Among the old negatives I’ve been scanning over the past week or two are a few from protests, which may perhaps be the first pictures that I took of protests, back in April 1978. Ten years earlier I had been taking part in a great many of the events of that year, mainly in Manchester where I was studying at the time, but had been far too busy marching and occupying to think about taking pictures, and had no money for film. It didn’t help that my camera, a 35mm Halina, had never quite recovered from twenty minutes or so spent on the bed of the lake at Versailles a couple of years earlier, followed by my amateur attempts to clean it. The bladed shutter would sometimes stick open and the shutter speed was in the hands of the rust god.
I’d continued going to protests, though rather less frequently, in the 1970s, but although I’d bought working cameras by then I can find no pictures, either because I took none, or perhaps because I wasn’t pleased enough with them to keep the results. By then I was keeping down costs by bulk-loading black and white film from 100ft cans and doing in all my processing, mixing up developers from large bottles of hydroquinone, metol and other ingredients, and printing in my kitchen with a cheap folding Russian enlarger. It was a good learning experience, but much of that early work ended in the bin for various reasons.
Things really are much easier with digital, and rather cheaper. Learning the old way wasn’t any better for being harder, and those old-timers who think it is somehow better to learn photography using black and white film in manual cameras are clearly deluding themselves. Learning with digital is cheaper and faster, though which is better is a matter of how and what you learn from it rather than if you use digital or film. But I certainly did it the hard way.
In 1978 the equipment I took the the protests with me would have included a buggy with a son approaching two and a wife, along with Olympus OM1 (and possibly an OM2 body.) Unless I meant to take colour as well as black and white I probably left the OM2 at home, so the OM1 could hang around my neck, with a couple of spare lenses in jacket pockets or a small ex-army shoulder bag, along with a Weston Master 5 exposure meter. Then, no serious photographer would ever leave the house without an exposure meter, and particularly if you used transparency film, you needed the Weston with it’s weird white plastic Invacone to take incident light readings, waving it in the air like a wizard’s magic wand before every exposure. The Weston was a great piece of kit, workmanlike and with no battery to run out, but with an Achilles heel, its meter needle going over a large and highly legible scale visible through the thinnest and most fragile glass window imaginable. After I’d paid good money to have this replaced half a dozen times I saw sense, removed the broken fragments and glued a suitably cut thin sheet of perspex in its place.
The images on these early sheets in my negative files come from two protests in 1978, but unlike now when we have EXIF data, including dates and times, I can’t tell you a great deal about them that isn’t actually recorded in the images. Probably I had a few more details in a diary at the time, though I never felt it necessary to record things like exposure times and aperture – like most other photographers at the time I took a rough guess when photography magazines asked for such things.
Most of these early images are from one of several rallies in Trafalgar Square organised by Friends of the Earth (FoE) and supported by other groups against the re-processing of nuclear waste at Windscale. Estimates for the number who marched from Marble Arch to the rally on 29 April 1978 vary from around 12,000 to 30,000; it was an entirely peaceful event and the protesters dispersed without incident. A little earlier I had also take a few pictures at a Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF) rally in Hyde Park.
While now we are used to seeing results immediately, it would often take me several weeks at that time to actually get around to developing the films and then to contact print them. I was working full-time as a teacher and few of my images got published, and then only in magazines some time after the events. Sometimes one film contained images from several events if I had not used one of my cameras much – and I would seldom take more than 30 or 40 pictures at any event.
Placards are vital to make clear the object of the protest, though some are clearer than others.
Signing petitions, then as now was an important part of many protests. I think the hand with the pencil and the white forms in front of the dark coat on the top edge of the frame was a deliberate framing decision and not just chance:
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
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