December, 2016 | >Re-PHOTO

Another Hull picture

Humber ferry approaches New Holland, April 1981

When I first went to Hull the route to Lincolnshire (should anyone wish to go to Scunthorpe, Immingham, Cleethorpees or Grimsby) was either the long drive to the Boothferry Bridge near Goole – and then back east or the Humber Ferry between Victoria Pier (aka Corporation Pier) and New Holland. There had been plans for a bridge or tunnel, but it was only the 1966 Hull North by-election that led to a Labour government actually approving plans for the Humber Bridge. And by the time it actually opened, 15 years later it was, as I wrote at the time, ‘a bridge too far’ and too late, being largely rendered redundant by the new motorways, with the M62 providing a new crossing and links to the then growing motorway system. Who after all really wanted to go to Scunthorpe or Grimsby – and if you were heading further south the M62 was your friend.

The ferry which has first run in 1315 ended its service when the bridge opened in June 1981, which was something of a shame as it was a nice trip out from Hull in the right weather, though there was precious little to do when you got to the other side – except get on a train for Grimsby etc or simply walk a little along the rather desolate shore before catching the ferry back to Hull.

My first trip on the ferry was on the PS Lincoln Castle, a coal-fired paddle steamer retired from service in 1978 but in April 1981 when I made this trip this was beached near the Humber bridge and open as a restaurant – and a day or two after I took this picture we went and had tea and cakes there. The diesel engined screw-driven replacement was more practical but less impressive.

In my book, ‘Still Occupied‘ this picture is wrongly captioned as approaching Hull, but it actually shows the view as we approached New Holland Pier on the other side of the estuary. There were only a handful of cars on the ferry, and many of the foot passengers like us were taking a ride before the service was coming to an end a couple of months later.

This picture was Monday’s addition to my new web site, also called ‘Still Occupied’ though the address is the perhaps clearer http://hullphotos.co.uk. So far the site contains my pictures from 1977 to my trip on the ferry in April 1981, and my intention is to add at least one more every day throughout the year 2017 when Hull is the UK City of Culture. If you want to see the latest new picture they will each appear in turn on the Introduction page of the site – so Bookmark that and make a daily visit.

I’ve also taken the opportunity of correcting a few mistakes in the book, though unfortunately not the one mentioned above, which I’ve only just spotted. The images and layout are unchanged and so this is not a new edition, and still has the same ISBN. The preview above shows quite a few of the 120 pages.

Special Offer
Until 11:59 pm on 13th December you can get a 20% discount on the cost of this and any others of my books at Blurb with the code GIFTWORTHY20 – in upper case as shown. Of course it still doesn’t make the books cheap. But you can download a high quality PDF version for only £4.50

Extra Special Offer

I have a limited number of copies avaialable of all my books at below Blurb prices for UK orders only – see prices and contact details here. And now a very limited number of copies of ‘Still Occupied’ for only £25 +£2 p/p to UK addresses only. When these few are sold the price from me will go back to the £30 listed on my web page.

Housing problems

Housing campaigners meet to march against the Tory Housing Bill, March 2016

Linda and I are fortunate to own our own house, even if it isn’t a huge house and nothing special, a smallish semi-detached Victorian cottage almost certainly built for farm labourers around 1880 (much like the few houses my own grandfather built for his workers) and condemned in the 1950s. The landlord decided to make some minor improvements, converting the outhouse into a just indoor bathroom and toilet and after a few years sold it to the sitting tenants. Rent controls then made private letting hardly worthwhile and certainly needed sensible reform, but were instead scrapped.

Ten years or so later when we managed to scrape together a deposit and get an 80% mortgage after both of us had just got half-decent pay rises, we left our new town housing corporation flat and moved in – paying ten times the landlord’s sale price. We are still there 42 years later, having made a few minor improvements – double glazing, some insulation, gas fires etc – and essential maintenance but basically living in a house which is now something of a museum piece, and estate agents would almost certainly descibe as ‘in need of major imporvements’ while still happily trying to sell it for their fat share of over 30 times the amount we paid for it.

For us a house was a place to live, and to bring up our sons, handily placed for the railway station 5 minutes away that now takes me to London in 35 minutes. We never wanted to join the others we knew playing the housing market – who are now sitting in houses that sell for several times the relatively modest (for anywhere around London) amount ours would command.

When we bought was almost certainly the only time we could have afforded to do so, unless we moved away from the southeast, and it was thanks to my union whose campaigns and actions had managed to produce the only decent pay rise of my working career. It was a short window that soon closed as inflation eroded incomes and house prices rocketed. But we didn’t particularly want to become a home owners and only did so because it was clear that rents were rising fast and that buying was financially a much better long-term option. It was only a few years before the mortgage repayments were lower than the rent we would have been paying had we stayed as tenants – and to rent a house like ours in the private sector would now be costing more or less my entire income.

Tough as things were back then, the situation is far worse now, and the reasons are pretty clear to all but blinkered politicians. It isn’t basically that there are not enough homes, but more simply, people who need homes can’t afford them. There are enough homes in London, but many are owned as ‘investments’ by the wealthy, and often stay empty all or most of the year.

Building more homes will only help if people can afford them, and that must mean more council housing – as much or most soccial housing, even if so-called ‘affordable’ is too expensive for most. When market rents are more than many people earn, the 80% of those rents that can be classifed as ‘affordable’ clearly isn’t.

Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’ though advantageous for some who bought their properties was disastrous because those properties sold were not allowed to be replaced by new council housing. Like the current government, her aim was to get rid of council housing. Many of the properties sold under ‘right to buy’ are now privately rented, bought from the former tenants as ‘buy to let’ properties.

Buy to let is just another part of the problem. Borrow to buy a house, take the interest and repayment costs, add on an agents fee and ten or 15% profit and get someone else to live in the house and pay it all for you. It is trading on the ability of the wealthy to borrow to enable them to profit from the poor who the banks won’t lend to, and getting the poor to buy property for the wealthy.

We need proper rent controls and to increase security of tenure in all areas of housing – including protection for owner occupiers who fall behind in their repayments. We need more control over the type of property that is built in our cities, and in particular more council and other social housing.

But we also need changes in attitudes towards communities, particularly those living in the remnants of council housing on estates such as the Aylesbury or former Heygate in Southwark. Councils need to threat them as people and as communities rather than just looking at balance sheets, particularly when – as with the Heygate – they get the sums spectacularly wrong.

Most if not all of these estates need real regeneration rather than demolition and wholesale scattering of communities that is currently taking place – to the profit of private companies but with a great loss of places where the people our city relies on can live. It’s to the Labour party’s great shame that many of the councils with the worst records – Southwark, Newham, Lambeth etc – are Labour strongholds, and the party needs a serious change of direction on housing.

It isn’t surprising that people whose home are threatened are angry, and many came to the march to show that – against both the government and a housing policy dictated by estate agents and the Labour councils who essentially sing the same tune, though often also protesting against the Housing and Planning Bill. It’s hard not to think about motes and beams.

And hard too not to rant about housing as you can see. Unless that is you are ignorant about what is happening or too busy stuffing the loot into your offshore bank accounts. It’s an area which is class war at its most naked – and where the poor have been losing badly. And one which Class War, who appear in rather a lot of my pictures, have been one of the more active groups in protesting about and bringing on to the public agenda.

Kill the Housing & Planning Bill
Continue reading Housing problems

More Hull Photos

You may have noticed that Hull , or as nobody ever calls it ‘Kingston upon Hull’ is 2017 UK City of Culture, with a year-long series of events. It has already started in some ways – I went to a preparatory (and rather limited) film festival there back in October 2014, and already things were being tidied up in preparation. And 3,2000 naked people painted blue posing for photographs made the news earlier this year, though I expect many of the pictures taken by amatuers and the press will be rather more interesting than those by Spencer Tunick to be unveiled at the Ferens Gallery next year (there are a few on The Guardian.)

Back in 1983 I too had a show at the Ferens Gallery, though with rather less publicity. My images were on a rather smaller scale than Tunick’s and despite the subject matter I think considerably more intimate. There were quite a few pictures – I sometimes call it a ‘gross show’, though I think it was may have been 4 more than that at 148 prints, mainly in black and white but with about 30 in colour.

The black and whites were on Record Rapid or Portriga rapid, both silver-rich Agfa papers ideally suited to the rather heavy printing – but with highly detailed shadows and a warm richness of tone (perhaps connected with the Cadmium content which was removed in later years on health and safety grounds) which I think unmatchable on current silver gelatine papers – though you can do it on the right papers using multiple black and grey inks on an inkjet printer, and probably with expensive quadtone printing for a book.

Silver gelatin is no longer king – though it never really was, with good carbon prints knocking its socks off both for quality and longevity. But carbon printing was a lengthy process – and very messy if you made your own carbon tissue, as I found when I tried it more than 20 years ago. There is an excellent article on it by Anthony Mournian, Carbon printing: An alternative process not for the faint of heart, in which he correctly states “Carbon printing relies on patience, fortitude and exacting darkroom techniques.”

The colour was taken on transparency film and were as I recall printed with Cibachrome, known more recetly as Ilfochorome, a dye-destruction process with fearsome chemicals that inherently increased the contrast and saturation of the already overcontrasty and oversaturated transparencies.

Ciba could be tamed by the tedious process of exposing with the tranny in contact with an unsharp negative, and I wasted many hours if not years of my life in getting good prints before finally turning to colour negative in the mid-80s. I still somewhere have most of the black and whites from that show, but though I will still have the transparencies I’m not sure if I’ve kept the colour prints

Or for that matter if the colour will have kept. Even Ciba prints have relatively short lives compared with the best inkject colour, although considerably better than the Kodak colour papers of the era that almost literally faded in front of your eyes. Fuji papers and films that came out around that time were considerably better and really gave the yellow giant a kick up the jacksy. They’d been resting on their reputation as No 1 for far too long and despite considerable efforts never quite managed to catch up.

Of course I’d taken many more pictures – and continued to photograph Hull at fairly frequent intervals for the next 20 or so years, and occasionally though much less often in more recent times.

Back in 2010-1 I took another look at my old Hull pictures, and produced a book of black and white images based loosely around that 1983 show but with slightly roughly twice as many photographs. I kept the same title, ‘Still Occupied – a view of Hull’ but included a few pictures from the two years after the show, and the book covers 1977-85.

I’d intended to produce a new book in time for the 2017 UK City of Culture, but time ran out, and instead I’ve tidied up the old one, correcting a few minor errors (and a really annoying glitch that crept into the page numbering while my back was turned) and will shortly announce the revised version here.

The other thing I’m doing to celebrate the City of Culture is a new web site, Hull Photos (hullphotos.co.uk) or rather Still Occupied – a view of Hull. I put it on line a few days ago and I’ve been testing it – and invite you to also do so and please let me know if you find any problems. I’ve put quite a few photos on already – mainly those up to 1981 – and intend to add a new picture every day (or at least most days, as I’ve not automated the process of adding them, though I have several hundred images ready to go.)

Each new photo will be featured for a day on the page http://hullphotos.co.uk/hullintro.htm so if you want to follow the series, bookmark that page and visit regularly to see the latest. I’ll also be posting them on my Facebook page.

Magnum Busy

Magnum appear to be having some kind of pre-Christmas offensive on social media, or at least more of their posts are coming to my attention on Facebook, which through its totally mysterious algorithms which determine which posts we each see – and more unfortunately which we don’t.

FB is actually becoming more than mysterious on my computer, it also manages to crash Firefox after a few minutes or seconds whenever I access my news feed, though on the pages feed or the groups I read it seems normally stable, and I have no problems with other sites. So far I’ve had advice to clear the Firefox cache, get rid of all FB cookies and change my password, none of which have made FB behave any better.

Those of you who live or visit London may like to make your way to the The Magnum Print Room at 63 Gee Street, London, EC1V 3RS where there is an exhibition of work from the collaborative project ‘Children’s World’, alongside images from David ‘Chim’ Seymour’s series ‘Children of Europe’ continuing until 27 January 2017. Its usually open 11:00 – 16:30, Wednesday – Friday, and if I finish work early enough and am not far away I might well drop in.

Chim’s work was commissioned by UNICEF, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund which had just been set up at a time of Europe’s largest refugee crisis in the years following the end of WWII. In 1947-8 he “documented their efforts to provide basic needs – food, shoes and vaccinations – to the children of Europe. His journey took him to refugee camps, schools, hospitals, residential homes, remote villages and cities, now reduced to rubble by bombing, where he recorded the impact of war and its aftermath on children.”

This work had particular resonance now, where again so many children are suffering, refugees from the war in Syria and elsewhere; as the Magnum page says, “Chim’s sympathetic and compassionate portraits led a friend to note that war was an enormous crime against children“, and it clearly still is. And our own government’s response has been so hardhearted and minimal, despite the wishes of the great majority of us.

‘Children’s World’ came from happier times and the age and thinking that inspired Steichen’s great ‘Family of Man‘ exhibition in 1955. The previous year Magnum had sent its photographers, Inge Morath, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour and Elliott Erwitt and others, to photograph children in Uganda, Lapland, France, Cuba, Italy, England, Holland and the USA, and other locations for a series that was published in Holiday magazine in three parts throughout 1955 and 1956.

Another FB post led me to the article A Surreal Friendship; How Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Henri Cartier-Bresson riffed on each other’s practices ,which was a great disappointment, failing to deliver what the title promised. You get a few facts about the relationship between Man Ray and Duchamp, with 3 photographs from 1968 of the two men by
Cartier-Bresson, and another of a urinal in Duchamp’s studio, but nothing of substance about the relationship between him and the others or how it affected his work. The subject would have made an interesting article, but that remains to be written.

On a far more positive note is the publication of Europa, An Illustrated Introduction to Europe for Migrants and Refugees which is being distributed free to new arrivals. Written in four languages – Arabic, Farsi, English, and French and “created by a group of Magnum photographers and journalists who have been covering both the refugee crisis in Europe and the many contexts across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa that gave rise to these migrations” it is “intended for practical use by migrants and refugees, and as an educational tool to inform, engage, and facilitate community exchange.” You can download a free PDF of the book and organisations working with refugees can ask for free hard copies.

The idea came from Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak and the Magnum Foundation provided initial funding for Europa which has been “produced in partnership with the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) in the framework of the Arab European Creative Platform, Magnum Photos, Al-liquindoi, and On The Move, with support from Magnum Foundation, the Geneviève McMillan–Reba Stewart Foundation, MDIC, the Protection System for Asylum Seekers and Refugees (SPRAR), and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In cooperation with Allianz Cultural Foundation.”

Finally from Magnum (at least today) is the first in a “new Photography Insiders series” , an interview with Alexia Singh who was a guest speaker at a recent workshop ‘The A-Z of Editorial Photography’ in London and is a content director and photo editor with 20 years experience in news and media.

Shut Down Yarls Wood

Yarl’s Wood is a small area of woodland close to the immigration prison at the back of Twinwoods Business Park which tooks its name. RAF Twinwood Farm opened in 1941 with aircraft taking off from a grass field, bu soon had three concrete runways, and was largely a base for RAF and later USAF night fighters when in 1944 it was taken over by the US Eighth Air Force to run in conjunction with RAF Thurleigh a mile or two to the north from which their Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses were taking off to bomb France, Belgium and Germany.

After the war it, together with Thurleigh became the highly secretive Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE Bedford) site, with Twinwoods housing giant wind tunnels. It was probably this use that stopped plans to make the area into a replacement for London Heathrow; in many ways its an ideal site, fairly empty countryside fairly close to the main London-Sheffield rail line and easily linked to both M1 and M11. After the site was decommisioned in the 1990s it became Twinwoods Business Park, with the vertical wind-tunnel now offering indoor skydiving and some of the buildings housing an occasionally open Glen Miller museum. Red Bull Racing also have a building there.

Twinwood’s major claim to fame is that it was from here that Glen Miller and his orchestra took off on its final flight in December 1944 (hence the museum).

Its major claim to infamy is the Yarl’s Wood Immigration Detention Centre, built at its southeast corner (there is a rather good view of it on Flikr from the top of the vertical wind tunnel – the protests take place in the field immediately to the left of the buildings, and Yarls Wood is the wooded area to the right.)

An official inspection in April 2015 concluded that Yarl’s Wood was “rightly a place of national concern” and this January the Shaw report exposed the extreme vulnerability of many of those detained including victims of sexual assault and gendered violence, pregnant women, victims of torture, the elderly, disabled and those with mental health difficulties. Again in 2015 Channel 4 news showed a series of undercover reports exposing the levels of abuse and racism in Yarl’s Wood and Harmondsworth detention centres.

It is totally shameful how this country treats asylum seekers, many who come here traumatised after threats, beatings and rape in their own countries to find a system that doesn’t believe their stories, locks them up for indefinite periods and threatens to return them to the hell they escaped.In 2015 the Parliamentary Inquiry into Immigration Detention report called for a 28-day time limit and judicial oversight of the use of immigration detention; one woman has now been held they for well over two years and many are held for six months or more.

We should have a fair and humane system for receiving and resettling refugees, not a process that is driven by the anti-immigrant ravings of a right-wing press to which both Tory and Lbaour have long kowtowed, outdoing each other in their attempts to appear tough on immigration.

I’ve written on My London Diary about some of the things that happened on the day, and many times about the iniquities of our immigration detention system. This cerrtainly wasn’t the first time I’ve been there and unfortunately as it remains open it won’t be the last. I’ll be there again with Movement for Justice this Saturday. And will keep going back with them until it is closed down.

Shut Down Yarl’s Wood

Continue reading Shut Down Yarls Wood