February, 2020 | >Re-PHOTO

Brixton march against government racism

Brixton in south London has a special place in the history of our country, as it was in this area that the first wave of post-war Black migrants found homes and jobs, with those who had arrived on the Empire Windrush being given temporary accomodation a short distance away in an underground bunker on Clapham Common.

Brixton had the nearest government Labour Exchange where they went in search of jobs, and many found them in local businesses and found cheap lodgings in the area, and in time brought their families to the area. Soon this working class area of London was developing the more vibrant and colourful culture that now, together with its location close to central London and good transport links makes it a prime target for gentrification.

Brixton has also been a flashpoint for social unrest, with riots (or uprisings) in 1981, 1985 and 1991 after heavy-handed and racist policing as well as in the London riots of 2011. The 1981 riots came at a time of high unemployment, particularly among the local African-Caribbean community who felt under attack by excessive policing and also by lurid press stereotyping of them, their culture and the area.

I began going to Brixton regularly in 1991, when a photography collective I had links with moved from near Clapham Junction in Battersea to the heart of the area on the edge of Brixton market and reconstituted itself as Photofusion. For years I went to most of their exhibition openings as well as visiting to take prints in to their picture library, which was then an important source for images of British social life. Photofusion is now in new premises but just a short distance away, though I think all the people I knew there are gone and it’s a year or two since I last visited the gallery.

But I have continued going to Brixton, mainly to photograph protests and events, particularly at Windrush Square, outside Lambeth Town Hall and at Brixton Police Station. And on September 14th I found myself again in Brixton, beginning at Windrush Square. This is a rather bleak and windswept area in front of the Ritzy Cinema, the Tate Library and the Black Cultural Archives, with a busy road along its west edge, ‘landscaped‘ a few years back by Lambeth Council apparently with the aim of making it a less attractive place for people to gather.

Here’s what I wrote about the protest on My London Diary:

Movement for Justice and Lambeth Unison Black Workers’ Group protest in Brixton against the continuing persecution of Windrush family members and other migrants, calling for freedom of movement, the closure of immigration detention prisons, and an end to Brexit which is being used to whip up immigrant-bashing and nationalism to establish a Trump-style regime in Britain under Boris Johnson.

After speeches in Windrush Square they moved to Brixton Market where wide support was shown by the public for speeches. Before they left Green MEP for London Scott Ainslie spoke about his LDNlovesEU campaign. They then marched up to Atlantic Road and back along the main street, Brixton Road for a final short rally in Windrush Square.

More pictures at Brixton anti-racist march.

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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Trans+ Pride

Stonewall tell us that:

One in five LGBT people have experienced a hate crime because of their sexual orientation or gender identity in the last year.

The number of lesbian, gay and bi people who have experienced a hate crime has risen by 78 per cent since 2013.
https://www.stonewall.org.uk/cy/node/57287

But they go on to state that things are even worse for the trans community:

Two in five trans people have experienced a hate crime or incident because of their gender identity in the last year, compared to one in six lesbian, gay or bi people who are not trans.
Two in five who identify as non-binary have experienced a hate crime in the last year.
14 per cent of trans people do not feel safe where they live. 44 per cent of trans people avoid certain streets because they do not feel safe, compared to 26 per cent of lesbian, gay or bi people who are not trans.
https://www.stonewall.org.uk/cy/node/57287

Trans people have particularly come under attack in print and on the media by a small group of largely ageing feminists, who have been labelled ‘trans exclusionary radical feminists‘ or ‘TERFs’ though these people object to the label, calling it a slur. Some of them use the rather non-specific term ‘gender critical’. Wikipedia says TERF is “used to describe feminists who express ideas that other feminists consider transphobic, such as the claim that trans women are not women, opposition to transgender rights and exclusion of trans women from women’s spaces and organizations.”

TERFs have disrupted various events including the 2018 Pride Procession and the London Anarchist Bookfair 2017. As well as TERFs, trans people are under attack form some Conservative religious groups and people on the far right including so-called MRAs, men’s rights activists. Odd bedfellows for feminists.

Stonewall was an appropriate source for my information for various reasons. It was the 1969 Stonewall riots that kick-started the whole gay rights movement, a time when gays first stood up against the police raids on gay clubs, and the main figures who led that defiance were three ‘women of color’, two of whom were trans women the third a butch lesbian. The ‘T’ has always been an integral part of the LGBT community, and transgender people have become much more visible in recent years.

There were fears that there might be some disruption of London’s First Trans+ Pride March by TERFs or other transphobic groups, but if there were any protesters against the march I didn’t see them.

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.

Rape Crisis in South Africa

Protesters met in Trafalgar Square to protest following the rape and murder of Uyinene Mrwetyana one of many such crimes against women in South Africa. The protest was in solidarity with those in the country which are calling on the government there to declare a state of emergency against gender-based violence, and to protest against gender-based violence across the world.

Protesters had been asked to dress in black and the vast majority had done so. Most of those protesting were women and the vast majority of gender-based crimes are against women. One woman held up a poster with the message ‘The Tortured Screams Of Millions Of Women Will Inevitably Be Drowned Out By the Pathetic Chorus Of “Good Guys” Mumbling “Not All Men.”‘

Another, rather more positively asked ‘Men: This Is Global Man-Made Crisis, What Action Are You Taking?’ though I was rather sorry that she was holding it upside-down when I took the picture showing her.

After the rally in Trafalgar Square, the protesters moved to South Africa House where they lit candles and put many of their posters against the wall of the closed High Commission.

The building and the crowd of protesters around provided some shade which just about made the flames visible in the middle of a bright sunny day.

More at Criminal Abuse of Women in South Africa.

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.

Against Hate Crime

I’d caught a train that should have got me to London in good time to meet the Stand Up to LBGTQ+ Hate Crime protesters outside the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, chosen because of the nail bomb attack on this gay pub by a Nazi supported in 1999 that murdered three people and injured many more. It was the second in a series of protests to combat the nearly 150% increase in anti-LGBT hate crime in the UK between 2014 and 2018. The campaigners say we should all be able to walk the streets without fear.

But the South West Railway had other ideas, and my train made several unplanned stops on its journey into Waterloo, arriving around 40 minutes late – over double the normal journey time. It’s hard to understand quite why South West Railway has such a poor record of time-keeping. They use fairly recent rolling stock with automatice doors that cut down calling times at stations by perhaps a minute at each stop. The trains have better acceleration than the older units and I think faster maximum speeds. They cheat by shutting the doors 30 or 45 seconds before the train time – so you may miss the 17.38 unless you are actually there by 17.37:30 – unless it is running late. And most years they manage to add a minute or so to scheduled running time. Back when I first moved to where I now live, the ‘fast’ trains used to get to London in under 30 minutes; now they take 35, an unremarkable speed of 33.6 mph. They are even slower at weekends.

I ran from the station to the bus stop, and fortunately didn’t have long to wait, though buses are now always slow in evening rush hour traffic, though still usually faster than walking over anything but the shortest distance. But I’d known roughly how long it would take and had allowed for that in planning my journey. I ran from the bus stop down Old Compton St, annoyed at having missed the start of the event but hoping I could still find them on their march.

Fortunately they had begun a few minutes later than planned, and I caught them just a few yards from the start of the march, though I was too out of breath to take many pictures immediately. But I was able to go with them on their march through Soho, where they attracted considerable support from many on the streets outside the clubs and bars.

The light was going down noticeably as they marched, though it was still 25 minutes before sunset when they reached Trafalgar Square. But some Soho streets are quite narrow and the light can be low. Trafalgar Square is wide open and there was more light. I was working with the Olympus E-M5II on auto ISO and it wasn’t long before it was sometimes reaching the maximum I’d set of ISO 6400. The results at this setting were noticeably noiser than at ISO3200, but at this and lower ISOs the camera was a pretty good match to the Fuji XT1, which started the evening at ISO 1600 but I later switched to ISO 3200. With a wideangle 10-24mm on this camera I didn’t need to go higher.

Trafalgar Square had been chosen for the end of the march partly because it was the scene of the murder of Ian Baynham in a homophobic attack almost exactly 10 years earlier, but also because it is a public place with a long record of protests. Protests in the main area of the square now require the permission of the Mayor of London, but the North Terrace in front of the National Gallery, though pedestrianised, still counts as the public highway and protests such as this are allowed.

More at Against LGBTQ Hate Crime

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.

Regents Canal 200

If you are in London next month you are invited to the private view of the exhibition ‘2020 Vision – Vistas and Views’ at The Street Gallery, University College Hospital, 235 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BU. The gallery is along an area at the front of the hospital – turn right immediately you go through the main entrance – and will be on show until 22nd April 2020.

As well as paintings by Hilary Rosen the show includes a dozen pictures from a project I’ve been working on when I’ve had time over the past year, ‘Regents Canal 200‘.

The Regent’s Canal, which runs from Little Venice on the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union Canal to Limehouse Dock was completed and opened in 1820, 200 years ago this year. There are other, more official, celebrations later in the year but I began this project in complete ignorance of these.

I’ve photographed the Regent’s Canal occasionally over the years since the late 1970s, and have hundreds or probably thousands of pictures from it, both in black and white and colour. But since space is limited in the gallery I will only be showing a small selection of the several hundred colour panoramas I’ve made over the past year.

Please RSVP to Laura Bradshaw – laura.bradshaw7@nhs.net 020 3447 7146 – though you will be welcome anyway, and Hilary and I will be pleased to see you there. If you want to print out a copy of the invitation you can open it as a PDF.

Suicide Crisis

I hadn’t realised until I went to this event the terrible scale of the suicide crisis this country is now facing. It isn’t something that is entirely evenly distributed and I have to think for a long time to recall someone I know personally who has actually killed themselves. But while talking to a friend a few months ago she told me that over 20 people she had know had taken their own lives, all disabled people in desperate circumstances because of cuts in benefits, either because of unfair assessements or following benefit sanctions.

I had a shock a few weeks ago, waiting for a train at a busy London station, standing on the platform when something had clearly gone wrong, with railway staff running down the neighbouring platform to stop an incoming train. I glanced back down the track and quickly turned away as some distance away there was clearly a body and a great deal of blood on the line. My train was just coming in and I got on and left without knowing what had happened, but several times a year the trains on my own line are halted because someone has jumped in front of a train at another station.

The last person I knew who did so was a photographer, Bob Carlos Clarke, who in 2006 walked out of the Priory Hospital in Barnes and threw himself in front of a train at a nearby level crossing. A year or two earlier I’d had some long telephone conversations with him about his book ‘Shooting Sex: The Definitive Guide to Undressing Beautiful Strangers’ and he had sent me a CD-Rom with some of his pictures, though I don’t think I ever got round to writing more than a short note about it – it wasn’t my sort of photography.

I’d come across suicide – or rather attempted suicide – at a much closer distance in my teenage years when I’d actually interupted someone who was trying to electrocute themselves, pulling away one of the mains wires they had wrapped around a finger and had burnt into their flesh. It was an event that seared itself into my mind too.

What shocks me now are the statistics on teenage suicides, with UK official figures showing more than 200 school age children now kill themselves each year. The campaigners were laying out 200 pairs of shoes to represent these 200 fatalities, 200 lives ended. One of the main factors that lead to this is the failure of mental health services, which simply lack the resources to deal eefectively with the problem, particularly with the problems of young people. Speakers told some horrific stories of teenagers waiting for months to get the specialist care they desperately need or at being let down by what care is provided.

A number of MPs and others had pledged support and some were shown on posters with their promises in writing, GPs and psychatrists came to speak, along with both the Shadow Minister for Mental Health & Social Care Barbara Keeley and Shadow Secretary of State for Health Jon Ashworth came and pledged a Labour government to action. But unfortunately we haven’t got a Labour government.

More at: Stop the suicide crisis.

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.

Making Money

I’ve just had a quick read of a post on the LightRocket Photography Blog entitled ‘9 Most Profitable Photography Genres‘, which aims to give guidelines based on broad international standards about “the value of your work, what sectors you want to work in and how much you should charge.”

Value of course is a rather wider concept than simply what someone will pay you for photography, and certainly some of the most valuable photography so far as I’m concerned both by myself and by others has been produced without any real commercial intent or support. Relatively few of the great photographers whose work I admire and which fills the histories of photography were actually making much of a living from those pictures at the time they made them. Some had other sources of income outside of photography, others produced routine and largely uninspired photography to fund their personal projects.

Many photographers whose work now commands high prices in the art market sold pictures for peanuts during their lifetimes or even gave them away. Few became rich from their photography and largely it was driven by motives other than financial. Even now for many – as one photographer jokes to me occasionally – the best career move would be to die.

But of course we do need money to pay our bills, to eat, to keep a roof over our heads, and to buy cameras and computers etc. So getting paid for our work is important, and some may find this guide useful, though it has few surprises, though by UK standards I think some of the prices mentioned are extremely optimistic.

The artilce is entitled ‘9 Most Profitable Photography Genres’ and it’s perhaps not surprising that it begins at number 10 with the area I sell work in, Editorial News. As they say, it “is one of the most popular areas of work for photographers but it is, sadly, one of the least profitable“, thanks to intense competition, particularly from the large agencies. They have driven fees down and negotiate licencing deals with major image users that make it very difficult for freelancers to sell work at prices that make any real profits.

In the UK the market for editorial pictures has shrunk considerably, with many newspapers and magazines largely relying on images, often of poor quality supplied free by readers and with press releases.

It remains possible and almost certainly easier to make a living at the other 9 types of work mentioned, though in many sectors things are getting tougher, with jobs once done by a photographer now being handled by anyone who can hold a smartphone and produce a picture – if not a very good one.

Smartphones have also made it very much easier to produce videos, and in the right hands (or on the right monopod or tripod) the results can be surprisingly good. Certainly the much wider use of smartphones for making pictures and videos has led to the skills of photographers becoming much less valued – and for most people expecting to pay less for them.

It comes as no surprise to find Wedding Photography still fairly high on the list at No 4. It has long been a useful way to make some money, and when I taught I used to suggest it particularly to some of the more reliable students as a way of earning at least a part of a living. While most wedding work is routine and uninspired and not particularly well-paid, it is an area where it is still possible to develop individual approaches and find clients willing to pay high prices for something a little different.

And equally predictable at the top of the list is Fashion Photography, though as the article says it is an area which isn’t easy to get into “small, highly selective and sensitive to trends” and where success depends very much on networking skills.

I am however rather unsympathetic to the underlying idea behind this post, that that people will chose an area of work on the basis of the financial rewards that are possible. Chose to try and work in fashion if you have a passion for it and are not worried by the ethical considerations (the fashion industry is one of the major drivers of climate change, second only to fossil fuels) not because it may make you rich; chose to be a wedding photographer if you love working with people (and if you want to make a lot of money, with wealthy people) and so on. We each only have one life and it would be a shame to waste it in the pursuit of riches.

London life

Possibly the only real weather pictures I took in 2019 were a couple during a short but torrential downpour in central London. I was travelling between protests and had stopped to change buses, and was fortunately standing under a bus shelter when what had been the occasional drop of rain suddenly went rogue. When a woman walked past under a pink umbrella I saw there was a picture and manged a couple of frames with a short telephoto before she walked out of frame and, more or less at the same time my bus arrived.

By the time the bus had gone along most of the Strand the rain had stopped and the pavements were beginning to dry. I looked down from the top deck of the bus and saw this group of three men sheltering in front of a print shop with bedding and belongings beside them. It’s a sight that is unfortunately far too common in London now, though virtually unknown in my younger days when I started taking pictures.

Under both New Labour, Tory Lib-Dem coalition and Tory governments we have seen increasing inequalities and a change in government policies, increasingly moving away from an attitude of care for the welfare of the poorest and towards a criminalisation of poverty, with councils bringing in bylaws that regard people living on the streets simply as an incovenient eyesore, fining people who feed those on the streets and also those sleeping rough. We used to say that Britain was a Christian country, but it’s hard to see that in practice now.

I was in Brixton for a protest against the continuing persecution of Windrush family members and other migrants and the increasing levels of hate crime encouraged by government policies and actions. Places like this are suffering from the Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ and immigration removal squads. But I’m always impressed by the colour and vibrancy of the place – and so are all those wealthy young people who are moving in and leading its gentrification.

One of those things that you obviously see when travelling by bus – at least if you have the energy to climb the stairs to the upper deck of London’s many double-deckers is the roofs of the cars. I’m always rather disappointed if the bus I’m taking turns out only to be a single decker, as the views from the top deck are so much more interesting.

This month the various traffic jams around Trafalgar Square gave me plenty of time to contemplate the reflections in car roofs and to photogrpah a few of them. It’s rather tricky angling the camera down at an angle and often the glass is too dirty to make it worthwhile; reflections also often spoil the images, though I use my arms and coat to try to cut them out. I do have the solution to this in a giant floppy lens hood, but that sits protecting a little dust on my desk at home whenever I need it.

The line of hexagons at the bottom of this image rather adds to it, and is on the window of the bus. I think this is the full frame as I made the picture and would perhaps benefit from a slight crop at top and right. Although the sun was out, you can see a sky pretty full of clouds reflected in the roof.

See more pictures from my September travels around London on My London Diary at London Images .

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.

Yorkshire Dales

Writing this at the end of a day of lousy weather, wind and rain that caused transport havoc somehow seemed an appropriate time to think back about our week’s holiday last year in Wharfedale, one of the Yorkshire dales. The weather forecast for that week was little more encouraging, but in fact the weather turned out rather better than the forecast. Folowing our great gale back in 1987, when BBC forecaster Michael Fish had told us not to worry about it, according to Wikipedia, “major improvements were later implemented in atmospheric observation, relevant computer models, and the training of forecasters. Perhaps the major aspect of that training was to make all forecasts on the pessimistic side.

And while today there have been floods in some towns, trees blowing down and blocking roads or falling through roofs and it must have been terrible for those concerned, as well as for the many homeless on our streets, it hasn’t been a great disaster for most of us. And many photographers will have been out taking ‘weather pictures’, and a few living in the worst hit areas may have made decent sales. It’s not a speciality I’ve ever had much interest in, though I have sometimes gone out to take pictures in the snow because of the very different look that places have.

So although the forecast for our holiday week was pretty dire, it didn’t turn out quite so bad, though we did get quite a bit of rain, but there was also some unforecast sunshine. And that rain did make the several waterfalls we visited rather more impressive than in a dry summer.

I took only one camera with me on holiday, travelling fairly light with the Olympus E-M5 II and just a couple of lenses. No flash, no tripod but several spare batteries made up my kit. It would have been a very light kit with just the 14-150mm, but I also took the slightly buliky but outstanding Panasonic Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 8-18mm f/2.8-4.0 ASPH, something of a mouthful. To be fair it is well less than half the weight of an equivalent full frame lens, but for a holiday I could perhaps just have taken a fixed focal length ultrawide. But such things hardly exist.

The Olympus is a fine camera for holiday use, and I have used it for photographing events, but there I find it just a little disappointing, espcially in low light. With both a physically smaller sensor and a smaller file size the results have sometimes not quite had the image quality I want.

One thing I was pleased to have with me was a poncho. I’d bought one after seeing another photographer working wearing one, but hadn’t yet worn one myself at work. I generally rely on the Met Office’s forecast and dress accordingly and somehow it hasn’t yet been poncho weather, but up in Yorkshire it certainly was on several days, with at least light rain and reasonably warm. Warm enough to work up a sweat walking up hills in a jacket while a poncho gives plenty of ventilation. Most of the time the camera sits in the dry under it, and you can just pull it up on the outside when you want to take a picture.

Here are some links to the pictures:

Kettlewell and Starbotton
Skipton
Bolton Castle
Wensleydale waterfalls
Kettlewell & Arncliffe circular
More Kettlewell
Skipton Castle
Litton Church & Falls
Buckden circular
Kettlewell final
Linton
Conistone walk

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.

Suziki and Fuji

There are reports on several web sites including PetaPixel and DPReview about Fuji removing a promotional video showing Japanese photographer Tatsuo Suziki and removing him from their https://www.dpreview.com/news/6165309898/fujifilm-pulls-controversial-x100v-promo-video-due-to-the-featured-photographer-method global list of photographers.

I’m not sure how photographers qualify to be on the list, though I took a quick look through it and failed to find a single name I recognised but that probably isn’t the main criteria. As someone who has owned at least five Fuji-X cameras and used them at least occasionally since Fuji first brought out the X100 (now a paperweight on my desk) I don’t recall ever having heard of it before. But I’m more interested in what you can do with cameras than in the always fallible beasts.

It is a decision that has caused considerable controversy, generating many comments from photographers on both sides. Both PP and DPR point out that Suziki’s approach has similarities with that of Magnum photographer Bruce Gilden. When his book ‘Facing New York’ came out I wrote a review in which I expressed my uncomfortable feeling about his combative approach to his subjects, more or less pushing his camera and flash into the faces of unfortunate strangers on the streets of the city.

It wasn’t the fact that he took pictures without permission that worried me; we live in a public domain on the streets and just as we may look I think we have the same right to take photographs – so long as we do so without causing distress to others. That seemed to be a line that Gilden obviously and aggressively crossed, and so does Suziki, though in a rather more creepy way.

There is something about the way he moves, and the way he looks not at the subjects through a view finder but at the screen on the rear of the Fuji X100V the video was promoting which I find unsettling as so clearly do some of the people, mainly women, he confronts on the street. Much as I dislike Gilden’s approach it somehow seems more honest and direct.

My love/hate relationship with Fuji cameras continues. While they are capable of fine results, on a par with the heavier and larger full-frame Nikons I also own, the Fuji XT30 and XT1 do add a little unpredictability to my photography. I suspect it comes down to my having fingers, but sometimes on the XT30 I find my settings seem to have mysteriously changed during a session taking pictures. So one day when I had set the ISO to my ‘Auto-3’ setting I found that I had taken quite a few images at H – ISO 51200 before I noticed the change. I also notice some rather odd behaviour with shutter speeds when working with shutter priority. I may have the shutter set to 1/250 but sometimes the camera has a different opinion. And for aperture priority I’ve learnt to use a piece of black sticky tape to stop the aperture ring on the 18-35 lens from making mysterious moves as I handle the camera.

And oddities remain. Although I’ve turned off image review I still sometimes find myself looking at the previous exposure sometimes when I raise the camera to my eye to focus, though I can’t get this to happen consistently. There are good points too. Particularly the image stabilisation when using the 18-135 lens in low light is remarkable.