was well past midnight that I finished, even though I left writing the stories to go with the work until the following morning.  Few of the things I photograph make  urgent news, and I’ve decided to keep to my old-fashioned slow working methods rather than join the modern world and take a laptop with me when I’m photographing and send in pictures directly after I take them, but I try to get them in the same day. By the time I went to bed it was around 14 hours since I’d left home to travel to the first protest.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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A Year Without Shelter

Thursday, January 17th, 2013

Barbara Tucker has now been just over a year in Parliament Square without shelter – police removed her tent on 16 Jan 2012.

© 2013, Peter Marshall

The peace protest on the pavement facing Parliament was started by Brian Haw on 2nd June 2001 and has continued 24/7 since then; Barbara was one of those who joined Brian in the early years and has continued his protest since his death in 2011, and on those occasions where she has had to leave the square – various arrests, court hearings and two spells of imprisonment – others from the campaign have ensured it continues.

It’s a truly remarkable protest, and still continuing, though Barbara’s own future is under threat. On December 27th she began a hunger strike and as I write is on day 22 (you can see the current position on BrianHaw.tv, the campaign web site.)  A few days ago I was passing by and had time to stop briefly to see her. Then she looked cheerful and well but was too busy working on a statement to meet a deadline to talk. Although I would have liked to have talked with her – as I’ve done on many occasions in the past – I wasn’t quite sure what to say to her in the circumstances, and it was easier  being able to walk around and photograph her as she was working with a colleague.

I was on my way to a photographers meeting, and although I’d brought the D800 with me, with the 28-105mm lens, I hadn’t remembered to put in the flash, and it was pretty dark in Parliament Square. I set the camera to ISO3200 and to underexpose by one stop (otherwise it tries to produce pictures that are too bright, looking like they are taken during the day), but underneath the large umbrella where she was sitting it was pretty dark.

© 2013, Peter Marshall

It must help that the 28-105 is a VR lens, because otherwise my chances of getting a reasonably sharp image at 90mm equivalent focal length with a shutter speed of 1/5 second would have been slim. Of course I took several, and only a few were sharp enough to use. At shorter focal lengths things were a little easier as the maximum aperture is larger; f3.8 rather than f5.3 makes the lens roughly twice as fast. Taking a wider view was also easier as there was more light outside the umbrella, and with a wider subject I was getting shutter speeds of around 1/20th – seldom a problem with a wide-angle lens. The main light source for the pictures under the umbrella was the computer screen, which also changed slightly at times as they worked.  In most of the pictures I needed to use considerable ‘dodging’ particularly on faces, brightening and adding a little contrast, while there were often other areas that required burning. As almost always I took RAW files, which are considerably better for post-processing .

The D800 does have a built-in flash, but with many lenses you get a shadow at the bottom of the image if you make use of it. To my surprise it does seem to manage without doing so with the 28-105 at all focal lengths except for very close subjects at or very close to 28mm. I didn’t consider using it on this occasion as it would have have been too much of an intrusion, disturbing the two people at their work.

There are just a few more pictures on My London Diary in Parliament Square Hunger Strike. It’s freezing here as I write, and a terrible night for anyone sleeping out, even those not on hunger strike and denied shelter and not being harassed by police.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

The Mystery Woman

Thursday, January 17th, 2013

© 2013, Peter Marshall

You may recognise her (and comment if you do), but I have no idea who she was, but as she walked out of the Royal Courts of Justice yesterday lunchtime, two photographers who had been standing around ignoring the two events I was photographing sprang into action.

It wasn’t a pretty sight as they stood in her way, though she had clearly expected to be photographed and paused briefly for them to work – when I took these pictures – but they continued to pester her as she crossed the pedestrian crossing and on the far side of the road before she eventually walked off. Not only that, but they pushed and swore at another photographer who seeing what was happening had also decided to take pictures and they felt was getting in their way. He had just the same right as them to be there on the street and taking pictures and their action was uncalled for.

© 2013, Peter Marshall

The people taking part in one of the protests were watching this and asking each other who the woman was, and they asked me. None of us had a clue. I went up to one of the two photographers who was busily looking through his shots on the back of his camera and made a polite enquiry but he refused to give me any information at all. His response rather shocked me as I’m used to working with other photographers on the streets and there is a culture of sharing and cooperation.

I don’t work with paps, and don’t do that kind of photography. It gives photography and photographers a bad name. You can photograph people without hassling them, as I did on this occasion. But in the end it isn’t the photographers but the whole media culture which produces them that I’d like to see put an end to. Unfortunately whatever result finally comes out post-Leveson isn’t likely to alter this.