Re-photo

Twenty-five years ago people living close to the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India woke up in the middle of the night coughing and vomiting and began to flee for their lives. Around 3000 died that day and perhaps 8000 in the next 3 days, a death toll that has now reached around 20,000. Probably half a million were exposed to the deadly cloud of gases from the factory, and as it hugged the ground, children were at even greater risk. Twenty five years on, there is still around a death a day directly attributable to the leak,  and pollution leaking from the plant continues to pollute drinking water, leading to around ten times as many birth defects in the area as would normally be expected.

Bhopal was not an accident.   Although it’s exact time and scale could not have been predicted, the disaster was the inevitable consequence of cost-cutting decisions made by Union Carbide management. It was cheaper to cut the plant maintenance so that the safety systems no longer worked, cheaper to leave the toxic material (it was no longer being used)  in a site surrounded by half a million people than to dispose of it safely, cheaper not to train staff properly or inform them of the risks, cheaper to cut corners.

Wet pavements give a more interesting foreground

You can read a little more about Bhopal in my feature on Demotix, which reports a memorial service held on December 2, 2009 in a rather damp Trafalgar Square, organised by the Bhopal Medical Appeal.

Photographically the main problem yesterday was the weather. It was raining as I left home for the run to the station (that’s run using feet, not as in school run – and only necessary because I never quite get organised in time for the five minutes or so walk) and about 50 yards down the road I remembered I hadn’t put my umbrella back in my camera bag – it’s generally a fairly vital accessory in London, but there was no time to go back.

Fortunately the downpour only really got fully into gear as I came down the footbridge and into the ticket office, but as I sat on the train and it battered against the windows I wondered if the event might be rained off and my journey wasted.  It cleared to just a little light rain  more or less as I arrived at the square, and although the light was pretty low and there were plenty of puddles the umbrellas and the reflections on the wet paving stones perhaps improved some of the pictures.

And I didn’t get too wet, although one or two pictures were lost due to raindrops on the UV filter which protects my lens. As usual I kept a decent-size microfibre cloth in a plastic bag in a pocket and wiped the front of the filter fairly obsessively to try and keep it clear.  Probably I should have resisted the urge to economise and gone for a more expensive chamois leather, but at least with the microfibre I don’t have to worry about producing it while photographing animal rights activists.

Umbrellas may keep people dry, but they also put their faces into deep shade, especially if the umbrella is dark.  So flash became pretty essential on many of the pictures to put some light under them.  I still can’t quite work out how the camera and flash modes interact with the Nikon D700and SB800, and I think there is a little bug in my camera (perhaps that same one that occasionally produces random heavy underexposure and thinks I have that elusive f0.0 lens.)  And I forget to wait long enough for the flash to recharge far too often – as always. Sometimes of course it helps to have this kind of unintentional flash bracketing.

The wet pavements did mean that the idea of people getting down on the ground draped in white sheets to represent shrouded bodies wasn’t practical – but perhaps they were easier to photograph standing up.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 12:23 pm and is filed under My Own Work, Political Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.