>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Winogrand

An interesting interview in Mother Jones Never Before Seen Photos From Legendary Street Photographer Garry Winogrand with Mark Murrmann talking to Ted Pushinsky, a San Francisco street photographer who got to know Winogrand in his later years and at times drove him around Los Angeles as he hung out of the car window taking pictures, as well as walking the streets with him.

And I think there are eight or nine of the “never before seen” photographs that I’ve never seen before, though they do include one or two I never want to see again and which I don’t think do anything to enhance Winogrand’s reputation. It’s good to hear of a new show, but I’m not sure it will add much to the 1988 MoMA show – and you can see some of his work in their collection. There is a good selection of links on American Suburb X, and pictures at various galleries including Kopeikin and Fraenkel.

More about the new retrospective show – the first for 25 years – which opens at SFMOMA today and continues until 02 June 2013 (press release here) and later travels to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (March 2 – June 8, 2014); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (June 27 – September 21, 2014); the Jeu de Paume, Paris (October 14, 2014 – January 25, 2015); and the Fundacion MAPFRE, Madrid (March 3 through May 10, 2015).

What a shame that London apparently has no gallery interested enough in photography (or considered important enough) to put it on here!

Bill Wood’s Fort Worth

Thanks to a Facebook link by Rina Sherman for reminding me of the work of Bill Wood Jr (1913-73), a commercial photographer in Fort Worth Texas from 1937 to 1970 when he retired because of ill health. Most of the pictures in the collection that was bought by actress Diane Keaton, who has a great passion for photography, date from the 1950s on, when Fort Worth was a rapidly expanding city, and Wood provided the images that represented the new citizens as they wanted to be seen.

I don’t know how representative the book and show at the ICP in 2008 was of his work as a whole; a search in the ICP collection on his name brings up 348 objects, most of which are photographs by Wood, and most of which have an image on line. Although not all have a great interest, they are almost all carefully composed, straightforward images, clearly made for a particular purpose by a skilled craftsman. He wasn’t a photographer who took a huge number of pictures, and only made photographs for his clients, usually taking only a single or small number of exposures. The 10,000 negatives in the collection that Keaton bought are mainly from the 1950s and 1960s, and represent only an average of 500 pictures for a year – less than many photographers now take in a day. Even in the days of film, when Winogrand went to make a very different view of Fort Worth, he probably took more pictures in a few weeks than Wood in a lifetime.

There are pictures here that could well be mistaken – seen out of context – for the work of one of the photographers of the ‘New Topographic’ school, many of whom worked in similar environments on the outskirts of other US cities. And sometimes reminders of images by other well-known post-war photographers who worked in America, though Wood’s viewpoint is a very different one from any of these photographers.

You can hear Keaton and fellow curator Marvin Heiferman talking about the work on a Studio 360 public radio broadcast from 2008, and there are a number of reviews of the show and book online, including one by Ken Johnson in the New York Times and Melanie McWhorter in Fraction Magazine. There is also an article in North Texas’s Art&Seek, which includes the Pontiac/Kleenex image mentioned in the radio discussion.

Uxbridge

Perhaps the most surprising thing about my visit to Uxbridge to photograph Hillingdon Marches Against Cuts on the last evening of February were my bus journeys.

Uxbridge isn’t far from where I live, both towns on the edges of Middlesex, around 8 miles in a straight line, and perhaps 11 on a bicycle. If you’ve a half day to spare, and don’t mind some rough tracks you can even do it on a fairly pleasant and virtually traffic free route using local footpaths and just the odd bit of road to get to the canal tow-path that takes you there.

I’ve cycled it many times in the past by a more direct route, which takes you along some of the most dangerous roads and junctions for cyclists in the country, heavy with traffic to and from Heathrow, full of drivers more worried about catching planes or suffering the effects of jet-lag, and engineered without the slightest thought of cycle safety. If I’d been going for a daytime event I’d probably have done it again for this event, though I’ve never found a very good way to carry a heavy camera bag on my bike.

Public transport around London concentrates on going in and out of London, routes like spokes of a wheel from centre to periphery. Even more local routes tend to follow a part of this pattern. Drivers at least have the M25 that takes you around – and with its aid can make this journey in around 20 minutes on a good day, though often it takes rather longer. It took me careful planning and three buses and around an hour and a half from my door to where the protest was gathering.

But at least there was a protest to report on once I’d arrived, perhaps a little over fifty people going to lobby outside the London Borough of Hillingdon council meeting. It’s not particularly unusual to turn up to cover events to find nobody there at all, or just one or two people, and nothing to write about or photograph.

Again it was just getting dark as the protest gathered, and I was able to photograph at ISO 3200 with the fading daylight and a little help from fairly bright street lighting and shop windows in the broad pedestrian area. Although I now have three working i-TTL flash units – two SB800s repaired recently by Nikon and a Nissan unit – there is a limit to how much I can carry or work with around my neck, and I’ve decided I can only work with one flash for the normal two cameras I work with. Usually I put that on the D800 with the 18-105mm DX lens as I can work with slower shutter speeds with the wide angle 16-35mm on the D700, and then occasionally swap it on to the D700.

I’ve never quite worked out how flash is meant to work on the Nikons, and occasionally it seems to have a mind of its own, with random highly over-exposed frames, or refusing to allow the camera to set a shutter speed above 1/60 second despite being able to sync at much higher speeds. There are times when almost every setting on the camera or flash appears to interact in some strange way to stop me doing what I want. At one point I simply had to stop taking pictures, turn off flash and camera and try and set everything back to my normal starting settings. I’m still not sure if it was me or the electronics that have become confused beyond use. But Nikon do seem to have built some assumptions into the flash system that are not designed to work the way I work. And it would be nice to be able to set whatever aperture and shutter speed I like when working with the camera in manual exposure mode and then have the flash do its best to provide the appropriate light output in TTL mode, at least so long as the speed was within the sync range.

But though I curse about it and am often confused by it, flash does occasionally come up with the results, often when I least expect it. I didn’t have any time to think about this image, just saw it out of the corner of my eye and swivelled around and pressed the shutter. Of course the face and fluorescent jerkin were far to bright and needed considerable burning (and possibly I could do it a little more carefully than in the on-line version) but for me it is a powerful image of an independent spirit.

At least using flash you have a sensible colour temperature to work with, even if the auto white balance hasn’t quite done the job and my tweaking isn’t perfect in some of the results. Outside the Civic Centre it was rather like working in a black hole, and what little light there was seemed to be from sources that were rather deficient in some colours, with the results looking unnatural whatever combination of colour temperature and tone I selected.

I’d spent a lot of time working out the bus journey to Uxbridge, as there were perhaps a dozen different possible bus routes to take into consideration, and had decided it wasn’t worth trying to plan ahead for the journey home as I didn’t know what time I would finish. Uxbridge is in Greater London that has decent bus services, but I live in the outer regions of Surrey where they seldom venture at nights. A bus came just as I was getting to the stop and I had to run a few steps to get on it. I leafed through the bus timetable booklet sitting on the bus, and came to the conclusion I would have a long wait for a connection on the route I’d thought I would take, and it was worth trying another of the many combinations, and I got off earlier than planned to change buses. I was lucky and next connection – still a Greater London service – came within a minute. And at the next stop – Heathrow Terminal 5 – my local bus home came in as soon as I’d walked the few yards along to the right stop. Despite it taking its usual magical mystery tour around the local area, I was back faster than possible according to the timetables – and faster than I would have cycled.

Continue reading Uxbridge

Photographing Vultures

Although I don’t much like working after dark, it can often add a little drama to images, and digital cameras work so much better than film in low light. As I’ve often mentioned, the really important thing for me about this is that it enables me to produce much better images with flash.

The protest against vulture funds – companies that have bought up bad debts run up in the past by failed regimes for a small fraction of the original load (in this case the Argentine junta) and pursue their successors in courts around the world for every last penny started as light was fading fast, and I took my first pictures as the protest was starting by available light.

The light was rapidly fading, and soon most of the ambient was coming from street-lights and the windows of shops and offices, and was extremely varied in both quantity and quality. Most of the pictures I took were using flash, and in the images in Vulture Funds – Claws off Argentina! there are some examples of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ flash techniques. ‘Bad’ flash is sometimes all you have time to do, when you haven’t got time to do anything but grab the moment, and the obvious defects can sometimes produce interesting results.

So while I dislike the obvious shadow of the placard, the over-lit face of the young girl holding it does make her stand out in a dramatic fashion. Taken with the lens at 18mm (27mm equivalent) she was pretty close to the camera, and was moving around pretty rapidly. My main aim in framing was to include the message of the placard – slightly truncated but it still gets over the message that the vultures should take out their claws – and also I’d been trying hard in other frames to get in the ‘drop the debt!’ message on a number of t-shirts worn by the protesters. But the walker at top right with shoe and saucepan (and the other saucepan) is an example of the little bit of luck we need and just occasionally get.

This was taken in a particularly dark bit of pavement at one edge of the protest, and was one of a series of around 50 pictures I’d made trying to get a strong image from these two kids, who were very playful but extremely uncooperative. I could have posed them – and another photographer did, but that would have lost the incredible energy that I saw. And I don’t do that sort of thing! People posing for me of their own accord I’m happy with.

Of course the picture from the camera didn’t quite look like this. Her face was very close and like the placard needed considerable burning down to give an effect like that I saw, while the young boy’s face was rather darker, and needed some dodging. Using flash often needs quite a lot of post-processing. One thing I missed when doing it on this image was the biscuit in the girl’s mouth, which could have done with rather more toning down.

Another example of flash is this image of the vultures with pans holding the banner. I’d decided to work (as usual) from the side and needed a fairly high viewpoint to see the pans they were banging behind the banner. Flash was essential, but the nearest part of the image was perhaps a couple of feet away from my lens and the furthest perhaps ten or fifteen. Using the inverse square law, the difference in light from the flash would have been in the order of something like 25:1, perhaps 4 or 5 stops.

You can cut down the ratio simply by aiming the flash away to the right, swivelling the head on the SB800 around 45 degrees. I was using the built in diffuser and rather ineffective reflecting white plastic, which gives slightly more even lighting and there was still more than enough light at the left edge of the image. Using a high ISO 3200 also helped, giving a little fill from the street lighting, although most of the light around was actually from the windows behind. Because there was a lot of vigourous pan-bashing happening, I was working at a fairly fast shutter speed – 1/320 – and the results for this particular image would have been better had I thought to move to a slower speed. I’d simply forgotten to do so.

Again, a straight jpeg would have showed much more uneven lighting, and I’ve dodged and burnt to get the result I wanted, rather more like how the scene actually appeared than a completely straight result. I haven’t got it completely right, and the light is still rather uneven. The furthest parts of the image are also noticeably ‘noisier’ as a result of needing to be brightened in post, but the result is still usable.

One of the things I also found it that photographing vultures isn’t too easy. It was very easy to find angles from which vultures don’t really look too much like vultures. I’m rather more used to photographing people – and there are plenty of examples of that to, as well as more in the issue in Vulture Funds – Claws off Argentina!

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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Watermarks & Copyright

What if The Masters of Photography Used Horrendous Watermarks? by Kip Praslowicz, a photographer from Minnesota, had the ‘idle thought … it seems like many amateur photographs spend more time putting elaborate watermarks on their images than they do making images worth stealing.‘ So he took some famous pictures and put over them the kind of watermarks he was thinking about, and you can see the results.

As you can see on his page, it generally makes something of a mess of them, although I think I prefer his version of the Gursky, certainly it seems somehow more honest to have the image covered with dollar signs.

His post also links to a few other amusing posts on other sites which also amused me at least slightly. But I wasn’t entirely convinced with the premise behind his post, as there are plenty of examples of professional photographers and agencies which have covered their images with obtrusive watermarks (though perhaps quite at the level of his made-up examples.)

Paranoia about the use of images from the web doesn’t only affect amateurs, although it’s good to see that many photographers are getting over it, and at least one major agency that used to splatter it’s name over everything on-line has now abandoned that practice.

But visible watermarking remains quite a good idea, so long as it isn’t obtrusive, particularly with the kind of copyright legislation the UK government is trying to stealthily push through – read more about it in The Copyright Fight on the BPPA site and on Stop43.org.

I got a little fed up with the rather frequent unauthorised use of my images from the web a few years ago and decided to add a fairly discrete copyright message to every new image I put on the web. It’s very easy to set this up in a Lightroom preset – though I see I haven’t yet got around to changing the year to 2013!

It took me around 30 seconds to produce a new watermark file to get the year correct, selecting File, Export and my web export preset (it’s called Diary – for My London Diary), scrolling down and clicking on the name of the old watermark preset – pm2012 – and then choosing Edit Watermarks, changing the 2012 into 2013, clicking on the old name at the top left of the Watermark editor, selecting ‘Save Current Settings as new Preset’ and naming it pm2013.

I don’t take many pictures in the snow, so choosing a light grey for the watermark and a fairly high opacity makes it reasonably legible on most of my images. Of course the images on the web also have my name, contact details and copyright information in the metadata. My camera is set to add it automatically into the EXIF data as I take pictures, and the import preset which brings the images from the card into Lightroom adds it to the IPTC. But often these are routinely stripped from images. The watermark takes a little more effort to lose.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Reclaim Love 10th Anniversary

Unfortunately covering the protest by the Disabled Peoples Direct Action Network in Whitehall had taken longer than I had anticipated when I was planning my Saturday afternoon – I hadn’t realised it would only start after the Fuel Poverty rally. But it meant that I was late for this year’s Valentine Street Party at Piccadilly Circus

According to the t-shirt, the first Reclaim Love / One In Love / Operation Infinite Love street party organised by Venus CuMara took place in 2003, but that year I was in hospital waiting for an operation after a heart attack and unable to pay much attention to what was happening on the streets.

In 2004 I spent the Valentine weekend in Paris with Linda, though we didn’t actually go to the club in this picture:

but I don’t think there was a Reclaim Love event in London that year. The Wikipedia entry on the event (which mentions my site and includes several quotations from it both first and secondhand) doesn’t give a clear account of the history, nor is their one on the Reclaim Love site.

The first event that I attended – and photographed was in Piccadilly Circus in Feb 2005 and appears to have been the second ‘annual’ event, and that in the following year, 2006, was Reclaim Love 3.

Other than that first occasion, I’ve attended every year since, and you can read my accounts and see the pictures for 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 on My London Diary. This year, 2013, my ninth set of pictures was of the 10th anniversary event, and probably the last that Venus CuMara, who founded the event, will personally organise.

The central point of each year’s celebrations takes place at exactly the same time – 3.30 GMT – at the sites around the world (in 2010 there were around 40) which take part in the event.

“At 3.30pm be in the circle. Let everyone know that they are being joined by many other people across the world at this time to meditate on world peace as we repeat the words together. Let people know that we are meditating together in order to help effect a loving shift in consciousness for the good of All beings.”

The words repeated, from an ancient Sanskrit prayer, are “May All The Beings in All The Worlds Be Happy and At Peace” and you can read more about the event on the Reclaim Love site. Whatever we think of it, the circle of several hundred with joined hands and minds is quite a powerfully moving event.

In 2011 Piccadilly Circus was in rather a mess with much of the pavement being relaid and everyone paraded down to Green Park and the circle was made around a circle of 13 massive plane trees there. But Green Park is a Royal Park and the park police were not happy at this incursion into their sacred space, the only occasion where there has been any problems with the police. Here’s my account of what happened:

Everyone present, except for a few photographers, linked hands in a great circle joining the 13 trees and repeated together “May All The Beings In All The Worlds Be Happy And At Peace” for around five minutes, and then, still carefully avoiding the growing daffodils, began to party and dance in the centre of the tree circle.

At this point, two vans full of police drove up, and Venus rushed across to talk to them. Apparently the event was contravening a number of the by-laws of the Royal Parks, and it did not have the permissions needed. After Venus had talked to one of the officers for some time, explaining what they were doing and inviting them to join in, she gave him a hug (a picture I missed as I’d moved away to talk to a friend) and they eventually came to an agreement that the group would move out of the park by 4pm and make its way back to continue the party at Piccadilly Circus – exactly in fact as had been intended. As Venus walked away, treading carefully between the daffodils, the police turned towards their van and the officer who had been talking with Venus said to his colleagues: “I really thought I was in a parallel universe there” and indeed he had been.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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More on World Press Photo

Rather than write in detail about this again, let me just direct you to a piece on PDN Pulse by David Walker, World Press Hits Pellegrin with Wet Noodle (And Other Contest Scandals) which gives details of the complete failure to take any action over the recent problems with work by Pellegrin and others I mentioned in the recent post Magnum Failure.

As the title of his post suggests, WPP are basically trying to say it doesn’t really matter that a photographer wilfully misrepresents the subject. The PDN piece also links to another good post by photographer Kenneth Jarecke on his Mostly True blog, which discusses the case and also Pellegrin’s reaction to it.

There is a lot of discussion on Mostly True, and again much of it worth reading, but in the end I think the issues are simple. What Pellegrin did simply was not acceptable for a documentary project; he should not have misrepresented it as documentary work.

I hope that both WPP and POYi will reconsider. Magnum will lose what respect it has among photographers – and the informed public – unless it puts pressure on both Pellegrin and the organisations to get the project withdrawn from the contests. At the moment they are all just trying to defend their backs rather than to correct the error.

And it was an error, and Pellegrin needs to admit it rather than blustering against everyone involved in bringing out the true story. It certainly isn’t enough to say “Looking at the presentation on the World Press Photo and POYi sites, I do regret the formulation, ‘where these pictures were taken’ in the background text in relation to Shane’s picture.” Of course there is nothing wrong with taking portraits in a documentary context, but this was a picture that was out of context in the actual story he was attempting to cover. Pellegrin attempts to plead innocence but his response pleads ignorance, which isn’t a defence. If he didn’t know it was because he didn’t ask the right questions, and having a good picture certainly doesn’t absolve you from this essential part of the job.

And I’ve just come across another post worth reading – Is it Lying? by Samuel Corum.

Direct Action Network Roadblock

This isn’t the greatest picture I’ve ever taken, but it shows an interesting moment in the protest by the Disabled Peoples Direct Action Network at the end of the Fuel Poverty Action rally in Whitehall. The text about both actions is at Fuel Poverty Rally & DAN Roadblock.

Earlier in the day I’d missed an attack on a photographer by a group of those marching with the South-East Alliance, but this time I was wide awake when others had failed to notice the start of the move by protesters to block Whitehall, as the small group of wheelchair protesters had moved quietly a few yards along the road and the woman closest to me had just eased two wheels of her chair onto the road.

At the back of the picture are the police, seemingly quite oblivious to what is happening, with a Forward Intelligence Unit looking rather backward. Closer to the action, but in a small group talking to each other rather than alert to what was happening are three photographers – and there were others around mainly equally oblivious.

Had the other photographers been close enough for me to reach out and touch to alert them to what was happening I would have done so, but it was important to me not to do anything that would interfere with the action that was proceeding – my job was to report it.

I moved in front of the protesters as they moved out into the road and stopped the traffic, keeping slightly out of the way so that it really was them stopping the traffic and not me.

We had all been given a hint in advance that some kind of direct action would be taking place, but hadn’t known exactly what, where or when. I’d been watching carefully for hints, clues or signals and had spotted and read them more or less correctly and was in the right place at the right time. There are times – and this is one – where you need to try and read situations rather than simply respond to them, though at times I have read them in a disastrously wrong way.

Where there is a choice I seldom want to work with groups or speakers head on. It’s usually better to be a little to one side, particularly if people are using microphones. So when the road was blocked, I moved a little to one side, while the main crush of photographers was directly in front.

Looking from the side concentrates your view on those closest to you, while a head on view leaves everyone at the same distance and thus scale. Later I went further to the side and was then able to move in close without blocking the view of other photographers when an officer came to talk to two people he had identified as leaders of the protest – one was holding a megaphone.

© 2013, Peter Marshall
An officer tries to persuade the protesters to move
Even when I moved around to the other side to get a better view of the exchange it was the officer rather than me who was blocking the other photographers.

But then I had to move back to allow another wheelchair user came up to join in the conversation. After taking a few more pictures the officer moved and I then felt that I was perhaps getting a little in the way of others. I went down on my knees top take a few pictures from a low angle and be less in the way before moving back a little. Once I’d got the pictures I wanted it gave others a chance to get theirs.

Of course we all get in each other’s way from time to time, and, like the photographer in the image above, we get in each other’s pictures. It’s inevitable when more than one or two photographers are covering an event.

But most of us realise the problem and try to work in cooperation with other photographers. It’s mainly the amateurs, often using their phones who walk in front of other photographers, though a special place in hell is reserved for those few video crews who think they are more important than the rest of us because they work for one of the big media companies.

More pictures at Fuel Poverty Rally & DAN Roadblock.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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Defend the Flag

There are some events I cover where I have little in common with those taking part, and the ‘Defend the Flag’ march organised by the ‘South East Alliance’ (SEA) was one of these. The SEA is a group that has emerged from various people who have become dissatisfied with the EDL, where there has been a considerable amount of falling out over the activities of a few of the leaders, particularly ‘Tommy Robinson’, particularly since some spectacular failures such as the march at Walthamstow last September. Many others in the various ‘patriotic’ or right-wing movements have long expressed dissatisfaction with the EDL for various reasons both personally to me and in the various right-wing forums on the web, and I’ve reported some of these when covering events on My London Diary.

I’ve always tried to cover events in a fair and unbiased way, to show clearly what happened at them, and to convey the views of those taking part. Partly because I think it the duty of a journalist, but also because I think it is the most effective way to expose extremist views for what they are. It doesn’t mean not making my own views clear, but I try to separate these from the accurate reporting.

At this march, I noticed that as well as those taking part from organisations linked to Northern Ireland, including men wearing the tie or badge of the Somme Association , there were also several wearing British National Party ties and badges. This isn’t something I’ve previously noted at recent right-wing marches (where dress has tended to be more informal) and I mentioned both in my account and the captions to photographs – as you can see in Defend the Union Flag on My London Diary.

This upset another of the BNP badge and tie wearers enough to make him complain to the agency that originally carried my pictures for the event. Of course there were no grounds for any complaint. If you protest on the streets you do so in the hope of getting publicity for the cause you are supporting and are encouraging people to report on your actions and publish photographs of them, and you can certainly have no expectation of privacy. If you don’t want people to know you are a member of the BNP then don’t wear the badge or tie.

Along with the other photographers I had been asked by one of the organisers to keep out of the actual march, and although I felt it was an unreasonable request I didn’t make an issue of it. There were just one or two pictures that I could only take from inside the march, and I went in briefly and did so without problems, but the rest of the time I worked from one or other side.

© 2013, Peter Marshall
Jim Dowson, Britain First’s Northern Ireland organiser, who once headed
fund-raising for the BNP, speaking

To me the march and the rally which followed appeared to be a peaceful and reasonably well-ordered event. Unlike at some previous right-wing events I didn’t get abused, threatened or spat at by anyone, though there were a few personal comments but the worst thing I was called was a ‘commie photographer’ who worked for ‘Searchlight’.

I’m a socialist who has never belonged to any of various communist parties around and never worked for Searchlight, but don’t take being accused of either as an insult, just a symptom of the paranoia some on the extreme right suffer from. And if Searchlight would pay the agency they could use my work just as the Guardian, Sunday Times, Jewish Chronicle and other publications around the world have done. So far the only sale I’m aware of for any of my pictures from this not very newsworthy event has been in Brazil.

Later I learnt from other photographers that my impression of the march as peaceful was not entirely true. While I was photographing the front of the march opposite Parliament, just down Parliament St a hundred yards of so away, a small group of marchers threatened several photographers and attacked one of them.

It’s always a problem that you can’t be everywhere and can’t see or photograph everything, even at a relatively small event like this, with a little over a hundred people taking part. I hadn’t had an opportunity to talk to the other photographers about it as I’d rushed away shortly before the event was due to finish to another event. But once I knew I posted a correction to the story.

I’m unhappy with any group that tries to annex one of our national flags for its own purposes – whether in Northern Ireland or in the rest of the United Kingdom. It seems to me that a national flag should be something that unites a nation rather than divides it. It should be a national flag and not a tribal or factional one. And of course our national flag is the Union Flag. I was no fan of the Olympics, but it was good to see it being proudly carried by teams which reflected the great wealth of diversity in our country.

There was a certain irony too, when watching the solemn laying of wreaths by the representatives of the Somme Association at the Cenotaph commemorating the brave Ulster men who died fighting for their country to think that this monument, designed to commemorate the military dead of the First World War from all across the British Empire, was unveiled for a second time in 1946 to remember those who died in the war against fascism to know that among those watching in the march behind the barriers were those who belong or have belonged to fascist organisations.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

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Greenwich Riverside

Many years ago, more or less by accident, I came across the riverside walk north from Greenwich on the south bank of the Thames. This was before there was an official ‘Thames Path’ and there were few books containing routes of walks, certainly very little written in any way about areas such as North Greenwich, then a mix of industrial sites, some derelict and other waste land. Of course the footpaths were familiar to locals, many of whom used them on their way to work. But those people who walked for leisure made their way to the greener heights of the North Downs or the wooded areas around London, rather than the grimier regions.

Few of the people I showed the pictures I was taking then appreciated them. At the camera club the judges would largely scratch their heads and wonder why anyone had bothered to take photographs in such places. But I was very aware that we were in a time of rapid transition, moving from being a country based on manufacturing to one depending on services, and that was being accelerated by government policies, and wanted to photograph the process.

The result of this was a project called London’s Industrial Heritage, which became a web site of the same name towards the end of the 1990s. The web design was by my elder son as a surprise birthday present, and generated the site from a set of images and a database file of their captions and locations. It was an ingenious solution, relying on some very long strings in the URLs, but also visually simple and elegant. You can use the interface to select pictures in various ways, and one is by area; of the 23 pictures now on the site, around a dozen are from the riverside walk between Greenwich and the dome at North Greenwich.

I had been taking pictures at Lewisham at lunchtime, and wasn’t due in central London for another event until 5.30pm, so it seemed an ideal opportunity to visit the riverside walk again, as I’d heard that a part of it which had been closed for some time had reopened. So I took the bus from Lewisham to North Greenwich. Walking down Drawdock Rd to the Thames, it became clear that the section south from here was still a building site, and the path still closed. I took a little walk along the path around the Dome, until I could get a view of London’s most expensive river crossing, the ‘Dangleway’ or cable car service between North Greenwich and the Royal Victoria Docks.

I’d decided I didn’t quite have the time to take a ride across (and without my Oyster or a Travelcard it would have been a bit expensive) so I turned around and took the Thames path back into Greenwich – around 3 miles. From Drawdock Rd going south there is at the moment a fairly dull detour by road until you reach a footpath leading back to the river, still helpfully marked as closed by the local authority. Fortunately I had more up-to-date information, and was also able to confirm from a couple walking out of the path that it was now open all the way south to Greenwich.

In 2002 the area had already become a curious landscape of sand and gravel, and the only change over the next 11 years seems to have been the weather, as you can see from the picture below.

This image seems somehow to have got a little darker than I made it – but you can see it and the others from the walk on Thames Path Greenwich Partly Open. One recent edition to the path are a number of works by Greenwich Guerillas Knitters.

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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : Londons Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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