Anonymous: Obama Bin Lying!
I was happily photographing a group in ‘Anonymous‘ masks holding a banner ‘Obama Bin Lying!’ in the garden of Grosvenor Square in front of the US Embassy, and was taking a few rather closer images of the masked figures when I realised there was a lot of noise coming from the No War In Iran & Syria protest on the other side of the hedge closer to the Embassy.
Looking over the hedge it was clear there was some kind of disturbance, and so I ran towards the gate in the corner of the gardens (it isn’t the kine of hedge you can get over or through) and started to make my way through the crowd to where things were happening. But the crowd was too dense to get through at any speed, even with the kind of experience and facility at doing so that comes with years of experience, and I soon gave up, retraced my steps and went round the other side, where a long packed line of photographers was standing on the edge of a raised flower bed looking down from a few feet on the rally.
Abbas Edalat speaking – and the Free Iran protesters wanted to put their view too
A noisy argument with some pushing and shoving in the crowd
I managed to squeeze a lens through between two of them and see where things were happening and took a couple of pictures, but I wasn’t going to get the kind of pictures I wanted from there. So I apologised to the two photographers on each side and went between them and lowered myself down the three or four feet from the wall (rather carefully, as my knee was still painful from a fall a week earlier) and through a very thin hedge and around some metal barriers into the crowd.
Once down in among them, it was hard to see what was happening, and probably the best guide was the noise, and I squeezed through to find a shouted confrontation taking place between a man who I later found was from the Free Iran Green Movement and the Stop the War Stewards. Things were so noisy it was hard to hear what they were shouting about, with almost everyone around except me and a couple of other photographers joining in. I was getting pushed around a lot and it was hard to keep in positions where I could see to take pictures – and a few times I had to lift the camera up above my head or push it out in front of me and hope, but mostly I was still working with the camera to my eye. As the people were getting pushed back, I had to move around in front of the way they were going and find new positions from which to photograph, and much of the time my view was blocked by what seemed rather randomly moving bodies.
Iranian Greens argue with Stop the War stewards
Iranian Greens stop their ‘Free Iran’ banner being taken away from them
Eventually three rather bemused constables waded into the crowd and tried to sort things out, though like me I think they had great problems knowing what was going on. Eventually they managed to bring the Iran Greens who had been fighting to keep their Free Iran banner out from the protest and let them mount their own in the area usually kept free directly in front of the embassy.
The Met start to get things sorted out
Perhaps those photographers who kept up on the wall got a better overall view, but I doubt if they got much in the way of pictures. It’s often a tricky decision whether to get down and in the middle of things when they get a little heated, and a large DSLR with a flashgun stuck on top is just a little fragile. But despite the anger that some of the protesters were showing towards each other, I didn’t feel any of it was directed towards me, and I felt little danger.
What is always difficult in crowds like this is getting sufficient distance – even with a 16mm – to show enough of the scene. If you try to move back a little, then protesters or other photographers will fill the gap. All of the images I took in the crowd were made with the 16-35mm on the D700, mostly in the 16-24mm range.
I was photographing this incident for around 8 minutes and took around 180 frames, all as single exposures. Had I been using film, I would have had to withdraw from the action a few times to reload, and would have taken considerably fewer images – and probably missed the better moments. Of those 180, almost all are reasonably sharp, thanks both to autofocus and relatively fast shutter speeds as I had the camera at ISO 1000. Exposures varied but were mostly around 1/200 f5.6, but some as low as 1/125. On film I’d have been working at ISO 400, again probably working at f5.6 to give sufficient depth of field even with the wide angle, and the slower speeds would certainly have meant fewer sharp images.
It was a very confusing event, and I think in my initial account on Demotix I got mixed up a little over who was who, certainly in a later part of my account. Stop the War also seem to me to be a little mixed up over the different views in Iran and Syria, and appear to have sided with the ruling regimes there and be opposed to the opposition groups who are also against military intervention.
Both Syria and Iran give financial and political support to Hezbollah which is widely seen as a resistance movement against imperialism across much of the Arab world (and as terrorists by the West), but both regimes also oppress and commit atrocities against their own populations – news from Syria tells us daily of the protesters killed, and today is the 30th anniversary of the Hama massacre of 1982, which left 100,000 refugees, 60,000 prisoners, 40,000 martyrs, 15,000 missing & 5,000 homeless.
Groups such as the Iranian Green movement are strongly opposed to US attacks on Iran, believing that they would have the effect of strengthening the regime there and keeping it in power for another 50 years. Stop the War appears to have become closely aligned with groups supporting these tyrannical regimes and I think needs as a coalition to walk the more difficult route of uniting all those opposed to the war rather than taking sides.
My London Diary has a longer report on the actual protest, together with more pictures of the event, including more of these scuffles in No War Against Iran & Syria.
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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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