Climate Change

Yesterday I went to Shepperton for a carol service in the shade of the reservoir next to the studios, and then on to dinner a few yards down the road. Several times during the evening I thought of Shepperton’s most famous twentieth century resident, the late J G Ballard, and wondering how his dystopian vision could fit into this rather cosy corner of suburbia.

I particularly thought of his vision of a flooded world, and of the perils of global warming and the failure of will of almost every nation around the world to get to grips with the issue at Cancun. The notable exception was Bolivia, and at the annual Campaign Against Climate Change march and rally a few days earlier I had photographed Maria Souviron, the Bolivian Ambassador to the UK, speaking.

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Maria Souviron, the Bolivian Ambassador to the UK

At Cancun we saw an agreement, but it was very much an agreement for the richer countries to continue more or less business as normal, and one that even were its best hopes realised would still produce an unacceptable climate warming. It was an agreement to lift the foot off the accelerator slightly when what is urgently needed is a change to reverse gear.

De-growth isn’t really a word in English, and certainly not an idea in conventional economic thinking, but an idea that we need to embrace for our civilisation to have more than a very limited future.

© 2002 Peter Marshall.
Bush in bed with the Esso tiger in March 2002  – the wheels fell off on Westminster Bridge

I’ve photographed these annual marches and other demonstrations by the Campaign Against Climate Change since they began – and then I was still using film and mainly black and white. And although I could very much sympathise with Caroline Lucas when she said she hoped we wouldn’t need to be here again next year, I also felt it was both highly unlikely that our Lib-Con government was going to completely change its spots and make our protest unnecessary – and that it is an event I’m always keen to photograph.

I was glad I wasn’t the official photographer in Hyde Park, perched up in a cherry picker what seemed a very long way above the crowd lining the numbers 2030 in Hyde Park – the date that the protest was calling for Britain to be a zero carbon country. There is a long history of such overhead shots, and they do still sometimes attract the attention of the media, though personally I find them very boring. It looked very chilly up there and I don’t have a great head for heights, and would have  been shaking from both fright and cold.

I’m pleased too that I can’t see myself in the official photo, though I was certainly there somewhere, taking pictures while standing in one of the lines while the others were waving towards the camera.

© 2010, Peter Marshall

You can just make out a pink pixel where these guys were jumping up, and though you can see the white suits of the group below, the pants don’t appear to be visible.

© 2010, Peter Marshall

Of course there were also more – and often rather better opportunities for pictures while the march was forming up and also during the march, and you could actually read the text on the banners and placards.

© 2010, Peter Marshall

© 2010, Peter Marshall

And while it was just possible to recognize from some of the distant buildings on the horizon that the ‘2030’ image was taken in London, it was just a little more obvious in some of the pictures I took later!

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Climate Rush in the march at Parliament Square

And although Caroline Lucas was apparently not well, she spoke as powerfully as ever and if anything looked healthier than usual while she did so.

© 2010, Peter Marshall

It was a cold and overcast day, and I was generally able to work without flash, but by the time it came for the rally at the end of the march it was beginning to get a little dark, and I needed to use flash. I was standing fairly close to the speakers who were a couple of feet higher on a platform, which was covered with a fairly white roof. The struts you can see are a little ugly, but otherwise it wasn’t a bad background, and I was able to get some bounce from the front of it by aiming the SB800 flash on camera up at 45 degrees.

Later they added a powerful light low down in front of the speakers, giving them a rather ghoulish appearance as well as some nasty shadows from the microphone and stands. Using flash again helped, as well as providing much better colour rendition than this continuous light.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.