>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

No Sharia Zones

People in inner East London boroughs last month began to see bright yellow stickers appearing on lamp posts and other street furniture announcing ‘You are entering a Sharia Controlled Zone – Islamic Rules Enforced’ and a number of symbols banning alcohol, gambling, music concerts, prostitution, drugs and smoking.

The authorities in these areas have been working hard to remove these stickers, posted by a small fringe Muslim group, but many are worried by this attempt to replace our normal British rule of law by an unofficial and illiberal regime which it would be illegal to attempt to enforce.

There is very little support for Dr Anjem Choudary’s Muslims Against Crusades (MAC) in the Muslim Community, and a few minutes research soon reveals that the other organisations that were listed as backing the march for Sharia Zones and the ‘Islamic Emirate Project’ are the same few people under different names.

It was noticeable as we went through the streets of Leyton and Walthamstow that although many stopped to watch the noisy protest, hardly a single person – Muslim or non-Muslim – showed any expression of support.

Several right-wing groups had been rumoured to be intending to demonstrate against the MAC march, although many on their forums had suggested it made more sense to stay away and ignore it, and there was a strong police presence – certainly involving more police that the 70 or so protesters. A mile or so from the start two men were sitting on a seat on the opposite side of the road to the march, one holding the old ‘red hand’ Ulster flag still used by Unionists. Two police officers were talking to them, apparently preventing them from making a protest as the march went by.

Another group of people were being held in a pub, the door blocked by several police and a line of officers along both sides of the building. It was not clear to me why police did not allow them to protest outside the building, as there were clearly more than enough police around to prevent any disorder.

A demonstration was allowed a few yards from the end of the march in Walthamstow, where a thin line of police stood along the roadway as the march went by on the other side. This protest, by the English Nationalist Alliance, led by Bill Baker, had a few placards with lengthy text that the marchers would have needed very good eyesight to read. Their message and tone was rather different to some of the insults and gestures made by the protesters as the Muslim march was passing.

I had few difficulties photographing the event, except for the length of the march, which seemed excessive, partly because it was taken very slowly. There really was not a great deal happening most of the time. I was greeted with a few jibes by the ENA, who accused me of being biased against them. The comment originally came when they confused me with another photographer who had also written an article for Demotix on one of their marches; I had reported the event accurately, but he had not, and Mr Baker quoted from his report but attributed it to me.

I don’t share many of the attitudes of the ENA or other English nationalist groups, but like them I think there is no place for Sharia law in this country. It’s perhaps a shame that other groups such as ‘One Law For All’ which oppose Sharia have not been more active on the streets, and that the great majority of moderate Muslims are also not more visible in their opposition to people like Dr Choudary.

More pictures and text: Muslim Extremists March For Sharia Zones

Photocall and Protest

I’m not a great fan of organised photo-calls for several reasons, not least that they are usually rather boring. Of course it’s always useful when people have material that visually represents their protest in some way – so the Murdoch face masks produced by Avaaz were welcome (and for once quite nicely produced, although rather over-saturated, tending to photograph rather too beetroot.)

The people who devise such things, doubtless well trained in PR, seldom seem to have a great visual sensitivity. Their idea of a good photograph would appear to be something like this one.

For me it’s the weakest of all those I took, and the challenge is to try and find something just a little different in these occasions.

The banner was a problem, with so much empty monochrome blue space, and it was difficult to crop it and still retain anything of use. So the obvious thing was to avoid it, and I more or less did so throughout the pictures I took.

The sameness imposed on the image by the identical faces and t-shirts was also a problem, and one I tried to lessen in several ways; it was made easier when a rather different and larger Murdoch puppet headed figure joined the protest. But before that I’d tried various other things, such as finding an actual face among the masks:

adding some wonderful curly blonde hair (and in the background the curly red interloper poster of Rebekah, but I didn’t quite get enough depth of field:)

and I think most successfully finding a viewpoint and grouping that had a clear caption on a placard at the left of the image and a lively grouping of those Murdochs at different scales.

A couple of hundred yards away a real protest was taking place, and I followed the man with the Rebekah poster (who had not been at all welcome with Avaaz) to this, hoping perhaps to see an opporturnity of a picture on the way, but it didn’t happen.

But as you possibly see form the pictures, I was rather happier in the middle of a real protest,

and made use of that Rebekah poster a little more legibly there.

Though there too it seemed that the rather more political protesters didn’t much like the sense of humour it showed.

Coalition of Resistance Picket Murdoch
Avaaz Protest Murdoch At Parliament

Rev Billy Triumphs

One of the performances of the year was surely the exorcism of BP in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall by the Reverend Billy and his Church of Earthalujah, and I was pleased to be able to photograph and write about it.

There was quite a lot of light inside the Turbine Hall, and I could have chosen to use a higher shutter speed, but as usual I wanted to work a little on the edge, and most of the pictures were taken at 1/30 to 1/60 despite there being considerable movement. Combining flash with ambient meant that there was a reasonable chance of people closest to the camera getting a sharp flash image, and I used an aperture around f8 to give me reasonable depth of field.

This image of Rev Billy advancing on the BP sponsorship logo is a good example, taken with a very wide angle and tightly framed (it is more or less uncropped) was one that worked, although as always there were plenty that were just too blurred because of the slow shutter speed. But although it was the image that I selected for the ‘front page’ of my piece on Demotix it was the picture two frames earlier that I actually like most, and is on the front page for Rev Billy’s Tate BP Exorcism on My London Diary. The hands are not quite as good, but I like the radial blur in the background.

Again this is more or less uncropped, and the only thing I’ve done in post-processing is a certain amount of burning in, mainly on the hands and windows, and I think a little ‘dodging’ on those white trousers. The rest of the effect was in camera, where the 16-35mm has a zoom ring that can be conveniently spun during exposure, with not entirely predictable results. The flash exposure is short, so hardly if at all affected by the zoom.

They are more or less uncropped, but quite a few of the images I took I did crop, because there was another camera which often moved into my frame, and I didn’t want it. You can see it in quite a few of the rather too many images from this event I’ve put on line. Usually video cameras don’t come with very wide lenses, but this was someone using a still camera with a very wide lens and shooting video. I’ve seen a clip of the film that he shot, which also includes some footage from a second camera on the balcony, and it is really very good and I feature rather prominently in it.

The problem with using wide-angles for video is that you need to get really close to the action and to stay there, and that means you are likely to get in the way not just of photographers, but also of the performers and the audience. Ultra-wides are much less of a problem with still photography as you move in, take a few frames and then move out. Even with just one guy doing it, I felt he was too obtrusive, and if others take it up then we are in danger of never actually seeing an event again except on film. Everything will get to look like those walls of players lining up in front of the guy taking the free kick.

I’d had problems with the D300 taking pictures of swans earlier in the day, and hadn’t sorted out what was going wrong, so I’d left it at home and was working with only one camera, and very much feeling the limitations. Changing lenses is really too slow, and there were points when I would have loved to have had a second camera with the 10.5 fisheye, and others where I just didn’t have time to change to something longer than the 16-35mm. Here’s an example:

I think it’s a good picture but I found myself reaching down for the D300 which wasn’t there. If it had been I would have made another picture as well, something like this:

Reproduced small it has a big advantage in letting you clearly read the banner on the balcony. Of course you can crop, but I’d much rather have taken what I wanted in camera.

Out Of Touch

I don’t have a smartphone and I live 20 miles out from the centre of London. I only heard that things were kicking off in Tottenham when there was a short (and it turned out later rather misleading) item on the radio news as I was thinking of bed. By that time my quickest way to get there would have been a couple of hours on my old bike and apart from the fact that it would have exhausted me to ride around 25 miles in the middle of the night, I thought everything would be over even if I did make it. I was tired, had drunk a few glasses of wine and bed was the only option.

I’d been sorry to miss the vigil at the police station earlier in the day, but again I’d only found out about it at the last minute. I’ve photographed community demonstrations against the police at Tottenham before. But if I had gone doubtless I would have taken my pictures and gone home after an hour or so, several hours before that peaceful event ended and well before the trouble flared.

Sunday morning the news was all over the Internet, with even some decent coverage on Sky, though it took the BBC a while to really catch up with what had happened. Friends of mine had posted on Facebook in the early morning that they had got home safe (if some were rather bruised) after a busy night, and I saw some of their pictures.

Everyone was expecting further trouble and I wondered vaguely about going to see what was happening. Earlier in the week I’d asked a friend if he’d like to come with me to photograph a couple of events that day, one not far from Tottenham, but he was busy with other things and I’d decided not to go on my own but to do other things. I thought briefly about changing my mind, looked at the weather forecast and decided there were things I could more usefully do at home.

It was almost certainly a sensible decision. When things get a little tricky on the streets you need to be in touch and to be with other photographers. A smartphone really becomes as essential as a camera, and at times if it can take a halfway decent picture you would be better off using a phone than a camera. Possibly it won’t be too long before DSLRs are relegated to history and the standard kit for photojournalists and press will be a videophone. And I did get some essential work I’d been putting off for a while completed.

Of course I knew that many of my colleagues – particularly those in the London Photographers Branch of the NUJ would be out there on the streets covering the events which were rightly a matter of great media interest. I’ve always seen my own particular niche on My London Diary as covering the events that don’t make the news, and to try and make them into news, or if not news to write them into our history. One of my pictures from an earlier demonstration against police in that area, when I was one of the few (if not the only) photographers present on a bleak winter’s day became part of a national museum display.

The best set of pictures I’ve yet seen from the events were by the Chair of the NUJ London Photographers’ Branch, Jess Hurd, working for Report Digital, remarkable both for their drama and their clarity. Apart from everything else they do show the remarkable capability of current DSLRs in low light; phones still have a long way to go.

These pictures came as no surprise, as so often her work does stand out from the crowd (and there are plenty of other good photographers in the crowd.) Until 28 August you can see her show of “10 years of intrepid work”… involved in people’s struggles for dignity and freedom around the world”, ‘Taking the Streets – Global Protest‘ at the Usurp Art Gallery in Harrow (close to West Harrow Underground, open Thursday to Sunday 2-7 Free admission.)

Upping Again

One day a year I allow myself to photograph swans.

“Photography is not cute cats, nor nudes, motherhood or arrangements of manufactured products. Under no circumstances it is anything ever anywhere near a beach. Walker Evans“

Had Evans lived in the UK, I’m sure swans would have featured in his list of no-nos (even if, for the moment I can’t remember an Edward Weston picture featuring one.) Back in the years when I used sometimes to have to look at photography displays in schools my heart would sink when I saw a wall heavily laden with these birds. Another staple, cemeteries and gravestones, was somehow far less dispiriting.

But once a year I give myself special licence and go out and shoot the Queen’s birds (and those she graciously allows to the Dyers and Vintners.) Not literally shoot them of course, it’s probably still a hanging offence and even they don’t shoot them any more. They don’t even eat them or even make nicks in their beaks to mark them. Upping is now more a kind of roving clinic that gives the cygnets a quick MOT and snaps a ring around a leg so they can be identified in later years.

I’m not in favour of royal privilege, and find it ridiculous that the Queen or anyone else should claim rights on these wild birds, but there are some positive aspects to the upping as it is today, both for the health of the birds and also as a more general measure of the health of the environment. On our stretch of the river, despite apparent increases in water quality and banning anglers using lead weights (the latter prompted in part by evidence from the upping) swans are not doing well. They swarm on the river in great herds, but don’t breed, or certainly very much less than they used to only a few years ago.

I’ve photographed the uppers most years since I stopped teaching on Mondays – the day they come more or less past where I live – in 1999. It’s not as good as it used to be, partly because we have less breeding swans now, but also because they no longer have a man on a bike going ahead of the crews and attracting the swan families to handy spots by feeding them biscuits. I got to know Eric who did this, and for a few years rode along with him and could occasionally give him the benefit of a little local knowledge. He was a great help as he almost always managed to get the swans to a good place to photograph on the same side of the river as the towpath – and his and my bicycle. Now the Swan Warden’s outboard dinghy goes ahead, but not very far ahead, and the swans are upped wherever they happen to be.

I wasn’t going to bother with the swans this year, as I’ve got to the point where I have good pictures of almost everything, enough for a decent book, and really the only thing that would add to it would be some pictures from further up the river. One year when I’m less busy I’ll ask to go on the official press boat again and follow it further, as further upstream a bicycle becomes less useful. Though I may need to borrow a long lens to make it really worthwhile.

But it turned out to be a nice day, and I thought I could spare a couple of hours in the morning, so I decided to go after all. By the time I’d followed it for a couple of hours and the only cygnets that had been found were up a backwater and on the opposite bank where even after I’d waded through chest high stinging nettles I could only get the poorest of views, I was thinking I should have stayed at home.

Finally they came across a swan with six cygnets just a hundred yards or so short of their lunchtime stop at the Swan Inn in Staines, and there was a decent opportunity to see them at work. Unfortunately the bank where they boats surrounded the swans was a little overgrown, and there wasn’t time to do some gardening, so what would have been the best pictures are seen through rather too many weeds in the foreground, but I made a few that were not too bad. There are just a few parts of the event that are difficult – and usually impossible – to photograph well, for example when the birds are being returned to the water, as you would need to be in the river and in the way to be in the right place.

The upppers didn’t catch the male swan, who had been on the other side of the river, and he swum around a few yards away watching while his mate and offspring were being processed on the bank. There was a touching scene when the female swan was put back into the water and swam out to meet him, and despite my feelings about pictures of swans I had to take some pictures.

I grabbed the D300 which had the Sigma 28-300 attached and took a series of pictures without stopping to check exposure – having previously been using it I knew they wouldn’t be far out.

When I looked at the images after the swans had moved apart, I found that they were all very dark towards one edge. Eventually I worked out that the camera wasn’t working properly at speeds faster than around 1/1500 s. Testing showed the image darkened and blacked out from one edge progressively at speeds above this, unitl the entire image had gone at 1/4000 s, even wide open where it should have been fully exposed.

Fortunately Lightroom with its graduated filter came to my rescue (though I still find it very tricky to use) and the defect it fairly hard to spot in the final result.

It isn’t a fault that will worry me in normal use, where I seldom use fast shutter speeds, and the camera is long out of warranty, so I’ve decided to live with the problem until something really important goes wrong. Perhaps before that happens Nikon will announce a new model that I’ll want to get rather than repairing the D300.

See more pictures (and text) at Swan Upping on My London Diary

d’Agata Interview

Thanks to Jim Casper at Lens Culture for his tweet mentioning the interview with Antoine dAgata at Gomma magazine, which is worth a read. One of the people he mentions is Joan Liftin, who I met some years ago when I attended a Charles Harbutt workshop at the late and lamented Peter Goldfield‘s Duckspool. Joan sent me a copy of her book ‘Drive-Ins‘ which I reviewed on About.com when I was writing for that site, and is unfortunately no longer available. d’Agata goes on to mention Nan Goldin, who I wrote about at some length for About, and later produced a revised and updated version of my piece on her, Nan Goldins Mirror on Life for this site .

One of the last posts that I wrote for About, back in May 2007, was about Gomma Issue 3, when I noted:

there are some good interviews, with Daido Moriyama, Anders Petersen, Boris Mikhailov and Boogie. Along with Lise Sarfati, they also provide some great photographs, and there is plenty of other interesting work in the issue, for example the ambrotypes of Stephen Berkman (I mentioned his work with the Camera Obscura briefly eighteen months ago) and the highly personal black and whites of Danish photographer Jacob Aue Sobol.

Those names were all those of people I’d written about on About, and in the original there were of course links to those pieces, some short, but all linking to other information on the web. I’m still upset that the New York Times (the owners of About.com, at least when I dismissed) not only took all that resource off line, although without constant upkeep much of it would now be out of date, but more that there is still nothing on line which really replaces what I did. It was more or less a full time job, and I could not continue it without the financial support that About.com provided.

Gomma too has changed. Here is what it says on the web site:

Gomma Magazine, the printed six-monthly publication, was edited in London, printed in Italy and distributed worldwide through major distribution companies.

Unfortunately the publication of the magazine has been put on hold due to logistic issues, – however a relaunch plan for the magazine is currently being discussed. Also there are talks to create a small publishing house of high quality photography.

The Online platform Gommamag.com continue to be a valuable resource for photographers and visual artists. Its use and registration is free, although some new pay-per-entry structure has been installed so to avoid duplicate and flooding of the same info.

Having looked at the site, I’m not too sure what Gomma is, but there is certainly some interesting material there.

Pro-Choice Protest

The threat to change the law on abortion brought protesters to protest opposite parliament last month. There were quite a few men present, but it was mainly women, and of all ages and types. Naturally as a photographer I was particularly drawn to those of more dramatic appearance, and in particular one woman who held the main banner reading ‘My Body My Choice‘ but it was largely her bright blue spiky hair that drew my attention, although her tattoos and t-shirt helped.

So you will see rather too many pictures of her in my work from the day in Pro-Choice Rally at Parliament posted at last on My London Diary. Of course there were plenty of other people to photograph, and I did so, but it is rather hard to miss someone like this.

For this particular picture I had to get up on tip-toe to photograph over the banner she was holding, very carefully framing to show the face and fist on her t-shirt and also I wanted to get the text ‘Women must decide their fate‘ at the top right of the picture.

There were also plenty of placards of all sizes, and the mini-placard appears to have caught on, as this picture shows:

Something about the message on this one made me laugh, and I think my comment about it made the woman holding it laugh as well. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I think I was glad she had a sense of humour. Another of these minute placards had what was almost certainly the longest caption of any at the protest:

Just in case you’re finding it a little difficult to read, here it is in full:

What Do We Want?

Properly Resourced, Funded and High Quality Sex and Relationships Ed and Sexual and Reproductive Health Services For All People.

When Do We Want It? Now!

Unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to really make a good picture of it.

Perhaps the placard that amused me most was this:

It also has in the background what I felt was perhaps the most important issue in the whole controversy, a call for evidence-based health policies, a point mentioned by several of the speakers, including the only man brave enough to speak, at least while I was there. This was a doctor, the former MP and Liberal Democrat science spokesman Evan Harris. Facing him as he spoke was a woman in a green hat holding up a placard ‘Politicians Make crappy Doctors!’ You can see her in my picture but I couldn’t find a way to really make her stand out as I wanted. Although it had been a fine sunny afternoon, by then a heavy shower had begun and many people had their umbrellas up, and after taking this picture I decided it was time to leave.

On John Szarkowski

I’d not read the obituary of John Szarkowski, the man who defined our medium for several decades in his tenure at MoMA in New York from 1962-1991 and whose work remains a strong influence, written for Artforum in 2007 by Maria Morris Hambourg, so it was interesting to see it republished on American Suburb X.

Although I’ve sometimes poked a little fun at some of his writing, his view of the medium was largely one that I subscribed too, based as it was – and as Hambourg makes clear – on the work of Walker Evans, whose ‘American Photographs’ remains one of the truly great photographic works. Among the aspects of Szarkowski’s work that particularly interested me were his promotion of the work of Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, and also the re-evaluation that he made of the work of Eugene Atget, with his fine series of four books of his work, a project with which Hambourg was involved, and which came out around the time I was also investigating his work in my own ‘Paris Revisited‘, recently revised and republished as In Search of Atget.

Hambourg also mentions his ‘Looking at Photographs‘, still one of the better books which displays some of the joys to be appreciated in photography, although perhaps surprisingly she fails to mention his ‘The Photographer’s Eye‘, arguably the best introduction to how our medium works.

As she says, the “new directorial mode, constructed realities, appropriated pictorial worlds, and borrowed media identities interested him not at all”; like me he felt they had little to offer photography. Hambourg sees this as a weakness, but it came from the strength of his belief in the essential core of the medium and his appreciation of its subtleties and power.

Climate Rush Cycle Protest

Finally I’ve got around to putting some more pictures from this protest on July 13 on line on My London Diary.

My main dilemma in photographing this event was in deciding whether or not to take my bike. Handy though a bike is for following any bike-based protest such as this, it also tends to be something of a liability. Whenever anything is happening and the protest moves you have to decide whether or not to stop taking pictures and get your bike. When you arrive anywhere you need to find somewhere safe to lock it before you can start taking pictures.

Of course, if the cyclists are going to go large distances, a bike may become essential, especially when, as on this occasion the destination has not been disclosed. Often when covering protest marches I’ll take the tube (or even sometimes a bus if the protest isn’t so large as to block the streets) so as to get to the end before the marchers. With a bike it’s easy to keep up with other cyclists.

When I heard there was also going to be a bloc of the protest on foot as well as the cyclists, I decided not to take my bike but go with them, and I think it was the best way to cover it. We set off a few minutes before the cyclists and arrived at the destination before them, so I was able to take a few pictures of the large bloc of cyclists arriving.

The protesters had large placards which looked good in photos, but they had been made on the back of those used for a protest against university fees. Although this was fine when they were marching with them and holding them the right way, once they were on their backs on the roadway to stop the traffic they were holding them up in the air, and then around half were always showing the wrong message. I was slow to pick up on this at the spot and had to reject many pictures because they had the wrong placards, and it was very obvious when reviewing the work on the computer screen. I met some of the organisers at another event a few days later and pointed out this problem to them – so next time they will have double-sided placards, or at least blank out any confusing messages.

I’m not sure whether Jenny Jones, a Green Party GLA member, will like the picture I took of her, but I do,

and I was also quite happy with several other ‘portraits’, as well as pictures that showed the action that was taking place.

Perhaps my favourite image from the evening was this one of a protester who decided to lie down as soon as he was on the box junction, flat on his face next to his abandoned white bicycle. Apart from the design with just lines and circles it appeals to me because of the simplicity of it’s colour scheme, with just black and white (and grey) with three yellows and some purple details on the bike and shirt along with the blue jerking.

Arbus: 40 Years Gone

James Pomerantz, who blogs as ‘A Photo Student‘ marked the 40th anniversary of the suicide of Diane Arbus a couple of days ago by publishing the obituary from the Village Voice at the time, written by A D Coleman, along with a link to 1972 Masters of Photography video in four parts with contributions from her daughter Doon Arbus, Lisette Model, Marvin Israel and John Szarkowski.

A D Coleman is of course still writing about photography, and always worth reading (though perhaps it helps that I usually agree with him.) Our medium hasn’t been blessed with too many who have actually written intelligently about it and he is one of the few who doesn’t seem to be too scared by images to actually look at them rather than hide behind obscuring theory.

I’ve several times mentioned his detailed postings on the still unfinished saga of the attempts to pass off some rather second-rate images of Yosemite as previously unknown work by Ansel Adams. His latest series of articles, Ive Seen the Future, and Its In 3D, is about how the image world is rapidly and inevitably moving “toward a 3D digital environment.”

For some years people – including museum curators – have been telling me the future was moving images. It’s a trend that I’ve deliberately resisted, still personally finding much greater satisfaction and a greater plasticity in still photography. With still photography you can work much more on the individual image, and then go on to putting images together in different ways, and it’s always seemed to me to give more scope for the individual artist. Making film (and the first cameras I seriously used when I was a student were TV, video and 8mm film cameras) was always a team effort.

Of course video has its uses, and often gives a clearer view of the story of what is happening at some of the events I cover, but it lacks the focus on significant instants that the still image gives. The 3D digital environment clearly has its uses, but it takes imaging further away from the kind of personal response that for me is the power of the still image.