December, 2018 | >Re-PHOTO

Migrant Mother

Had you asked me a few days ago I think I would have said that there was little more to say about Dorothea Lange‘s ‘Migrant Mother’ which has already had so much devoted to it, as one of photography’s truly iconic images. But there appears to be at least one significant fact I was not aware of in the new book from the Museum of Modern Art, written by Sarah Meister.

Perhaps not enough to make me want to read the book, but James Estrin, the co-editor of Lens, the New York Times photographic blog, has written a post on it, as always clear and concise, Unraveling the Mysteries of Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’.

As the image was one of a set taken for US federal Farm Security Administration, it is of course available at the Library of Congress, where you can download several versions of it and the others Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children.

This is a smaller version of my favourite of this image, and probably the oldest. The current version of it, available for download as a large tiff if you want to make your own print, has slightly different scratches on it, and both versions would take considerable retouching to make a really good print. As the LoC page above states “This is an unretouched version of the image listed in #1. This version of the image shows a thumb in the immediate foreground on the right side.”

There is more about the retouching to remove the thumb in the book and Estrin’s post, which remind us that Roy Stryker, “Lange’s boss at the Farm Security Administration … thought it compromised the authenticity not just of the photo but also of his whole F.S.A. documentary project” although such practices were widespread at the time and “Ms. Lange considered the thumb to be such a glaring defect that she apparently didn’t have a second thought about removing it“, getting an assistant to retouch the image in 1939, some 3 years after she had made the image in February 1936 (according to the FSA, though possibly March.) Personally I’m with Mr Stryker on this.

Perhaps the most interesting issue raised in the book is that after Florence Owens Thompson came forward and identified herself in 1978, an Associated Press article revealed that she was not as had been assumed of European descent ‘but “a full-blooded Cherokee Indian” from Oklahoma‘, something that would certainly have caused the image to have been seen differently had it been known when it was widely published – and even now where considerable prejudice still exists against Native Americans. Lange appears not to have provided the usual field notes and captions for this set of images, and to have known relatively little about her subjects.

Sarah Meister’s book is one of a series “One on One” on individual items in the collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art. Surely a prime candidate for such a series should be a book by A D Coleman on Robert Capa‘s iconic D-Day landing image, for which the material by Coleman and his collaborators has been published online in voluminous and convincing detail at Photocritic International in the Robert Capa D-Day Project. While I’m sure that this will one day emerge in book form, I think it is unlikely it will be published by MoMA.

November 2018 complete

November seemed a short month and one of short days with the clocks having gone back and evening coming in around 4pm. The protests by Extinction Rebellion which were launched on the last day of October occupied me on two days, though I didn’t try to cover their series of smaller actions during the week, but without them it would have been a relatively quiet month.

When I began to write this post about the month I discovered that there were a couple of protests and a few pictures from a walk in Burnham Beeches that I’d managed to leave out, and had to go back and add them.

Back in the days when we worked on film I made a conscious decision to lock away colour film in the autumn to avoid wasting too much on colourful leaves, autumn and particularly ‘fall’ colour making a fortune for Kodak but producing nothing of any real interest.

Of course I didn’t literally lock the film away – the cupboard didn’t have a lock, but back then I had neither the time nor money to waste on such things (though I did just occasionally sin.) But there are some things that it is better to simply stand and admire rather than photograph, and that photographs seldom if ever do more than hint at the glory of the real. Its something I feel too about sunsets and magnificent landscapes, where few of those I’ve taken really satisfy, and many I see simply look false.

The two missing protests were both outside meetings of south London councils, Lewisham and Southwark and both took place on the same cold wet night. At least there was reasonable street lighting on Tooley St, but it was curiously dark in front of the civic centre at Catford. Both Labour councils are trying hard to push through housing schemes against the interests of their current residents, many of whom will be forced out of the area.

Nov 2018

Protest at Lewisham Council & Mayor

Southwark protest estate demolitions
Free Political Prisoners in Iran
Extinction Rebellion Buckingham Palace

Extinction Rebellion Funeral Procession
Extinction Rebellion Parliament Square

IWGB at London University Founders Day
No10 Vigil says stop Brexit
Focus E15 protest former Newham Mayor
Extinction Rebellion form Citizens’ Assembly
Unity Against Fascism and Racism
Extinction Rebellion: Southwark, Blackfriars, Waterloo
Extinction Rebellion Bridge blockade starts
Burnham Beeches

South Norwood stands with Grenfell
Class War picket the Ripper ‘Museum’
Global Day to save the Sunderbans
Leave Voters say Leave Now!
Save Old Tidemill Garden & Reginald House

Class War protest Labour Housing record
No Demolitions Without Permission
Save Our Libraries march
Euston to Kings Cross Coal Drops

London Images

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My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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Class War & the Rees-Moggs

Jacob Rees-Mogg comes out to welcome Class War as they arrive to protest

I published the true story about Class War’s protest outside the Westminster home of Jacob Rees-Mogg on Facebook the morning after the event (and in picture captions hours after it happened), when the newspapers and TV were up in arms about a story they had invented about an “ambush” based on a largely irrational over-reaction to a dramatic short video taken and posted by Class War.

Starring Adam Clifford as Jacob Rees-Mogg

Both Class War and Rees-Mogg were I think delighted by the outcome, which provided an incredible amount of free publicity for both. I was upset because it showed a total failure of objective journalism in the UK. Not by the two journalists who were actually present at the the event – myself and another photographer who came along as it started (two other photographers arrived as it was finishing) but by those who fulminated on it without making any checks or inquiries as to what actually happened. Although I’d posted about it with the pictures I filed later in the evening, and the following morning on Facebook, my account was never used by the media and I was never interviewed. The media had made up their story and didn’t want to know what actually happened. And as Class War’s Ian Bone got bleeped out and insulted for telling Nick Ferrari on air, it was “total bollocks“.

and Jane Nicholl as Nanny Crook

I was there because, like the Rees-Moggs, I had read about it in advance on Facebook, where it had been fairly widely posted in advance. I don’t expect the Rees-Moggs read the various groups on which it was posted but clearly the police and others do, and had informed them, and Jacob Rees-Mogg had decided to miss a meeting of Brexiteers to play his role in the event, along with his family and Nanny Crook. He could of course simply have taken his family and nanny out of the house for the evening to avoid the protest, and I’d rather assumed he would, or that they would simply stay inside the house and ignore it. But he or his advisers were rather cleverer than I’d expected.

The family and Nanny came out to join in

Having decided to cover the event I told Class War and was invited to join them at the pub where they were meeting before going to the Rees-Mogg home, where two of the small group put on costumes for it, as Rees-Mogg and as Nanny Crook. A third activist was carrying a costume as a giant inflatable penis, but she didn’t start putting it on until the protest had started and missed most of it.

The boys didn’t want to miss the performance though adults pulled the blinds

It was a short protest, and I’ve written about it at some length in Class War visit the Rees-Moggs on My London Diary where you can read what actually happened.

At the end I went back to the pub with Class War, and watched the video one of them had posted with them, before going back home to file my pictures and story a couple of hours after the event. It was the video that made the story sensational – and it only showed a little of the event. And the media totally failed to ask the kind of questions every journalist should have asked.
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All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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Climate Reality

Together with several other photographers we spent some time looking for this protest – and met protesters who were also having the same problem, but finally we found it, not actually at Tate Modern where the Facebook event page had said, but hidden from there behind some greenery at the edge of the busy riverside path in front of the gallery. I think it had only just started, and certainly quite a few others arrived later than us, perhaps having had a similar problem to us. We’d actually walked close to it earlier on our way to the Tate, but it had been hidden on the edge of a larger crowd of tourists listening to some busking musicians.

Like many protests it was rather a matter of preaching to the converted, and there were some good and worthy speakers, but perhaps a little lacking in popular appeal, but it was a part of a worldwide action, and seems to have been set up mainly to provide a photograph to send to the international web site. At the end of the rally those at the protest came out of the bushes to stand in front of Tate Modern and be photographed from a high balcony looking down at the crowd, who had been asked to wear yellow for the event.

I hope the photographer on the balcony got a decent picture, though I suspect it wasn’t too impressive.

Certainly it didn’t work that well from the ground, though I did my best, trying to show we were in London by including St Paul’s in the background, but getting the whole crowd in needed a very wide angle of view and this made the cathedral rather small; it was only a little better when I cut off a few at the edges. There was a similar problem when the crowd were asked to turn through 180 degrees for a picture with the former power station behind them, with its high brick wall and tall chimney.

Of course I’d been using St Paul’s in the background while I was taking pictures of the protest and the speakers, but a longer lens had made it more visible, though of course not showing the size of the crowd – a few hundred people. By the time they were invited to walk up onto the Millennium footbridge I think quite a few had decided to leave. Probably the best viewpoint was as they came up the slope, but they did so in dribs and drabs. And once on the bridge it was difficult to photograph them protesting along it. I lent out with my camera, strap wrapped securely around my arm and tried a few pictures, but framing was tricky as I couldn’t see either viewfinder or rear screen. The frame at the top of this post was my best effort, and I was quite pleased with it.

I then rushed down to ground level and took some more photographs. Again there was the problem of either showing the whole group with a fairly wide view which made them rather small, or of using a longer focal length and showing just a small section of the protesters. As you can see from my other pictures on My London Diary at Worldwide Rise for Climate the latter approach was probably better than the wider view above.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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Justice for Windrush

Months after the scandal over the Home Office’s treatment of the ‘Windrush Generation’ and their families first came into the national news, there seems to be no end in sight. Fresh revelations about the ‘hostile environment’ created at the Home Office, largely by Theresa May keep coming to light, new stories of deportations or continuing fights to stay in the UK, more on the deliberate destruction of historical records continue to come out, and the Home Office and government response is still sadly lacking in compassion.

Demands are still being made to produce documents that few residents of the UK would have kept and peope are still being threatened with deportation, and we now know of many who have been deported and died abroad, away from the families they have here.

Several of those who are have been personally affected, some still having to fight to remain here spoke at the event which was organised by Movement For Justice, an organisation that has for years worked with detainees in immigration detention, and has taken the lead in organising protests at Harmondsworth and Yarl’s Wood detention centres in recent years.

The protest began slowly with a rally in Windrush Square, its name commemorating the first wave of migrants lured to work in this country who arrived on the Empire Windrush, though many came in the following years, when UK organisations were actively recruiting to fill the gaps in the NHS, London Transport and other vital public services.

It’s the same racist hostile attitude to migrants that has also, along with a more general disregard of the poor that has led to disasters such as Grenfell, and unsurprisingly there are links. Many of those killed in that disaster were migrants, and among those affected were children and grand-children of the WIndrush generation.

Brixton is where many of the Windrush generation settled, largely because they were given temporary accomodation in an large air raid shelter up the road in Clapham and went to Brixton Labour Exchange to find jobs. Friends and families moved into the area to keep up connections – and also to avoid the worst of the racism found in other areas of the city and country.

Their presence gave a new life to a rather tired part of London, creating a vibrant atmosphere in the area, which together with its good transport links and closeness to the West End has made it a prime target for gentrification. The march around Brixton made its way back to Windrush Square down Brixton Road, under the railway bridge on which the graffiti reads “Clapham That Way You 2D Flat White Tepid Colonialist Wanker”

Ennerdale

I spent the first week of September staying with friends at a large holiday cottage in Ennerdale on the western edge of the Lake District.

Ennerdale is an area many tourists to the Lake District never visit, away from the main centres and rather isolated, particularly because there is no road though it. The nearest town of any real size is Whitehaven. You can cycle along some distance, but have to come back the same way and the only way to go through is on foot, and walkers do pass particulary those on Wainwright’s coast to coast walk. There are a couple of car parks near to the lake from which you can walk.

Ennerdale is being deliberately ‘re-wilded’, though given the large forestry plantations around it, it will not revert to its previous state. But it does mean it is not being developed for tourism like some other parts of the Lakes, though walkers are welcome and there are two youth hostels up the valley. It is also under threat by the nuclear industry which is the largest employer in the area, based at Sellafield, with offices in Whitehaven who see it as a suitable place to set up a radioactive waste facility or GDF (geological disposal facility). Cumbria, the county council turned this down in 2013 but it still remains likely.

I took two Fuji cameras with me to Ennerdale, the X-T1 and X-E3, along with several lenses including the Fuji 10-24mm and 18-135mm and a Samyang 8mm fisheye. They performed well, though I did need the five batteries I had with me on several days, and it was sometimes tricky to recharge them all for the next day. Even if you don’t take many pictures, the batteries still run down, and I never managed anything approaching the quoted battery life on either camera.

I’ve written about the various places I photographed on My London Diary and will simply list the different stories here. There are many more pictures with the posts there.

Ennerdale Holiday
Ennerdale arrival
Ennerdale Bridge

Cleator Moor
Loweswater

Whitehaven
Walking round Ennerdale Water
A Lakeland Drive
Crag Fell
Penrith Castle

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My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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South Kenton to Hendon

Here is the text I wrote about this walk for My London Diary. If you go to Capital Ring: South Kenton to Hendon you will see many more pictures from the walk.

On August Bank Holiday I walked another stage of the Capital Ring with Linda.

I’m not a great fan of potted walks like the Capital Ring, though it does go through some interesting places. Though it does ring around the capital, it does so wherever possible through green spaces rather than the high streets and industrial areas which are often of greater interest, at least to me. As often we made a few small detours to add interest (and one where the somewhat curious walk directions led us astray.)

Today our walk began at South Kenton, where we had ended the previous section with a drink in The WIndermere. Today it was too early for that and we carried on through suburban streets and parks towards Fryent Country Park, where we climbed to the top of Barn Hill, with views towards Wembley, and then across to another hill.

The directions in the guide from there were rather lacking and we got just a little lost before finding our way out to Salmon Lane.

The graveyard around the old St Andrew’s Church had some interesting gravestones, but by then I was eager to get on the the Welsh Harp where we planned to eat our lunch. We had to make a detour to the garden centre before then, but soon we were able to sit on a seat overlooking the water.

At Cool Oak Lane we left the road briefly to view the West Hendon Waterside, where council and developers are destroying the West Hendon estate to build expensive flats. As one resident put it in a blog:

“local Tory councillors see the place where they live as not a community, but a business opportunity, and under the pretext of ‘regeneration’, and despite a promise to residents of a better housing on the same site, handed the publicly owned land to Barratt London for a private, luxury high rise property development.

The land was worth £12 million, but was given to developers for £3, so as to allow them to maximise profits on their investment, conservatively estimated last year at a mere £92 million.”

Barnet is not alone in following a policy of social cleansing for the profits of private companies both here and in the Grahame Park estate. It is happening all over London and it isn’t just Tory councils, but Labour ones such as Southwark, Newham, Lambeth and the rest who are using the pretext of regeneration to get rid of their poorer residents and replace them by wealthier ones who can afford high market rents. If the council have a duty to rehouse tenants they may find themselves offered a flat in Newcastle, when their jobs and schools are in the London borough they have lived in for years, perhaps all their lives.

Crossing the A5 Broadway took a little time, and then it was a long walk up Park Road to the subway underthe much busier Hendon Way and on to Hendon Park. By now I was getting tired and it was a pleasure to have an icecream at the Hendon Park Café, the first kosher park café to open up in the UK, before catching the underground on our way home.

More pictures from the walk on My London Diary at Capital Ring: South Kenton to Hendon.
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My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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Animal Rights

I have no qualms about being called ‘speciesist‘ other than I think it an ugly coinage. While I’m happy with the idea that animals have rights, I still think that there is something special about being human. We are after all the only species that campaigns for animal rights, and whose future is in doubt because of our own actions.

Nor either am I a vegan, though I’ve no quarrel with those who choose to be so. As a species I think we are omniverous, evolved to exist on a diet that includes vegetables as well as meat. But certainly we eat far too much of it, many more than is good either for us or the planet, and I’ve long reduced my own intake. But while nature is still red in tooth and claw I refuse to feel guilty about my occasional intake of grass-fed meat or free range eggs or dairy products. Being vegan is good for the planet, but everyone being vegan would be a calamity.

Some of my ancestors were farmers, and I think I still have distant relatives who are, though we’ve long lost touch. They kept sheep on Welsh hills and of course geese and chickens and I think the odd cow and pig, mainly for their own consumption. We had chickens too, just down the road at my gran’s, scratting about in her yard, and my father and an uncle were both bee-keepers. The animals were looked after well – they were after all a considerable investment – and of course farm animals only exist because when the time comes they will be killed and eaten. And the English countryside without farm animals would be a very different place.

Back when I was young, even in outer London where I grew up we were far closer to the sources of our food. Our fruit and veg came mainly from our gardens and allotments too and we ate what was in season, along with a few things that came in tins. I’d seen pineapples when I was small but for us it was a fruit that came in rings in tins, though we did have apples, pears, plums, strawberries, raspberries, loganberries, gooseberries, red currants, black currants, blackberries in profusion, along with our annual glut of peaches, far more than ever we could eat or give away from two stones my father had planted years earlier in the back garden.

We were, as the planes going a few feet over our heads reminded us every minute or too, close to Heathrow, in a part of Middlesex which had once been full of orchards and market gardens but is now largely covered in concrete runways and housing estates.

As usual I digress. But as I photographed the various banners and placards, I found myself sometimes a little uneasy about the hectoring tone of some and overstatement of some of them. Meat really isn’t murder and milk isn’t rape and to say so rather insults the victims of these abhorrent crimes. Of course there were many I could sympathise with, against cruel farming practices, the fur trade, hunting… but too many that seemed to be based on thinking that animals are just like us. They aren’t. Animal rights are not human rights. And I couldn’t but wish that we could see some of the evident enthusiasm and activism being directed towards protecting human rights which are abused and under threat both here and around the world.

More pictures at: Thousands March for Animal Rights

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My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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Rothschild’s Gunnersbury

It should have been an easy walk from Brentford Station to Gunnersbury Park and it wasn’t far, but seemed longer going on a narrow path past extensive building work. The park used to be the home of various Rothschilds, part bought by Nathan Mayer Rothschild in 1835, and the rest in 1889. He had come to establish a bank in London and made a huge fortune in the Napoleonic wars smuggling gold bullion to pay Wellington’s troops, and by the time he bought the ‘Large Mansion’ was the richest man in Britain, but didn’t live long to enjoy this country estate, dying the following year. It flourished under his son Lionel, the man he lent the government the cash to buy half the Suez Canal.

After Nathan’s grandson Leopold died in 1917 (the family having acquired a ‘de’) parts of the estate were sold off and in 1925 his widow sold the remaining 75 hectares of park and houses to the boroughs of Ealing and Acton (with some financial support from Middlesex County Council) to be kept for leisure purposes as a memorial to her late husband, and the park opened to the public in 1926.

Gunnersbury had been chosen as it was ‘out of town’ a convenient ‘country estate’ for the lavish parties held there, only a short drive of around 8 miles from West End homes. Part of the reason for the sale may have been the opening in 1925 of the Great West Road, running along the southern edge of the park which would have brought much more traffic and make the location considerably less rural, with new estates being developed all around it.

The Large Mansion has been recently done up and looks in splendid condition, though the local history museum it contains has been given a makeover as a rather shallow visitor attraction. There are some things of interest, and it is still worth a visit, particularly the extensive kitchens, but I prefer my museums dusty and crowded with artifacts, and preferably with ready access to local history resources. Perhaps the large collections the two boroughs had are still available elsewhere; some documents form Hounslow are now at the libraries in Feltham and Chiswick.

In the upper corridor are some fine large prints from the Autochromes taken around the house by Leopold de Rothschild, a keen photographer in the early years of the last century. He took up the process in 1908, the year after it was introduced, and The Rothschild Archive holds 733 autochrome plates, the largest collection by any single British photographer to have survived, and you can download an interesting document about them.

One of the reasons why the autochrome process never achieved great popularity was that there was no simple way to print or reproduce the images. The plates, available in sizes from about 4.5×10.5cm to 18x30cm were usually viewed with a special viewer containing a mirror (or eyepieces with prisms) as the images were inverted. Now of course it is possible to scan them and make prints.

We met the older members of our family at the mansion, after they had taken the short bus journey from Acton Town and ate at the cafe in the park. Tasty enough but not a place for either the hungry or poor, and for me the least satisfactory part of our day out.

I made my excuses and left to take a further walk around the park and more pictures on a more direct way back to Brentford, intending to pick up another small snack when I got there. I’d just missed a train so took a further short walk around Brentford, although it was now raining slightly.

Gunnersbury Park & Brentford
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My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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