For once there is some good news to report about one of the events that I photographed and supported. On Friday 6 May I photographed six Iranian men who had been on hunger strike for a month, three outside Lunar House in Croydon and the other three in Shoreditch when they came to protest outside the houses of Parliament and the nearby Home Office building, along with around 50 supporters.
My own report on the event, Iranians Hunger Strike against Deportation to Torture And Death, went on Demotix that evening, and on My London Diary a couple of days later, and I gave permission for the group supporting the hunger strikers to make use of some of my pictures to publicise their cause. Every little helps, but it was the determination of these men (of course driven by their desperate position) that impressed me and finally the UK Borders Agency to agree to reconsider their cases and their evidence, and I was very pleased to read a report in the Croydon Guardian (CG) on May 11 to that effect.
To most of us it seems insane to suggest that it can be safe to send anyone – or at least anyone except a card-carrying Muslim fundamentalist – back to Iran. Certainly not anyone who is linked in any way to the Iranian protest movement. Though the CG story attracted several comments apparently from people who knew nothing about the case and had failed to read what the CG had actually reported, but just saw it as an opportunity to air a little racist anti-immigrant bile.
Photographically I wasn’t entirely pleased with what I had taken, and felt I had missed one obvious image. Three of the hunger strikers had stitched up their lips with nylon fishing line, and really I hadn’t gone in for a close enough image to show this. Possibly the reason was that I was using just a single camera body, the D700, with the 16-35mm Nikon and the 28-300mm Sigma, as I’d been out earlier with some of my family and didn’t want to carry more.
The Sigma does focus reasonably close, and I took a number of fairly tight head shots in which the nylon line is clearly visible, but I could (and should) have got closer, even though the lens that would really have let me do the job well, the Nikon 60mm macro, was back on my desk at home.
Although my usual kit covers most eventualities, I try to think before I leave home if I might need any of the many bits and pieces that I don’t usually carry. But though I might have wanted to take the macro, I also wanted to travel lighter than usual because of the other things I was doing that day.
More on the story and more pictures at Iranians Hunger Strike Against Deportation on My London Diary.