>Re-PHOTO

On April 18th I posted 7 stories, though it wasn’t really as busy as that makes it seem, as four of these were really from the same event as it developed over around five or six hours, but it was still a long day for me, and one of those where the ‘logistics’ seemed almost as important as the photography.

At the weekends we have engineering work taking place on the Underground, with some lines being part-closed, and it can make getting around London something of a puzzle to be solved. There is help on-line, particularly through the TfL (Transport for London) web site’s Journey Planner, though a recent update designed to help the casual user and those on smartphones has actually made it considerably less useful for me. The problem is that it can’t be relied on to give the right answer, and that sometimes you really need to ask a slightly different question, or split your journey into smaller parts to get the best results. Recently it gave me a route with three changes taking around an hour for a journey, and I looked at it and thought to myself that I actually knew a rather better answer as the two places were linked by a ten minute trip on a number 10 bus. Which I took instead. Though extreme, this isn’t unusual, though it does sometimes tell me that a journey I want to make is impossible.

It is actually a useful site, but trying to deal with a complex set of networks – bus, rail, underground – and streets over a very wide area that are just a little beyond its capabilities.  Though it can often come up with suggestions that I would not have thought of. One of my reasons for getting a smartphone is that I can also sort out my travel around London using it – though I now find Google Maps more useful that TfL on this.

My first problem was simply that the march commemorating a Centenary of Armenian Genocide and a series of ‘flashmobs’ presenting the Football Action Network Manifesto to the offices of the main political parties were due to start at the same time but in different places. Even I have my limitations on that score!  I decided I could start with the Armenians who were gathering on Piccadilly and spend perhaps 45 minutes with them before the start of their march (usually when things are most interesting) then rush to catch up with the football fans who had conveniently published the times that they would descend on the different party HQs. I would have missed them at the Labour Party, but should just be able to make it for their appearance outside the Conservative Party HQ.

It should have been a fairly easy journey on the tube, walking from by the Hard Rock Cafe to Green Park, then one stop to Westminster and another short walk, but the Victoria Line wasn’t working. Given it was only just a mile to Matthew Parker St and I had just over 10 minutes I decided to do it on foot. It was a little warm for jogging with a heavy camera bag, but I made it in time, only to find nobody there when I arrived a minute before the stated time. It was advertised as a flashmob, so I waited, hoping for a sudden appearance as Big Ben chimed twelve, but still nobody came.

I walked on to their next venue, the Lib Dems, 300 yards away and came upon them there, running around half an hour early and took some pictures and talked briefly with them. There were rather fewer than I (and they) had anticipated but they have some interesting views about the game and how fans are let down as big business dominates the game which you can read on their web site, along with the responses they got from the parties to their manifesto.

As I was talking with them and hoping to go with them to take some pictures in front of the Houses of Parliament, a group of strangely clad cyclists, some on vintage machines including ‘penny farthings’ stopped in front of use, and I rushed to photograph them. I’d not heard before of the Tweed Cycle Ride, and would not have gone out of my way to photograph it, but when something actually materialises in front of my camera I’ll usually take pictures even if it isn’t really my type of story.  By the time I’d gone with them the couple of hundred yards on to Parliament Square – fortunately they were stopped by two sets of traffic lights – it was too late to go back and take more of the football fans.

Because again I needed time travel. I’d been standing outside the Tory HQ at noon, and that was when the Stop TTIP rally was starting on Shepherd’s Bush Green. Shepherds Bush is four miles away from Westminster as the crow flies, but normally lacking wings I would have taken the Jubilee Line and changed to the Central Line at Bond St. But on this day the necessary part of the Central Line wasn’t working. I’d planned the journey in advance, with TfL coming up with several different routes depending on the exact start time, but it wasn’t quite clear which would be best.

From Westminster I got on a west bound District line train towards Earls Court and I still wasn’t quite clear which way would get me to Shepherds Bush faster. Fortunately my phone could get a signal (it doesn’t on the deep tubes) and I was able to check while travelling that my best choice was to change to the Overground at West Brompton.

Dame Vivienne Westwood makes her second point

It turned out I needn’t have been so worried. Although the event had been advertised as starting at 12.00, the rally didn’t begin until a couple of minutes after I arrived at around 12.40. It was a fairly slow-moving event, with a great deal of audience participation, people discussing the issues around TTIP in small groups as well as coming together to listen to speeches.

At the rally I was told there were going to be a number of direct actions following from it, and the first was immediately opposite, KFC protest over TTIP. I’d talked with and photographed the group in their white coats before this happened and had something of a lead over the other photographers when they made their way across the road for this, but the very narrow and busy pavement made it a difficult protest to photograph.

Again, one of the protesters had told me they were about to go across to the other side of the green for the BP die-in against Climate Change. It  was a little déjà-vu, as I’d photographed another protest at exactly  the same location back in 2010 with Tar Sands Party at the Pumps, as well as dancing outside here back in the 1990s with Reclaim the Streets.  I was tempted to leave as this protest finished but again I was told there would be more happening shortly, with a visit to the Westfield Centre coming up.

I was a little apprehensive about this. Shopping centres are not photographer-friendly, and security at this particular centre had assaulted both protesters and photographers at a previous protest there. But in the event I had no problems, although at least one other journalist, a demographer, was told he must not film as the Westfield ‘Save our NHS’ protest began outside the Virgin shop.  I’d been deliberately keeping a slightly low profile which was perhaps why I didn’t get approached by security at the same time, and shortly after I think they decided that so many people were involved they couldn’t really stop it. In theory you need permission to publish photographs taken in a private place – which such shopping centres are – but if there is a genuine public interest in doing so then journalists go ahead and do so, with little fear of any consequences. Though often security will lead you away should you try and do so.

By the time this action had finished, I think both protesters and this photographer had had enough, and though there was some discussion of further protests, it was time for me to go home. With seven stories to write up and photographs to edit and send off (and of course a dinner to eat) it would be well after midnight before I finished.

Continue reading Another Busy Saturday

CETA (TTIP) Trade Deal

Although I’m pleased to hear the news today in Peta Pixel and elsewhere that an overwhelming majority of European Members of Parliament voted to a  reject a controversial proposal that threatened to restrict the photography of copyrighted buildings and sculptures from public places, I’m not convinced that its passing would have made a great deal of difference to most of us.

According to Petapixel, who on June 20th published a report based on Wikipedia’s Signpost, the proposal that “the commercial use of photographs, video footage or other images of works which are permanently located in physical public places should always be subject to prior authorisation from the authors or any proxy acting for them” would have brought all European countries into line with those, including France and Italy where such laws already exist.

Stop TTIP rally

I’ve yet to notice any great outcry among French or Italian photographers at the problems that they face in photographing in their cities, and certainly I’ve never felt encumbered by this aspect of their law.  Except in the one case of photographing the Eiffel Tower at night, where apparently the lighting is trademarked, and that is at times enforced. And of course there have sometimes been problems related to quite different issues of privacy.

For the same reason, there are also some problems already in London over the London Eye in commercial photography. While these may mean you would need permission to use it as the background for a fashion shoot, it has never prevented the kind of use that Signpost illustrated in a graphic, of the London Eye seen in a wider view of London landscape.

#NoTTIP – Hands off our democracy

Another ‘No-No’ for commercial photograph in London is of course the Underground roundel, again a trademark.  It is almost certainly (at least in two-dimensional form) protected by UK copyright law as also would be billboards, posters, graffiti, murals and all 2D artwork displayed in public. But their incidental inclusion in photographs has never been a problem, and many of us have also published images where murals and graffiti were the main or only subject without comeback.

UK Copyright law explicitly gives us permission to photograph buildings in the public eye, and also sculptures displayed in public. Probably as photographers we are quite pleased that our work, even if visible in public, is still protected along with paintings and drawings.

CETA Trade Deal Threat to Democracy

When I once was one of the volunteers who helped to run a small non-profit magazine covering the visual arts I found a great difference between the attitude of photographers and people making paintings and drawings in regard to the reproduction of their work in reviews. While artists were keen to have their work in print, photographers were sometimes difficult or impossible to persuade – and often requested payment although we were investing heavily in them out of our pockets by reviewing the work.

In a way it’s understandable. In publishing a painting or drawing we were only actually publishing a photograph of a painting or drawing, while in publishing a photograph, you are in effect publishing the real thing. A photograph of a photograph is a photograph.

The outcry against the proposed law included a petition signed by 540,000 people around the world. I’m pleased that the MEPs have rejected it, but sorry that they have so far failed to stop something far more important, passing a resolution on the secretly negotiated EU-US trade deal, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

The fight on TTIP is far from over yet, and the vote was passed despite a petition signed by over 2.3m European citizens, who realise, as War on Want Executive Director John Hilary stated, that: “TTIP offers a nightmare vision of a world sold into corporate slavery.” Rather more important an issue than a copyright principle that would probably have had little effect on 99.99% of the photographs we take of cities. Unless you are happy at being a slave who can take photographs.

Continue reading Freedom of Panorama

April 15th was one of those evenings where a lot was going on in London. Events do often seem to cluster and there are often several days with nothing I feel worth going to photograph and then everything happens at once. Usually its on a Saturday, understandably because most people who go to protests do actually work during the week, or have lectures to give or attend Mondays to Fridays. But this week it was Wednesday. I don’t think there was anything special about this Wednesday, though it was three weeks and a day before the general election.

I don’t know why Docs Not Cops chose this particular day to set up a border post outside the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel against the plans by the Tories to make doctors and medical services check up on the immigration status of patients.  It came at fairly short notice after some details of the plans were announced to charge some migrants for GP and emergency treatment from the 6th April under the  Immigration Act 2014.

It was a relatively small event and was aimed at informing those entering and leaving the hospital, both patients and medical staff, and a number did stop to find out more about the plans. You can see some more pictures at Checkpoint Care – Docs Not Cops. Most medical staff certainly seem to resent the idea that they – like landlords – should be doing the job of border control, rather than treating those who need treatment.

Earlier in the day I’d decided against covering a couple of protests. One, over the sacking of an RMT cleaner for her trade union activities was a little early for me to get there, and would have meant me paying the excessive fares for rush hour travel.  It’s something I’ll only do for very special events, or when (as rarely happens) I’m commissioned to cover an event and can get my travel expenses paid.  I’d like to cover such things, but with the current low fees for the few pictures that are used it just is not feasible.

There was a second event a little later that I could also have gone to photograph.  The day had been designated a global day of action in solidarity with the fast food workers’ strike movement in the US, and Fast Food Rights was organising protests at McDonald’s in cities and towns across Britain, with Unite organising a protest at Marble Arch. Had there been nothing else on later in the day I would probably have gone to photograph this (and perhaps the RMT protest as well, as the two events might just make the extra cost worthwhile.)

But I decided against doing so on this day, as I would then have had nothing to do for around four or five hours in the middle of the day. I could have filled in time – perhaps going to an exhibition or two, perhaps sitting in a pub… Back in my younger days I would have gone and done some ‘personal’ work, but now that would tire me out too much. Working what amounts to a ‘split shift’ like this is now a problem for me, as I live just a little too far out of London to sensibly go home and travel back later.

Baker’s Union leader Ian Hodson at McDonalds demands union rights and an end to zero hours contracts

But fortunately  there was another Fast Food Rights protest in the early evening at McDonald’s on Whitehall that would fit in nicely between ‘Docs not Cops’ and a later event. So I decided to cover this rather than the morning protest.

It wasn’t an easy event to cover, because the pavement outside is narrow, and police were continually asking photographers and protesters to move on and keep the pavement clear. They should really have closed the inside lane of Whitehall to traffic with a few cones to make it possible for the protest and the normal heavy pedestrian traffic to keep moving – and make it safer for us all, as well as easier for photographers. But the Met Police almost always seem to make keeping traffic moving their number one priority, only closing or part closing roads when it becomes impossible to keep them open. See more at Fast Food Rights at McDonald’s.

This protest turned out to be a case of two birds with one stone, with striking workers from the National Gallery and in particular their victimised union rep Candy Udwin coming to speak.

On the way from Whitechapel to Whitehall I’d taken the tube (well at least the Underground – it was the District Line which pedants will insist is not a tube) to Embankment and walked up Northumberland Avenue past the Nigerian embassy, coming across a group of Nigerians, mainly women, protesting on the anniversary of the kidnapping of the over 200 Chibok girls abducted by Boko Haram. Bring Back Our Girls was their message to the new Nigerian government.

I wasn’t surprised to come across another protest I hadn’t known about. Probably more often than not on days I walk around the centre of London I’ll come across a protest by chance – and if it seems interesting will photograph it. There are a few, particularly by fundamentalist Christians, some anti-abortionist as well as by individuals who seem rather unbalanced that I’ll just take a look and walk by.

The main event I had actually come up to London to photograph was No More Deaths on our Streets, a protest by people and groups worried by the growing number of homeless people living on the streets of the UK, the removal of welfare support and increasing official persecution. When I was young it was rare to see anyone in London sleeping rough, and I first saw street begging on a visit to Paris in my twenties. It became a growing problem here later, and has increased markedly in the last couple of years.

While many individuals and charities give help to people on the streets, the official response seems to be getting harsher and harsher. By laws to make feeding the homeless an offence, police being sent in to take sleeping bags, cardboard and possessions away from rough sleepers. Measures to move them out of various areas (for example at the time of the Olympics in 2012.)

Homelessness has become more of a problem recently mainly because of the increasing lack of affordable housing in London, and because of the cuts made as government cuts the funding to local councils. London is fast becoming a city for the rich, where those at the bottom are not welcome to live, however necessary they remain to keep the city working.

A static protest opposite Downing St became (as planned) a march around Westminster. After it had gone in a large an seemingly aimless circle, I left it and went home, too tired to continue.

Continue reading Wednesday Evening

The Village Green at Harmondsworth

The day after I’d photographed the End Immigration Detentionn protest at Harmondsworth’s immigration prison, I got off the bus at the same stop, but instead of walking the few yards towards London turned the other way and took a pleasant footpath alongside the Duke of Northumberland’s River and up to the village of Harmondsworth. It’s a pleasant enough path, but one with a constant reminder of Heathrow, not just in the continual noise from take-offs and landings but also because the path is in the landscaped grounds around ‘Waterside’, the headquarters of British Airways.

The river looks natural now, but was created around 500 years ago in Tudor times to take water from the River Colne at Harmondsworth to the River Crane at Feltham to give a more reliable supply to the watermills on the Duke’s property at Isleworth. Not much else happened to change Harmondsworth until the Colnbrook Bypass was built in the late 1920s, with the Road Research Laboratory set up here (where the prisons now are) in 1930 and a few businesses in the next few years, including Penguin Books, here until the 1990s.

The area south of the Bath Rd changed dramatically after the RAF it took over with the hidden intention of making it into London’s new civil airport after the end of the war. Plans to take over much of the area north of the Bath road were defeated, and aside from a little new housing, Harmondsworth Village remains a small Middlesex village, much as it was when my father cycled around the area before the war.

Great Barn interior (image for personal use only)

It has kept its small village green, with a fine church and two pubs (though a third is now a private house.) Take the footpath from the back of the churchyard and across a couple of fields you reach a bridge across the M4, but the fields are still farmed, and just to the west is the Colne Valley Regional Park, with pleasant walks (and bordered by the M25 and its huge junction with the M4.) But most importantly of all it has kept its huge tithe barn, Grade 1 listed, built in 1426 and described by Sir John Betjeman as ‘the Cathedral of Middlesex’ and the largest surviving medieval all-timber building in Britain.

A giant mural where the proposed airport boundary would be, just yards from the Village Green with a polar bear and four general election candidates all opposed to the expansion.

A local campaign led to the barn being bought by English Heritage in 2012 and one of those who led that campaign was local MP John McDonnell (wearing a tie above), who was among those at today’s events, aimed at preserving the area against the latest expansion plans by Heathrow. The report of the Davies Commission was always expected to recommend that Heathrow be allowed to grow yet again, despite that possibility being ruled out a few years ago after massive protests in the area. And even more massive protests can be expected if a further attempt is made. Politically it remains very doubtful if it can ever happen, and perhaps the report will be shelved as have other rather more sensible proposals before it.

It was a very pleasant afternoon, marred only by the feeling of impending doom. I had taken two Fuji cameras, the X Pro-1 and the X-T1 along with a few lenses, and the bag on my shoulder seemed almost weightless compared to the normal load.

It wasn’t however an entirely satisfactory exercise, as I kept finding both cameras were not working exactly as I expected. I’m just not familiar enough with how they work, and it wasn’t until some weeks later that I managed to sort out one or two problems. Somehow I had managed to lock in an incorrect white balance setting on the XT-1, making everything rather pink (though of course I could correct this in Lightroom) and all too often I still find the fastest way to get either camera to respond to a shutter press is to switch it off and then on again. Batteries as always were a problem, and I’ve now disposed of a couple (one genuine Fuji, another a cheap replacement) that  didn’t seem to recharge reliably. But the X-T1 still sometimes seems to run through batteries very fast, and sometimes gets noticeably warm.

I missed a few images when I had to turn the camera on and off, and sometimes focus was just too slow, but most of the pictures were fine. The 10-24mm which I’d recently bought seems to be an excellent lens, as is the 18-55m which I kept on the X Pro-1 all the time.  With the X-T1, as well as the 10-24mm I also took a few images on the 8mm Samyang fisheye.

Photographing the Datchet Border Morris dancing inside the Great Barn did present some problems, with movement and relatively low light levels. The light inside the ban was also very uneven, coming mainly from the large doors and some post-processing was needed to even things out. By increasing the ISO setting to ISO6400 I was able to work wide open on the 10-24mm at around 1/100s, enough to stop at least the slower movements in a wide-angle view – the lens is at around 18mm, giving the equivalent of a 27mm view on full frame.  A faster lens would not have helped, as I needed to use f4 to give sufficient depth of field – and another half stop down would have been even better.  Had I used the 18mm lens at f2.8 the beams would have been noticeably out of focus.

English Heritage have done a fine job in restoring the roof of the barn, which had been neglected for years; it lies just outside the boundary of the expanded airport, but it would be no pleasure to visit should the expansion go ahead (which I think is very unlikely, though it will be a fight to prevent.)  The tiles on the roof have been replaced, the new tiles having been specially made for the purpose to the same pattern as those used previously. Photography is allowed on the site, but only for non-commercial use, and you can see quite a few more pictures of its interior – and an exterior view – at Heathrow Villages fight for survival.
Continue reading Harmondsworth Sunday

Many asylum seekers come to the UK from countries where being gay can be life-threatening

Harmondsworth isn’t far from where I live, but it isn’t a place I visit often, but in April I found myself there two days running.

I don’t avoid it because of the place itself, but the journey there is off-putting. As a kid I used to cycle there along back lanes in the Middlesex countryside, from Cranford, a short distance from where I lived. But sixty years later things have changed rather, mainly because of the impact of Heathrow and the tremendous amount of road traffic that this generates, which new roads like the M25 and M4 have also added to.

Now I live a little to the south and the route between reservoirs and around the side of the airport is along unpleasantly busy roads and dangerous junctions, large roundabouts with with lorries revved up from or anticipating the motorway. I don’t often cycle that way. Fortunately there is a bus which, having made an extensive tour of the suburb to the south of Heathrow makes its way from Terminal 5 to Heathrow Central and will drop me off just a few yards from the immigration detention centre, where protesters were arriving to call for an end to immigration detention.

Most of those coming to protest there have a longer journey, from central London to the end of the Piccadilly line for another bus, or by coach from Birmingham, Sunderland or even Scotland. For many it is still a short and easy journey compared to coming to this country, for many of those taking part in the protest are asylum seekers or those who have been granted asylum here. Many have suffered being held in detention centres like Harmondsworth (now renamed Heathrow Immigration Removal Centre) or Yarl’s Wood, imprisoned with no fixed length of sentence and facing the treat of deportation at any time to the countries where they left to escape persecution.

Support for the protest from Shoreditch Sisters WI who call for an end to immigration detention

The name is significant. This is an ‘immigration removal centre’. It isn’t concerned with investigating the truth of their claims for asylum, but intent on removing these people from the country. Our immigration system starts from the assumption that they have no right to asylum, and locking them up makes it harder for them to prove their case, while the fast-track system recently found to be illegal by our courts ensures they don’t have time to do so. The whole thing is a travesty of justice, a turning upside down of the rights we see as the cornerstone of our legal system.

The protesters aim to make a loud noise so the prisoners inside can hear that people care about them

The fight for an end to detention and fast track and for a proper and just system for migrants to this country has been led by the Movement for Justice, a group which grew in the 1990s after racist attacks in London, organising protests against fascist groups, deaths in custody and racism. This protest was one in a long series against our racist asylum and immigration system, now going back twenty years. The event in April was the seventh in a series of protests there (some months their have been protests at Yarl’s Wood instead) since the Movement For Justice began a new campaign around a year ago in solidarity with a mass hunger strike in the prison.

The two immigration prisons at Harmondsworth (Harmondsworth and Colnbrook, now both run by Mitie as Heathrow) stand on either side of a short private road leading from the main A4 which runs along the northern edge of Heathrow. The whole site is government property, having been long ago the site of the Road Research Laboratory. Except for a range of tall buildings along the front of the site, the prisons are enclosed by a very tall fence and at some earlier protests, the protesters were allowed to walk along the track around this. Since Mitie took over running the prison at the start of the year, organised protests have been confined to a pen at the front of the site, with police and security present to ensure they stay there.

Shouting “Detention Centres, Close them Down” in front of the Harmondsworth Administration block

Photographically the event and its problems were similar to those I wrote about at the end of my post Surround Harmondsworth 6, and I’m afraid the pictures are perhaps rather similar too. It’s difficult to think of an entirely different way to approach the event, though the liveliness of the protesters makes them a delight to photograph.

Although the protesters still had plenty of energy after a couple of hours of shouting and dancing in the warm April sun, I got tired and decided to leave, keen to get on with processing and then uploading the story, and I crossed the main road to catch a bus. As I climbed to the top deck ten minutes later, I looked out of the window and saw the protesters emerging on to the main road, and marching along.

Protesters march along the Bath Road in front of Harmondsworth (left) and Colnbrook immigration prisons

(It isn’t a good picture, and the bus windows were none too clean and with a slight tint and as well as the normal reflections there was also some odd colouration like ‘Newtons Rings’, all of which I’ve worked to reduce.) It was too late to jump off the bus and join the marchers (the next stop is a mile or so away in Terminal 5 and the service infrequent) but had I known this would happen I would have sat down to rest and waited. They were on their way to protest at the back of the Colnbrook prison where a public footpath runs to a park and then on to Harmondsworth village, and I was sorry to have missed it. I should have checked with the organisers before leaving and had failed to do so.

More on the protest and more pictures at End Immigration Detention.
Continue reading Harmondsworth Saturday