Archive for December, 2017

November 2017 complete

Tuesday, December 5th, 2017


Zambia’s The Post reports the exposure of mining company Vedanta’s tax fraud

November was another busy month for my posts to My London Diary, and it seems there are ever more things to protest against. But undoubtedly the most moving event was the monthly silent march for Grenfell Tower, the first time I had been on this. In contrast towards the end of the month I went on a very noisy demonstration about that same disaster.  There was yet another protest at Yarls Wood, against a cruelly unfair system of immigration detention, a rather long and tiring day for me.

Nov 2017

‘Toxic Tour’ shames mining companies


Protesters visit Grenfell councillors
End Slave Auctions in Libya


CAIWU protests for blacklisted Beatriz
Protest at Turkish LGBTI+ ban
Zimbabweans celebrate Mugabe’s resignation
Homes for All Budget protest
Budget Day Brexit Protests
IWGB protest London Uni outsourcing


Shut Down Yarl’s Wood 12
Students march for free education
Silent Walk for Grenfell Tower
Another Canada Goose animal cruelty protest
Orange Lodges Remembrance Day parade
Remember Refugees on Armistice Day
Close Canada Goose for animal cruelty
Silent Remembrance Peace Vigil
ORAL Squat empty NatWest Bank
Vigil for Islington cyclist killed by HGV


LSE against Homophobia
Picturehouse Strike for a Living Wage


Class War back at the Ripper
Equal Rights & Justice for Palestine
Maria Spiridonova – Armed Love
Vigil for Daphne Caruana Galizia
Mexican murders Day of the Dead vigil

London Images

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Like you’ve never been away

Monday, December 4th, 2017

I got quite excited this morning when a parcel arrived and I unwrapped it to find a signed copy of the new edition of Paul Trevor‘s amazing pictures of children in Liverpool in the mid-70s, ‘like you’ve never been away‘. The first edition, which sold out pretty quickly, was published as an exhibition catalogue in 2011, and was a rather unsatisfactory portrait format, with pictures split across the gutter, and the new edition’s landscape format is a great improvement.

I’ve always regarded Paul Trevor as the most interesting of the whole batch of British photographers who became known in the mid 1970s at exactly the time I was myself coming to photography, and there were some other impressive talents, some of whom are very much better known. Some were rather better at self-publicity.

I wrote a little about the first edition when it came out, and still have it on my shelves, but I was pleased to be one of the 193 supporters of the Kickstarter campaign which closed on 28th October andt enabled this re-publication (though I didn’t pay the extra to have my name included or get the very reasonably priced prints on offer.)

The new edition is of a thousand copies, of which half are hardback and the rest softcover. It isn’t yet listed for sale at the publisher, Bluecoat Press, and the link at Amazon is still to the unavailable First Edition, copies of which secondhand now cost roughly twice as much as as the new and far preferable hardcover edition.

I’m sure it will soon appear on sale, though perhaps not for long as quite a few copies will have been sent out to those supporters. The hardback is ISBN 9781908457387 and the cover price £25 it might make a good Christmas present for someone with an interest in photography. I’ll try and comment or update on this later.

Hull Photos: 27/10/17 – 2/11/17

Sunday, December 3rd, 2017

Still trying to catch up with putting these weekly digests on line, but getting diverted by other things. You can keep up to date by following my daily posts on Facebook, and can of course see the pictures but not the texts on the intro page at Hull Photos. Comments and corrections to the captions and texts about the pictures are always welcome here or on Facebook.

27th October 2017

Another view of Wellington St – little had visibly changed since my previous picture two years earlier. Behind the wholesale fruit and vegetable sheds is one of Hull’s still existing smoke houses, though this one was apparently built for bacon rather than fish. It has recently been restored.


85-5k-32: Fruit Brokers and Smoke House, Wellington St, 1985 – Old Town

28th October 2017

It was a busy high tide at the mouth of the River Hull, with Newdale H going upstream and through the Myton Bridge which opened for it, and a grab dredger operating at the mouth of the river (on the left in this picture) and then watching as a tug turned the trailing suction hopper dredger Bowstream around in the River Humber at the mouth of the Hull and then towing it into the Old Harbour where it berthed on the east side.


85-5k-45: Bowstream being towed into the Old Harbour, 1985 – River Hull

29th October 2017

A man pushes his bicycle along the pavement on Subway St, off the Hessle Rd. His bike is loaded with lengths of old piping, probably reclaimed from houses in the area awaiting demolition and he is presumably taking them to a scrap merchant. The houses here are all soon to be demolished, along with R E Powell, who will no longer be selling fish here.

It’s hard to place this exactly on Subway St, as there are few clues, though the distant view of Hessle Rd is clear. Powell’s could be on the corner of St Andrew St, which no longer exists. At the right of the picture is the corner of a fish smoke house, and there is still one in Subway St, but I think that is further south from Hessle Rd, and the one on the edge of this picture I think is one that has been demolished. More of it can be seen in the next two pictures I will post.


85-5l-44: Subway St, 1985 – Hessle Rd

30th October 2017

A fish smoke house, I think in West Dock Avenue, seen from Subway St. So much in this area has been demolished that it is very difficult to find exact locations for these pictures. This was taken just a few feet away from the previous image, and the brick wall at left is on the right of that picture, with the side of the smoke house.


85-5l-45: Fish Smoke House from Subway St, 1985 – Hessle Rd

31st October 2017

Another view of the back of the site with a fish smoke house taken from an empty plot on Subway St


85-5l-46: Fish Smoke House from Subway St, 1985 – Hessle Rd

1st November 2017

A view alongside the Fish Dock entrance lock. Although St Andrews Dock had closed there were still a few offices open here as well as by the end of William Wright Dock which was now the fish dock, with cars parked here – and there is still a fluorescent light on inside Humberside Driver Training Services Ltd, part of C E A Towne (Ship Riggers) Ltd.


85-5l-56: St Andrew’s Dock, 1985 – Docks

2nd November 2017

Yet another dredger – the Grab Hopper Dredger Redcliffe Sand moored in William Wright Dock. 1424 tons and built in 1964 by C. Hill in Bristol for British Transport Docks Board, she was sold by Associated British Ports in 1989 and after several owners was renamed Ribel in 1992/3 and scrapped as a total loss in 1996 in Beirolas, Lisbon.

William Wright Dock, at the west end of Albert Dock, had become Hull’s fish dock in 1975 when the neighbouring St Andrew’s Dock closed. The rather ancient-looking wooden Hull telephone box had clearly seen better days but I think was still in working order.


85-5l-65: William Wright Dock, 1985 – Docks


You can see the new pictures added each day at Hull Photos, and I post them with the short comments above on Facebook.
Comments and corrections to captions are welcome here or on Facebook.
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Ten female photojournalists

Saturday, December 2nd, 2017

This great article, 10 World Press Photo Awards, 10 Backstories Ten female photojournalists share the stories behind their iconic award-winning images, put on-line by photojournalist Yunghi Kim needs no further comment from me.

But if anyone is still unaware of Yunghi Kim‘s own work  do follow the link above to her web site and to Contact Press Images, an international and independent photojournalism agency founded in 1976 in New York City by French-British journalist and editor Robert Pledge and American photojournalist David Burnett, with some interesting photographers (and one largely non-photographer) on their list.

Yunghi Kim has also been a leader in getting photographers to register their copyright in the US and to take action against infringers. One her web site she writes that “Every penny recovered from the unauthorized use of my work is put towards” the Yunghi Grants made each year since 2015 which give $1,000 to each of ten photographers selected from the Facebook group Photojournalists Cooperative “in recognition of the values and principles all of us hold as essential to our creative and productive well being.” See the 2016 awardees here.

Brooklyn’s Sweet Ruin

Friday, December 1st, 2017

Sixteen years ago, with Mike Seaborne, who was then both a photographer and Senior Curator of Photographs at the Museum of London, I agreed to set up a web site dealing with one of our great shared interests, photography of the urban landscape. I had some web space for it, wrote the site registered the domain urbanlandscape.org.uk in December 2001 and the site was online for the start of 2002, with pictures by Mike and myself.

It was never our intention that the site should be limited to just our own work, and from the start there was an invitation to submit work, both photographic essays and theory, that fitted our ideas of urban landscape photography, and I tried hard to include some definition of what we were looking for.

As well as the ‘contribute’ page which was a part of the original site, which began with the message:

We welcome critical essays on urban landscape and small bodies of urban landscape work by photographers, although we are unable to offer any payment.

and continued to give some details, at the start of the following year I added another page, which attempted to explain my definition of urban landscape, with some example images.  We had added a few of the many submissions Mike and I had received, but far too many were just from people who made pretty pictures in the urban environment without any real intention to say anything about the city.

But there have been other submissions over the years which have have given us a great thrill to receive and one of earliest of these was by Paul Raphaelson, whose work ‘Wilderness‘ we added to the site in 2005.

So I was delighted to get an e-mail from Paul a day or two ago announcing his new book, Brooklyn’s Sweet ruin.

Books

You can see some of the pictures from this project on Paul Raphaelson’s web site, along with more of his work, and they appeal to me greatly. I’ve long had an attraction to decaying former industrial sites – which you can see in some of my own work both on Hull and in London’s docklands and estuary – and Paul’s images have a clarity and elegance that I admire, along with some fine colour. I’ve not seen the actual printed book, but it appears to be a fine publication, available from Amazon through various UK suppliers.

Both Mike Seaborne and I have moved on considerably since we set up the site, and although it is still on line and still open to new contributions, we haven’t really been keeping it up to date. As readers of this blog will know photographing protests around political issues have been engaging much of my time, and this year I’ve been putting another image from my work in Hull in the 1970s and 80s on line every day as a contribution to Hull’s year as UK City of Culture both on the Hull web site and on Facebook. Next year as well as adding some more images on the Hull site I also hope to put a new site about my work on London Buildings from 1986-2000 on-line, most of which has not previously been published.