Progress at shutting down the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay has been painfully slow, and President Obama’s pledge to close the camp, which has brought shame on the USA has seemed increasingly empty, though not entirely due to him. There can be few thinking Americans who don’t feel setting up the prison was a terrible mistake, and one that has harmed their country’s standing in the world, as well as increasing the risk of terrorism it was meant to combat.
The whole sad record shamed the US in the eyes of most of the world; the tortures approved by the Bush administration both inside Guantanamo and at Bagram and elsewhere – and the still continuing mistreatment there, the illegal renditions to there which also compromised many other Western countries. Many if not most of those taken there had little or no connection with terrorism, but were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, or had enemies who took advantage of US naivety.
But the whole idea was a contradiction, an attempt to impose law by breaking all the laws which govern international conflicts, and one which made far more enemies. It perhaps wasn’t surprising in that it came from a country whose agencies supported and trained many of those now causing it most grief in the Middle East.
I’ve been photographing London protests against Guantanamo for at least ten years, and they still continue, and will do until the last prisoner is released. In recent years a major focus of many of these was to call for the release of the last Londoner held there, Shaker Aamer, a charity worker who lived with his family in south London and was kidnapped in Afghanistan and sold to the US authorities there.
Recently released, Shaker Aamer attended the vigil outside the US embassy along with six other UK former detainees, and it was a great pleasure for me to be able to meet him, speak with him, shake his hand and be hugged by him.
Ahaker had spent almost 14 years inside the prison – after torture by the US in Afghanistan. In Guantanamo he had been subject to further torture and beatings as well as prolonged periods of solitary confinement. There was never any credible evidence against him, and he was cleared for release under the Bush administration, then again when Obama was in power.
He wasn’t release not for anything he had done in Afghanistan, but for what he had seen and heard when he and other prisoners were being tortured. As someone fluent in English as well as Arabic he served as a translator and gave support to many other detainees. He was a witness who could give evidence that would damn both the US and UK security agents who took part in torture – and they kept him inside as long as they could.
Photographically there were the usual problems of working in the darkness in front of the US Embassy; I think it has its own special kind of darkness, with just a few areas of brighter light in front of its aggresively ugly facade, surrounded by a tall fence behind which armed police walk up and down.
I used flash with some images taken with the D810 and the 28-200mm in DX mode – and at the longer focal lengths there was no alternative, but it rather spoils the atmosphere of a candlelit vigil, though there are a few images where I managed to get a good balance.
Mostly I was working with the D700, and as well as using the 16-35mm (at 20mm in the image above), there were also some images for which the 16mm fisheye was invaluable, as in the picture at the top of this post of Shaker Aamer lighting a candle. For that, at ISO3200 and wide open at f2.8, the shutter speed was 1/30s and the file was a few stops underexposed! I was holding the camera out low in front of me as I crouched in front of Shaker.
It would perhaps have been good to have the camera in ‘Live View’, but I think the image would have been too dark to be a great deal of use. And I don’t find it easy to get the camera to take pictures when I want it too when using this mode – it really is rather clunky. So I took a number of frames and hoped. Of course it would be hard to miss the main subject when using the extreme wide view of the fisheye, and I hoped to be able to crop the image (after straightening the verticals with the Fisheye-Hemi plugin).
There is another frame along with many more images from the event at Guantanamo 14 Years on and in some respects it is a better picture, helped by a stop more exposure. But most of the time, Shaker was looking down at the candle he was lighting, and you can’t see his face so well.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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