‘You bulldozed my village … the whole world is watching’ ‘De-List Vedanta.’‘
It took quite a few tries before I got everything how I wanted it for this picture. I could have speeded things up by directing things a little, but that would have meant crossing what is for me a vital line. But the poster, the banner and the placard here sum up what this protest outside the London Office of mining company Vedanta – was about.
Of course I took pictures in which the people involved feature more prominently, including CEO Anil Agarwal himself with blood scattered across his face on the end of the banner, as well as a forthright comment about him on a poster held by an Indian activist – and more at De-List Vedanta from London.
It was a fairly animated protest, but I couldn’t find anything very different to photograph. I had to leave after around an hour to go to the next event I wanted to cover, at Broadcasting House, around a quarter of an hour’s walk away, which was due to start at 2pm. I arrived more or less on time, to find a few police and an empty pen set up for the protest. Shortly after the first protester arrived, and after another half hour or so there was a protest to photograph, if still a fairly small one, against the bias at the BBC against Palestine, and in particular their complete failure to report the hunger strike by two Palestinians held without charge or trial in Israeli prisons and the assault on one of them in the courtroom.
You can see the other protesters and read more about it at BBC Ignores Palestinian Hunger Strikes.
I’d done all I could think of there by around 2.30pm, and wanted to find out where I could meet one or other of four or five walks that were taking place that afternoon marking the 11th anniversary of the illegal US prison camp at Guantanamo bay, mirroring the routes by which five men (or rather four men and a boy) had reached there, visiting the embassies of all of the countries who had colluded in their illegal rendition by the US. I’d missed the start, and the routes hadn’t been published, but I had the mobile numbers of the walk leaders for the two I was most interested in. Unfortunately neither were answering their phones.
So I was kind of looking for a needle in London’s haystack, but I had a few clues. I knew where they had started – one at the Pakistan and the other at the Afghanistan embassy – and I’ve visited most of the embassies in London at some time or other. I knew there were an awful lot of them in the area around Belgrave Square, so I took a bus to Hyde Park Corner and walked there. No sign of anyone there, so I thought I’d wander up to the Pakistan embassy. Again blank. I realised then that I was close to the Ecuadorian embassy, so took a short detour to visit the daily afternoon vigil there and talk to the small group and take a few pictures – Assange Supporters Continue Embassy Vigil.
Finally as I walked away towards the French embassy on Knightsbridge at last I saw some orange suits in the distance and ran to meet the group of a dozen or so tracing Shaker Aamer’s illegal rendition – and on their way to Belgrave Square.
I tried to get a little echo of ‘Abbey Road’ as they crossed the square, but without actually posing people to copy it closely. In Rendition Routes to Guantanamo you can read the letter they tried to deliver to the Turkish embassy (and they did give a copy to the Portuguese embassy) which makes clear what illegal rendition entailed.
By this time I was a little cold and tired, and I left the walkers who (like me) were going on to the US embassy for a vigil there and took a bus to one of my favourite London pubs not too far from there to sit down with a drink for half an hour in front of a warm open fire – and do a little editing of my pictures in camera. Then it was off to the US Embassy for my final event of the day, Guantánamo – 11 Years of Illegal Detention.
It had been a long and tiring day for me, longer than I like to work now, and the pictures at the last event weren’t among my better examples. But although I was pleased to get on the bus and start my hour or so journey home, my day was not of course finished.
When I got home I still had to edit the pictures, do a little post-production, keyword and caption them and send them off, though I had to eat first, and it was well past midnight that I finished, even though I left writing the stories to go with the work until the following morning. Few of the things I photograph make urgent news, and I’ve decided to keep to my old-fashioned slow working methods rather than join the modern world and take a laptop with me when I’m photographing and send in pictures directly after I take them, but I try to get them in the same day. By the time I went to bed it was around 14 hours since I’d left home to travel to the first protest.
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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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