Re-photo

As I write this post at the end of November, Class War has just suspended its series of protests about separate doors for the rich and poor residents of One Commercial St.  They have in the last week declared a ‘truce’ as the new owners of the  building have expressed a desire to resolve the situation, with a meeting of the interested parties which hopefully will result in all residents being able to enter on the main street, rather than those on the ‘poor’ side having to go down the side alley.

People often tell me that it isn’t worth protesting, that protests never acheive anything, but that simply isn’t true. Of course not all protests are successful, but many do make a difference. If it had not been for the protests over a ‘third runway’ at Heathrow, we would now be fighting against plans for a fourth runway and Terminal 6 or 7; if it hadn’t been for the protests of UK Uncut, tax avoidance would not have become an issue. Protests seldom manage to wave a magic wand, but they often do effect changes in the ways that issues are seen and debated, cultural changes that alter  the course of events.

One Commercial St isn’t in itself that important. One block of many similar blocks springing up across the UK, and of course particularly in London. An exemplar of the trend towards social segregation which is accompanying the increasing financial gulf between rich and poor in this (and many other) countries. Class War’s stand here is one of principle rather than about the particular, and whatever the final outcome in this building, it has put the issue firmly on the political and media agenda.

Housing has become a major issue, and it has largely done so not because of the obvious and often desperate problems many face, not through the dedicated lobbying of charities and the research of academics, certainly not by the largely spineless approach of Her Majesty’s opposition (who through some Labour dominated councils are very much a part of the problem) but because of the work of grass roots activists such as Class War, Focus E15, New Era and others.

At first these kind of activities are only reported in social media and by alternative news media. Posts on Facebook and Twitter, articles in blogs and on campaigning web sites. Gradually they begin to surface in more major media outlets. I’m not a great fan of Russell Brand, but I was pleased to see a few weeks after the events in these pictures to meet John Rogers (who I met some years back when we both featured in the London International Documentary Festival)  filming at a later Poor Doors protest for Russell Brand’s Trews Reports (which have also recently covered  Focus E15 and New Era.   If you have any interest at all in London you will find some fascinating videos on his YouTube page – I particularly recommend his full length documentary The London Perambulator, a full-length documentary film.)

Back to September 24th, and Class War Occupy Rich Door, a night that marked a hotting up in the battle between protesters and the Redrow staff of the building over the rich door. Before there had been tussles with the protesters attempting to  hold the door open  when residents entered or left during the protests, but this week something different happened.

Perhaps it was the presence of Marina Pepper, Class War’s candidate to stand against Iain Duncan Smith in his Chingford Constituency, at the protests for the first time and posing above in the always locked revolving door that led the building manager to simply walk away when a protest put his foot in the door to hold it open. But whatever the reason, the open door seemed an invitation to walk inside, and the protesters, after a few moments shock at seeing it made so easy, simply walked in and made themselves at home.

The building manager called the police, but for the moment the protesters were in the foyer and Ian Bone is holding up a framed notice from the desk with details of the 24 hour phone lines to the Concierge in the building – and comparing that with the broken entry system on the poor door in the dimly lit alley. In front of him is the walking stick he now relies on, and behind him on the desk a vase of flowers. As often, while speaking, he was flourishing his stick, sometimes rather wildly.

At some point in the next few minutes, walking stick and vase connected, either by accident or design, and that vase crashed to the floor and shattered. The noise startled me, and it seemed to startle Bone too.

It took eleven minutes for the police to arrive, and they came in and one chatted with the protesters while another went with the building manager into his office. Soon more police arrived, and after I’d gone outside to photograph them at the rich door, prevented me going back inside again. Eventually the police got the building manager to tell the protesters to leave and then the police threatened to arrest them for aggravated trespass if they didn’t go, and after being inside for 20 minutes they left in a jubilant mood.

The protest then continued as usual on the pavement outside, with one rather odd incident when a man began to shout loudly that no one was prepared to answer his question, which he had apparently asked some of those holding one of the banners. He continued to shout this loudly for some minutes, while refusing to tell everyone who was asking him what his question was. Police tried to get him stop shouting and leave, but without success, and he ended up arguing with a small group of protesters. It was only at the following week’s protest that I talked to them and found that he felt that people should be protesting about rights for men.

His intervention prolonged the protest for a few minutes, during which more police arrived including a van. As Ian Bone turned to leave, a police officer stood in his path, and soon he was surrounded by others and after a short argument he was told he was going to be arrested for breaking the vase and taken to be searched by the back of the police van before being driven away. The following week he said the vase had cost him seventy quid.

Photographically the light inside the building was a little on the low side, and I had some problems with depth of field and blurring due to subject movement, even working at ISO 2000 and a little above, with typical exposures around 1/80 f4.  In the few minutes I was able to move freely in and out of the building I didn’t always have time or remember to change the settings to cope with the very different lighting. In situations like this, where I’m conscious that at any moment I could be asked to leave, I tend to take too many pictures and not think enough about them.

I wasn’t asked by the building manager to stop photographing, though had I been I would probably have told him that I thought it was in the public interest and continued.  But I do tend not to use flash, as that does remind security people that I am taking pictures, and I didn’t do so. The pictures were almost certainly better for it.

At the end of the protest, when Bone was being stopped and arrested, it was beginning to get dark. But it wasn’t too dark – the image above at ISO2000 was taken at 1/60 f9. I needed to stop down for the depth of field even at 18mm (27mm equiv) on the 18-105mm. The main problem as always in such situations was getting to the right place, with both so many other protesters and also the police getting in my way. My thanks to Constable Merrick on the right of the picture for not interfering with me or trying to stop me getting a picture – too often police officers seem to think it part of their job to prevent photographers working.

More at Class War Occupy Rich Door.
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Jasmine and Sam of Focus E15 Mums hold the pot plants they have been given for moving into the Carpenters Estate flats

Housing is fast becoming a really major issue in the UK, and particularly in London, where property prices and market rents have risen so much that most of those who work there can no longer afford to live there. The current minimum wage is £6.50 per hour,  which works out to roughly £1050 per month for a typical worker without overtime. Those who get the London Living Wage are a little better off at around £1400 a month. Newspapers have recently been reporting on the tenants of the New Era Estate, a fairly typical inner London estate, currently paying rents of around £600 per month who are threatened with a rise to ‘market rents’ of around £2400 per month.

People may qualify for the misnamed Housing Benefit, (it’s really more a benefit for landlords), but the benefits cap introduced by the government (including an overall benefits cap of £500) make this totally inadequate in London. The only viable solution to the problem of keeping London running is a crash programme to build low-rent social housing, but neither of the major political parties is seriously proposing this, and while there is considerable building taking place in London, the vast majority of it is high rent private properties, many of which are being bought by overseas investors. Some simply leave them empty while property values soar, others rent them out to companies for employees here on short-term visits or as holiday lets.

Some Labour councils are among the worst offenders in this process, getting rid of social housing and profiting from sales to developers. Some have even made a mess of this, with Southwark Council reported to have lost millions in the costs of emptying the Heygate estate came to more than the bargain deal the developers made. Of course some individuals – both on the council and the developers – do nicely out of these schemes.

Jasmine and Sam in one of the Carpenters Estate flats while the Focus E15 MumsFirst Birthday Party continues outside

Newham Council, 100% Labour and with an elected Mayor have for ten years been trying to empty out and sell the Carpenters Estate, next to the centre of Stratford with its excellent transport links. It is truly a prime site, but unfortunately an earlier Labour council which had the interests of the people of the area in their heart built a well-planned council estate on it.  One that people liked living in, and despite ten years of harassment, that some are still living in.  In a borough with one of the worst housing shortages – and particularly of social housing – some properties there in excellent condition have been boarded up and empty for ten years.

Newham is also where one of the most vital campaigns over housing has been taking place, led by young mothers from a hostel for which the council decided to cut the funding to the housing association for a little over a year ago. The mothers, with some help from political activists, decided to make a stand together and fight, forming the Focus E15 Mums campaign.  They refused to move away from London to be rehoused in Birmingham or Hastings or elsewhere, away from jobs, family and support systems as the council suggested. They set up a weekly protest stall on the high street every Saturday, protested at the housing association, at the council and elsewhere, and turned the insights they developed from their fight into a more general ‘housing for all’ protest against what they had come to realise was a policy of ‘social cleansing.’

I’m pleased that I’ve been able to photograph some of their protests and help through my pictures in gaining public attention to their fight, though I regret not having done more – but there are so many calls on my time. I was sorry, having been there to take these pictures of their re-occupation of a block of four flats at the centre of the Carpenters Estate, not to have found the time in the following couple of weeks to go back and record some of the events they staged there in what was always intended as a short-term occupation of the properties.

Photographically it was a little tricky in that there was little light inside the flats, and not enough for the pictures I took as I first went inside them, in the hall and on the stairs. Most of the metal grilles were still in place, with a little light coming through the pattern of holds in them, but parts were still very dark.

I’d anticipated this, and together with the knowledge that I’d be in a crowded and confined space had switched to the 16mm f2.8 while waiting to go inside – it was a long wait and I’d had plenty of time to think about it.  One thing I often feel the lack of with my Nikon cameras is fast lenses. Back when I was using film one of my favourite Leica lenses was the 35mm f1.4 (it had cost me about a month’s salary when I bought it second-hand around 1980.)  That aperture makes it 8 times as fast (3 stops) as the 16-35mm f4 Nikon lens.

The two fastest Nikon lenses I own are the 16mm f2.8 fisheye and the 20mm f2.8 – and I’d left the latter at home. For many purposes not having fast glass doesn’t matter – particularly when we can know work at ISOs that were not viable in the days of film. You get the same shutter speed with an f4 lens at ISO 3200 and an f1.4 lens at ISO400.  But this was a time when the f1.4 at ISO 3200 would have been rather better.

It doesn’t matter so much when your subjects are static. Even handheld with wide-angle lenses its quite possible to get sharp results at half a second – just not every time. The 16-35mm has image stabilisation, but I’m unconvinced it is of much significance with wide angles, though it certainly helps on longer lenses.

As we went in it was also quite crowded and the physical size of the 16-35mm can be a problem – the 16mm fisheye is a nicely compact lens.  Once we got into the actual rooms things were easier, and I was able to take pictures with both the 16mm and the 16-35mm, and to lower the ISO, even down to ISO800 for some pictures.

This was one of my favourite interiors, taken with the 16mm fisheye, processed with the Fisheye Hemi plugin to make the vertical and near-verticals more or less straight.  The woman at the left looking into the room is in the darker corridor, but lit be light through the doorway (with a little help from Lightroom.)  Stopped down to f5 makes everything sharp (the near objects at right just slightly less so), and even at ISO 2500 the quality is pretty good. Of course noise reduction, removal of chromatic aberration and fringing in Lightroom help. At 1/100th second there is perhaps just some very slight blurring of parts of the people as they look around, something that I like. On the original it is easy to zoom into the image and read the year 2014 on the calendar on the far wall.

When the protesters moved in they found the flats in good order, and the water was still connected. The council soon turned it off after the occupation began. The picture above shows one of the perils of using the 16mm fisheye – and that large 16-35mm on the camera hanging down from my neck with its lens hood intruding into the image.

September 21st, when I took these pictures, was the second day of the London Open House Weekend (a week later than the rest of this country) so although it hadn’t been listed in the official catalogue, this was of course the Focus E15 Open House Day and there are many more pictures both of the party and the occupation of the flats in My London Diary.

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These two men were posing for a photograph in Trafalgar Square, not posing for me, though I’d photographed the man on the left several times earlier, but for a picture being taken by a man with a phone – I think the elbow seen at the right of image is his. The man in the centre is looking at me and may be aware that I’m taking a photograph, though I’m a short distance away using the 18-105mm at 62mm (93mm equiv). He is wearing an EDL sweatshirt, with its motto ‘No Surrender’ and holding an England flag. He probably isn’t aware of the raised hand salute the man with an arm around his shoulder is making for a photograph. Its something most who come to EDL marches have learnt to avoid, preferring to raise two fingers, as you can see in the image below, taken a second later with the same lens in wide-angle, but there are almost always a few who stick to the old ways.

The EDL have often accused photographers of misrepresenting such gestures, of catching someone waving to his friends. Here I think it is clear that this is not the case. It wasn’t the only such gesture that I saw during the event, but was certainly atypical. And gestures are often easily misinterpreted.

This was one that perhaps left little room for misinterpretation, with one of the EDL stewards holding both palms in front of the lens  of another photographer who like me was attempting to photograph the public rally that came after the short march.  Again taken with the D800E and 28-105mm, at 26mm (39mm eq) and perhaps just cropped a little too tightly in camera. with the top of the speaker’s head cropped at upper left, and the lens hood just not quite pushing far enough into the image.  Perhaps it could also be made a little clearer in post-processing. Like around 99% of the images I use this is the un-cropped frame – I try hard to crop in camera and sometimes perhaps do so too tightly.

I don’t know why the steward felt he wanted to stop one of my fellow journalists photographing the event. There might well have been a good reason for trying to stop anyone recording the speaker, but I suspect the EDL will themselves have put videos of his speech on the web.

The EDL did seem to be making an effort to improve their image. Early in the day I’d heard a steward tell someone to put their can of beer away when he started drinking in the pen opposite Downing St, and there was certainly less drinking than at earlier events. The meeting point for the march wasn’t this time at a pub, but in the traffic island at Trafalgar Square with Charles I on his horse.  And although some groups were drinking, most people were simply standing around and talking. Some posed for photographers and others were happy to be photographed. I had a few polite conversations, including some with people who recognised me from earlier events (and hostile comments on the web) and was able to wander freely without harassment.

Again the man carrying the pink pig was posing for a friend of his to take a picture, being held by the man in the E.D.K. Rotherham Lads shirt and pig’s head mask.  I was a little too far away to get the picture exactly how I would have like, and by the time I had moved closer the picture had gone. Again I perhaps could have framed a little less tightly, but I didn’t have a clear view. I did take some other pictures of the man in the mask a minute or two later, some with a wide-angle, which are graphically stronger, but perhaps this one is a more truthful images of the event.

There are always dilemmas. Does producing strong images glorify the activities of the EDL? Do photographers inevitable sensationalise groups like this? Do we always pick on the atypical but photogenic?

Of course we have to dramatise, to make pictures which will interest the viewer – or else no one is going to look at them event when they do get published. And while I may disagree with the politics of the EDL and other extreme right groups, they do include some visually interesting individuals. But I try hard not just to photograph these people but to show the events in the round, to tell the story through my pictures.

Back in the days when reproducing images was difficult and expensive there was perhaps some justification for the way that newspapers handled images, with those that used photographs (and some of the more serious press didn’t) generally picking a single image. Magazines would perhaps use a few, but even with the ‘illustrated magazines’ they were seen as subservient to the text.

Economics and production have changed, both in print and of course on the web, but the major media still largely stick to the old mould. Where they have embraced images it has largely been as video. Some publications will occasionally add an ‘image gallery’. But I can think of no major publication that has ever seriously engaged with Moholy-Nagy’s 1930s statement ‘The illiterate of the future will be ignorant of the use of the camera and pen alike’.

I’m not sure what the results of taking this seriously would be, though of course there were some attempts in those illustrated magazines, both back in the 1930s and since. Occasionally there are article which effectively mix text with pictures on the web, but not I think that really go far enough.

My own My London Diary for practical reasons largely separates images and text – site design and time constraints don’t allow me to go further in this direction. It’s also not possible for one person to effectively cover almost any event both as a photographer and as a writer; the two require different approaches. Combining videography with writing  is rather easier, as the video provides a continuous stream which records the event, while the still photographer has to concentrate on moments.  And for us the sounds and speeches are often a distraction while for the writer they are essential. A video camera can act as a notebook for the writer (particularly those ignorant of shorthand) in a way a still camera cannot.

Giving journalists a camera and sending them to events to write and photograph is to sideline photography, and some of the results that we have seen show this clearly. But it is also true that the media have seldom managed to use images effectively.  And perhaps photographers have played some part in this, with the willingness to play along with the clichés, often in the name of professionalism, particularly in the UK.

Any publication that tried to do so would of course be accused of ‘dumbing down’ in our logocentric culture, but there is no reason why this should be the case. Images can add to understanding and appreciation of events without in any way compromising the written text, while the current emphasis on getting writers to take photographs will undoubtedly damage their writing.

And were publications to serious use photographs, both online and in print, they might just become more popular, reaching a wider audience. Which would be good news, and even perhaps reverse the current financial bankruptcy of photographers, as repro fees continue to plunge. If the papers used ten of my pictures in place of one to help them tell the story effectively it would just about compensate for the lower rates compared to twenty years ago.
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