Milena Nova is someone I often meet while photographing protests, and when I saw her outside Westminster Council Offices on Thursday I remembered to ask her if I might use her picture of me on my blog. I have a simple policy about using other people’s pictures, partly a matter of the cautious legalism of my former employers at About.com but more a matter of my respect for copyright law – which protects my own work – and I only use other people’s images with their permission. Earlier I’d posted a link to it – and again in my opinion you never need permission to publish a proper link – but it was a link to her Facebook page and might not have worked for some. So here it is.
Taken just a minute or two after I was hit by a paintball at Oxford Circus. I’m clutching a handkerchief in my hand that I’ve used to wipe a little paint off, but to little effect.
My wife likes this picture, though I’m not quite sure how to take this. Would she like to throw paint at me? I think it is the best that I’ve seen of me in this state, but I’d rather it hadn’t happened. I’m smiling at Milena because she is a friend taking my picture, but I was really pretty fed up. But I wasn’t prepared to give up.
Today I didn’t get anything thrown at me, which was perhaps a bit boring, given that successive Saturdays it has been paint, feathers and flower petals I was wondering what the next member of that series would be. Along with others I did get assaulted by one young man who thought that being one of the stewards on a march gave him the right to push photographers around, but otherwise most people were very friendly. But perhaps more about that later.
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