Re-photo

Although I’ve not been to the Ukraine, I did photograph Ukrainians in London holding a protest and a remembrance service for those killed in the protests.

I’d been told that they would be marching from a cultural centre in Notting Hill a few hundred yards from the Russian Embassy, but when I approached at the time for the protest, the street was empty. I thought that perhaps I had missed them, and a man came up to me, obviously going to the protest asked for directions to the Russian embassy. He spoke very little English, (and I zero Ukrainian) but I gathered – wrongly as it turned out – that the march had already left, so I hurried towards the embassy too.

Not that you can actually protest at the embassy, which is at the other end of the still guarded private street which also houses the Israeli embassy. As there, protests are on the other side of the main road close to the street opening. Though at least here there is a building with a Russian flag – the consulate – actually opposite behind a tall fence.

There were a few Ukrainians already there, along with another small group of Syrians and Syrian Peace Protest supporters, several of whom I recognised. Having greeted them, I went to talk to the Ukrainians, and found that the march had not arrived. I took a few pictures and then decided to go and look for it, meeting it a couple of hundred yards down the street. I think there had been a last-minute change of plan, and they had started from elsewhere.

There were still nothing like as many as I had been told to expect, but slowly more arrived and the protest grew. Many wore or carried Ukrainian flags and there were enough placards to make it clear what the protest was about, although not all were in English. A few protesters carried flowers, and some came with candles. Fortunately they got on well with the Syrians, joining together as both protested against Russian interference in their countries.

One image I saw in my viewfinder did give me something of a shock. It wasn’t quite the picture below, but a slightly wider view of the same person.

The woman was holding a bunch of daffodils with a blue ribbon tied around them in her left hand, which also held one corner of a Ukrainian flag. With her right she grasped another corner of the flag, and what seemed be a large knife. It was only on looking more closely I realised it was in fact only an unlit black candle, outlined against the white of a placard behind. Framing more tightly as above made the wick more visible, and moving it away from the text on the placard cuts down the illusion a little too, but there is still something slightly chilling, at least for me. The angle of the candle (or blade) and the intense expression remain powerful.

The plans changed again. It had been intended to march to the Ukrainian embassy a short distance away, and then on to the statue of St Volodomyr a short distance away on Holland Park Avenue. I’d called in there on my way to the protest and took a few pictures as it was surrounded by candles and a few photographs of those killed in the protests. But they had decided there wasn’t time for the embassy visit, and, after singing their national anthem, hands held on hearts, they set off for there.

At St Volodymyr, things were pretty crowded, with Ukrainians adding and lighting candles and adding more photographs of the dead to the display. Many of the candles in the jars had gone out and needed re-lighting. It was a pretty cramped area, and with quite a few photographers trying to get pictures, things were a little difficult. As usual I was working mainly with wide-angles, both the wide end of the 16-35mm and the wider still 16mm full-frame fisheye. Inevitably along with the Ukrainians and the candles there were also other photographers in the image. It’s something I usually try to avoid unless I want to make a point of it; usually photographers are there to record the event not to be it.

I make a point of dressing in fairly dull clothes when covering events. Dark blues, dull russets, greys, blacks. I don’t have a great deal of bright saturated colour clothing in any case, but I don’t wear it when I go out to take pictures. There are times and places where high-viz is essential, but this certainly wasn’t one of them, and I found myself cursing a photographer who had chosen to wear a bright red wool hat, though not to his face.

But it did really spoil a number of my pictures. And it led me commit at least a minor photographic sin. That hat the photographer close to the centre of the image was wearing was really about the same colour but rather brighter than the one the woman on the left below was wearing. I’ve not removed anything, but I think applied excessive burning in and a little desaturation, probably beyond what Reuters would approve of. I shouldn’t have done it, but it really was a sore thumb, and I succumbed to temptation on this one frame.

I’d actually taken off my hat in any case. It was decidedly warm for February but it was also something of a religious reflex. In the tradition in which I was raised, at a time when men almost all wore hats or more often caps, but always removed them when entering church – or indeed for open air services such as was being prepared for here.

I don’t know whether this is a part of Ukrainian Orthodoxy as well, but I did notice that all of the men in the large congregation gathered around the statue were bare-headed. But perhaps our English winters are too mild to merit any head-covering.

But during the ceremony itself there were another couple of photographers whose behaviour was I felt unsuitable, really intruding on what was happening, moving around and rather getting in the way.  I felt a more reverent attitude was appropriate. I feel it is a privilege to be allowed to photograph events such as these, and holding a camera isn’t a licence for bad behaviour.

Story and more pictures: Ukrainians Protest, Celebrate and Mourn

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I photographed Bob Crow, the RMT leader who died last Tuesday, on several occasions, and like others around me who heard it at a trade union protest outside Parliament was shocked by the news.  He was a great inspiration to many in the trade union movement and dedicated his life to his union members. Others too owe him, because the union has fought not just for better working conditions and pay, but also for public safety, particularly on the London Underground.

Of course both during his life and after his death the media was full of lies about him; while he was alive they demonised him, and afterwards there was a sickening rush to publish the fulsome comments from many who never had a good word about him when he was living.

Although I have quite a few pictures of him at various events, I never felt I had taken a really good picture of the man. Perhaps some of the better ones are still buried in my black and white files from pre-digital days.

When on Friday morning I woke to the news that Tony Benn had died, there was little surprise, but a great sense that we had lost a major figure, and one loved by many. He was as many have said a charming man and a great speaker, combining wit and timing with a persuasive and eloquent logic.  He was a man who always sounded reasonable – even to those who opposed his views. At times I was so carried away by his speaking that I forgot I was there to take photographs.

I don’t know how many times I photographed Benn over the years; probably hundreds, and certainly not all of the thousands of images I took were good pictures. Again many of the better images may be in my uncatalogued files.

And of course, so often he was right, something perhaps the media tributes have failed to make clear. Most notably in recent years about Iraq, and also about what we should have done about it. It was a great shame that the Stop the War movement failed to follow his lead and take effective action, too set as they were in the dinosaur left mind-block. His was a mind that was always open to new ideas.

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After their party at East Thames Housing Association in January I was very pleased to be able to photograph the Focus E15 Foyer mums again in February (though it would be rather better if Newham and East Thames lived up to their obligations and started housing local people in their local area and they could end their protests.) I really admire these young women for fighting for their rights against what appears to be a corrupt and complacent local council, more concerned with feathering their own nests than with serving their local community.

If these women had not decided to fight they would by now be living in substandard accommodation scattered around the country miles from the families and friends and from the various organisations that currently offer them some support. They would be in private rented accommodation with no real security of tenure – at best liable to eviction at a couple of months notice. They would be paying high rents (with the landlords enjoying the huge subsidies provided by housing benefits) for squalid rooms, most likely with mould growing on the walls from rising damp or leaking roofs.

Housing, or at least social housing and the less expensive end of the private sector , has deteriorated hugely in my lifetime. When I was the same age as these women there were large stocks of social housing – though never enough. I lived for around six years as a private tenant, enjoying the protection that tenants then had, at a rent that now seems laughable, even allowing for inflation. Even as very cash-strapped students, the rent of the half a house we lived in for the first two years of our marriage was less than one sixth of our combined income.

It wasn’t perfect – insulation then had not been thought of, and it was freezing in winter, with ill-fitting draughty single-glazed windows, and expensive electricity on a coin-in-the slot meter that ate up half-crowns at a huge rate. Most of the wallpaper in the kitchen fell off too. The next private-rented flat we lived in was more expensive, and the bathroom really was below freezing in the cold winter – and I gave up trying to shave and grew a beard.  Later when I started teaching we got a very nice new flat from the local authority, with a low rent that meant that 3 years later we could afford to put down a 25% deposit on a house, taking out a 20 year mortgage for the remaining 75% at what now seems a ludicrously low repayment.  Nowadays in London we would struggle to buy a garden shed.

Things are very different, thanks largely to various government decisions. Tenants have very little security, most of the social housing has been sold off to tenants (and then sold on) and new developments generally have only token amounts of so-called ‘affordable’ properties, available at rents that only make any sense with large subsidies to landlords (the so-called housing benefit.) Property prices have risen greatly – a house like ours would perhaps sell for 30 times what we paid for it, while salaries have risen rather less, perhaps by a factor of 12 or 15.

I was sorry not to join the mothers in Stratford for their open-top bus ride to City Hall, but that would have meant a very early and very expensive start for me to make my way across London. Instead I met them at their destination, arriving shortly after they did, and while they were still setting up the play tents and banners outside City Hall.

City Hall is a difficult building to photograph, as it usually looks rather wonky. Its a kind of egg shape, and really needs to be seen from a distance, and the protest was right next to it. It curves away and just doesn’t look right close to. However Tower Bridge made a good background that really makes it obviously London.

For some unknown reason I had a problem with the times recorded in these images, which resulted in them being in the wrong order on my web site. I try to keep the images in a story more or less in the order they were taken, though I’ll occasionally alter this a little to fit the page design better, mainly to let me put two portrait images together. Years ago I designed the image pages on My London Diary to a fixed width, with the picture content being in a roughly 900 pixel wide column. The images are all nominally 600×400 pixels (with the D700 this is 600×399) though a few are cropped and panoramas are generally 900 px wide. The column can take one landscape image, 600px wide, either left or right aligned, and two 400px wide portrait images. Towards the bottom of the column the images have to be right aligned to allow for a menu at left (and any portrait format images can’t be doubled up.)

Green Party GLA member Jenny Jones came briefly to talk to the protesters, but I didn’t see any other members. James Ratcliff,  Assistant director of the affordable homes programme in London, came out to meet them and take a letter from them. I didn’t feel he really had much time for the women.

I’d been just slightly worried that there might be problems with security, as the riverside walkway here is not actually public land, but part of the privately owned ‘More London’, and although the public are generally allowed to walk freely across it, at least in theory photography is not allowed. Although there is greater public access than before the redevelopment, there were places along here which were public, and these have now been absorbed into the private estate.

Almost 3 years ago, on World Press Freedom day photographers held a flash mob protest here against the restrictions on photography. But although some photographers have been stopped from photographing in this area, I’ve never had a problem. There were several ‘More London’ security guards watching the protest, but the only thing they stopped was people handing out leaflets.

I took a lot of pictures with the 16mm full-frame fisheye. It seemed a good way to capture the whole scene, with Tower Bridge, the riverside walkway and the protest – and a little of City Hall.

I used it also to photograph three of the mothers with the card (it was a week late for a Valentine) they had written to take in to City Hall for Boris Johnson, with the printed greeting ‘There’s no place like home’ and a longer message about their need for housing in London. I wanted to get in the group with City Hall behind them, and I could get everything in without having to persuade them to walk rather a long way from the building.

It isn’t a very flattering image, either of the women or the building, making it and them look rather too much like Humpty-Dumpty. The Fisheye-Hemi plugin usually does a good job with landscape format images, but can’t really cope with portrait format.  Perhaps I can do better with other software such as the Adaptive Wide–Angle correction in Photoshop. It didn’t exist in my old version of Photoshop, but I decided recently that although I don’t like the subscription idea it made sense to upgrade to Photoshop CC. More about that in a later post.

It was a little better when I went inside the building with the mothers. As we went in the security man at the gate said “You can’t take pictures in here” but I decided he was talking to Kate who was using a camcorder rather than to me!  The 16mm fisheye was useful inside, and is a rather less conspicuous lens, tiny beside the relatively huge 16-35 zoom.

I left while the mothers were still trying to get in to take their card to Boris, but I think in the end they simply had to leave it at the reception desk for him.

Focus E15 Mums at City Hall for more pictures and text about the event
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Paula Peters of DPAC speaking outside the Atos HQ in Triton Square, Euston

The only fast way to get around London is by bicycle. But a bike is something of a liability when actually taking pictures unless you can find somewhere truly safe to leave it, and such places are rare in the city. Lock one anywhere you can’t keep an eye on it and there is a fairly high chance it won’t be there – or won’t all be there – when you come back, especially if you ride a real thief magnet like a Brompton, relatively expensive and slips very easily into a car boot.

I get absorbed in what I’m doing when I’m taking pictures, often so absorbed with the images I don’t even notice important things on my camera like leaving the ISO on a silly setting. All I can think about is the rectangle in my viewfinder and the event that I’m viewing through it. Even if my bike was locked a few yards away I probably wouldn’t notice anyone taking an edge-grinder to the lock.

So although using a bike might have been the obvious solution to my travel problems on a busy Wednesday I didn’t think about it. It was a day with an unusually large number of protests – there were a dozen that I knew about, and others that I only found out about later. Most were part of a day of action around the country against Atos and the tests that it administers on disabled people to decide if they are fit for work. Thousands who they have said are fit die within a few weeks, and they have included people who are in comas or already deceased.

I wanted to cover at least one of these, and it seemed to make most sense to cover the main national protest in central London rather than the smaller events around the capital. And since this was to last from 10.00 am to 16:00 pm it didn’t seem to give me much chance of doing anything else.

But I knew that there wouldn’t be things going on all that time I would want to photograph and also my own union was organising another protest from 11.30 to 1.30 that I both wanted to attend and also felt some obligation to go to. There was also another event, a vigil I would like to photograph at 10.30 to 1pm and yet another from 11.30 until 1pm. It would have been tricky if they were all in more or less the same place, but there was over 3 miles between the two more distant of them.

It was a day that involved some fairly tricky planning with the Transport for London web site and the map. I ended up making use of six underground trains, one bus and several bits of walking, and in all I probably covered a dozen miles or so to get to the four events on top of my normal 20 mile each way train journey from home to London

Dennis Skinner, Labour MP for Bolsover since 1970, speaking at Atos, Triton Square, Euston

I started at the Atos National Day of Action, arriving in Triton Square outside Atos’s UK HQ around 10.20am shortly before things really started there. I recognised many of those there from earlier protests, including Dennis Skinner who had really torn into what he called the “heartless beast” of Atos during the parliamentary debate triggered by a petition against Atos and was at least as fierce in his denunciation of them and the inhuman DWP policies of Ian Duncan Smith that drive them on this occasion. It was one of the times when I wished I’d been recording sound, though fortunately there were others present making videos, so I could concentrate on my job – though having people making videos does make it a lot harder to move around.

Narmeen Saleh Al Rubaye and her daughter Zeinab at the vigil for Shawki Ahmed Omar at the Iraqi consulate

Things quietened down a little around 11 and I hurried the short distance back to Warren St station and took the tube, changing at Green Park and on to Gloucester Road. A quarter-mile walk took me to the Iraqi Consulate in Elvaston Place for the Solidarity vigil for Shawki Ahmed Omar, where I apologised to his wife and daughter who I’d first met last May at the US Embassy for not being able to stay long, spent 5 minutes taking a few pictures then hurried back the quarter mile to the station, taking the tube to Hyde Park corner.

The Irish Embassy for the Free Margaretta D’Arcy picket was only a couple of hundred yards away, and again I apologised for rushing away after a little under 10 minutes, jumping on a bus to take me up Park Lane from the stop just a few yards down Grosvenor Place.

It  wasn’t a long way to the Egyptian Embassy, but the bus was faster, even though I had to walk a couple of hundred yards further than necessary as I couldn’t remember which was the nearest stop, the Hilton or the Dorchester. Both are slightly curiously named as going north neither is particularly close to the hotel, and probably few guests to either come by bus. NUJ demands Egypt release jailed journalists was a larger protest and I worked there for around 15 minutes, photographing the protest and a letter being taken in to the Embassy asking for the release of the imprisoned journalists, but decided not to stop for the speeches.

From there it was half a mile to walk to Green Park for the Victoria Line back to Warren St and the Atos protest in Triton Square. I’d hoped to be back in time for speeches at 12.30, but several minor hold-ups on the tube meant I was twenty minutes late, but I hadn’t really missed a great deal, and I stayed there until the event ended, rather earlier than planned. The finale was the release of a large net full of yellow balloons, and as usual I didn’t really manage to get a good picture, partly in this case because they were released before most of us were ready.

Some of the protesters were going on to protest elsewhere, but by then I felt I’d had enough. And I had a lot of post-processing to do, as well as writing stories about the four protests, so it was well after midnight before I finished work.

You can read the stories and see the other pictures I took on My London Diary:
Atos National Day of Action
NUJ demands Egypt release jailed journalists
Free Margaretta D’Arcy picket
Solidarity vigil for Shawki Ahmed Omar

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