Streets of Shame

I’ve never sat down to really write my views on street photography at length, partly because I’ve never taken it that seriously as a category. The defining text is still ‘Bystander – A History of Street Photography‘ by Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz published in 1994, which deserves a closer reading than the flip-thorugh on Vimeo, but this does demonstrate that it attempts to annexe a signigicant proportion of the history of our medium to its rather flimsily described genre.

Of course it isn’t the fault of these authors that street photography has now gained the popularity it has nor that most of what passes under that title is sloppy, self-indulgent ephemera. There are some fine photographers who call themselves ‘street photographers‘, (and I’ve written about some here and elsewhere) but they are in a small minority. It’s probably the same for any other genre, but it shows more simply because everybody and his cat is now a ‘street photographer’.

My murky thoughts on the subject were stirred up a little this morning by two articles I read. One on PetaPixel, Why Street Photography Matters in 2017 by London-based street photographer Temoor Iqbal, and the second a feature on Amateur Photographer, Ali Shams: iPhone Street Photography with his pictures made in Qazvin, Iran.

As I write this, there are 18 comments on the first article, and some of them are worth reading, but none on the second, which has to my mind the far more interesting images. But your opinion may differ.

I’m getting ready to go out and photograph on the streets in a few minutes, my first call being at Downing St. But while I might have been a ‘street photographer’ back in the 80s and 90s, these days I’m just a photographer. As for Downing St, I’ll finish with a link to a verse written 95 years ago by “socialist MP, poet and lion-tamer amongst many other thingsJohn S Clarke.

Fleet Street used to be referred to – at least in ‘Private Eye’ – as the ‘Street of Shame’. That accolade has now firmly passed to Downing St.

An Afternon in London

The protest outside Holloway Prison overran its scheduled time, and was still continuing when I rushed off to catch a bus down to Oxford St, where ‘Victory to the Intifada!’, a campaigning group of the Revolutionary Communist Group and friends were mounting a ‘rolling picket’ along Oxford St to mark Nabka Day, the ‘day of the catastrophe’, remembering the roughly 80% of the Palestinians who were forced to leave their homes between December 1947 and January 1949.

This was a peaceful protest, with music provided by a mobile sound system, banners and posters making its way along the pavement to protest for a few minutes outside various businesses with short speeches about the continuing oppression of the Palestinian people, and against current Israeli government supported attacks on the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement which attempt to brand any opposition to the actions of the Israeli government, its miilitary forces and companies that support Israel as anti-semitic.

Police tried hard to keep the small group of Zionists who waved Israeli flags from getting in the way or attacking the protesters, and their presence certainly made the protest considerably move visible.

The Zionists made no real attempt to present facts or information, but simply shouted that the facts and figures from well-verified international reports by UN and other agencies and by well-respected human rights organisations were lies and shouted insults at the protesters, who largely ignored them, refusing to sink to their level.

I left the protest outside Topshop (where I would return later in the day) and went to Trafalgar Square where I knew a group was holding a protest calling for human rights, fair treatment and support for refugees. It was rather smaller than I had hoped, but I took a few pictures, and also found a protest by Vegans taking place, wearing white masks and holding laptops and tablets showing the film ‘Earthlings’ about the mistreatment of animals in food production, bullfighting, etc.

While I was taking pictures a farmer who was visiting London came up and tried to talk with them, saying how he cared for and looked after the animals he farmed, who made use of land that would otherwise not be productive, but there was no meeting of minds.

Finally it was time for the major event of my day, at Topshop in Oxford St, following the sacking of two cleaners from the United Voices of the World union after they protested for better pay and conditions. A long line of police stood in front of several of the entrances to the store, and there was a little pushing and shoving from both protesters, many of whom wore masks showing Topshop owner Philip Green, and police at the largely peaceful protest.


Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, MP and Ian Hodson, Baker’s Unions General Secretary outside Topshop

The protest received widespread support from various supporters of trade union rights, including the two in the picture above, Class War and many more. And after a noisy protest outside the Oxford Circus Topshop, Class War and others led the protesters onto the street to block the road at Oxford Circus.

More police poured in and started to threaten the protesters with arrest unless they moved, though by the time they arrived Class War were already moving on, leading the way to protest outside John Lewis, where cleaners have been protesting for years to be treated with dignity and respect by the management. They play an important role in the running of the store but say they are ‘treated like the dirt they clean’.

Here there was more pushing and shoving as police stopped the protesters from entering the store, and some angry arguments between UVW General Secreatary Petros Elia and the police about their handling of the protest.

The protesters moved off and marched down Oxford St to continue their protest outside the Marble Arch branch of Topshop.

Here the staff had locked the doors and shut the shop early as the protesters arrived. The protest continued noisily outside for a while, but seemed to be coming to an end. I was getting tired and hungry, having had a busy day and decided to leave for home.

68th Anniversary Nabka Day
Vegan Earthlings masked video protest
Refugees Welcome say protesters
Topshop protest after cleaners sacked

Continue reading An Afternon in London

Hull Photos: 2/2/17-8/2/17

2nd February 2017

The view from the end of Cooper St (or close to it) looking southeast across the former Cottingham Drain towards Pauls Agricultural Products, on both sides of Wincolmlee on the River Hull where cereal processing has taken place since the beginning of the 20th century. Pauls Agriculture Ltd is now Maizecor, the premier supplier of milled maize products to the UK baking industry, brewing and for animal feeds, using certified non-GMO French yellow maize. If you want large quantities of bran, maize flaking grits, coarse and fine maize grits, medium polenta, maize germ, maize meal or maize flour, they can supply them.

Drains like the Cottingham Drain and and the Beverley and Barmston Drain which enters the Hull a few yards upstream date from around the start of the nineteenth century and are a part of huge drainage schemes begun by monks in the middle ages (though they were mainly interest in them as a transport system), but mainly from the late 17th century onwards which turned a huge area of saltmarsh and peat bogs (carrs) – the largest wetland area in England outside the Fens – into habitable and profitable land. Recent floods are a reminder of the past and the inability of any system to cope with truly excessive rainfall, though the tidal barrier protects the area from tidal flooding. The Cottingham Drain was culverted in 1963.


28i32: Pauls Agriculture Ltd (now Maizecor) from the end of Cooper St, 1981 – River Hull

Extra pictures:

28i46 – another picture of Victoria House, Cooper St, 1981 – River Hull


28144: Brick structure, Cannon St area, 1981 – River Hull

3rd February 2017

Catherine St is one of Hulls shorter streets, but Google halves its length to around 30 metres with no real buildings on it, naming it other half as part of Machell St, though the street signs still have it at original length. The corner site shown here is now a yard for LS Lighting & Signs. The building at extreme left on Scott St has also gone, though there is a similar building a few yards further on on the other side of Wincolmlee.

Spear Warehousing & Transport Company Limited owned a number of warehouse premises in Hull and the company was liquidated in the mid-1980s. I don’t know the history of this building, but it looks fairly solid and a good example of commercial building of its era, with a rather impressive carriage entrance at the left, and it is a shame it has not survived.


28i35: Corner of Catherine St/Scott St, 1981 – River Hull

4th February 2017

This building was on the corner of Carr St, which appears now to have disappeared into a parking area of the Maizecor site. It was only a short street and ended at the Cottingham Drain.

It was built probably around 1803/4 as a Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, one of the first in Hull, and had seating for 531 worshippers. The plain brick was coated with stucco some time in the mid 19th century and the building is mentioned in the Hull pages of Pevsner. The population of Sculcoates fell and new Methodist churches opened elsewhere in Hull and the chapel became a printing works. It was in use by Mason and Jackson Ltd from 1910 until after I took this picture – you can read more details and see pictures in Paul Gibson’s Hull & East Yorkshire History. Sadly listing of this building was refused and it was bought and demolished for a lorry parking area by Maizcor in 2001.

28i36: Scott St Wesleyan Chapel (Mason & Jackson Ltd, printers), 1981 – River Hull

5th February 2017

From an iron foundry established in the late 18th century Rose Downs and Thompson developed an engineering business specialising in machinery for the edible oil industry. Constructed in 1900, their ferro-concrete factory extension was the first in England (a year or two after Weaver’s Granary and Flour Mill at Swansea, which has been demolished for a Sainsbury’s car park) using the Hennebique system and is said to be the only remaining example in England though many were built, and is Grade II listed.

Hennibique’s agent for the UK, L G Mouchel, was extremely active in promoting this patented method of steel reinforcement in concrete – and invented the English term ‘ferro-concrete’.

Hull has another listed Hennibique structure, a bridge over the Foredyke stream in New Cleveland St, next to its junction with WItham, also built by Rose, Downs & Thomson Ltd in 1902 and a plaque on it states it to be the first ferro-concrete bridge in the UK. The stream has since been filled in and only the parapets are visible on each side of the road.

There were plans to convert the factory to flats in 2010 and some Hull councillors challenged the listing and wanted to get it pulled down in 2012. It was still in a derelict state in August 2016.


28i45 Hennebique ferro-concrete built factory, Rose Downs and Thompson, Cannon St, 1981 – River Hull

6th February 2017

Conveniently placed public toilets under the statue of Queen Victoria by Henry Charles Fehr erected in 1903 in Hull’s main square. The toilets date from 1923 and their position under the former monarch was highly controversial at the time but Victoria was back on the throne the following year. The toilets were restored in 1989 but retain most of their original fittings in the Gentlemen’s section. Both statue and toilets are Grade II listed.

King Billy (William III) in Market Place with 4 lamps around him is Grade I listed, though the toilets he rides towards are again only Grade II listed. I rather doubt if Queen Victoria would be amused to find herself above the public conveniences, and I’m sure that – unlike King Billy, who is well-known to pop down off his mount for a pint when the clock on Holy Trinity strikes midnight – she never needs to make use of the facilities beneath her.

28j15: Queen Victoria & public lavatory. Victoria Square, 1981 – City Centre

7th February 2017

The Grassendale, a 667 ton gross twin grab hopper dredger built by Richard Dunston Ltd at Hessle in 1954 was in the Union Dry Dock on Great Union St. It appears that Grassendale was owned by the British Transport Docks Board (now Associated British Ports) and was earlier based at Barrow in Furness but replaced in about 1978. She is also said to have been based at Garston and an undated postcard published by the magazine ‘After the Battle” shows her at Fleetwood. The ship was broken up at Millom in Cumbria in 1987.

The ship was around 50.3m long and 10.4 m wide, reasonable fit in the dock which was 65.2 by 14.8 m according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Hull Wikipedia. The dock, built in the first half of the nineteeth century was at the time of the photograph I think owned by Mersey Welding; it is still present, but was completely silted up. The shed at left and a brick building just out of this frame to the left are still there, with a sign in front for Blenco Welding Ltd on the pipe at the right of my picture. I think that company is no longer in business.

One of several photographs of the Grassendale on-line shows her at the entrance to Humber Dock Basin in 1980, presumably dredging in preparation for the reopening of Humber Dock as the Hull Marina in 1983.


28j21: Grassendale in Union Dry Dock, Great Union St, 1981 – River Hull


8th February 2017

A view which was almost impossible to resist photographing every time I walked across the Drypool bridge, and the presence of Humber Dawn in the left foreground added to the scene. Owned by John H Whittaker (Tankers) Ltd of Hull it was, according to various web sources, built in 1967 in Poole and originally was called Druid Stone and is now in harbour in Gibraltar.

The view shows in the distance the new Myton Bridge which opened in 1981, with just a single car visible on it (too small to see on the web image), and a fairly usual mix of barges and other vessels moored on both banks of the river. At right are the Grade II listed Pease Warehouses, with the fire damage at the extreme right having reduced the right-hand block from five to two storeys.

28j24: River Hull looking south from Drypool Bridge, 1981 – River Hull


You can see the new pictures added each day at Hull Photos, and I post them with the short comments above on Facebook.
Comments and corrections to captions are welcome here or on Facebook.

Continue reading Hull Photos: 2/2/17-8/2/17

Early Days

One of the sites I like to look at occasionally is the Blogs page of British Photographic History, launched in 2009 by Dr Michael Pritchard, where there are often posts from members that interest me, though I write far less about photographic history than I used to when I was writing for another place.

There of course I chose to write about many of the important figures in the medium, including its inventors and many of the early greats of the medium, drawing very much on the lessons I’d earlier given on photographic history as well as published works and the generally rather small amount of information on the Internet in the early 2000s. But although I spent some time looking at actual photographs in collections, exhibitions and museums and was involved for some time in actually creating images using some of the early techniques, I was never really a historian, relying largely on the contributions of others though occasionally with a little of my own interpretation and perspective. And just a few times being able to point out some of the errors in published work.

I wrote at least four full-length features on the work of W H F Talbot, both about the processes he developed – photogenic drawing, salt paper printing and the calotype – and his use of photography, particularly in his ‘Pencil of Nature‘. And while I had access to a number of books on him and his work, the William Henry Fox Talbot catalogue raisonné now available in a beta version and formally announce this Friday would have been a great extra resource.

You can read more about the project, led by Larry J Schaaf on the site itself, so I need not waste your time with details here. There are some parts of the site which are not yet complete, but there is already a very large searchable collection of the work of Talbot himself, as well as a number by Calvert Richard Jones and a few by others.

From the catalogue record you can click on the image to go to the image viewere, which as well as allowing you to zoom in, also has some tools (at top left) by which you can alter brightness and contrast, change from colour to greyscale, and invert the image – particularly useful when viewing the paper negatives.

There are some exhibits that seem almost to be blank paper – either because they were greatly underexposed or because images have faded with time. But perhaps as a scientist, Talbot beleived in keeping the result of every experiment he made with the new medium. Fading of prints was certainly a major issue in the early days, and many surviving Talbot prints have faded badly, sometimes to the extent that they have little value as pictures, though this doesn’t stop them being sold for silly money.

Photography on paper really became practical with Talbot’s calotype process, and the two people who produced the best-known body of work in the early days were Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill (who I think should be thought of in that order) working as a team in Edinburgh in the early 1840s. Also on British Photographic History was a post about the sale of their former premises, Rock House, next to Calton Hill in Edinburgh for more then £1.7m. The post links to both the estate agents site for the property and to an article in The Herald about the sale. Although it would be a grand place to live, I didn’t put in a bid for it, as the “house was recently redesigned internally by Jonathan Reed, a designer who had worked for figures such as David Bowie, Giancarlo Giammetti and Queen Rania of Jordan” and I think I would want a complete redesign for comfort before trying to live there having seen the pictures.

The studios, later home to other notable Scottish photographers, have been bought by an individual who wishes to remain private, but Adamson & Hill’s real studios where they made the great majority of their portraits are the Edingburgh cemeteries which remain open to the public.

Tish Murtha

I’m not a fan of the Metro, the free newspaper that litters our trains in the mornings. It’s useful if you have to wait for a train, to put underneath your bottom to sit on those cold metal benches, but otherwise I never bother to pick up a copy myself, and when occasionally I pick up a copy someone else has left on the train, a quick flick through confirms my belief that it isn’t worth reading. Which is what you expect given it comes from the same stable as the Daily Mail, a sorry excuse of a right wing newspaper.

But for once the Metro web site has published something worth reading – and my thanks to friends on Facebook for point out Ellen Scott‘s article Powerful photo series captures unemployed youths of Thatcher’s Britain, about the work of Trish Murtha (1956 – 2013), a photographer who lived the life she photographed in Newcastle’s west end.

Murtha first used a camera to frighten away men who would proposition her on the streets where she lived, taking it out and threatening to take their pictures – even if there was often no film in the camera, but soon got hooked on photography and aged 20 went to study at Newport’s School of Documentary Photography in 1976, returning to photograph in the community where she lived. Later she spent some time in London.

The Guardian published a piece written by her younger brother Glenn Murtha, in their That’s me in the picture‘ series in 2015, and you can find out more about her on Wikipedia, which also links to a number of sites with her work on them. She died suddenly of a brain aneurysm just a day before what would have been her 57th birthday in 2013.

Her daughter Ella Murtha wants to make sure that her mother and her pictures are not forgotten, and manages an official Facebook page dedicated to her. She is planning to create a Kickstarter page shortly to fund the publication of a book of this series of pictures and her essay, Youth Unemployment. I’ll add details here when they become available.

My opinion about the Metro was confirmed by the two stories listed under the heading ‘MORE’ at the bottom of the piece which includes eighteen of Tish Murtha’s pictures.

MORE: Photo series celebrates hard-working cats on the job
MORE: Photographer captures the weird and wonderful things people have flushed down the toilet

Holloway

I wasn’t sure about going to take pictures at Reclaim Holloway; I had several other things to cover later in the day and this was expected to be a relatively small event. Holloway is up in the north of London, and although its not a hugely long journey it would make my day a rather long one.

But in the end I decided it would be worth the effort, and part of the reason was that it was in the Islington North constituency of Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, and knowing that he is a good constituency MP there was a decent chance he might turn up.

I’ve photographed Corbyn many times over the years, supporting protests on a wide range of issued – often in the past few years along with John McDonnell, now his shadow chancellor. But since he won his remarkable victory  to become party leader by a substantial majority, he has become a hate figure for the British media and often is at the centre of an intense media scrum at events, and seldom has time for many of the smaller protests he used to come to.

It was also an event that interested me, as housing has long been a special interest – since I was a student activist back in the 1960s. The protesters want Holloway Prison, which is closing down, to be kept in the public domain and used for social housing and community services, rather than to be sold to developers for yet more expensive housing that few Londoners can afford.

And Corbyn did turn up, and there were only a couple of photographers present, though many people taking pictures of him with their phones, but it was all pretty civilised. He spoke briefly, giving his support to the campaign, posed behind the banner (after I had asked him, more for the campaign organisers than myself – it wasn’t my sort fof picture) and then cycled off to do what he needed to do as party leader, while the rest of us marched off to HM Prison for another rally.

Reclaim Holloway

Continue reading Holloway

Walking Backwards

One of the skills that every photographer who covers protests has to master is walking backwards, or rather more importantly, taking photographs while walking backwards.

Back when I learnt photography – and when I taught it – there was a considerable emphasis on avoiding camera shake when taking pictures.

We learnt and taught to stand  still, feet a foot or eighteen inches apart to make a solid platform (of course if you could lean against a post or wall, kneel or lie prone it was even better.) The camera should be held firmly in both hands, the left cradled under the lens, the right holding the body firmly with the first finger resting gently on the shutter release. Elbows should press in against the side of your chest, and it was vital to hold your breath and squeeze rather than jab at the button.

Of course, even this was only second-best, and ideally photographs should be made with the camera on a truly solid and weighty tripod. Of course in part this was a hangover from the days of large cameras and slow emulsions. Back in the 1890s when people started to make pictures without a tripod, exposures were often well under the 1/30th which makes hand-holding relatively easy with standard lenses.

I still sometimes see photographers trying to work this way – and some even at protests, but I’ve come to hate tripods (except for those few very special projects for which they are essential) and many, if not the majority of my pictures are taken while I’m walking, and often when I’m walking backwards, though sometimes I walk in the same direction as the people I”m photographing and twist around to work at an angle over my shoulder. It works for me better over the left than the right shoulder.

Walking backwards when taking pictures does need a little practice, but if you match your speed precisely and keep in step with those you are photographing you can get surprisingly sharp results at shutter speeds slow enough to give an attractive blurring to the background.

Though more normally I play safe by using ISOs that were unthinkable in the past. With both the D810 and D750 I’m now using there seems to be very little advantage in working below around ISO800, and results at much higher ISOs are still usable. In general I set the D750 with the wide-angle lens to ISO640, and the D810 with the 28-200mm at ISO800 and ISO auto allowing it to rise to ISO6400.

Nearly all the wide-angle pictures are sharp, and those with the longer lens usually suffer from focus problems rather than those caused by camera or subject movement.

One slightly limiting human design specification is the lack of eyes in the back of the head, and when walking backwards it is essential to take the occaisonal glimpse behing to check for curbs, lamposts and other obstacles. Falling over backwards is something of an occupational hazard, and could be dangerous, though the worst I’ve suffered has been the odd bruise.

But the march I covered on the 8th May was a break from all this, as the marchers were marching backwards from Trafalgar Square down Whitehall, though in easy stages with several  stops for speeches on the way.   And they really weren’t very good at it, proceeding very slowly and cautiously.

This march in reverse gear was to highlight the governments back-tracking over clean energy, with insulation grants being dropped and clean energy programmes being crippled while they back technololgies such as fracking and burning biomass which contribute to climate change as well as proposing massively polluting and unnecessary road and runway projects.

The event had started with some speeches including one from a woman whose house had been flooded. It brought back memories for me of watching the water come up to my own house a year or so earlier – though fortunately in our case it had stopped an inch or so short.

One of the others who spoke was Kye Gbangbola, whose son Zane had died in those same floods in February 2014 and had been left part paralysed. Despite a lengthy inquest since then it still seems not entirely proven that this was the effect of carbon monoxide rather than deadly hydrogen cyanide released by flooding from landfill.

Later there were speeches from others as the march halted first at the Old War Office, where speakers included Dame Vivienne Westwood, and opposite Downing St, where Sheila Menon of Plane Stupid talked about the lack of any real need or public good of airport expansion and the catastrophic effect it would have on climate change, as well as the increased deaths through air pollution, and called for the huge subsidies that aviation enjoys to be removed.

Finally outside the Dept of Health there were speechs and street theatre, which again looked at the huge subsidies the governemnt gives to the oil industry while at the same time it is cutting green initiatives. The protest had been intended to end in Parliament Square, but time had run out, probably because non-photographers are so slow at walking backwards.

More pictures at Going Backwards on Climate Change
Continue reading Walking Backwards

UVW at Barbican


Saturday Evening, May 7th, I went to one of London’s best-known arts venues, the Barbican Centre, in the City of London and owned by the City, not to listen to a concert or view and exhibition, but for yet another protest in a long-running fight to get the prestige venue to treat its cleaners with proper respect and dignity and give them decent pay and conditions.

It wasn’t the first protest by cleaners that I’ve photographed there, and over the years the cleaners have made some progress, achieving, more or less, the London Living Wage through previous protests. But one of the problems with outsourcing of cleaning contracts (and other outsourcing) is that at the end of the contract period, new contracting companies come and put in lower bids – and the only way they can achieve these is by screwing the workers harder. Since the hourly rate is now more or less protected, that means increasing workloads, getting the cleaners to clean more and more, so they can cut hours and make staff redundant. And when Servest took over the contract that is exactly what they tried to do.

The Barbican managers try to claim they have no responsibility for the pay and working conditions of people Servest get to work to keep their centre running, a ridiculous and totally untenable position. And while Servest aren’t quite employing slave labour and whipping them to work harder it should be a condition of any contract that the Barbican make that workers are treated fairly and reasonably – and the Barbican should insist that this is so.

There are workers at the Barbican who are little different from slaves. Certainly under the previous contractor there had been workers on ‘Workfare’, under which those who had been unemployed for over three months were given the choice of working unpaid for companies or organisations or being “sanctioned” – losing their benefits. There are no whips involved, just the threat of destitution.

I’d got the message from the cleaners’ union , the United Voices of the World (UVW) that the cleaners, who had kept their protest secret except for trusted supporters from the Bakers Union, Class War, SOAS Unison, Unite Hotel workers branch and IWGB Couriers branch, would be meeting a short distance away and then walking together into the Barbican, hoping to rush past security.

When we met up it was still pretty light on the street, but I changed the D700 to ISO 2000 to be ready for going inside, and changed from my normal 16-35 f4 zoom to the one stop faster 20mm f2.8. As the group neared the entrance they broke into a run, and we all made it inside, except for a small group including the workers at the Barbican who stayed to protest outside the main entrance – going in could have resulted in disciplinary action – and Servest were already singling out union members for redundancies.

Inside the lighting was even lower than I remembered and I took the ISO up another stop to ISO 4000 on the D700, while relying on auto-ISO on the D810, where I had the 28.0-200.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 in place, as usual working in DX mode. The 18-105mm would have been more useful, though it is no faster, as there is rather a large gap between the 20mm and the 42mm equivalent of the 28-200, but I only thought about that after I’d left home. Generally the auto-ISO chose ISO in the range ISO 4000-10,000, and the results, though noisy were usable after some fairly aggressive noise reduction in Lightroom.

After around 15 minutes of noisy protest, stating the cleaner’s case to people waiting to go into events and in the foyer areas, the police arrived, and after a little argument the protesters agreed to go out by the way they had come in, keeping up their noisy protest as they slowly made their way out through the busy areas to where the others were protesting in front of the main entrance. The protest had made quite a stir and despite their disclaimer I think it certain that the Barbican would be putting pressure on Servest to try to avoid further happenings like this.

Cleaners invade Barbican Centre

Continue reading UVW at Barbican

Hull Photos: 26/1/17-1/2/17

Images posted daily on the Hull Photos web site. Comments are welcome here or on Facebook.

26 January 2017

The Alexandra Hotel in Hessle Rd on the corner of Ropery St remains a splendid example of a Victorian pub, built at some time between 1870 and 1890 and was Grade II listed in 1994. My picture shows the side in Ropery Rd, but the Hessle Road side is in the same style. Both the oval fanlight above the corner door and the circular one at right have a six-pointed ‘Star of David’ glazing, and it is perhaps not coincidental that there was a large Jewish population in the area around the time it was built.

The pub now looks much the same as when I took this picture, though it was damaged and closed for repairs for six months after the floods in December 2013. Unlike many pubs built as ‘hotels’ it still offers bed and breakfast, and at prices that I’m told are worth it just for the English breakfast, though the rooms are rather basic and the noise from the drinkers and traffic might make sleep difficult.


28h53: Alexandra Hotel, Hessle Rd / Ropery St, 1981 – North & West Hull – Hessle Rd

27 January 2017

There were several fish smokehouses around Ropery St in 1981, and the two shown in this pictures are still I think present if looking somewhat different. At the left of centre is one I think at the rear of 54 Alfred St and that to the right of centre at the rear of 140-142 English St. This seems now to be built into a recent shed which is part of Happy Hutch Co., and the empty space in the front of the buildings is now occuped by the premises of parts distributor Andrew Page Ltd.

It is hard to see the first smokehouse from Ropery St now because of more recent buildings. The area has changed with the builidng of CLive Sullivan Way and the expansion of Smith & Nephew, but I also photographed a third smokehouse, possibly one of the two still present between Tadman St and Daltry St. One of the pictures shows a sign for ‘Kingston Fish Foods’ who are no longer in the area, and nothing else seems to resemble the buildings in these pictures.


28h56: Yard and fish smokehouses, Ropery St, 1981 – North & West Hull – Hessle Rd

28 January 2017

There were several buildings in Linnaeus St, not far south of Anlaby Rd which were associated with the Hull Western Synagogue which opened there in 1902 and closed in 1994 some years after I took this picture. There are some impressive gates which according to the 2008 Grade II listing (and the text on them in English and Hebrew) were dedicated to the memory of the late Edward Gosschalk and presented to the Hull Western Synagogue By his widow and sons June 1926. Gosschalks are still a leading Hull solicitors in Queens Gardens.

I didn’t photograph the main gates, but a simpler part of the iron railings around one of the buildings, which was then boarded up, and where the shadows seemed to add an air of mystery, and I very carefully and reasonably precisely lined up the ironwork with the edges of the door surround, taking several frames to ensure I got it right, working with the 35mm shift lens.

I think this was a part of the Jewish School on the site which has now been extensively restored. The synagogue (also listed) is at the back of the site on Convent Lane, but I didn’t photograph it.

Linnaeus St was originally called Botanic Lane and at its south end were Hull’s first Botanic Gardens. It was renamed after the famous Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), the inventor of the binominal naming system for organisms still in use, in 1823, and kept the name after the Botanic Gardens were moved to a site off Spring Bank West around 1880. The buildings from the synagogue complex are I think the only pre-war buildings remaining in the street.


28h53: Star of David railings, Linnaeus St, 1981 – North & West Hull – Hessle Rd

29 January 2017

The area around Abbey St has changed since I took these pictures and I cannot always identify the exact locations. A B Rooms, Lock and Safe Engineers (see previous picture in this section) had premises in Field St, but later moved to new buildings in Abbey St close by. Their building in Field St has been considerably altered since I took that picture.

I can find no information about ‘Reynard Building…’ in Hull. If Carl Sharp reads this he many well know more! I think it was probably in Abbey St (as I recorded on the contact sheet a month or two after taking it.)

This is perhaps another picture that is more about the formal qualities, and in particular three rectangles, and the contrast between a black aperture and the white painted area on the wall. There is a kind of reprise at the left of the image with three vertical rectangles of doorways. I don’t think I would have made an exposure without the tree or the name ‘Carl Sharp’ written so confidently. But it’s a view of a derelict corner of a city whose changes I was recording and made at a time when I was striving to put form to work in the pursuit of content.

Working with the shift lens (or a view camera with movements) as I did on most of the Hull pictures is a rather different exercise to taking pictures with normal positionally fixed lenses. It enables the photographer to establish a point of view and then to precisely place the edges of the frame, moving the whole frame left, right, up or down a considerable amount. I’ve chosen to keep the verticals upright, chosen to stand on a particular line that places the distant pale door next to the larger gate on the corner, and to stand at a distance so that the frame cuts the doorway at left and also fills the right of the frame with a wall which actually on close inspection curves away at the extreme edge.

What I couldn’t control is the actual aspect ratio of the frame, and like all of the pictures from Hull this is presented without cropping. But I am tempted to remove that last brick or two at the right. The Olympus had a good viewfinder which showed almost all of the image, and a tiny bit also gets removed in the scanning and squaring for printing, but we may be seeing just a tad more than appeared in the viewfinder when I was making the image.


28i13: Abbey St area, 1981 – East Hull

30 January 2017

A game of cricket in the street – again according to my contact sheet, Abbey St – in front of a rather forbidding factory building which I’m pretty sure is no longer there. The G5 is perhaps for Gate 5, suggesting this was a fairly large undertaking. The ball, a tennis ball, is just visible to the left of the batter, a girl who has taken a pretty hefty swing which failed to make contact. Perhaps having an audience put her off her stroke.

I think this was a family game, with an older man at the left who could be a brother or father. I stood and watched for a few seconds, taking 2 pictures – this was the second. The 35mm shift was a manual lens, not ideally suited to action, but I had learnt to squeeze the button on the lens to stop down the aperture and press the shutter release as a single action – and still find myself sometimes doing so while taking pictures – just as I sometimes still try to push the lens body to one side or another to adjust the framing, but realise what I’m doing when it doesn’t move.

The 35mm shift was a kind of gift from Hull, something I’d long coveted but not been able to afford. One day I got off the train in Paragon Station and walked across Ferensway to look in the window of the photography dealer a few yards up the road, Hilton Photography (they moved to Paragon St years ago) and there was the lens in the window. It wasn’t cheap, but it was in pristine condition and considerably less than the new price. These were rare items, I’d not seen one secondhand before and nor I imagine had the dealers, and I suspect they didn’t really know what it was or what it was worth. I really couldn’t afford it, but I bought it on the spot.


28i15: Abbey St area, 1981 – East Hull

31 January

The curved cafe window on the corner of Dansom Lane and Holderness Rd has been replaced, but there is still a cafe there, and the buildings across the Holderness Rd look much the same although now selling scooters and bikes. Witham ends across the road to my right on the other side of Dansom Lane South as I took this picture with the Holderness Hotel at 55 Witham, so my caption ‘Witham’ in the book ‘Still Occupied’ is just a few yards out.


28i24: Cafe, corner of Dansom Lane and Holderness Rd, 1981 – East Hull

1st February 2017

Much of Hull’s industry grew up alongside the River Hull, and one of my favourite streets in the city was Wincolmlee, at the back of warehouses and wharfs along the west bank of the river. Among the early industries along the Hull were shipbuilding, and the first steam packet in England is said to have been built on the River Hull, in a Wincolmlee yard, in 1796, under the direction of Furness, from Beverley, and Ashton, a Hull physician, some years before Fulton’s better-known invention.

But the main businesses in Wilcomlmlee and the Sculcoates area around it were oil mils, milling a wide variety of seeds and nuts brought in by boat, producing oils including linseed oil, used in cloth, linoleum and paint, palm and other oils for soap, rape, flax, barzil and other oils, as well as large quantities of the oil cake which remained being used to produce cattle feed. Paint factories based on the oil production included those for Sissons and Blundells, both of which became well-known. White lead factories supplied the paint industry, engineering firms produced the presses needed to crush the oil.

Other factories processed the sugar that came into the port, the whale oil, produced glues and soap. There were large cotton and flax mills, corn mills and more. Much of this industry had ceased by the time I was photographing, but some remained, along with many of the buildings that had housed it.

Cooper St is a short street off from Green Lane, which used to end at the bank of the Cottingham Drain, now just a narrow strip of wasteland, less than a hundred yards form the junction of Green Lane with Wincolmlee. Victoria House, built around 1840 but with late 20th century alterations was Grade II listed as at 2 Green Lane in 1994 and until recently was the site of a printing business, CTP Plates, liquidated in October 2016.


28i31: Victoria House, Cooper St, 1981 – River Hull


You can see the new pictures added each day at Hull Photos, and I post them with the short comments above on Facebook.
Comments and corrections to captions are welcome here or on Facebook.

Continue reading Hull Photos: 26/1/17-1/2/17

Jan 2017

A combination of minor ailments, bad weather and other commitments meant that I was able to complete uploading January’s stories and pictures to My London Diary earlier today, 1 February, something of a record. I’d hoped to get it finished yesterday, but had to work on other things. Until the last few days, January had been a relatively quiet month, and I’ve not been able to cover the recent anti-Trump protests for various reasons. My work hasn’t been helped by a hike in rail fares to get to London, some of my journeys now costing around 30% more than they did in 2016.

I’ve written before that I’ve been trying to cut down the work I’m doing on My London Diary and spend more time on other things, one of which is Hull, currently enjoying its year in the spotlight as 2017 UK Culture. As well as publishing work from the 1910s and 80s over the year on my new Hull Photos web site, I’m also hoping to carry out a new project in Hull, as well as visiting for talks and possibly workshops etc. Meanwhile I’m also working on a new website on my old work in London, hoping to launch something on the first 10 years later in the year.

The biggest event of the month for me was the protest by the UVW and friends at Harrods. People often tell me that it isn’t worth protesting, but this tells a very different story, with the protest hitting the national news before it even happened and Harrods being shamed into giving the staff the money their customers assumed the staff would get. It’s only one of many protests I’ve photographed that have had a successful conclusion, and many others have succeeded in getting attention to issues that otherwise would never have been covered by the national media or discussed in homes, workplaces and parliament, putting issues on our national agenda. Protests don’t always work, but they often do – and not protesting never has any chance of effecting change.

Jan 2017

End Japanese dolphin slaughter


Save our NHS from STP Cuts
Ban HP from BETT show


King’s College cleaners strike
Nelson Walk
Justice for international students
March against closing community centres
Oh! Mother march against knife crime


Peckham march against deportations
F**k Trump


Crowds protest Trump’s Inauguration


Brixton march against mass deportations
End Deportation Charter Flights to Nigeria
15 Years of Guantanamo – No Joke!
Alarm Bells for the Housing Crisis


Harrods stop stealing waiters’ tips
Save the Sunderbans Global Protest

London Images

Continue reading Jan 2017