From Parliament I went to St Paul’s and walked across the footbridge towards Tate Modern to see the next anti-DSEi protest, a ‘bubble-mob’ by Dr Zig and his gang from Wales. The bubbles were truly amazing, and a squally wind drove them at speed once they were released. Made from a suitably magic and secret formula, they seemed to be tougher than the average soap bubble and took on some intense interference colours, particularly against the slate black clouds which were advancing.
Capturing the colours in a photograph doesn’t always seem to be easy and they seem usually to record less intensely than we see them, but I was reasonably happy with a few.
I’d arrived shortly before the end of a bubble session, and while the bubble-makers took a break had time to sit and eat my sandwiches before the heavens opened. Perhaps making bubbles is an effective rain-making ceremony. Fortunately there was shelter at hand under the Millennium Bridge, and we all stood it out there until it eased off enough to make more bubbles.
What was more difficult was making some kind of visual connection between the bubbles and the Arms Fair. The protesters had brought a couple of banners, but neither was particularly easy to include with bubbles in the pictures. Here’s a picture where you can just about make out that the banner says ‘Kids need human rights not cluster bombs‘ but most of the time there were too many people in front of it.
Add kids playing with the bubbles and it gets trickier; here are two of my better attempts.
Eventually I gave up – you can see some more of my attempts at Dr Zig’s ‘Bubbles Not Bombs’ Protest.
I took a bus across Southwark Bridge into the City for the next protest on my list, arriving to find only a small group there wondering why nobody else had turned up. After a quarter of an hour I thought to check the times on my printout from the web site and discovered that we were still 45 minutes early – the time we had read was when people were going to leave from Parliament and the protest was due for an hour later.
I took the chance to rush away to see my Gardens show in St John’s Wood which I had last left with the walls being painted and my prints piled on a table, but had been hung at the weekend, and I needed to get some decent installation views. I didn’t quite have time to get there and back and take the pictures, but thought it wouldn’t matter being just a few minutes late. Then on the way back I just missed a train, and the gap until the next one was several times longer than normal, and the interchange at Kings Cross had me walking at least half a mile underground. Fortunately the protest was still going on when I arrived after running from the station.
It was a very tight location, a narrow pavement with traffic on the road behind me, and I was glad of the 10.5mm which enabled me to include the pavement and the London offices of General Atomics, makers of Predator and Reaper drones. Things got tighter still when UK Drone set up their tableaux photo-opportunity, with ‘dead bodies’ on a target in front of their banner and a woman with a Playstation controller standing in for the remote RAF and USAF pilots in Nevada killing people in Afghanistan.
Again taken with the fisheye, but you can see that the verticals of the buildings, although at an angle have been straightened. Without this partial correction using the Image Trends Fish-Eye Hemi filter plugin for Photoshop, the woman at the left of the image appears too distorted for my taste.
More pictures at Down the Drones City Arms Fair Protest.
