Gaza Anniversary

I don’t much like photographing protests at the Israeli Embassy. The actual embassy is hidden away down a private side street where photography and protests are forbidden, and protests take place on the busy roadway of High St Kensington. Sometimes there are problems with police not allowing photographers to stand in front of the protest pen, either telling you that you can’t walk along there, or opening up a narrow area for the public to walk through and telling photographers they have to keep moving.  Fortunately on this occasion they were not doing either, but allowing photographers reasonable access, but it still was to a narrow restricted area, with traffic moving past on the other side of a row of cones a couple of feet in front of the protest.

I actually like to work close to people when photographing, but this was at times just a little too close even for my taste, and your presence is always very much felt by the protesters. The actual pen is always fairly narrow too, so it gets very crowded inside, and its often tantalising to see an opportunity for a photograph but not being able to get the the right position to make it.

Although mostly I was using the wider end of the 16-35mm zoom (on the D700) there were also some pictures where by working up to the barriers and aiming the camera roughly along them I was able to get a little more distance – as the the picture above of the woman and the placards. Unfortunately it was a dull day and the 18-105mm seems to have been having a few problems with autofocus recently – and this image is not quite sharp on her face. Later I took a few more simiilar images – and there are some in Gaza Massacre 5th Anniversary – but as often happens, the first image was the one that I thought best – apart from its softness. I took it soon after I arrived and there were relatively few photographers (and protesters) present, but soon lots of other photographers were also photographing her and I think she got very concious about being photographed, and was smiling most of the time.

Another woman had a very nicely drawn poster and I wanted to photograph her holding it in the protest, but it was hard to get a picture I liked.  The plastic sheet over the poster was also a problem with reflections. I took a few working close to her, but they didn’t work – as it seldom does if you ask people to hold their poster or placard for a photograph. Later, from a little further back with the 18-105mm I made this one which was more what I wanted.

There is rather less of a problem in photographing people wearing ‘Anonymous’ masks in that their expression doesn’t change when they are aware of the camera. But it was still a better picture when I photographed this guy as he walked through the crowd rather than the posed image above.

Of course the scarf makes a difference, but it is mainly the hand up to his mouth which produces something more immediate, and the people and placards around the figure work better.

I couldn’t stay for all of the protest, and was anxious to get off to go to another event. but one particular person was worrying me. He was one of the most noticeable of those protesting, and had appeared in more or less the first image I took, as well as several others. But I just wasn’t too happy with pictures like the one above; it wasn’t bad, but I felt there must be more I could do. I’d turned away and walked a few yards towards the tube, then turned back and decided to make one last effort. I took a short series of images ending up with the one below.

It didn’t look quite like that on the camera back – his face was in fairly deep shadow and the flag at top left was rather pale, with light shining through the thin material. But I felt I had essentially captured what I wanted and put my camera away. This really was the final frame I took of the protest.

Continue reading Gaza Anniversary

Jeremy Nicholls interviewed

I’ve often linked here to posts by Jeremy Nicholl on his The Russian Photos blog, for example his excellent coverage of the Morel vs AFP/Getty saga (the agencies have lost twice but are still fighting – perhaps just to benefit the lawyers) and it was interesting to read an interview with him today on the ‘SellNews Blog‘.

The heading to the post there also made me smile a  little.  “A comfortable pair of shoes is one of the most important pieces of photo equipment” is a quotation from Nicholls, but was also almost word for word my reply some years ago when I was being interviewed for some amateur photographic magazine.  There it was the kind of interview that went through a stock series of questions, and one at the end was “What is your most useful photographic accessory?” and my answer “A comfortable pair of shoes” was not really what the interviewer wanted.

A few years later in another similar interview, about my urban landscape work, my answer had changed, and had become my Brompton, a superb British-made folding bicycle that had made my later work in the Thames Gateway possible. The distances there were too much for convenient walking, and the bike took me to places that a car would not have reached (and in any case I’ve given up driving) and let me stop almost anywhere on the roads to photograph. No nonsense about finding somewhere to park and walking miles back to find the light had changes or that what looked interesting at 5o mph didn’t quite look so good when you got back to it. The Brompton has the big advantage that once folded it could also always be taken on trains and the underground across London (and on buses, but usually it’s quicker to ride.)

More recently it’s back to shoes again for me, with much more of my work in central London, and often at events where a bike might be damaged or be very likely to be stolen if locked out of the way.  So it’s back to buses and walking – and sometimes the tube or Overground. My taste in shoes has changed – then I went for lightweight hand-sewn leather, while now I prefer rather heavier, warmer and more expensive and waterproof  models that provide more support.

But Nicholl’s interview isn’t just about shoes and the Morel case, and there is a nice section where he gives his view that photographers have to be not neutral but honest, as well as his views on social media, his problems photographing in Russia, his equipment and his clear advice to those amateur photographers who wish to become professional: “marry into money.” Though he does go on to say more. The whole piece is worth reading.

Focus on Newham Housing

It’s always nice to be invited to a party, and even better when its for what seems to be a very good cause, supporting the young women in East Thames’s Focus E15 Foyer who are under threat of eviction after Newham Council cut their support.

Social housing is very much under threat at the moment, and although much of this is down to the policies of successive governments since Thatcher determined to get rid of it with policies including the right to buy, in London it seems to be some Labour controlled councils who are most at fault.

I’ve written before about Southwark’s disgraceful behaviour over the Heygate estate at the Elephant and Castle, where their behaviour has been so blatantly disgraceful that they are currently fighting in a tribunal to keep the details secret over a scheme that has sold off property on the cheap to developers, forcing around 1,200 families from their homes and will produce a development with very few social rented properties. See my and Walking the Rip-Off – Heygate & Aylesbury for more on this.

And in LB Newham there is the saga of the Carpenters Estate close to the centre of Stratford, where the council has been ‘decanting’ tenants for some years, leaving decent homes on a well regarded estate boarded up and empty for years – sending in their workmen to smash them up to prevent squatting. You can see more about this in my , where I write about the problems I faced photographing in the area.  Their scheme to sell of the area to University College appears to have fallen through, but doubtless they are now trying to get some other development with little or no social housing.

The young women and their children from the Focus Foyer have been shabbily treated by Newham Council.  At first some were offered re-housing in distant parts of the country, away from friends and jobs and support systems, and now, after putting up a fight, the council wants to disperse them to private rented accommodation in different areas of London.

This is a council in an area with large numbers of properties currently being developed – particularly post the Olympics – by the East Thames Housing Association, and being made available at commercial rents, unaffordable to those who rely on housing benefits.  Housing Associations aren’t being allowed to do what they were set up to do, Housing benefit has become a huge subsidy to private landlords and people like these young mothers are being forced to live in sub-standard properties with no real security of tenure.

We need much more social housing, Affordable should mean genuinely affordable for those on low or even minimum wages (and, if necessary, benefits.)  Councils, especially Labour councils like Newham should be striving to provide housing in Newham, not trying to export its poorer residents to other areas.

We met on a street corner a few yards from the East Thames offices near the centre of Stratford. The details of the protest had not been released, and I had expected us to walk to some empty property nearby for the promised childrens’ party, but instead it took place in the show flat – just two rooms – built inside the foyer of the housing association.

When we walked into the offices, a young couple was being shown the show flat – it represents the properties being offered to those who can afford them in the Olympic village, and the mothers lined up outside for the local press photographer who had come along to take a picture.

Then when the couple came out, the mothers went in and I went with them. It was very crowded in the kitchen with perhaps around 20 people, and even with the wide end of the 16-35mm was difficult to get sufficient distance to photograph what was happening. Fortunately I’d got the 16mm frame-filling fisheye in my camera bag, and most of the pictures were taken with this. Although it has the same focal length as the wide end of the rectilinear zoom it takes in a much wider angle of view.

However it does compress objects and people towards the edges of the frame and renders any straight lines not through the centre of the image as curves. Photographing people, those curved lines are seldom too important, but the compression is.  Software such as the Fisheye Hemi plugin convert the image to a more natural look, removing the compression and rendering all  upright straight lines as straight – giving a similar image to a camera with a swinging lens. It does so at the cost of losing some of the image in the corners of the picture. When looking through the camera viewfinder you need to allow for this effect, and you can do so to some extent by using two eyes, one at the viewfinder and the other viewing the subject directly.

The mid-points of the two sides will become the midpoints of the two edges of the converted picture, and similarly to midpoints of the top and bottom edge are also the limits of the converted image. But anything in the four corners of the image will be lost.

I felt a little sympathy for the man from East Thames who came in to talk to the mothers and their supporters. His hands which he was waving around rather a lot were really rather tied by Newham Council. He was probably sincere in saying that he wished he could rehouse the mothers as they wanted and need, and certainly not responsible for the policy that prevented him from doing so.

It really was very crowded in their, rather more than it looks in the pictures, and it was very difficult to move around as you really need to to get into the best position to take photographs. There were others filming on their phones and a videographer working, and I was trying hard not to get in the way of others. There were really few opportunities too to show the posters that told the purpose of the event.

Later the party really got under way in the living room next door, which was a little less crowded, though there were still a lot of people in a fairly small room. But the main problem was really one of lighting. The show flat was in the window of the offices, with direct sun streaming in and lighting up parts of the room, giving a pretty extreme difference in lighting between the areas in sun and those in shade.  With the 16mm fisheye it is hardly possible to use fill flash (and even with the 16mm rectilinear lens very hard to get it anything like even) so I was working without fill. It was hard to avoid burnt out highlights, and the images needed extensive burning of the sunlit areas and dodging of those in shadows to get results like the above picture.

Timing is also rather tricky when people are popping party poppers and I was pleased to get so many strands caught in the sunlight streaming into the room in this image.

You can see more pictures from the party in Focus E5 Mothers Party Against Eviction.
Continue reading Focus on Newham Housing

January 2014 Complete

So far I’ve managed to keep up my resolution this year to publish work faster on My London Diary, and January’s posts were actually finished a few days ago. It was made a little easier by my taking it a little easier in the last few days of the month, partly because I’d been overdoing things earlier and needed a few days rest. There are still a few events I’ll probably write more about later, but here is January’s full list:

Jan 2014

IWGB at Cofely GDF-Suez
IWGB in Royal Opera House


IWGB at Parliament


‘3 Cosas’ Strike Picket and Battle Bus
‘3 Cosas’ Strike Picket
‘Axe the Bedroom Tax – No Evictions.’


‘Free the Primates’ Anti Vivisection Coalition

Solidarity with African Refugees in Israel
Students march to protect Education


Release Margaretta D’Arcy Now!
No More ‘Benefits Street’ Channel 4
Staines Evening
Israeli Gay Tourism Pinkwashing
Peace vigil for Syria


Anonymous March For Freedom UK
Gaza Massacre 5th Anniversary


Focus E5 Mothers Party Against Eviction
Shepperton & Ballard
Benefits Street Protest at Love Films
More Flooding
Sisi Supporters Oppose Boycott


Free Egypt Alliance Urge Vote Boycott
Repeal Indian anti-Gay Law
12 Years of Illegal Guantanámo Jail
Vigil for Bogotá Mayor Petro


RMT Protest at Tube Cuts
Free Shaker Aamer Vigil
Against Uganda’s Anti-Gay Law


Thames Path Panoramas
Kennett & Avon: Newbury

Continue reading January 2014 Complete

To Cliffe


At Shornmead Fort, near Gravesend. 1985

Past Gravesend the Thames widens out and is still even now something of a shipping highway, with Tilbury Docks, opposite Gravesend on the Essex bank remaining a busy port for London – though there is now a new London Gateway Port a few miles further downstream. In June 1985 I walked from Gravesend along by the river east to Cliffe, a small village on some low chalk cliffs overlooking the river. And back.

I was perhaps prompted by reading one of my favourite books by Fay Godwin, ‘The Saxon Shore Way‘,  published in 1983, three years after the long distance path was established, though it would annoy Fay greatly to hear me say that it was the text by Alan Sillitoe that attracted me as much as the photographs. It was one of her persistent (and in some ways justified) gripes that although she had conceived the book and been its prime mover, like all of her other collaborations with writers, it was always listed under the name of the writer, with her treated as simply the illustrator of their text.

As I told her, it wasn’t simply that she was a photographer, though words here in the UK always take precedence over text. To get her books published, the publishers required a well-known name to put on the cover, and despite her record in publishing,  her’s was not a name that would sell books. Few books by individual photographers sell well – and things were even worse thirty years ago. Sillitoe was a name that would drive sales far more effectively. If she had wanted to get a greater share of the credit she should have got John Smith (and no, not the John Smith) to provide the text – and get the publisher to market it as a book by Fay Godwin. But as she had set it up, what she complained about was inevitable (and she knew the industry well enough to know it.)

It isn’t her best-known book, and her pictures of this first section of the walk from Gravesend to Rye are perhaps a little disappointing, though there are some fine examples of her work later in the book.  I’ve never completed the full 163 miles of the walk myself, though I have photographed at both ends and a few other places along its length.


The Hans Egede at Cliffe, 1985

It wasn’t my first visit to Cliffe, I’d been there a couple of times before with photographer friends, and photographed the beached hulk of a wooden ship which had become a playground for photographers and small boys.  (Wikpedia informs me it was not some ancient wreck, but the Hans Egede, built in Denmark in 1922, a three-master with an auxiliary engine which was damaged by fire in 1952 and then, with fittings removed, used as floating storage for coal and/or grain moored in the Medway. In 1955 while she was being towed up the Thames to London she started to sink and was eventually beached here.

I’ve posted the top picture on this page here before, and it was taken a little before I got to Cliffe, at Shornmead Fort, one of a number of forts along the river. There was a small fort here from 1796, but it was rebuilt a couple of times in the next century and what is left dates from around 1870.  The guns were removed before the end of the century, but it was re-armed in both World Wars. Later in the 1960s it was part demolished and apparently used for target practice. There was still a live firing range next door in 1985 but they didn’t see to be aiming in my direction as I sat in the sun to eat my sandwiches, waiting for a ship to come past and watching young bikers on unlicensed bikes speeding along the riverside path.

Cliffe has some low chalk cliffs from which it gets its name, and was probably a Saxon town, but it was the coming of the cement industry in the 1860s that transformed the area. As well as the confusingly named Nine Elms cement works a canal and tramway were constructed across the marshes to the Thames.  The emptiness of the area also make it a good site for an explosive works, which proved rather too explosive; only working for the first 20 years of the 20th century, 16 workers were killed in explosions. The marshes weren’t too healthy before then, with malaria still common in the area before much of the marshland was drained around the end of the 19th century. The original cement works closed in the 1920s, but cement production continued with the Alpha Cement works until the 1970s. They dug out much of the marshes leaving many unfilled pits that are now nature sanctuaries.

The industry remaining on the riverside is now sand and gravel, dredged from the Thames.

Cliffe came back into the news in 2002, with plans to site a new London airport there, but these were abandoned largely on cost grounds at the end of 2003.


River Thames and Saxon Shore Way near Cliffe, 2002

I went back to the area shortly after the airport plans were announce and have a vivid memory of having cycled there not long after that, but though I’ve spent several hours searching I can’t find any pictures. Perhaps it was just in my dreams, as it certainly doesn’t seem to be in my filing system!

Continue reading To Cliffe

Marking the Meridian – The Line

It seems a long time ago that in anticipation of the forthcoming Millennium I embarked on a photographic project to document the Greenwich Meridian in London, but it still came as a shock to work out it was almost 20 years ago that I started. The project obviously came from thinking about time, but also came after I’d completed a project on the DLR extension to Beckton using a series of panoramic images with a swinging lens Widelux camera. The long format was ideally suited to documenting linear structures of the DLR viaducts and I decided it would also be appropriate for the virtual line of the meridian.

At the time I was surprised to find the Meridian line unmarked both on the Ordnance Survey maps and only in rare places on the ground. When grants were being made for art projects to mark the Millennium (or at least the year 2000, 12 months before) I put in for a project to produce a series of Millennium walks illustrated by my images, exhibitions at public libraries and other venues close to the line to publicise it and also to mark key points on the routes by suitable pavement markers. It did not even reach the short list.

Now it is rather easier to walk more of the Meridian, with increased public access at various points on or close to the line. The line has also been added to the maps – with my 1999 edition of ‘Explorer 162’ having a green flash on its cover ‘Showing the Greenwich Meridian‘, and quite a few new markers were added around the year 2000.

Of course the Meridian is marked at the Greenwich Observatory, both with a line in the yard where people like to pose a leg in each hemisphere, and also on the footpath just outside. There is another marker near the back of Greenwich Power Station, from where it goes along the river Thames, touching briefly again on the south bank near the Millennium Dome (where there is a rather nice linear marker.) It’s marked again on the north bank in the former East India Dock site but a little north of that was an area which when I carried out my project in 1995 was closed off to the public for around a mile, passing through the Poplar gasworks and then an industrial area adjoining the Bromley-by-Bow gasworks, before emerging to public view again at the Channelsea River south of central Stratford.

Since 1995 when I finished my Meridian project I’ve been able to access a couple of these areas and make more panoramas. West of Bow Creek I was commissioned to photograph the removal by barge of some of the highly toxic contaminated earth from the Poplar gasworks site, and on the east a walkway has been opened up from the Bromley gasworks bridge by the riverside down to the former gasworks dock, within a few metres of the meridian.

The dock itself, Cody Dock, is also the site a new social enterprise partnership with community and educational activities, and I’ve visited them and taken pictures on a couple of occasions – see Gasworks Dock Revived.

The promotional video for a new project ‘The Line‘ starts with images from Cody Dock, and its aim is to bring world-class modern and contemporary to a new sculpture walk more or less along the Meridian line – and to do so this summer by using already existing works. There are already a few fine works more or less on the line, and it would be great to add more. The project is to be crowd funded and you can contribute on Spacehive.

The Line will link Queen Elisabeth Olympic Park and the Millennium Dome (aka O2) and contain up to 30 sculptures. It will provide a great free walk (though you will need to get across the river – perhaps by that splendid white elephant cable car, which doesn’t come on a Travelcard) and will also go by the World Heritage site of Three Mills at Bromley-by-Bow.

It’s a splendid walk even without the sculptures. Phase 1 of the campaign to get on with the planning and organisation has a target of £146,429 and your pledge will only be charged if the project reaches its goal by St Valentine’s Day (Feb 14). Phase 2 will only start if this is reached and is for around £2m for insurance, transport, security, signage, an App and a book etc.

If you are a world-class sculptor with work currently not on show, applications are now open. But the rest of us can support the project by making a pledge online.

What is a photograph?

The newly opened show at the ICP in New York is not one I’ll bother to go to. Having looked at their web page about it with a slide show of 15 images, I’d probably not bother with it even if I could hop on a bus outside my front door direct to the show.

According to ICP Curator Carol Squiers, What Is a Photograph? “will explore the intense creative experimentation in photography that has occurred since the 1970s“, but I’m afraid it leaves me distinctly unimpressed. A few of the captions seem more interesting than the images, always a bad sign and to me in their attempts to probe photography itself, “the role of light, color, composition, to materiality and the subject” rather than reinventing photography they appear to have deserted it.

Which perhaps would not be important in itself if these works could stand on their own in the world of art, rather than occupying some of the very limited cultural space allowed to photography, but I doubt most can, even if most are selling well in the current art marketplace.

It is in part perhaps a matter of selection – there are many both past and present whose creative experimentation has been of rather more interest, from the earliest days of photography with Talbot and Hippolyte Bayard through people such as Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy and on to guys like Henry Holmes Smith and Ralph Eugene Meatyard and others to the present day.

The issues which this show claims as the prerogative of these conceptual artists are those that every worthwhile photographer addresses each time they make an image, but the question that obsesses them is not ‘What is a photograph?’ but ‘What makes (or how do I make) a worthwhile photograph?’. To me it seems a distinctly more crucial issue.

The Drowned World

The floods got me thinking again about one of our former local celebrities, whose second book (and the first that he later acknowledged) ‘The Drowned World‘, published in 1962 was set in a post-apocalyptic and largely unrecognisable London of 2145, mostly underwater and tropical thanks to the effects of global warming. Back in the 1960s it seemed far-fetched, though now it seems only too likely.

On one sunny afternoon in January as the Thames was beginning to subside, I got on my bike and took a ride, camera around my neck and decided to make a short pilgrimage to the street where he had lived for many years.


It got deeper further on and I turned down a side road away from the river

I wasn’t in a hurry and decided to try the scenic route, along by the riverside most of the way, though I was fairly sure that the road by the Thames would still be closed and I would have to divert – and this turned out to be so. I could perhaps have pushed on a little further through the flooded tow-path at Laleham, but I would have risked getting my feet (and perhaps more) wet if I had to stop or met an underwater pothole.

Its a rather boring but shorter ride on the main road through Shepperton Green to Shepperton, ending with a little climb on the bridge over the motorway, and then down with the traffic lights at the bottom of the hill almost always wasting your momentum, and cars getting in the way in a queue for them.

I’m not aware of any blue plaque or other official recognition of J G Ballard in the area, certainly there is nothing on the actual semi-detached house where he lived and which was sold following his death in 2009. But as I moved off from the lights I saw the new and rather ugly new block on the corner, Ballard Lodge retirement apartments.  It would perhaps have amused him slightly, perhaps in a true Ballardian fashion.

I don’t think his house has changed much. Still the 1930s windows and the faintly ridiculous door surround and a dowdy patch of lawn. But I didn’t like to stop and stare too long at what is just an ordinary semi.

The road now ends short of where it did when he moved there in 1960, but there was still an area of swampy ground where perhaps he sometimes walked and perhaps thought about his work.  The River Ash runs just to one side, quite a small stream, bring water from the Colne at the southern edge of Staines Moor and flowing on into the Thames.

Behind me when I made this picture was the spiral ramp up which he may have sometimes walked, built as the M3 cut across his road, and I pushed my bike up it wondering if he had contemplated the building of the motorway when writing perhaps his best-known work, ‘Crash’. Unlike the film version, much of the book was set in this south-west area of Middlesex, along with some of his other works.

You can see a few more of my images from the area on Shepperton & Ballard, where I also have written a little more about the man who has been described as our most important post-war novelist. Perhaps not, but certainly one worth reading, and one who had some influence on my own project ‘Under the Car’ back in the 1970s.

You can read a little more about that in Under the Car, posted on this site in 2007, based on part of a presentation I gave in Brasilia.

The  ‘The Drowned World‘ is one of a number of Ballard’s novels s that is still available. You can read (and download) the book online.

The pictures from Laleham and Shepperton were taken on the Nikon D800E with either the 18-105mm DX or 16mm Nikon FX fisheye (and with a little help from the Fisheye-Hemi plugin.) The D800E gets a little heavy around the neck when cycling, even though both of the lenses are fairly small and light. The one not on the camera fitted in a jacket pocket.

I’m getting to like the 16mm a lot, perhaps even a better lens than the 10.5mm DX, certainly less chromatic aberration, though Lightroom does a good job of removing that in any case. It’s possibly the only FX lens that is smaller and lighter than its DX equivalent, though there is much in it. It works well on both the D700 and D800E, though I’m more likely to use it on the D700 for most things simply because of the huge files it produces on the D800E. The 32Mp raw files are a not unreasonable 32Mb or so, but to use Fisheye-Hemi, Lightroom has to export a 16 bit Tiff file, and these are around 200Mb a time. With the D700 they are a more reasonable 65Mb or so.

But by the time I got home, even though I’d probably only cycled around ten miles I was beginning to wonder why I hadn’t picked up the Fuji X-Pro1 instead as my neck was beginning to ache. With the 18-55 Fuji X and the 8mm Samyang fisheye the load would have been lighter.

Continue reading The Drowned World

McCullin & Somerset Levels

One of the more famous residents of the flooded areas of the Somerset Levels, and someone who has for some years devoted himself largely to photographing that landscape is Don McCullin, and as I listened to the news some of his black and white landscapes came to mind. There is one at the bottom of an article from the National Gallery of Canada (you’ve just missed his show there) that seems particularly apposite, a deliberately dark and moodily printed image of flooded field and a silhouetted line of winter trees under a heavy sky, The Somerset Levels below Glastonbury, UK (1994).

McCullin hates being described as a war photographer, but many of his most famous images are war photographs but of course he has done so much more. There is a short video of him talking that is worth watching  mentioned recently on fStoppers, and an excellent and well-illustrated recent feature by Gerry Cordon, McCullin: a conscience with a camera.

This includes another of his images from the Levels, as well as a rather hillier Somerset landscape, and also tells the story of what McCullin describes as the only picture that he has ever staged.   Some of the same ground is covered in an article about his photography the McCullin himself wrote for The Guardian in 2012. For a slightly different perspective you may like to read My Husband Don McCullin, written by Catherine Fairweather of Harpers Bazaar where it was published in 2013.

I’m not quite sure what to make of a Canon advertising film, Inspiration, made in mid-2012 in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of the South of France, when Canon sent him with a well-known wedding photographer Jeff Ascough as his guide to “discover more about shooting with Canon digital cameras.” It says “Don McCullin is still shooting with his Canon EOS 5D Mark III DSLR and a variety of Canon EF lenses” and good luck to him, though should I reach his age I think I might prefer something rather lighter. I think the best of these digital images by him are still in monochrome, and there are some nice pictures of him by Ascough.

 

Benefits Street

I don’t watch television. 45 years ago, when I was first married, we decided there were far too many other things to do in life to waste time on watching TV, and I’ve not owned a TV set since (though the other things have rather changed.) I do occasionally watch programmes after transmission on the computer, where you can select the short sections worth watching and quickly slide through most of the tedium. I seldom watch more than 10% of any programme.

So I’ve not watched a whole episode of Benefits St, let alone all those that have aired, but I have seen a few short clips and read a number of articles and some of the many comments on them. Most interesting were those from people who actually know or even have studied James Turner Street in Winson Green. The programme seems to me a cynical exploitation of the people featured with no attempt to examine the underlying causes or to treat the residents with appropriate respect or honesty.

The Birmingham Mail quoted one of those in the show who helped Love Films in making it, Dee Roberts as saying:

“They said they wanted to film for a TV show about how great community spirit is in the street. I participated in the show on that belief.

“But this programme has nothing to do with community, which you can tell from the title. It’s all about people in the street living off benefits, taking drugs and dossing around all day. It makes people out as complete scum.”

From what I’ve seen and heard, the values behind the programme seem to be entirely those of making ‘”good” – i.e. popular – television; the morality of the viewing figures. It’s perhaps what you would expect from a company noted for The Great British Bake Off, a kind of cultural lobotomy. Truly bread and circuses.

Photographically it wasn’t an easy event to cover as it seemed rather disorganised. Visually the most interesting aspect was perhaps a very short period of shouting slogans towards the Love Film office. But the protesters were standing very close to the front of the building and the photographers were behind them, though I managed to squeeze between protesters and the offices for the top picture (and a few similar) and some of those present didn’t really seem to be getting involved.  It was a protest where those taking part didn’t seem really sure what they were supposed to be doing.

Later things did get a little more organised, with a number of speeches, including those from campaigner Reverend Paul Nicolson of Taxpayers Against Poverty, no stranger to the ways of television as he was for 16 years until his retirement in 1999 the real Vicar of Dibley, or at least the church used in the filming of that series in Turville, Buckinghamshire.

As you can guess from this picture, by the time he was speaking it was raining fairly persistently, and the lighting in the narrow street surrounded by tall buildings had dropped considerably – and it had been dull at the start.

It’s always difficult to know how to adjust the colour balance in such circumstances, and I often find that the auto white balance gets things not quite right. It isn’t easy to know what is right, and it probably isn’t what is technically correct in most cases, but I found myself making more tweaks than usual in these pictures, mainly aiming to get believable skin colours.  The Rev Nicolson is red in parts on his face because of the light through the disposable red Unite Community rainwear, which is fine, but in the top image, I had to do a little brushing of the tint with Lightroom’s Adjustment Brush to bring a more healthy looking face to the woman shouting.

When taking pictures of speakers at event such as this, wherever possible I look for backgrounds which relate to the person and/or the event and provide some context – such as this placard with its message ‘Bankers are the real scroungers’.  Another of the placards read ‘Target the Tories Not the Poor’  and for the woman below, from Barnet Alliance for Public Services I like the out of focus word ‘Justice’ which can be made out from the Southwark Benefit Justice Campaign banner behind her.

Story and pictures at Benefits Street Protest at Love Films and there are a few from a smaller protest a week later at Channel 4’s Victoria offices, No More ‘Benefits Street’ Channel 4.

Continue reading Benefits Street