I thought about going to celebrate the new nation of South Sudan on Saturday, but felt too tired after photographing a couple of other events in London to go on to do so, and caught the train home instead.
Of course the real celebrations were going on a few thousand miles away in Juba, the capital of this newest of countries, but as I’ve often noted, the whole world comes to London to protest, and also they celebrate here when there is anything to celebrate.
But three weeks ago there was a powerful reminder of some of the problems that Sudan and South Sudan face, with a protest by the London-based human rights movement Nuba Mountains Solidarity Abroad. You can read about it and see more pictures in Solidarity with Nuba in Sudan
The Nuba mountains lie more or less on the border between the two countries, but have not become part of South Sudan. One of the more balanced and informed comments I’ve read on the area puts it like this:
The Nuba, as has been the case for more than 20 years, are fighting for their land and their cultural survival. The fact that their southern allies left them in the lurch by choosing to secede doesnt change that.
The roughly 1.5 million Nuba (not to be confused with Nubians) have a diversity of religion, including Christian, Muslim and traditional faiths (even at times within the same families) as well as around 50 different languages. The Sudanese government, as well as quelling all military opposition in the area aims to create an Islamic state, making Islam the official religion and Arabic the official language. Sudan’s president al-Bashir at the start of the month repeated his orders for the ‘cleaning’ of the area and its conversion into a loyal part of this Islamic state.
Photographically I found it difficult not to concentrate on one young man, with wide open eyes. Though when he was joined by a younger girl with a similar gaze there was strong competition.
The problem in photographing her was the police barriers in front of the protesters, the upper bar of which was just above her eye level. As you can see clearly from the shadow on her forehead and jacket, I was using flash. The SB800 was as usual in the hot-shoe and really needed because the light level was pretty low and things just looked rather dull without it. But I did try a few pictures, including this one:
Skin tone is often an issue, and many of those taking part in the protest had truly beautiful dark skin, and in processing the images rapidly to put on the web I’ve lightened it too much in some pictures.
I had a few exposure problems with some of these pictures, largely because I didn’t realise that I had the D300 set for spot metering. In a picture like the one below, this gives quite different results from the face or the poster the woman is holding, neither of which is appropriate. Of course there is a beautifully clear symbol at the bottom left of the viewfinder image to tell you the metering mode in use, but when you are absorbed in the subject, anything else is easy to miss. Spot (or more pedantically, semi-spot) metering like this is a great tool to have on a camera, but one that requires considered use.
This is also a picture where it was important to have the whole of the message on the poster legible, and I was pleased to find that in this and most of the other images I took at least the key placards were legible. At this event it was easy, as everyone was facing more or less the same way and holding the signs in that direction, and there were plenty of them, unlike some protests where there is little or nothing to tell the viewer what they are protesting about.
This was another London protest ignored by the mainstream media, and I seemed to be the only photographer covering it. Although it’s taken a long time for me to post here, my story and pictures were on Demotix later the same day (I’ve used more or less the same text in the My London Diary feature.) When sometimes I think about taking things easy and stopping reporting on events, it is events like this that might otherwise go unrecorded that keep me going.