Month: July 2013

I hadn’t known what to expect when I turned up at Piccadilly Circus to photograph a protest calling for the closure of all slaughterhouses. I’m not a vegetarian and certainly not a vegan, though I’m very much against cruelty to animals, and on environmental grounds think that most people eat too much meat. At home we eat quite a lot of vegetarian food, but I still like to have a varied diet, and although the protest took place at lunchtime, and I was feeling a little hungry, I waited until I’d gone elsewhere before getting out my ham sandwiches!

I arrived more or less dead on time (oh dear), and for a few minutes it looked as if this was going to be a rather small and not too interesting protest.  But more people arrived, including a few that I knew, and one told me that if I was lucky there would soon be some scantily dressed women arriving. I wasn’t entirely sure if he was joking.

But soon I saw a woman sitting down on some large sheets of white card and removing her modelling gown to reveal she was dressed only in bra and pants.  Soon she was lying down and a man in a white suite labelled as a ‘Demon Butcher’ was dribbling fake blood over her before two others wrapped her in cling film and slapped on a large label with a bar code, ‘HUMAN MEAT’. Then a second woman was getting the same treatment.

I took quite a few pictures trying to work out the best approach. Getting in close and cropping the torso to use the white background;  taking the picture wider to show the pavement around, or including the protesters behind – and a few other variations – you can see some on ‘Human Meat’ – Close Slaughterhouses.

For a protest in the centre of London there were surprisingly few photographers, and even the many tourists around seemed a little shy about taking pictures.

The posters and placards you can see in the pictures certainly show some terrible scenes of animal cruelty, and they protesters say there is no such thing as humane slaughter and call the attitude that allows us to treat animals differently to humans ‘speciesist’. I can’t agree, because I do think we have a special relationship with others of our own species.  People do matter more than animals. But of course we shouldn’t be cruel to animals, although many animals are terribly cruel to other animals, killing them to eat in the only way that they know. We humans know better and should do better. If that’s ‘speciesist’ I’m proud to be so.

I enjoyed my ham sandwich on the bus on my way to the next protest. I hope the pig lived a decent life and was slaughtered humanely, though I can’t be sure. Though of course the pig only had a life because it was going to be eaten at the end of it.

Continue reading Human Meat

I’ve photographed Canary Wharf on and off since the mid-1980s when the old West India docks were being demolished. On the ground during building the new area, and even  from the top looking down in the late 90s, when the office space in the tower was mainly still empty.

Canary Wharf station and Cabot Square

Since then I’ve been back various times, taken several photography workshops there as well as going to take pictures, and although I’ve got stopped a couple of times by security while taking pictures not really had a great deal of trouble.  I’ve photographed several protests there, most recently with the cleaners, and not been troubled by security while doing so.

So although I know people have had problems photographing on this huge private estate with its own security force impersonating police, I didn’t share the fears voiced by some that the ‘They Owe Us’  “creative civil disobedience”  there “in one of London’s economic power centres” was likely to end in trouble, though they were promising “an element of surprise that will be revealed on the day” though of course you can never be sure what will happen.

At least it was a nice bright sunny day, though rather windy, but perhaps the heavy-handed policing on Tuesday had put people off, and numbers were rather fewer than I’d expected.  Things eventually began to happen in the area in front of the tube entrance, with two adjacent areas with public address systems, one with some political speeches and performances, and the other more serious workshops and lectures, though visually neither was hugely interesting.

There were some seriously large banners, and in a creative area two large tripods were erected to fly the main banner – with the event’s title ‘They Owe Us’ – between.  Ultra-wide lenses were useful for these big banners, and in particular the 10.5mm fisheye let me not only show the banner but also in some pictures the tops of the high buildings to the south and north of the area.  The pictures with this seemed far more satisfying to me than those taken with longer lenses. With all those buildings with their rectangular arrays of window around almost all the fisheye images looked better after processing using the Fisheye-Hemi plugin,  which straightens the vertical lines (I’ve looked at alternatives to this, but it remains the best I’ve found.)

Of course not everything can be straight, and the sweep around of the paving slabs clearly shows this – and the buildings at left and right of the picture actually face each other.

A bit of tilt was needed to get the tops of the towers in the picture, and I was perhaps just a little too close for this picture – stepping back a few feet would have let me see more of the tripods, but I had to be more or less where I was to get the background ‘Power to the People’ banner in the image as well.

The two images above show the difference between a normal ultra-wide and the fisheye. The lower image was made with the 16-35 zoom at 23mm, about the widest for a rectilinear lens before the edge elongation becomes noticeable – the horizontal angle of view is a little over 75 degrees.  The upper image, taken from just very slightly to the left and a few second apart is almost half as wide again and gives a better impression both of the event and the surroundings.

But of course there are times when you do want to want to concentrate on a smaller part of the subject, and here is a third image taken a short time before the previous two. I was possibly just slightly closer, and moved down onto my knees to put the display of exchange rates and share prices which was travelling around the building behind the speaker.  The equivalent focal length using the 18-105mm DX lens was 120mm, and at f14 the rate is almost sharp – and you can count the speaker’s eyelashes, although theoretically diffraction is dragging the performance down a little it doesn’t seem to show on the original.

Finally, a reminder of what the protest was about. Canary Wharf, Pig Trough of the 1%, is in one of London’s most deprived boroughs, stolen from it and given over to the ultra-rich greedy pigs. In Tower Hamlets outside this private fiefdom, 1 in 4 children are living in poverty.  Getting balloons to point the right way on windy days wasn’t easy, as you can see in some of the other pictures on ‘They Owe Us’ G8 Protest on My London Diary.
Continue reading They Owe Us

Canada Day came to London a couple of weeks early. Although there are some celebrations taking place around Canada House as I write on July 1st, on 13 June we had not one but two protests against Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper taking place in Westminster.

It should be a matter of national shame that Harper was invited to address our Parliament when he came over on a lobbying mission to try to force Europe to take Canadian tar sands oil, the dirtiest of dirty fuels.  Producing a barrel of tar sands oil creates three to four times more climate pollution than producing conventional crude oil in Canada or USA, and the amount already approved by the Canadian government for extraction in Alberta is enough to push the planet past the 6 degree global warming catastrophe level. And on top of that there area huge direct environmental effects, as well as tragedies for the indigenous population of the areas being devastated.  Exploiting the tar sands presents a threat to the future of human existence that is hard to exaggerate and impossible to deny – all for the sake of short-term profits of the oil companies.

I didn’t find it an easy event to photograph, or perhaps I wasn’t at my best. I’d arrived a little late a few minutes after the event started which perhaps just didn’t help, and just  as I arrived a photographer had started organising the protesters for a group picture, which seldom helps me – but perhaps he was desperate for an idea too.

I didn’t actually take a photograph of the whole group, partly because I seldom if ever find such things interesting, but here a row of ugly flagpoles in front of it didn’t help. I did try going back, but then there were too many photographers and other people in the way. So I’ve got a few little bits of the protesters in front of Big Ben. One or two aren’t bad, and press photographers only want one, but I like things to be happening and some kind of story to tell.

Perhaps I was just having an off day, but there are some times when I never quite seem to settle and find a subject that really interests me visually. Perhaps I need to try harder. Or I should have got out the 10.5mm, which stayed firmly in my bag. There does seem to be something about looking through that which makes me see differently, and I think engages me more in events, even if I don’t always get good pictures with that lens.

I’d actually got there earlier – a few minutes before the start time – to find nobody around, and wandered a little around the area. I saw what appeared to be a protest a couple of hundred yards down the road and went to investigate.  These people didn’t look like your normal protesters.

They were members of Canada’s Foreign Service, members of the Professional Association of Foreign Service Workers, aggrieved because they get paid less than some others who they say do the same work.  Perhaps you get more if you are a spy? Spread out along the edge of College Green they were at least on the route that Harper came to Parliament. They told me they thought he would arrive very soon, and I hung around a few minutes before giving up and going back to the Tar Sands event – where by now I was just a little late.

By the time the Tar Sands protesters had decided to go, the daily shift for the Save Shaker Aamer campaign had arrived, and I spent a few minutes talking to and then photographing them.  Without great results, though I rather liked the red shoes of a woman walking past.

More pictures from all three protests:

Harper, we don’t want your dirty oil!
Canadian Foreign Service Protest
Shaker Aamer Daily Vigil Continues.

 

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