>Re:PHOTO Peter Marshall - Thoughts on Photography

Jiro’s Café Reopens

Jiro Osugas installation, Café Jiro, in the Flowers Gallery in Cork St, London in May 2009 was for me certainly the wittiest art show I’d seen in years, and you can get some idea of it from my pictures in this blog and on My London Diary.

Jiro’s Café has now returned to life, with a significant difference: what was then a café in an art gallery is now an art gallery in a very real café, the Queen’s Terrace Cafe, just off the Finchley Road a few steps from St John’s Wood station. Rather than just walking around a gallery you can now enjoy morning coffee, a fine lunch or afternoon tea while surrounded by a unique work of art.

One whole wall – the longest display space in the small café – is covered by a panel that was in the previous Flowers show, but there are three large works for the new installation along with a number of smaller pieces – including three in the smallest room.

I spent a very enjoyable evening at the opening, talking to many old friends and meeting new. Most were finding a great deal of fun in sorting out the answers to a gallery quiz by Jiro, exploring a few of the historical and art-historical references in his work.

Drinking in the café you can find many famous figures, including Marx, Lenin, Che, Mao, the Queen and a ‘famous frog’ I’m not allowed to name.

Mireille Galinou, who had the idea for this cultural cafe, with arms folded

The Queen’s Terrace Café is described by Mireille Galinou who conceived and runs it as a cultural café, and has a programme of events which include:

a talk ‘Food in Art’ by Professor Michael Kauffman, former Director of the Courtauld Institute (Thursday 14 July, 6.00pm – £6.00 includes a drink)

a walk on pubs, hotels and houses in St John’s Wood led by Mireille, whose book on the history of the area, Cottages and Villas: The Birth of the Garden Suburb, was published by Yale University Press last year (Thursday 25 August, 6-8.00pm – £6.00 includes a drink)

Places for these events should be booked in advance, either at the café, by phone (020 7449 2998) or at queensterracecafe@bitinternet.com – places are limited and tickets are non-refundable.

The exhibition quiz, devised by Jiro Osuga, is available during the show, and on Thursday 25th August he will be there for a ‘Quiz Night’ when the answers will be revealed and prizes awarded for the best entries – entry £2.00 on the door.

There are also two special projects taking place based on the local area.

Gardens: I am working with Mireille Galinou on a documentary project where I do the easy job of taking photographs – mainly panoramic – of gardens while she works on “their basic historical pedigree… and their owners’ aims and recollections” for a publication and exhibition at the Queens Terrace Café.

Studios: Photographer John Chase is working on a second project on artists’ studios in the area. Judging from the many blue plaques I’ve noticed walking between gardens there may be quite a few – and the area seems to have been particularly popular with sculptors.

Like You’ve Never Been Away

© 2009 Peter Marshall
Paul Trevor looking worried at the opening of a small show of his work in
the Museum of Childhood, Bethnal Green, London in 2009 – more here

One book that I can definitely recommend and that won’t break the bank is Paul Trevor‘s ‘like you’ve never been away‘, published by The Bluecoat Press in Liverpool and accompanying his exhibition of the same name at the Walker Art Gallery from 13 May to 25 September 2011.

Back in March Paul Trevor sent me a link to this BBC Merseyside feature, and somehow I simply forgot to write about it. It’s a good film that is worth watching, with Paul talking (and walking,) meeting some of those he photographed in 1975 and showing them his pictures, and he also talks about the “great loss to society” that we can no longer photograph children on the streets in the way he could then.

I was reminded about it again by a review of the book on the Online Photographer blog, which also prompted me to buy the book. You can read a little bit more about it and see a couple of pictures of the double page spreads there.

Being a lazy (and fairly poor) Londoner I haven’t made the trip to Liverpool for this or any the other events which are a part of Liverpool’s first ever international photography festival, Look11, which is nearing its end, which means I’ve missed quite a few shows and events I would have liked to have seen. Of course most things come to London some time, but perhaps this is unlikely for Trevor’s Liverpool show, though there is still plenty of time to go and see that.

There are around a dozen of his pictures from Liverpool in the 1982 Open University publication ‘Survival Programmes‘, a record of what is I think the last major documentary project in the UK, carried out by the ‘Exit Photography Group’, Nicholas Battye, Chris Steele-Perkins and Paul Trevor in the mid-70s, and most at least of them are in this new publication, with considerably better reproduction. They include what is one of his best-known images, Mozart Street in Toxteth transformed into a beach on a Sunday afternoon, kids playing in bathing trunks as a woman gleefully aims a hose at a kid been held aloft by a man in the doorway of these terrace houses opening directly onto the now wet pavement. Paul spent 6 months living in a flat in tower block in the area and getting to know and photograph the people there.

‘Survival Programmes‘ has long been out of print, but Trevor kept some boxes when it was withdrawn from sale and I bought a copy from him a few years ago, at rather less than you might expect were it published now. For him it is simply a way to give people who take an interest in his work the opportunity to have the book, although he would have preferred some of the other books he proposed to publishers to have been published. His approach is totally different from some photographers today who deliberately create shortages with limited editions to enable them to sell off copies later at high collector’s prices.

Trevor is I think an example of a photographer who was too good for Magnum, too focussed on what he wanted to achieve, and it is good to see his work getting a little attention now, though a proper showing of his work on London is long overdue (as I’ve often told certain museum and gallery curators.)

You can, as the Online Photographer instructs, with some slight difficulty buy ‘like you’ve never been away‘ on Amazon, as although it says ‘temporarily out of stock’, the ‘3 new‘ link takes you to a set of listings that includes the publisher, who charges a reasonable £2.80 for delivery bringing the total to £12.79 (as well as to another dealer already charging twice the price.) My copy arrived around 36 hours after I made the order. You could possibly save the postage by ordering from Amazon, who are currently out of stock, but I don’t know how long that might take.

The images are well reproduced – much better than in ‘Survival Programmes’ and there are many great pictures I’ve not seen before. My only gripe is that all the landscape format images are printed on a double spread across the gutter, a design decision I’ve seldom found acceptable in photographic books, and which probably means your copy will soon fall to pieces as keep viewing the images, although the book does seem well-made. It is a decision that contributes to the low price while still allowing the landscape images to be roughly the same size as a 10×8″ print, but I still don’t like it.

As the quote on the back cover by Annie Lord, of National Museums Liverpool says:

“This is an extremely warm and moving book about childhood, life and Liverpool in the 1970s.”

Grab a copy while you can.

LSPF Gets Early Start At Photofusion

The London Street Photography Festival is billed to be in July and includes some interesting events, including a show of pictures by Vivian Maier, the Chicago nanny who only became famous after her death in 2009 and who I wrote about here last December. My thoughts about her work then included:

Interesting though her work is, it does not appear to have been innovative, and has long lost any ability to alter the course of our medium. At best it can retrospectively broaden and enrich its history.

The show at the German Gymnasium from 1-24 July (entry £3.50) includes 48 black and white and colour prints and “a selection of her fascinating silent films” about which I know nothing. A talk on her by John Maloof, one of those who discovered her work, has already sold out, and other events in the LSPF are also likely to be popular – this really seems to be the year for street photography.

The big exhibition in London remains ‘London Street Photography‘ at the Museum of London which opened in February and continues until 4 September 2011. In its first week people were queuing for more than an hour to see it, and museum attendances were I think around ten times those at the same period the previous year. With such a long run it isn’t crowded now, but still attracting a decent audience.

Photofusion kicked off the festival early with On Street Photography: A Woman’s Perspective which opened on 10 June and continues until 22 July with pictures by Anahita Avalos, Polly Braden, Tiffany Jones, Johanna Neurath and Ying Tang, the three London-based photographers with pictures from London, pictures from Mexico by Tehran-born Avalos (who now lives in Paris) and pictures from Shanghai by Ying Tang now living in Germany.

I spent some time at the opening in pedant mode wondering whether that should have been ‘Five Women’s Perspectives‘, as the photographers have little in common, and rather more time wondering whether ‘Five Perspectives by Women‘ would have been more accurate still. But in the end what is important is whether the pictures are worth looking at.

It doesn’t even matter if much of the work in this – and the Museum of London show – is not really what I would consider street photography, although at least The London Street Photography Festival (unlike the museum show which hedges its bets by quoting several) does have a working definition which Photofusion quotes:

un-posed, un-staged photography which captures, explores or questions contemporary society and the relationships between individuals and their surroundings.

The work that interested me most was something that I would probably call a documentary project rather than street photography by Tiffany Jones, a Canadian who lives in London and has photographed for a couple of years in a particular London bar.

The pictures are largely an upfront look at the relationships between people and the gestures that show these, and they also illustrate the advantages of digital photography in working in low and mixed light situations. Until recently, work like this would almost certainly have been in gritty black and white (as for example in Cafe Lehmitz by Anders Petersen in Hamburg in the late 1960s – one of the photographers Tiffany and I talked about at the opening) and the differences that this creates are interesting.

More pictures from the opening on My London Diary.

The event was also an opportunity for me to try out my new toy, the Fuji X100, which might almost be an ideal camera for street photography (if only it had been a 28mm f2 equivalent instead of the 35mm.) I’m still having problems sorting out the different views and so on, and I missed a few pictures, but the camera coped pretty well with extremes of contrast and some very different light levels in different areas of the gallery. Hints are emerging on the web of the first firmware update that will deal with a few little annoying glitches too – like the difficulty at times in getting it to wake up when it has gone to sleep.

I’m still finding it hard to force myself to spend around £70 on getting a lens hood, but it really is essential, not for preventing light shining on the lens but for keeping fingers out of it. Fingerprints on the lens gave a few of these shots rather more flare than I would like. I’m hoping China will come up with a cheap alternative via e-Bay for this, or at least for the metal ring that includes a filter thread. Rather than the expensive Fuji machined aluminium hood I’d quite like to fit a cheap flexible rubber one, as these avoid both vibration and reflections when shooting though windows and cost less than a fiver.

Odo Yakuza Tokyo

Last November Anton Kusters was in London to talk about his project on the Yakuza, the Japanese crime family that runs the streets of Kabukicho, the red-light district in the heart of Tokyo. He had won the 2010 Blurb Photography Book Now Editorial Prize for 893 magazine, a report on his progress on the project every six months. I was impressed by his photography and his approach to the project, and wrote about it here on >Re-PHOTO, also linking to his blog on the project.

I’m not quite clear what the difference between a magazine and a book is – and there is a long history in photography in volumes that bridge that gap, with for example some issues of Aperture magazine have also been sold as books. But clearly Kusters saw 893 as a part of the process of which his first book, Odo Yakuza Tokyo, is a finished product. He writes about the difference here.

Like many photobooks, this is a fairly small edition, with a print run of 500 copies and is being sold through burn magazine, the web site stated by him and Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey in 2008 to encourage and support emerging photographers, and for which Kusters is creative director, as well as running his own web and interactive design agency based in Brussels. In the interview with Kusters, published on June 17, Harvey predicts the book will sell out in 2 weeks and he is probably not far off, so if you want a copy of something that will most likely become a collector’s item, load up the web page and hit the ‘Buy Now’ button without delay.

At 50 Euros it is not a huge expense, but enough to deter me from adding it to my already too extensive collection of photography books. Although some are now relatively valuable I decided long ago I was not interested in buying books (or anything else) as an investment, but tried to limit myself to those I felt would be important working tools. Perhaps I’m too old for this to be so. You can see 36 images from the book on the web page, and read more about the project on the web. It may well be something you want to buy, and almost certainly a good investment.

This whole project is actually one that makes me feel the photographic book is no longer as important as it was. Although Kusters would very much disagree, I think it is the magazines and web content that are actually important and the book at the end is really almost superfluous or perhaps attempting the impossible in trying to be a summation of the work, possibly ending up almost relegated to the function of a full stop at the end of a sentence. Which we could at least sometimes do without

Although I’ve not seen the book, I also get the feeling that it might for me be a little of a disappointment after the experience of seeing the photographer giving a live presentation of an incredible project. At the time I felt very strongly that it was and would make a fine audiovisual presentation, a DVD rather than print.

The Liberator of Parliament Square

I suppose as someone who has long felt that the main qualifications for being a Conservative MP were to be ignorant and opinionated I should have felt vindicated at the tasteless blatherings of one such lunatic on Radio 4 on the morning following the announcement of Brian Haw’s death.

Instead I was sickened, although a contribution from Bruce Kent about Brian did a lot to restore my faith in humanity. But what really got up my nose was the Tory twit going on about how Parliament Square should be for everyone to make use of and not just for one person to make a protest.

I wonder if he had ever actually set foot in Parliament Square or does he arrive at the House of Commons blindfolded in a limousine? Certainly he had absolutely no grasp of what has been happening on the ground there over the last ten or so years.

© 2006, Peter Marshall
Police hand out SOCPA Section 132 Notices to bystanders and press in Parliament Square warning them they are liable to arrest if they remain

One of Brian’s great achievements has been the liberation of Parliament Square. Before his protest started the square was a black hole in the centre of our capital, surrounded on all sides by traffic with no pedestrian crossings from the surrounding streets which were and are still thronged by tourists. Ten years ago it was rare to see anyone at all making there way to what was essentially a large traffic island. Most of the tourists on its periphery probably thought it was a banned area, and the authorities clearly intended it to be what the police like to call a ‘sterile zone‘.

Tourists, already fazed by London’s traffic coming at them on the wrong side of the road, stood little chance of making it to the middle of the square, and even few Londoners chanced the risky and rather unpredictable crossing.

Over the 10 years of his occupation, Brian and his friends and later other protesters have effected a great transformation – one that Ken Livingstone as Mayor failed to do – in opening up the square to people. Many came to see Brian, others to mount their own protests and yet more to sit and picnic on the grass – before Mayor Boris – for reasons political under a minor horticultural smokescreen – fenced it off.

Thanks largely to Brian, we’ve seen a remarkable change in London and a movement of the centre of political protest in the capital, a movement away from Trafalgar Square down Whitehall to Parliament Square, where it is a little harder for it to go unnoticed by both parliament and the media.

Brian and the other protests in the square became a tourist attraction, with group leaders umbrellas raised bringing their charges across the traffic lights and it was very much an advertisement for British democracy – though given the repeated attempts by politicians to get rid of him rather an unmerited one. Truly it was more an index of Brian’s doggedness, as well as the support he received from many, including the occasional judge or magistrate who remembered the freedoms our law is supposed to protect – if unfortunately it seldom does when the obviously more important vested interests of the rich and powerful are involved.

And as for Speaker’s Corner, mentioned by that Tory ignoramus, it was long ago abandoned to religious bigots and eccentrics, a minor tourist attraction rather than a site with any meaningful politics, and a happy hunting ground for photographers of the meaningless gesture.

But although Brian’s example may have liberated Parliament Square, the battle is still taking place to take it away from the people and keep it back under tight wraps. We need to support those who are continuing to protest there, in particular Babs, Barbara Tucker, who has been with Brian there for so long and is continuing his battle. Read more on BrianHaw.tv where there is also a link to the “tastless threat” on the Today programme.

NUJ Photoshop Shock

Video still by Jason N Parkinson; Photoshop by A N Incompetent?

I can’t imagine the reason for the latest bit of crude manipulation of images to come to my attention, found rather surprisingly in the latest Freelance, the newsletter of the London Freelance Branch of the National Union of Journalists.

There I am, standing at the left of the picture – from a video still by Jason N Parkinson, wearing a jacket and with two Nikons around my neck, but with my head apparently swathed in bandages. I really didn’t think I was so ugly I had to be photoshopped out.

I was there and taking pictures and was making no secret about it – writing about it here on my blog and even getting quoted in ‘Amateur Photography’ so there was certainly no need for anonymity. It seems purely a gratuitous example of the very kind of manipulation that we regard as unethical. Given its crudity it might of course even have been simply the result of a careless mouse gesture.

You can read more about the protest in Photographers City Hall Flashmob on My London Diary.

A week ago I went to the London launch of the booklet* about the successful ‘I’m a Photographer, Not A Terrorist’ campaign that the World Press Freedom Day flashmob at City Hall was a part of.

And here, completely unretouched, are a couple of pictures I took at the launch event. And no, I wasn’t wearing bandages around my head that night either.

and outside on the pavement after the speeches:

Though shortly after the unadorned picture of me was taken I could have done with some bandages as I turned around suddenly and went flying as my shin contacted bloodily with the sharpened concrete edge of a street flower container. Probably I should sue.

*copies free if you send an A5 SAE with 2 stamps on it to :

Photographer Not a Terrorist
308-312 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8DP

Brian Haw RIP

© 2007, Peter Marshall
Brian Haw: Find Your Courage; Share Your Vision; Change Your World. (T-shirt from Dan Wilkins, The Nth Degree.) Brian and Dan were both very pleased to have copies of the picture.

The news of Brian Haw’s death in a German hospital came as no surprise to me after his long illness, but it still was a shock and a feeling that the nation has lost a figure of importance, a man who almost single-handedly reminded us of the need for a national conscience and who dedicated his life to the cause of peace in ten years of protest in Parliament Square.

I have to admit I was slow to recognise the seriousness of his protest, and although I had photographed him earlier, on black and white film, the earliest picture I posted on My London Diary was only in October 2004, by which time, according to the notice, he had been in place for 1219 days.

At first I’d been put off by his concentration in the early days of his protest on the single issue of the suffering of children due to the sanctions, as well as by his fundamentalist Christian views. But his protest became more general about peace and I got to know him just a little and began to appreciate his sincerity and persistence, becoming a fairly regular visitor to Parliament Square, as well as photographing him in nearby protests.

© 20045 Peter Marshall
Police drag demonstrator away as peace protestor Brian Haw holds a placard “War Kills the Innocent” in front of Cenotaph and Code Pink wreath, “How Many Will Die in Iraq Today?”. Whitehall, 7 Nov, 2004.
© 2005 Peter Marshall
Serious organised crime and police bill: Haw addresses the Houses of Parliament

I began to drop in for a visit whenever I had a few minutes to spare and was in Central London, only bothering to take pictures if anything special was happening. And although like almost everyone else who visited I occasionally got on the wrong side of Brian’s temper, I kept on going, unlike many others. There were times when I didn’t agree with him, but I still felt it was important to support him and the continuing protest against the war, even or perhaps especially when many former supporters appeared to desert or turn against him. And I feel it was an honour to have known him and perhaps to have captured a little of his spirit in my pictures of him.

© 2008, Peter Marshall
Police laughed at Brian Haw as he tried to make a complaint after an officer had pushed his camera into his face making it bleed.

© 2009 Peter Marshall
Police arrest Brian and push him into back of a police van – he was released the following day after an extremely brief court appearance – the arrest was simply harassment by the police. 30 Oct 2009

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Brian with a t-shirt with the front page of The Independent after the protest at the state opening of Parliament

© 2010, Peter Marshall
Just after I took the portrait,police arrived to serve a warrant on Babs for using a megaphone – their idea of a 9th anniversary present.

I’d watched Brian’s health obviously deteriorating over the years, worn out by the continuous strain and hardships of his protest, and in particular by the harassment of the police and others – including at times gangs of army-trained thugs the police were somehow blind to see as they attacked the peace camp in the middle of the night. The pressure and also the periods of boredom in the square also meant that he was smoking heavily. It came as little surprise to find that he had been admitted to hospital in September 2010 with breathing problems and that a tumour had been found. Although he was certainly a man who would put up a hard fight – he’d always lived that way – the years in Parliament Square had taken a heavy toll on his general health. It’s true to say that Brian lived and died for peace.

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The Scandal of London’s Largest Ghost

London’s Heygate Estate, 25 acres in a prime position next to the Elephant and Castle in Southwark has had a bad press. Completed in the early 1970s and home for years to more than a thousand families it was a brave and far-sighted attempt to provide high quality social housing in a remarkably green development for its time. Given proper management by the council over the years it would now be seen as perhaps the most successful development of its era. Instead it is a rotting, empty ghost city, waiting to be demolished and replaced by lower quality development which will doubtless make millions if not billions for private developers. The developers certainly got a bargain, paying only £20 million for a site and the advantage of some £1.5 billion of public funds going into the Elephant redevelopment scheme.

It had the disadvantage of being built at a time when architecture was passing through a visually brutal phase, and the vast slab blocks that surrounded it to create an oasis inside were on a massive scale. It didn’t look a friendly place from the outside, and in the early years before the many trees that were planted grew it was a little bleak inside.

Somewhere Southwark Council lost the plot – or perhaps changed to a very different one – and made a concerted and largely successful attempt to change what had been seen as a good place to live into a sink estate, through a lack of maintenance and using it to rehouse “problem families”; coupled with a great deal of bad press and TV documentaries – those walkways made for some great images and it was so handy to get to. The council describe the scheme as ‘failed architecture’ but in reality it was the council that failed it, and the architecture is still in excellent shape – and likely to have been longer-lasting than its proposed replacement.

You can read more of the story of how the Heygate was demonised in the Guardian article from March 2011, The death of a housing ideal and more about its present state at the blog set up by one of the few remaining residents, Adrian Glaspool – a good place to start is here. For more information see the Southwark Notes blog, which has a great deal of information and comment on the council’s actions here and elsewhere in the borough.

After the decision to demolish and sell off the estate was taken, the council started encouraging tenants to move out in 2007, giving them a six month time limit to find replacement homes (they had stopped giving secure tenancies in 2001, meaning that they had no obligation to rehouse the roughly 30% of tenants who had moved in since then.) Tenants were supposed to find properties through the council’s Homesearch scheme, but very few were on offer. Evictions and compulsory purchase, along with less legal measures, were eventually used to more or less clear the estate, with just a handful of residents now remaining. Labour councillors when in opposition accused the council of “strong-arming and intimidating tenants and leaseholders out of their homes on the Heygate” but little seemed to change after they were voted into power in 2010.

Leaseholders on the estate were treated in a particularly shabby fashion as the Council carried out a programme of what was essentially forcible removal from the estate. The leaseholder’s action group site states:

“Leaseholders were left to watch as their neighbours were moved out one-by-one, leaving them all alone in blocks infested with vermin. Vacated properties were not cleared before being sealed up, lifts were turned off, the district heating & hot-water system was turned off, estate lighting was turned off, cleaning services and rubbish collections reduced and postal services dropped.”

Also on their site you can find details of the ridiculous undervaluation of properties made by the council:

“Elderly leaseholders or those with language difficulties came off particularly bad, and the council was able to convince some to accept offers as low as £32,000 for a 1-bed flat and £66,500 for a 3-bed maisonette. “

Similar maisonettes in this area cost around £300-400 a week to rent, and the market price is probably in the range £175-250,000.

The blog quotes environmentalist Donnachadh McCarthy, writing in the ‘Southwark News‘ describing the demolition of the Heygate and Aylesbury estates as ‘one of the biggest carbon crimes of the decade by a local authority.’ It has certainly resulted in an enormous waste of public money, and as well as the carbon waste involved in demolition of usable buildings some 40 years before the end of their lifetime and their replacement by new build, the estate is now a considerable urban forest and most of its trees appear certain to be felled.

Like other buildings of its age the estate contains considerable amounts of asbestos, not a great safety hazard unless disturbed, but making the job of demolition of these structurally sound buildings difficult. For this reason it will be perhaps another four years before the demolition of the larger blocks actually starts although almost all the tenants and leaseholders have been forced out and the estate allowed to become derelict.

Recently a fringe area of the estate has been demolished, but work is not timetabled to start on the rest of the estate until late 2014 or early 2015. In April this year, some of the few remaining residents decided to clear the former garden areas and use the space to grow flowers and vegetables, informing the council who at first started legal proceedings for ‘unlawful gardening’ but then entered into talks aimed at authorising and controlling the allotments.

Residents and other interested parties held a day of workshops to try and influence the regeneration of the whole Elephant & Castle area on July 4 which I was unable to attend, but I took these pictures on the following day, along with many more on the Heygate estate, more of which will go on My London Diary shortly. In particular I made a number of panoramic views of the area which perhaps give a better impression of the estate and in particular its trees, and I’ll post some of these later.

Lewisham Funeral

The Lewisham Funeral for the NHS was a little disappointing, mainly because so few people came. I got off the bus at the hospital and there were perhaps 30 or 40 people in all gathered there, and both I and the organisers had hoped for rather more. The cuts to the NHS and the reorganisation are important to all of us who live in England, but perhaps a little heat was taken out of the opposition when the government announced they would consult and change the bill.

Not that I have much confidence that this really means a great deal. Despite the promises from Clegg and Cameron I remain convinced that the plan is still to stitch up the NHS into handy bite-sized packages so that the government’s mates in private provision can pick the easy cherries so that the state run services will necessarily become less and less economic and efficient and before long will cease to exist. Which was more or less the plot of the playlet that the group performed in the market in the centre of Lewisham, and the bonus was the singing of the ‘Strawberry Thieves Socialist Choir‘, their name derived from one of William Morris’s most successful textile designs, incorporating thrushes and strawberries (though the actual berries in the pattern look rather more like raspberries to me) first produced at his Merton Abbey works around 1883. Morris was one of the great English socialists, and I think something of a hero for my father (Ruskin was another, but Dad generally kept quiet about his politics as my mother was a staunch Conservative) and like me I think he found ‘News From Nowhere‘ a stimulating utopian work.

But back to Lewisham, where I was finding it difficult to know what to photograph. The group started to march from the hospital into the centre of the town, but it seemed a very disorganised affair. One of the funeral props was a coffin, a little on the small side, white and labelled NHS, but it was being carried by one man on his own, who was staying on the pavement while the rest of the marchers were in the roadway.

There perhaps should be a guide for persons organising demonstrations, which should have an entry such as:

Coffins: These should be black, preferably coffin-shaped and always carried by at least four, preferably six, pall-bearers, dressed in black. They should be accompanied by suitable placards or banners relating to the subject who has died.

It just was not like this, though after a couple of hundred yards there was a short discussion and another of the protesters took over the carrying of the coffin and brought it within the procession, and was soon joined by another man to carry it. I took a few pictures, but still it wasn’t really working, and I broke one of my rules about photographing events.

I didn’t quite set things up, posing people and telling them to looks this or that way, but I did ask the woman in this picture if she wouldn’t mind walking with the coffin so I could take some pictures, and I took I think 3 frames, of which this was the best:

Not a perfect image or even a great one, but something that was beginning to make sense visually of what was otherwise something of a shamble along the road. After I’d taken the pictures I thanked her and she moved away from the coffin again. The angle I’d chosen made slightly better use fo the two NHS logos on the coffin, the lighting (mainly the little bit of flash on the figures) was better too. I was pleased that too that the man at the head of the coffin kept his eyes on the road ahead rather than look as me as the other two people were doing. Although there was a certain amount of arrangement involved it still I think retains the essential authenticity of the occasion.

Of course many protests would benefit from a little more thought about their visual effect – and again this was clear later when there was a short theatrical performance. Obviously a lot of thought had gone into the script, but little or none into the visual aspects, and it was saved for me simply by the performance of one of the women taking part.

Of course protests aren’t arranged for my convenience (something which some photographers seem sometimes to forget), but the kind of things that make some easy for me to photograph are also generally those that help them to communicate more generally and reach their intended audience.

It was a protest where I felt I had to work hard to get pictures, but in the end I found ones that told the story, as I hope you can see in Lewisham Funeral For the NHS.

Fuji FX100 Panoramas

One of the features of the Fuji FX100 is the large number of different ‘Drive Modes’ it offers. I suppose it is a good thing, but the way they are implemented definitely isn’t, as it is only too easy to change into the wrong one.

Pressing the main control drive on the rear of the camera even slightly off-centre towards the top brings up the menu which offers as well as the default ‘still image’ the possibilities of ‘movie’, ‘motion panorama’, ‘dynamic range bracket’, ‘film simulation bracket’, ‘ISO bracket’, ‘AE Bracket’ and ‘Top 10’. All of which might have their uses, but if you just want to take pictures, switching away from still image by mistake is all too easy to do and extremely annoying.

So far I’ve taken a few bad movies without intending to, and also tried on perhaps 50 occasions to use the ‘motion panorama’ setting. One of the first did give me a more or less usable panorama (there were slight but hardly noticeable problems), but all my other attempts since have failed miserably, with distinct bands as the exposures failed to match across the image.

I think it may be necessary to select manual exposure to get it to work, although the exposure is supposed to be set by the first frame, but clearly something is happening to stop this feature working as it should. It’s a shame as it would offer a quick and easy way to make a panorama. I’ve actually still found it useful to do a quick test shot before setting up my tripod and D700 to shoot the real thing, giving a good idea of what my final result might be like.

The FX100 offers you a choice of 120 or 180 degree pans, with the camera in either portrait or landscape mode. A 35mm lens is not quite wide enough for many pans in landscape, but is much better in portrait mode, though I usually prefer a 20mm or even wider, and provides a useful horizon guide line with an arrow showing the direction. Both portrait or landscape mode produce 120 degree pans 5120 pixels wide, but in landscape mode they are only 1440 pixels high while portrait mode gives a more useful 2160 pixel height.

Although I’ve not had great success so far with the ‘motion panorama’ setting, I have found it easy to use the camera to take panoramas simply by setting manual exposure and focus and making a series of exposures, and then using software such as PTGui (or the free open source Hugin) to combine them. I find it particularly easy to hold the camera in portrait mode for this, and the ‘artificial horizon’ feature makes keeping the camera upright easy. The nodal point seems to be pretty close to the centre of the body – and rotating the camera around the tripod screw works well for landscape format pans or around the centre of the end of the body for portrait ones.

I took a couple with the camera of the Derwent by the East Mill in Belper the weekend before last. The first, produced from just 3 landscape exposures is a roughly 90 degree horizontal view, and the original file is 7281×2556 pixels. Taken under a tree there was little difficult in lining up the leaves, though I did need to make use of the PTGui masking facility to get a perfect result.

The larger pan, a 132.7Mb file, was made with the camera in portrait format, stitched from 6 frames to give a 137 degree view, 22,080 pixels by 4187. If I had a long enough sheet of paper, printing this at 300 dpi would give a six foot long print.

The images were shot on RAW and those in each set were processed in Lightroom, adjusting one file and then ‘synching’ the settings to the rest in the set before adding some identical local brushing to the sky area across all of the images. Lightroom also applied a profile to them which reduces chromatic aberration and distortion, presumably making it easier for PTGui to stitch them together. Later in the weekend I took a similar scene with a wider lens (20mm f2.8) using a Nikon D300. The wider angle of view was an advantage, but the FX100 was easier to use and the results seemed just a little better.

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