Police nick Class War banner

The picture above shows three police officers grabbing a banner from a protester at the protest outside the ‘rich door‘  of the flats at One Commercial St, the door at the front of the building on the main street that the social tenants in the block are banned from using.  As I’ve mentioned in previous posts here and in My London Diary, residents in the social housing and their visitors have to use a less convenient entrance in an often dirty alley at the side of the building – the poor door.

The banner the police are taking is one that has appeared at some of these and other recent protests being carried by Class War, and has been seen by thousands. Many of those who have seen it have been noticeably amused, some clearly expressing agreement, and while some may have felt it unfair or inappropriate, I’m not aware that anyone has been seriously offended by it.

It’s a banner that does cause me some problems, and I usually refer to it euphemistically as the ‘Political Leaders’ banner.  Similar posters with individual images of the party leaders were published by Class War at the time of the last election, and one over-zealous police officer organised a raid on the home of a well-known photographer who had displayed them in his front window.

There are two words that I seldom use in the caption across the bottom of the banner, the ‘f’ word and the ‘w’ word. I can remember the shock expressed in the press when the first of these was first used on live TV in the UK, but now it, like the ‘w’ word is commonplace, though still to some extent controlled.

We don’t often say it in polite middle-class company, but for the great majority of the population it is a part of normal speech; when I first went to work in an engineering factory as a student it accounted for around 50% of the speech of some of the workers on the shop floor, and there would be relatively few sentences without it. Travelling around London on public transport or foot I overhear it in frequent use. We may dislike it or disapprove of it, but it has little power to shock or offend.

After police seized the posters in 2010, the photographer concerned had a surreal exchange with the police, which resulted in him replacing the posters in his window but with the word ‘onanist’ replacing ‘wanker’. Later, a court decided the police action had infringed his right to freedom of speech and expression, and the photographer was awarded compensation for the police actions.

After the protesters had lit flaming torches and a green smoke flare, a police officer decided it was time the police took some action. He went up to the people holding the banner and told them it was offensive and they must put it away.

They asked him if anyone had been offended by it, and fairly clearly no one other than that officer had been, but he and another officer then the officers then warned individually each person holding it that they were committing an offence and might be arrested, and then seized the banner.

One of the people holding the banner continued to hold on to it as the police tried to pull it away, saying they had no right to take it. After they had forced it out of his hands, he was led away, and handcuffed.

Eventually police reinforcements arrived, including a more senior officer, who appeared not to be too pleased at what had happened, but the arrested man was taken away to the police station and the protest continued more or less as usual.

The last I heard of the case was that the police were trying to get the man to accept a fixed penalty so that the case would not go to court, where a conviction might be difficult.

The photographs – as often in other events – make things appear very much more ordered than they were. One thing that is largely missing from my pictures are the half a dozen photographers also trying to photograph them, and the crowd of perhaps twenty protesters also trying to see what was happening and at times to intervene while the banner was being grabbed and during the arrest.

A wide-angle lens lets me get in close, but its also vital to try to anticipate how the scene will develop and where it would be possible to take pictures. It’s also important that while recording the actions of the police photographers don’t impede them. Most of these images were made with the D800E and the 18-105mm DX lens at 18mm – 27mm equivalent. I was working at ISO3200 but on some images there was a couple of stops of exposure compensation, so making it more like ISO12,800. The reflective strips on police clothing give problems with flash, and the exposure compensation stops these burning out, though quite a lot of burning in of them and the fluorescent green jackets was needed.

There is also a high degree of editing. Much of the time it was quite crowded and people were pushing and bumping into me and even though I was using flash some are not sharp. The light was also fairly poor for autofocus. And many pictures were rejected because of people getting in my way as I was taking pictures. Of course I will have got in their way too.

The flaming torches also present something of a challenge so far as exposure is concerned. Getting detail in those flames as well as the rest of the scene isn’t too easy even given the great dynamic range of the D800E, and there are a few pictures where I didn’t quite do it as well as I would have hoped.  But others seem to have held the detail in the flames well – with the help of a little flash and quite a lot of Lightroom.

You can see more at Police seize Class War banner.

Continue reading Police nick Class War banner

Lens TAAB

Those among you who like to use manual focus (or have no other choice) may well be users of Leica cameras and have lenses that incorporate a focus tab. On my first Leica, a second-hand M2, the only lens I had for the first year was a ‘collapsible’ 50mm f2.8 Elmar, an excellent lens that would largely disappear inside the body when twisted and pushed in, so the camera and lens would slip inside a largish pocket.

There was a small downside, in that it was possible to fail to get the lens completely pulled out and locked when you wanted to take a picture, resulting in a very out of focus image. Sometimes you only found out when – perhaps weeks later – the film was developed.

But another feature of that – and I think other old Leica lenses – was the focus tab, which stuck out from the lens. On that Elmar it was metal, and on its end was a small button which acted as a lock. To move the focus from the infinity position you had to press this in as you pushed the tab around. Being Leica designed and engineered it worked smoothly and ergonomically.

By the time I’d saved a month’s wages for my second lens, a Leica Canada 35mm f1.4 Summilux, the tab was plastic and there was no lock, though it had gained a better shape that fitted your finger. The great thing about both these tabs was that they removed the need to look at the camera when focussing. Cartier-Bresson style we learnt to adjust focus by the tab before raising the viewfinder to the eye to frame and expose.

Various people like me who miss the convenience of the tab have found ways to add them to other lenses. As well as focus by feel, they also give focus by finger tip; possible without but usually on lenses without a tab we use the less convenient finger and thumb to focus.

Some people have previously made various tab devices available for sale, and the Steer from Leica goodies is designed for “fast and big glass such as the Noctilux, the 75 Summilux and the 90 Summicron“.

But a new product (currently you can pre-order on the web site) from TAAB does look like a better solution. TAAB is a flexible neoprene ring that incorporates a tab and can be stretched over the focus ring to grip and provide a tab. Three sizes will fit most lenses. A recent design tweak has slimmed the rings down by 1mm, removed the logo and tapered the tab into a more ergonomic finger-fitting form compared to the prototypes shown in on-line images.

Mostly I’ve moved to using auto-focus, with Fuji-X or Nikon cameras and lenses. But perhaps I might get a TAAB to use on one of the Fuji lenses – perhaps the 18mm – to work with on the street, where manual focus is often the best way to go, as auto-focus too often finds the background rather than the subjects.

Thanks to PetaPixel for an article that let me know about TAAB.

Fox Talbot goes on-line

WHF Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, died some 115 years too early to set up his own web site (though I think there is little doubt that had he still been around he would have been at the forefront of that scientific advance too.)

But now the Bodleian Library is about to repair that omission, with “an ambitious project to create a new web-based research tool that will allow scholars and members of the public to view and search the complete photographic works of British photographic pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot.”

There is already some material on-line at the project site, including a blog “to provide updates on the development of the William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné” and the project is a large and lengthy one, due to be completed by 2018. It is hoped that the publication of the work in this way will lead to new information and insights into the work of WHF Talbot – and perhaps even the discovery of new images that were made by Talbot and his circle of photographic colleagues.

My only slight quibble over what appears to be a magnificent development is over the statement: “Catalogues raisonnés are common in the world of art, serving as a detailed academic inventory of an artist’s work. However, nothing of this scale has been attempted for photography.”

While the scale of this particular project may be unique, there have been a number of publications which are essentially catalogues raisonnés for the work of the photographers concerned, though bearing in mind the different natures of photography and painting or sculpture. While it may be relatively simple to cover every painting by an artist, every print and every reproduction of a photograph by even a not very prolific photographer is an virtually impossible challenge. Ours is a prolific if not profligate medium.

You can read more about some of these photographic equivalents – including the magnificent two volume edition of Alfred Stieglitz, The Key Set and the 4 volumes of ‘The Work of Atget‘ in a post Photography Catalogues Raisonné by Loring Knoblauch on Collector Daily in 2009 – and the suggestions in the comments on that piece, which include references to a number of other photographic catalogues raisonnés.

2015 PDN Photo Annual

There is plenty of good photography in the winning work in the 2015 PDN Photo Annual, though there are some of the various categories that interest me less than others. They include quite a few that have me thinking ‘how slick’ rather than really appreciating, and rather too much ‘so-whattery’, but it’s easy to skip on to the more worthwhile.

As well as the well-known names, there are also quite a few new to me. If you are short of time, I’d recommend going to the Student section first. Much of the other good work you may already have seen, and this also seems to me the most consistently interesting group of work. And perhaps surprisingly given my lack of interest in most sports photography, the Sports section here (which I almost didn’t bother with) is one of the more interesting.

I think the PDN Gallery might be more useful if it featured rather fewer photographers – if you worked your way through all the work here and went on to follow the links to the websites you could spend a few weeks on this site. It perhaps isn’t as obvious as it might be that the ‘Next’ button at bottom right of the screen is a very good way to go through all the photographers in order, showing you the first of their images – and you can then either view more or quickly jump to the next person.

Through a Glass

For some years in the 1980s and 1990s I worked on a project for which the great majority of images were taken through windows. Some of those images eventually made their way into an ‘artist’s book’ that I produced one year during during the Christmas break around 20 years ago, under the title Café Ideal, Cool Blondes, and Paradise.

At the time I was working with colour negative film and having these trade processed with 6×4″ prints of every exposure, or occasionally when I was feeling rich, 7½x5″ (later I processed my own C41 and only contact printed films.)  And these postcard-sized images were pasted onto sheets of 12×8¼ cotton rag with a ¾ folded at the gutter end to paste to the previous sheet, eventually with a little sewing and thick cardboard covers made into a 64 page hardback volume with a short text and 54 images. It still sits on my shelf.

I showed the work to a couple of publishers, both of whom expressed some interest, but eventually decided not to publish it, or at least not unless I could come up with at least half the cost either from my own resources or from a grant, and I lost interest. A few years later, in 2000, I put a very slightly different version of the work on the web, where it can still be seen: Café Ideal, Cool Blondes, and Paradise.

Almost all the images were taken with a 35mm shift lens on an Olympus OM4 body, with a few using a 28mm; possibly some of the earlier work on the project was made with an OM2.

Of course some of the images I made depend for their success on the reflections, but there were many where the reflections made images impossible, or detracted from those I did make.

During the project I learnt quite a lot about reflections, starting with the fact that the polarising filter I always carried and which every magazine article and technical tome told you was essential seldom actually did what you wanted it to.

For many of the pictures I was able to work close to the window glass, and used a collapsible rubber lens hood costing a couple of quid (now from £1.12 post free on Ebay) pressed on to the glass surface to eliminate all reflections.  Also essential was a cloth to clean the outside of the window through which to photograph.

Sometimes, the dust on a window – often on the inside where I couldn’t reach it – added to the image, as in this image of tables inside a café, taken a short distance from the glass with the lens well stopped down. I’m not sure now whether the scratch was on the glass or a later addition to the negative!

What led me to think again about these pictures was a post by Michael Zhang on PetaPixel, about research at MIT into the removal of reflections from images taken through glass. When working through glass, reflections normally are a double image, with a reflection from both the front and back surfaces of the glass, and by searching for parts of the image that are seen double the software is able to distinguish the reflections from the rest, and can then reduce or eliminate them. Perhaps before long we will see a ‘reflections’ filter in Photoshop.

Zhang also points out that there are products that are more elaborate (and more versatile, not to mention rather more expensive) than my cheap rubber lenshood for allowing you to work through glass – such as the Lenskirt.  The price of around $50 puts me off, and it’s also considerably larger, though it will work with almost any lens. The days of lens systems like the Zuiko, where almost every lens I used had a 49mm or 52mm filter thread are unfortunately gone.

One of the other problems I faced was that window glass is often rather coloured, and although filtration when printing with colour neg might deal with this, when using a wide angle, rays from the edges of the subject travel obliquely through the glass with a longer path, sometimes leading to a noticeable colour shift.  It’s a problem that would be much easier to solve working with digital images than in the darkroom, where I sometimes resorted to dodging and burning with different filtration. I worked on scans of some of the images and wrote about it in a post here in 2008, Cafe Ideal, Cool Blondes and Paradise revisited.

I hope to publish a revised version of Café Ideal, Cool Blondes, and Paradise at a future date, in a new edit with some extra images and a few replacements. But finding the images and scanning the negatives will be a long job.  Along the bottom edge of some of the prints in the book and on the web are details of the date and location where the images were taken, which makes finding things easier, but over the years many of the negatives that I printed from have been filed out of the date sequence I nominally used.

Continue reading Through a Glass

Time to Act

Or rather well past time for some real action on Climate Change was the message of a large and largely unreported protest in London at the start of March. In my account at Time to Act on Climate Change I began “Over 20,000 protesters marched through London” and while it is hard to be definite about the exact figures at such events it was certainly a large protest.


Time to #AxeDrax

Over forty-five years ago, when I first began to think about environmental issues (and even to speak in public on them), climate change was something that would happen in the future, the stuff of post-apocalyptic fiction such as J G Ballard’s ‘The Drowned World‘, first published in 1962 (though I only read it much later.) Now it is very much with us, and among the pile of discarded papers I moved to find my keyboard this morning I came across an article about wine producers buying up estates in Kent and Sussex as the Champagne region is becoming too warm.


Champagne is perhaps the least of worries for most of this, though perhaps not for those in the 1% whose opinions driven by wealth really matter. But unlike many of those associated with global warming, one that is easily overcome by a simple shift of location. Less easy to solve the problems of countries such as the Marshall Islands or Bangladesh already suffering from rising sea levels and global climate instability.

Last September, ahead of the New York Climate summit we had another large march in London, the Peoples Climate March, about which I commented that it seemed to have been “taken over by various slick and rather corporate organisations rather than being a ‘people’s march’ and seemed to lack any real focus.”  Although some of those same organisations were backing this march, they were far less visible, and it was far more a march dominated by climate activists and grass roots organisations.

The important arguments are no longer I think about environmental or scientific details (though of course the detailed matters of ecology remain vital) but of politics – how we get the change we know is vital to save life on this planet, if indeed that is possible.  How are that small and wealthy elite – the 1% or perhaps rather fewer – to be persuaded to abandon their own increasingly insulated lifestyle of extravagance based on planetary exploitation for the sake of a future for the rest of us. Can it be achieved within the institutions – including governments – which they dominate or will it only happen through catastrophe or revolution?

Protests such as those I spend much of my time photographing often don’t acheive their aims, often indeed are asking the impossible, often are doomed to failure, but that doesn’t mean they are unimportant. There are sometimes small victories, but even more vitally they serve to bring issues into the open, to manage to break through the dictatorship of the elite over the public agenda, to slightly rock the government boat. They are the way that many things start to happen. And even in my gloom, especially in it, there is hope that something may happen over climate change. And much of that hope comes from the people that appear in my pictures and what they are doing.

The event began in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the largest public square in London, including the surrounding roads around 250 yards by 180 yards, enough to make a large crowd look fairly sparse. As the front of the march was leaving from the south-west corner, people were still flooding in to the square from Holborn station and High Holborn. It took around 35 minutes before the last of the march – which at the start was fairly tightly packed – to leave the square.  The “Over 20,000” was the organiser’s estimate, and my own guess would have been a little lower. But where most of the media talk about hundreds when thousands are on the streets a little overestimate helps to balance things.

I stayed taking photographs in Lincoln’s Inn Fields until the end of the march had got fairly close to the start point, and then rushed off to catch up with its front. I had the advantage of being able to take a short cut where the marchers went around the one-way system at Aldwych, and they had been walking rather slowly with frequent stops, and I caught up halfway down the Strand.


‘Renewables – I’m a Big Fan’. Fossil Free Pompey at McDonald’s

Ahead of us were several places where I thought some of the marchers might decide to make some kind of protest, and I kept close to a group who I thought might be involved in this. And as we approached McDonald’s I was not surprised when things livened up. But the police had also for once anticipated the action too, and McDonald’s had extra security staff on the door. Instead of trying to enter, people sat down in the road, and hundreds of other marchers followed their example, blocking the street and stopping the march.


Tina-Louise Rothery and friends on the Strand

The low winter sunlight made photography difficult, with areas of deep shade and bright sun. Working with an extreme wide-angle as I mainly was, using fill-flash was impracticable, and although I tried hard to avoid blown highlights I wasn’t always successful. After  making some pictures close to McDonalds I stepped over protesters who were sitting or lounging on the road to get across to a group of anti-fracking protesters towards the far side of the road and joined them to take pictures.  Among them were several, including Tina-Louise Rothery and some of the other ‘Nanas’ who I’d met at previous protests, who it was good to meet again. It does make working with the 16mm fisheye easier when the people you are photographing know you and are happy to be photographed at close quarters.


Time to Act on Climate Change

After a few minutes the protesters got up and the march moved on, though the corner of Trafalgar Square and turning down Whitehall.  Here the black bloc came to the front of the march, and I expected some lively scenes at Downing St.  There was a little shouting and they were joined by a small group of polar bears, but soon they were on their way again. On reaching King Charles St  they rushed off down it, followed by a small group of marchers. I ran down with them for a short distance, and then had to decide whether to stay with them or the main march.

Their protest might well have provided some images of clashes with police and of minor damage to property that would be likely to be used by the mass media. Thinking purely in terms of likely use of images and possible sales, I should have stuck with the black bloc. And I think like most photographers I welcome the adrenaline of confrontations. But I’m not happy with the way that such images are used by a press and broadcasting establishment dominated by the 1%, which picks on such things to obscure or denigrate the main issues. I vacillated, then turned around and ran back to photograph the main march as it came into Parliament Square.


‘Frack With Us Cameron and the Oven Gloves are Off’

I was anxious too not to miss the rally on College Green and the opportunity to photograph the speakers and the crowd there. Though there was relatively little press interest as the only major celebrity input came from a video link with Vivienne Westwood speaking from Paris. But there were some interesting speeches and speakers, including John McDonnell and Caroline Lucas, Matt Wrack and others, with Tina-Louise Rothery bringing Frack Free Lancashire activists with her and John Stewart coming on with some of the polar bears who had protested earlier in the day at Heathrow.


Almost corrected image of the Viking Longship and oil slicks against BP sponsorship of Art by ‘Art Not Oil’

At the end of the rally I had another choice to make. I could either go back north to Parliament Square and Westminster Bridge with activists likely to face confrontation with the police, or go south with Art Not Oil‘s Viking ship to protest on the steps of Tate Britain. Either would have taken me towards a station from which I could catch a train home, something my body was telling me it was time to do. Although Parliament Square would have been more exciting it was also more open-ended with perhaps hours of police kettles and confrontation, I went with the ship simply as a quick and easy option.  I’d done enough and needed a rest and dinner.

More at:
Time to Act on Climate Change
Climate Change Rally
Viking longship invades Tate steps
Continue reading Time to Act

Inside in France

Like me you probably missed the show Prisons: 2011 – 2014 by Grégoire Korganow which was at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) from Feb 4th-May 4th, 2015. I’ve been just too busy to go over to Paris for a while, much though I would like to.

In 2010, Korganow was working in French prisons on the making of a doucmentary film about the man in charge of them, Jean Marie Delarue, The Comptroller General of Places of Deprivation of Liberty (CGPL). At the end of the filming, Delarue asked him if he would photograph the French prison system, and Korganaw had the unique opportunity to work in twenty prisons, spending 5-10 days in each of them over the next three years.

Korganow was made an ‘inspector of prisons‘ and he writes on his web site “I’m able to photograph everything; the inside of the cells, the exercise yard, the visiting rooms, showers, the ‘cooler’ (solitary confinement unit)… Day and night. I have access to all areas.”

As Pete Brook writes: “Korganow has made the most of his phenomenal access producing an unrivaled and varied of body of work about the French prisons.” It really does seem to be a remarkable study. As well as the exhibition, there is also a book, Prisons-67065 (the number is the total of prisoners in French prisons on Jan 1st, 2014), with 432 pages (ISBN-13 979-10-92388-05-3) which I’ve not seen. It seems to be a relatively small format but rather fat book from the dimensions on the publishers page of 17 x 22.5 x 5.2 cm and its weight of three and a quarter pounds. I can’t see anywhere the number of photographs it contains.

I read about the show on Pete Brook’s Prison Photography site, and the same feature, with larger illustrations is also on Vantage, which seems a site well worth looking at.  On its ‘About’ page it reveals simply “We are fans of photography” but then goes on to list an impressive list of editors and writers including of course Pete Brook, but also a number of other names I recognise.

Vantage is a part of Medium, which is a kind of publishing network and looks very interesting – you can find out more about it in Ten reasons why I love writing on Medium. If I didn’t already have too many other things to do I might be thinking about using it.

 

Landscape of Murder


Antonio Zazueta Olmos
Last night I attended the opening of a photographic show by Mexican-born photographer Antonio Zazueta Olmos, based in London since 1994 and well known for his work for The Observer and other publications, and now for workshops in street photography he has led as a part of the Guardian Masterclass series.

The Landscape of Murder, on show at Rich Mix on London’s Bethnal Green Road until 30th May 2015 is the distillation of a remarkable project by Tony, in which he photographed the location of every one of the 210 murders that took place in London within the M25 over the two years 2011-2012. Rich Mix is more or less opposite Shoreditch Station, and a short walk or bus ride from Liverpool St.


A small crime at Rich Mix – Tony loses a hand

I wrote in 2010, before he began the project about his contribution to one of the best evenings at London’s Photoforum, and in particular the advice he passed on that ‘if you find yourself surrounded by photographers when taking pictures, you are almost certainly in the wrong place.’ in 2013, in a post Murder & Masterclass I looked briefly at some reports of his street photography classes and his Landscape of Murder project, recommending the dedicated web site, where you can see many of the images in this show.


But it was soon recovered


Sean O’Hagan

I won’t write much about the show itself, as you can read the text written by The Guardian’s Sean O’Hagan, who was present at the opening. A longer version of that article appears as the foreword in the book ‘The Landscape of Murder‘ which includes 79 of the images, along with a short text giving some details of the crime which also accompany the scenes on the wall at Rich Mix. The show there has very much fewer pictures on the wall and is perhaps stronger for it, though a few of my favourites from the book are missing. There is a projection in the rather dim mezzanine space where the show is held, and as seems to be usual for such things they were quite noticeably out of focus.

Although Rich Mix has hosted a few good photography shows, I get the impression that their heart is not really in it (for example see my comments in Paul Trevor at Rich Mix.) It’s centre is cinema, and those going into the cinema will walk past Olmos’s picture and I’m sure many will stop and look – as Tony tells me they were when he was there to help with the hanging. The lighting on some of the works is a little too dim, a shame as they seem superbly printed. But Rich Mix is a lively and stimulating arts centre that hosts many great events, and it’s good to see another fine photography show there, ad very bad news that the future of this place is now under threat – as indeed after yesterdays election results so much else is too.

London isn’t a violent city. It’s one I’ve walked around for 40 years and seldom felt at risk – and then mostly from riot police. The book ends with a short analysis by crime reporter and author Peter Stubley of murders in London and then details of all the 210 murders, along with thumbnails of Olmos’s images of the scenes.  The end papers present a map of the area marked with the locations – which is far more effective as a single large map in red on the gallery wall.
Continue reading Landscape of Murder

Stanley Greene in Brixton

Stanley Greene is one of the best photojournalists around (see his work on Noor if you have any doubts), and someone I’ve written about before, particularly over his coverage of Chechnya. You can – though I don’t now for how long – see his coverage of the UK elections on Catch Up on Channel 4 News.  Asking him to cover the it was certainly a great idea,  and you can see the results in a video which combines  video footage with his black and white images at From Beirut to Brixton: war photographer on election trail. And there is an article about it.


One of my pictures from earlier in the day in Brixton

I was in Brixton earlier in the day at the event which he covered, but didn’t see him there.  Much of his coverage from Brixton (it starts at 7m30s) is of people that I know and that I also photographed, and its great to see how a real master does it (though I did get a few decent pictures too.)


One of my photographs of Lisa McKenzie in Brixton

The piece does a fine job of combining video clips with the still images and also is nicely edited, combining well-selected opinions from people on the street – including Class War’s election candidate standing in Chingford against Iain Duncan Smith, Lisa McKenzie – with Greene’s own intelligent and somewhat laconic insights.  As he concludes, there is plenty of politics happening on the streets, “but it seems to me, its the politicians who aren’t taking part.”

Camera buffs will no doubt find the equipment hung around Greene’s neck of interest. In Brixton at least there were two cameras, one of which has the word ‘Nikon’ on it, but I don’t recognise it. Certainly it isn’t a D3s which he mentions in a 2012 interview on ClueCult :

I’ve got it all figured it out. I’m shooting Leica for black and white, Nikon D3s for big jobs where you pull out the camera to say “I am the photographer”. I’m shooting the Leica M-9 when it’s a digital work with an artistic flavor and I can match it up. I’m using the Olympus to do daily life, it is my diary.

Embedded in that interview is a short video trailer for his book Black Passport, which is better viewed at higher resolution on Viewtube. There is also a video interview with him by the French magazine Polka which is also worth watching.

Often I find photographs produced now in black and white an annoying affectation, with photographers sometimes thinking that working that way makes their images more ‘documentary‘. But there is a big difference between a photographer who thinks in black and white – as Greene clearly does here, and those who work in colour and simply convert the images to monochrome.  In the Channel 4 video, choosing to work with black and white photographs clearly also has the function of separating them from the video clips.
Continue reading Stanley Greene in Brixton

Same Circus, Different Clowns

This isn’t a post about our general election, though I suspect the headline might do for the possible result, which might be a marginal improvement on the equally likely Same Circus, Same Clowns but isn’t I feel going to change things a great deal. Of course I shall still go out to vote, though only to register my opinion, which I think is important to do, however impotent politically.

But as Maximus – Same Circus, Different Clowns makes clear, this was an event about a different company taking over the administration of Work Capability Assessments for sickness and disability benefits from Atos, who have been so hounded (and justifiably so) by protesters that they have thrown in the towel.

People didn’t protest because Atos were conducting the tests, but because the tests themselves, based on box-ticking computer questions are generally agreed to be woefully unfair and inadequate, and mainly because of the way that Atos pressured those largely unsuitably skilled people administrating them to do so in a way that was grossly unfair to claimants. It’s possible, though perhaps unlikely that Maximus will do the job better, though they will still presumably have the same financial incentive to fail as many people as possible. No fair system would pay more for failing more or set targets for the number to be failed.

Of course the tests should be scrapped, and replaced by assessments based on medical evidence provided by properly qualified people, and protests will continue until this happens, and this was just the first against the new administrators, Maximus, a US company with a UK office close to the Dept of Work and Pensions.

DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) and other disabled groups represent people who have been hardest hit by the coalition government’s welfare reforms, with Minister Iain Duncan Smith cynically seeing them as an easy target. Events have proved him wrong; their disabilities have made them one of the toughest groups of protesters in the country, both on the streets and in the courts, where they have inflicted a number of defeats on the government – though the response has been largely for the DWP to ignore the verdicts.

DPAC are determined because so much is at stake for them – and many know friends who have committed suicide because of losing essential benefits or the continual harassment of regular incorrect assessments and appeals which eventually overturn these.  Their protests also rightly attract a great deal of public sympathy, not least among the police, who also fear the bad image that reports and photographs of them treating the disabled as they sometimes do the general population would give.

There is also a great reserve of often unused and under-appreciated talent among people with disabilities, some of which leads to their protests being more inventive and more visual than most. It’s always a pleasure to photograph their protests, and you are never quite sure what will happen, though it is likely that something interesting will. And the public appreciation of the poor deal they have had from the government does result in greater interest in the media – and my pictures of events involving the disabled have been more widely used than those of other protests.

It’s not everyday you get the opportunity to take a rather different image of Westminster Abbey complete with a flying pink pig, and I’m not sure I really made the most of it, though I tried a few times. You can read the account of the event and see more pictures at Maximus – Same Circus, Different Clowns.  As usual I was working with the Nikon D700 with 16-35mm f4 and the D800E with 18-105mm DX, as well as just a few frames with the 16mm fisheye on the D700. The top image in this post was made with the D800E, others all with the D700.
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