It has taken me a long time to complete putting my work from August on-line. Partly because I had a week’s holiday at the start of September. But while I covered quite a number of protests in August – and they all take time to put onto the web, I also found time to continue with one of my other projects with panoramic images, which take me rather longer to prepare.
Most of the pictures of protests are available for editorial use from Alamy, where the easiest way to find them is probably in my pages there. The latest images there are on the first page of many. Other pictures can be obtained direct from me.
There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, please share on social media. And small donations via Paypal – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.
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.
Youth Strike, inspired by Greta Thunberg’s protests, has injected a remarkable energy into the campaigning against what seems the inevitable climate disaster we are heading towards.
Most of those taking part in the protests on Fridays in London are taking time off from school to do so, sometimes with approval and even encouragement from teachers, but often despite threats and sanctions. Along with them are some students from FE and HE, but it does seem to be school students who are leading these protests.
And while schools may not approve, I think that many of the posters and placards show that the campaign is stimulating a great deal of activity in art departments across the area.
Of course as they say, it is their future which is at stake, their future lives that are at risk, while most politicians and those in charge of financial institutions and businesses in the rich world are likely to die before the worst effects of climate change begin to bite. Schoolkids don’t have a vote and feel that those who do are not thinking about the future of the young, and generally I think they are right.
Of course we are a part of the rich on this planet (despite homelessness and the other avoidable aspects of our increasing inequality); people in parts of the majority world are already in some places dying because of the effects of global heating, while here in the richer countries we are still ruled by smug wealth keeping getting richer with business as usual, and climate deniers who reject the science.
Theirs is a generation already feeling cheated by Brexit (whether we get either the current bad deal or a no deal) and by government cuts and longer term policies that have removed funding from education.
Protests like this one, and those by Extinction Rebellion, do have some effect in raising awareness and combating the lies still too frequent in the media. More people are beginning to think about how their own personal choices – over food, holiday travel and more – effect the environment but there still needs to be far more, not just at the personal level but also a giant cultural shift as well as political actions both here and across the world. We need as some of the posters and placards state, ‘System Change not Climate Change.’
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.
There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, please share on social media. And small donations via Paypal – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.
I was going to the opening of an exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands that evening and since it was a nice afternoon decided to leave early and take a walk around Canary Wharf on my way there. And again when I left I took a few pictures on my way to the station.
It’s quite a while since I’ve seriously gone there to take photographs, though occasionally I’ve walked through parts of it on my way elsewhere, taking the Jubilee Line from Waterloo and walking to nearby places or changing to the DLR.
I hadn’t seriously intended to take photographs, but I did have a camera with me, though only the Olympus OMD E5II with a tiny 17mm f2.8 pancake lens – a 34mm equivalent. I’d recently got this secondhand (it seemed so cheap I couldn’t pass it by) and was interested to see how well it performed. It makes the camera almost pocketable.
I read a review which promised high levels of chromatic aberration and barrel distortion, and thought that these would probably not be important for most of my photography. But trying them out at Canary Wharf they might be a problem.
Of course they were not, as you can see from some of these pictures (and the others on My London Diary in the post Canary Wharf. Both are lens faults which software can handle well, and it is hard to find much evidence of either in the results. If I open the RAW files in Photoshop, clicking the ‘Lens Correction’ icon in the Camera Raw dialogue tells me “This raw file contains a built-in lens profile for correcting distortion and chromatic aberration. The profile has already been applied automatically to this image”.
But then I looked at the RAW files, and they seemed fine too, with no hint of barrel distortion and the same small amount of colour fringing, not normally noticeable. I think my viewer software will actually be looking not a the raw data but at a jpeg incorporated into the RAW file, which I think means that any correction needed has been done in the camera. A few clicks on the web and I find that Micro-4/3 images are auto-corrected according to the stored lens profile (lens firmware) and a review on Optical Limits which shows the effect. As they say, barrel distortion “is only rarely noticeable in field conditions.”
The reviews also say the lens isn’t that sharp, at least when viewing large prints, but even examining these pictures at 1:1 on screen the sharpness in both centre and corners seems acceptable. There may be some uses for which it isn’t sharp enough, but I think it’s good enough for most of us. If anything it is the actual file size of the camera (4608×3456 pixels with the EM5II) that will be a problem for really large prints, not the lens.
Most years unless I’ve some more pressing committment I’ve accompanied my wife as she takes part in a sponsored walk around London churches in support of Christian Aid.
Walking around the City is always interesting, and although I’ve been in most of the churches before, most years there is something new to see. Many of London’s churches are open at times during the week, often hosting lunchtime concerts, others are usually locked.
The walk isn’t of huge length, but it takes quite a time, especially if you want to look carefully at those churches you get inside – some of the checkpoints are a table outside a locked building. Other churches offer tea and cakes and it gets difficult to complete the circuit in the time allowed; this year I was disappointed that we arrived at the Temple Church just as it was closing.
Most of the churches in the city were built around the same time, after the Great Fire of 1666, and usually the architect was Wren, but although they share some characteristics there are significant differences.
But of course the City has many interesting secular buildings as well as its churches, both ancient and modern, and I photographed a few of these as we walked by.
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.
There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, please share on social media. And small donations via Paypal – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.
The British colonised Ceylon and in the nineteenth century it was a major source of coffee grown on British owned plantations. When the coffee crops began to fail, efforts were made to replace coffee by tea plants and seeds from Assam in India. Although at first this was unsuccessful, by the end of the nineteenth century tea had replaced coffee as the major export crop.
Sri Lankan Tamils had lived in parts of the island since at least around the 2nd century BC, but the tea plantations imported Indian Tamils to the hill areas in large numbers. Following independence in 1948, the Sinhalese-led government deported large numbers of the Indian Tamils and also made life difficult for the Sri Lankan Tamils, severely limiting employment opportunies, suppressing their culture and encouraging anti-Tamil riots, leading to the start of a civil war in 1983.
One-third of Sri Lankan Tamils now live outside Sri Lanka, the largest group, around 300,000, being in Canada. There are thought to be between 100,000 and 200,000 British Tamils living in the UK, the figures vague as Tamil was not one of the ethnic groups listed in the UK census, though people could write it in.
Over 70,000 Tamils are thought to have been killed in the earlier phases of the Sri Lankan Civil war, but it came to a particularly disastrous and bloody end in 2009, on a small strip of land at Mullivaikkal, where 40,000 Tamils, around half of them civilians, are thought to have been killed, mainly by shelling by Sri Lankan government forces in what they had designated as a ‘no-fire’ zone, but some by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The numbers are highly disputed, with huge variations between government and Tamil sources, but there is no doubt that it was a massacre on a terrible scale. According to the Tamil Guardian:”
After providing an initial death toll of 40,000, the UN found evidence suggesting that 70,000 were killed. Local census records indicate that at least 146,679 people are unaccounted for and presumed to have been killed during the Sri Lankan military offensive. “
The protest I photographed included some graphic re-enactments of shooting (though only with crude wooden guns) and many people with bandages and fake blood, giving plenty of photographic opportunities. And unsurprisingly, feeling run high. Tamils want Sri Lanka to face prosecutions by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and a referendum in Sri Lanka to lead to the setting up of an independent state, Tamil Eelam.
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.
There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, please share on social media. And small donations via Paypal – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.
I felt uneasy covering this protest against the prosecution of soldiers involved in the Bloody Sunday massacre, the murder of civil rights protesters in Derry/Londonderry in 1972, and other incidents in the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles.’
It wasn’t because of my views about their protest, though I’m clear that there is a need to see justice done for those who lost family and friends in that terrible event. I do wonder whether 47 years later there is much point in bringing ageing ex-soldiers to trial, and those who bear the real responsibility for the events – from Prime Minister Edward Heath down – are long dead. But is there any other way to reach some satisfactory conclusion?
It is of course shameful that these clearly illegal killings were not properly investigated at the time – and those soldiers who were found to have acted illegally brought to justice at the time. We shouldn’t have the culture of cover-up which is so deeply embedded in both our military, government and judicial establishment – and continues to cover up crimes such as the killings by police officers of mentally disturbed black young men, newspaper sellers and Brazilian electricians and those responsible for creating the death-trap of Grenfell tower (and almost certainly the mysterious death of weapons expert David Kelly.) The list goes on and on…
If I had been a few years older I would have either faced National Service either in the armed forces or to have taken the decision as one of my brothers did to enter one of the non-military essential services as an alternative. Fortunately for him, the call-ups ended in November 1960 when he was still a student, and I was still at school.
After the last National Servicemen left the forces in 1963, they became solely reliant on recruits and their nature has changed, developing a more conservative and right-wing nature. Extreme right organisations such as the EDL included many ex-soldiers among their members, and the Veterans Against Terrorism joined with the Football Lads Alliance for what was clearly a racist and Islamophobic protest despite the protestations of the organisers in October 2017.
So while the veterans protesting here were a much wider group – and certainly I would not label them as racists, I knew that among them would be some of those who had threatened and attacked me when I was photographing right-wing protests, and I was uneasy when mingling with the crowd. And as I made my way to the front of the protest I did see and hear several people pointing and making aggressive comments about me and moved very smartly away.
Once at the front of course I had no problems as those leading the protest were keen to get press coverage and not involved with the extreme right; when a UKIP EU Election candidate tried to make a political speech he was given very short shrift and hustled away, by people shouting “No Politics“.
The protesters feel strongly that the soldiers who served in the Troubles should be protected from what they see as unfair prosecutions – as the government have made clear that those who served in operations in other countries such as Iraq will be. It does seem hard to argue that those who served in Northern Ireland should be treated differently from those who served in overseas conflicts.
What really would I think be even more important than bringing the few guilty individuals to trials which may or may not find them guilty – and after so many years it must be difficult to find really convincing evidence despite their guilt – is for there to be a proper recognition of the institutional culture, prejudices and shortcomings that lay behind their actions and which allowed them to be covered up for 47 years – and I suspect may still operate to prevent a true verdict being obtained in any prosecution – and for effective action to be taken to correct these.
The Stephen Lawrence case made clear and public the institutional racism of the Metropolitan Police, and led to some actions to oppose this, though clearly much more still needs to be done. The deaths at Deepcut Barracks revealed the the toxic culture in the Army and much more needs to be done to combat this.
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.
There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, please share on social media. And small donations via Paypal – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.
