MI6 HQ at Vauxhall, 2007
Many years ago, my wife had to sign the Official Secrets Act, a curious practice that has no legal effect, since as it is a law we are all bound by its provisions. But by now it is common knowledge that the building curiously designed by Terry Farrell (it always makes me think of Lego) on the banks of the Thames at Vauxhall Cross is the HQ of MI5, and as such has starred in several films and numerous photographs. But it still worries me a little when I take photographs of it, and carrying a camera and taking pictures around it can still arouse the interest of police and security, and on one previous occasion I’ve found myself being fairly obviously followed around while doing so, and another time told by police not to photograph near the entrance.
But now in some respects things about MI5 are more in the open, and police saw no problems when the Save Shaker Aamer campaign decided to hold a protest outside the building after it emerged that one possible reason that the US authorities have yet to release him from Guantanamo was that MI5 had been feeding them lies about him. Aamer, a London resident whose family live a mile or two away from the MI5 building, was cleared for release long ago when George Bush was president, and again under Obama, but is still held there, still being routinely beaten by guards, and currently on hunger strike with violent force-feeding. Kept there because of the evidence he would give of torture by the US authorities and of the part MI5 played in this.
I arrived as the participants were getting into their orange jumpsuits in a railway arch opposite MI5, and was asked what I would like them to do. This isn’t usually the way I work, but I have to confess I did suggest to them it would be a shame not to make use of the footbridge we were more or less next to, but after that I left it up to them. I’m not in the business of art-directing.
I’ll be very glad when the US finally closes Guantanamo, though I don’t think it can ever recover from the shame of this blot on human rights. But at least it can bring the injustice to an end. But I’ll be particularly glad as a photographer not to have to deal with the problems of those bright fluorescent orange jump suits, which overexpose and lose detail. I’ve tried various ways to deal with them, including using special ‘untwisted’ or ‘invariant’ profiles in Lightroom, but they are still difficult. For this event, processing the images in a rush, I mainly relied on burning in the orange (the colour shifts to yellow with over-exposure and gets redder when underexposed), sometimes with a small reduction in vibrance or saturation, feeling that the unnatural brightness might help to make the figures stand out.
For many of the pictures I wanted to use flash to bring out the foreground figures, which in some pictures were in shadow, and this caused some problems with the laminated placards., which can reflect light strongly back towards the camera. They can do this with available light also, and occasionally I have to ask people to angle them a little differently, but the effect is harder to spot when using flash, except by checking on the camera back. Uneven lamination is also a problem. giving small rise to hotspots which are tricky to tone down in Lightroom.
These were pictures of both the protesters and of the building outside which they were protesting. For this reason, mostly the pictures were taken either from the opposite side of the road or in the fairly wide central reservation, where the 16mm still let me include much of the building, if with quite a large tilt. I wanted to correct the verticals for some images, but hadn’t always managed to get a wide enough view to do so without cropping essential elements.
Where some direction could have produced stronger images is when the protesters formed a line to walk across to the MI5 entrance. I can imagine in a film an event such as this looking much more dramatic, but in real life people don’t keep in line, they hang back, look every direction except towards the camera (except when you want them to look away) and so on. But the clichés of cinema are the clichés of cinema and I’ve no real wish to perpetuate them; reality is more messy but more interesting.
Outside the gates – where the letter (note to protesters – please write the name and address on letters in big bold letters!) was predictably refused on security grounds – was a good opportunity to work with the 10.5mm (and later Fisheye-Hemi.) Just as the protest finished another photographer arrived, having almost missed the event and began immediately to start arranging protesters for his pictures. It was a good time to leave.
Stop MI6 Lies About Shaker Aamer
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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