>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Awesome!

There is, according to the Everypixel Aesthetics Test, a 99.6% chance that my picture uploaded to their test page below is awesome:

Well, actually it isn’t, just a rather ordinary image, typical of many that I take. Publishable? Yes, and fairly nicely done, but certainly not awesome. Here it is rather larger so you can judge for yourself:

It’s clear, leaves no doubt about what it is – spells out in the banner who the group is carrying it and why they are protesting. And they are obviously marching down a street in London as I caerfully took it with ‘Big Ben’ in the background. You can see too that it is part of a larger demonstration as there is another banner to the right. Clearly the people are actually walking along a road – except for one in the middle – and you see the wheels of her wheelchair. It’s competent, even precise (if rather hurriedly processed) but awesome? No.

I tried out the 14 images currently on the front page of my website My London Diary, on the test page, and the results were interesting, with this image getting the highest score, though there were others that ran it close. And one that I rather like that only scored around 25%.

Clearly the algorithm used to set the scores needs some more work, and I doubt it will ever be able to spot the awesome, though it might well be able to weed out the truly hopeless. And when I hear some picture editors get sent 50,000 images a day that could certainly be useful. There is a disclaimer on the page, which admits it isn’t really – despite the name – makeing aesthetic judgements at all. It states:

Surprised by the result? This service doesn’t measure the coolness or beauty of a person or any object in a photo. It cares only about technical parts like brightness, contrast, noise and so on. Service doesn’t dedicate for historical photos, illustrations or 3D visualizations.

What is surprising – and perhaps even at the currrent basic level useful is the ability to generate keywords from the visual content. This is perhaps a fairly simple image, and some of the others I tried were a little more impressive, but here is the algorithm-generated list for the image above:

Protest, People, Marching, Flag, Parade, Men, Cultures, Outdoors, Editorial, Protestor, Street, Sign,

It isn’t 100% accurate – but then neither are my own hand-crafted keywords for images, particularly since time constraints often mean I’ll synchronise a list across a whole set of images, and only fine-tune them for individual images if I have time later. Obviously this list doesn’t have any of the more specific keywords I’d find essential, but only because the agency I place most pictures with doesn’t make sensible use of captions for searching its image library.

Writing good captions is essential – and the old rules still hold, though so many images on the web and on many sites selling images are full of images are lacking. But captions for photographs to go in an online library are not the same as captions that will be used when an image is printed in a newspaper, magazine or book.

One of the old and good rules about captions in printed material is not to state the obvious. But to be computer searchable image captions need to include the obvious as they will generally be read without the image when searches are conducted. And while you may send a batch of images and feel you don’t need to mention some piece of information on every one, you have to remember that searchers – machine and human – are often going to see just a single one of them.

The 5 W’s remain essential:

What
Who
Where
When
Why

and sometimes there is a How worth adding.

Something like Everypixel or an enhanced version of it, taken together with software that could parse captions to generate keywords from them could make assigning keywords unnecessary. Actually computing power is now such that there is no reason not to search captions and give them greater significance in searches. After all, any editor likely to want to use that picture above would be looking for a generic ‘Protest’ but would be interested in a protest about ‘disability rights’ or the UN and UK disagrement or the organisation named on the banner or some other specific. And those would be in the caption but are not in Everypixel keywords.

Going further down the Everypixel web page we find that they actually – despite the disclaimer above – make the claim that their ‘Heartless algorithm‘ has ‘learned to see the beauty of shoots in the same way as you do‘ because it has been trained using Artificial Intelligence techniques on a sample of images provided for them by ‘designers, editors and experienced stock photographers‘. My short test on the site suggests to me that there is still a very long way to go.

I rather hope it does work, as they suggest it might be used for ‘intelligent image curation‘, giving high-scoring images a higer ranking in search results, and I think I would generally benefit from this. I’m often apalled at the poor quality images used by the press when I know that much better and more appropriate images by myself and others are available if only those resonsible for finding images had done a better search.

But I’m just a little worried about it being used to weed out low-scoring images. I suspect it would eliminate all of the most creative and unusual pictures along with the rubbish. It does give some scores in the 20% range to some of my favourite images.

But I’m pleased to say that sometimes I agree with the software!

Continue reading Awesome!

Hull Photos: 30/3/17-5/4/17

30 March 2017

At left are the Pease warehouses, built in 1745 and 1760 and being converted in to flats in 1981. Joseph Pease was involved in almost every business based in Hull, and set up its first bank here. He invested in ships, whaling, insurance, oil seed crushing, cotton spinning, making whiting, paint and soap.

Another prominent Hull family were the Listers, who were lead merchants. Two John Listers, father and son, were Hull MPs in the 17th century, and the house now know as Wilberforce House was built for the younger of them around 1660 on land by the River Hull they had owned since around 1590. Lister Court, at the right of this picture was built as a warehouse around 1880.

Pease Court was Grade II listed in 1954, and Lister Court in 1994.

28×24: Pease Warehouses & Lister Court, High St, 1981 – Old Town

31 March 2017

Spurn point, with the North Sea at left and Spurn Bight and the Humber at right looks bleak, even though this picture was made in August. It is around 30 miles by road from Hull, and on this occasion the weather was poor and we didn’t stay long, deciding to turn around and go to Withernsea rather than driving further on.

Several years later we visited in better weather and walked out and picnicked on the sands around the point.

This was then the narrowest point, but Spurn now is sometimes cut off at high tides, and is called Yorkshire’s only island, though Whitton Island perhaps has a better claim to that title, even if a tiny sliver belongs to the other side. And of course there are many other islands in Yorkshire rivers including Howden Dyke Island.

32l21: Spurn Point, 1982 – Humber

1st April 2017

The Humber Bridge seen from Barton-upon-Humber. We drove across the bridge and walked around Barton a little, but I think it was a Sunday and everything was closed. I photographed a giant knot outside Hall’s Barton Ropery (it closed a few years later in 1989 and is now and arts centre), and then we walked down to the shore and west far enough for me to take a photograph of the bridge, filling the foreground with a small lake and reeds.

On the full-size image I can make out the Lincoln Castle, beached on the foreshore at Hessle as a restaurant, just to the left under the lowest point of the suspension wires, and further to the right some of the taller blocks of Hull are visible on the horizon.

32l56: Humber Bridge from Barton-upon-Humber, 1982 – Humber

2nd April 2017

The area to the right of Humber Dock Basin, now part of Humber Quays, was once joined from Wellington St by a bridge across a channel, Albert Channel (also known as ‘Paraffin Creek’) which led from Humber Dock Basin to Albert Dock Basin, but this was largely filled in when I took this picture and the draw bridge had disappeared, though I think you can see the gap into which it was once lowered at the extreme right.

Further west the Albert Channel had been filled in to ground level and the island re-united with the mainland, but this area, used as a parking area for lorry trailers and a single boat, was closed to the public.

The name of the boat, Hull registered H428, is hard to read on the full size image, but looks like ‘Glenhelo’ or possibly ‘Clenhelo’; I haven’t managed to find any more about it. Another view, taken from a higher viewpoint, probably from inside the customs watch house by the Minerva Pier, then a heritage centre but now private flats, looks across this area to the Albert Dock entrance.

This area is now a part of Humber Quays.

32m42: Humber Dock Basin, 1982 – Old Town

3rd April 2017

The gateway from Princes Dock St into Hull Trinity House, was the entrancew to Trinity House School, but now leads into a public car park, Zebedee’s Yard, named in memory of Zebedee Scaping, headmaster of that school from 1854 to 1909.

Hull Trinity House was officially founded as a guild in 1369, though it had apparently already been in existence for a couple of hundred years. It was associated with Holy Trinity, Hull’s parish church and is a charity for masters, pilots and seamen with a school, Trinity House School, almhouses, grants to needy seafarers and an outdoor education centre. It has an extensive collection of objects and records, including personnel records for the entire Hull Fishing Fleet from 1946 on. It gets an income for its work from a number of shops and office properties.

Trinity House School and this gateway was built here in 1842, modernised in 1956 and extended upwards in 1973, but the school moved out to George St in 2013 and the buildings inside the yard were demolished to provide a public car park. The gateway was Grade II listed in 1952.

32m52: Gatehouse to Trinity House School, Princes Dock St, 1982 – Old Town

4th April 2017

Wagons inside the dock area would be mainly moved either by horses or gangs of men, or could be pulled by chains or ropes around capstans from hydraulic winches or locomotives. They also turned wagons through 90 degrees on turntables like this, moving them at the end of the dockside onto rails leading out from the dock, where they would be coupled into trains. Maps show there was an extensive system of rail tracks in the area, particularly into the large goods shed of the Railway St Goods Station which was on the site of Hull’s first railway station.

At left is one of the dockside sheds of Humber Dock Basin, and to the right the outer gates of Humber Dock, with the Minerva pub (circa 1820, Grade II listed) and Waterguard Offices, 1909 (a customs watch house, now private housing.) The dockside in front of these was Steam Packet Wharf, one of many locations in Hull from which goods and passenger services once ran. The Minerva pier can just be seen beyond , along with two curious round-headed cylinders, part of the hydraulic mechanism for opening and closing the dock gates.

32m56: Wagon turntable, Railway St/Wellington St, 1982- Old Town

5th April 2017

The picture was taken where Bankside swings away from the River Hull, around the large paint factory and between it and the gas works. The wharf was in good condition but appeared to no longer be in use. A bend in the river means that this view is loooking roughly east. Hull Exhaust Centre is still here, but the all of the buildings framed inside the metal arch have gone.

Those at the left were part of the paint factory, now all gone, and there is now a new road, Innovation Drive which runs past the the left edge of the newer shed beyond the arch which is now the only building of the Exhaust Centre; the wharf is now a car park.

Paint was produced in Hull at least as early as the 1730s by Joseph Pease and there was a significant breakthrough in 1791 when John Kirkby Picard began the manufacture of white lead, previously imported from Holland (though made from lead mined in Derbyshire) in Lowgate. The paint industry flourished in Hull from the early 19th century with famous names including Sissons Bros (established 1803) and Henry Blundell (1811).

Paint manufacturers Storry Smithson & Co Ltd and Sissons Bros & Co built factories along Bankside around 1830, but later the whole area became Sissons works. Largely destroyed by wartime bombing their new factory was built in a 1930s style and opened in 1953. The works closed around 1990 and were demolished in 1994, with the loss of the building and its famous trademark mural showing two painters carrying a plank a typical example of the failure to conserve the city’s heritage.

You can read more about Hull’s paint industry (and much more of Hull’s history) at www.paulgibson.com. Though no longer active in the UK, the Sisson’s name is still important in paint in the Caribbean, Far East and elsewhere.

32m64: Wharf & Hull Exhaust Centre, Bankside, 1982 – 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: 30/3/17-5/4/17

NUT on strike

Although I’ve been a photographer since around 1971, it was only in 2000 that I gave up a full-time teaching job to become a full-time photographer and writer, and for the next few years I continued with a little part-time teaching partly in case I didn’t make enough as a freelance, but also because there were parts of the teaching I still enjoyed – and I was able for most of the things that I continued to keep away from those aspects that were beginning to make most teacher’s lives hell.

By then I was running an industry-led computer networking course based on on-line materials that came outside of Ofsted’s remit – as did an evening course I also taught on elementary web design. And that meant I had no need to worry when the college had its Ofsted inspection. Inspectors did come into my lessons – having sought my permission – but only because they wanted to see what the future might look like rather than to inspect.

I’m still a member – a retired member – of the National Uniton of Teachers, as well as an current member of the NUJ (and sometimes get the NUT and NUJ confused in my mind) and so was happy to go along and photograph members of my old union as a member of the new one.

Succesive governments had stuck their messy fingers into education, all driven by a mistrust of teachers and a disdain for expert opinion, and largely sharing a common public perception that teaching is an easy number as teachers only work from 9am to 4pm (if that) and get long holidays.

Of course education needed reform. We needed to get rid of grammar schools – and one of the few things Mrs Thatcher deserves praise for is getting rid of so many, I think more than any other Prime Minister. We need a national curriculum – and got one thanks to Kenneth Baker, though it still needs to be made universal and less prescriptive in detail. We needed better in-service training, but Baker days really didn’t deliver. Inspection needed reform, but not Ken Clarke’s Ofsted, badly thought out and irrepsonisibly implemented. But we certainly didn’t nees Academies or so-called ‘Free Schools’, nor the increasing emphasis on national rather than local authority control of schools.

And many much needed reforms, including the change to middle and upper schools, with reform of 14-18 education and in particular vocational education and the replacement of long outdated A levels were reversed or sidelined, with various rather crackpot ideas replacing them.

The NUT strike in July was against cuts in government funding and the increasing deregulation of teachers’ pay and conditions through the increasing pressure on schools to become academies – something which has got worse since Theresa May became Prime Minister not long after, though her aggresive plans to bring back Grammar Schools (somewhat ironically a sop to the Thatcherist right) seem to have been rather put on hold at the moment.

Teachers were supported at the event by parents, and in particular the parent-led ‘Rescue Our Schools’ campaign who brought along their children and life-belts, and one of whose founders spoke at the rally, as wll as one of the leaders of the Junior Doctors campaign aqnd of course the then Acting General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, Kevin Courtney. I was pleased ehn he was eleceted as General Secreatry, not least as one of my earlier pictures of him was used on his campaign statement.

And it was good also to see and photograph Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, and his speech give me a little hope that Labour might once again get a sensible education policy, though it remains to be seen how Jeremy Corby’s pledge to build a new National Education Service will actually translate into Labour education policy – and to see if Labour MPs can give up their anti-Corbyn plotting and get behind their only hope of returning to power in the foreseeable future. It really is long past time the right and their supporters got beyond saying that Corbyn is unelectable and got behind him trying to provide a proper opposition and to get their leader elected.

NUT Strike Day Rally
NUT Strike Day March

Continue reading NUT on strike

Jerusalem Day

Writing on the day that the news is full of controversy over Ken Livingstone‘s continued suspension from holding office in the Labour Party, this protest and in particular the picture above seem rather appropriate. The Neturei Karta Jews shown in this picture waiting for the start of the Al Quds Day march are staunchly anti-Zionist, believing that ‘Torah demands ALL Palestine under Palestinian Sovereignty‘ and that ‘Judaism rejects the State of “Israel” and condemns its criminal seige & occupation‘.

They were marching with Palestinians and their supporters on Al Quds Day, an event began by the Iranian Imam Khomeini in 1979, who stated ‘Al Quds Day is a universal day to support the oppressed against the oppressor’, but its main purpose is to show solidarity with the Palestinians, in particular over the occupation of Jerusalem and to generally oppose Zionism and the Israeli state. Israel has its own Jerusalem Day (Yom Yerushalayim), celebrating their gaining control of the city after the June 1967 Six-Day War.

Back in the 1930s, which Livingstone’s comments concerned, Zionism was not universally popular among Jews, and the British government was against mass migration of Jews to Palestine. In 1917 when they had made the Balfour Declaration calling for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” the only Jewish member of cabinet, Edwin Samuel Montagu, had warned strongly against it, calling it “a capitulation to anti-Semitic bigotry” and warning of the dangers.

Livingstone’s comments were clearly based on historical fact. Hitler was never a Zionist, but he wanted the Jews out of Germany, and the Hitler government reacted positively to suggestions from the Zionist Federation of Germany and supported their efforts to encourage Jewish emigration to Palestine from 1933 until it became impossible during the war. There were even Zionist training camps for settlers in Germany, where they were allowed to fly the Jewish national banner – now the familiar Israeli flag, though the Nazis still opposed the idea of a separate Israeli state.

It wasn’t politically astute to have said what he did when he did, but part of Livingstone’s appeal to me has always been a tendency to say what he thinks rather than think politically, and his comments have been manna to those opposed to the Corbyn leadership of the party. As an interview with Lord Levy on the Today programme this morning made plain, this is what is really behind the fuss over Livingstone’s alleged anti-Semitism.

Al Quds day is equally controversial, not least because the main organisation behind it in this country is the Islamic Human Rights Commission, which critics say is funded by Iran and which supports Hezbollah and Islamic extremism, and fails to criticize human rights abuses in Iran and some other Islamic states. My pictures over the years do show some supporters of Hezbollah on the marches, but whenever I’ve heard them, speakers have been clear that they are not anti-Semitic but firmly anti-Zionist, a distinction that their critics seem keen to dismiss.

Although IHRC is an imperfect organisation, it does useful and well-respected work in many areas, while most of those making the accusations are highly prejudiced and unreliable, and many of the details they state clearly fly in the face of facts.

At the end of the march, outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, the Al Quds Day marchers were welcomed by a rather smaller but very vocal group waving those Israeli flags, the Sussex Friends of Israel, Zionist Federation and the Israel Advocacy Movement who were holding their ‘It’s Time To Stop The Hate: Stand With Israel‘ rally. While police more or less kept the two groups apart and the bulk of the Al Quds Day marchers moved on to their really in front of the embassy, most of the Neturei Karta climbed on to one of the raised beds opposite the Stand with Israel protest.

The pro-Israeli protesters weren’t too keen to be photographed, but the police who were keeping the two groups separate refused the requests by some of them to prevent photographers working, though I was unable to stay as close as I would have preferred. Although they were all holding placards proclaiming ‘Peace Not Hate‘ there was soon a barrage of what can only be called anti-Semitic insults and pure hatred being screamed over my head towards the Neturei Karta, who responded vigorously in similar fashion.

Al Quds Day March
Supporters Stand Up for Israel

Continue reading Jerusalem Day

Interior America revisited

I was interested to read ‘A Second Look: Chauncey Hare’s Interior America‘ by Jörg M. Colberg on his Conscientious Photo Magazine, and I recommend it to you. As might be expected, its a thoughtful and considered view of a man and a body of work which for various reasons the photographic world has rather forgotten and who himself gave up on photography and the institutions of photography to become a therapist.

I was introduced to Hare’s work by Lewis Balz when I went to a workshop Balz gave at the Photographer’ Place in Derbyshire a year or two after Interior America was published (Aperture 1978), and went to buy his book immediately after. It wasn’t that easy to find in London and I don’t think the Photographers Gallery had it in stock, but I managed to get a copy and both the pictures and the introductory essay by Hare made a great impression on me.

I didn’t start going out to try and make work like his, but it did have an influence on me in terms of the wide-angle view that he used. Balz’s work also got me working with ultra-slow emulsions, though I never liked the isochromatic films he used, but worked instead with Kodak’s Technical Pan, a film with extended red sensitivity, and one of the most frustrating emulsions ever made. Developing it for pictorial use – at least until Kodak made its Technidol developer available was rather hit or miss, and you could get great almost grain-free and incredibly sharp negatives – but some films I pulled off the dev tank spiral straight into the bin as they contained only the ghosts of images.

But I couldn’t afford a quality wideangle for my 4×5 camera, and Technical Pan offered comparable quality from 35mm, if only at ISOs between ISO6 and ISO32 depending on your choice of developer and a little luck. And the Zuiko 21mm f/3.5 was a fine and affordable lens that became a ruglar part of my equipment.

Around 2000 I wrote a short note about Chauncey Hare for the web site I was then working for, where, among other things, I had a guide to several hundred photographers of note. It got updated a little after Hare himself got in touch with me, initially I think suggesting firmly I should remove it. We exchanged a few more e-mails, and I tried to get him to agree to my writing more about him and to include some of his pictures, but without success, but eventually I think he was reasonably content with the short note I wrote about him, which incorporated a little of what we had discussed in our messages. So here it is, from around 2002:

Chauncey Hare

Chauncey Hare is known for one set of work, and a chilling one at that. He qualified and worked for as an engineer for a large oil corporation for over 20 years, becoming increasingly alienated from his work and the attitudes it forced him to take and at the same time more involved in photography.

Eventually he quit the lab and began a journey into many people’s homes to photograph them in their rooms. Some were people he knew, others total strangers who allowed the photographer with his large format camera into their homes, thanks to credentials from various museums and the Guggenheim Foundation who supported his work. At times they were unaware they were in the view of the extreme wide-angle lens he used, while some others pose for the camera. Often they are caught awkwardly by the blast of a flash, pinned to a wall by their shadow.

These are pictures, as Theodore Roszak wrote in his note on the cover of Interior America, that chronicle not just the spiritual desolation at the heart of an industrial society, but also reflect Hare’s own despair.

We can also see in them echoes of other work in photography, perhaps most notably the interiors of Walker Evans some 40 years earlier. They give a fascinating if somewhat depressing insight into the psyche of a nation from a highly individual viewpoint.

Hare’s 1985 book ‘This Was Corporate America’ accompanied a touring exhibition of his work showing photographs of the Social Security Administration, subway riders in San Francisco, and people working in the electronic industry in silicon Valley. These pictures complemented his earlier work on people in their homes.

Although curators – including John Szarkowski of MOMA, NY – recognised Hare’s work for its formal qualities, they failed to respond to the need for changes in society the pictures made obvious. The galleries and the art world were a part of the problem, enmeshed in and supporting a sick corporate world that denied human potential.

Hare decided he needed to leave photography, as it no longer allowed him to make the statements he wanted to make, and to work on the problem in a more direct way. He is now a licensed family therapist and Co-director of Work and Family Resources, a not-for-profit community-based business offering “personal coaching” and group seminars for people who are, or have been, abused at work.

Today I might add a little on the end, mentioning of course the 2009 Steidl republication of his work, Protest Photographs, and perhaps articles like Two Slight Returns on Afterall, and articles elsewhere. THe LIbrary of Congress has 8 of his pictures, but none of them available on line, and their restricitons page has the message: “Publication and other forms of distribution:Restricted. Mr. Hare has stipulated that his photographs may not be copied by researchers in any way or for any purpose.”

You can however see an number of his images on line by going to Google and doing an image search on the name ‘Chauncey Hare’. Its generally pretty obvious which are his from the rather mixed set that is returned.

Around Brexit

Understandably the vote – by a considerable but narrow majority – to leave the European Union was dominating our minds and events on the street at the start of last July. I suspect I’ve already made my own views on it pretty clear – it was a shocking gamble by a Tory Prime Minister concerned only with his problems inside the party and not with the interests of the country, and was won by cynical politicians – again mainly Tory – making promises they knew there was no possibility of being achievable.

Although we can’t know what the end result will be, things are not looking good, and seem likely to get worse. While exit from the EU seems inevitable now that the process has started, it also seems inevitable that it will lead to a tremendous disillusion among those who voted for it, as they find it won’t lead to more jobs or fewer immigrants, more money for the NHS or any of the other ‘goodies’ dangled before their eyes in the referendum campaign. Given the incredible levels of mistrust of politicians by ordinary people across the whole political spectrum this can’t be healthy, and seems likely to lead to some kind of populist backlash.

My first assignment (or rather self-assignment) of the month was a rally in Islington against the reported rise in hate crime which followed the referendum result, with people from across the community coming to stand together against hate crime against racial, faith and other minorities. I wasn’t surprised to find among the speakers a local MP, Jeremy Corbyn, not just because it was in his constituency, but because of his anti-racist views he has always expressed.

Corbyn’s rise to become leader of the Labour Party was an expression of the growing disillusion among Labour Party members and supporters against the kind of politics that have dominated the party over the past twenty or more years – and which still runs the party mechanisms, which has led to the continuing conspiracies in the party against him. And what really worries the handful of ultra-wealthy who own our media (and the BBC which is also controlled by our ‘elites’) is that he and those moderate socialists (largely Keynsian rather than Marxist) who back him could well win, though were I a betting man I might consider it wiser to put my money on Farage. And even were Corbyn to win, I think the most likely outcome would be for us to find a little more about where power actually resides under our strange and unwritten constitution.

So I took my pictures of the event and the speakers, wrote my captions, all stressing the issues and filed my pictures. And I actually made a little money from them, but the story wasn’t about race hate, but about the jacket Corbyn was wearing, a ‘designer jacket’. Though I expect the reporters who wrote the story, like me, probably knew or strongly suspected that he been given it or had bought it in a charity shop. And of course when I took the picture I too was wearing a rather similar designer jacket; most clothing these days appears to be labeled in this way.
Love Islington – NO to Hate Crime

From Islington I rushed to Hyde Park Corner, where a March For Europe against Brexit was starting more or less as I arrived. It was a large march, and it took well over an hour and a half for the fairly tightly-packed crowd to pass me as I walked up and down taking pictures of marchers and their placards before I walked briskly to the Underground for a train to Westminster, where the rally was taking place in Parliament Square.

Numbers are always difficult to estimate, but I think at least 5-600 people were going past me a minute, taking up the whole width of the road, and for over 90 minutes, giving an estimate of over 50,000 on the march. Given the topicality of the issue and the numbers involved you might have expected some significant coverage in the media, but there was relatively little; it would have got more on the BBC had it been a protest against the government in Spain.

The Rally For Europe against Brexit had almost finished by the time I arrived – even though I’d come by tube, but I did catch a couple of the final speakers, including Bob Geldorf. There was a giant TV screen above the speakers relaying them to the large crowd in the square, many of whom would otherwise not have been able to see, and whoever was putting the image on to it was playing with some effects as Geldorf spoke, which made a more interesting background to my image of him. I found the slight delay – presumably due to the effect processing – between the two images interesting and you can see it in the different positions of his finger in the picture.

His was a speech that the content didn’t greatly detract from my concentration on the image, and I looked for ways to use the reflection of the crowd in the mirror of his dark glasses – and found it when a suitable background came up on the screen behind.

The following day I was in Westminster again, photographing 16-17 Year olds demand the vote, a protest triggered by the referendum where they had no vote, despite being among those whose future would be most affected by it. Had they been able to vote it might have swung was was a fairly narrow margin (though I think it would have needed some of the other excluded groups too.) Finally, after covering their rally in Parliament Square – rather smaller than that the day before, I wandered over to the tribute to murdered Labour MP Jo Cox, the Jo Cox banner of love, to take a few pictures before going elsewhere to cover other protests.

Continue reading Around Brexit

The Struggle Continues…

It’s hard to cover events that keep on and on and try to produce images that look fresh and different, but sometimes important to do so. The Wood St strike by cleaners in the United Voices of the World was a good example, and at the end of June had reached its 22nd day.

I hadn’t of course been there every day, though the pickets had been, but this was my fourth visit on days when the union had decided to hold a special rally, this marking the fourth week of their strike. While the UVW and other unions have held one or two day strikes, the UVW say this is the first indefinite strike in the City of London, and it looked as if it would continue for some time, with the direct employers Thames Cleaning having taken an extremely hard line, going to court to try stop the strike and getting an injunction covering the union’s actions, the costs of which came close to bankrupting the union, and Thames apparently getting the uncritical backing of the company that runs the offices, CBRE.

The picketing and rallies present an embarrassment to CBRE, but also, along with the lack of proper cleaning (though doubtless Thames were trying their best to keep things going though their managers and non-striking cleaners) were building up pressure on CBRE from the people who work in the offices and the well-known companies they worked for. Just because these city workers are themselves very well paid doesn’t mean they don’t have sympathy for those who are badly paid – and who they know they rely on to keep their workplace pleasant, and many had taken the leaflets from the strikers and some expressed their support.

Publication of articles and pictures about the strike – even on the web and in the alternative press, but particularly when the story gets picked up my newspapers and TV stations disturb these powerful companies – and they put pressure on those they pay for office space who in turn dictate to the actual employers. CBRE are paying Thames and can and will in the end tell them to pipe down and come to an agreement with the UVW that will eventually end the strike – as they did around a month later. One new aspect which might have helped the strike get more publicity was the threat by on of the sacked workers to go on hunger strike.

While I try hard to ensure my coverage of the events keeps to the facts, the very fact that I and other journalists are there and covering them is important in uncovering injustice, to me one of the vital roles of a free press. Its news that should be published, even if most of the media ignores it most of the time, often in favour of trivia. And the presence of the media does sometimes appear to improve the behaviour of both security staff and police.

There is no doubt that low pay and the increasing inequality of our society is an important topic, and it is actions like this that help put it on the national agenda – so much so that even a Conservative government recently felt it had to introduce a “Living Wage”, even though this was largely an evasion, well below an actual Living Wage, particularly in London. The figures for the living wage are readily available, published annually, but ignored by then Chancellor George Osborne.

UVW Wood St Strike continues
Continue reading The Struggle Continues…

London Mix

Some days there are just too many things happening in London. Well all days there are, but I mean too many things that I have access to and am trying to photograph, and June 28th last year was one of them. And in the early evening there were three protests occurring simultaneously in the same area of Trafalgar Square and to make things worse it was raining steadily and fairly intensively.

Rain isn’t necessarily a bad thing for photographers, and umbrellas can offer some visual interest – I once published an article ‘The umbrella in photography’ looking at examples by a number of photographers including Kertesz, though I have to admit I’ve probably seen more than enough pictures made through rain-drenched windows to last several lifetimes.

But umbrellas in crowds are something of a problem. Unless you have an assistant holding a large one over your head, they become pretty impossible to use when using a camera. If you are alone in plenty of space and there is little wind it can be manageable to hold one tucked under your left arm and held up by your wrist as you hold a camera to your eye, but this becomes untenable in crowds, as you get buffeted by other brollies and yours will uncontrollably poke other people in their eyes.

Working without one, you get wet. Wetter than just the rain would make you, as those other umbrellas around direct the rain they protect the holders from onto you, and unless you are wearing a hood, unerringly down the back of your neck, making you sodden from inside your clothing. In winter I wear a good waterproof jacket with an integral hood, but even an expensive ‘breathable’ coat becomes unbearably hot in summer.

Cameras too suffer from water. Even those that are ‘weather-sealed’ will slowly drown, but lenses generally go first. You can keep wiping the front surface with a chamois or microfibre cloth (and I often walk around holding one in front of the lens), but you do have to remove it to make the exposure. Zoom lenses which alter their length pump moisture into their interior as you alter the zoom, and even those that only move internal elements had something of the same tendency. Something that seldom gets a mention in the manuals is that lens hoods, at least with telephoto lenses, are at their most useful in keeping the rain off.

I do have a kind of plastic raincoat for my camera, but its a real pain to use, and though it diverts the rain (except from the front lens surface) it doesn’t stop the moisture. Usually I put one camera away in my bag to keep dry, and keep the other under my jacket as much as possible – though that does mean leaving my jacket rather open so the rain (and those brolly drips) can enter too.

And when the lens clouds over due to condensation on its inner elements, I take the other camera out of the bag and work with that. Until it goes too. Usually I’ve at least one more dry lens in the bag to change to, though that may mean I end up taking far more pictures than I really should on the 16mm fisheye.

When all my cameras, lenses and clothes are sodden, its time to give up and go home. Though at such times I always remember what my father used to tell us kids when we complained about getting wet, ‘You’ve got a waterproof skin’.

You can read what the protests were about and see more pictures on ‘My London Diary’:

Act Up for Love
London Still Stays

The third protest was a group of four women protesting over the agreement between the South Korean and Japanese government over ‘comfort women’, the Koreans used as sex slaves by Japanese soldiers in the second Worlad War – and I only used the one picture above.

Continue reading London Mix

Hull Photos: 23/3/17-29/3/17

23 March 2017

These railway tracks ran into the Neptune St Goods station of the Hull & Barnsley railway which opened in 1885. The company, full name The Hull Barnsley and West Riding Junction Railway and Dock Company had been backed by Hull Corporation to compete with the monopoly of the North Eastern Railway on traffic to the city and the docks. It opened its new Alexandra Dock the same year. After financial difficulties towards the end of the century it agreed to work with the NER over the building of a new jointly owned dock, opened in 1914 as the King George V Dock, and it merged with the NER in 1922, shortly before the 1923 grouping when this became part of the LNER.

The goods station was closed around 1960 and the yard was taken over Drapers to cut up steam locomotives for scrap around 1967 when they moved there from the old HBR Sculcoates Goods; around 578 engines ended their days at the two locations, and the pile of scrap past the wagons is probably some of their remains.

The large brick building left of centre is the HBR good shed and it and some of the Neptune St buildings remain. There is still a bridge, though completely rebuilt in concrete as a part of the construction of Clive Sullivan Way. The white building at left is the AJK Ltd (Andrew Johnson Knudtzon) Neptune Street bulk cold storage warehouse, 36,613 cubic metres of space for your frozen seafood, meat and other products close to Albert Dock.

28v41 Rail tracks under bridge to William Wright Dock, Goulton St, 1981 – Docks

24 March

Brenda’s Cafe was on a street corner somewhere on or close to Goulton St, but appears to have been boarded up when I took this picture, and I have no recollection of exactly where it was located. Almost certainly like most of the housing in this area it will have been demolished shortly after I made this and a second photograph concentrating on the message ‘THIS IS BRENDA’S CAFE’.

I liked the underlined ‘THIS IS’, written on a slant and then the careful alignment to the brick courses of ‘BRENDA’S CAFE’, provided with a correct apostrophe and a full stop but no acute accent. But I imagine Brenda’s was a cafe rather than a café.

28v42: Brenda’s Cafe, Goulton St area, 1981

Also:

28v43: Brenda’s Cafe, Goulton St area, 1981

25 March 2017

Above the doorway of the 1930’s brick building of the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen’s Queen Mary Hostel (a building that is now the Hull Training Business Academy) in the 3 layers of stone facing above the stone door surround was a fairly lightly scratched bas-relief of two fishermen hauling nets aboard a small planked boat. The section at bottom right had suffered somewhat from erosion and the wheelhouse of the boat at top left was almost invisible.

I think my focus was possibly slightly out on this image, but the stone was also rather worn. A few years later this sculpture was painted to make the details clearer, but when I made this I think it was bare stone. When I last saw it, most of the paint had faded or flaked off and the work was reverting to its former state.

The building is a few yards to the west of the junction with Boulevard and on the north side of Goulton St.

28v44: Fishermen bas-relief, National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, Goulton St, 1981 – Hessle Rd

26 March 2017

This statue, I think in fibreglass, of a fisherman was in the reception area of the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen., and could be seen clearly through the glass door and window, though the fine wire grid in the toughened glass.

I made several near-identical exposures through the right-hand window, and can be seen doing so in a reflection at the left of the picture, apparently from an interior glass divider.

I have been unable to find any information about this sculpture, or about its current location, though doubtless some people in Hull will know.

28v46: Fisherman, National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, Goulton St, 1981 – Hessle Rd

27 March 2017

Although my note on the contact sheet states ‘Boulevard’, I think this fine doorway was almost certainly in Coltman St, another of the streets I walked down on my way to Hessle Rd. You can still see a very similar example at the end of a row in Coltman St (I think at 194) on the west side fairly close to Anlaby Rd. There is a gap where two properties have been demolished, possibly following fire damage, a rather common fate for various reasons with derelict properties, particularly when listed. This may well have been one of those now missing.

There are around 15 houses in the street which were Grade II listed in 1973, and this example must surely have been one of these. The street was named after the Coltman family who owned the land and developed it from around 1840 starting at the south end on Hessle Rd, and it includes a number of houses in a ‘Greek Revival’ style from the 1850s.

28v53: Doorway, probably Coltman St, 1981 – Hessle Rd

28 March 2017

I photographed this shop window on several occasions. A small general store and sweet shop on Church St I think I went in and bought the occasional Mars Bar or can of drink to keep me going in an otherwise rather desolate area. The normal window was simply a few drink cans thrown in randomly and this was a special effort for the Royal Wedding , with the tray and carefully arranged cans.

Church St used to lead to St Peter’s Church, the parish church of Drypool a large building which replaced and incorporated parts of the earlier church in 1823, with seating for a thousand worshippers. This was destroyed by bombing in 1941, though its former churchyard is still there across from where Church St meets Great Union St. The site of the church is now occupied by Humber Galvanising and its car park.

28×12 Royal Wedding Window Display, Church St, 1981 – East Hull

29 March 2017

Like St Peter’s Church nearby, the Clarence Flour Mill was badly damaged during wartime bombing, with only the silo remaining from the original 1891 flour mill, but it was rebuilt and reopened in 1952, continuing in operation until 2005.

Hull’s most prominent landmark, it was demolished in 2015, supposedly to allow a remarkably ugly replacement, the Radisson Blu hotel, to be built in time for the 2017 City of Culture. When I walked past a month ago the site was still just an empty gap of ground-level rubble and brick, with no building work having started.

Joseph Rank was born on Holderness Rd, Hull into a milling family in 1854 and was running a small rented windmill by the time he was 21, but it failed to make money. He invested in a larger windmill which was profitable and a few years later after seeing them in action at another mill he realised the potential of using steel rollers and mechanical power to greatly increase output, building his Alexandra Mill in Williamson St off Holderness Rd in 1885, the first mill of its type in the UK.

The Clarence Flour Mill, as well as having roller mills with high capacity also led in other areas of technology, including the bulk handling of flour, discharging it in into barges on the River Hull.

As well as the large ‘JOSEPH’ at the top of the picture, my attention was also drawn to the much smaller message across two of the ground floor window panes, ‘HELP ME’. My younger son, Joseph, then three, may well have been with me when I made the exposure, and I certainly pointed out his name to him on various occasions as we went past, and I may well have felt in need of help myself. But somewhere inside this huge building, with its hundreds of panes of glass there was someone who felt trapped.

While now it would have been trivial to correct the perspective using a wider lens and computer software, it wasn’t possible to get it right in camera with a shift lens, nor to correct the slight distortion, and I have left these more or less as taken.

28×23: Joseph Rank’s Clarence Flour Mill, Clarence St, 1981 – River Hull

February 2017 at last

Finally I’ve managed to finish the month of February on My London Diary. It’s been hard going, partly because I spent 5 days away from home and taking pictures, working on a new Hull project in the 22017 UK City of Culture. The Hull pictures took a long time to process because I was mainly taking panoramas, which end up as files a little over 200Mb. They are slow to take as it’s essential to get the camera level in two dimensions as well as setting the framing at the edges. It is possible to make very slight corrections on the computer, but anything more than a small tad is destined for the bit bucket.

My time was also occupied in getting files ready for the show ‘All About the Lea‘ which opened at Cody Dock in West Ham last weekend and is open from 11am till 5pm on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays until 23 April. Cody Dock arranged the printing and hung the show, but I had to work on the files to get the 28 pictures ready, as well as checking up on locations and dates for the captions.

March also saw a rare appearance for me speaking in public on a discussion panel at Battersea Arts Centre after a performance of ‘E15’ there, a verbatim play based largely on the protests by the group of young mothers from the Stratford Focus E15 hostel. The play was a slightly strange experience, re-living for me the experience of a number of their protests that I had photographed (and you can find the pictures on My London Dairy by searching on ‘E15’.)

I don’t often speak in public, and I spent some time worrying beforehand (as well as doing a certain amount of preparation), but it went well on the night, and I was sorry when we ran out of time – though most of the panel and the cast had an enjoyable discussion over a few glasses afterwards.