February, 2020 | >Re-PHOTO

Jan 2020 – My London Diary

My London Diary for January 2020 is now complete. The month ended on a sad note as we left the European Union, something we just have to try and make the best of, at least for the moment. Rather than the fight over whether or not to leave we will now be fighting against some of its more dangerous and oppressive consequences, and perhaps we will see greater national unity in some of those struggles as Brexiteers too find out what Brexit really means.

I’m still trying to cut down on the new work that I do, and to cope with my huge archive of images on film. On Facebook I’m currently uploading a picture a day from those black and white images I took in 1984, while on Flickr I’ve posted albums of pictures from 1977 to 1982. Since I last used film around 2005 there is quite a long way to go. I’m chosing a little more carefully which events to cover and realising I can’t do everything.

Jan 2020

À bientôt EU, see you soon
Extremist Brexiteers Behaving Badly
British National (Overseas) Passports

Brexiteers celebrate leaving the EU
Cargill, worst company in the World
Twickenham walk

March against fascism in India
Zimbabwe Embassy weekly protest
Rally Against Fascism in India
Resisting State Violence – Brazil to India

Brumadinho mine disaster vigil
Regent’s Canal panoramas
Ugandans at UK-Africa Investment Summit
Egyptians at UK-Africa Investment Summit

Against war crimes in Idlib
Earth Strike Oxford St rolling protest
‘Stay Put’ Sewol silent protest
Support for Anti-regime Protests in Iran
Release the Russia Report

Fight Inequality Global Protest
No War on Iran rally

No War on Iran march
Act over Australian Bushfires
Justice for Cyprus Gang Rape Victim
No War With Iran

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.

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Bruno Barbey

Bruno Barbey, a French photographer born in Morocco in 1941, has photographed around the world over the years, and is one of the few Magnum photographers who deserve to be better known. Not that the others are bad photographers, but rather that they are everyday names, at least in the world of photography.

I was reminded of Barbey by a Facebook post by photographer Antonio Olmos (who also deserves to be better known) of a group of pictures taken in Poland in the early 1980s, when Barbey spent 8 months living in a camper van and working there despite strict surveillance by the communist state, because “Poland was the page in history that was being written and it was the memory of an ancestral society on the verge of disappearing”.

Barbey studied photogrpahy in Switzerland in 1959-60 and first went to Magnum in 1964. He served as their vice president for Europe in 1978/1979 and as President of Magnum International from 1992 to 1995. He is now a contributor and you can see a great deal of his work on their sit e.

In an excellent short video made for Paris Photo he talks about his life and work and some of his pictures.

I hadn’t been aware until I watched this of the various similarities between his views on photography and mine, though in other respects we are so different (for one thing I hate travel and he has spent his life going around the world.) In part it is a generational thing, though I only really got started in photography around fifteen years later than he did.

He speaks of beginning photography with a Leica M2, a camera I bought back in my early years in photography in 1977, though by then my copy was something of an antique, and of course he was working as we almost alll did, in black and white. He learnt to work quickly and unobtrusively, moving close into situations with a 21mm lens, and saying “I never ask permission to take photographs … except for portraits”, using the depth of field of the ultra-wide angle to avoid the need to focus.

In that early work – like most photojournalists of the era – he worked entirely by natural light, and says at the time he really didn’t understand flash, when for example he was covering the events in Paris in ’68. Of course then flash outside the studio was crude and somewhat unpredictable, usually with flash bulbs, though electronic flashes were coming into wider use and largely replacing these. I still remember the first occasion on which I spent several minutes working out how to use fill-flash back in the 1980s, something modern cameras and flashes perform automatically (and at much faster shutter speeds.) And if he was then still using that Leica M2, it’s X-sync speed of 1/50th was more than a little limiting.

On the video he also talks about the difference between working with film for magazines in colour – that meant Kodachrome, a film I could seldom afford – in the old days, when after taking pictures you had to send off the film for processing and while travelling he might not see the images until weeks or months later, and today’s immediate digital photography, when instead of having a good dinner in the evening you might be up to the early hours working in front of a computer. It’s something I find it hard to adapt to, refusing to file without properly editing my pictures on a large screen, though often having that good dinner and a glass or two before finishing the edit.

Students for democracy

After a lengthy rally in a packed Whitehall, so full that police asked the organisers to tell people at the end only to move out in the direction of Trafalgar Square to avoid the danger of people being crushed as the Parliament Street end was so packed, Youth Strike for Climate and other mainly young protesters decided it was time for some more direct action.

It had been a long rally, with speaker after speaker, and the crowd in front of the stage was so packed that I was unable to move through it as I usually do during the more tedious of the speeches. There were some good speeches, and some well-known speakers, but I now find standing in one place for a long time makes my legs start to itch and throb, inflaming my varicose eczema.

So when the Youth Strike moved off, I was more than happy to follow them, though I did hope they would not move too far. There were other groups that marched as well as those I was with, some going into the West End, but fortunately these marchers went to a rather more convenient place for my journey home.

As they marched up Whitehall, police appeared to be forming a cordon across the top of the street, and they turned right down Whitehall Place, then continuing up Craven Street to The Strand. Police made no further effort to stop them, with just a few officers marching with them as they made their way onto Waterloo Bridge and sat down, blocking the south-bound carriageway.

They began their own rally there, and there were several short speeches, but the lure of Waterloo Station just a short distance further on soon proved too great, and I left to go home. As I walked off the bridge, several vans full of police arrived and were doubtless about to attempt to re-open the bridge to traffic, but I’d had enough.

More pictures Students March to Defend Democracy.

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.

Democracy under threat

Democracy in this country is certainly not perfect, but what we have is the result of hundreds of years of history, of the fight for power between the monarchy and a parliament which has long represented the interests of the rich and powerful. An early victory along the road came with Magna Carta, when the barons who had spent the night just a few hundred yards from where I now live, forced King John to sign a document that outlined some basic freedoms and the principle that the monarch was subject to the laws of the land.

It wasn’t a document that did a great deal for the peasants or the serfs, though two years later another charter by Henry III did restore some of the rights of free men which had been appropriated following the Norman invasion.

Despite the rise in the twentieth century of the Labour movement, our democracy remains one that largely protects and serves the interests of the rich and powerful. And although theoretically we are all equal under the law, in practice this has never been the case. And although the constraints and enforcements are generally more subtle than in most countries we are still a feudal country in many ways, with power still residing in the ownership of land, including huge areas by the descendants of those Runnymede barons, as well as the ownership of media. And occasionally the monarchy and its agents still bites – as Dr David Kelly’s staged suicide shows.

Much of the more recent amelioration in areas such as worker’s rights has of course come from our membership of Europe, driven by countries which had the sense to behead their royalty or lost them in wars. There is a huge irony in the continual parroting by some working class Brexiteers that Brexit is “taking our country back“. It is – but giving it back to the rich.

Boris Johnson’s government is a part of this process of restoring control to wealthy elites, taking power away from Parliament. The government tried to close down debate on leaving Europe without a deal by simply shutting down Parliament. Eventually the Supreme Court decided that the move was illegal. Now that the Tories have a large majority it seems certain that the powers of the court will be limited to prevent such legal scrutiny occuring again. And already parliament is having its powers to debate any new trade agreements removed.

Although ‘Boris’ cultivates the image of a clown, it’s wrong to think he is one, or indeed that he is really in charge, rather than just a figure-head being allowed to perform by others with far more serous designs. And while some posters featuring the monarchy were amusing, the suggest that they carry that we would somehow be better off if the monarchy was more powerful is misguided. We may well be heading to become an unconstitutional ‘Banana State’ but we would be better fighting for a people’s republic.

More pictures: Defend democracy, Stop the Coup.

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.

Issei Suda (1940-2019)

I first came across the work of Issei Suda at some time in the 1980s, when I used to make regular visits to the few bookshops in London that stocked a reasonable range of photographic books.

I’d got to know Claire De Rouen when she was running the bookshop at the Photographer’s Gallery (though I think we first met at the ICA) and we both were part of a large group of people who might visit the Porcupine for a drink after openings and meetings. From there she moved to run the photographic section of Zwemmers a short distance away – and of course later to set up her own splendid bookshop a little further up the street on the opposite side. The shop, above a bookmakers (not as often said a sex store), continued after her death, I think aged around 80, though she always seemed so much younger, in 2012 but just wasn’t the same without her and it closed in 2017.

Whenever I went into the bookshop we would have a talk and share our latest enthusiasms in photography – and if the shop wasn’t too busy these were sometimes rather long conversations which always ended in me buying at least one of the books she had enthused about.

One in particular was Issei Suda’s 1978 monograph ‘Fushi Kaden‘, one volume from a long packed shelf of works published by Asahi Sonorama (and possibly some other Japanese publishers) that I think were unavailable elsewhere in the UK. I couldn’t read most of the text (there is one page in English), but could read the pictures, though they were clearly in a different language.

In the Eye of Photography today is an article The Legacy of Issei Suda (1940-2019) : Human Memory which accompanies ” the first posthumous exhibition in the United States of renowned Japanese photographer Issei Suda who passed away in early 2019″ at the Miyako Yoshinaga gallery, the second show of his work there.

You can see a ‘page-through’ of a later edition of his work, ‘Issei Suda – Fushikaden‘ by PhotoBookStore UK on Vimeo. It’s a different sequence to the book I have and I think rather more pictures, though many of them are the same. The hands turning the book sometimes get in the way, and at times some pages escape scrutiny, but it gives a good general impression.

You can also read a scholarly paper about the work,

Archiving the Spirit: Suda Issei’s Fushi Kaden and “Essential” Japan by Ross Tunney in Trans-Asia Photography Review – here is a short quote from what is an interesting discussion:

Suda has nonetheless suggested a sense of native experience in two ways: first, by evoking a sense of natural association to aesthetic practice in his subjects; and second, by fashioning these same subjects into static signs that reflect a putatively timeless and uniquely Japanese aesthetic.

On the Moor

It was August Bank Holiday, the last Monday in the month, and I thought vaguely about going up to photograph the carnival in Notting Hill as I’ve done in many previous years. But only rather vaguely; I used to revel in the loud music and the crowds, feeling the ground and my whole body vibrating to the powerful bass, dancing along with the crowds by the sound systems and Mas bands.

River Colne, Staines Bypass from the sluice for the River Ash

But more recently, though I still get a thrill from carnival I also get tired rather quickly, and soon find myself wanting to go home or anywhere to enjoy some peace and quiet. And since I left regular employment to go full time into photography, Bank Holidays have lost the attraction they used to hold. I’m my own boss and can take any day off, and am more likely to be working on them and weekends than on weekdays.

Bank Holidays have often become times for us to go on overlong country walks, taking advantage of the earlier times we can get the lower ‘Super Off-peak Fares’ on our local trains to get to our starting point. But this time both Linda and myself were hobbling a little – I’d been on my feet too long taking photographs over the previous week and she was still suffering from a minor bike accident, and, as she reminded me, there was plenty to do in house and garden.

I can’t quite remember what that plenty was, or how much or probably little I did of it, but by mid-afternoon we were both of us ready to give up and go out for a short local walk. It turned out to be a little further than either of us anticipated, having forgotten quite how long taking the path we did would commit us to, and what we had intended to be a couple of miles turned out to be five, with the last two or three becoming rather painful. But at least it was a fine day.

Staines Moor is an oddly interesting place. Dead flat apart from the ant hills and a man-made lump once part of a rifle range. Continously grazed for at least a thousand years but not ploughed, a SSSI. Part of a number of areas of common land which used to surround Staines, though the part our house backs on to missed out on registration. There were fights and riots when parts here were enclosed, with rancour continuing into the early years of last century over the Lammas. And fights which still continue over gravel raising, which has taken place over much of the area – and gravel companies who own the moor and have worked around its edge certainly still have their eyes on it. It’s a curiously quiet place surrounded by noise from the M25, the Staines Bypass and aircraft climbing or descending to its neighbour Heathrow. A flat area with on two sides the long sheep-grazed flanks of giant reservoirs.

Our walk took us beside or past four of the rivers of Staines – and just briefly close to home by the other two, the Thames and Sweep’s Ditch. The four are all streams of the Colne – the main river, the Ash, Bonehead Ditch and the Wraysbury River. We also twice crossed the Staines Aqueduct built in the early years of the 20th centruy to take water from the Thames at Wraysbury to Staines and Hampton, still present though at least partly replaced by a 2.4m diameter tunnel in 1960-63. It was responsible for considerable flooding in Staines in 2014, overflowing into the Ash.

The moor is still grazed, though rather less intensively than it used to be. We live on the wrong side of Staines to have grazing rights, and in any case came too late to the area to register for ‘farrens’ in 1965. So none of those horses or cows in the pictures are ours.

Too many more pictures at Staines Moor.

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.

LGBTQ+ in Poland under threat

Poland has a long history of tolerance, with homosexuality only being criminalised by occupying powers (most recently during the second world war), and consensual same-sex acts were decriminalised under the Penal Code of 1932 with the age of consent being set at 15.

But Poland is also in many respects a deeply conservative country, with a 95% Roman Catholic population. Many basic human rights are still denied in Poland, and various EU directives on equal treatment get ignored as “unconstitutional”. Amnesty, quoted by Wikipedia, in 2015 concluded that “the LGBTI community in Poland faces widespread and ingrained discrimination across the country” and that “Poland’s legal system falls dangerously short when it comes to protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people and other minority groups from hate crimes”.

Things have got succesively more difficult since the Law and Justice (PiS) party came to power, becoming a majority government in the 2015 elections. Their campaign in the 2019 elections was strongly around opposition to gay rights, and several cities and provinces covering most of south-east Poland issued declarations of ‘ LGBT free zones’, later amended to be called ‘LGBT ideology-free zones’. In December December 2019, the European Parliament voted by over 4 to1 to condemn the over 80 LGBTI-free zones in Poland.

One small photographic problem was with a large chalk rainbow which the protesters had drawn in front of the protest. Showing it all in a picture that made sense was not easy. Even using the full-frame fisheye lens it was difficult.

A view from one side was perhaps an improvement, and the rainbow umbrella certainly helped.

The event was a strong expression of solidarity with the Polish LBGTQ+ community, and included speeches by Peter Tatchell, Nicola Field of Lesbians and Gays Support The Miners and Weyman Bennett of Stand Up to Racism as well as by Polish Rainbow in UK.

More at Solidarity with Polish LGBTQ+ community.

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.

Brexit

I suppose I should say something about Brexit. It’s a topic I’ve tried hard to avoid since the referendum. It’s a disaster we’ll just have to live with, at least until the nation comes to its senses and demands we rejoin Europe. Or perhaps that the whole world situation changes in ways that make the whole debate irrelevant.

Not that I’m a big fan of the European institutions, but we have gained enormously from our membership of the EU in so many ways, while managing to negotiate extremely favourable terms – which we won’t be able to regain when we re-apply. And the EU will have changed in many different ways during our absence without us having been able to have our say.

According to the Free-Find search on My London Diary there are 31 references to Brexit on the site, between June 2016 and Jan 2020. It probably isn’t entirely accurate and may ‘double count’ some occurrences, but it gives a fairly good idea of how much I’ve photographed related stories. The pictures here are a fairly random selection of the many I’ve taken in that three and a half years.

I did cover the large anti-Brexit protests that took place in London, but many times as I’ve wandered through Westminster to other events I’ve come across Steven Bray and his SODEM protests, just occasionally stopping to take photographs.

Rather less frequently I’ve met Brexiteers, and taken photographs. At times they have been rowdy and obnoxious and I occasionally felt personally threatened. I also photographed them behaving in extremely threatening ways towards Bray and also to Anna Soubry – which resulted in probably the only sales to newspapers of my Brexit-related pictures.

Brexit of course was not really about Brexit. For many of those who voted leave it was a protest vote about feeling neglected by government and powerless. Fears about immigration obviously played a part – though more so in areas with relatively few immigrants than in cosmopolitan London. A feeling that those in Westminster didn’t understand what was happening outside and didn’t much care – which remains undoubtedly true. A disillusion with the state of politics, enlarged by the war on Iraq and the 2008 crash. For those who drove the leave campaign a desire to keep their tax havens and weaken human rights and laws which protect workers and thus restrict profits.

Since it’s largely this latter group who will be leading our negotiations with Europe and with the rest of the world I think we who aren’t in the top percent or so of the most wealthy are in for a pretty raw deal over the next few years. I’m fortunate enough, though certainly not rich to be reasonably financially insulated against their worst, but I fear for the poor, the disabled, the sick, the homeless, refugees, asylum seekers…

Of course leaving is now a done deal, and there is little that can be done other than hope that our negotiations are carried on rather more sensibly than seems likely. The arguments over Brexit have been a tremendous distraction over the past three years from so many other important issues which perhaps can now be fought.

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.