Million Women Rise 2018

Like so much more in London, the annual ‘Million Women Rise‘ march against violence against women is greatly enhanced by presence of many from our migrant communities, such as the Latino feminists in the picture above.  It takes place in central London on the closed Saturday to International Women’s Day.


2008

I first came across the event and photographed it and its founder Sabrina Qureshi (below) in March 2008, which was I think the first mass march, though the numbers then were about 2-3,000 and seem to have remained roughly constant since then – and most years I think I have taken at least a few pictures. Looking back at the two here from 2008 I can also see how much raw processing software has improved over the last 10 years; Lightroom was then in version 1.4, and many of us were still smarting at the loss of the then superior Rawshooter when Adobe bought up Pixmantec. I’m still unsure how much the acquisition was for the technology or simply to remove a better competitor, but it took a few more versions for Lightroom to really catch up – and perhaps only now does it really enable us to do a better job, though, as in the top picture here it is rather easy to overdo the colour saturation.


Sabrina Quereshi, 2008

Although I had no problems on that occasion (and later allowed the organisation to use some of my pictures), being a women-only march has sometimes caused some difficulties in covering the event, with a few over-zealous stewards some years who have objected to men being anywhere near the event.  Although some years there have been some of the women’s groups who have insisted that their male comrades march with them – leading to some fierce arguments – I’m happy to stay on the sidelines during the march (and have never tried to attend the rally) despite this often making my normal photographic close approach impossible.  So you will see in the pictures from these events rather fewer extreme wide-angle views and rather more work with the telephoto.

This year things seemed a little less rigid than some earlier occasions (and I did see a few men actually marching) and there were just a few occasions when I put at least one foot on the roadway to take pictures during the march without getting attacked. But generally, since I know that it is important for some of those on the march that it is a women-only space, I keep well out of it. Things are a little less defined before the march starts, when marchers in any case spill over onto the pavement.

Of course it isn’t just Britain’s migrant communities on the march, but looking at my pictures it is surprising to me what a great proportion they make up, though my pictures may well not reflect the march as a whole. As a photographer I’m obviously attracted to the more visual of the protesters and the more interesting of the posters and placards.

There are other individuals and groups that stood out for me, including these women from Mother World.

Million Women Rise

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David Goldblatt (1930-2018)

One of the first photographic books I bought was ‘On The Mines’ by David Goldblatt and Nadine Gordimer, published in 1973 in Cape Town, and I think purchased from Creative Camera’s bookroom in Doughty St, which played an important role in my own development as a photographer. Unlike many books, I still have that first edition hardback, and can still find it and am sitting looking at one of Goldblatt’s best-known pictures on its back dust-jacket, “Boss Boy”, taken in 1966 and from the essay ‘The Witwatersrand: a time and tailings’ with Gordimer’s text and Goldblatt’s pictures and captions which is the first of three parts of the book – which continues with his ‘Shaftsinking‘ and ‘Mining Men‘.

So far I’ve read five obituaries of Goldblatt, though doubtless many more will be published, and I may even look out a dust off a short piece I wrote about him perhaps 20 years ago, though probably not, as certainly others knew him far better and probably wrote more perceptively about his work. Of course, back when I was growing up we all knew about apartheid and condemned it – and as a teenager I remember acting a part in a play about it, and later joining the Anti-Apartheid Movement and going on marches and protests.

But Goldblatt’s photographs, often very calm and carefully composed like that superbly framed ‘Boss Boy, the tips of the folding rule in his top pocket a fraction from the tope of the frame and his presentation ‘Zobo watch presented by the company for his safe working at the bottom edge, and on his left arm the company’s three star rank ‘Boss Boy’ metal badge touching the right edge of the picture, along with the texts strikingly brought home the realities of living under the Apartheid regime.

The five articles I’ve so far read are in the New York Times, The Daily Maverick  and Mail and Guardian from Zambia,  Al Jazeera and The Guardian.

 

 

International Women’s Day

International Women’s Day was a busy time for protests in London, though I think none of them got in the news, where there seems to be a consensus that only middle class women’s issues matter on that day.

International Women’s Day began in New York in 1909, when the Socialist Party of America organised a National Women’s Day there on Feb 28th, and the following year it was adopted as an international celebration by the 1910 International Socialist Woman’s Conference.

In 1914 the date became standardised as March 8th, and in London the Suffragettes marched, with Sylvia Pankhurst being arrested on her way to speak at the rally in Trafalgar Square. And on March 8th 1914 in Russia (for them it was still Feb 23rd) it was the actions by women in cities including Petrograd and St Petersbury that began the Russian Revolution against the Czar – and a week later he abdicated and women were given the vote by the provisional government.

It was only the the 1970s, that the UN took up the day, and in 1977 it was adopted as the UN Day for women’s rights and world peace. Though we seem to have rather given up on world peace.

My Day began in Parliament Square, where Global Women’s Strike were staging a mock trial of the Family Courts. They say the courts fail families and remove children for adoption unnecessarily, mistaking poverty for neglect and failing to give support to victims of domestic abuse, and disabled mothers as required by the 1989 Children Act, and the Care Act 2014 . In Spain almost half of children needing taking into care are placed with kinship carers – mainly grandparents – while the figure for the UK is only 9%, less than one fifth as many.

Next I went to Russell Square where women were taking part in the London Women’s Strike, refusing to do work either paid or unpaid, including housework and domestic work. There were speeches and singing and various events both in Russell Square and elsewhere in London supporting protests concerning women, three of which I attended.

The first was at the Home Office, where protesters had come to show solidarity with the women detained in Yarl’s Wood, some of whom were on the 15th day of a hunger strike and general strike against their imprisonment and the conditions and treatment by the detention centre staff and the Home Office. The Home Office has so far responded to their demand for proper treatment by issuing public denials that the action is taking place and sending letters to the women taking part threatening them with accelerated detention.

Next I met the CAIWU at Covent Garden, where a largish crowd from the London Women’s Strike had come to support the cleaners, mainly women, at the Royal Opera House, where several CAIWU members are bing victimised by contractor Kier for taking part in successful union action to get a living wage there.The larger crowd made the protest more impressive, but it took a whole series of almost daily actions there for some weeks to get justice.

My final event for the day was at Unilever House and was again with Global Women’s Strike who are calling for Unilever to end their $667 million investment in Myanmar where the military government are committing systematic rape and other torture with total impunity as part of their genocide against the Rohingya people. Posters showed their actions in marked contrast to the image and advertising of Unilever’s Dove products, which claims that “UNILEVER aims to improve safety for women and girls in the communities where they operate.”

Although some of the women were going on to further events for the day, by the end of this I was exhausted and decided it was time to go home.

More at:

Family Courts put on Trial
London Women’s Strike
Solidarity with Yarl’s Wood
Reinstate the Royal Opera House 6
Unilever & Myanmar’s Rohingya genocide

US Embassy

I made another visit to the new US Embassy in Nine Elms, and the picture above I think gives a good example of the strengths and some weaknesses of the wide-angle panoramic format. This image would be impossible with a rectilinear lens, as the horizontal angle of view is around 147 degrees.  My maths is a bit rusty but I think on full frame that would need a 5.3mm focal length (and have just checked this with an on-line calculator.)

The widest full-frame rectilinear lens I’ve ever used is a 12mm, which gives a measly 113 degrees, and stretched out objects at its edges to an often ridiculous extent. Even the 16mm of the 16-35mm (currently in a broken state on my desk) with it’s 97 degrees had to be used with extreme care. I sometimes miss the extra width now with my 18-35mm, (90 degrees) but it is a lot easier to use.

Looking at the edges of the image above, buildings and plants, including the slender tree trunk have retained their natural shape and size, even right into the corners of the image.

Holding the camera absolutely level enables the horizon to be kept straight, but has the disadvantage that it is always exactly across the centre of the image, often where you want it, but with a whole series of images it can become rather monotonous. This is one reason I often crop from the 1.5:1 format in which I make these images to 1.9 or 2.0:1. A second reason concerns horizontal lines away from the image centre.

Although the image is corrected to make vertical lines straight, other lines away from the horizon become increasingly curve. While this does not often show in a sky area, it can create unnatural-looking curves in the foreground. Cropping some of this can often remove the most glaring effects.

The ‘moat’ creates an almost perfect subject for the treatment, being curved. The lens perspective enhances that curvature, appearing to wrap it more around the building than is truly the case. It could be seen as a problem, but it does improve the picture.

Where things are less happy is with the building itself, which is basically a cube with some added decoration on three sides (only one of which is visible from this viewpoint.) To me this picture clearly makes the corner shown look less than the 90 degrees it actually is.

Even with a rectilinear lens, working close to the embassy doesn’t really show it as a cube – this picture is with the 18-35mm at 18mm. From the other side of the road it perhaps looks rather more the shape it really is – as the picture below shows.

But for various reasons I feel it is a building better viewed from a distance – as I do most days when I’m travelling up to London. Though since the trains on this route no longer have windows that open it is hard to avoid reflections and the view is seen through often scratched and dirty glazing.

More pictures around the embassy at Embassy Quarter.

The protest I had gone there to photograph was the regular monthly Shut Guantánamo protest by the London Guantánamo Campaign, which have been taking place outside London’s US Embassy since 2007. This was there first protest at the new location, which some had problems with finding and only arrived after I had to leave. They intend to continue these monthly protests until all of the 41 still held there have been released and the illegal prison camp closed down.

Shut Guantanamo at new US Embassy

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My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Lange & Winship at the Barbican

Opening shortly at the Barbican is ‘Dorothea Lange / Vanessa Winship – A photography double bill‘, with Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing showing together with Vanessa Winship: And Time Folds in the Art Gallery there from 22 June —2 September 2018, presenting the work of two photographers I greatly admire.

I’ve several times printed a copy of Lange’s best-known picture, ‘Migrant Mother‘ from the high-quality large Tiff file that I years ago downloaded from the Library of Congress, and have written on several occasions about this and other works such as her ‘White Angel Breadline‘ from 1933 which prompted her career as a documentary photographer.

The show apparently has a large section on this work, and you can read more about it and see the some variants on a page at the Library of Congress, where you can see all her work for the FSA (a search using the term ‘Lange, Dorothea’ yields over 4000 items, though not all are photographs), and find more about various shows of her work. On the Library of Congress they reproduce Lange’s own story about how she made the picture, written for Popular Photography in 1960:

“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”

But apparently Florence (Owens) Thompson, the woman in the picture saw it differently, according to her grandson’s recollection (I think recorded in Anne Whiston Spirn’s book on Lange Daring to Look, and mentioned in my 2008 post on that)

 “a well-dressed woman jumped out of a smart newish car and started taking pictures, getting closer with each shot. Florence decide to ignore her.

After taking the pictures, Lange is said to have told Florence who she was and that she was working for the Farm Security Administration and to have promised that the pictures would not be published. Next day they made the front page of all the newspapers.”

Lange gave a long interview to Richard Doud in 1964, a year before her death. You can hear 12 seconds of her voice and read the lengthy transcript  in the Smithsonian Oral History Collection.

Some brief biographical details I wrote almost 20 years ago about Lange may be of interest:

Dorothea Lange was born in New Jersey. She gave up training to be a teacher to become a photographer, working part-time in the portrait studio of Arnold Genthe before studying with Clarence White.

She moved to California, meeting Imogen Cunningham and opening her own portrait studio. In the early 1930s she began to take pictures of people suffering from the effects of the Depression, such as the ‘White Angel Breadline‘ in San Francisco in 1933.

The following year she met sociologist Paul Taylor who she was to marry (after divorcing her first husband, painter Maynard Dixon) and began to work for various Government projects, most notably the Farm Security Adminstration.

Her career was interupted by illness for almost ten years from 1945, following this she travelled extensively around the world with her husband before settling down to photograph things ‘close at hand‘ around her home and family.

One single picture she took for the FSA stands as an icon of the depression. ‘Migrant Mother‘ shows a mother looking worried into the distance, as if wondering what future there is for her. One child lies sleeping on her lap, two older children frame her, turned away from the photographer with their heads bowed. Lange recorded that the mother was aged 32 with 7 children; they were migrant pea-pickers but the harvest had been ruined by frost so there was no work. They had already sold the tyres from their car for food and were now living in it, keeping alive on wild birds the children caught.

Surprisingly the article in yesterdays Observer, Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing review – a visionary whose camera never lied by Laura Cumming fails to even mention that the show is on together with Winship’s, though possibly this was made clear elsewhere in the print edition. I’ve long been a fan of Vanessa Winship, and have several times mentioned her work here (I think this is the 15th.)

The best of these posts is I think  Sweet Nothings – Vanessa Winship written in 2009 which included a couple of her portraits from Turkey.  In a more recent post, I quoted from Sean O’Hagan’s blog in The Guardian:

“From Mississippi to the Black Sea, Winship’s poetic, masterful photographs show how hard it is for people to belong … so why don’t British galleries acknowledge her as this large Madrid retrospective does? She deserves it”

At the time I commented: “Though I’m afraid the explanation is unfortunately rather simple. She is a real photographer, and there is no major British gallery with a real interest in photography.” It is great to see her work acknowledged at last in the Barbican show.

 

May 2018 pictures

May was another busy month, despite my intentions to take things easier and a rather painful right leg which did make me decide to miss a few events. Going away for one weekend  and attempting to celebrate my birthday also had little effect on the amount of work. I did manage several walks with myself and family which are included here; though relaxing in some ways they often take more time in researching what I have photographed – the late May Bank Holiday stroll from Falconwood to North Woolwich being a good example.

May 2018

Woolwich wander


India complicit in Thoothukudi killings
March Against Turkish Occupation of Afrin
Youth Peace Walk by Korean-based cult
‘Be the Change’ Knife and Gun Crime
Windlesham Walk
Universal Credit rally & march


Universal Credit protest at Tate Modern
Stop Charter Flight to Pakistan
DPAC protest GTR rail discrimination


Solidarity with Gaza – end support for Israel
Barclays Stop Funding Climate Chaos
Zionists defend Israeli shootings


Israeli massacre of protesters
Erdogan, Time To Go
Grenfell Parliamentary Debate Rally
BNP say release Khaleda Zia
Manchester walk
Manchester marks the 1948 Nabka
Rochdale Canal
Capital Ring Greenford to South Kenton


Windrush Immigration Act protest
Windrush rally against Theresa May
Anti-Abortion March for Life
Women protest anti-abortion march
Croydon march for May Day
Lambeth Housing Tell Us the Truth
CAIWU Mayday Mayhem at Royal Opera
Precarious Workers – King’s College


Precarious Workers – Ministry of Justice
May Day Rally
May Day March on the Strand
Against Deportation Charter Flights
Lyme Disease epidemic


London May Day March meets

London Images

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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Dark Practices

Outsourcing of staff is a dark practice used by many organisations to retain their own shining images while screwing their workers, who get the kind of management, employment rights and wages you would expect from least scrupulous of companies whose only concern is making profits while reducing their bids for the contracts to the lowest possible levels.

So it was perhaps appropriate that this protest by the IWGB which represents cleaners, security officers, receptionists, porters, gardeners and others who work at the University of London keeping its central services running outside Vice Chancellor Sir Adrian Smith’s graduation dinner should be one of the darkest that I’ve ever tried to photograph.

The protesters were in their usual good spirits, making a great deal of noise and calling for the university to employ them directly, for an end to zero hours contracts and to implement promised pay rises.

In the days of film, the only possibility would have been to use flash (or pay a fortune to light this as a film set.) But digital has shifted the possibilities, and I decided to work with what little available light there was, and just occasionally to supplement this with my handheld LED light source. This event soon showed the limitations of this, a Neewer CN-216, at least when running from rechargeable AA batteries, when the power drops off considerably after only a few minutes of use, though it continues to give some light for several hours. Most pictures were made without its help. The light will also run from a number of Sony and Panasonic batteries and Neewer also make high-capacity ones to fit which might improve the performance.

Almost all the pictures were made with the camera set at ISO 12,800 and with an exposure bias of -0.3 or -0.7 stops, and were still mainly underexposed, at shutter speeds mainly around 1/30 – 1/50s. Neither of the two lenses I was using was a fast lens, the 18.0-35.0 mm f/3.5-4.5 and the 28.0-200.0 mm f/3.5-5.6, and I often had to stop down a little for depth of field. I don’t own any very fast lenses, but hadn’t expected these Stygian conditions or might have replaced the 28-200 in my bag with the heavier Sigma 24-70mm and added the petite Nikon 20mm f2.8 for luck. Neither is particularly fast but a stop or two does make a noticeable difference.

But apart from being heavier, and running out at only 70mm when I often want something longer, somehow I just don’t trust the Sigma. It wasn’t a cheap lens, but I think isn’t quite sharp enough wide open to be worth carrying the extra weight. I bought it for use on DX where it perhaps does better.

The IWGB met outside Barbican station and marched to protest outside the dinner through the tunnel under the Barbican. There the lighting was much brighter and I was able to work at a lower ISO even using shutter speeds around 1/100s.

More pictures: IWGB protest at Graduation Dinner

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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

Grenfell – One Year On

A year ago, Grenfell Tower was still burning, and I woke up to hear the news on the radio. I didn’t know the block, though I’d walked through the area on various occasions. Often very different to now as I made my way to or from Latimer Rd station on my way to or from carnival.

I  lay in bed listening to the terrible news of people trapped, burning to death, some phoning to say goodbye to relatives and friends knowing there was little or no hope of rescue. Thinking of those too who had managed to make their way out, finding their way to the stairs through thick smoke and making their way down the stairs, floor by floor.  Many years before I’d walked down eleven flights from my room, but fortunately it was for a false alarm.

Once I got up I went to my computer and started looking things up about Grenfell. One of the first things I came to was the blog by some of the residents, the Grenfell Action Group. The post KCTMO – Playing with fire! which stated as inevitable that the fire would happen at some time was only the latest in a series of posts raising the residents concerns about fire safety in the black.

There are many other posts on the Grenfell Action Group’s blog worth reading, and which expose the cavalier attitude of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea’s council – councillors and officers – to those in the housing it owns as well as the council’s TMO to which it delegated management. There is also an excellent recent long interview with Eddie Daffarn from the group published by Channel 4 News last month.

One of the first serious reports on the fire and its physical causes was ‘The Truth about Grenfell Tower: A Report by Architects for Social Housing‘, also available as a PDF, published just five weeks after the fire – and much of what it contains came from a public meeting they organised only 8 days after it, and recorded in edited version in the film ‘The Truth About Grenfell Tower’ which is also on the ASH page.

The official response has of course been much slower, with hearings only recently getting under way and dragging on for many months. Many see the deliberately slow pace of this and other public inquiries as being a deliberate tactic to allow the guilty to escape judgement, and it seems unlikely to unearth much that isn’t already known. Mainly it – and other major inquiries – allow the parties involved to spend huge amounts employing barristers whose task is often more to obfuscate than elucidate. And of course earn large fees in the process.

Probably the least useful document to emerge about Grenfell is the recent publication by the London Review of Books,’The Tower‘ by author Andrew O’Hagan. In ‘O’Hagan And His Ivory Tower‘ the Grenfell Action Group publish a letter of complaint to the LRB by one of the local residents interviewed by O’Hagan who was appalled to see how her input, and that of others, was misrepresented, and how inaccurate much of the essay was.

The LRB also produced a film, ‘Grenfell: The End of an Experiment?‘ by Andrew Wilks, which is considerably better, although still at times attempting to cast the council as the victims rather than the perpetrators. But at least we see some of the evidence, and not just the author’s recasting of it and can make our own conclusions.

Also well worth reading is the long and detailed refutation of O’Hagan’s essay by Simon ELmer of ASH, ‘The Tower: Rewriting Grenfell‘.

Grenfell of course isn’t just about Grenfell and those who died and the survivors who are still suffering – and will continue to feel its effects for the rest of their lives. Grenfell is a symbol of a much wider malaise in our society, and the attitudes of the wealthy towards the poor. It’s perhaps a curious and largely unnoticed coincidence that the first issues of the anarchist magazine Class War were actually produced in Grenfell Tower, Ian Bone’s first London home.

Tonight I’ll be on the silent march marking the anniversary – one of a programme of events. There are also marches taking place in other cities.

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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Horsing around London

I don’t like police horses. It’s perhaps something that goes back to 1968 and those student demos I took part in, at at least one of which horses were deliberately ridden into crowds unable to move out of their way. But even though I’m sure that both the Met’s horses and riders are highly trained, every time I see them in action at protests there are times when the horses are clearly out of control. One in particular at this protest was proving my point, its rider spending most of her time shouting at everyone to get out of the way as it pranced and kicked out randomly.

Of course, it’s partly this lack of control that makes them effective, particularly in confined spaces and crowds, where large, heavy animals with only partly controlled movements are extremely frightening. If a vehicle with similar properties were to be built, it would quite rightly be banned. There is a place for horses, and they certainly can look impressive on ceremonial occasions, but they are a far too blunt and unpredictable force for crowd control.

March With The Homeless was an event by grass-roots groups which work on the streets with the homeless, providing them with food and shelter, filling the gaps that have become much more gaping in our society, thanks to successive governments failures to deal with problems. In my lifetime we have moved from a society where we cared for everyone and homelessness was rare to one where there are beggars on the streets and people sleeping all over our major cities.

When I was young, there were a few tramps. Some would knock at our door – a small semi on an outer London street – and ask for water, and my mother would give them a cup of tea and talk to them. They tramped to find seasonal work. We seldom had pennies to spare, but I think she would find a few for them. But it was only when in my twenties that I went to Paris that I first saw beggars – and at first I didn’t realise what they were – and people living on the city streets.

People squat unused commercial buildings – there are many around London – and set them up as unofficial community centres, offering free food (often scavenged or donated) and a roof, as well as friendship. They sometimes have problems with police, though officers often see they are providing a vital service and saving lives, police orders come to protect property and the officers enforce them. Owners get court orders and bailiffs come to evict, often helped by police even when legally their role should be to see that the bailiffs keep to the law.

The protest was a relatively small one, and taking place towards the end of the evening rush hour. It was unlikely to lead to any great public disorder, and would have gone ahead rather more smoothly with no police presence at all. The horses – and rather more on foot than was needed – were I think there in case the protesters had decided they wanted to march down the Mall to protest outside Buckingham Palace – as they had at a previous protest.

In fact they had other plans, though they were not letting the police know, wanting to go through Covent Garden and parts of the West End to finish at the squatted Sofia House on Great Portland St. There were a number of confrontations as police tried to get them to go a different way at several road junctions, though it was hard to see why, other than to try to show they were in charge, before the march finally came to a halt at the top of Haymarket, where the police horses were joined by others in the sculpture on the corner and the road was blocked by police and demonstrators.

There were some lengthy discussions between police and the march leaders, with the police insisting the march go down Haymarket, but the protesters intending to go forwards to Piccadilly Circus. I think eventually the officer in charge realised the futility of the police action, which was merely increasing the disruption caused by the march, and an agreement was reached with the march going on towards its destination. But by this time I was tired and hungry and went home.

More at  No More Deaths On Our Streets.

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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Weegee the Unknown

Arthur Fellig, the self-styled ‘Weegee the Famous‘ is certainly one of the oddest figures in the history of photography and his best images of his New York have a remarkable raw power. I’ve tried to write about his on various occasions with varying success, and one of the great problems has always been to separate the facts from his inventions.

Writing a biography of the man would seem to be a rather Herculean task, and one not attempted before but it looks as if Christopher Bonanos’s ‘Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous‘ is a remarkable effort. I’ve not read the book, but there is an excellent long article about it in the New Yorker which I’ve just enjoyed by Thomas Mallon, Weegee the Famous, the Voyeur and Exhibitionist. As Mallon says, all we have had before is “a host of fragmentary recollections and the loudmouthed, unreliable memoir, ‘Weegee by Weegee’, published in 1961.” And of course the pictures, available in various books of which Weegee’s own ‘Naked City’, published 73 years ago is still possibly the best. But to go with Bonanos’s book you need a rather wider collection of his work since he refers to too many of this pictures to be included in the biography.

As well as various more recent publications, some listed in The New Yorker, there is also the web, and the ICP has quite an extensive archive of his work on-line. For a better short introduction I would recommend the 42 images at Amber, which also has a short version of his life. A Google Images search also throws up an interesting collection of pictures, though not all by Weegee. It also led me to the graphic novel, Weegee: Serial Photographer, by Belgian cartoonists Max de Radiguès and Wauter Mannaert, now translated into English and published last month, and the hour long “documentary” from 1993, The Real Weegee, not in great quality, but the few scenes I’ve dipped into have been, as one comment says, “Terribly produced and horribly executed.” As well as using his photographs it is based around footage of Weegee himself acting out an extremely silly script of a fake story of his life.

I’m never quite sure how much knowing more about a photographer’s life helps us to understand his work, though certainly in Weegee’s case it does answer some of the questions that have long bothered me about some of the pictures. There are also some photographers whose work would never have emerged into the art world had it not been for their biography. But sometimes I find myself thinking that I wish Minor White or Edward Weston had written less and had less written about them, and perhaps rather more about their actual pictures.