March for me went out with a very busy day, covering three protests in London, but for once they were fairly well-spaced across the day, even giving me time for a short rest (and a couple of beers with another photographer) before rushing to the final location.
Disarm the National Gallery was my starting point, where a team of ‘artists’, each with paint-stained smock, black beret and moustache (optional for the women), palette and easel painted a single letter of the slogan in a long row in front of the National Gallery. I’d been there earlier in the year when activists from the Campaign Against the Arms Trade had tried to run into the gallery when they were hosting a dinner for VIP guests to the DSEi Arms Fair in London (see Arms Unfair 4), and on this occasion the gallery was taking no chances of a repeat and had shut their main entrance on the portico overlooking Trafalgar Square. Today’s protest was quiet and entirely orderly and drew the attention of the public, including those in the long queue to enter the gallery by a small and easily guarded lower door, but it was hard to find a way to photograph it except for the obvious.
On My London Diary in Disarm The National Gallery you can see a few variations on this. It wasn’t too easy to get a picture like this, mainly because this area is actually a busy walkway, and it really wasn’t possible to work from a great enough distance to use a normal wide-angle or get a better perspective on the gallery building. When they did it for the second time the easels were a little better placed, and there are other images that are better. But this was I think the concept behind this protest. I was able to get the whole message in by using the 10.5mm fisheye, and then to get the verticals straight by converting to cylindrical perspective. The horizontal angle of view that this gives is something like 147 degrees, while anything more than around 100 degrees gets impossibly stretched at the edges with rectilinear perspective.
There was plenty of time to take pictures, though I had to be careful to keep out of the way of the people from CAAT who were videoing the event – except when they decided to video me photographing. So I could take pictures of the artists painting and other things that were happening, although it was hard to get away from a sameness in the images with almost everyone taking part being in the same uniform and doing the same things.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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