Lunatic photographers

It’s almost a week since I last wrote a post here, and I’m rather scratching my head to say why. I have perhaps been a little busier than usual, starting with the funeral of the father of one of my friends, where I was appointed official photographer. This isn’t something I’ve done before, and although I did a decent job at the wake, I didn’t feel I really did a job of the actual funeral, too many inhibitions showing themselves.  It would have been easier had it been a burial rather than a cremation, and I found myself very much a mourner rather than a photographer.  The pictures I did take I’ve given to the family, and have decided not to share in public.

Since then I’ve photographed several protests, one very large and some quite small, but all taking time, both to attend and to edit and file work, and I’ve made a resolution to try and keep My London Diary up-to-date – so you can already see the pictures I took yesterday there. Today I’m having some time off because of a minor health problem, though tooth-ache never feels minor. I had to rush to my dentist for an emergency patch-up yesterday, though it will require rather more painful work at a later date, and have time to write now because I’ve had to cancel a couple of things in my diary. Though being still tanked up on pain-killers and feeling a little unsteady probably isn’t the best state to be in charge of a keyboard, it does take my mind off my symptoms, and I started my day looking back at some of the things online I’ve missed over the past few days.

Judging from the pictures I’ve seen on Facebook and elsewhere, one of the biggest photographic events I’ve missed in the past few days was the “super blue blood moon” of January 31st, described by the Telegraph newspaper as a  “a once-in-a-lifetime event“. Except it wasn’t. I saw the moon rising through my window and there was really nothing special about it, and I didn’t bother to pick up my camera. It was the same old moon, a little brighter than sometimes, thanks largely to a clearer than usual atmosphere here, and exactly the same colour as usual.

Of course, London wasn’t the right place to photograph it, as the eclipse which did give it that blood-red colour was over well before the moonrise here. Which didn’t stop a number of photographers from producing (and the papers and web publishing) nice orange or red sunrise pictures, which of course owed more to our atmospheric pollution and perhaps a little Photoshop than the moon.

You can read a long account and watch a video on Peta Pixel of how Michael Tomas  took a series of these pictures showing a moon rising through the skyline of central London 10 miles away from a hill in Richmond Park with a 1000 mm lens, though I have to tell him he didn’t shoot a super blue blood moon, as he was several thousand miles away from a blood moon, with the total eclipse starting at 12.52 and ending at 14.08 and moonrise in London being at 16.55, almost three hours later, and three quarters of an hour after the end of even the penumbral eclipse (which is almost impossible to see.)  It’s still an interesting image and got a remarkable amount of exposure. Though I feel rather sorry for him for thinking this makes it the best photo of his life.

It wasn’t even a true ‘blue moon’, as Diamond Geezer points out in his daily blog for 31st January, the blue moon a name given to the third moon in a single season which had four moons rather than the normal three. On this definition there are no blue moons in 2018, but we do get one on May 18th 2009. But a journalist in 1946 got it wrong, and journalists have been getting it wrong ever since, calling the second moon in any month a blue moon. We get our next one by this definition on March 31st this year.

And it was hardly a ‘supermoon’ either, though it was a little larger than usual (5.9% according to the Hermit Eclipse web site).  The actual perigree (closest approach) was a day earlier. Visually these differences are hardly visible.

Lunar eclipses happen quite frequently – there is a good one due on 20th July 2018, where the total eclipse should be visible at moonrise in London at around 9pm.

But it is instructive to compare Tomas’s real image with the many Photoshopped ones that appear, notably that by Peter Lik, which has been the subject of much discussion, including on FStoppers, but also posted on Peta Pixel. Clearly this is a composite image and the fact that an identical image of the moon appears in another of his pictures makes this beyond doubt.  Perhaps the most mystifying aspect is that only 75% of those who voted in the accompanying poll were sure it was made in Photoshop, though I suspect the other 25% hadn’t watched the video or read the article in any detail.

Lik’s work is obviously very commercially successful, though few believe that his claim to have sold a single copy of a print for $6.5 million in 2014 to be anything more than a publicity stunt, he certainly makes a small fortune providing expensive decor, enough to employ a small team of people working on his images in Photoshop; two of those taking part in the FStoppers discussion revealed that a former employee had hold them he had spent an entire seven days working on one particular image. People could paint these things from scratch in less time than that.

But in the end I don’t have much interests in how Lik’s images are produced; they are simply not worth bothering with. I fail to see anything of interest in them, bad paintings produced with a little aid from a camera and rather more from software, clichés that lack any sense of reality and any meaning.

Another Stop Killing Londoners

Rising Up’s Stop Killing Londoners group (SKL) continued its series of protests against the dangerous level of air pollution in London by a couple of brief road-blocks on one of inner London’s busiest roads the Marylebone Rd, beginning with one at the Baker St junction as many workers were making their way into the station on a Friday evening.

SKL protests are designed to get as much publicity as possible while causing only minimal inconvenience to the public – who like them are at great risk of lung conditions and early deaths because of excessive pollution levels in London air, especially around busy roads such as this. Those taking part include people who had campaigned for years to try and get some action over air pollution, but with very little effect, and they feel that protests such as this will embarrass London’s mayor into taking action – both through coverage in press, radio and TV and in particular if they get arrested and taken to court.

Actions were timed for the early evening partly because there is more traffic on the roads at the rush hour, but also for the very practical reason that most of those taking part are at work during the day time. Later SKL also organised a number of early morning protests before going to work, and I was unable to cover these because of the problems of getting up and travelling in to London in the early morning.

The kind of short hold-ups that SKL protests involve are not unusual on London streets. Any minor accident will cause longer stoppages and road works or building work often lead to much longer queues.  Both through posters and over the PA system they try to let motorists know that they will not be held up for more than a few minutes, but despite this a few drivers get very irate. One on this occasion even tried to use his white van to push the protesters out of the way, and when it became clear this was not going to work threw water from a bottle over them  – and over me as I took his picture.

I usually try not to involve bystanders in my pictures and to concentrate on those taking part in the protest, but once this guy had tried to drive through the protesters (and me) I decided he was fair game. I rather liked the image with reflections through the van window, though perhaps it is too fussy and too arty for editorial use. It did take a lot of work in Lightroom to bring out the different areas of the picture and even out the lighting, and some have thought this was a multiple exposure. It is a single exposure with my camera close to the van window, using the view inside the cab, the reflection in the window and the view through the cab and the front and opposite side window.

As often when unexpected things happen I was a little caught out when he started throwing water at the protesters, with a shutter speed that was more suited to the relatively static protest than action, and quite a few pictures were rather too blurred. And it isn’t easy to keep your camera steady when things start to get thrown at you.  So I only got the picture of him point the bottle at me and instinctively ducked out of the way.

Stop Killing Londoners road block
Continue reading Another Stop Killing Londoners

American History of American Photography

Only Part 1 of Marc Falzon‘s short survey of the history of American photography is currently available (and featured in PDN Pulse), but it’s 8 minutes offers an interesting introduction to the subject, dealing with it through 3 key curatorial figures, Alfred Stieglitz, Minor White and John Szarkowski (part one only deals with Stieglitz) and a few key photographers.

Among those photographers, so far only Timothy O’Sullivan and Walker Evans have been the only to have been looked at in any depth, with a passing mention of a few others.

It’s an introduction that tries to demonstrate what is peculiarly American about American photography and makes some interesting points, while of course minimising or neglecting much European work of the era.

Where it descends to the ridiculous is in suggesting that photographers such as Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson were somehow the product of American advances in the medium and the influence of Stieglitz. What influence there was clearly flowed the other way.

It wasn’t the school around Stieglitz that motivated Walker Evans – except in a reaction which dismissed it as well as the newer modernism of photographers such as Paul Strand, but the vernacular photography of the many unknown American photographers – and the work of Atget which was brought to New York by Berenice Abbott and Julien Levy.

What I find most annoying about this video is however the way that the photographs are shown, generally starting zoomed into a detail and wandering around the image, with only at best a fleeting glimpse of the image as a whole. Framing is so intrinsic to our medium and we need to see and study pictures in their entirety – perhaps occasionally zooming in to view significant details.

Rashan Charles


Rashan Charles’ father (left) stands beside Edson da Costa’s father as he speaks

Like many I watched in horror as a video on social media showed a young black man being held down on the floor of a shop in Dalston by a police officer, with help from another man not wearing uniform (though some reports said he was also a police officer but others describe him as a ‘member of the public’.) According to the police, Rashan Charles became “ill” and was taken to hospital where he died shortly after, though others say he died on that shop floor.


Dianne Abbott MP

There will be an inquest later this year which will perhaps clarify some of the details, though the two men responsible for his death have already been granted anonymity (though I think their names are known to many.) The Independent Police Complaints Commission advised the Met to suspend the officer involved but they refused. The IPPC (now the Independent Office for Police Conduct – IOPC but otherwise much the same) sent a file to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for the police officer to be charged with common assault, but they decided that “the evidential test for a prosecution for common assault is not met. We will therefore not be taking any further action regarding this offence.” Presumably they haven’t seen the video.


Tottenham anti-racist campaigner Stafford Scott speaks for the Charles family

Rashan Charles’ great-uncle Rod Charles, a retired police sergeant with 30 years service with the force and former representative of the Police Federation, has commented that the the force used appears to contravene the official police guidance and described it as “unreasonable, disproportionate, unnecessary and excessive” and that the police failure to explain the purpose for the arrest also appears to be in contravention of the law.

Rashan Charles was one of three young black men who died at the hands of police in the past few weeks, the others being Edson da Costa, who died after arrest in East Ham and Darren Cumberbatch, who died earlier this month after arrest in Nuneaton. People held up pictures of all three men at the protest.

The protest outside Stoke Newington Police Station was organised by Stand Up To Racism, and I was disappointed that no-one from the Movement for Justice who had come in support was allowed to speak, though you can see their large posters in some of my pictures. Also missing was a speaker from the United Families and Friends Campaign (UFFC) which has led the fight for the families or those killed by police and in prisons etc over the last 20 years or so. It seemed a shame that the event represented a sectarian approach rather than uniting the different groups concerned and active in the area. It’s an approach that has also weakened the campaign to get justice for Grenfell Tower.

More at Justice for Rashan Charles.

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Atos still kills


Atos adminster fake tests for PIP – Personal Independence Payments – denying them to many disabled people

DPAC – Disabled People Against Cuts – were out yet again the following day, which was the finale of their week of action for the London World Para Athletics Championships, an event which gives the government a great deal of positive media coverage because of their support for the para-athletes while the media fail to cover their attacks on the many more disabled who are not athletes which discriminate and kill.


Moira Drury “was effectively abandoned without support and income by a glacial and bureaucratic benefits system” She was not well enough to attend a work capability assessment and her benefits were stopped. She had no income for the last seven weeks of her life, and stopping her benefits meant she became liable for full council tax and receiving a bill for almost £2000 was the last straw.

DPAC’s target for this action was ATOS, the company whose proven incompetence and bias lost them the contract for Work Capability Assessments, despite which they are still carrying out PIP (Personal Independence Payment) assessments of the disabled for the Dept of Work and Pensions. It is a clear statement that the DWP doesn’t concern itself with the reliability of these assessments but just wants a system that cuts down the number of people it has to make payments to, regardless of their actual needs – and cares nothing about the hardship or even death that this will cause.

DPAC state that Atos use inadequately trained and qualified staff to produce assessments that are “riddled with lies and inaccuracies” and the many cases that are overturned on appeal because of real medical evidence which was available to the assessors but disregarded. They say the assessments should always be carried out by suitably medically qualified staff and that there should be no financial incentives to end or reduce benefit or targets in reducing the claims that assessors are obliged to meet.

An academic study published in BMJ Open last November linked cuts in UK Government spending since 2010 in health and social services to “a substantial mortality gap”, with analysis showing around 120,000 early deaths – a figure they estimate will reach around 150,000 – 170,000 by 2020. As the Independent article states, this is around a 100 extra deaths a day, and Atos must take its share of the blame for carrying out these reprehensible policies with fraudulent zeal.

The protest outside Atos’s offices close to the Euston Road was rather smaller than expected, perhaps because a week of campaigning had tired some of the disabled protesters, and also because for many the cost of coming to the protests is difficult to afford on their limited benefits.

Some had transport problems getting to the event, and only turned up as it ended – in the now traditional DPAC way – with a short block of one carriageway of Euston Road.

More at Atos still killing the disabled.

Continue reading Atos still kills

Right to Turn Up and Go

Back in the 1990s it took direct action by disabled people  – DAN or the Direct Action Network for disabled people to get the 1995 legislation that made it illegal to discriminate on the grounds of disability in the workplace, along with some consumer protection. But realising the difficulty of provision in some areas it allowed for a timetable of up to 25 years over which barriers were to be gradually removed in areas such as transport.

Although there have been some improvements, an enormous amount remains to be done before the intentions of that act and the dreams of those who protested with DAN can be realised. In London, for example, although all buses and taxis are wheelchair accessible, only around half Overground stations and a quarter of Underground stations currently are.

On National Rail, help for disabled passengers is notionally available for any journey, although to work the system requires advance booking, often needing 24 hours notice. And while railway workers generally do their best to help disabled travellers who turn up without arranging their transport – like non-disabled passengers can – there are many stations without staff to assist.

Disabled passengers often need some help from the guard on the train and are particularly worried about plans for one-person operation being pursued by some rail companies and backed by the government. Even where they are able to board or alight from a train without help they may be much slower than the average passenger, and at much greater risk of being trapped by the closure of automatic doors.

Guards on the train are a valuable safety measure for all passengers, and something I’ve been grateful for on various occasions. One was when my train was derailed, and although there were no injuries there was a certain amount of panic, and the guard calmed people, kept us informed and assisted in our de-training and transfer to another train, but the others have involved drunk or otherwise obstreperous passengers.

Buses can manage with just a driver, though I sometimes miss the conductor – and suspect that there would be fewer problems with buggy users refusing to vacate disabled spaces when required. Back in the old days, conductors ensured that all buggies were folded and kept an eye on them and other luggage in the luggage space.

But what works with a smallish vehicle like even a double-decker bus seems entirely inappropriate for the 8, 10 0r 12 car trains which are now common on many routes on Southern and other railways serving London. And surely any vehicle which seats perhaps more than a hundred people will provide sufficient fare income to make paying for a second member of staff of little consequence.

Like DAN, DPAC are a direct action network, protecting the rights of disabled people and still fighting for them to be properly provided. Most of their actions have been directed against the government and the benefit cuts it has introduced which have resulted in great hardship and far too many deaths among disabled people, with policies either deliberately intended to kill or displaying a woeful ignorance of or indifference to their likely effects. This action too was against the government, and in particular the Department of Transport, which has been shown to be pressuring Southern Rail to continue the dispute with the RMT.

Someone only came out from the Dept of Transport to take the petition after the protesters had waited for a very long time and were threatening to keep the entrance blocked until it was taken; it seemed fairly clear that the department were hoping the protesters would go away if they kept them waiting long enough.  They should have learnt by now that DPAC are made of sterner stuff, though I might have left them to it as I had a train to catch.

As the joint protest with the RMT and others ended, DPAC ended their protest in what is now their traditional way, with a road block outside the ministry. After a few minutes police managed to persuade them to move so they only blocked the road in one direction, and the road block was only short.

The DPAC action was one in a whole week of protests to coincide with the London World Para Athletics Championships which DPAC say the government uses to try to show it is highly supportive of the disabled while actually they are highly discriminatory against all those who are not high-performing para-athletes. DPAC are certainly high-performing protesters.

More at DPAC/RMT ‘Right to Ride’ protest.

Continue reading Right to Turn Up and Go

Grenfell Blues


People watching the Council Leader on a giant screen in July react to her speech

The Grenfell Tower disaster continues to drag on and to appal. Even now, over 7 months after the tragedy the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is failing the victims. At yesterday’s council meeting one of the volunteers who has spent much of her time outside her working hours helping people there was speaking at a council meeting, telling how a woman with a one-year-old daughter who had been rehoused temporarily in a hotel had recently become homeless when the council’s payment to the hotel had been stopped but the social worker involved had made no provision for her to be housed elsewhere. It was a long story of failure and evasion, with the woman and her child only being saved from sleeping on the street by the action of volunteers.


A local speaker holds up some of the flammable cladding that spread the fire rapidly

Hers was only one case among many of a council failing to live up to its obligations and its promises over a huge tragedy that resulted from the actions of the council and its TMO set up to manage its housing. The council didn’t light the fire, but it was their actions, their ignoring of the warnings by residents, their deliberate policy to avoid proper fire inspections, that made Grenfell a firetrap simply waiting for a spark.

Urgent action was promised, both by the council and by national government; little has happened. Money was promised by government, to deal with the problem here and in other areas where similar cladding was found – but it hasn’t been forthcoming. Major charities collected millions – but little of it has reached the victims. There was to be a full inquiry – but those most affected have  been shunned and sidelined.

In July there was a large presence outside the council meeting – and a giant screen outside for those unable or unwilling to go inside – and security kept some out. At yesterday’s meeting there were quite a few inside, but only a handful outside, and apart from myself only one other journalist had turned up – and he decided there was nothing to film, and I could only take a handful of pictures. Grenfell, for all the outcry at the time, is now becoming smothered in the long grass as intended, as are the  other crimes of our establishment. And while there were undoubtedly crimes, there have as now been no arrests, and it seems likely there will be no justice.

It isn’t inevitable. The monthly silent walks continue, but put very little pressure on anyone, taking place as they do in an obscure area of London and getting less and less coverage in the mass media. But other protests are getting smaller and the whole momentum seems to be getting lost.

The protest in July was perhaps a peak, but it was one that was split, actually two protests called by two different groups, both on the left, along with local Latimer/Ladbroke Grove rappers El Nino & CX4  who came with blackened faces and  reminders of the burning cladding and smoke and a banner ‘The Royal Murderers of Kensington & Chelsea‘  to perform their Grenfell Tower’s Burnin.  Typically the national news media reported them as rioters rather than as performers.

It was a shame that there were two rival areas with speakers, though there were some good speakers at both of them, but it was inevitable when the larger group refused to let the others speak at their microphone, having put together a list of invited speakers they made it clear others were not welcome.  It seems sad that particular sectional interests are weakening the opposition to the council. A few speakers did perform at both, as did the rappers.


Simon Elmer of ASH

One of the more interesting contributions came from Simon Elmer of Architects for Social Housing, a group which shortly after produced a report about the technical issues involved and were also featured in a video which I watched at the ICA residency in August.

Grenfell survivors tell Council “Resign now!”

Continue reading Grenfell Blues

Should you work for free?

I think I’ve written often enough about my own attitude to providing photographs for free. I share a great deal of my work on Facebook and on the web, where as well as putting current work on My London Diary I also have extensive web sites on Hull, on London, Paris and on the River Lea, as well as several others and a number of smaller sites. I’ve also contributed work to various other sites, including Fixing Shadows, one of the earliest of photography web sites – still on line – and many more.

I’ve also provided photographs free of charge to many groups I’ve photographed for their own use, and generally am prepared to do so for campaigns or organisations that have no paid staff. But groups or organisations that can afford to pay people to work for them I’ve always demanded should pay me for my work as well, particularly if they are making money from publishing it.

With small charities, campaigning groups and educational projects I quote at a considerable discount on my commercial rates, but still feel it important that I’m paid. Not so much because I need the money (though photography is an expensive habit and I couldn’t do all I do without it generating some income) but because giving my work away would be unfair to all my colleagues. It isn’t easy to make a living from photography, and harder still to make one from work which I think worthwhile and important.

Today I’ve read two rather different articles about working for free. One in Peta Pixel, by Gil Wizen, Why I Rejected Your Request for Free Photos, and the second, linked in one of the comments to that piece, an opinion piece of Digital Photography Review, What I’ve learned after sharing my photos for free on Unsplash for 4 years by Samuel Zeller.

Wizen’s article is a pretty much straight down the line NO, with an explanation why and some illustrations of unreasonable attitudes, though he does describe one exception to his rule. Zeller’s is more interesting in his discussion of changes in the web landscape as well as of how contributing images to a site which shares them free can contribute to building a career.

A photographer choosing to share some images (as I do on the web) is quite different from other people deciding they would like to use your work for free. Unsplash does seem to offer a significant amount of exposure in a way that few if any of the proposals that people and companies who have hoped to use my pictures for free would have provided. It is a platform on which you can advertise yourself as a photographer, paying for it in pictures rather than cash, and for some photographers and some kinds of work it may be appropriate to do so. Though not I think for me.

Daniele Tamagni (1975-2017)

It came as a real shock as I caught up with my reading online today to learn of the death of Daniel Tamagni, someone I still thought of as a young photographer, born in Milan in 1975 and only 42 when he died last month, and who I first heard of and met in 2007 , the year when he won the Canon Young Photographer Award for his series on ‘The Gentlemen of Bacongo‘, African dandies or ‘Sapeurs‘

I met him first at around that time at a show he had with two others in Peckham, writing about it for this web site, Peckham Rising, where he showed me a newspaper article on his work on Black Churches in the area, one image from which was in the show, and I was sorry to have missed the earlier show he had of that work.

I wrote about him again when his work on the ‘Sapeurs’ was on show at the Michael Hoppen Gallery and my piece Sapology included the picture of him with Araminta De Clermont, whose pictures were also showing in the gallery. The work had by then gained him the 2010 ICP award for Applied Fashion photography, and had been published by Trolley Books (Gentlemen of Bacongo, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-904563-83-9.)  As well as writing a little about the Sapeurs and Tamagni’s pictures of them I was also pleased to be able to photograph one of them in person at the event.

I used that picture again when I wrote another piece, Encore Sapeurs, following on from a post by  Joerg Colberg on his on Conscientious blog which linked to some of Tamagni’s work.

My last meeting with Daniele was at the opening of ‘Global Style Battles‘ at the  ArtEco Gallery in Wandsworth (now the Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery), an enjoyable occasion graced by the presence of a number of leading photographers who live in London, including James Barnor (with him above) born in Ghana and Charlie Phillips, born in Jamaica (below).

It was a memorable night and you can read about it and see a few more pictures at Daniele Tamagni at ArtEco.

You can read a brief obituary of him, as I did, on PDN Pulse, and, in Italian, in Corriere della Sera.

Little Italy Festival

Back in the middle of the nineteenth century the area of London around the Clkerkenwell Road to the west of Farringdon St was crowded with Italians living and working there, and one day a year it still is, when many return to the area for the annual Processione della Madonna del Carmine – the Procession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which has been taking place there (except during the two world wars) every year since the 1880s. Clerkenwell by the end of that century was home to thousands mainly from the south of the Italy, with those from the north settling around Soho.

Apart from among Italians in the UK and people who live in the immediate area the festival still doesn’t seem that well known to Londoners. I’d not heard of it until around 20 years ago I went with a friend of Italian origin to photograph it and the Sagra  – the festival – which accompanies it in the street below St Peter’s Church, which is itself worth a visit, opened it 1863 it is Grade II listed.

Statues for the procession and lined up in front of the church, and floats prepared down the side roads, while people wander in the crowds in the Sagra, buying Italian food and wine.  This is one occasion when I do have a cup or two of Italian red while working.

When the time comes for the procession,crowds line both sides of the Clerkenwell Road to watch as a long stream of biblical tableaux on float, walking groups with banners, the Four Evangelists, at least two Jesuses, one accompanied by Roman soldiers and carrying a cross and another leading first communicants,   people in traditional Italian dress and more make their way past the front of the church and process around the streets of the area.

The exact form has changed a little from year to year, but not greatly in the 20 or so years I’ve been going most times.  At some point members of the clergy are handed white doves and release them – and more recently this has happened both around the beginning and end of the procession, and there is also some tinsel fired.

At the end, the clergy who have been watching from the road in front of the church join on the the procession and are followed by a large crowd of the congregation. And as they move off, some of us take the opportunity to return to the Sagra for another cup of wine.

But the pictures tell the story better than I can in words:
Processione della Madonna del Carmine

Continue reading Little Italy Festival