Save Our Surgeries

I left the ‘Housing for All‘ march at East Ham station and took the District Line to Aldgate East, in the neighbouring borough of Tower Hamlets. Like Newham, this also has a directly elected mayor, but a very different character. For a couple of years Lutfur Rahman was the leader of the Labour council here, but was replaced by the party when he became controversial over media allegations about his links to the Islamic Forum of Europe, a group with an important place in the Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets. IFE supporters say it works actively to oppose extremist groups, while the right-wing press accuses it of extremism.

After much infighting among various groups in the Labour party Rahman was finally elected by Tower Hamlets Labour Party as their candidate for the first elected mayoral elections by a large majority. But the Labour National Executive Committee removed him, replacing him by the man who got the least votes of the three candidates, a decision that, along with the published account of what actually happened in the meeting, puts the party in a very bad light.

Rahman considered legal action to get reinstated, but then decided to stand as an independent candidate instead and got elected – and this year elected again for a second term. But his ‘Tower Hamlets First‘ party are a minority on the council, with around half of all councillors still being Labour. A great deal of ill-feeling still appears to exist between at least some of the Labour group and the Mayor, with non-cooperation and allegations of malpractice being fed liberally to the media, most of which have been only too pleased to report and distort it.

To an outsider, Rahman appears despite the problems to have done a very good job as mayor and to be very open to the people of Tower Hamlets – and indeed to put them first. He has turned up at several events I’ve photographed (and sent along others with his apologies and a message of support when unable to come personally) and seems to have supported projects across the many communities in the borough. I’ve not known another mayor who is as visible and accessible to local people and wish other mayors were more like him at least in this respect.

Like most people in Tower Hamlets the Mayor is greatly concerned to the threat to the surgeries in the area (and in other deprived areas) of the withdrawal of the support they currently get because of the extra needs of the area. They fear these will be unable to continue, and will be replaced by cut-price services run by large health companies and providing only a low level of health care. The date chosen for the Save our Surgeries rally and march was the 66th anniversary of the founding of the NHS.

Of course the Mayor was just one of a number of speakers, including the local Labour MP, Rushanara Ali as well as doctors and other health professionals and a patient. I tried to photograph them all, but it mainly their audience that attracted me, very much a reflection of one of London’s multicultural boroughs. The placard too is one of the more decorative I’ve photographed, though rather less graphic than most, and reflects something of the diversity of the area, with its small island of business wealth at Canary Wharf, old buildings and the recent mosque, though it does rather lack the bustle of its streets.

It is perhaps a reminder that when taking photographs we too need to be aware we are creating representations, and we need to be aware of the message that our pictures convey, not just of who or what we see as the subject of our photograph. At the end of the march as it went past the old Royal London Hospital building were an elderly couple, walking slowly and with some obvious difficulty. I took several pictures, including the one above, including some showing their faces, taking care not to disturb them, but this is the one I chose to use. At first I wondered why I had deliberately chosen to include that disturbing red light which to me looks like a distorted mouth sliming its way across the rear of the car so prominently in the frame. But now I’ve grown to rather like it, though I’m not entirely sure why.
Continue reading Save Our Surgeries

Housing for All March

Focus E15 Mums began almost a year ago as a campaign by a group of young mothers living in a hostel in Stratford to fight eviction when Newham Council cut the hostel’s funding. They started a weekly protest stall and made their fight to stay in the area a very public one, asking questions at meetings and staging protests, some of which have featured here before.

Their campaign has meant that so far they have managed to stay in London, close to families, support services and jobs, when Newham was trying to move them out to Birmingham or Hastings or anywhere rather than Newham.  It isn’t that there is no housing available in Newham, at the centre of one of the largest areas of regeneration in the country, with new blocks of flats appearing every time I go there and of course huge developments on the former Olympic site.  Not to mention the many vacant properties on the Carpenters Estate close to the centre of Stratford. More that these young women are not the right kind of people for Newham’s new vision; to put it simply they just are not rich enough.

Newham is of course a Labour-run council. Entirely. All of the 60 councillors now in office are from the Labour party. Unusually it also has a directly elected mayor, Robin Wales, Leader of Newham Council from 1995 to 2002 and Mayor since then, elected for a fourth term in May this year. You might think that this should mean a council that cares for the poor and the disadvantaged in the community, but it appears you might be sadly wrong.

One of the placards being carried in the protest had a picture of Sir Robin on it, along with the text  ‘Olympic Legacy = Evictions and Social Cleansing – Robin the Poor – Robin Wales Mayor of Newham’.  His policies are built around the ideas of ‘resilience’, which seems to mean helping those who help themselves, rather than any care or concern for those who are weak or who face problems they are unable to deal with. To me they seem to have abandoned the key ideas of the Labour movement, and would readily fit with those of the Chamber of Commerce and the Conservative Party.

I was disappointed not to get a better picture with that placard, and it wasn’t for want of trying. Perhaps I was mistaken, but just occasionally at protests there do seem to be people who go to considerable effort to evade the camera.


Four members of the Counihan family came with the Brent Housing Action banner

Of course there were many people at the protest who were happy – if not keen –  to be photographed and many that I knew from other events. I’ve photographed the Counihan family who started a campaign about their own housing problem with the London Borough of Brent – and who like the Focus Mums have gone on to campaign over housing on behalf of others in their own ‘Housing for All’ campaign, Brent Housing Action.

It was also good to see another friend I’ve photographed on various occasions, Tamsin Omond, who was handing out leaflets for a protest against the expansion of London City Airport, also in east London as well as carrying a placard in the protest. Some of the events I photographed her and the other Climate Rush activists at 5 years ago were against the building of a third runway at Heathrow  – and it now looks increasingly as if we will be protesting there again before too long.


Climate Rushers and local residents lead the ‘NO THIRD RUNWAY’ procession at the Heathrow perimeter fence
I had to leave the ‘Housing for All’ march as it passed East Ham Station as I wanted to photograph another event. You can read my report on the march and see more pictures at Focus E15 March for Decent Housing.

Continue reading Housing for All March

25 Years of Drik

Hard to believe it, but there are still people with an interest in photography who haven’t heard of Drik, the innovated photo agency set up by Shahidul Alam in Dhaka, Bangladesh 25 years ago. As he puts it in his blog, “Tired of being pitied for our poverty, and do-gooder attempts to ‘save’ us, we had decided to become our own storytellers.”


Shahidul Alam talking in London in 2011

It has been a difficult journey, starting on shoestring resources, and for which they also had to create much of the infrastructure, including setting up Bangladesh’s first email network using Fidonet. The government did their worst to close them because of their support for human rights, sending police to shut down some of their shows, and they were “stabbed in the street, arrested, and generally persecuted.”

The photographic school set up by Alam and those working with him, Pathshala, the South Asian Media Institute in Dhaka is now widely recognised as one of the leading schools of photojournalism in the world, and many photographers who have studied there have become well-known, and its former students increasingly feature in the major international photojournalism competitions.

On my table downstairs, until now unopened, is the September issue of ‘New Internationalist‘ magazine – which I’ve subscribed to since its inception (and before it became ‘New’ in 1973, when it was the magazine of ‘Third World First, a student group now known as ‘People and Planet’) though I don’t always get around to reading every word – and I’m still reading the previous issue. It’s essential reading if you want to know what is really happening around the world – and why – and not just what Murdoch and his like want you to know. Over the years they have published a number of articles by Alam, including The Majority World looks back in 2007, as well as making use of images from Drik and Majority World, another of his initiatives.

The latest issue of the magazine has a double-page spread, ‘Telling our own stories‘, celebrating 25 years of Drik, which you can see and download from Alam’s post. I’m pleased to add my small voice to the congratulations.

WE ARE THE LANDSCAPE

COLLECTIVE PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION

dominikgigler
Photograph © Dominik Gigler

Press Release

The East is being redefined. The Olympic fever has put an outcast on the map. The mainstream is now investing the once despised. It is not the first time the East has been given a facelift. The continuous migrations, the war and previous rejuvenations turned this landscape into something both identifiable and adaptable. The East End was and remains a land of experiments where the individual shapes his surroundings. 11 artist photographers familiar with its background and morphing captured its idiosyncrasy through various methodologies. Still the East End cannot be defined and the proud inhabitants are its essence. The East is not a landmark to contemplate but a hub to be lived and inspired from.

Curated by Tendai Davies and David Boulogne

Artist photographers are Paul Walsh, Kajsa Johansson, Dominik Gigler, Arnau Oriol, Susan Andrews, David Boulogne, Alessandra Chíla, Chris Dorley-Brown, Peter Marshall, Mike Seaborne, David George

Opening night Tuesday 9th September from 6.30pm, public from 10th Sep – 5th Nov
The Russet, 17 Amhurst Terrace, London E8 2BT Open daily 9am – 11pm

Train: Dalston Kingsland, Rectory Road, Hackney Downs, Hackney Central
Bus: 67, 76, 488, 149, 236, 243

General enquiries contact David Boulogne
david@2exposures.com 07949033085
Sales contact Tendai Davies
tendai@therusset.co.uk 07733444421

Visit http://2012pics.blogspot.co.uk for more details

As you can see, I have work in this show which opens next week in Hackney. I’ve made my 5 prints, just need to frame them and get them there. I’ll write more about my work for the show, which comes from my book ‘London dérives 1975-1983‘ (ISBN 978-1-909363-08-3) later. Hope to see some of you at the opening – please RSVP to David Boulogne if you can come.

Duckrabbit, Ethics & Sheep

Most days when I’m not out taking pictures I spend at least a few minutes (more often about an hour) before I start on my own work for the day looking through Facebook posts and a number of blogs and web sites on my newsfeed, stopping to read those that really catch my interest. One blog that often does this is duckrabbit, and I’ve often shared posts from there on this blog.

There are a couple of things in the past few weeks that have interested me there, and the latest is a post by John Macpherson The thin blue line reflecting on two posts about Ferguson, one by a black police officer and the second an Al Jazeera Opinion piece by Malcolm Harris: ‘Unethical journalism can make Ferguson more dangerous’. It’s this second post that is particularly pertinent for photographers who cover events – as I occasionally do – where some of those involved may be breaking laws, where Harris suggests that “publishing images with identifiable faces” in situations like this is a “violation of accepted practice“.

Macpherson makes some very sensible comments about this and while there are situations where anonymity should be respected, journalists are not there to decide on who is breaking the law, but to report “the situation as it unfolds, and recording it with professional objectivity.”

Of course there are situations that call for anonymity, and times where journalists can only work on that basis or when we chose to do so by the careful choice of camera angle and framing, but this isn’t something we should do without careful consideration, and not something that would generally apply on protests on the streets. I’m careful at times not to include “innocent bystanders” in my pictures, and have been known to advise people wearing masks to protect their identity to actually cover their faces with them. But I think those acting openly on the street can have little complaint if their actions are reported openly.

There have been a few occasions when I have decided not to take pictures, on the grounds that a particular image would misrepresent the event I was covering. I’m not sure in most cases my decision was right, and it would have been better to take the pictures and decide later whether or not to use them. But for most journalists now there isn’t a ‘later’, with publications and agencies demanding images almost before they are taken, rather than the several hours that allow me to consider and edit my work.

My photographs have never been used in court, but I have on several occasions provided copies to protesters to help in the preparation of their defence (I think as so often the charges were dropped in all these cases) where the pictures showed police acting in an aggressive manner.

Photographs, and particularly still photographs, are in any case rather curious evidence, seldom providing reliable evidence on their own. They need captions, explanations, supporting testimony. Even with information now embedded in digital images they are often not entirely reliable about when and where they were taken, and, as we photographers certainly know, an image taken a fraction before or after, or from a slightly different viewpoint may provide a quite different impression of what was taking place.

The second duckrabbit piece, ‘Cut out the crap‘ is a short link to a blog post by Bartosz Nowicki to the work of a little-known photographer from Wales. Peter Jones grew up in Abwerystwyth and after various night classes studied photography “at Manchester College of Art and Design ’66-’69 where I was influenced by the work of Edward Weston and Tony Ray Jones. Went to London to look for work and found a job as John Thornton’s first assistant.” But then he came home to Wales to visit his sick mother,  got drawn in to the family farm and never touched a camera for 30 years, only becoming involved in photography again when his sister entered him into a Millennium project where people were given disposable cameras and free processing. When ill health forced his retirement from farming he started taking pictures again, buying a Leica M6 and a 35mm and 50mm lenses. The images on the blog are from a project “Welsh Farming Community” which he says “will come to it’s conclusion when my shutter stops blinking.” It’s an interesting story with some fine images and I think should at some point make a fine book.

Good/Bad Light

I’ve written at times about my own rather coarse flash techniques using high ISO, and it was interesting to come across an article by a photographer working in a very different area,  Kristian Dowling, on PetaPixel a few weeks ago. Obviously the ideas and solutions that Dowling presents in  What Photographers are NOT Considering When Using High ISO work well for him – as you can see from the example images – but I’m not sure they are suitable solutions in my own practice, where situations tend to be fairly fast-moving and often rather crowded with both protesters and other photographers.

Like Dowling I have experimented with using LED lights, though not the Westcott Ice Light mentioned in the feature, and have not been too impressed with the results, though I’ve often piggy-backed on the video lights of others at events (though at other times they have been an annoyance.) At $500 the Ice-light seems a little on the expensive side (and there are ‘Accessories Galore’ to add to the expense), but perhaps it does do a better job than the £15 ‘160 LED Video Light Lamp Panel’ you can find on E-Bay. This seems to claim a similar light output, but is perhaps a more suitable rectangular shape than the long, thin, Ice Light sabre. But the cheap units I’ve tried have been a little disappointing in terms of light output for photographic use, though good for other purposes. More powerful units are available for around £100, but I’ve yet to try these.

Similarly while fashion work may make the Phottix Odin wireless TTL flash triggers seem a snip at $329 or $399 for the twin pack with second receiver, for those who work for the poverty fees now paid by newspapers and magazines (or more often 50% or less of them) may find the Yongnuo RF 603-II which offers a manual Wireless Flash Trigger and 2 Transceivers for around £20 of more interest (or if you want iTTl the Yongnuo YN-622N is around £60). At these kinds of price I’m tempted to try one out myself.

But I think what is important is to understand the difference between good and bad light, and there are things in the article by Dowling that I find confusing, either because they are confused or because I got to bed to late last night. Here’s how I think about lighting.

Quantity & fall-off

Light intensity is perhaps the most obvious feature. And for most artificial light sources we need to think in terms of the inverse square law – twice as far away means a quarter of the intensity etc. (Theoretically only for point sources but even with large soft boxes or bounce the light falls off, just not quite so dramatically.)

Spread

The angle from the light source over which you get relatively even light distribution. Can be increased by diffusers over the light source

Size

The size of the light source viewed from the subject (where the sun is a small light source but the light from a small flash tube bounced off a large white wall is large.) This mainly effects the hardness/softness of the shadows. Despite what many photographers seem to think, putting a diffuser in front of a flash hardly effects this unless the diffuser is considerably larger than the flash reflector, at least where there are no large reflectors around – it does work in rooms with low white ceilings. But using it outdoors simply cuts down the range of the flash and increases recycle time.

Colour

Pretty obvious, but mainly important in avoiding mixing light of different colour temperature. Filters come in handy at times, though I seldom bother to filter my flash, there are times when it would help to do so. The LED panels usually come with both a simple diffuser and an amber one to use with tungsten lighting, but little outdoor lighting is 3200K.

Direction & Position

The horizontal angle between the light, the subject and the camera, and the angling of the light down (usually) on the subject

Main Light and Ambient/Fill

Although we can have very complex lighting situations, it is useful to think in terms of the main light – which gives the subject its ‘volume’, the ambient which illuminates the whole of the scene and the fill, light used to soften lighting contrast by putting light into the shadow areas.

In Practice

The main light is always better away from the camera, whereas fill is best from close to the lens. So flash on camera is great for fill, but rather lacking as a main light. With camera systems like Nikon, flash in bright sun for fill is simple, and handled very well by the TTL BL mode with a flash in the hot shoe. With some lenses you can alternatively use the built-in flash on some bodies, but physically large lenses such as the 16-35 cast an ugly shadow in the frame.

At night, working in fairly brightly lit areas, you can still use flash for fill, (though not in P mode) by working at high ISO, setting up the camera with appropriate underexposure to give some feeling of night, and then adding a touch of flash to illuminate close subjects. Often I’ll combine the flash – of short duration – with relatively slow shutter speeds such as 1/15s to retain information in relatively dimly lit areas of the background.

When the light falls so low as to make flash the only possible main light source, again I usually like to use as high an ISO as practicable so as to pick up what little I can from ambient in the background. Here it would be good to have the light source off camera, but it isn’t always practical to do so. Probably the easiest method for my sort of work would be a long flash cable enabling me to hold the flash in my left hand, arm outstretched and above head height, but I think a wireless flash trigger would give more control and get in the way rather less, so I’m considering that option.

Even with flash on camera, there are things you can do to make life easier and your pictures better, at least with units like the SB800 I like, where the head will swivel both left and right and up and down. If you are able to have close foreground on only one side of the frame (often the case) you can get some help from the flash fall-off by angling the head away from the closer parts of the subject. Just occasionally I see the chance to bounce the flash from a suitable white wall or even a white coat or other white object rather than use direct flash, almost always an advantage.

And then of course there is post-processing, burning in closer parts of the subject and brightening the more distant. And just occasionally a little burning in parts of the face can help add the volume that the flash wiped out. Getty might not approve, but it is getting back towards how I saw the subject – without the distortions introduced by the flash.

Epping Forest

Should you be in the London area and feel a need for some exercise on Sunday September 14 you might consider heading to Epping Forest for the annual Epping Forest Centenary Walk organised by the the Friends of Epping Forest from Manor Park station to Epping.


The walk starts off across Wanstead Flats

The route was devised in 1978 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Epping Forest Act, 1878, which placed responsibility for the forest in the hands of the City of London, giving them the powers to take on the landowners who were then rapidly putting up fences around their properties. Although the City haven’t always seemed to have the best interests of the forest at heart, and various governments have interfered negatively (most recently during the London 2012 Olympics where they twisted the City’s arm to allow a temporary police building on Wanstead Flats) they managed to roll back some of the encroachment and have preserved pretty well all but the southern tip “for the recreation and enjoyment of the people.”

The advantage of going on the organised walk is that you meet people and there “will be ample stops and pauses when short explanatory talks will be given on the Forest and its management and history in furtherance of the Walk’s objective to promote the appreciation and knowledge of this priceless Open Public Space!” You also won’t get lost, which is rather easy to do on some sections of the walk.


Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge at Chingford is worth a visit

There are timings given on the site linked above for those unable to walk the full 15 or 16 miles. But if you want to take pictures, it is probably better to walk it on your own, or with a small group of friends or family as I did in 2009, though it has taken me 5 years to put the pictures on the web – at Epping Forest Centenary Walk.

And of course you could split the rather long 16 mile route (and longer when you get lost or wander off to take photographs) into several sections. Something I’d heartily recommend as I was more than shattered by the time we reached Epping station for the journey home. I was calling it Effing Forest by the time we finished.


Pole Hill at Chingford is a little under a mile from the route

It would make two rather nice walks, splitting the route at Chingford. You could even make a short detour to some interesting parts nearby – such as Pole Hill, which has a pole, or rather an obelisk which was erected by an astronomer royal on the Greenwich Meridian so he could line up his telescope from the Royal observatory and make sure it was pointing due north. Some time later they decided to move the meridian a few yards, though I suppose if the telescope was still in the same place it didn’t really matter.


There are many seriously old trees in the forest, but also some open space – forests are not just trees
Continue reading Epping Forest

Notting Hill – better weather in 2009

I’ve now put more of my pictures from Notting Hill Carnival in 2009 on-line in Notting Hill – Children’s Day on My London Diary.

Though as you will see there, they are not all of children, though I have concentrated rather more on those of children in selecting images to put on the web.

But carnival is a great event for people of all ages.

I took a great many pictures that day, almost 1500 in around 4 hours in Notting Hill, which works out at around one every ten seconds, though I’ve put less than 50 on the web. They probably include most of the better images I made, though I didn’t go back and look through all of them to make the selection, just the 200 or so I’d developed from the RAW into jpegs at the time.

There may be a few images that I missed when I did that initial edit, but I doubt if there would be anything truly stunning. With digital I ruin far fewer images than I used to on film, but I doubt if I make any more good ones either. So while I still have almost every negative I ever took, it perhaps makes more sense to be at least a little selective about which digital files to keep.

Another forty-something pictures of Notting Hill – Children’s Day from 2009 now (at last) on My London Diary.

Continue reading Notting Hill – better weather in 2009

How Not to Write About Women Artists

When I taught photography, many of our best students were women. Perhaps over the years there were half a dozen who I thought really had potential as photographers, but I can only recall having that same feeling about one male student. As it happens he is the only one who has gone on to become really successful as a photographer, though others who passed through our classes with less obvious photographic talent have made a living behind a camera. As Eric Barker puts in in his  Time article on careers, “Persistence trumps talent”. Or perhaps it is rather harder for people who have a definite personal vision find to produce work that fits the dimmer perception of others.

Many of the contemporary photographers whose work I admire are women. I’ve never thought to check what percentage, but certainly many come to mind, not because they are women but because of their work. Where perhaps in the first hundred of so years of the history of photography women were notable exceptions – because of wider societal restrictions and conventions – this is no longer the case. And some of those exceptions were truly notable – including such examples as Julia Margaret Cameron, Berenice Abbott and Dorothea Lange. Wikipedia has an interesting list.

When I was teaching and when I was writing about the medium for a living I wrote about and used examples from the work of many women photographers, some well-known, others less so. Many of our students were inspired by the work of Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, Jo Spence, Fay Godwin and others – as well as that of male photographers.

I wrote as well about others who I felt deserved to be better-known – such as Nelly’s and Grete Stern (neither well-served on the web) and about a few others who were well-known but whose work I could not relate to or felt rather lacking in photographic interest. Although I mainly wrote about things I liked, I was running a site which I felt had to provide at least basic information across the whole range of things photographic (though I drew a line at so-called “glamour”.)  But there were a few women photographers whose reputation seemed to me more connected with feminist politics than artistic production, though this was and is dangerous territory for male comment and I largely restricted myself to giving the facts and links rather than opinions in their cases.

It was a link to an article posted by Alan Griffiths of Luminous Lint that started me thinking about “women photographers” again. In Hyperallergic, Alex Heimbach (a freelance writer and graduate student at NYU) reviews a recent book with the title ‘Women Photographers from Julia Margaret Cameron to Cindy Sherman‘ under the heading How Not to Write About Women Artists.

The photographers – who are arranged alphabetically, itself a curious choice, begin chronologically with Anna Atkins, who, while an important figure in the history of photography, was probably not a photographer. Her Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, its first installment published in 1843, is considered to be the first photographically illustrated book, using the cyanotype process invented the previous year by her friend Sir John Herschel and the photogenic drawing technique she had learnt from another friend, a Mr Talbot. Quite likely she had learnt his calotype process from him as well, and may have been the first woman photographer, but no evidence of this remains. The Wikipedia article on her provides a rare link to a piece I wrote about her work in 2005, rather a flashback for me.

Among the 55 photographers in the book by Boris Friedewald listed on the contents page (which you can view on the ‘Look Inside!’  page at the Amazon link above) are around 40 that I have at some time or other written about, one I know personally, half a dozen I’ve not heard of and a similar number who I feel certainly don’t deserve inclusion. There are quite a few – including Atkins who perhaps fall outside the remit of the title, the others being from post-Sherman generations. You can also see the pages on Berenice Abbott and Eve Arnold in the preview.

But the article by Heimbach has some more serious criticisms. As she writes; “it’s impossible to imagine an equivalent book titled Men Photographers: From Eugène Atget to Jeff Wall.” And while projects like these ideally “serve to illuminate lesser-known artists, who may have been discounted because of their gender (or race or sexual orientation or class)“, too often as seems to be the case with this book “their thoughtlessness generally renders them pointless at best and misogynistic at worst.”


Nina (left) and Naomi Rosenblum with pictures by Walter Rosenblum, 2007, Peter Marshall

There is more to her argument than this, and the article is worth careful reading, and she contrasts its approach with that of Naomi Rosenblum‘s A History of Women Photographers, (incidentally first published by Abbeville Press in 1994, rather than 2010), a book I used, together with Rosenblum‘s A World History of Photography in my teaching.) As Heimbach says “Rosenblum’s book aims not only to highlight the work of female photographers, but also to dig into what their gender means for their lives and careers. Rosenblum offers not just a who but a why.”

Monkeying with Copyright

I started writing a while back about the monkey who snatched a camera from a wildlife photographer and started taking pictures, but somehow the article never got finished. I can’t remember why, but suspect it wandered into musings about ‘monkeys‘ and ‘blunts‘ on Fleet St (remember Fleet St?) and the esoterica of copyright and slowly faded out in a million diversions. Quite a few of the things I write rather end that way, though just occasionally I’ll scrape them up and  tighten them enough to see the light of day. Or maybe I just fell asleep when writing it and forgot to save it when I woke up.

You’ll have read about the monkey selfie. If not, read it here. The picture and story went viral in 2011, but what brought it back to attention in 2014 was the attempt by the owner of the camera, David Slater, to get Wikipedia to take down the picture on the grounds that rather than being, as Wikipedia stated ‘Public Domain’, it was copyright and that he owned that copyright.

Wikipedia, after its usual long process of internal discussion, disagreed, arguing that under US Copyright law a photograph has to be taken by a human being to be copyrighted. And a recent post in ArsTechnica confirms that US Copyright Office agrees: a “photograph taken by a monkey” is unprotected intellectual property.

Here in the UK, things may be different. As ArsTechnica puts it:

“Under UK federal law, however, Slater could claim the intellectual property rights to the picture—even if he didn’t press the shutter—if the image is part of his “intellectual creation.

While this reflects an interesting view of the UK, a ‘federation’ which is currently looking increasingly likely to split up a little, the law in question actually applies rather more widely than we might think, with Wikipedia stating that as well as the whole of the United Kingdom, it also applies in Bermuda and Gibraltar, as well as to works “originating (by publication or nationality/domicile of the author) in the Isle of Man … Antigua, Dominica, Gambia, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Kiribati, Lesotho, St. Christopher-Nevis, St. Lucia, Swaziland and Tuvalu” and any other countries which were included in “the Imperial Copyright Act of 1911, or the 1956 Acts.”

A similar feature in the Telegraph – which ArsTechnica links to as its source – concludes:

“In the UK, under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, a photographer can claim rights over an image even if he or she did not press the shutter button if the results are their “intellectual creation” – for example, they came up with the concept of a monkey taking a “selfie””

They go on to say that it is something that has never been tested in court, and it would seem to me not to apply in this case, where the snatching of the camera was clearly the monkey’s idea and not the intellectual creation of the photographer. The photographer’s intervention came only after the act.

In the ‘New Yorker‘ you can read what the monkey thinks of it all, at least according to Bill Barol. It actually contains a piece of good advice that many educational establishments in this country should heed, that “digital really lets novices shoot with abandon, and this the best way to learn” and that monkey does seems to have learnt fast, which an image that puts most human selfies to shame. Perhaps it’s a pity the camera was taken away from him, who knows what he might have gone on to produce.