>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Paris 2012

I hope to get to Paris Photo next month, but if I don’t I can save my feet an awful lot of wear by looking at the 276 photo sneak preview on Lens Culture.

I’ve put in for my press pass, but am still waiting for a reply from Paris Photo. It saves a little queuing to do it in advance, but certainly in previous years hasn’t really been necessary, and it would have been almost as quick simply to join the queue to get processed on the spot, as the people on the gate hadn’t been told how to handle those of us who had pre-registered.

Actually the Paris Photo show is really a dealers thing, though it is a great opportunity also to see an enormous amount of photography at first hand. But the more interesting things go on outside, both in the many shows in the Mois de la Photo, but even more in the fringe festival which accompanies it, the Mois de la Photo-OFF , the first of whose openings is this Tuesday.

But the ‘Off‘ really gets into gear on the 8th of November, with 24 openings that night, while Paris Photo is a week later, from 15-18 Nov. I’d like to go to Paris for it all, but it would be expensive, and I’d perhaps miss too much in London. So I’ll have soon to make up my mind which I prefer. The Off is also resolutely a French festival (the main language at Paris Photo is the US dollar), despite having an English director, so I’m happier going to the events with my multilingual wife Linda as my interpreter for when my poor schoolboy French runs out, so some negotiation is going to be necessary.

Appleby Horse Fair

Side Gallery’s Archive Photographer of the Week is Dave Thomas, with a fine set of black and white images of the Appleby Horse Fair which he took in 1969-70 and were acquired by Side in 2000.

It’s sad however that these a perhaps only being shown because Thomas, born just outside of Glasgow in 1940 and a graduate in painting from Glasgow School of Art in 1962, died last month. Like many of us in the early 1960s he was inspired by the ‘New Wave’ French and Italian cinema, which led him to his own black and white photography.

After working as a freelance in Glasgow he got a job teaching photography at Leeds College of Art in 1968, which required him to spend a part of his paid hours as a practising professional, giving him the opportunity for a number of documentary projects in Yorkshire and the north of England, of which the annual horse fair in Appleby, Westmoreland was one. Later he went back to freelance work, and then again into teaching. But I think there are relatively few teaching jobs now which would be set up to pay photographers to continue their photography alongside teaching.

Some of the pictures are also for sale at the Equestrian Gallery, where his photographs stand out alongside “prints, paintings and sculpture by a selection of the most talented artists in the field.”

Also on Side you can see his documentation of the Blue Circle cement works at Eastgate in Weardale, County Durham, 1991.

In Protest Opening Speech

It wasn’t a large event, with many friends unable to attend for various reasons, but we had a very pleasant evening, and for once I think I managed to talk to nearly everyone who came, even those who only had time to be there for a few minutes, most of whom missed my short speech – as did a one or two who came late. Of course not everyone is in London, and some photographers who might otherwise have been there were unfortunate enough to be in Birmingham with David Cameron and Boris Johnson. But it was good to see some old friends, and a few of London’s best photographers.

The show of course continues for another two or three weeks, at least until Friday 26 October, and I think will actually still be on the wall for the 27th.

Paul Baldesare kindly took some pictures with my Fuji X100 camera, and this is me giving the speech.

I’ll put some more from the evening on My London Diary later, and probably later still when I get the time, almost certainly after the show closes, I’ll put up some web pages with a permanent version of the show.

Among other cameras, Paul regularly uses the Fuji X-Pro1, and he commented how much better and more responsive the X100 is compared to that camera, even with the improvement made by the recent v2.00 firmware update. But we both agree on how hopeless the menu systems were on both cameras, really letting them down.

It’s also a shame that Fuji decided to produce the X100 with a 35mm rather than a 28mm lens; the add-on converter now available might solve that problem at a size, but it adds around 1.5 inches on the front of the lens, while a 28mm prime could possibly have given an even more compact camera. Even so I think I may buy one, as although some feel the small difference in focal length isn’t a big deal, for me it seems critical. For years I worked with a 35mm as a standard lens, and 28mm seems about the longest that works as a wide-angle.

So, here’s what I had to say last night:

I’d like to start by saying thanks to everyone for coming here tonight, it’s great to have your support.

When I heard from Maggi Pinhorn, the director of Photomonth, that this year’s festival was to have Radical London as its key theme, I made a few tentative enquiries among friends about a show we might put together, and was very firmly told this had to be a show of my own work.

As I’ve written for the wall, it was in some respects an impossible task. I first photographed protests, very much as someone taking part, in 1978, and over the next 34 years I’ve taken a few pictures. Since I started My London Diary, a dozen or so years ago, I’ve put on-line around 50,000 pictures from protests. It’s relatively easy to go through the digital work, much more of a task to look through and review almost 30 years of contact sheets, spread across something like a hundred large files – and one I’ve yet to finish.

I was also clear I wanted to show work that reflected both some of my own convictions about photography and a wide range of the issues that I had worked on. Not just a wall of my “best images” whatever that might mean, though one or two of those here have enjoyed a little success.

There is a lot of text on the wall, particularly with the colour images, something that reflects my feelings of the importance of context, but far too much for most to read on an opening night. I want to share a couple of paragraphs from my statement with you now:

“I was dissatisfied with the photographs that I saw published of protests – usually static groups of people and banners at the front of a march, or of a few of the better-known speakers, and wanted to produce something that more reflected my own experiences as someone taking part in the events. It was also important that the images were about something; I was more interested in telling stories through my pictures than in making pictures, though of course effective story-telling needs pictures that embody the skills of photography. But I wanted to be sure that I didn’t confuse the means with the end.”

In other words, photography isn’t about making pictures; making pictures is how you tell a story.

“The pictures from protests were part of a wider view of society and varied sub-cultures in London, work which also includes various religious and other festivals as well as daily life on the streets. As the title ‘In Protest’ was meant to suggest, it was in most instances in solidarity with those who were protesting and reflected my own viewpoint, and an attempt to put into practice the emotional imperative: ‘if it moves, photograph it.’ Anger, empathy, love, hate, lust, amusement, hope, excitement, affection, joy, admiration and sometimes just plain nosiness have all at times provoked my images, and some of those on show were taken with camera hiding my tears. ”

But there other things I’d like to say. There are many myths about photographers, some a hangover from the idea of the romantic artist starving in a garret (if anyone still knows what a garret is) and others about money-grabbing paparazzi hounding so-called celebreties. And we all know how many photographers it takes to change a light bulb! 136*. Its no surprise if some do exhibit fragile egos, when we are often disregarded, often expected to work for free and sometimes treated like something people have picked up from the street on their shoes.

But in making these pictures I’ve been very much aware of photographers as a community that works together, giving each other support and encouragement. There’s a sense in which this work is a communal effort – between myself and the other photographers but also with those many people who appear in the pictures – sometimes unwittingly and occasionally unwillingly, but in the public interest.

One of the first photographers who talked to me and gave me practical advice when I was photographing protests was the late Mike Cohen, best known for his work for Searchlight and the Morning Star, who once kindly characterised my approach to subjects as fly fishing compared to his coarse angling – though he was not being entirely fair to himself. Another who who is no longer with us but will be remembered by photographers here was Mike Russell, ‘Mini Mouse’, who organised the media coverage of Climate Camp. But there are many others fortunately still on their feet and some who have made it here tonight. Thanks to you all.

In particular I’d like to thank the small group of photographers I’ve worked closely with over the past 20 or more years, including Mike Seaborne, whose show at Foto8 opens next week, Dave Trainer, unfortunately not able to be here tonight, and the others. Most of all, Paul Baldesare without whose work this show would not have been possible – and also Sara who with him has so kindly organised the most important part of tonight’s opening. Thanks also to Phil and his staff at The Juggler, perhaps the nicest place in London to exhibit, and it’s sad that this may be the last show at the Shoreditch Gallery.

I want to leave you with one last thing. A few nights ago, lying in bed unable to sleep, worrying about the show and about this speech, my desperate thoughts somehow turned to photographer’s epitaphs. It came to me that one I might like to have earned would be ‘A photographer who never shot a picture.’ These images were never shot, seldom taken but always made.

Thank you.

It was good to hear from the gallery that there has been quite a lot of interest in the show with some people spending a lot of time looking at the pictures and reading the extended captions.

Doubtless it helps that it is one of the shows listed on the front page of the brochure as ‘exhibition highlights’ and it is also stands out slightly in the listings as I think the only entry with both a red and a green dot – red for being part of ‘radical london’ and green as part of ‘eatyourartout’. Unlike some café venues it is generally easy to look at the pictures without feeling you are intruding into the privacy of the customers, or that you need to buy food or drink, although they do have some very tempting filled rolls if you are feeling hungry.

Continue reading In Protest Opening Speech

Tonight’s Opening

Bad news about tonight’s opening of In Protest: I intend to make a speech.

Good news – it won’t be very long!

So if you are in London, it would be nice to see you tonight.

London Met Protest at Home Office

The decision by the UK Borders Agency to withdraw the licence from London Metropolitan University to have overseas students seems to be particularly spiteful, obnoxious and counter-productive. It will cause great and entirely unnecessary disruption to the lives of those students who were following their courses assiduously, with many personally disastrous effects, while those who made use of London Met without being genuine students – assuming they exist – will have already melted away.

Financially it may be ruinous to one of the UK’s largest universities, possibly effecting the futures of many home students. But the biggest financial damage is likely to be to the UK economy. Overseas students studying here make a large contribution to our economy, both directly and indirectly, and the cavalier treatment those at London Met have received at the hands of the UKBA is likely to result in the loss of many millions – if not billions – as future overseas students decide to study where they are made welcome and promises are kept. This senseless action will cost the country dearly at a time when it can least afford it.

Given that the protest outside the Home Office was outside of student terms, most of the students at the protest were postgraduates, and the protest was surprisingly large. Police had provided a rather smaller pen than was necessary, and photographing the protesters was hampered by them keeping the pavement in front of it clear, moving on anyone who stopped to take pictures. We were made to stand a couple of yards back on a small grass covered bank, though I did slip down and take a few pictures occasionally before getting moved on.

The speakers too were standing on that same bank, and it was difficult to work in front of them – there was really little or no space that the police would allow – except from inside the crowded pen which was a little far away, and also sometimes difficult to find a space. Most of the time I was having to work very close from on the steeply down sloping edge of the grassed bank or even closer to one side.

Then there was the lighting. It was a sunny day with quite a bit of cloud, but when the sun wasn’t behind a cloud I often found myself working into it; sometimes dramatic but almost always giving problems with flare. In the image above I’ve made the two large greenish circles above and to the left of the head almost invisible by darkening and desaturating them so they almost match the greyish background, but some frames were ruined.

Photographing people in the crowd was also rendered tricky by the extremes of sun and shade. In the top picture I’ve done considerable ‘dodging’ and ‘burning’ in Lightroom to reduce the contrast, particularly in the face at top right, which started with probably even greater contrast than that at bottom left – where I liked the dramatic poster-like effect.

The Home Office is an interesting modern building with a jutting out roof with large horizontal areas of colour glass, through which the sun was shining, giving large patches of coloured light on the pavement and people. Again the effect can sometimes be interesting – as in this picture of one of the speakers:

where the orange-red on his hair, shoulders and hand adds something to the image, but on some other subjects it just creates an unpleasant colour cast – the blue in particular is difficult to work with. I’m not quite sure about the bright orange fingers of the woman below, caught in one of these patches of strongly coloured light, though it would probably be possible to reduce the effect by a little local painting with a suitable complementary colour – although this would go beyond what some would consider acceptable for news images.

Those fingers make her look as if she is wearing some curious rubber gloves with nails on them. I used another frame where the effect was less obvious.

The protest got a little more active after the speeches were over and the petition handed in and the employees from London Met had left for their afternoon’s work, as the students decided to head for Downing St. Police halted their impromptu march after a few hundred yards, but after some discussion and negotiation and being held for around a quarter of an hour they were allowed to continue to their destination.

This is a picture taken between a row of police stopping the front of the march toward the long end of the 18-105mm, and so depth of field was a little limited. I didn’t quite get the focus right on this one, it seems to have been on one of the hands rather than on the face in the middle and I didn’t notice. The D800 can actually spot faces in images and automatically focus on these at least in some modes which should have made this image a little better, but I probably wasn’t using the right mode. There are just too many things to remember, too many things I still have to learn about this camera, but I’ve been too busy using it!

You can see the pictures from there and more from the Home Office, as well as more information about the story in Don’t Deport London Met Students on My London Diary.
Continue reading London Met Protest at Home Office

Karol Kállay 1926-2012

Slovakian photographer Karol Kállay, born on 26 April 1926 died on 4 August 2012 aged 86. He took up photography seriously when he was only 14 and by the time he was 17 had won a gold medal in the national photographic exhibition had his pictures published in the Swiss magazine ‘Camera’ and organised an exhibition of his work in Spain.

Kállay travelled the world as a freelance, published many fine books, had his work in magazines including GEO, Paris Match, Focus and der Spiegel, won various awards and had many exhibitions around in his own country and around the world – his web site lists Prague, Berlin, New York, Moscow, Budapest, Warsaw, Bucharest, Sofia, Paris, Hamburg, Baghdad, Cairo, Osaka, Istanbul, Havana… But he appears to have been virtually unknown in the UK, and if his death was mentioned in our press or photographic press I didn’t notice it.

I met him in Poland in 2007 where he was one of a dozen or so exhibiting photographers who gave a presentation of work at the FotoArtFestival in Bielsko-Biala where I gave a lecture. I wrote about my experiences there in a diary, although I managed to avoid mentioning him or his work and I think he is absent from my pictures.

In the catalogue for the 2007 festival, photographer Eberhard Grames writes

“His images remind rather memories of an inconspicuous, friendly smiling fellow-traveller. Because that is how it is – Karol takes photos as a good, nice and cultivated man. That is why he becomes a “dangerous” witness of all those human commonplaces and tragedies, which take place in his surrounding.”

“It is very hard to find a proper word, which would define “the image talk” of Karol. His talk with people is nice, friendly, without any superficiality. Karol likes when his photos state questions and simultaneously have the strength of a philosophical stroke.”

“Sometimes, his photographs look like a frightening moment with a little deal of cynicism (which characterise life in big cities.) Therefore some of his photos discover “that something typical” in people, caught in the twinkling of an eye.”

There certainly is something about many of these images that reflects the twinkle of the photographer’s eye which you can also see in some portraits of him. But as well as humour in his work there is a very strong sense of design underlying all of them, perhaps sometimes becoming a little too dominant for my taste, something which has remained more prominent in central European photography than here in the UK. It perhaps explains why my favourite image from the 140 or so on his site is of people sitting around in a Montmartre square, lovers kissing on a bench in the foreground, people listening to a guitarist sitting on a wall, while at right a young girl seems lost in a world of her own. That truly is a picture I would have loved to have taken.

Inez Baturo and Eberhard Grames at the 2005 FotoArt Festival in Bielsko-Biala Continue reading Karol Kállay 1926-2012

Walthamstow Wins

I’ve got a little behind putting my work on My London Diary and today it was work that I took on 1st September in Walthamstow. Although it was a good day for Walthamstow, it wasn’t one of my best occasions. I really didn’t feel at my best and at the critical moment went the wrong way and found myself in the wrong place. And I let myself get upset by being sworn at, threatened and generally harassed.

Things started well enough, at the rally before the march by ‘We Are Waltham Forest’, a group of local people and organisations put together to oppose a march and rally by the English Defence League into their community supposedly to ‘take back their streets’ in Walthamstow. Walthamstow is a place with a strong identity and radical tradition, where one of the great English socialists lived – and it’s William Morris Gallery has just had something of a facelift, and it is now one of London’s more mixed multicultural communities – as the image above perhaps shows.

The audience too included people from all communities, and the event was next door to perhaps London’s largest street market and a short walk along this would also show people from many diverse backgrounds getting on with each other.

It was an impressive march, and people in the shops and houses along the route came out to watch and greet it, obviously giving it wholehearted support. I’m not sure what the police expected to happen – they were present in large numbers – but it seemed unlikely to me that they would have been able to stop it reaching its destination had they tried.

In fact it stopped itself, on the junction with Forest Road, along which the EDL were expecting to march to the civic centre for a rally, with large numbers of people sitting down on the road. Others just stood around, and a few danced to a samba band. Walthamstow was clearly not about to be moved.

I walked down to where the EDL where expected to arrive, although they had been held up when RMT members had refused to let them on the train they had intended to take.

As usual, the EDL were mainly not happy to be photographed, and I was sworn at, threatened and the target of various gestures as I took pictures – as you can see on My London Diary. It was just as well that there was a tight line of police surrounding them, although at one point a man did push through to put his hand across the front of my lens before police pushed him back. But working with a wide-angle – the 16-35mm -between the closely packed police wasn’t easy.

I think this woman was trying to hold her hand up between my camera and her face rather than give a salute, but I’m not sure. There were some rather strange things in the march – for example one man carrying a a Serbia Montenegro flag (perhaps a fan of war criminal Slobodan Miloevic?) and another wearing a military cap was carrying a copy of an English translation and interpretation of the Koran. But at times the 18-105mm (27-157mm equiv) DX lens wasn’t long enough for what I wanted, and I wasn’t particularly happy with what I had managed.

In contrast to the other march, few people came out onto the streets as it passed, and those who did either made clear their opposition – and got a great deal of abuse in return – or turned their backs on it. If they were in Muslim dress or black they got abuse anyway. The EDL claim not to be racist, but clearly there were many among the couple of hundred on the march who were not toeing that party line.

I only saw one person show support, an old man who came out of his house and raised his hands in support – at which the marchers went wild, shouting, whistling and raising their arms in return with gestures of approval.

As the march approached the blocked junction it was clear that the police were going to divert them down a side street. There were a few hundred counter-demonstrators on the road, but I thought that they would actually try to stop the march a little further on where it would have to cross the Chingford Road to get to the Council offices, and went a little ahead. By the time I realised that things were happening on the corner I had missed much of it, and the police were blocking the way. I guess I was trying to be too clever and so missed the obvious.

I think the police had also probably prevented the protesters from going up the Chingford Rd from the junction they had blocked, as there were only a few protesters as the EDL escorted by a large police presence, made their way across without incident.

Outside the civic centre there was a small group of EDL, including both ‘Tommy Robinson’ and Kevin Carroll who was speaking. A few yards back, police were holding a large crowd of angry counter-demonstrators from ‘We Are Waltham Forest.’ Although their counter-protest had set out to be peaceful, things were now getting rather heated, and plastic bottles and parts of placards were beginning to be thrown towards Carroll at the microphone. When a half-brick came over I decided that it was no longer healthy to be standing in the middle. I was tired and a bit fed up at having missed the main action so far.

The main group of the EDL were being kettled where I had parted company with them in a side street a few hundred yards away, and it was fairly clear it would not have been safe to let them approach. Attacking the police, as many of the EDL had earlier, had clearly not been a smart move, particularly as they were already clearly seen as troublemakers by wanting to march into the area. I didn’t think the police were likely to allow them continue, and decided the event was more or less over and it was time for me to go home.

I don’t think there would have been much more to photograph, although the police did rather rub the EDL’s noses in it, making their failure rather more of a humiliation than it would otherwise have been. But the people of Walthamstow had made it very clear that the EDL were not welcome on their streets.

I had taken a number of decent pictures – as you can see in Waltham Forest Defeats the EDL on My London Diary – but I hadn’t been feeling too well and I hadn’t really had a good day.

Continue reading Walthamstow Wins

Apologies For Nonsense – Again

Unfortunately someone has hacked into this blog, and added long lists of counterfeit/pirate software offers on the bottom of some recent posts. You will only have seen them on the RSS feed rather than if you read the blog directly because they have a tag in the code which hides them when you actually read the pages from my own site.

I don’t know how this has happened. I’ve deleted the rubbish from the pages where I found it, and will try to stop it happening again. But if you have suffered please accept my apologies.

I will slightly change the format of the posts which I hope will make this a little more difficult. It will mean that some posts on the RSS feed will end with

(more)

even when there really isn’t any more.

Continue reading Apologies For Nonsense – Again

London’s Pubs

Some of the pictures of London pubs in The Pubs Of Old London on Spitalfields Life seem familiar, and while it was good to see these images, from “glass slides many dating from a century ago left over from the days of the magic lantern shows given by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society at the Bishopsgate Institute“, it would certainly be nice to know the actual dates of the pictures as well something more about the people who took them.

The pictures have an added interest for me in that over the years I’ve visited quite a few of them, and have photographed some, along with quite a few other pubs. Those that I recognise are still well-known London pubs, although some now look rather different.

One that has changed less than most it ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese‘, in Wine Office Court, an alley off Fleet St. Back before the national press moved out from the street, this was a favoured haunt of many journalists, and I’ve met and talked with a few of them there. Inside it still seems much the same, except that the beer recently jumped up rather in price and smoking isn’t allowed, though the roaring open fire still smokes out my favourite bar. If you see any journos there now, they are returning on a nostalgia trip.

The restaurant there used to be a good place for roast beef served in the traditional English style with roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, thick gravy and overcooked vegetables, and it was delicious. Best to go with a handful of friends to fill the benches along one of the long tables – and cheaper to bring in your own beer from the bar opposite. But last time I went, just a couple of years back, the beef was stringier and the portions smaller and although the place looked the same the atmosphere didn’t seem as warm. Presumably like other Sam Smith‘s pubs it now has to serve Sarah Brownridge frozen food – and you’d actually do better eating at most Wetherspoons (Penderel’s Oak on Holborn seems ok.)

Now too the price of beer there has shot up. Until Nov 2011, Sam Smith’s had a policy of only increasing their beer prices in line with increases in duty, and a pint of bitter was around £2.10 – considerably cheaper than most in London. That policy went out of the window, and now its around £3 a pint.

The George & Vulture in Castle Court is another Sam Smith’s pub, and there has been a pub on its site since 1268, though the present building only dates from 1748, and was later a favourite haunt of Mr Pickwick. I thought it had probably changed remarkably little when I photographed it in the 1980s. Like most of London it’s now been tidied up a bit, though I’ve not been there lately.

Ye Olde Mitre in Ely Place is a Fuller’s Pub, and the passage shown on Spitalfields Life looks very similar to that I photographed, though the last time I went that way it had also been tidied up. The George in Borough High St is of course very famous, and owned by the National Trust.

But the picture that caught my particular attention was of the London Apprentice on the river-front at Isleworth. At 16 I became a sea scout, and perhaps the main attraction was that after the meetings we would adjourn to a local pub. Then it was occasionally the London Apprentice, though they were a bit of a posh joint even then, and sometimes disinclined to serve unruly under-age youths. I think the smaller pub a few yards down the road we used to prefer has now closed.

I’ve photographed quite a few London pubs, and been photographed in them, but finding the pictures is a bit tricky and random. Doggett’s Coat and Badge is perhaps most notable for its view over the Thames, perhaps best in the evening.

Another pub I’ve photographed a few times is the Lord Napier in Hackney Wick, noted for its graffiti:

I’ve photographed pubs in many places and for different reasons – and perhaps one day I’ll seriously put together a collection of them.

But one of the ways that pubs have perhaps changed most doesn’t come over in the pictures. Some time in the late 70s we had a visitor and decided we’d like a bottle of wine with our meal. The off-licence across the road had unfortunately closed down, so we took the short walk to our local, the Beehive, which had an ‘Off-Sales’ department with its own door, its title etched into glass, walked in and rang the bell for service.

“I’d like a bottle of wine”, I said to the man who had emerged behind the counter. “Wine, wine…?”, he scratched his balding head, “I think we have a bottle” and he walked away to search, returning a couple of minutes later triumphantly holding up the entire two bottle stock of the cellar. “Red or white?” We took the red, and I still wonder if they ever sold the white. But at least the price was sensible, unlike some pubs today (mentioning no names where they like to charge a few pence short of £18 for a bottle that would cost around four quid in the off-licence down the road.

Continue reading London’s Pubs

March for Justice 2012 Starts Today

You almost certainly won’t have heard about the March for Justice 2012, not if you rely on the newspapers and TV for news. Because although it is an event on a large scale which could have some fairly major consequences in various countries around the world, this Jan Satyagraha is taking place in India, and its start today, Gandhi’s birthday, is at Gwalior, over 200 miles away from Delhi. Over a hundred thousand people are expected to be on the march by the time it does arrive in Delhi at the end of the month, and it might then get a small mention. Otherwise we will only hear about this non-violent march should it meet with some catastrophe. Protests about land rights by the dispossessed rural poor aren’t news to our media organisations, although it’s an issue world-wide and one that is growing.

I won’t be going to India to photograph it, not least because I think it should and probably will be done better by Indian photographers (although we are unlikely to see their images) who have a more profound understanding of the conditions and cultural issues involved. But I was pleased yesterday to photograph a small event showing solidarity with the marchers and the movement, Ekta Parishad, which is organising it. Rather less pleased that the event at lunchtime took place in pouring rain.

It wasn’t a very visual event, and the weather didn’t make any of us want to hang around outside. It was good to have the statue of Mahatma Gandhi (a fine work by Fredda Brilliant unveiled by Harold Wilson in 1968) watching over the event, but I found it difficult to really make much use of it, and close to the light from the sky was giving some troublesome flare over the dark metal head unless I made sure there were trees behind.

I put these and a more few pictures on Demotix, along with an article which as so little is likely to appear elsewhere outside the Indian press I’ll repost here.

Supporters of the land rights movement Ekta Parishad in India met at the Gandhi memorial in London in a show of support for Jan Satyagraha – March for Justice 2012 from Gwalior to Delhi which starts on Gandhi’s birthday, 2 October.

The just over a dozen people who met at the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi in the middle of Tavistock Square came from a number of charities which work with groups in India, including Christian Aid, War on Want, Action Village India and others. Because of heavy rain the speeches and discussion which had been scheduled for the square were abandoned and the discussion continued in nearby Friends Meeting House.

The march in India, organised by Gandhi-inspired grassroots land-rights movement Ekta Parishad, and attracting support from over 200 Indian organisations will have 100,000 marchers who will take 30 days to cover the almost 220 mile from Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh to Delhi, eating just one meal a day. They are determined to make their voice heard by the Indian government, and both the government and the opposition BJP are now taking an interest in land issues.

According to recent studies, almost half of Indian children are malnourished. Economic development has not benefited they poor, but has allowed large firms to establish legal claims to land on which many of them have lived for generations. The displaced people lose any chance of growing their own food, and have to move to the towns where they try to scrape a living, often with little success.

The march by Ekta is being supported by groups throughout Europe, including Action Village India (AVI) who organised today’s event and other UK charities. Last Saturday the Swiss section of the International Human Rights Society dedicated the 2012 Human Rights Award to P V Rajagopal, President and founding member of Ekta and Vice Chair of the Gandhi Peace Foundation, “in recognition of his dedicated engagement and the non-violent action in favour of the most disadvantaged people in India.”

AVI delivered a letter in support of the land rights movement to the Indian High Commission in Aldwych for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh before coming the event at the statue of Mahatama Gandhi, who was born Oct 2, 1869 and assassinated in 1948 shortly after independence.

In a phone link with the march organisers in Gwalior we heard of the plans being made for the march with many thousands already having arrived at the Mela Ground for its start tomorrow, and also of talks with several Indian government ministers who were telling Ekta that there was no need for the march as the government was committed to taking action. The Indian Minister for Rural Development, Mr Jairam Ramesh, has promised to come and talk to the marchers in Gwalior tomorrow and give some specific answers to the people’s claims. The marchers can now celebrate these official promises and the march will provide the government with the support they will need to carry reforms through as well as the pressure to ensure that this time they will keep their promises.

Five years ago, in 2007, Ekta organised a march of 25,000 people to Delhi, and Rajagopal met the minister for rural development and government officials who set up a Committee on Land Reform and a Council chaired by the Prime Minister to take things forward. But although this led to a Forest Rights Act which gave more rights to the adivasis, Indias traditional forest-dwelling communities, little has been done to implement this and the promises have not been delivered.

Action Village India is a charity started by people who had lived or worked in India which supports six locally-based partner organisations in which work with marginalised and disadvantaged rural people in the Gandhian tradition of non-violent change. It isn’t a rich charity, but a hard-working one, and one source of their income is the Madras café run by AVI volunteers at WOMAD and some other events. Ekta have been one of the organisations they have supported since 2001.

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