I’m not a great fan of organised photo-calls for several reasons, not least that they are usually rather boring. Of course it’s always useful when people have material that visually represents their protest in some way – so the Murdoch face masks produced by Avaaz were welcome (and for once quite nicely produced, although rather over-saturated, tending to photograph rather too beetroot.)
The people who devise such things, doubtless well trained in PR, seldom seem to have a great visual sensitivity. Their idea of a good photograph would appear to be something like this one.
For me it’s the weakest of all those I took, and the challenge is to try and find something just a little different in these occasions.
The banner was a problem, with so much empty monochrome blue space, and it was difficult to crop it and still retain anything of use. So the obvious thing was to avoid it, and I more or less did so throughout the pictures I took.
The sameness imposed on the image by the identical faces and t-shirts was also a problem, and one I tried to lessen in several ways; it was made easier when a rather different and larger Murdoch puppet headed figure joined the protest. But before that I’d tried various other things, such as finding an actual face among the masks:
adding some wonderful curly blonde hair (and in the background the curly red interloper poster of Rebekah, but I didn’t quite get enough depth of field:)
and I think most successfully finding a viewpoint and grouping that had a clear caption on a placard at the left of the image and a lively grouping of those Murdochs at different scales.
A couple of hundred yards away a real protest was taking place, and I followed the man with the Rebekah poster (who had not been at all welcome with Avaaz) to this, hoping perhaps to see an opporturnity of a picture on the way, but it didn’t happen.
But as you possibly see form the pictures, I was rather happier in the middle of a real protest,
and made use of that Rebekah poster a little more legibly there.
Though there too it seemed that the rather more political protesters didn’t much like the sense of humour it showed.
Coalition of Resistance Picket Murdoch
Avaaz Protest Murdoch At Parliament