It’s a while since I wrote much about my pictures from London on My London Diary with other things including my trip to Paris getting rather in the way. But Paris wasn’t the only thing I did in November, and before my trip there I did photograph a few events in London.
The cleaners are continuing their fight for a living wage (and unfortunately I’ve not yet managed to cover there protests at the Barbican.) But I was at the Tower of London on 3 Nov – as you can see in Cleaners Protest at Tower on My London Diary. I’d missed an earlier protest where they had actually gone inside the Tower; this time they just made a token move inside the gates of the site after beginning to protest a few yards away.
The protests certainly get noticed by the crowds of tourists who keep the building open as a tourist attraction, though I don’t think many – if any – actually decided not to visit because of the protest. The picture above appealed to me for several reason, starting with the obvious determination of the man blowing the plastic horn and the red flags in the background. But this was also a protest with very few placards, and the on in this image with the singles word ‘SHAME’ stood out. I spent some time photographing him, trying to get the crown with the EIIR logo also in the image. The cleaners don’t of course actually work for royalty, but are employed by contractors to ‘Historic Royal Palaces’, which itself is an independent charity, though the Tower is still owned by the Queen.
November 5th is of course celebrated in the UK as Guy Fawkes Day, originally a fairly rabidly anti-Catholic event, though I think we now generally are on the side of Fawkes, often referred to as “the only man ever to enter Parliament with honest intentions.” The ‘Anonymous’ movement has adopted the Guy Fawkes mask worn by the mysterious revolutionary ‘V’ in the 1980s graphic novel (and 2005 film) V for Vendetta written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd as it’s trademark (mainly they wear the Warner Bros version of the mask.) In recent days the film, previously censored there, has been shown for the first time in full on Chinese state TV.
The novel was written during the Thatcher years and set at a future date in the 1990s when the UK, after a nuclear war was a fascist police state. Things didn’t quite turn out that way, but sometimes we seem to be going in that direction, and around 2000 Anonymous supporters met in Trafalgar Square, as a part of a worldwide protest, marching to Parliament against austerity, the cuts and the increasing gap between rich and poor, warning the government they need to change. #Operation Vendetta was perhaps a little more tame event than expected, as you can see in Anonymous March to Parliament and certainly lacked the drama of the film. But I was very pleased to have the rather incredible high ISO performance of the Nikon D800E for pictures like that above, even when I was using flash. Some parts of Trafalgar Square can be remarkably dark.
The following day I was busy too, with a small protest outside one of our immigration prisons following the death of one of the men being held there after he was ‘restrained’ by staff. I was shocked to hear that there had not been any police investigation of the death under what seem to be very suspicious circumstances. The police – as you can see in Noisy Demo after Immigration Death – appear to be very much more concerned with preventing protests such as this than with protecting the civil rights of those inside detention centres.
Later in the day I was outside the US Embassy for a US election night protest, Truth, Justice and the American way? about those still held in Guantanamo. Obama had promised before his election to close down the camp, but has failed to do so, and 160 prisoners are still held there, many like British resident Shaker Aamer ‘cleared for release’ but still being held – now for around 11 years.
In parts there was enough light to work without flash (at ISO 3200) but the SB700 also did a good job when required. For once I remembered from the start that I needed to use shutter priority (or manual) setting on the camera with it.
It got plenty of use the following night too, with a chilly open-top bus ride from the City of London where Campaign against Climate Change had been protesting outside the London offices of dirty coal and tea party backers the Koch Brothers before the journey across London for another protest outside the US Embassy – see Stop Fossil Fuel Dirty Money takeover of US.
Finally, on Saturday, I went to the dogs – the fight to save Walthamstow Stadium Continues.
