Twenty years ago today on 3rd November 2001 I wrote:
the trade justice parade was a serious event but also we were having some fun. the world trade organisation isn’t at all amusing, but i loved the t-shirt that said ‘wto – unsuitable for anyone with a conscience.
giant pound signs, balloons, a hug fat cat, the wto dragon, pirates and everyone made it an event to remember.
speakers included naomi klein (author of ‘no logo’) and sergio cobo from mexico.
My London Diary
And with the article I posted the two black and white images shown here. But I think most of the pictures I took of the parade were in colour, taken on colour negative film. But the only work I was putting in to a picture library back then was in black and white – and then still 8×10″ prints. There was still greater demand for black and white, and some of the pictures I took in colour I printed as black and white. The library would have taken colour, but mostly they worked with colour transparencies.
But I had recently bought a scanner with which I could scan colour negative film and it had software that could produce positive results with something like the correct colours. The results were not great and seemed to accentuate the faults in the negatives and exaggerate flare. The results were certainly not of professional quality as you can probably see – even after I have improved the pictures in Lightroom.
A year after I made these pictures I bought my first DSLR and things changed, though it took a while for the library and some other outlets to shift to accept digital files, and for a little while I was still taking black and white film for the prints they wanted as well as digital colour. But things changed quite rapidly to an all-digital world.
Going back to the negatives I’m sure I could now make much improved digital versions than these by ‘camera scanning’ – using a DSLR to photograph them and then Negative Lab Pro software to convert them to positives. It’s good news for those of us with archival material on colour negative film. But I can see no reason at all for wanting to take film again when digital produces so much better results with much less hassle.
The issues people were protesting about in the Trade Justice Parade are still very much with us – and in the UK the government last week passed yet another act hastening the privatisation of our NHS, while many of the same issues that were brought up by the protest are behind the failures to deal effectively with climate change. The huge greed for consumption and wealth of a small minority of the ultra-rich underlie both; they are not ‘high net worth’ but ‘high global liability.’
Tags: 2001, colour negative, GATT, health, London, march, Naomi Klein, NHS, peter Marshall, protest, scans, Trade Justice, WTO, WTO dragon