Protest at the Opera

I almost missed the International Workers (IWGB) cleaners protest at the Royal Opera House (ROH) in Covent Garden. I’d been told they would be there at 5pm and either the time had changed or whoever told me had got it wrong, and they were actually planning to start at 5.30pm.

But there was clearly nobody around, or at least no protesters when I arrived a little before 5pm, having been photographing a few other things on the way – a Rastafarian protest calling for the Restoration of the Ethiopian Monarchy (I couldn’t at all understand why they thought that would help in ‘Economic Liberation), then on my way back on the top deck of a double-decker bus I saw the weekly Anti-Fur Picket at Harvey Nichols and decided I had time to cover that on my way to finding a large crowd of Anglican women priests celebrating 20 years of Women Vicars. They were marching from a rally outside Church House, the Anglican HQ where the decision to allow them was taken (rather belatedly as some other Christians had allowed women to take a full part in their work many years earlier – even centuries ago.  Then, as so often when walking up Whitehall I’d come across another couple of protests, and photographed one of them, a token Baloch Hunger Strike in sympathy with that about to enter its second week in Karachi.

At 5pm outside the ROH I really thought I’d had enough for the day, and thought about going home; but I’d promised the cleaners I would be there, and sat down in the sun to read a book and wait.

A lot of press photographers spend a lot of time waiting, often outside the homes of people who don’t want to be photographed, or outside courts during celebrity trials, opposite the door of 10 Downing St, and more. I don’t, partly because I’m not desperate for money, mainly because I don’t want to hound the innocent or glorify celebrities. And also because I’m very impatient (and not on payroll.) Anything over ten minutes is really beyond the call of duty for me.

But it was a nice May early evening, and I found a comfortable place in the sun – not then too hot to sit out in and was well into a chapter or two when I was suddenly disturbed by the unmistakable sound of iron-shod hooves and wheels on tarmac and got up to see a whole string of horses and traps approaching at a brisk trot.

I stood up and prepared to take pictures as they came past, but then the leading trap took a fast left turn down Floral St by the side of the Royal Opera House, and I had to run across and down the street to photograph them.

On Floral Street they soon slowed down as the leaders stopped to decide which way to go, before slowly turning to their right and parking up, appropriately by the Nags Head pub. Soon after I’d finished taking a few pictures of them – they included at least one cart rather like those my grandfather had a business making – and made my way back to the front of the ROH, a couple of the cleaners came round looking for people, and I found they were meeting up around the corner at 5.30pm.


A man in a funny suit gets angry – and the security guard steps in as he grabs IWGB leader Alberto Durango, who refuses to be provoked.

You can see more about their protest and read about why they were at the ROH in IWGB Cleaners at Royal Opera on My London Diary.

As often seems to be the case at the moment the police, when they arrived some time after the protest had started, seemed to be unsure whether they were present to defend the right to protest or to defend the interests of the wealthy – in this case the ROH and its clients. And at one point when a couple more vans had arrived, they simply seemed to lose the plot completely. It was just lucky those water cannons haven’t arrived yet.

I’m not an opera fan, though I often listen to bits of it as my wife is something of a singer, though her choir sings choral works rather than opera, and often listens to Radio 3 as well as going to some of the Proms and other classical concerts. My favourite singer is BillIe Holiday, who only puts in very rare appearances on Radio 3, though it does have the occasional jazz programme. I favour public subsidies for the arts but object to the fact so much of it goes to opera and in particular the huge £26m for the ROH*. More generally I think it’s time to give a finger to the star system and pay the ‘stars’ less. I think the BBC should take a lead too with truly drastic cuts in what they pay often rather dubious ‘talent’ and management. But if the odd fat lady or gentleman decides not to sing in London, it’s no great loss, and many of the ROH audience will fly abroad to see them in any case.

I’d certainly hope that any future Labour government would make it a requirement for any organisation that receives Arts Council funding in England (and any remaining parts of the UK still under Westminster control) to pay all employees (direct and indirect like the cleaners) a living wage and have decent conditions of employment.

* Disgruntled northerners may like to know that Opera North gets another £9.6m and these two organisations account for around 11% of the budget. The total grant of grants to 699 organisations is £339m, an average for each of £485,000.
Continue reading Protest at the Opera

Joint Enterprise

The last fatal duel in England took place a short bike ride from where I live (or if I’m feeling lazy there are a couple of buses that more or less take me up the hill) ino Englefield Green, where in 1852 two Frenchmen came with their four companions to settle their differences. One of them, politician Frederick Constant Cournet, described by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables as “a man of tall stature; he had broad shoulders, a red face, a muscular arm, a bold heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible eye. Intrepid, energetic, irascible, stormy, the most cordial of men, the most formidable of warriors” received a fatal wound and died in the local pub, where you can read a possibly not very accurate account of the event.

Cournet had been one of the engineers on the streets of Paris in the 1848 revolution – Hugo describes his massive barricade in the Faubourg St Antoine as “three stories high and seven hundred feet long.” He was elected to the National Assembly in 1850, but then sentenced to a year in prison for abetting the escape from jail of Eugen Pottier who later composed ‘L’Internationale‘. In December 1851 Cournet was in trouble again, having been one of the leaders of a failed coup d’état against Louis Napoleon and had to flee to London.

His opponent in the duel was another veteran of the 1848 barricades, Emmanuel Barthélemy, and although the dispute is sometimes claimed to be about remarks Cournet made about a former girl-friend of his, more likely it was because Barthélemy was a supporter of Louis Blanc, and Cournet  a supporter of his opponent among the emigre French socialists in London, Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin.

Duelling was illegal, and three Frenchman who got on the train at Datchet were detained on arrival at Waterloo following a message (presumably by telegraph) from the Windsor police. Barthelemey was first charged with murder, but this was later reduced to manslaughter and his sentence was a short one. But less than three years later he was caught in the act of murdering his employer and a neighbour and was hanged at Newgate in 1855. For those who are interested there is more about the duel from the trial (in brief, Cournet fired first and missed, Barthélemy had the second shot, but his pistol did not fire – so Cournet lent him his, and was then fatally wounded) as well as information about the murder on a rather grisly site, Execcuted.Today.com.

All this came to mind (and prompted a little research, though I’d read the not entirely accurate account inside the bar of  the Barley Mow a while back) when I went to photograph a protest by the oddly named JENGbA, short for Joint Enterprise – NOT Guilty By Association, a campaigning group against the injustice of ‘Joint Enterprise’, an offence said to have been “introduced three hundred years ago in a clamp-down on dueling, enabling the seconds and doctors who attended duels to be arrested as well as the actual duelists.”

Being Common Law rather than defined by any statute the exact history is hard to trace, though there are a number of key cases which serve as precedents to define it. But its Common Law orgin also renders it liable to be misused and subject to political pressures on those responsible for prosecutions who attempt to widen its application. What makes good sense in very limited circumstances has over recent years been expanded into a catch-all offence in what is seen as a war on gang killings. Surprisingly there are no official statistics, but through freedom of information requests researchers concluded recently that more than 1,800 people had been charged with homicide (and many convicted) under joint enterprise in the previous eight years.

I was shocked when I read about some of the cases of injustice that JENGbA has taken up, one or two of which I mention in My London Diary. Although there has been considerable disquiet over this in legal circles with a Bureau of Investigative Journalism study and a report by the House of Commons Justice Committee, there has really not been the public outcry that it demands, probably because most of those convicted come from disadvantaged groups and many are tarred, often inaccurately, with belonging to criminal gangs.

It is just one other aspect where ‘British justice’ no longer meets the standards we used to believe in – as too are the police killings of suspects during arrests like that of Mark Duggan and the many suspicious deaths in custody.


Obviously I wanted the Houses of Parliament in the background, but also carefully framed for the shadow at right

Photographically the main problem I had in covering the march by JENGbA was one of contrast, with the low sun often seeming to come from exactly the wrong direction for my purposes. Of course I should probably have used some flash fill, but somehow I felt this might be a little intrusive and upset what felt like a rather delicate relationship between me and the families involved in the protest.

I’m also getting a little worried about the 16-35mm lens. It does seem to be giving far more flare than it used, and I wonder if it is in need of a good clean. But given the bill I got the last time I took it for repair I’m not keen to repeat the experience, particularly when I’m not quite convinced it is necessary.

I do seem to get both more specular flares (aka ghosts), bright spots of light, sometimes coloured and often hexagonal, and also more veiling flare, the diffuse creeping of light from over-bright into shadow areas of the picture.

Ghosts sometimes add a little to the image and are usually difficult to remove or ameliorate. Somtimes it is possible totone them down a little. Small ones entirely in areas like sky can be cloned away if necessary. With the diffusion, using an adjustment brush on the affected area to increase contrast, reduce highlights and increases clarity can help, sometimes with a slight positive or negative exposure change.  I’ve tried to do this, perhaps a little clumsily on the head of the leading figure with a megaphone on the top image in this post.

Shortly after the start of the march, it came across the rather macabre site above on the pavement, in an area well away from any buildings in front of the large yard of Chelsea College of Art.

More about the march and a little about some of the cases at Joint Enterprise – NOT Guilty By Association.

Continue reading Joint Enterprise

Private View Invitation

uclh arts and heritage

invites you to

City Streets and River Paths

Watercolours by Hilary Rosen MA (RCA) and photographs by Peter Marshall

Private View
6.00pm-7.30pm 16th June 2014

Exhibition Dates
13 June 2014 – 30 July 2014

The Street Gallery
University College Hospital, 235 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BU

RSVP guy.noble@uclh.nhs.uk 020 344 75451
uclh arts had been generously funded by UCLH Charity

Download the official invitation here

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Regular readers will have noticed I’ve not been posting as much as usual in the past few days. As usual that’s partly because I’ve been busy taking photographs, and sometime in the last week or so I passed what perhaps should have been a significant milestone, publishing my 1,000th story on the main agency I send work to, Demotix. I think it happened on the last dayt of May, but I was too busy to notice. They didn’t either.

One little extra that has occupied me in the last few days is sending out invitations to the show ‘City Streets and River Paths’ with work by myself and painter Hilary Rosen. It should be easy to do, particularly when most go by e-mail, but although scammers seem pretty good at sending multiple e-mails it took me quite a while to get lists of e-mails together and then to get my mail service to let me send the messages out. Inevitably too some of the addresses were out of date, and I then had to look to see if I had a newer e-mail for the person concerned.

So if you’ve not had an invitation yet by e-mail, it may not be because I didn’t mean to send you one, but simply down to my incompetence. Of course you may have been really unlucky and got two or three invitations… And one from Hilary!

I was hoping to post the actual invite on this blog, but came up with one practical problem. My picture on the invitation (there were two versions printed, one using a picture of mine and the other one by Hilary) is rather long and thin and the card is 1/3 A4, about 210 x 97 mm. It’s an aspect ratio that doesn’t fit well on this blog, where portrait format images fit rather better. So at the top of the page is my small re-written version.

So you are welcome to have a better copy – but will need to download it as a PDF here, or come along in person on Monday, when I should still have a few copies of the actual card left. And of course it would be good to see any >Re:PHOTO readers, whether old or new friends.
Continue reading Private View Invitation

Shad Thames


Shad Thames, 1981

This weekend there is a festival taking place in Shad Thames, though I doubt if I will have the time to go there, and to do so always makes me feel a little sad. Though I wish the Shad Thames Area Management Partnership (STAMP) and the Shad Thanes Resident’s Association and their Local Eyes Festival  well, I can’t help feeling that the love for Shad Thames really came perhaps over thirty years too late.


St Saviour’s Dock, 1980

Shad Thames, like the rest of London’s Docklands, used to be completely off the radar for most Londoners, even though you could glimpse it from Tower Bridge. There was indeed a sense that even if there were no fences or walls the general public were not welcomed, and it looked – and was while it was still a working area – a rather dangerous place.

It’s perhaps hard to remember when it is now a tourist trap, that back in the 1970s and 1980s it hardly got a mention in even the more adventurous of the tourist guide books. Access to the south bank of the Thames east of London Bridge was then pretty limited, with no riverside walks and it was certainly not regarded as a desirable area to live. Few would have dared to go there at night.

Disused warehouses became homes for artists, inhabited by a Who’s Who of British artists, most of whom were forced to leave the area after a disastrous fire at Butler’s Wharf in 1979 alerted the authorities to their semi-official presence and the fire risk they posed, particularly as many were living in their studio spaces.


Shad Thames, 1980

I first went there shortly after the fire in 1980, when plans were being made to turn the area into something that one local councillor described as “like a zoo where you come to gawp at the jet set” with Terence Conran taking the lead in a scheme described by Southwark Notes as “The perfect plonking down overnight of the Conran dream. Timeless and spectacular with a winter Dickens chill and fog off The Thames but nary a boat to be seen. Just the clanking of coinage and the rustle of 20’s” and by the perpetrators as ‘a combination of luxury apartments and offices and to make it a gastronomic destination‘.


Shad Thames, 1980

Although the area still retains many of the original buildings (though some are just façades) much of the detail that gave the area and the street Shad Thames in particular with its many seemingly chaotic bridges across the narrow street between the tall buildings its character was taken away, in part replaced with bland replicas. Replica is far too kind a word, as no attempt seems to have been made to reproduce the originals and their variety. Poor pastiche would be more accurate.


Reed’s Wharf, 1980

Recently I put together a small book of some of my pictures from Southwark and Bermondsey taken in 1974-84. Much of it is work that I first published on line in small images on the web site ‘London’s Industrial Heritage‘ around 15 years ago, and some has been exhibited a few times in various places. I wrote more about it here a few weeks ago where you can see a preview of the book and a link to buy it as a PDF or a print version.


Shad Thames 1980

If you are going to Shad Thames for the Local Eyes Festival, you may like to download a copy of the PDF of ‘Southwark and Bermondsey’ and take it with you on your tablet or notebook and see something of what has been lost. Perhaps then ‘Local Eyes‘ will cry with mine. Though of course there are still things that remain and are worth groups like the Shad Thames Resident’s Association fighting to keep.

May Day in Trafalgar Square

Light rain was a minor problem as the May Day marchers were arriving at Trafalgar Square for the rally there. Apart from the occasional frame spoilt by a drop on the lens filter between my wiping with a microfibre cloth and taking the picture, it was also making the plinth around Nelson’s Column a little slippery. And while a few years ago it was easy for me to put my camera bag up and bound up onto the plinth, now it is at best something of a struggle, though often someone already on it will give me a hand up. But I decided to walk around to the official way up, a small stairway provided for the event, and waved my press card at the stewards.

They were trying without a great deal of success to keep the plinth clear, but rather grudgingly seeing my union logo on the card let me up; I’m not sure I would have made it at this event if I still got my card – part of the same national press card scheme – through the employers!

I wanted to be there mainly to photograph all those people the stewards were trying hard to keep off, spirited young protesters with banners who do so much to give the event a little life and colour, but also to get pictures of the marchers arriving from a higher viewpoint. But as soon as the rally started with speakers on the platform it was not a good place to be and I made my way down into the area below.

With the microphones being close to the front of the plinth there is little room to photograph the speakers from the same level, though I’ve occasionally managed to do so, and today I didn’t want to stand right on the edge and risk slipping. It isn’t a huge drop, perhaps around 5ft, but enough to cause injury and damage to equipment, and I have increasing problems with vertigo. Even standing on a wall a foot high can give me the shakes.


TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady

Working from ground level isn’t ideal. You need a longish lens and to be able to stand back some way. The long end of the 18-105mm DX is generally OK, but I need the 75-300mm to get tight head shots. Its good to use the 75-300mm as a DX lens, as this lets you see outside the frame, which is good for following the speaker’s gestures and allowing you to zoom to re-frame appropriately. But here I mainly used the long zoom as an FX lens on the Nikon D700, where the DX images are a little small (around 5 Mp) and kept the 18-105mm DX on the D800, as there wasn’t a great deal I might need a wider lens for at that point.

Much of the time I will in any case watch the speaker through my left eye with my right at the viewfinder. Getting decent pictures of people speaking takes a lot of concentration, watching the expression and the eyes in particular. Many speakers move enough to throw a long lens out of focus, but the autofocus normally handles that, but the movements often enable you to find a moment when the microphone is less in the way.

This rally was different to most in that the first part of it very much centred around the two great men whose lives were being celebrated, Tony Benn and Bob Crow, with short videos of selected clips from each of them.

But as the rally wore on, my attention began to lapse, and I was feeling the strain of having been on my feet and working for some hours. I’d come intending to go on with the Occupy London group to photograph their protest against loan sharks Wonga, but in the end only photographed a group of them getting ready to leave from Trafalgar Square before making my own exit for the train home and the lengthy business of editing my work from the day and writing a couple of stories. And of course you can now see the results of this at May Day Rally.
Continue reading May Day in Trafalgar Square

Legends

A few weeks ago (in Bleeding London – re-Inventing Streetview?) I wrote about one widely quoted legend that had become accepted as fact despite it having little or no basis, that of Phyllis Pearsall walking the streets eighteen hours a day for several years in the 1930s to produce London’s first street atlas, the A-Z. It’s a story you can still read on Wikipedia, referencing two apparently unimpeachable sources, her New York Times obit and the Oxford National Dictionary of Biography. But the Wikipedia article (at least now – it was last modified on 31 May 2014 at 05:39.) also contains more accurate information about how the A-Z was put together as well as links to sites which disprove some of the more extravagant claims.


from ‘1989’

Although it linked to photographic issues, including my own personal journey in photography (and I have walked more than the 3,000 miles on London streets she was alleged to have done, though over more than thirty years) and gave a pretext for sharing of few of the images of London I’ve taken, Pearsall’s was not a photographic story. But many of the legends of photography are just that, with only a tenuous connection to the facts, with some photographers being at least as good story-tellers in words as they are with images. While photographs are rooted in the facts of the situation, there is little to anchor the stories that can be constructed around them.


from ‘1989’

The first book I brought out on Blurb a few years ago was a deliberate exploration of some of these issues and of how we interpret or construct the world we see and photograph through stories and other images. ‘1989’ is a series of carefully chosen images taken in 1989 but written in 2005-6 for a web site (and soon after featured on this blog when that site folded and I put it in a corner of my own), then shown as an exhibition in a documentary festival before finally being put into a small book, later re-issued with minor corrections and an ISBN – and in a PDF version. There is a preview of around half the book on Blurb.

In a recent post Ends and Odds Yet Again on Photocritic International which began my train of thought. A D Coleman busts one legend about Steve Martin and Diane Arbus and breaks the spell over Pentti Sammallahti’s mystical relationship to dogs, as well as taking a critical look at ‘Selfies with the Dead‘, ending with a link to a dramatised version of a truly surreal transcript from the Ohio Supreme Court. As ever, Coleman’s posts are stimulating.

Continue reading Legends

London May Day March


Frances O’Grady talks to Bob Crow’s partner Nicky Hoarau

May Day is a big day for the left around the world and in London in particular for some of London’s ethnic communities – most of whom are British and were born in London, but still very much relate to the countries where their parents or grandparents were born, and where May Day is celebrated more widely than the UK.


Turkish worker’s newspaper journalist Suliman Yete was killed in a Turkish prison in 1999 – MKLP

The traditional British left does take part, but for most people in the UK, May 1 is a normal working day. While I was working as a full-time teacher, it was only when May 1 fell at a weekend that I was normally able to go to the march, but now as a photographer I go every year and it is very much a working day for me.


Turkish People’s Front – Halk Cephesi

May Day, 1 May is a public holiday in many countries around the world, but in the UK we instead have (since a Labour Government couldn’t quite bring itself to back anything as socialist as May Day in 1978) a bank holiday on the first Monday in May. Because May 1 is usually a working day, support for May Day celebrations such as the annual London march from UK trade unionists has generally been limited, although of course the march gets official support – and some trade union leaders take part.

Among the regular marchers have been Bob Crow of the RMT and veteran of the left Tony Benn. This year’s march was dedicated to both of them, with their faces and the message from a telegram sent by union activist Joe Hill shortly before his execution in 1915, “Don’t Mourn, Organaise” took pride of place on the official banners and placards as the theme for this year’s march along with its three ‘constant calls’ – trade union rights, human rights, international solidarity.

This is a London march, and it reflects the nature of London now, as the statement from the organising committee shows:

The London May Day has been a unique bringing together of trade unionists, workers from the many international communities in London, pensioners, anti-globalisation organisations, students, political bodies and many others in a show of working class unity (see our supporters list). The whole theme of May Day is unity and solidarity – across the city, across the country, across the world. Three constant calls have been made – trade union rights, human rights, international solidarity. We have been proud that a vital and major part of the March are workers from the different international communities in London – a practical expression of working class solidarity.

In the list of supporters referred to among others it lists “organisations representing Turkish, Kurdish, Chilean, Colombian, Peruvian, Portuguese, West Indian, Sri Lankan, Cypriot, Tamil, Iraqi, Iranian, Irish, Nigerian migrant workers & communities plus many other trade union & community organisations” and it is certainly a lively and at times rather confusing event, particularly for a photographer weaving his way though the crowded Clerkenwell Green where the marchers meet up and mingle. Sorting out quite who is from which group is a problem both while taking pictures and when captioning, and I as usual have to apologise in advance for any I’ve got wrong.


Matt Wrack, Terry Hutt and Frances O’Grady

The main press interest was in the family of Bob Crow who were among those at the head of the march, along with TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady. I was pleased to get a few pictures of her talking with someone I’ve photographed at many protests and still going strong as a pensioner, Terry Hutt, though photographers often call him Terry ‘Hat’ for his headgear over the years, which is now a badge covered cap threatening to rival the one that Brian Haw wore in Parliament Square for his epic almost ten-year protest


Brian Haw in Parliament Square in 2006

There is a lot to photograph on May Day, and I try hard to show as many of the banners and placards as possible as well as the people. It’s an event where I take a great many pictures and I think something important to record, so there are well over a hundred images on line from Clerkenwell Green and the march at May Day March for Bob Crow & Tony Benn.

Continue reading London May Day March

City Streets and River Paths


Thamesgate: Broadness Salt Marshes, 2006

Some years ago I helped to organise a few exhibitions in London which featured a group of artists, including my own photographs for a long defunct organisation called ‘London Arts Café‘.  The last was in 2007, and ‘City People’ included work by 15 artists, one of whom was Hilary Rosen, who had also been in earlier shows.

You can still see quite a lot of material about the activities of the group and some of the work we showed on line, where the web site has been left with a few notices to say the group is no longer active (though that doesn’t stop the spam from people offering to optimise it for search engines at a price.)  The group had initially been set up as a charitable company with the hope of opening an actual café that would show art; this never happened as the surge in property prices and rents in London made this beyond our means, though a few years later the Queen’s Terrace Café allowed LAC founder Mireille Galinou to put her dream into practice for a year in St John’s Wood, with several shows, including my own (more pictures of the Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood here.) I was for some years one of the directors of the company, and although I was sad to see LAC go, I was pleased to no longer have to declare myself a company director.

The picture above was one of the images in our LAC show ‘River‘ in 2006 – and you can see one work from each of us  still on line.


An image made on a dismal January day outside University College Hospital in 2011

Hilary Rosen and I have for some years worked loosely on several joint projects, but without finding a suitable sponsor or venue. One project we were encouraged to pursue concerned hospitals, and it was with this in mind that we first went to University College Hospital (as well as several other hospitals), where she spent some time working on the views from the upper storeys and I made a few panoramas mainly on the street around the building.  Although that project did not materialise we do now have a show in the hospital itself.


Thamesgate: Northfleet, 2000

Another of the several themes we have worked together around is the Thames, and my contribution to the show is based on that, with two sets of half a dozen pictures, the first from 2000-2006 from by the wider river to the east of London including several new prints of work that was in the ‘Estuary’ show at the Museum of London Docklands last year (my own prints rather than those made by the Museum of London).  All of these except the picture at the top of this post were taken on film.


Upstream: Tideway Walk, Nine Elms, 2014

The second set of six prints are from the Thames Path between Vauxhall and Wandsworth, and include a couple of pictures from a walk along a part of this with Hilary. These were all taken this year and illustrate my newly found freedom with digital panoramas which you can see in a several posts on My London Diary. The walk I made with Hilary is at Wandsworth Panoramas, but for the show I’ve used a different interpretation of the images in a rather more panoramic format, though still with the same horizontal angle of view.

Hilary’s work in the show will be more varied, and I will be interested to see her final selection which will include some work I’ve not yet seen. I think it will include some of her watercolours made from UCH as well as some lino prints, and possibly some river images.

The show is open to the public at ‘The Street Gallery‘ University College Hospital, 235 Euston Rd, London NW1 2BU from 13th June – 30th July 2014 and is I think open – like the hospital – 24/7. I’ll post a proper invite to the Private View we are having on Monday 16th June 6.00-7.30pm in a few days when I will have copies of the card (and e-card) to send out.

April on My London Diary

April was a busy month, and although I’d hoped to catch up with myself in May, that has also turned out to be pretty busy.  There are 30 days in April and I think 31 links below, though as usual there were quite a few things I would have liked to have photographed but was unable to get to for one reason or another.

April 2014


Stop HS2 Rally at Parliament


Workers Memorial Day
Cat Hill Protest against L&Q
IKEA Not Welcome on Greenwich Peninsula
Rana Plaza Anniversary at GAP
Staines & Wraysbury Walk
Easter Morning
Staines Passion
Good Friday in Staines
G4S Occupied on Palestinian Prisoners Day
Bill Gates end support of Israeli child torture
End Hunger Fast Vigil against Food Poverty
Barts cuts Health Advocacy & Interpreting
QE Olympic Park Panoramics
Somali Refugees mistreated in Kenya
Against the Electoral Masquerade in Algeria
Don’t Buy Sodastream at John Lewis
Bring Back Shaker Aamer Before He Dies
‘POP UP’ Syrian Refugee Camp
Wild Animal in Circuses ban
Vedanta Zambian Copper Scandal
In Deepest Surrey
Occupy London General Meeting


World Pillow Fight Day


Axe the Bedroom Tax at One Hyde Park


Muslims & Britain First Clash
Wave of Action
Shut down Yarl’s Wood
Probation Officers Strike for Justice


Kurds protest at Rojava attacks
DWP & Atos Work Assessments

Continue reading April on My London Diary

Glenna Gordon & #bringbackourgirls

The New York Times Lens blog has a follow-up to its story about the abuse of images by Ami Vitale which were used to publicise the kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram which I wrote about earlier (Image Abuse.)

In Bringing the Nigerian Schoolgirls Into View, James Estrin writes about the work by Glenna Gordon who having photographed the demonstrations over the kidnapping in Nigeria decided she needed to do something more personal about the missing girls, and made the difficult journey to meet with some of their relatives and friends. In the Lens blog, and on her own web site you can see pictures of some of the clothing, notebooks and other items that belonged to them, along with some short descriptions of them and their hopes in life and some pictures that their families allowed her to share with the world.

It is also worth looking at the other work on Gordon’s web site, which as well as the 16 pictures on the Lens feature includes a longer series, ‘the hunters who want to #bringbackourgirls’, vigilantes keen to take on Boko Haram, said to be better armed than the Nigerian Army, with bow and arrows and hunting rifles.

There is of course much more to look at on her web site, including a lovely series on Nigerian weddings, as well as a powerful set taken in King George Home for the Elderly in Freetown, Sierra Leone.