The State of News Photography

World Press Photo, the University of Stirling and the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism recently surveyed news photographers around the world and have just published the results of the survey.

There is an clear article on Petapixel giving some of the key findings (based on the report’s ‘Executive Summary’), and it also contains a link to the full report – all 76 pages – released by World Press Photo yesterday, so I won’t go into details of the report here, but simply make a few comments.

The photographers sent the survey were  the over 5000 from around the world who submitted work to the 2015 World Press Photo, and about a third of these responded. There were some problems because many of the submissions are made by agencies and the actual photographers were then less likely to get the survey, and non-English speakers were probably less likely to respond as the survey was in English only, but there were still responses from photographers in over a hundred countries; the largest from any country came from Italy with 143 respondents, and just over half came from Europe, with only a perhaps surprisingly low 142 from North America.

Of course only a particular section of working photographers sends in work to WPP, not least because of our perceptions about the kind of work that is successful in these annual competitions. In North America too there are perhaps other annual competitions which attract greater attention than the European-based WPP.

Perhaps the most interesting section of the report for me was on journalistic ethics, where photographers were asked whether they ever staged, manipulate or enhanced their images.

Perhaps surprisingly, only just over a third of news photographers stated they never stage images, with around half saying they sometimes do. As the report comments “This is certainly contrary to codes of practice at most news organisations and indicates an important gap between the codes and what happens in the field”. Unsurprisingly North American photographers were far less likely to do so (56.5% Never) than their European counterparts (29.4%). My own experience in working for a US company in the past certainly suggested a much greater emphasis on journalistic ethics – and not just in photography – than in the UK.

While over three-quarters of photographers agreed that the addition or subtraction of material content (manipulation) in images was a serious issue, only 9.4% stated in this confidential survey that they never did so, with 28.9% claiming they always did! It certainly suggests that such practices are far more routine than I had every suspected, and I think casts serious doubt on the whole practice of our profession.

The whole report contains much more, with a whole section of quotations from the 300 photographers who replied to the open-ended question “so what is important to you?” making particularly interesting reading. The ‘Conclusions’ at the end of the report also make interesting reading, and deserve greater prominence – they seem a little hidden, starting on page 66 of the report. Don’t stop at the ‘Executive Summary’.

A New Magna Carta?


A police officer comes to tell protesters they need permission use a megaphone to speak in Parliament Square

On June 15th 1215 King John met the Barons at Runnymede and put his seal on Magna Carta, which several hundred years later began to be touted as the basis for our legal system and the “foundation of our liberties”. John immediately then went off and wrote to the Pope, Innocent III, and got him to declare it “null and void of all validity forever” on the grounds that he had signed it under duress.

There were later versions of Magna Carta that reinstated the important parts of the treaty so far as our law and liberties are concerned, and we might have been better to wait to celebrate until 2017 or 2025, but in perhaps the whole thing is misguided, as the rights and freedoms involved were not novel, but date back certainly to before the Norman conquest; Magna Carta was their reinstatement rather than their genesis.

What we need now is not a celebration of Magna Carta, but a new Magna Carta, to replace the rights and freedoms that we have lost – and which if our current government has its way we will lose more of, with proposals to repeal Human Rights legislation, bring in corporate control under TTIP, further restrict trade union rights, close down freedom of information requests and more.

Of course it isn’t just the current Tory government who are responsible, not just them and the ConDem coalition. The two previous New Labour governments brought in an enormous number of new laws, many of the impinging on our freedom, and of course governments both Tory and Labour before them. But it does seem to have taken on a new impetus since the last election.


Police prevent people coming to celebrate Magna Carta at the Runnymede Eco-Village

It isn’t just laws, but also the way that the state and authorities act, often using the police and security agencies and abusing the laws. And a very clear example of this was over the suppression of the Magna Carta festival planned at the Runnymede Eco-Village, which I’ve written about here earlier. A huge police operation took place to stop just several hundred people celebrating peacefully close to where the charter was signed.

The Eco-Village was evicted and their homes destroyed around a week ago, following a court decision a few days earlier, which privileged the rights of property owners above those which were important in the thirteenth century charters. The villagers were looking after the forest rather better than the owners, and were not in the way of the development at the top of the hill.

On the anniversary of Magna Carta, I began at the Truth & Justice Magna Carta Day Protest outside the Royal Courts of Justice by the Campaign for Truth & Justice. While there were – as my account I think makes clear – some rather odd characters and views among those taking part, it is hard to doubt that there is something rotten at the heart of our society.

From there I went to another rather odd group, Voice for Justice, with whom I felt rather less empathy. It really did seem to me that these people were protesting for the freedom to be a bigot rather than standing up for the kind of values which I feel important. Though some of their placards said ‘Magna Carta – Equal Rights for All’ they seemed firmly opposed to equality laws.


Protesters wore yellow rubber gloves like cleaners might wear

Not far away, the PCS were protesting for a true living wage for all governent workers on the 25th International Justice Day for Cleaners and Security Guards outside the Treasury. Fine I thought, but why just those who work for HMRC. All workers deserve a living wage – something even the government now seem to believe in, though their idea of a living wage is far too low.


Selma James

Back in Parliament Square, another protest was taking place, Close Yarls Wood, End Detention! with the All African Women’s Group leading a rally in the International week against detention centres, calling for the closure of all immigration detention centres to be shut down. And up came a police officer to tell them of the restrictions on protest outside Parliament.


Jeremy Corbyn MP

I’m pleased to say that they more or less ignored him, with Selma James and another speaker being followed by 3 MPs, Jeremy Corbyn, Kate Osamor and John McDonnell before the protesters marched to Downing St to deliver a report on rape and sexual abuse in Yarl’s Wood.


Jeremy Corbyn MP

Downing St was convenient for me, because the next event in my diary, Magna Carta justice for Shaker Aamer was taking place on the opposite side of Whitehall. Speakers there again included Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell.

Continue reading A New Magna Carta?

Hine and the Empire State

A short note in L’Oeil de la Photographie (The Eye of Photography), one of series by former LIFE picture editor and photographer John Loengard, based on his 1994 book and current touring show Celebrating the Negative, set me thinking about the life and work of Lewis Hine, and in particular his images of steelworkers made during the building in 1931 of New York’s Empire State Building.

At the bottom of the piece in L’Oeil there are links to several other posts in the series by Loengard, on negatives of celebrated images that he photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Wynn Bullock, Edward Weston, Joe Rosenthal, Robert Capa, Man Ray and Richard Avedon.  (It should be noted that the short quote on Capa rather perpetuates the myth around his D-Day images that has been so effectively researched and demolished by A D Coleman and his collaborators in the Robert Capa D-Day Project, though of course their in-depth research does nothing to diminish the power of  Capa’s images.)

Loengard in his note on Hine states that that the new art director of Survey magazine which had used his work over the previous 20 years “found his pictures old-fashioned“, wanting more graphic images.

You can see more of Hine’s work on the Empire State in various collections, including that of George Eastman House. There appears to be more on their older web site than in their new image licensing website (search for Empire State.) There is another good collection online at the New York Public Library.

You can read more about Hine on various sites. I’ve written only fairly briefly about him in various places, including in a longer essay on the New York Photo League, which inherited some of his work as well as his being influenced by his work. This piece, written in 2001, is still available (though slow to load) from the web archive, and includes this paragraph:

Hine occupied a special place in this pantheon of the League. His campaigning work from around the turn of the century, fighting for protection for children in the workplace (and the enforcement of existing laws designed to protect them) was the epitome of the type of photography the League existed to promote.

It goes on to state that “When Hine died in 1940, his collection of pictures and negatives was presented to the League” and gives some further information. You can learn more about what happened to his work in an earlier article by Vicki Goldberg in the New York Times about a show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In it, Goldberg writes of Hine’s “daring and daringly designed images of men and steel and sky” which seems to match better what I see in the work than the opinion of the Survey art editor.

Goldberg goes on to write “Hine’s work sharply poses one of the crucial questions about photography: how much does esthetics count in documentary?” It remains a crucial question though my answer has been that aesthetics must be the means rather than the end. It was a conclusion that decisively altered my own work 35 years ago.

And Hine’s own end also perhaps has lessons. Goldberg writes that in his last years no one wanted his work; “he lost his house, stopped photographing and applied for welfare. He died as destitute as anyone who ever sat for his lens” and later in the piece, “Hine could scarcely sell a photograph at any price.”

Apparently at his death, “the Museum of Modern Art was offered his pictures but did not want them; George Eastman House in Rochester did.” Hine’s work wasn’t entirely lost from sight, and I first met him in the pages of the two early popular histories of photography, by the Gernsheims and by Beaumont Newhall, but the attitude of MoMA is still reflected in the art world today.

We saw it recently in the Arts Council England’s treatment of Side Gallery here in the UK, which lost its entire ACE funding in 2011, and Photofusion which lost funding in 2015. Side, like the Brooklyn Museum of Art which Goldberg states “put Hine squarely in the spotlight with a retrospective in 1977 after a nearly 40-year hiatus“, also exhibited his work in 1977.

Swanscombe


Coal Wharf at Bell Wharf, Swanscombe. A ropeway took coal to the factory

I’m still working on my North Kent book with images from the 1980s that I’ve mentioned here before, and looking at some of the images from back then made me want to go there again, especially since parts of the area are changing.

Of course I have returned occasionally over the years, and published and exhibited some later images, such as those in Estuary and my book Thamesgate Panoramas (as always those with UK addresses can order the print version more cheaply direct from me, though I recommend the PDF from Blurb at £4.99.)


Where the Eurostar emerges from under the River Thames

One particular area under threat is the Swanscombe Peninsula, a triangular area of Kent that juts out towards Essex a little to the west of Gravesend. It’s both an ancient and a modern crossing point, where pilgrims crossed the river on their way to Canterbury, and where enormous pylons, 623 ft high, carry the National Grid across, while the HS1 Eurostars dive into a a tunnel at high speeds close to Ebbsfleet station (where just a few stop) though the more local Javelin services reduce the journey times to central London to 18 minutes for the wealthy. There are plans for what sounds like a particularly tacky theme park based on films and TV programmes which has government backing to cover the whole area.


Pilgrims Road – and a giant pylon in the distance on the opposite side of the Thames

I took the slow route to Swanscombe station on a Gravesend train. The time difference for me is minimal, as the fast trains go into St Pancras, to the north of London, and I can catch the slower trains far more conveniently at Waterloo East, and get there about as quickly but with much less climbing up and down and walking in stations. This was important as I was taking my Brompton with me and together with my cameras it adds up to quite a weight. Best not to carry it at all – and I didn’t need to on the marginally slower route.

This kind of consideration makes me wonder about the calculations presented to justify prestige transport projects, such as HS2 against the less sexy options of increasing traffic on existing routes. Shaving a few minutes off the time from Birmingham to London isn’t a big deal if you end up in Old Oak Common – or at the other end you come into Curzon St when your onward journey is from New Street station.  Changing the London terminus for Eurostar from Waterloo to St Pancras might have cut the Eurostar journey times, but had no effect on my overall journey times for that matter.

When I first visited Swanscombe it was in parts a desolate wilderness, with heaps of waste from the former cement works, which was still standing. Disused rails led to fenced off piers. Everything now is rather more overgrown, but otherwise much of the peninsula has a similar feel.


Bell Wharf: coal and clay came in, and cement was sent out. Taken standing on the Brompton

I didn’t find Broadness salt marshes in my early explorations of the area, taking a more inland route and missing it. One of my favourite landscape pictures was taken there in 2006, but I’d never fully explored the area, and this was just one of the things I set out to do.

And I took a similar view to the one, that I’d made 9 or so years ago, though then the tide was rather higher, with the creek filled with water.

The creek is at a dead end – probably why I’d not bothered to go to it in the early days. Then I always went on foot, slow, sometimes exhausting, but still the beast way to see the country. Taking a bike enables me to cover more ground and in areas like this can be ridden along footpaths as well as roads, It means I’m happy to go half a mile down a dead end knowing I’ll just have to ride back, whereas on foot I might well decide not to bother. From here I came back and cycled to another dead end, opposite the Tilbury Docks, before returning and going back by Botany marshes, now rather more domesticated as a nature reserve.

The bike is also useful for photographing over walls and fences. Several images in the Swanscombe set were made with the Brompton leaning against a wall or fence and with me standing one foot on the saddle and the other on the handlebars. There is a tendency for it to roll away dangerously but it does add a useful couple of feet to my stature.

Rather than a normal camera bag, I was using a Brompton bag which fits on the front of the bicycle, and working with two cameras, the Nikon D800E with the 16mm full-frame fisheye, and the Fuji X-T1 with Fuji X 10-24mm (15-36mm equiv) and 18-55mm (27-82mm equiv.) The Nikon images have been converted into a cylindrical perspective with horizontal angle of view around 146 degrees.

For most of the day both cameras worked perfectly, but on the way back to the station I stopped briefly to take some pictures looking south from the main road, which runs along the narrow spine of chalk left between two large quarries. I wanted to be sure to get good detail so I turned the ISO dial on the Fuji X-T1 down to 200. Unfortunately the dial below the ISO dial, the Drive dial, turned as well, into the so-called ‘Advanced Filter’ position, with disastrous results.


Fuji’s ‘Advanced’ filter uncorrected. I’m not sure whether this was ‘Toy Camera’, ‘Minature’ or ‘Pop Colour’

The Advanced Filter selection is a clear case where more is less, a capability the camera would be better without, though presumably marketing don’t think so. There are perhaps people who want a setting that destroys your images in camera rather than leaving that to Photoshop, but I’m not one of them.


A near identical frame after considerable general and local work in Lightroom

Worse still, not only do the ‘Advanced filters’ mess up  your pictures with silly effects, they also switch from Raw to jpeg. I was left with garish images, all subtlety of colour lost, and because they are jpegs it is impossible to get back to the original image. I’ve done my best with the image above, but the sky in particular remains impossible, with all cloud detail absent and some vignetting still visible. You can see the difference if you compare it with an image taken at more or less the same place using RAW with the Nikon.


Nikon D800E, 16mm fisheye. From RAW file

The default settings on the X-T1 actually make it very easy to select the filter in error, simply by pressing the Fn1 button to the right of the lens mount.  It’s one of several defaults it makes sense to change to something innocuous.

On My London Diary you can see more of my pictures of Swanscombe and the adjoining areas and also read more about the area, my ride around it and the pictures.

Continue reading Swanscombe

July 2015


Al Qud’s Day march in London

It seems to take me a long time to get anything done. But finally I’ve finished writing and uploading the diary entries and images for July to My London Diary. July turned out to be rather a disappointment for me in various ways, not least in my Nikon D800E suffering what I think is a terminal breakdown.

Jul 2015

Reinstate the Sotheby’s 2
BBC protest over Palestinian Hunger Strikes
National Gallery Leaving Party
Loddon & Thames


Kurds blame Turks for Suruc massacre
Make seats match votes
FreeSteve Kaczynski from Turkish Jail
Festival of Our Lady of Mount Carmel
10 years since Iran hanged gay teenagers
Ecuadorians support ‘Citizen Revolution’
Eritreans Vigil for Peace?


Falun Dafa vigil against Chinese Atrocities
Whitecross Street Festival
Justice for Tyree
Reinstate the Sotheby’s 4
The Jurors


Surround Harmondsworth
Al Quds Day march
IWGB protest at Royal College of Music


Sotheby’s 4 sacked for protesting
Save Shaker Aamer weekly vigil
Joint Strikers Budget Day Rally
DPAC Parliament Square Budget Day protest


DPAC blocks Westminster Bridge
DPAC ‘Balls to the Budget’
Darent Valley Path & Thames


Ahwazi crash secret UK-Iran business meeting
Sotheby’s ‘Dignity under the Hammer’ protest

Continue reading July 2015

Gibson’s Political Abstractions

A post in the L’Oeil de la Photographie sent me looking again at the work of Ralph Gibson,  who has a show which opened a few days ago at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York, Political Abstractions. The show, which continues until Oct 31, 2015 consists of diptychs, pairs of images sometimes in colour and sometimes black and white. I’ve read the text in L’Oeil and in the gallery press release without getting a great deal of enlightenment, but you may do better than me.

One of the things that inkjet printing makes easier it printing a black and white and a colour image on the same sheet of paper, and most of the images on-line pair colour and black and white, though some use two black and whites, and I think one – on Gibson’s own site – has two rather similar colour images. But mostly the pairs seem fairly unrelated, with a few showing a similar line or shape (or pattern or shadow, according to the press release, which also has nice summary of Gibson’s signature “everyday objects isolated, strongly shadowed, and cropped so that they become potent and mysterious.”)

I fail to understand why Gibson terms these works ‘Political’, though the release states: “The subject of the work
becomes not the individual images, or their juxtaposition, but the act of looking” which may be behind the use of the term.

Early in my time as a photographer I became something of a fan of Gibson, and certainly made a few images that (for me at least) recalled some of his in the early 1970s, and my copies of his Lustrum trilogy, The somnambulist (1970), Deja-Vu (1973) and Days at Sea (1974) are dog-eared and falling to pieces. Though I’ve also been impressed at more recent shows and publications it sometimes feels that there is little new in his work. There is perhaps only a short divide between a style and a rut and sometimes I’m unsure which side of that distinction the newer work lies. But there are still images that Gibson produces that have a powerful resonance. Whether or not that is increased by pairing them I leave – like Gibson – to the viewer.

 


Kensal Green, 1988. Peter Marshall, from Café Ideal, Cool Blondes & Paradise

Ralph Gibson certainly encouraged my photography through his publications (including the other books from Lustrum as well as his) and also in person on the one occasion I showed my work to him, I think in 1988 when he had a London exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery. Not just to him but at a public criticism to a crowded space in the gallery where I took up my portfolio with some trepidation, after he had been fairly tough on the work of a previous photographer. I’d taken colour prints – from the body of work that produced (among other things) my ‘Café Ideal, Cool Blondes & Paradise‘ and he spent some time looking through the book as I stood there shaking.


Shoreditch, 1986. Peter Marshall, from Café Ideal, Cool Blondes & Paradise

His comments and questions were fortunately both perceptive and positive and it was a great encouragement to me to continue that work.

Poplar, 1988. Peter Marshall, from Café Ideal, Cool Blondes & Paradise

Continue reading Gibson’s Political Abstractions

Summer 2015?

Today it really seems summer is over. The rain stopped and I went out in the sun, getting a little hot in my jacket to buy something to bring home for lunch, thinking it would be nice to sit out in the garden and eat it with a glass of wine, but by the time I got home, dark clouds filled the sky and there were a few drops of rain. And it was dark by 8 o’clock.

Looking back we hardly seemed to have had a summer at all, but there were a few good days, and one was early in June, when there was a protest in the morning at the Excel Centre in East London, where G4S had chose the UN International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression to hold their AGM. Actually like me they probably didn’t know there was such a day, but it was established back in August 1982. And though it’s an international day and relates to all children around the world, it was established because the UN General Assembly, meeting in a emergency special session on the question of Palestine, was “appalled by the great number of innocent Palestinian and Lebanese children victims of Israel’s acts of aggression“.

Unfortunately the UN General Assembly’s resolution 33 years ago appears to have done little to change the situation for Palestinian children, and the protest was aimed at G4S because of its involvement in running the Israeli prison system in which young Palestinians are held, sometimes in solitary confinement in underground cells, are threatened and sometimes tortured. There are regular protests outside the G4S HQ in Westminster which I’ve occasionally covered, but the AGM brings together a wider range of organisations comprising the StopG4S coalition to protest, not just about their work in Israel but also in this country, where they are best known for their failure to provide security at the London Olympics and the death of Jimmy Mubenga during his forcible deportation. They currently run five UK prisons as well as a young offender institution and secure training centres and “is the main provider of in-country escorting, overseas repatriation services, and the operator of four of the eight of the privately run immigration removal centres in the UK.”

Although there was plenty to photograph outside, with protesters from the various groups, much of the protest takes place inside the AGM, where protesters purchase shares to entitle them to attend. When they ask awkward questions or otherwise protest inside the meeting they are removed, sometimes rather forcefully, by security staff. After the bad publicity following the publication of a mobile phone video taken of this at last year’s AGM, mobile phones were not allowed to be taken inside at this year’s events – and I certainly had no chance of taking pictures there.

But it was a fine day, and the protests had started early, and by 11.50 I felt I’d taken enough (though looking back at G4S AGM Torture Protest I think I could have done better) and had the rest of the day to myself. I started by going over the high-level bridge across the Victoria Dock next to the Excel Centre, then walked around the dock to photograph the three sculptures there as a part of The Line – Sculpture Trail.

It was an experience that left me under-impressed. The docklands cranes, the high level bridge and the cable car all seemed rather more interesting than the sculptures, with the only work of the three there really having a strong presence being the tall figure of Vulcan, a 30ft-high bronze by the late Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi. This proved tricky to photograph, situated on a corner where I wanted to be suspended over the water for what seemed likely to be the best viewpoint. Perhaps it would be easier at a different time of day.


Martin Creed’s ‘Work 700’ perhaps looks better straightened out

I was working to produce very wide angle images, using the 16mm fisheye on the D800E, and transforming these to remove the curvature of vertical lines. The D800E has a big advantage for this in helping you to get the camera level, providing markers at the right and bottom centres of the viewfinder. Get both of them showing as little triangles and you have the camera straight and level. It would be slightly easier with the camera on a tripod, but you can – and I always do – work hand-held.


Barking Barrage

As usual I’d bought a Travelcard, so I could then travel on to anywhere in London, and decided to revisit the River Roding and Barking Creek. I’d tried a few years back to walk along the riverside path there and found it was closed. Unfortunately I found it still was and again had to walk in the other direction and went as far as the Barking Barrage, which I crossed and then returned along the other side of the river to the A13 to catch a bus.

Continue reading Summer 2015?

Bags

I don’t think I’ve written before about camera bags. Well, not for some time anyway. There may be somewhere in the 2,500 posts I’ve written (not quite all published) for this site a small rant, but certainly I’ve never done the whole thing, with those photographs beloved of some photographers with all their gear laid out neatly beside the receptacle of choice. And you will probably be pleased to hear that I don’t intend to do that now, though often things do change once I sit down at the keyboard and let my thoughts roam.

I’m not sure why they are called camera bags, because when I’m working the one thing they don’t contain is cameras, which are hanging around my neck. And the most vital things that my bag contains are not cameras, but sandwiches, a water bottle and a book to read. And yes, a couple of spare lenses, the odd map, and a few other things that I like to take but probably don’t use.

There’s a plastic fork, in case I get extra hungry and buy something that needs a fork to eat. It’s occasionally useful when the sandwiches I take fall to pieces; home made bread may be delicious but it doesn’t have the tensile strength of the rubbery shop-bought ersatz. And of course an umbrella. Then there’s the flash unit, spare batteries for camera and flash, lens cleaning stuff I almost never use, the lens pen I do, an old voice recorder that might still work, and a battery operated cable release that I last used at the spring solstice. A wad of business cards and a few spare memory cards just in case. A pocket on the back has a rain sleeve I can never find when it rains and when I do find it can’t be bothered to use. An old pocket-sized A-Z that’s falling to pieces and never covers the area I’m in as I usually only need it in outer London which it doesn’t cover or looking for a street built since I bought it in 1991, but then I reach for the London cycle map (they came free) but always find I’ve got the wrong sheet of the 14 that covers the whole of Greater London (and a bit in pale grey outside.)

It was Jeremy Corbyn that got me thinking yet again about camera bags. I was crouched on the floor at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park at the front of a group of photographers covering the Victory Party planned by supporters there, listening to the results. When his almost 60% vote and election as party leader was announced, the supporters went wild, but so did some of the photographers, and I was trampled underfoot as large men with large video cameras raced forward over me, kicking over my camera bag as they did so, scattering flash, water bottle, sandwiches and more on the ground. It wasn’t a big deal to have to pick the stuff up, but I missed some of the moments I’d been waiting in place to record.

I’ve used a Lowe Pro Stealth Reporter bag for many years, despite the silly name and my current bag is the second with the same name, but distinctly inferior to its predecessor. They have a zip along the top of the cover, so you can reach in and grab stuff while keeping it reasonable secure. It worked fine on the original model, but is pretty hopeless in its replacement, so most of the time I find myself working with the cover unfastened though still covering the top of the bag, so I can just push it aside to get stuff in a hurry. But then if it’s kicked over stuff falls out.

I think like most photographers I have a whole collection of bags, though others are better than me at throwing out old stuff. I still have my old Olympus film outfit with two OM4 bodies and various lenses in a rather nice but highly worn Fogg canvas and leather bag that I loved, waiting should I ever decide to give up digital, but too small to take the Nikon gear. And there’s another rather anonymous smaller bag still with the Leica/Konica/Minolta CLE kit waiting too.

There are several small bags that came free in various ways. Not a lot of use, but sometimes when I go out to walk rather than take pictures I’ll through a water bottle, map and a couple of Fuji-X bodies and lenses in one. Not to mention the five spare batteries.

When I’m working more seriously with the Fujis I usually use a black messenger bag that can take an A4 document. They don’t look like camera bags because they are not, but they can carry all the other stuff I need. I bought a new one recently, and it just isn’t as good as the old one which is wearing out after many years. Probably someone went to great lengths to redesign it; it does have a special padded notebook compartment, but the old version had a compartment that would take my notebook padded by whatever you placed in compartments on either side which seemed an adequate solution that wasted no space.

There isn’t such a thing as an ideal case, and all photographers have their own views and preferences. Some rave over the Billingham bag which I only own because a friend gave it to me; though undoubtedly well-made it seems to me truly the most awkward and badly designed camera bag I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet. And costs a ridiculous amount.

The alternative to shoulder bags for many photographers is a back pack. I have one of those too, though I’ve never used it for photography it is quite handy for a fairly spartan weekend away. I bought it in weak moment, tried it out and decided it wasn’t for me

Back packs worn by other photographers are often a menace, swiping you inadvertently and getting in your camera view. A photographer stands next to you to take a picture, then takes a step away and turns to the side to chimp the image, turning his (or her) bag right in front of your lens.

They get in the way as you try to move through crowds. They make photographers into snails with their houses on their backs and are generally inconvenient to use. If you need a backpack you are carrying too much gear.

What I’m probably working up to is buying yet another bag. It probably won’t be any better but who knows. If anyone has any advice or suggestions feel free to comment.

Celebrating Corbyn


Jeremy Corbyn, MP, End The Torture, Bring The Troops Home Now 22 May 2004

As I sat in the garden this afternoon, taking a rest after a week of hard work – 16 stories in the last six days – and still quietly celebrating Jeremy Corbyn‘s victory in the Labour leadership election with another glass of white wine, I wondered when I had first photographed Jeremy.

Certainly it was long ago, almost certainly in the BD era (before digital, which for me really means before 2002.) In more recent times it sometimes got to be embarrassingly often bumping in to him so regularly, along with another Labour MP Jphn McDonnell, destined now for a leading role in the Shadow Cabinet. Both men I admire for their integrity, even if their views on the moderate side. The idea of Corbyn being on the extreme left put forward by Cameron and other Tories (including some in the Labour party) is laughable, though I hope his election is a sign that we genuinely have a widespread reaction against the lurch to the right by Thatcher and Blair.

But enough party politics. Searching for my pictures of Corbyn presented some problems, but mainly that before digital I have only a limited capacity to search my images digitally. I actually got seriously into computing with an Amstrad PC 1512 in 1986, though I’d by then been using computers at work for six or seven years, mainly to catalogue my work. And I do have a database that lets me find images by locations and key words that I started then and covers my black and white work until sometime in 2000. But somehow it never seemed worth taking the time to fully enter people and events I covered into this, though some get on it. Most were filed separately to my main projects which were largely related to the urban fabric of London and thus not entered on the database.

Although I went digital to the extent of buying a Nikon D100 at the end of 2002, I could only afford one Nikon lens, a 24-85mm (equivalent to 36-127mm). The library I was then submitting images to could not at that time handle digital files, working with only black and white prints and colour transparencies, so most of my serious work was still on film. My earliest pictures of Jeremy will certainly be somewhere in those black and white negatives and probably in the 1990s.

By 2004 when the two images above were made I was still working with the D100, but had managed to afford a longer lens, though I can’t now remember which it was. The top image was taken at 140mm (210mm eq) and the lower one at 195mm (292mm eq), both in Trafalgar Square. I suspect it was a fairly cheap Sigma zoom, perhaps a 55-210mm, possibly the one that disappeared out of my camera bag in January of the following year when I was photographing the Red Army Choir. Not I hasten to add by one of the choir members, but in the very densely packed crowd of onlookers. I wasn’t too sad to lose it, though it was a very light lens to carry, but it did give me a good excuse to buy the newly introduced Nikon 18-200mm.


Michael Foot, Hiroshima Day Aug 6th 2004

I’d photographed Jeremy again as he compered the annual Hiroshima Day Ceremony that August, but its a rather ordinary picture and I seem to have been having problems with developing raw images at the time. Perhaps more interestingly, also present is someone with whom Jeremy is sometimes compared, Michael Foot, and I have several pictures of him. Foot was crucified by the press for wearing a donkey jacket to the Remembrance Day protest (of course it wasn’t really a donkey jacket) and Jeremy will doubtless get similar treatment this November, both for his attire and the white poppy he is expected to wear (though he might follow the advice of some others I know who wear their white poppy together with a red one.)


International Workers Memorial Day London, April 28, 2006

I’ve always felt that Jeremy and I share the same tailor, though not literally, but we certainly have a similar attitude to dress and hair. His hair is rather more lively than mine but we have quite similar beards and I have occasionally been mistaken for him, though I don’t think we look much alike.


Kings Cross – never again! London, 26 Nov 2005

By November 2005 I was working with a Nikon D70, bought on the cheap as a grey import. Although an ‘amateur’ camera it was far superior to the D100, and by then I was getting rather better at raw conversion, partly because of improved software.

Time for another glass. Though for Jeremy it will be another cup of tea.

Continue reading Celebrating Corbyn

The New East

Somewhere I picked up a link to an article in the Calvert Journal from July this year, In focus: 29 women photographers picturing the new east written by Anastasiia Fedorova who states:

With cameras in hand, women are leading the way in defining the visual identity of the new east. Reclaiming their gaze from a conservative, male-dominated society, they are exploring gender roles and sexuality, myths and archetypes, the body, landscape and the urban environment. Here’s our pick of the female photographers at the head of the pack in picturing the new east.

Its an interesting selection, with much worth looking at. Quite a few of the photographers are now working mainly in the old west so some names may well be familiar to you.

I wondered about the Calvert Journal, which I’d not come across before and find it is published by the Calvert 22 Foundation, “a non-profit UK registered charity created in 2009 by Russian-born, London-based economist Nonna Materkova” which describes itself as providing: “A guide to the contemporary culture of the new east: the post-Soviet world, the Balkans and the former socialist states of central and eastern Europe” and as well as publishing the on-line Calvert journal established the Calvert 22 Gallery, (currently closed for refurbishment) dedicated to the contemporary art of Russia and Eastern Europe, in two floors of a converted warehouse on Calvert Avenue in Shoreditch, East London.


Arnold Circus, Bethnal Green (C) Peter Marshall, 1986

Calvert Avenue is a street I’ve often walked down, leading to Arnold Circus, at the centre of the Boundary Estate which has a good claim to be the oldest council housing in the world, built starting in 1890 by the Metropolitan Board of Works and completed by the then new London County Council. (That body’s successor, the Greater London Council, was the victim of one of Thatcher’s most malicious and senseless acts, from which London still suffers, with a ridiculous, divided and unsuitable system of government for a major city.)

It was a slum clearance scheme, replacing part of London’s most notorious slum, the ‘Old Nichol’. You can read a little more about it in my post Bethnal Green Blues, and much more about the area as a whole and its people in Cathy Ross’s ‘The Romance of Bethnal Green’ which that post is partly about.

The gallery and other recent developments in Calvert Avenue are a part of the gentrification of the area. One blogger described it in this way: “Just a few years ago it was semi derelict save for the launderette and newsagent, but now the street is a buzzy destination for the style-savvy supporters of the independent retailer revolution.” That semi-derelict street was of course the home to many who now find themselves priced out of the area as it gets taken over by oddly-bearded ‘hipsters’.

One of the events I missed photographing in July was a street party in neighbouring Camden; its event page on Facebook included the following:

The heart of Camden is being ripped out, pubs are being converted to luxury flats no one can afford, venues are under threat, the market is flogged off to be a casino (and yet more unaffordable flats) Rents are rising….fast.

Soon this community will be an unrecognisable, bland, yuppie infested wasteland with no room for normal (and not so normal) people.

Back in 2010 at Paris Photo I went to the launch of the book ‘Lab East’, featuring 30 young photographers from Central and Eastern Europe, writing about it on this site.

I don’t think any of the women from this book are included in the Calvert Journal feature. Partly this reflects the great number of interesting photographers emerging from Central and Eastern Europe, but also I think that ‘Lab East’ seems to be more at a grass roots level, while the more recent feature is more about those who have already made it in the west.